Mercy of a Rude Stream: The Complete Novels

EDITOR’S AFTERWORD

I spoke with Henry Roth for the last time on Monday, the ninth of October, 1995. Having been unable to reach him at his home, a ramshackle former funeral parlor that he had purchased after the death of his wife, Muriel, I surmised that he might be in the hospital. I checked an ever-expanding list of Albuquerque hospital numbers that I kept in my address book, and was able to track him down that evening, shortly after I had come home from work. Despite the frailty of his condition and the excruciating severity of his pain, he sounded even jolly, his voice lilting and upbeat. Handed the receiver by a nurse, he was pleased to hear from me, his editor, his occasional analyst, but mostly, his friend of nearly four years.

Since I had first become acquainted with him back in December of 1992, just after Roslyn Targ, his devoted agent of over thirty years, had sold me the first volume of Mercy of a Rude Stream, I had become inured to his expressions of gloom — his lugubrious moods that would descend on him for a day or two, sometimes even a month. Some of these depressive seizures were so intense that he would exclaim dramatically that he wished to die (“apothonein theilo,” he’d write in Greek), and that he would kill himself as soon as he turned ninety and had a big party.

But this night of October 9 was not like so many of those other nights. Gone was the gauze of melancholia, the “dark sullen telepathy” that had so often encumbered him, preventing him from continuing with the monumental task of writing, editing, and constantly revising the four books that form this quartet, which he had called Mercy of a Rude Stream, borrowing a phrase from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. That Monday night, he was genuinely pleased that I, together with his assistant and final literary muse, Felicia Steele (the last of three women who had enabled him to create literature throughout his life), had made so much progress completing the editing of From Bondage and Requiem for Harlem, the third and the final volume of the Mercy series, respectively. Even as his limbs and his bowels had failed him with increasing regularity throughout 1994 and 1995, he had worked compulsively to complete the arduous task of shaping and rewriting over 5,000 pages of text, which comprised the four volumes, a large portion of which had already been hailed by numerous American reviewers as a “landmark of the American literary century,” in the words of the critic David Mehegan. Even when Steele was no longer able to work with Henry, since she herself had gone off to graduate school in English at the University of Texas,* he had engaged another young University of New Mexico undergraduate, Eleana Zamora, and the two of them had worked on the various revisions that were required in the final editing and restructuring of the last two volumes.

That October evening, Henry politely asked me how my own father, his senior by a mere seven months, and physically in no better shape, was doing, as if the two old men were competitively engaged in a race to see which one would meet his maker first. Not wanting to alarm Henry with dire medical reports from California, I lied, of course, and said that my dad was holding his own, and Roth replied, “Carry on the good work, my friend,” as if he were a literature professor from one of his 1920s screwball plots. Four days later, on Friday, October 13, Henry was gone. He had died just after sundown, having made the Sabbath in the very nick of time, and to mix Hebrew and Greek images, as he was wont to do, just after Helias in his horse-drawn chariot had raced by Albuquerque on his nightly run.

Felicia, in touch with Henry’s two sons, Hugh and Jeremy, left the news of Henry’s passing both on my telephone machine at home and in the office, messages that I picked up in California soon after my plane had landed. My father was in worse condition than I had imagined — his head drooped so low, his consciousness so dim that the doctor advised the next afternoon that we not feed him intravenously. I sat that afternoon in the kitchen of my parents’ apartment, at work at the table, numbed, grief-stricken, with the manuscript pages of Mercy spread out willy-nilly before me, struggling with the editing of a particularly salacious description of sex between the fictional cousins Ira and Stella. Yet as stunned as I was about Henry’s death, I took great comfort in knowing that Roth, at least for me, had not died; in fact, the very pages before me represented his very tree of life, and what better way to show my love than to do just as Henry had commanded, “Carry on, . my friend.”

I am sure that I was concentrating so mightily on Henry’s prose because I wished to distract myself from my own father’s predicament — Dr. Reed’s pronouncement of gloom, and the knowledge that Henry’s departure was a harbinger of my own father’s imminent death. And as the doctor was packing his bag, my father suddenly struggled to lift his head — he even bolted — and like the stirring of a shroud, acknowledged my presence, speaking his first words in over two days. Casting his gaze on the messy sheaf of papers, my father suddenly uttered, with his thick, barely comprehensible German accent, the questioning words, “Henry Rot, Henry Rot?” “rot” being the German pronunciation of Roth, as in the color red, although Henry of all people was not unaware of the pun.

“Doctor Reed, did you hear that, he knows what I am working on, he said ‘Henry Roth,’” I exclaimed. The doctor was as stunned as I was; so was my mother, and although this was the only phrase my dad uttered that weekend, the doctor immediately called for an IV bag and an infusion of fluids, and arguably, because of Henry Roth, my father lived another sixteen days.

