HENRY ROTH

Jim Burns

When Henry Roth died in 1995 his name had recently been in the news due to the publication of the first two volumes of a six volume novel sequence. What had caused much of the interest was the fact that these books marked Roth's reappearance as a novelist after a sixty year break. His first book Call it Sleep had been published in 1934, but Roth then slipped into virtual silence as a writer, with the exception of a few short stories and other prose pieces which appeared in magazines. Call it Sleep was rediscovered in 1964 and gained both critical and popular acclaim, but few people thought that Roth was likely to produce any more major works of fiction. That he should start to publish novels again when he was almost 90 seemed incredible.

       Roth's death may have affected the plans to publish the six novels on an annual basis, starting in 1994. It would seem that the third is ready for publication, but the rest may need some skilful editing before they can be put into print. Roth and his editors were working on them when he died, and his absence will obviously delay the process of editing.

       Who was Henry Roth and why was there such a long gap between books? He was born in 1906 in what is now part of the Ukraine. He was the son of Jewish parents who brought him to America when he was two years old. The family lived in Brooklyn, the Lower East Side of New York (once described by Roth as "a virtual Jewish mini-State") and finally, an area of Harlem which was then largely populated by Irish and Italian immigrants. The final move was a significant one for Roth, bringing a sense of isolation and alienation which he had never felt on the Lower East Side. In later life he said: "Had I stayed there on the Lower East Side I'm sure I would have been a lot happier and I might have been a Rabbi - who knows? Or a good zoologist, had a happy Jewish family .... the point was I'd have rather been happy, no matter what, instead of this tormented life that I've lived."

       It is the early New York years, roughly 1910 to 1914 when the family went to Harlem, which are dealt with in Call it Sleep and which tell the story of David Schearl, who is sensitive, smart and easily disturbed. He is close to his mother, but afraid of his father, a moody, sometimes violent man. Thomas J. Farraro, in a book about the immigrant experience as it is expressed in American novels, neatly summarizes the basic situation in Call it Sleep: " a lone male child terrified of sex yet driven to an increasingly hallucinatory probing of his parents' troubled sexuality; the father economically and culturally disenfranchised prone to impotence and a compensatory paternal rage, feeling increasingly isolated from wife and child; the mother betrayed in her marriage, turning vengefully to the affection of the son, exposing him to the ultimate divergence of his awakening desire and her growing need." And in a significant passage in the book Roth describes David's distance from his father: "As far back as he could remember , this was the first time that he had ever gone anywhere alone with his father and already he felt desolated, stirred with dismal forebodings, longing desperately for his mother. His father was so silent and so remote that he felt as though he were alone even at his side. What if his father should abandon him, leave him in some lonely street. The thoughts sent shudders of horror through his body. No! No! He couldn't do that!"

       It's not my intention to deal with Call it Sleep in detail. The book is impressionistic and my main aim is to give an impression of it. What it deals with, in addition to David's feelings about his parents is his response to the world he experiences outside the home. There is a passage where Roth describes the move to the Lower East Side and what David finds there:

"In February David's father found the job he wanted. He was to be a milkman. And in order that he might be nearer the stables, they moved a few days later to Ninth Street and Avenue D on the Lower East Side. For David it was a new and violent world, as different from Brownsville as quiet from turmoil. Here in Ninth Street it wasn't the sun that swamped one as one left the doorway, it was sound - an avalanche of sound. There were countless children, there were countless baby carriages, there were countless mothers. And to the screams, rebukes and bickerings of these, a seemingly endless file of hucksters joined their bawling cries. On Avenue D horse cars clattered and banged. Avenue D was thronged with beer wagons, garbage carts and coal trucks. There were many automobiles, some blunt and rangey, some with high straw poops, honking. Beyond Avenue D, at the end of a stunted, ruined block that began with shacks and smithies and seltzer bottling works and ended in a junk heap, was the East River on which many boat horns sounded. On Tenth Street, the Eighth Street Crosstown car ground its way towards the switch."

       There is, of course, a highly autobiographical element in Roth's fiction, but it should not be assumed that he was writing autobiography in Call it Sleep. Roth was selective. In real life he had a sister but in the book, to quote Roth, she

"almost doesn't come into the picture for a number of reasons. Primarily because I was that much of an egotist as a child or young man. I so continually monopolised my mother's affection that I regarded myself as the one and only child around - with the exception of my father." And in the same interview he added: "At the time I wrote Call it Sleep I thought I was honestly portraying my childhood ..... I think this is one of the things that gives the novel its strength. Now I think I wasn't really portraying myself at all: the child is much too innocent, almost completely victimised, passive. It was simply an idealisation based on the notion that I was a much finer sensibility than what was around me - so fine I was being persecuted and victimised."

