Journal of the Short Story in English Les Cahiers de la nouvelle

44 | Spring 2005 Henry Roth's short fiction

Alan Gibbs (dir.)

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/115 ISSN: 1969-6108

Publisher Presses universitaires de Rennes

Printed version Date of publication: 1 March 2005 ISSN: 0294-04442

Electronic reference Alan Gibbs (dir.), Journal of the Short Story in English, 44 | Spring 2005, « Henry Roth's short fction » [Online], Online since 13 June 2008, connection on 03 December 2020. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/jsse/115

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword Alan Gibbs

Lawrence Henry Roth

A Means to an End: Henry Roth's Self-Consuming Short Fiction Alan Gibbs

"At Times in Flight": Henry Roth's Parable of Renunciation Steven G. Kellman

Against Oblivion: Henry Roth’s “The Surveyor” Virginia Ricard

Writing and Parricide in Henry Roth’s “Final Dwarf” Lene Schøtt-Kristensen

Henry Roth’s Short Fiction (1940-1980): A Geography Of Loss Martín Urdiales Shaw

Pieces of a Man: Considering Shifting Landscape as Autobiographical Critique Simon Turner

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Foreword

Alan Gibbs

1 Although Jewish American writer Henry Roth is best known as a novelist, he also left behind a rich store of short stories – both published and unpublished – at his death in 1995. Roth came to prominence with his first novel, Call It Sleep, although more so after its reissue in 1964, than in its initial publication in 1934. This novel is now widely regarded as a classic of the depiction of Jewish American experience. The majority of Roth’s short published pieces, collected together in the 1987 volume Shifting Landscape, were written during the 60-year period between Call It Sleep and his second novel, the four-volume Mercy of a Rude Stream. This latter, often autobiographical, work regretfully contemplates Roth’s life from the perspective of elderly ill-health. Roth’s shorter works, many of them similarly autobiographical, offer a wealth of illuminating reflections on his life and art. In particular, Roth used the short form to explore his attitude towards his childhood and past, and especially his difficulties in producing longer fiction.

2 No lengthy study of Roth’s short fiction has previously been published. Contributors were invited to supply essays on Roth’s short stories, concentrating either on individual pieces, on thematic groups of stories, or on the relationship between his short texts and his longer work. The focus could either be on Roth’s published pieces or his unpublished manuscripts. Besides Roth’s published oeuvre, a considerable amount of material remains unpublished, housed in the American Jewish Historical Society’s archive in New York City, appropriately the city that figures so strongly in Roth’s work. The unpublished material comprises both large projects (material that extends the so- far published Mercy volumes, for example) and short pieces. We have been fortunate enough to obtain permission from Roth’s literary estate to publish one of these pieces, “Lawrence”, which begins this volume.

3 The essay following Roth’s short story examines interactions between his shorter pieces and his longer fiction, specifically, Roth’s use of the short story as a means of carrying out experiments which reach their full fruition in his longer works. Thereafter, essays by Steven G. Kellman, Virginia Ricard, and Lene Schøtt-Kristensen, examine three of Roth’s strongest stories, from the 1950s and 1960s, respectively “At Times in Flight: A Parable” (1959), “The Surveyor” (1966), and “Final Dwarf” (1969).

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Finally, two articles by Martín Urdiales Shaw and Simon Turner take diverse overviews of Roth’s work. Common threads amongst these essays include the tracing of autobiographical currents in Roth’s work, in particular his anguished search for redemption, for a stable self and a suitable location from which to begin writing again. Roth’s short works provide a fascinating supplement to the intense search for identity and redemption that characterises much of his longer work. This collection hopefully provides the beginnings of a suitable recognition for this aspect of the overlooked and underestimated legacy of Henry Roth.

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Lawrence

Henry Roth

EDITOR'S NOTE

The following story, “Lawrence,” is a previously unpublished piece by Henry Roth, which until now has existed only in manuscript form, held at the American Jewish Historical Society’s collection of Roth’s papers in New York City. The story was apparently originally drafted in 1947-48 (as the date at the beginning suggests). Roth revisited the story in the 1980s and 1990s when he was writing the “Maine Sampler,” a lengthy manuscript covering his years in rural Maine. Characteristically, Roth decided at this point to incorporate “Lawrence” into the longer narrative. It was at this point that the final section of the story (after the separating asterisks) was added. Both versions of “Lawrence” – the original 1940s typescript and the 1990s reworking – are held in the Roth archive. The following draws on the later, expanded, version, with a very few minor emendations. The editor is very grateful to Lawrence I. Fox of the Henry Roth Literary Estate for permission to publish this story.

1 November, 1947 The first time that I met Lawrence Hannon was not due to chance, but instead to mischance. I had ordered and paid for a trio of Muscovy ducks from a place at the other end of Maine; and a few days later, I had been phoned by the railroad express company in Thorndike, some thirty miles distant from our home in Center Montville, that the ducks had arrived. Since I had no car, that meant I would have to get someone with a car to drive me there and fetch them. I had secured the services of Frank Livingston. Lately from Boston, Frank now lived in the farmhouse just below me on the gravel road, and still owned the old LaSalle in which he and his family had migrated here. Sure, he would drive me to Thorndike for a couple of bucks. But a light-headed man, lush in promise and meager in performance, he had gone down the hill to Lawrence's place, had stayed too long palavering - over a quart of beer perhaps - and by the time he was ready to drive up the hill again, the snow which had begun to fall - and in time

