Mercy of a Rude Stream: The Complete Novels

INTRODUCTION by Joshua Ferris

Mercy of a Rude Stream is Henry Roth’s sophomore effort, his follow-up, after sixty years of near silence, to his classic debut novel Call It Sleep. Roth began writing the heavily autobiographical Mercy in 1979 and revised it until his death in 1995; had he lived longer, he would have likely continued writing his life until the two — the writing and the living — had fully caught up to one another. The first volume, A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, was released in 1994; the second volume, A Diving Rock on the Hudson, a year later. The latter two volumes were published posthumously.

Mercy tells the story of Ira Stigman. Like Roth, Ira was born to Jewish immigrants from Austro-Hungarian Galicia. Like Roth, Ira lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan as a young boy and suffered when his family moved to Harlem. Like Roth, Ira escapes penury and drift, and squalor, and hopelessness, and mindless toil, and the countless dead ends and cul-de-sacs awaiting even the hardest-working immigrants in “the golden realm,” and makes himself a writer. He succeeds because he’s resilient and shrewd, and because he’s possessed of native literary talent. The culminating event of the novel is Ira’s departure for Greenwich Village: he leaves behind his beloved mother and his tyrannical father and the sister with whom he was incestuously involved for the embrace and nurture of a NYU professor named Edith Welles, the fictional counterpart to Roth’s real-life lover Eda Lou Walton.

Mercy is a rare species of literary epic: an autobiography that doubles as a historical novel. The action of Mercy—set primarily between 1914 and 1927 but interlaced with dispatches from the 1980s and ’90s, and including intermittent reflections of the years in between — encompasses nearly the entirety of the twentieth century: from the outbreak of World War I to the advent of the personal computer. But Roth’s novel isn’t a product of painstaking research; he reconstructed his lost world out of pure memory. Working throughout his seventies and eighties — he lived to be eighty-nine — he filled his bildungsroman with the finely grained details that one can expect only from a firsthand account.

Roth had a brilliant photographic memory. But he wasn’t didactic; he also had the novelist’s instinct. Where fact and fiction begin and end in Mercy is never an easily discernible divide. The basic outline of Ira Stigman’s life as chronicled in the book — his development through adolescence and into his young adulthood — closely mirrors that of Henry Roth’s. But if Mercy is largely shorn of the Joycean artifice of Roth’s earlier book and pointedly tries to narrate life as it was lived, Roth happily sacrifices biographical truth in Mercy to the more pressing emotional one that had revealed itself to him decades later. There’s little doubting the detailed accuracy of his reconstructed Harlem, or his rich evocation of immigrant life in New York City in the first decades of the last century, but the embellishments are there to serve Roth’s hard-fought artistic purpose.

And it was hard-fought. After writing Call It Sleep, Roth floundered. By the time of that book’s publication, in 1934, he was deeply committed — as many on the American left were in the 1930s — to the communist ideal. He was internally riven by the need to square his “bourgeois” talent for detailing the rich inner life of the individual with the proletarian dictates of socialist art. He was badly affected by his first book’s reception in left-leaning periodicals, and was determined to write something the Party would be proud of. With an advance from Maxwell Perkins, who admired Call It Sleep, he set out to do just that, but failed. Thereafter he worked, as a good communist must, various hard-scrabble trades. He started a family. He squandered time and fell out of sight. It would take a profound disillusionment with Soviet communism and a long personal reckoning before Roth would seriously take up writing again, only to conclude, after so long and so much trouble, that he only ever had one subject: himself.

An omnibus edition of Mercy is an exciting event, a chance to introduce it to a new generation of readers. But even old readers need to take a new look, now that the sweeping scope of Roth’s work has been fully contained between two covers.

Mercy was originally published as four separate books. The first, A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, was artistically the least successful of the four. It’s likely that Roth had trouble finding the right balance, the right pacing, the right rhetorical and fictional tactics with which to begin his monumental undertaking. There was much to do in that initial salvo: introduce Ira, his parents, and their extended family; introduce as well a latter-day Ira who lives with his wife, M, in Albuquerque and who discourses with his computer, Ecclesias, on the challenges of composing a book identical to Mercy; establish a dialectic between these two Iras — typographically, rhetorically, circumstantially, and philosophically distinct, and separated in time by nearly seventy years — that would come to shape and inform the following three volumes; re-create a bygone world of Yiddish-speaking immigrants ensconced in a vanished Harlem with all its thrumming, threatening vibrancy; situate that world within the larger context of the First World War; and convey to the reader Ira’s personal drama: his crushing solitude, his aimlessness, his sensitivity, and his nascent gifts as a writer. Henry Roth was seventy-three years old when he began the book and had been more or less blocked for the previous forty years. He was racing against time and in declining health. To be writing again, indeed to be redeeming his life by writing it, must have felt like an extraordinary relief almost indistinguishable from panic.