       Call it Sleep, as I've already noted, covers only a few of Roth's childhood years. His biographical years show that after completing High School he entered the City College of New York, one of the few places where a Jewish student with little or no money could study for a degree. His intention was to study biology and then possibly work in that line or as a zoologist but two significant things happened while he was a CCNY. He wrote a piece for an English class which his tutor thought so good that he recommended it for publication in the college magazine. Roth, it ought to be said, was an avid reader as a child, with the public library serving almost as a refuge from the pressures of home and the streets, and he had a natural understanding of how a piece of writing can be structured and what it is required to do. It's interesting to read the story Impressions of a Plumber which was based on Roth's experiences working as a plumber's mate during the summer of 1924 and was an attempt to capture the rhythms of the working day and the speech patterns of the various characters. Roth phonetised what the people said so as to show the vibrancy and variety of language in New York and to stress how the immigrants used English in their own way. He used this technique again in Call it Sleep though in the novel the family appear to speak "pure" English when they are conversing in Yiddish. This was a stylistic gambit, designed by Roth to heighten the clash in David's mind between the language he heard at home and that heard on the streets. Impressions of a Plumber is valuable, too, in terms of what it says about Roth's attitude towards work, bosses, and the capitalist system. It does not have any direct political comment, other than a brief reference to how workers view the boss, but its proletarian subject matter would not have been unwelcome in left wing circles.

       The second major event in Roth's life around this time was his meeting with Eda Lou Walton, a lecturer at New York University who had some standing as a minor poet and hostess of a literary salon which included Hart Crane, Leonie Adams, and Louise Bogan. Roth's A Diving Rock on the Hudson, the second volume of Mercy of a Rude Stream (his six volume work), covers Roth's initial encounters with Walton and has a scene where he attends a poetry reading given by Leonie Adams. The third part, when it appears, will presumably tell the story of how Roth had an affair with Walton, a woman twelve years his senior, and moved into her apartment in Greenwich Village, which had the effect of almost cutting him off from his family whilst at the same time introducing him to the world of the avant-garde in politics and art. It was during the years that he lived with Walton that he wrote Call it Sleep, which was heavily influenced by his reading of James Joyce's Ulysses. When asked what he thought he had gained from Joyce, he replied:

"What I gained was this awed realization that you didn't have to go anywhere at all except round the corner to flesh out a literary work of art - given some kind of vision, of course. In stream of consciousness I recognised that my own continual dialogue with myself could be made into literature. It was a tremendous impetus toward writing."

       Roth had joined the Communist Party in 1933, an act which he later described as "a sentimental thing," and when Call it Sleep was published in 1934 it was attacked by some left-wing critics who saw its impressionistic view of urban life as lacking in political commitment and failing to correspond to the social realism expected of proletarian literature. Early in 1935 the Communist Party cultural magazine The New Masses, printed a review which ended by saying: "It is a pity that so many young writers drawn from the proletariat can make no better use of their working-class experience than as material for introspective and febrile novels." But although some literary historians have suggested that left wing reaction to Roth's book was totally hostile, the records indicate otherwise. Several readers wrote to protest about the review, and the noted critic Edwin Seaver came to the novel's defence, saying: "What better use could Roth have made of his working class experience as a child than to have shown honestly and exactly what that experience consisted of?" And another Communist party publication The Daily Worker printed a favourable review of Call it Sleep by Alfred Hayes, then a young left wing poet and later a talented novelist.   It would seem, too, that the novel did not sell badly by the standards of the time, 1934 being one of the worst of the Depression years in the United States.   But the economic situation did work against Roth and his publisher went bankrupt, with the result that Call it Sleep was soon forgotten by all but a few of its admirers.

       The ideological atmosphere of the 1930's did have its effect on Roth as he admitted many years later:

"About mid-1935, after the trauma of Call it Sleep had worn off, I began to get the itch to write again. Now here is where the Party must have had its influence -because I now felt that I wanted to break away from an extension of the immigrant East Side Jewish childhood and do something from the American middle west. Now suppose I hadn't known anything about the party - I probably would have done the adolescent years, perhaps taking it as far as meeting Eda Lou or growing consciousness of artistic abilities. Instead, I broke away and was going to do the proletariat, right out of the American scene."

He planned a novel which would have a central character based on someone he'd met who seemed to represent the sort of proletarian hero liked by the party, and he did complete over 100 pages of this book and was given an advance against it by the noted publishers Scribner's. But it was never finished and, in Roth's own words, "After that came the block."

       Some accounts tend to suggest that Roth stopped writing altogether once Call it Sleep was completed, but as mentioned above, he did begin work on his "proletarian novel", and some of what he wrote was published in a magazine in 1936. He also published stories in the New Yorker in 1939 and 1940, and one or two other short pieces also appeared, including a curious 1937 piece for The New Masses. Called Where my Sympathy Lies it was an expression of support for Stalin and said of the Moscow trials.

"There are several things about this trial about which I am confused. Nevertheless, enough and more than enough has been revealed to convince me of the guilt of the accused; and by guilt, I mean that all their efforts were calculated to nullify or destroy the very growth of the safeguards that would ensure the freedom and fraternity of millions of men."