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developed into a blockading blizzard - already lay thick upon the road. Frank's tires were bald. He skidded, and went off the road. I left the house, and walked down the hill to find out what was causing the delay. Had we set out when we agreed, we would have been back by now. I found Livingston swearing at his car in a ditch. Instead of his helping me, I now had to go find help for him. At his urging that I go get Lawrence to bring his team, I went to Lawrence's house, and since he wasn't at home, I told his mother, Mrs. Hannon, about the plight Frank was in. Lawrence was at Gene Perry's, and she would call him. Then I plodded uphill again to where Frank was stranded. I tried to extend a little comfort, to assure him help was on the way, though I fervently wished the so-and-so in hell. The wind was blowing, gusts whipping up the snow into swirling clouds stinging our faces. We heard someone calling. As if out of a cavern in the environing snow, Lawrence appeared, driving his big white team. Trailing along with him was aging Gene Perry. I had thought, from hearing Gene mention him before, that Lawrence was an older man than the one I now saw. But this was a way they had out here of giving a person his mature attributes, or speaking of someone as if he were already a seasoned, responsible individual. I had been quite misled previously by the way Gene had spoken of Lawrence's younger brother, Mike, as though the lad were a grown man and had full authority in deciding serious matters like lending harness and other farm equipment, or deciding when he would come help his older brother 'yard in' the firewood. And yet when I saw Mike, he was just a spindly youngster in grade school. And now Lawrence: I saw a rather young man, perhaps twenty-five, face raw in the wind, sturdily built, but nothing exceptional, scantily clad against the snowy gale, and driving a team of white horses. Only less white than the driven snow, magnificently thewed woods' horses, they must each have weighed eighteen hundred pounds or more. Like Percherons or Clydesdales in size and gait, great-breasted, great-thighed, they paced ponderously, slowly into view. "Think you can get her out?" Livingston asked in his half-whining, half-wiseguy manner, shivered - and then let loose with another pack of empty oaths against the offending automobile. The car had not only slid into the ditch. It had in fact deepened the ditch with the rut it had made for itself, or Livingston had made for it, by spinning the rear wheels canted sideways in the muddied snow. That, combined with the uncommon depth of the ditch at that point in the road, made the pull that would have to be exerted on the vehicle seem to go almost straight up, rather than outward. And then I became acquainted with Lawrence's never-failing optimism, his cheerful confidence: "Oh, we'll get her out, goddamn 'er." And he laughed. It was always that way, the way of the Yankee, the New Englander: "We'll get 'er, goddamn 'er," or "We'll do it, by Gawd." And he would laugh. And always he succeeded, or so it seemed. Was it recklessness, was it valid self-confidence? It was only a matter of minutes for him to hitch the strong logging chain around the front axle of the car, and then attach the hook at the other end to the massive ring the horses trailed. He stood to the right side of them, and with the end of the reins, lashed out. There was nothing vicious about the act; it was the only way he could transmit his human will to brute intelligence. The team sprang forward; the car leaped out of its ruts, out of the ditch - and stood upright on the snowy road. "We got 'er, goddamn 'er," said Lawrence. I saw him again thereafter on a number of occasions. But for some reason, I never seemed to recognize him, to identify him clearly. I had seen him so briefly the first

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time, been distracted by Livingston, by the magnificent team, by the realization that the trio of ducks I had bought and paid for were languishing in a railroad station in a place called Thorndike. I always had to ask Gene, if he was with me at the time, "Is that him? Which one is Lawrence?" He worked then, as he does now, for Bill Yeaton, the owner of a large, open-air saw mill which had been newly set up alongside the road. Yeaton had bought several hundred acres of timberland, and was having the trees cut down, and sawing them up into boards. He himself worked, feeding logs to the formidable, gleaming disk of the spinning circular saw. He was not what he seemed: a bluff, middle-aging, stocky sawyer in blue dungarees and denim work jacket. He intended to study astronomy as soon as he got enough money to retire, he told me - to my surprise. The stars fascinated him. He owned a large telescope. His mind evidently strayed to other things beside lumbering. I once stood at his side, when he yelled, "Ass hole," and pulled his hand away from the whirling saw blade just as it cut through two of the fingers of his leather glove. At another time, I ordered a wagon load of birch slabs from him. Birch slabs, when sawed up made good firewood, hot firewood, not as lasting as other hardwoods, but far better than softwood slabs, which could be had for the hauling away, but creosoted the chimney. He forgot to bill me, and at the end of the month I had to remind him, most unwillingly. At all events, Yeaton had three or four men working for him, and one of them was Lawrence. He drove his team through the woods, and brought the felled trees to the improvised mill. Still, when he mingled with the others, I couldn't single him out, so I would always ask Gene, if he was with me: "Which one is Lawrence?" And then came the next real meeting: It was a Saturday afternoon in the spring of the year. Lawrence and I had both ordered fertilizer from Carleton Banks at Liberty, and we were going to drive out there and back with Lawrence's team. He had groomed them especially for the occasion. Glowing white, their tails tied with ribbons into fancy knots, they looked like proud, legendary steeds as we drove into the town of Liberty, drove sitting on the autotruck chassis that he had adapted to haul logs on. It struck me that the combination of vehicle and traction represented an indefinable fusion of the modern with the traditional, of a world departing with a world arriving. Lawrence himself seemed to embody just that kind of fusion. Perhaps he drank so much because that was his only way of coping with an inner strain, one that he felt, felt but could never verbalize. So I speculated. Meanwhile the people in the town, people on the sidewalk, stopped and gazed. They all knew Lawrence. They knew his team. Still, they stopped and gazed, their attention drawn by the sound of thudding hooves on the asphalt, and held by the sight of the pair of immense cloud-white chargers. By the time we got to where the fertilizer was kept, he had already brought out a quart of beer. We drank. Another bottle was produced out of the box on which we sat, and that bottle too was emptied. We loaded the bags of fertilizer aboard. By now we had quite a bun on. He kept swilling the stuff, far beyond my capacity, swilling beer all the way home, urging me to do the same, and even though I couldn't hope to keep up with him, I became thoroughly drunk. We were both drunk. When we got to my place, which we drove to first, I noticed the displeased look on M's face, but was too soused to take it seriously. We then drove downhill to his place. Before we finished unloading his dozen bags of fertilizer, I began to puke. It was just before dusk. I staggered home. M had watched me out of the window as I lurched from one side of the road to the other, climbing the hill. And when I entered

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the house, she minced no words to express her displeasure. She thought my behavior was disgraceful, humiliating to her in the extreme, that her husband should be seen in public reeling drunkenly up the road. Still stern and uncompromising, she served our boys and me our supper of scrambled eggs, mashed potatoes and dandelion greens, goat-milk for them, and coffee for me. They were subdued by their mother's severity, and as for me, I became sober almost instantly. The thought of her possible estrangement, the first time in our lives, dispelled the effects of alcohol, even before the coffee did. I asked her forgiveness. Never would I do that again, I promised. And I never did.

2 Sometime between then and the haying season, Lawrence had gotten hurt. He had fallen between his horses. I had noticed at the time when he drove his team into the barn with the load of fertilizer aboard the autotruck, that he wouldn't let his brother Mike help him unhitch the horses; drunk or not, Lawrence had to do it himself. Apparently that was the rule: No one but he touched his horses. And now, having returned alone from Liberty of a Saturday afternoon, and drunk again, no one came out of the house to see what happened to him when he drove into the barn. He had fallen between the two heavy animals. They stood there patiently, never moving from their place, until finally one of them had evidently stamped a foot against a gadfly, and trampled the edge of his hand. Closing the wound required fourteen stitches. "He'll git killed by them hosses some day," said Gene tersely. "Sure'n hell. He'll git killed. Drinks too much." Fortunately Mrs. Hannon had come out to hang up some wash, and caught a glimpse of her son lying between his team on the floor of the barn. She and her son Mike had dragged Lawrence out from under. Otherwise who knew what would have happened to him. He might very well have been seriously, perhaps fatally, injured. I didn't go see him then, but that incident of him falling between the two ponderous beasts seemed symbolic of something, though I couldn't tell what. The pair of huge, white docile animals that were the sole object of his affection, unwittingly destroying their master. Perhaps I didn't get around to seeing Lawrence, because he recovered so rapidly. In a week's time I heard from Gene that Lawrence was up and working in the woods again. The man's recuperative powers were remarkable. Came the end of August, haying time. Gene and I were stuck. Gene was very poor. The house he and his wife Elsie lived in, the second house down the hill below Livingston's, had long since lost every vestige of paint: the clapboards were weathered almost lavender. The interior carried out the promise of the exterior. Inside, all was stark and bleak. Not a scrap of floor covering in the kitchen. Nothing on the walls except a few snapshots of Elsie's daughter. She was an illegitimate child, Gene told me, born to Elsie before he married her, which made him seem like an altruistic sort of person in my eyes, although I'm sure poor Elsie paid for her youthful indiscretion all the rest of her life. Good-hearted man though I knew Gene to be, he treated his wife almost like a slave; while I was there, he threw a piece of bread on the floor - in a pique over something - which she silently retrieved. A gaunt woman with a solemn visage and sad, dark eyes, life had apparently not entirely crushed her wit and her sense of humor. We were cutting 'pulp wood' together, Gene and I, on a piece of property I thought was inside my property line, although Littlefield, whose house was between Livingston's and Gene's, thought the land was 'on him'. Still, he raised no further objection, and Gene and I cut twelve cords, all this with bow saw and cross-cut. And the buyer for the pulp mill paid all of $12 a cord for it! Twelve bucks each for a volume of pulp wood