As the epic begins, we first meet Ira as an eight-year-old boy. He has just moved from the Lower East Side, where life passed by in an unconscious blur because he was surrounded by fellow Jews, and because he was so young. The Stigmans move as far north as 108 East 119th Street — some blocks north of Harlem’s Jewish enclave — because cold-water flats can be had cheaply there, and Ira’s father is a wickedly parsimonious man. The new dwelling also has a front window, which is especially important because Ira’s mother has depressive tendencies and relishes the light and the view. But for Ira, the move is nothing short of exile from Eden. Hostility in goyish Harlem awakens the boy from his daydreams; “Irishers” rule the street, and scorn, even in that slice of melting-pot America, is reserved especially for the Jew.

At the same time that he’s awakening to the inevitability of being “a lousy Jew,” as the Irishers would have it, and in his wish for assimilation, he rejects his all-too-Jewish extended family. They have arrived at the outbreak of the war, fleeing not only international hostilities but the pogroms that made daily life for European Jewry an unrelieved nightmare. Ira hopes to find in these new arrivals the kind of people he left behind on the Lower East Side — protectors, mentors, and friends. His kin, he hopes, will be “bountiful, endowed with a store of beguiling anecdotes, with rare knowledge of customs and places which they were only too happy to impart on their doting little kinsman. In short, they would somehow be charmingly, magically, bountifully pre-Americanized.” Instead, he encounters:

Greenhorns with uncouth lopsided and outlandish gestures, greenhorns. . engaged in all manner of talk too incomprehensible for him to understand, speaking “thick” Yiddish, without any English to leaven it. . dull, colorless, greenhorn affairs.

These dual disappointments — the move to Harlem, the arrival of greenhorns — come swiftly at the start of Mercy and establish the central conflict of the remaining volumes: Ira is no longer sure of who he is or with whom he should identify. As he puts it many years later in conversation with Ecclesias, the move to Harlem was “the beginning of attrition of his identity.”

Beyond these opening moves, not much more happens in that first volume. My fear is that some earlier readers might have given up prematurely on Roth’s project. Its grand ambitions, its scope and life, flowered slowly, in installments.

With Mercy now presented in its entirety, the infelicities of A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park are easy to forgive. The preamble that once made a slight novel now serves beautifully as the prologue of an epic one. Where, and with whom, Ira belongs, is the book’s main business. Ira’s search for himself is what makes Mercy more than a sociological document, more than a panorama of the immigrant experience, more than a finely wrought reconstruction of a lost world, more than a portrait of the artist as a young man, and more than a diary of an old man looking back. Mercy is all of those things. But above all it’s a quintessentially American novel about the rootless individual forced to reinvent himself out of whole cloth and against great odds.

Much of the initial interest in Mercy came from two sources of curiosity, one artistic in nature and the other prurient. What would Henry Roth, the precocious genius who reworked the squalor of immigrant slums into a delicate masterpiece of high modernism, deliver after sixty years of drought? And did he really sleep with his sister?

Incest is the dark throb at the heart of the book—“earthmurks drowned in lust,” as Augustine put it, an apt phrase for an Augustinian hero — but the fact of it, its simple presence within an autobiographical novel, threatens to overshadow the psychological portrait of the individual marred and molded by it. Now that the gossipy murmur over Henry Roth’s real-life relationship with his sister has lost its initial shock value, we would do well to stick to news that stays news, and ask: How did Ira’s sexual deviance affect his search for himself in Henry Roth’s novel?