Roth went on to attack Trotsky and Trotskyism and referred to it as "A sure way to paralyse all our efforts for a united front against fascism." Of course, Roth wasn't alone in his views and in a 1985 interview admitted how wrong he'd been:

"That's the very example of, a perfect example of, conversion, the definition of the very thing I would condemn utterly, today, after I had once completely committed myself to blind allegiance. It's something you have to live down and it's something that (needless to repeat) continually haunts you."

If and when the appropriate volume of Mercy of a Rude Stream is published it will be interesting to see how Roth deals with this phase of his life. He did once refer in an interview to burning the original manuscript of his proletarian novel, together with some valuable journals, during the McCarthy period because he thought they contained self-incriminating political material. As far as I know, he was never subjected to FBI harassment in the 1940's and 1950's, nor was he ever called before any sort of committee investigating political activities and allegiances. But the nervousness about it was clearly there.

       Roth made a break with the Communist party in the late 1930s, around the same time that he left Eda Lou Walton, and it is from this period that his almost total disappearance from the literary scene can be marked. He had met Muriel Parker in 1938 at Yaddo, a retreat for artists, writers and musicians, and married her in 1939. She gave up a promising musical career and became a school teacher and Roth took to a succession of jobs, including being a machinist, teacher, forest fighter, plumber's assistant, and insane asylum attendant. In 1953 he bought some ducks and geese and started a business in Maine selling feathers and preparing carcasses for the table. He remained there until the 1964 publication of Call it Sleep brought some unwelcome publicity but also the money to travel and eventually settle in New Mexico. He began writing again in earnest in the 1960's - a story which was excerpted from a novel he was working on was published in the New Yorker - but it was only in 1980 that he began to put together the first volume of Mercy of a Rude Stream.

       Obviously, the "facts" of Roth's life do inform his fiction, but it may be that Mercy of a Rude Stream is more factual than Call it Sleep. The earlier work does have accurate descriptions of New York ghetto life in the early part of the century, but its stylistic devices act against it being a realistic novel. Like Joyce's Ulysses it stands as a single, highly idiosyncratic and almost unrepeatable achievement, something Roth perhaps knew in his heart and which might explain why he felt frustrated about proceeding any further. Mercy of a Rude Stream does have some self-consciously experimental aspects - there is a running commentary by an ageing author who ruminates throughout the book about his past and present problems and sometimes engages in a dialogue with his computer - but they are the least interesting parts and the value of the writing lies in its vivid descriptions of the past and the way in which it evokes what it was like to be alive and engaged in certain activities (childhood, schooling, work, intellectual adventures, sexual strivings, etc.) at specific times. The writing is often almost pleasingly "old-fashioned" in the sense of the language being direct and without any pretension, and I was occasionally reminded of the kind of novels produced by James T. Farrell (does anyone read him these days?) which are fascinating social documents and aim to record things exactly as they were. As I was reading the two published volumes of Mercy of a Rude Stream I was also looking at Metropolitan Lives, a book about the painters of the so-called Ashcan School (John Sloan, George Bellows, Everett Shinn, etc.) and realizing how accurate were Roth's descriptions of New York. And the vividness of the pictures he paints of the ghetto slums were confirmed for me when I referred to the writings and photographs of the great reformer Jacob Riis. It's unfair to compare Mercy of a Rude Stream to Call it Sleep, even if they are linked by more than their subject matter and author, and it deserves instead to be put alongside other major works of the Jewish experience in America, such as Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky and Michael Gold's Jews Without Money. And that is to rate it highly. Henry Roth may have written only one book, Call it Sleep, which deserves to be called a major work but there is much in his other writings worthy of admiration.

NOTES

Call it Sleep was originally published in 1934. It was published in this country in 1963 by Michael Joseph in a hardback edition which has a useful introduction by Walter Alien. Various editions have appeared here and in America since then, and it is currently in print as a Penguin paperback.

A Star Shines Over Mount Morris Park and A Diving Rock on the Hudson, the first two volumes of Mercy of a Rude Stream, were published in 1994 and 1995 respectively by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Shifting Landscape is a collection of short stories and other prose and is linked with a commentary and excerpts from interviews. It is an extremely valuable book from the point of view of providing a backcloth for the novels. It was published in 1995 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Thomas J. Farraro's Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in 20th Century America was published in 1993 by the University of Chicago Press. It has some interesting comments on Roth's Call it Sleep. A discussion of the controversy in left wing circles when the book was first published can be found in James M. Murphy's The Proletarian Moment: The Controversy Over Leftism in Literature, published in 1991 by the University of Illinois Press.

Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinksy has been in print in a Penguin edition in recent times, and Michael Gold's Jews Without Money in an edition from Carroll and Graf, New York, published in 1984. James T. Farrell is known today mostly for his Studs Lonigan Trilogy which is occasionally reprinted. His other novels and short stories, which are admittedly of variable quality but can be good, are now all out of print.

Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and their New York by Rebecca Zurier, Robert W. Snyder, and Virginia M. Mecklenburg, was published by Norton in. 1995.