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measuring 128 cubic feet. And you know, the wood had to be stacked so that the rounds of the wood hugged close together - not, as the saying was, so that a cat could go through, and a dog after her - but compact. I told the buyer, a tall man in a fine suit, I told him in no uncertain terms: Never again!... But it was so quiet, peaceful and restoring working in the woods with their scent of pine and cedar, felling a tree, limbing it out, sawing it up into four-foot lengths - I'll have to talk about that experience in some other book, or in some other world, perhaps the next one. Anyway, to return to the thread of humor I perceived in forlorn, gaunt Elsie: Gene had invited me for lunch at his house. It consisted of crisply rendered salt pork, bread and butter, home churned and strong, fresh squash and coffee. Gene was a sinewy man in his early sixties, not ruggedly built, toothless: he chewed food with his 'goomies'. All of his garments were patched. He held up his faded blanket-lined jacket that had a fresh rip in it and remarked, "I guess it's jest about used up." Elsie, with hollow voice, but with a snap of light in her sad, dark eyes, rejoined: "It was throwed away three years ago." Her remark seemed to brighten up the cheerless, penurious kitchen. Gene was poor. He had no hay rack, no wagon, no mowing machine, nothing. But he did have a horse and a cow. We had agreed that he would cut the hay on my two neglected meadows; I would help pitch it, and we would go halves on the yield. Ludicrous is the only way I can term what happened. We borrowed the mowing machine from Wally Curtis, the town pauper. It was, or rather it had, only a three-foot cut. And we were going to borrow Lawrence's hay rack. At any rate, after we came and got Curtis's mowing machine, which had been left out in the weather all year, and we tried it out, it wouldn't work. It wouldn't cut. The teeth were serrated with abuse. Not only was the mower dull, but we had to go into the woods and cut two hornbeam saplings for shafts, which in Maine were called fills (hence the term 'backing and filling'). We were lucky we didn't use the rusty, old rig, because before very long, here came Curtis himself, wanting it back - and the nerve of the guy, trying to blame us for breaking one of the main gears. We had to calm him down, and demonstrate that it was not broken. And while we were jawing about it, just as we convinced Curtis that the gear was intact, word came from Ory Morse, riding by on his wagon, that Lawrence was hurt, badly hurt this time. He had gotten drunk, and driven his farm tractor, an improvised affair, recklessly over the road, and the thing had overturned, pinning him beneath. Why he wasn't killed no one knew. The machine had thrown him when it overturned, and one of the deeply-treaded rear wheels landed on his back, the motor still running and the wheel still turning, burning him severely. The whole weight of the rear wheel was on him, spinning and burning his flesh. "Drunk again," said Gene. "Same old story." "But this time it's his tractor," I remarked. "Got to be one 'r t'other'll kill him," Gene asserted. He was lying prone in bed when I went down to see him. He was wearing only his pajama pants, his muscular arms and shoulders naked, freckled, his back a mass of bandages. His mother stood by patiently, resignedly, left the room and returned, while we talked about the accident. He had "cut the tractor too sharp," and it turned over on him. Of course, it wasn't necessary for him to tell me he had been drunk. The whole weight of the tractor had rested on his back. "How in hell could you bear it?" I asked. "Well," and then he flashed me that never-failing grin, "it was beginning to get a mite heavy."

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"I should think so." "Livingston and Mike come running, when Ma called them, and they tried to lift the tractor, but they couldn't. They had to jack her up to get me out." "And you were under the machine all that time?" "I wasn't nowhere else." He grinned again. He was in pain. But what a splendid will, what fortitude; they shamed anything I possessed. I couldn't help but feel a sense of sorrow at such a reckless expenditure of human vitality. "Is that why the bandages are on your back?" "No." He tried to shift position, winced. Movement evidently intensified the pain. "No, the wheel kept a'spinnin', and burned me." "It didn't stop right away?" "No. Kept a'spinnin'." I shook my head. "It's a wonder you weren't killed." "I reckon 'tis." He turned his face on the pillow: Drawn features, blue eyes looking up at me sideways, sunburnt hair, thick and matted, tawny as a Toggenburg buck goat's. "Anything I can do?" "No. I guess I'll get over it." Moralizing, prating, would be of little or no use; they wouldn't do any good. It would seem as if any man in his right mind would give up drinking entirely after such a mishap. But drinking, I reflected, wasn't something that an individual like Lawrence could take or leave. It was his sole form of release from internal strains and stresses, perhaps immense strains and stresses, the cause, the magnitude of which another person could only conjecture. "Lawrence, I came to ask you, though maybe I shouldn't, when you're in this shape, but I have to. I'm stuck. Gene and I are stuck. We've got no farm equipment. You know that. No mowing machine, no hay rack, or anything. We can't get the hay in. We tried to use Curtis's mower. But you know the guy. He left it out all winter, and it wouldn't cut." I didn't want to go into personalities any further: how the machine reflected the man. "Three foot cut, ain't it?" Lawrence concentrated by an effort of will. "Yes." "You'll be a long time with that." "Yes, and we couldn't even cut with it. He's taking it back. I wonder if you'd care to make this arrangement: You're laid up. You can't use your machinery. Would you care to have Gene, and with me helping him, cut mine, and share it three ways. I've got four goats, you know, for milk for the boys. I need only about four tons." He was silent, in the traditionally deliberate New England way. "I'm about out of hay," he said. "You are?" "Oh, I'll get enough hay. There's two or three places I can cut. I've got about three tons over to Searsmont, but I can't get it." "Anything Gene and I could do?" "Oh, no." He was silent again. He had made no reply to my proposal. I could only be guided by a general acquaintance with New England custom: If no answer was forthcoming soon, I would have to leave. The man was in too much pain for me to stay longer. His mother was anxiously hovering near. "Doctor been coming to see you?" I prepared to go.