For starters, Roth suggests that that deviance might never have occurred had Ira found meaning in the religious devotion his Galitzianer grandfather brought with him from Austria-Hungary. The “attrition of his identity” would have been arrested by “the boundaries of Orthodox Judaism. . [its] shorings, stays, restraints.” But by the time he was ten, when the incest started, it was too late: Ira was already assimilated, naturalized, and could find no comfort in the ways of the old world. What did those greenhorns and their “outcry, their foreignness, their Yiddishkeit” have to do with Ira and his life? Wise to the American street and untethered from religious customs, he was no longer one of the clan. He had “pledged himself to a new resolve, to a new ‘pledge allegiance,’ a new covenant he couldn’t name, an American covenant.” Ira’s is an American search precisely because America itself has come between him and his inheritance of a stabilizing, inhibiting tradition.

But though he wills himself into a secular American, America refuses to let Ira Stigman repudiate his Jewishness. The Irishers remind him when he walks the street, and his teachers remind him when he goes to school, and his bosses and coworkers remind him when he works an odd job: despite all the country’s promises of freedom, he’s first and foremost — and nowhere so much as in his own self-consciousness — a Jew. This ontological burden follows him everywhere like an odious shadow and conspires to exclude him from everything good. “So everything beautiful was Christian, wasn’t it? All that was flawless and pure and bold and courtly and chivalric was goyish. He didn’t know how to feel sometimes: sadness; he was left out. .” Judaism becomes a vexing identification. It fixes Ira Stigman’s identity in stone and denies him “everything beautiful” while offering him no accommodating solace, living law, or sense of self.

But Ira’s alienation isn’t a simple matter of his Jewishness; he thinks himself corrupt in the soul for the sexual relationship he initiates with his younger sister, Minnie. The disclosure of incest is a surprising moment in the book; the fact that Ira even has a sister is coyly hidden until it can no longer be contained, and it bursts upon the page with the force of a sobbing confession. Everything we think we know about Ira must be recontextualized in light of his abrupt revelation, and everything that comes after lies under its black shadow. Roth never lets us forget it: for long stretches there’s a reminder every few pages, passages of confusion, self-flagellation, bleak regret. Roth presents the incest — and the burden of it, even foremost in his mind — as a vicious circle: deeply in thrall to its pleasures, Ira seeks it out hungrily; once it’s over, he’s beset by guilt; that guilt keeps him alienated from the rest of the world; in his alienation, he seeks out the stygian pleasures of incest. But not without consequence: this “canker in the soul” impedes all of his future friendships and potential love affairs. It blights him, forever foreclosing an American future free of guilt, disease, and self-hatred.

Roth suggests that the source of the incestuous act might reside in the “sad traces of his Judaism”; the link seems only natural to one for whom Judaism is bound up in the inbred filth of a slum. It’s a dismaying conclusion very much of its time. The cause is much simpler, and Roth dramatizes it again and again within the book — namely, the fact that Ira is prey as often he is predator. When still a very young boy, Ira is lured to Fort Tyron Park by a deeply menacing stranger called “Mr. Joe.” Mr. Joe is forced to abort his attempt to take Ira’s pants off inside the park when a young couple unexpectedly pops out of a nearby thicket. He makes Ira watch as he “pulls off” beside a tree, so thoroughly revolting his impressionable victim that masturbation is thereafter unavailable to Ira as an option of release. Even incest is preferable. Mr. Lennard, Ira’s junior-high Spanish teacher, proves worse than Mr. Joe. When Ira is forced to ask this terrible man’s permission to leave school early, Mr. Lennard removes his pince-nez and “breathe[s] on a lens, before delicately applying his silk handkerchief”—the menacing pause of a pederast operating with impunity. Soon he is molesting Ira on his desk, insisting the boy “make it stiff!” and ensuring Ira’s deep confusion about sexual matters as he enters adolescence.

How should one judge the sexual deviance of the abused innocent who has known only incest and predation? For in addition to being molested, Ira has witnessed firsthand his uncle Louis’s attempt to seduce his mother, overheard his mother’s account of her own incestuous relationship with her brother Moe, and has reluctantly shared a bed with his mother when his father travels to St. Louis. Roth repeatedly demonstrates how sex for young Ira is equated with perversion and violence. Consider even this passing scene: “Ira saw the big brute [his boss, Yeager] a few days later waylay one of the pretty girl clerks seeking an item in the cellar aisles, seize her, and force her over backward while he planted kisses on her. Her pleading—‘Please, Mr. Yeager! Let go! Mr. Yeager!’—went unheeded.” There is no sex in Mercy free of menace.