I felt that autumn that I had lost two giants, both men atavistic in wholly different ways. Having had the privilege of working with Henry, I can unequivocally state that my perception of the world has been remarkably altered. In fact, I can no longer walk the streets of Manhattan without feeling a far greater empathy for the poor. It is as if I had discovered a new Dostoevsky, and at the end of our stultifyingly narcissistic twentieth century at that. Despite our gap in age, I felt that Roth was writing about my city of New York in the 1990s, even though Henry’s stories detailed a far more technologically primitive world of a greenhorn generation long since vanished. Roth was perhaps the last voice of an era, yet his description in Requiem for Harlem of crosstown traffic on 14th Street—“shuffle and squeal. Glitter and gleam of windshield and hubcap”—save for the eloquence of his language, could easily pass for a street scene in 1997, so constant is the farrago of whirling images that New York manages faithfully to project. The immigrant Jews and Italians who were, of course, so hated in Roth’s youth have long since entered the mainstream, made complacent by the prosperity that education and middle classdom bring, yet the privations described endow us with a vision of poverty so compassionate and transcendent that we can never forget that there are millions of people in New York City alone who remain destitute. I as a reader have learned that behind the grimace of every street sweeper, behind the fretful countenance of every hot dog vendor, there exists a fellow journeyman, whose plaintive gaze or feral eyes bespeak a magnificent drama that remains untold. In listening to the story of a Pakistani taxi driver talking about his children at school in Queens, I am confronted by an immense pride and beauty, mine for the listening. Manhattan, despite the passage of seventy years, despite the incursion of television, graffiti, new racial tensions, and e-mail, has not changed at all — and the Rothian immigrant world of the 1920s remains as immanent today as it was when David Schearl, the young protagonist of Call It Sleep, was but a small boy on the Lower East Side.

There are, of course, numerous critics and countless readers who still continue to hold on to the notion that Call It Sleep is indeed the only masterpiece that Henry Roth ever wrote. As the first two volumes of the Mercy series came off press, most reviewers felt compelled to compare these new works to a book published in 1934 when its author was a mere twenty-eight years old, as if a man in his late eighties was simply expected to pick up writing in the exact manner as he had done as an unexamined young man. The notion was absurd, and this wretched form of comparison would be enough to dissuade any blocked writer, like J. D. Salinger, Harper Lee, or the late Ralph Ellison, from even contemplating a new work late in life. Yet Roth possessed in many ways an elephantine hide, and when he happened to glance at a review or two (most he never even looked at), he merely shrugged, and said, “Baah, she just didn’t get the book,” and that was that. His mission was manifest — it was ordained that he carry on his novels, as if writing were the only force that was keeping him alive, and a hostile review did not deter Roth in the slightest. It would often amaze interviewers who came to his home in the early 1990s to listen to the old man describe his one novel “from childhood.” He would tell not a few visitors that he had disavowed the first book — that it was a boy’s work no longer worth reading, a book that had been inspired under the spell of his erstwhile mentor and now necromancer James Joyce — and that he cared no longer to discuss it or its themes.

Call It Sleep was simply a book that had died when another man by the name of Henry had perished decades ago. Didn’t they have something else to ask, he questioned the parade of interrogators? When asked why he was writing the Mercy series, he prided himself in telling people that it was simply “for the dough,” and that this newly found income was required to pay for his nurses, doctors, and the cornucopia of medications that rested on the kitchen table.

It was only after Roth’s death, and with the publication of the third volume, From Bondage, that over a dozen critics and reviewers hailed the third book as a masterpiece in its own right, not a novel that had to be reviewed in the context of a distant literary antecedent. As Call It Sleep is arguably one of the finest American novels that has ever depicted childhood, so too can the four volumes of Mercy of a Rude Stream now be viewed not only as a necessary complement to the prior work, but as a unified body of literature that stands on its own. No less a scholar and critic than Mario Materassi, who for many years was Roth’s closest friend and soulmate, and who deserves singular credit for transforming Roth into a writer of such huge international stature, has written that “Call It Sleep can be read as a vehicle through which, soon after breaking away from his family and his tradition, young Roth used some of the fragments of his childhood to shore up the ruins of what he already felt was a disconnected self. Forty-five years later, Roth embarked on another attempt to bring some retrospective order to his life’s confusion: Mercy of a Rude Stream, which he has long called a ‘continuum,’ can be read as a final, monumental effort on the part of the elderly author to come to terms with the pattern of rupture and discontinuity that has marked his life.” My own personal feeling is that there are few works in this decade, much less in this century, that have come like Mercy to reflect as acutely the internal dislocation of the intellectual and the society at large.