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"He's supposed to be here now," Mrs. Hannon interposed. "Yes, he's been coming every day," said Lawrence. "Who is he?" "Dr. Bailey from Liberty." "I guess I'd better push off. You need rest." "Oh, no. It's good to talk to somebody. Forget the damned thing for awhile." "Well..." I hesitated. "Yes, you can have the mowing machine," Lawrence said suddenly. "It's a good un. It's got a five foot cut. You tell Gene to come down and get it. We'll rig up the rack so he can use it with his horse." "What do you mean?" I was elated, but I felt like a grave robber, a wretch taking advantage of a badly injured man. "I've been pulling it with a tractor." "All right. I'll tell him. We'll divide up the hay in thirds." "Anyway you want. It don't make any odds. But I'm about out o' hay. I'll ask Mike to help you bunch it." "Oh, great." "The sickle-bar needs sharpening. I've got a machine to sharpen her with." "I can help with that. I've been grinding tools for five years. If I can help with anything else without getting in the way I'd like to." I arose to go, smiled down at him apologetically. "I'm no hand at this." "Oh, that's all right. We'll get her in, goddamn 'er." "We?" I smiled uncertainly. "How long did the doctor say you were going to be laid up?" "Two weeks. But I'll be up before then." He winced trying to roll a little on his side. "Please take it easy, Lawrence. Get well. That's the main thing. Goodbye, Mrs. Hannon." I took my leave - just as the doctor's car drew up.

***

3 That was all I wrote at the time, my first sortie into the domain of letters after six or eight years doing other things. What follows is all rather dreamlike, as I sit here recalling that haying season of more than forty years ago, dreamlike, separated into discrete scenes, imbued with summery warmth, languid in retrospect, though not languid in the actual performance. The reassuring click of functioning sickle-bar mingles with the hiss of shorn grass, shorn grass with the scent of summer in it, proverbial scent of mown hay. It was good to have experienced at least once, lying on top of the huge, top-heavy hay rack, as I did, beside Gene and Mike while the wagon wheels beneath the lumbering load rolled up the hill, shedding wisps of hay to mark the hay rack's passage. Well, Fiona, since you and I are to collaborate in this retrieval and reconstruction of things past, some of them a good many years in the past, I might as well tell you that Gene and I hadn't been working for more than five days, when who should appear, with his bandages billowing up the back of his shirt, but Lawrence, driving his tractor, with Mike aboard. Alone, Gene and I, with our limited forces, and my very limited facility with a pitch- fork, would have been all the rest of the summer, and perhaps even till the snow flew, getting in the hay. But here came Lawrence, riding the tractor. I had performed one service that would make the mowing machine much more efficient. It was the only

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service I was really capable of performing: Grinding metal. I knew, I think, as much about grinding as anyone in Maine, having done it in machine shops for the past five years, having done it, I might add, for so many years that I thought I was through with writing... Well, with Gene turning the crank, I had ground the shark-toothed sickle-bar to a razor edge. "You sure got her ready to go," said Lawrence when he looked at the sickle-bar. "Never seen it done that slick before." M came to the door and said, "Hello." My two young boys, Jay and Herb, came out of the house to watch. Lawrence told Gene to unhitch the horse, and he and Mike would adapt the tow-bar so the tractor would pull the mower. "What the hell has got you out of bed?" I demanded. "Don't you hurt?" "Oh, some. But I'll be all right. I'm on the mend." "Don't get me wrong, Lawrence. I'm happy to see you here. But -" "Gene was over to see me last night. Told me how poorly you were doin'." "Still, another few days wouldn't matter." He flashed his invincible grin. "He said you had a full barrel and more o'hard cider down your cellar." "Well, yes, but I don't know. I tasted it. The second is just about as sour as the first." I had borrowed Gene's horse a year ago, and gotten two barrels of my wormy apples pressed at the cider mill. In a short while, the cider had become too sour in either barrel for M and me to enjoy it. "Don't matter if it's a little sour," said Lawrence. "It's hard cider." "It's hard cider, I guess, but it's too sour for me." "'T ain't for me. Mind if I try some?" "Sure. I've got a spigot in both barrels. I'll go in the house and get a glass." "No need to. I brought a jug along." He produced a glass gallon jug from the side of the driver's seat of the tractor, then he went down the stone steps of the cellar bulkhead. The sound of liquid trickling into the empty jug came up out of the darkness... Lawrence climbed up the stairs into daylight that gleamed warmly on the glass jug full of brown cider. "We'll git that goddamn hay in for you in no time." "We?" I asked again. He had emphasized the word, we, so strongly that I felt confused. "I'll send Mike down the hill after a couple o' men. That hay'll be ready to make winnrows outa, if the weather holds. I'll git all the help I need - for yourn. And for mine too in Searsmont." "Boy, that's great," I said. He and Mike and Gene completed the transfer of tow bars. And then, pulling the as yet motionless sickle-bar past the part we had already mowed, Lawrence drove the tractor over the bumpy field downhill. "Daddy, Daddy!" the two kids cried excitedly. "He's cutting it." "Yeah, I see." I turned to Gene: "What does he mean: Get all the help he needs? I can't pay for help." "Hain't no need to either. A barrel o' hard cider is wuth more'n a barrel o' gold this time o' year." "Is that what he meant?" "Shore as hell." "Jesus, am I gonna be responsible for another accident?" "The horses or the tractor's bound to kill him, one or t'other." "Then what'd you tell him about the cider for?" Gene's mouth opened in a toothless grin. "Gotta git the hay in."

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"But the guy's still got bandages on his back. Another couple of days won't matter." Gene jerked his head in negation. "You never know about the weather," he said. It may sound anti-climactic: But never would I know again so successful a haying season. Before we were done, we had two of Lawrence's fellow workers at the saw-mill pitching hay, all of them stewed to the gills on my sour hard cider. No one received so much as a scratch. And such benign weather! A flawless sky, lambent azure. "Hey, that's a he-bunch," Lawrence commended one of his mates lifting a pitchfork-full that all but bent the long handle. All of them guffawed. And to me: "I told you we'd get her in, goddamn 'er." I am loath to end.

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A Means to an End: Henry Roth's Self-Consuming Short Fiction

Alan Gibbs

1 American-Jewish writer Henry Roth (1906-1995) is best known as a novelist. More accurately, Roth is best known as the novelist who for many years failed to write novels: six decades lie between the publication of his first novel, Call It Sleep (1934) and his second, the first volume of the Mercy of a Rude Stream series (1994-98). In this intervening period, Roth wrote a number of short works, including stories, position pieces, and draft autobiographical extracts.