Roth doesn’t ask forgiveness for Ira — in fact, he exaggerated the incest to make his alterego more monstrous, more akin to his own distorted self-image — but he can’t help but dramatize the insular, alienating circumstances that could easily lead a young boy to prey upon his sister, and for brother and sister to take refuge in one another. The title of the book, from a passage in Shakespeare, imagines mercy for past crimes. Roth not only confesses those crimes — which were his own — but painstakingly re-creates them, perhaps in a final bid for mercy.

Despite his status as a Jew and the buried shame of his home life, Ira manages to make friends, and the consuming joy of friendship gives him some idea of who he might be — or who, at any rate, he longs to be. Roth introduces us to Farley Hewins, the son of an Irish undertaker who captures something of all that is “flawless and pure” in America. Farley bears no resemblance to a greenhorn. He is “a blond, trimly built youth, somewhat more mature than the rest, handsome, blue-eyed, with a rounded jaw, a light voice and a buoyant gait.” Roth might be describing a young Douglas Fairbanks. On Sundays, the two boys hitchhike out to the suburbs where Farley’s aunts and uncles live, and here, among these quintessential Americans, Ira gets a vicarious taste of what he’s really after: “In the steadiness, in the tranquility of Farley’s unassuming assurance, his good-humored poise, and the affectionate regard with which he was greeted and held by his kin, Americans all, part and parcel of America in their warm, tidy, suburban kitchens into which the breeze from the green outside seeped through the screen door, Ira could almost imagine that acceptance of himself was only a shadow away.”

Farley is but one in a series of friends through whom Ira cycles as he attempts to touch directly an idealized America open only to its more deserving Christian sons and daughters. After Farley we get the dauntless and Huck Finn — like Billy Green. “ ‘Boyish’ was the word that might best describe him, boyish in the best sense, in the American sense: self-reliant, sportsmanlike, outdoors-oriented, adventurous and yet supremely sane.” Billy Green is not merely the antithesis of everything contained inside Ira’s hermetic tenement world and an antidote to his incestuous pathologies; he is the apotheosis of America.

Billy Green gives way to Larry Gordon, a worldly and wealthy young man with artistic aspirations. Ira assumes the attractive young man must be a Gentile. He’s too assured, too assimilated, too “regular” to be anything but. Wanting to impress when he first meets Larry, Ira causes a ruckus in his elocution class. He’s asked to explain his behavior after class, and his words reveal, nakedly, devastatingly, how lowly he finds himself, and how deeply he longs for approval from his Gentile peers. “I felt like I found a friend,” he explains to the offended teacher. “He was rich and he wasn’t Jewish, and he liked me.”

But as it turns out, Larry is Jewish, complicating in interesting ways the type of boy Ira befriends: this one is one of his own. An expansive friendship grows up between them: Larry introduces Ira to modern poetry while Ira, somewhat more reluctantly and confounded by the appeal, introduces Larry to Yiddish phrases and greenhorn customs. Ira is everything the well-heeled Larry finds exotic. In the more sophisticated boy’s company, Ira, who has scorned the greenhorns who attach to him by blood, becomes the greenhorn incarnate.

This series of friendships has been Ira’s ad hoc way of escaping the oppression of the immigrant ghetto, and of living, if only temporarily and vicariously, the healthy, incest-free life bestowed as a birthright upon other Americans. But if Ira is going to find his true self in some more lasting way, he’s going to have to leave Harlem behind entirely. It won’t be easy. He’s poor. He’s denied certain rights simply because he’s Jewish. And he disdains the capitalist enterprise that so many of his relatives and fellow Jews consider the essence of the American dream. It increases his sense of isolation: the country cares only about “things that had the least meaning for him, that he didn’t give a damn about.” The traditional escape from material poverty would have been, for Ira as for Roth, indistinguishable from suicide.

What speaks most forcefully to him is the world of books. Books “took you into their world. [Y]ou were more in their world than in the Jewish world. [M]aybe some day he’d find a way out of his Jewish slum world into their world.” They rescue the boy from his squalid surroundings and self-loathing and, later, introduce the possibility of a more permanent escape when it occurs to him that he might be capable of writing a book himself.