Just when we think we know what Roth as a writer is up to, what course he has charted for his journey home, he twists and turns, and changes his mind, and with each new volume, we must constantly reassess our agile narrator as his epic proceeds. As Materassi has commented in his insightful essasy, “Shifting Urbanscape: Roth’s ‘Private’ New York,” Roth “has never been interested in any story other than the anguished one of a man who, throughout his life, has contradicted each of his previously held positions and beliefs.” A superb holder of secrets, Roth as a novelist does not even alert his readers (there is a one-line hint in the first volume, however) that Ira Stigman has a fictional sister until one-third of the way through the second volume, A Diving Rock on the Hudson. The revelation must be a surprise.

I once asked Henry if his wife Muriel, with whom he shared a compact one-bedroom trailer home, had ever read any of the early drafts of Mercy. “She never asked, and I never offered to show her,” he told me, as if it were completely natural for a writer’s wife not even to get one glimpse of the thousands of pages that lay on each side of the computer whom he chose to call Ecclesias. Although I cannot think of a human being who was more honest with me than Henry, Roth’s varying accounts of his life’s story, as Materassi has suggested, did shift frequently over time. For example, after having told reporters for decades that it was his Communist experience, and the resulting disillusionment, that prevented him from writing again, Roth suggested in the last few years of his life that his sexual preoccupations and obsession lay more at the root of his unwillingness to continue writing for more than forty years. Yet on other occasions, he maintained that the block was caused by his early break with Judaism and his family’s departure in 1914 from the hermetic, shtetl-like world of New York’s Lower East Side.

Like their creator, these modern books effortlessly mutate in tone and sensibility, and while the arc is unerringly tragic, the seismic waves registered throughout are unpredictable, and deliberately so. While A Diving Rock on the Hudson is purposefully scandalous and confessional in its often Augustinian tone, From Bondage, despite the brilliant sexual tension of the last third of the book (Roth called the Ira-Stella-Zaida section a “novella” in its own right), is largely redemptive, as if Roth were indeed seeking deliverance in this penultimate work. Yet the final volume, Requiem for Harlem, contains a sexual wantonness and “depravity,” a word favored by Roth, that seems surprising for a man of eighty-nine laboring to finish the epic of his life. As his close friend and literary executor, Larry Fox, once explained to me, “Henry could not die false. He was a truth seeker, and only when he could review the truth about himself could he become free. In fact, he remained alive to unburden himself so that he could die free and perhaps free all of us. Once Muriel died, Henry could finally tell the truth, and then it was only between him and his Maker.”

Roth would have been the first person to note that nothing in any of his books was gratuitous, so why would he so deliberately debase his alter ego Ira? Few people like seeing their idol so compromised or disgraced; no one indeed wants to see his revered novelist revealed to be a predator, an agent of incest, and victimizer himself. So why then did Roth in his eighties become so emotionally patulous, or why did he begin to flirt with Nabokovian flights of fancy, choosing to make Ira as sexually compulsive and loathsome as possible? Having known Henry quite well, I would refute anyone’s contention that this octogenarian’s “need” to eroticize his life was merely a way to jolly himself as his body disintegrated. This quite conscious decision to debase himself — to make his “rude stream” as repellent as possible — as he depicted “the last onerous lap” of his life, was meant, I suspect, to bring about a spiritual salvation in the only way that he knew how. In any given interview or even in the text of this work, Roth, however, would have been the first to negate any such redemptive refuge. Listen to his own words: “What a sinister cyst of guilt that was within the self, denigrating the yuntiff, denigrating everything within reach, exuding ambiguity, anomaly, beyond redemption now.” And so, Requiem for Harlem is a work fraught with often unimaginable family cruelty, the young man emerging from his adolescent chrysalis the very tyrant his father Chaim was. Indeed, we revisit more so than in any previous volume the unprecedented violence of Call It Sleep. At last, the abuse that the young boy witnessed so viscerally when his father beat his mother gets replayed here with equal ferocity — the cup of scalding tea hurled in Leah’s face, for example, or the horrific way in which Chaim torments his wife after she has caught him flagrantly fondling their lustful niece. It must be her fault after all, so Leah is led to believe.