2 Especially in the period shortly before the writing and publication of the Mercy series, at a time when he felt reborn as a writer, Roth published a number of short pieces. Most of these, as with his longer works, were at least partly autobiographical. In many ways, they represent a series of preparatory exercises for the final magnum opus. Impressive as many of Roth’s shorter works are, he took an approach to the short story, which might be described as utilitarian. Roth often used the form as a preliminary means to explore themes that he would develop at both greater length and depth in his novels. Moreover, in the Mercy series, Roth’s obsessive urge to document his life led him to co-opt a number of previously published pieces into the larger narrative, thus challenging their status as discrete short stories.

3 The following considers both of these aspects. Firstly, this essay examines the consequences of Roth's incorporating an earlier work – a 1940 short story entitled “Somebody Always Grabs the Purple” – into the text of the Mercy series. The second half focuses on the way in which Roth uses a short piece from 1977, “Itinerant Ithacan,” as a springboard for later writing about the same episodes in the Mercy volumes. My focus in terms of Roth’s interpolation of “Somebody Always Grabs the Purple” into the Mercy series is not so much its thematic content, the unsuccessful attempt of a young New York boy to obtain a particular fairy book from the local lending library. Instead, the essay explores the significance of Roth’s very act of inserting this earlier text into the later one.

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4 After appearing in The New Yorker in 1940, “Purple” was also reproduced in Shifting Landscape, the anthology of Roth’s short pieces.1 Its interpolation into the Mercy series is thus the piece’s third materialisation in print. While the story, even as originally conceived, is undoubtedly somewhat autobiographical, the degree to which the reader understands it as such varies amongst these appearances. Part of the reason for these different readings derives from the variant contexts or, to use Jerome McGann’s influential phrase, the bibliographical codes surrounding the story. These would actually posit it as entirely different every time it is published. McGann maintains that these codes “call our attention to other styles and scales of symbolic exchange that every language event involves. Meaning is transmitted through bibliographical as well as linguistic codes” (57).

5 For its appearance in the Mercy series, the bibliographical codes work primarily to ease the insertion of the story seamlessly into the larger narrative, stressing its similarity to the surrounding material. This process of absorption functions to suggest that the story is more autobiographical than the reader might otherwise have believed. “Purple” is perhaps no longer classifiable as a short story once it appears as part of the larger narrative that comprises the Mercy series. Instead, it is specifically cited (and sited) in this context to provide evidence supporting the autobiographical project of Ira Stigman, the narrator-protagonist and Roth’s alter ego. Each time, however, this piece is published, it has served a different purpose, and is locatable by the reader as part of an ongoing, protean narrative. In its first appearance in The New Yorker, it represents an attempt (almost Roth's final one before a long silence) to sustain the stalled and seemingly dying writing career of the author of Call It Sleep. In its second incarnation, in Shifting Landscape, it serves the purpose of demonstrating the struggle and decline of a once promising writer. Mario Materassi, the editor of Roth’s pieces in Shifting Landscape, externally constructs around them a narrative of Roth’s triumph, failure, and comeback as a writer, of which “Somebody Always Grabs the Purple” is but a small part. 2 Finally, in Mercy of a Rude Stream, Roth’s framing suggests that the story illustrates the young Ira's character.

6 Throughout the narrative of the Mercy series the character of Ira is problematised, as Roth seeks to dislodge any sense of stable subjectivity in order to deal with the dangerous autobiographical narrative of adolescent incest. Most obviously, Roth employs dual layers of narrative: not only that of Ira’s adolescence, but also the voice of the old man narrating, as he types the principal narrative into his computer. But Roth further complicates the doubling of self by introducing additional narrative levels to the old and young Ira. By interpolating into the narrative of the Mercy series older pieces such as “Purple,” Roth introduces another temporal dimension to the narration. Firstly, the insertion of these stories further obscures any sense of the reader’s distinction between Roth and Ira: “Somebody Always Grabs the Purple,” written by Roth, is ascribed in the Mercy series to Ira. Secondly, it grants a new temporal perspective.3 As the commentary surrounding the interpolation of this story suggests, the narrator of the story is temporally far closer to the material he relates than is the old Ira: “Forty-five years ago, forty-five years closer to the self-involved, self-indulgent, ill-at-ease, lonesome, moody, aimless scapegrace he was then” (A Star Shines 68). This might imply that the story is therefore considerably more accurate. Elsewhere however, the mechanisms within which Roth frames interpolated works construct a

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model denoting them as flawed, inferior, and inaccurate in comparison to his current vision. After “Purple,” for example, Ira finds it “ retarding - was that the right word? - arresting, inhibiting, to view this evidence of the writer he was, he once was, the preserved specimen of the writer he had been: the arrogant, egotistic, self-assured author of his first novel. Rereading his product of forty-five years ago drained him of what he was today...something better than he had been, he thought, he hoped” (A Star Shines 72, original emphasis and ellipsis).

7 The gentle derision directed at his younger self, combined with the hope and belief that he is today “something better” as a writer, suggests that these earlier works are, to a degree, repudiated. Roth thereby constructs a hierarchy of access to autobiographical truth, expressing a firm preference for the present over earlier powers of recall.

8 Crucially, in the Mercy series, Roth introduces written records of events from the period between the recalled event and the period in which the older Roth/Ira (since they are here indistinguishable) now writes. These records – what I would term ‘interim memories’ – highlight the changes in perception wrought on Roth/Ira by the passage of years and demonstrate the effects upon current recall of having previously written accounts of the same incidents. The following passage, concerning Ira’s attempts to recall his serendipitous borrowing of Huckleberry Finn, illustrates aptly how the very fact of having previously penned “Purple” affects Roth’s/Ira’s subsequent powers of recollection: There was something awry with the time frame of the picture, with the ambience of the moment of his borrowing the books. He was on the downstairs, the adult floor of the library–that was his distinct impression–and the lady with the pince-nez was the head-librarian: As befitted her rank, she was the one who always stamped books downstairs. The chances of the Purple Fairy Book, or of any fairy book, being downstairs were very slight. Hence it was something he had concocted in his own imagination, a sheer figment. (A Star Shines 149)

9 Ira thus candidly highlights the problems he encounters when his seemingly genuine memories become hopelessly entangled with the details of the short story penned in 1940. It is as impossible for the reader as it is for Ira to determine the degree to which the Purple Fairy Book and the female librarian with the pince-nez are recalled from his experiences at the time, or from “Somebody Always Grabs the Purple.” Bruce Kawin suggests that “in the human memory, repetition more often than not is the destroyer and not the saver: a neutralizer, habituator, falsifier.… We set seal after seal on the experience – to flatten it, in fact to kill it” (27-28). Conversely, the use of interpolated texts by Roth actually serves as an admission of the difficulty posed by interim memories; by foregrounding this problem he invigorates rather than flattens the narration.