This awareness dawns slowly over the course of his friendship with Larry and later with Edith Welles. In ways overt and inadvertent, through their appetite for the exotic and their own artistic striving, Larry and Edith awaken Ira to a fateful fact: his source of shame — the low roots, the deprivations and depravities of an immigrant childhood — is, for the budding artist, an embarrassment of riches. James Joyce’s Ulysses, an early copy of which Edith gives to Ira in upstate New York after Larry scorns it, shows him how to put those riches to good use. To slip the bonds of Jewish immigrant life, Ira will have to return to it, tunnel deep inside it, and transform it into art. To escape requires embrace.

We get a sense of Ira’s artistic potential early on in the book, when he spots a star shining over Mt. Morris Park. He can be no older than nine or ten when he thinks like a writer for the first time. The revelation is worth quoting at length:

And he passes below the hill on Mt. Morris Park in autumn twilight, with the evening star in the west in limpid sky above the wooden bell tower. And so beautiful it was: a rapture to behold. It set him a problem he never dreamed anyone set himself. How do you say it? Before the pale blue twilight left your eyes you had to say it, use words that said it: blue, indigo, blue, indigo. Words that matched, matched that swimming star above the hill and the tower; what words matched it?. . Not twinkling, nah, twinkle, twinkle, little star — those words belonged to someone else. You had to match it yourself: swimming in the blue tide, you could say. . maybe. Like that bluing Mom rinses white shirts in. Nah, you couldn’t say that. . How clear it is. One star shines over Mt. Morris hill. And it’s getting dark, and it’s getting cold — Gee, if instead of cold, I said chill. A star shines over Mt. Morris Park hill. And it’s getting dark, and it’s getting chill.

Like Farley and Billy Green before him, Larry Gordon is eventually discarded and replaced. Ira, like Roth, is a shrewd young man, as people of any greatness must be if they hope to escape the inauspicious circumstances of their birth and finally achieve something of lasting merit, and to that end must choose Edith over Larry. Edith represents a natural progression: she is a Gentile, an intellectual, a mentor, and in time, she will become a patron and a lover. Confusing Ira for an innocent, she confides in him. She takes him into her complicated (and progressive) personal life, and he doesn’t judge her for what she discloses. The two develop a trusting friendship, so that when it comes time for Ira to confess his own transgressions, which he does under great duress, like a character out of Dostoyevsky, Edith doesn’t judge him. She forgives him — shows him mercy — so that he may forgive himself. Edith restores the romantic ideals Ira finds in books, which he thinks closed to him forever on account of the incest. With their restoration comes the permission to dream, to live, to write.

Mercy is an epic of the outsider, a chronicle of self-survival and self-discovery and the realization of the self. It’s also a masterpiece of immigrant fiction. It’s what would have been called, even a few decades ago, a great Jewish-American novel, written by a pioneer of Jewish-American fiction. But though it applied at the time of Call It Sleep, to call anything a great Jewish-American novel now, with Malamud and Bellow under our national belt, and with a different Roth retired but transcendent, and a new generation of American Jews writing vital and varied fictions, is ghettoizing. No one calls Philip Roth a great Jewish-American writer, or Junot Díaz a great Latino-American novelist.

I would argue that to fully understand the more junior, and more celebrated, Roth of American letters, to comprehend clearly the complex, rebellious, and often loving relationship between father and son that Philip Roth constructs repeatedly in his fictions, one has to understand Henry Roth and his generation of Jewish Americans. One has to understand Henry Roth’s characters in Mercy, especially Ira Stigman’s father, utterly cowed by the world of goyim, and Ira himself, whose unease and obsequiousness, whose sycophancy before American goyim, is what Philip Roth takes aim at in books like Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint. And one has to understand the complex interplay between Chaim Stigman and his son. Ira’s engagement with the world of Gentiles, with Edith Welles and the bohemians of Greenwich Village, demonstrates extraordinary social progress from the vantage point of his father, who, when not slavishly serving Protestants of one stripe or another, pointedly avoids them. But Ira’s integration into a broader America is characterized by the outsider’s feelings of inferiority and subservience that Philip Roth’s autobiographical avatars would simply not abide. From Roth to Roth, then, we can assess the wildly changing dynamic of Jews in America, and American society more broadly, as it shifts from a nation that shuns immigrants, and Jews in particular, to one that embraces and celebrates them. The progression from Roth to Roth is the very same that allows us, with Mercy of a Rude Stream, to finally drop the designator “Jewish” from “Great American Novel.”