No wonder that Roth’s mother unknowingly “had indoctrinated him into tragedy, given him a penchant for it, the tragic outlook,” for her path toward depression and episodic madness seemed destined, given her docile and even masochistic nature. And while the mother so lovingly depicted in the final volume becomes a “wavering demi-agnostic” and questions the existence of Adonoi, so too did Roth throughout his life simultaneously embrace and reject the notion of a forgiving God. Yet while Roth no doubt inherited his depressive gloom and his religious ambivalence from his mother, he learned far too ably at his father’s knee as well. The brilliant boy, once David Schearl, now Ira Stigman, absorbed from his father a relentless pattern of violence and verbal imprecation that mixed often explosively with his mother’s maternal kindness. The boy, as precocious as he was, learned at a very tender age, whether from his father or through a pederast named “Moe,” that the star was no longer shining over Mt. Morris Park (stella, stella, it was getting so dark after all). And familial incest, many psychiatrists have maintained, comes twinned with family violence, and the fictional relationship between Ira and his sister Minnie and cousin Stella must have had some basis in the models provided in various ways by both of Ira/Henry’s parents.

Yet despite Roth’s constant claims that redemption, particularly at the end of our materialistically excessive century, was no longer viable, I contend that he was transfixed in his declining years by the possibility of mercy, perhaps not for himself, but rather for his wife Muriel, for both of his sons, for Eda Lou Walton whom he had abandoned in the late 1930s, and, in fact, for us all. If we could as readers still like, empathize, or even pray for Ira, even after all that he had perpetrated, then there might be mercy even for us. And so the old man pecked away furiously, keenly aware that his days were diminishing, the stream of urine dripping from his leg not even deterring him as the story reached its terrifying dénouement. And “for a moment the waning ivory moon above the gloomy gantries of the New York Central trestle seemed poised like a tusk at Ira as he pattered down the sandstone steps of the stoop to the sidewalk; boar’s tusk aimed at Endymion, he thought, turning left on grubby, cold, dark, deserted 119th Street toward the corner at Park Avenue.” Entranced by the drama of the narrative, age seemed almost miraculously to disappear, and once again life had suddenly achieved a unity; this unity, despite a persistent theme of alienation, being perhaps the crowning literary achievement. And as many readers have no doubt noticed, the dialogue with Ecclesias, the philosophical chatter between the old man and his computer, actually recedes in Requiem for Harlem, for the old man is once again in his prime, not distracted by physical decrepitude, this work being the last gasp of existence before the proverbial jig was up.

While Roth commented numerous times before his death that Mercy of a Rude Stream comprised six volumes, his publisher, along with Felicia Steele, Larry Fox, and Roslyn Targ, all agreed at the time that the work would best be served by appearing as four. In fact, Roth did write six separate books, the first four which he called “Batch One,” and the last two, which he simply labeled “Batch Two” of Mercy for lack of a better title. The truth is that these first four volumes possess a stylistic and thematic unity which are quite distinct from the other two books. The first volume opens with Ira’s move to Harlem, while Volume IV concludes with Ira’s decision to flee Harlem into Edith’s overprotective arms. Likewise, all four volumes take place over a sustained period of thirteen years, from 1914 through the end of 1927. Written in two voices and two type styles (Roth was adamant from the beginning that the Ecclesias passages were essential to the thematic wholeness of the works), the books are linked by a chronologically coherent and unified style.

On the other hand, the two books that Roth called “Batch Two” do not contain an Ecclesias narrator, and jump the reader to the 1930s. They tell the story of Ira’s breakup with Edith Welles and the love affair with a young composer named M, who would soon become his wife. The final revisions that Roth was able to undertake both in 1994 and in 1995 were of From Bondage and Requiem for Harlem, so that the story that unfolds in “Batch Two” was written in the late 1980s and was revised with Felicia Steele in 1990 and 1991.†

“‘You are not required to finish,’ ran the Talmud dictum” notes Roth in the final volume of Mercy, and perhaps the same thing can be said of this opus, as if “the past coalesced into a kind of opaque introspection that marked the end.” As Edith Welles in the story quelled Ira Stigman’s “fears and guilts, as if bleaching them out of sight with her objectivity,” so the same can be said of Roth pecking away at his beloved keyboard at the end of his life. “She [Edith] reduced the onus of his wickedness, eliminated much of the sense of heinousness, quenched the shimmer of guilt, stealth, risk that informed, that magnified his form,” and so do these books, their completion being a deliverance from the vile self-loathing that had consumed Roth for almost all of his life.

“Strange, unhappy lad. Let’s put as much of that behind us as we can,” his mentor and lover — the woman of “brown eyes very large in the sallowness of pallid olive skin”—tells Ira, and Mercy of a Rude Stream, as fine a portrait of the artist in old age as we may ever see, achieves in virtuosic fashion just that what first Edith and later the senescent genius Henry Roth set out to do.

— Robert Weil

September 1997

* Felicia Steele has since become a professor of English at the College of New Jersey. [2014]

† “Batch Two” was subsequently edited posthumously by Willing Davidson, a fiction editor at The New Yorker, serialized by that magazine, and published as one novel by W. W. Norton in 2010. [2014]