10 Roth could, of course, have chosen to redraft “Somebody Always Grabs the Purple” in order to integrate the incident more seamlessly into the principal narrative of the Mercy series. In an aside to his computer, Ecclesias, however, he admits that “Recollections formed so long ago become discreet [sic], immutable” (A Star Shines 205). 4 Interim memories exert such a strong shaping force on Roth’s powers of recall that he feels forced to acknowledge the present-day constructedness of his ostensibly autobiographical writing. This proposition helps to explain why pieces such as “Purple” are grafted into the Mercy series as extraneous, sometimes ill-fitting interpolations. The effects of Roth’s strategies of interpolation are manifold. Not the least of these is that the narrator of the Mercy series becomes an extremely protean and elusive subject,

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divided against himself. Given the shameful nature of the revelations of Ira’s behaviour (namely the adolescent incestuous relationship with his sister) this divided subjectivity perhaps represents a further example of Roth’s tendency to use the short story form for apparently grander purposes. The interpolation of “Purple” and the resultant decentring of Ira’s subjectivity extend numerous other elusive and evasive narrative strategies whereby Roth seeks to shift blame by disowning the actions of his protagonist.

11 Of crucial importance is how these interpolations, these “recollections formed so long ago,” affect the subsequently-written evocations which comprise the bulk of Mercy of a Rude Stream's narrative discourse. Roth interpolates these pieces – fictions, earlier drafts, even letters – in a relatively unmediated way, to illustrate the difference made by interim recollection, that is, by having previously written about an episode. Although much of the published version of Mercy of a Rude Stream consists precisely of reworkings and reeditings of previous drafts, it appears that there are earlier versions of certain episodes, generally from before he began writing drafts of the Mercy series, which Roth felt, for various reasons, disinclined to reedit. These pieces are therefore inserted jarringly into the principal narrative precisely to demonstrate how interim recollection affects his subsequent ability to construct a narrative based on memory.

12 To turn to Roth’s use of the short story as an arena of formal and thematic experimentation, the following section examines “Itinerant Ithacan.” This is the longest work published by Roth between Call It Sleep and the Mercy series, a fact that immediately suggests its importance. Roth himself was clearly aware of its significance as a work geared towards future writing. In Shifting Landscape, each piece is bookended with various contextualising comments, often extracted from contemporaneously- written letters. Those selected to introduce “Itinerant Ithacan” are notable for what they reveal about the direction that Roth's writing was then taking. For example, Mario Materassi elaborates on Roth’s description of the work as experimental: “The experiment consisted of...two seemingly unrelated nuclei in a work that required sustained narrative tension and well-defined focal concentration. In this perspective, ‘Itinerant Ithacan’ is to be seen as a most important stepping stone toward the conception of Mercy of a Rude Stream” (192). The story therefore works as an experimental precursor to the Mercy series perhaps less significantly in terms of the subject matter and more through the narrative strategies adopted. The tension between present day incidents, the writer constructing the historical-autobiographical narrative, and that narrative itself, the “two seemingly unrelated nuclei” Materassi identifies above, is precisely what Roth develops at greater length in Mercy of a Rude Stream. The presence of this juxtaposition of then and now in “Itinerant Ithacan” makes the piece an important conceptual stepping stone towards the later work. Roth himself was also apparently aware of the importance of the formal experimentation in “Itinerant Ithacan.” In an interview excerpt reproduced before the story in Shifting Landscape, he describes trying to “work a narrative together with the author’s quotidian” (193). Again, Roth clearly conceives of the piece as a speculative exploration of narrative strategies he later employs more fully in the Mercy series. As an aside, one might add that the present day narrative, “the author's quotidian” mentioned above, in “Itinerant Ithacan” is considerably more complete than the frequently rambling digressions in the Mercy series. In “Itinerant Ithacan,” perhaps because of the nature of the short story as discrete, “the author’s quotidian” is much more tightly developed,

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suggesting that the short story form actually imposed a welcome discipline on Roth that is lacking from the protracted later work.

13 Since “Itinerant Ithacan” runs to twenty-six pages whilst Mercy of a Rude Stream comprises over fourteen hundred, the narrative and thematic scope of the latter work is, obviously, markedly wider.5 It is not merely the case that “Itinerant Ithacan” contains fewer narrative incidents than the Mercy series, but also that the same events in the later work characteristically take much longer to narrate. The greater detail in the Mercy series reinforces much of what we know about Roth’s writing practices. In the years from the mid-sixties onwards, evidence from his collected papers reveals that as well as working on individual shorter pieces, Roth was sketching out scenes for a much longer, semi-autobiographical narrative. Roth began shaping the Mercy narrative in earnest from 1979 onwards, two years after the publication of “Itinerant Ithacan,” rewriting and extending drafts of the series until his death in 1995. The significant difference in length between the narration of the same incidents in “Itinerant Ithacan” and the Mercy series reinforces the sense of Roth’s growing garrulousness as he reached old age.

14 In narratological terms, in the later work the proportion of narrative to story significantly increases, thus significantly slowing the speed of Ira’s ‘telling.’6 This slowing pace is typically characterised by a greater solipsism in the Mercy series accounts. By the time Roth came to write the Mercy series, his commitment to understanding (as well as both expiating and exorcising) his earlier self had clearly become an obsession. In From Bondage, the third volume of the series, a scene between Ira, Larry and Edith (the latter two respectively Ira’s best friend, and his future mistress, currently a college professor) takes place in which they discuss, amongst other things, Ira’s growing fascination with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.7 A briefer version of this scene also appears in “Itinerant Ithacan,” and the variations between the two accounts are characteristic of a general pattern of change. For example, added into the Mercy version is a digression concerning a previous incident wherein Ira comes into some money by dubious means at the ballpark where he works as a drink seller. The ensuing discussion of Ira’s moral fibre, both between the characters and between narrator and reader, is characteristic of the greater focus upon Ira’s self in the Mercy series. Much of the greater length of the later narrative may be attributed to this solipsistic dwelling upon the autobiographical protagonist in such minute psychological detail.

15 Another example of the greater detail in the Mercy series account might be made by comparing the two versions of R’s/Ira’s first meeting with Edith. This incident, pivotal for his development as a writer, comprises two sentences in “Itinerant Ithacan” and two-and-a-half pages in the Mercy account. The earlier description of the encounter runs as follows: “It was then that R was introduced to Eda Lou. She was dark, petite, and grave - and yet with ready smile of solicitude for his tongue-tied confusion” (200). As suggested above, the incident is narrated in summary form, whereas in the Mercy account it is a narrated scene, including a representation of the actual conversation held between Ira and Edith, in which the reader is allowed access to, rather than merely told about, Edith's “solicitude for his tongue-tied confusion.” Likewise, in comparison to the brief “dark, petite, and grave” Eda Lou of “Itinerant Ithacan,” the Mercy series provides a full, flattering portrait of Edith, who is to become so important in Ira’s life:

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By some kind of inevitability, he knew, knew that the petite olive-skinned woman, turning away with winning and receptive mein, smiling countenance, like a dark- hued source for rays of generosity, sympathy, smiling countenance with prominent, sad eyes, the woman with small earrings, bunching a minute handkerchief, toying with a thin gold necklace, was Edith Welles. (Diving Rock 336)

16 Notwithstanding the possibly unconvincing abundance of impressions recorded in this instant in such a cascade of purple prose, the greater length of the Mercy series allows for greater depth throughout. Edith, for all her shortcomings as a tangible character, is considerably more rounded than the Eda Lou of “Itinerant Ithacan.”

17 The Mercy version also draws the reader’s attention to the “inevitability” of Ira’s meeting with Edith. This gestures towards a theme that Roth develops in the Mercy series and which is absent from “Itinerant Ithacan”: namely, the importance of chance, or, alternatively, the intervention of destiny, in his life. By the time Roth began to write the Mercy version of these events, it appears that he had realised the full implications of, for example, his chance meeting with Lester Winter which in turn led to meeting Eda Lou Walton, which in turn led to him becoming a writer. While the Mercy series explores the gradual growth of the autobiographical protagonist from slum-dwelling immigrant to artist, the element of chance or coincidence within this narrative is also developed with considerably more thematic clarity than in any of Roth’s earlier works. According to Henry Krystal, this attitude towards the past is typical for a person of Roth’s age: “Old age, with its losses, imposes the inescapable necessity to face one's past. This development determines that one either accepts one’s self and one’s past or continues to reject it angrily. In other words, the choice is, as Erik Erikson put it, integration or despair” (83). Roth, at his advanced age, is faced with the choice of accepting the past as somehow both random and inevitable, or railing against it, a dichotomy that indeed characterises these novels. In “Itinerant Ithacan” Roth allows an element of chance, whereas in the writing of the Mercy series he all but imposes an inevitability on the grand narrative of his alter ego’s life.

18 As an illustration of this, one may compare the two renderings of the protagonist's reaction on being told by Lester/Larry that he is in love with Eda Lou/Edith, an announcement which has an important bearing on his own chances with the woman. In “Itinerant Ithacan”, R is simply left dazed by Lester’s announcement: “If only his mind weren't forever groping in its phlegmatic murk - if only for once it would skip free into clarity. He shook his head” (201). By contrast, in the later account, Ira “listened, heard, comprehended” (Diving Rock 306), while the music to which the two friends are listening underlines Ira's understanding the momentousness of the occasion: “he had just turned off the aria from La Forza del Destino” (307). The relative comprehension of his protagonist reflects Roth's own grasp of the importance of Lester/Larry's announcement: by the time of writing the later account, Roth, like Ira, is more aware of the possible future which awaits him should he subsequently be able to oust his friend from Eda Lou/Edith's affections.

19 In the Mercy series the tension between the aleatory nature of Ira’s growth into an artist and the seeming inevitability of his destiny becomes insistent after Edith befriends him. Another crucial episode common to both versions in this respect is Edith’s smuggling a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses through customs, a book with which Ira rapidly becomes obsessed in terms its innovations of form. The later version is once more considerably longer (around eleven pages compared to a little more than a page), and culminates in Ira’s epiphany that Joyce’s language transforms his subject matter:

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“Language was the conjurer, indeed the philosopher's stone, language was a form of alchemy. It was language that elevated meanness to the heights of art” (From Bondage 77). The way in which this episode is introduced in the Mercy version, portentously emphasising the importance of the event for Ira, underscores the greater thematic depth of the later account: It would only be some time later that Ira came to realize the import of what took place in that elegant living room in that small fraction of time. And yet, the very fact that the event left behind, however small, an irreducible knot within memory would forever mark in Ira's mind the momentous instant of transition when the past departed from its old aim, its previously envisaged future, to a new one, the instant when sensibility redirected its commitment from an old to a new function. (From Bondage 61)

20 The “irreducible knot within memory” emphasises Roth’s realisation that the teleological perspective granted many years later places pivotal significance on apparently minor events. A major difference thus begins to emerge as we see the earlier short story’s focus – the protagonist caught between two worlds, the immigrant upbringing of his past and the artistic circle of his future – sharpened and deepened into the novel’s theme, which becomes the growth of an artist. The series may thus be characterised as a Künstlerroman, a Jewish-American Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, relocated to 1920s New York City.

21 This reading of the longer work as a Künstlerroman is reinforced firstly by Ira’s growing infatuation with Joyce: as he begins to read Ulysses, he describes his compulsion to “subject himself to this shibboleth of modern novels,” as a means of passing through what he terms a “gateway of esteem” (From Bondage 65). In other words, Ira finds it necessary as an artist to initiate himself thoroughly in the techniques of literary modernism, hence his obsessive reading of first Joyce, and then Eliot. With regard to the latter, a later episode, wherein the protagonist argues with a sceptical Lester/Larry over the merits of The Waste Land, while it appears in both “Itinerant Ithacan” and the Mercy series, is characteristically given much more weight in the longer work. In the short story, it is difficult to take the argument, which seems rather less consequential, to be greatly symbolic of R's growing artistic sensibility, not least because there is no evidence of the latter. In the Mercy series, by contrast, Ira has already shown evidence of his sensitiveness towards language, has had a short piece published in the college magazine, and is similarly beginning to appreciate that he may be the real artist in comparison to the dilettante Larry. For anybody familiar with the facts of Roth’s life, Edith’s question in the later work, “And you think Joyce and Eliot will guide you towards realizing future literary ambitions?” (From Bondage 163) seems prophetic indeed.

22 “Itinerant Ithacan” might be seen as Roth’s Mercy series in miniature, an observation which raises a pertinent question. Namely, what is actually added by expanding a modest twenty-six page short story into four volumes of material? Undoubtedly, the earlier story is an accomplished piece in itself, not least in its density and in the skilful way Roth begins his dual-level formal experimentation. But this experimentation is only tentatively begun in “Itinerant Ithacan”; it is in the Mercy series where this dispersed narration reaches its full fruition, through contributing to the devastating effect of the revelation regarding the existence of Ira’s sister, and their incestuous relationship. The two narrative levels enable Roth in the Mercy series to decentre the autobiographical protagonist, thus shattering the reader’s sense of subjectivity, a

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process redoubled, moreover, through the interpolation of earlier works such as “Somebody Always Grabs the Purple.” Similarly, and amongst many other thematic aspects, the vastly increased scope of the Mercy series allows Roth to address in more depth the tension between the twin elements of chance and inevitability in his development as an artist.

23 Roth’s approach to the short story is thus convincingly conceived as utilitarian. In the instances delineated above, he firstly reuses or consumes earlier works as a means to disrupt subjectivity. Secondly, he uses the form as an exercise, experimenting with themes and narrative strategies that he develops in greater depth in his novel series. None of this should diminish the status of Roth’s shorter pieces, a number of which deftly and vividly portray the preoccupation of a lifetime spent guiltily searching for sources of redemption. Nevertheless, one cannot help but conclude from the main direction of his efforts – notwithstanding the lengthy gap in his output – that Roth clearly perceived himself primarily as a novelist.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980.

Kawin, Bruce F. Telling It Again and Again: Repetition in Literature and Film. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1972.

Krystal, Henry. “Trauma and Aging: A Thirty-Year Follow-Up.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.

McGann, Jerome J. A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983

Roth, Henry. Shifting Landscape (ed. Mario Materassi). New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994.

___. Mercy of a Rude Stream, volume 1: A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994.

___. Mercy of a Rude Stream, volume 2: A Diving Rock on the Hudson. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.

___. Mercy of a Rude Stream, volume 3: From Bondage. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997.

___. Mercy of a Rude Stream, volume 4: Requiem for Harlem. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

NOTES

1. References to both “Somebody Always Grabs the Purple” and “Itinerant Ithacan” are from this publication, and are given in parenthesis after the quotation. 2. See Simon Turner’s article in this collection for a lengthier discussion of Materassi’s shaping role in Shifting Landscape.

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3. In this respect, the interpolation of “Purple” works in precisely the same way as that of other pieces written at a different time to the manuscripts of the Mercy series. For example, Roth also incorporates “P & T Yuletide - a Sketch” into A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, volume one of the series. This piece was not previously published, but exists as a separate manuscript, predating the Mercy series. 4. “ Discreet” rather than “discrete” is almost certainly an error missed by the copy editor. Elsewhere in his published work and manuscripts, Roth is evidently prone to the same slip (cf. Requiem for Harlem: “Life was full of chaotic fragments, discreet, in the mathematical sense, disparate” [168]). 5. I refer here, only to the published version of the Mercy series. There exist several hundred further pages of thus-far unpublished manuscript continuing the narrative into the 1930s. 6. In Narrative Discourse Gérard Genette identifies four ‘movements’ of speed in narrating: decreasingly ellipsis, summary, scene, and pause. While much of “Itinerant Ithacan” consists of summary and scene, the later, Mercy series accounts of the same incidents are either scene or, in the frequent present-day interruptions, pause; the pace of the etiolated narrative in the Mercy series is thus generally markedly slower. 7. In the “Itinerant Ithacan” version, Larry and Edith retain the actual names of the people upon whom they are based, respectively Lester Winter and Eda Lou Walton, while the Roth figure is referred to as “R” rather than, as in the Mercy series, Ira.

ABSTRACTS

Entre Call It Sleep et le premier volume de Mercy of a Rude Stream, Henry Roth a publié nombre de pièces de fiction brève, dont des nouvelles, des articles et des ébauches autobiographiques. Même si ces récits ont leur intérêt propre, Roth les considère comme mineurs. Aussi s’en sert-il souvent pour tenter des expérimentations qu’il exploitera plus tard dans son œuvre ou bien comme extraits qu’il enserre tels quels dans ses longs récits. Les récits brefs de Henry Roth sont ainsi davantage des outils au service d’une stratégie plus large. Le présent article étudie l’insertion de la nouvelle « Somebody Always Grabs the Purple » (1940) dans le premier volume de Mercy of a Rude Stream ainsi que les liens entre le récit bref intitulé « Itinerant Ithacan » (1977) et les quatre volumes de Mercy. Cette étude se propose d’illustrer la façon dont Roth retravaille les matériaux thématiques de récits courts, les développe et se les approprie pleinement dans son œuvre romanesque.

AUTHORS

ALAN GIBBS Alan Gibbs teaches at the University of Nottingham. His published articles on Roth include an interview with Robert Weil, the editor of Roth’s Mercy of a Rude Stream, for Studies in American Jewish Literature, and a piece comparing the posthumous editing of Roth’s Mercy series with Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth for U.S. Studies Online.

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"At Times in Flight": Henry Roth's Parable of Renunciation

Steven G. Kellman

1 By 1959, Henry Roth's one great bid for literary glory had been out of print for more than two decades. Published in 1934, Call It Sleep was the only book named by two contributors, Alfred Kazin and Leslie Fiedler, in a symposium on "The Most Neglected Books of the Past Twenty-Five Years" that appeared in The American Scholar in 1956. But both the novel and its fifty-year-old author were still neglected by most of the arbiters of literary taste. Roth was living, with his wife, Muriel, and his sons, Jeremy and Hugh, in self-imposed obscurity and poverty in rural Maine, raising and slaughtering ducks and geese. Although William Rose Benét's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature, published in 1948, included an entry for Roth's former mentor and lover, Eda Lou Walton, the volume made no mention of Roth himself or his forgotten novel. Nor, until 1965, did any other standard reference work acknowledge the existence of Henry Roth.

2 When Harold U. Ribalow, an energetic impresario of American Jewish culture who edited several early, influential anthologies, learned that the author of Call It Sleep was still alive, he immediately lay siege to him in Maine. Before persuading Roth to allow re-publication of his legendary novel, he managed to coax him into writing something new, a story that Ribalow placed in the July, 1959 edition of Commentary, the monthly journal sponsored by the American Jewish Committee. Titled "At Times in Flight," it became Roth's favorite among his own short pieces. Subtitled "A Parable," the six-page story is doubly parabolic; it deploys a sequence of actions both to suggest universal truths about the limits of art and to represent events in its particular author's life.

3 In "At Times in Flight," an unnamed narrator recalls the summer of 1938 spent at an artists' colony named Z located near Saratoga Springs, New York. He was attempting, under contract, to write his second novel, but, as he notes, "It had gone badly–aims had become lost, purpose, momentum lost."1 He had already completed a section of the book, but now not even the freedom of an artists' colony could help him to break his writer's block. Also residing at Z that summer was a young musician named Martha whom the inexperienced narrator makes

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awkward gestures at courting. Learning that she shares his fancy for sparkling water, he begins driving her into town every morning before breakfast to drink from the natural fountain in Saratoga Springs. Their daily route takes them past the town's famous equestrian track, and they marvel at the sight of trainers and animals preparing for the imminent racing season. "A horse is a beautiful thing," he observes. "Enormously supple and swift, they seemed at times in flight" (101).

4 Since neither Martha nor the narrator has ever attended a race, they decide to watch one together from the woods abutting the track at the edge of the Z estate. From their private, secret perch, the horses and their riders are distant, tiny figures. However, as the race proceeds the competitors come galloping toward them. Just as the pack thunders past, one of the horses trips and breaks a hind leg. The jockey scurries off the track, but a crew hurries to the scene of the mishap to dispose of the crippled horse. Fearful of a ricocheting bullet, Martha retreats into the woods, but the narrator remains to witness a member of the racetrack staff euthanize the animal with a pistol shot to his head. After watching the carcass hauled away in a truck, he rejoins Martha, mindful that "behind us was a scene that I should muse on a great deal, of a horse destroyed when the race became real" (104).

5 By subtitling his short story "A Parable," Roth invites the reader to muse a great deal on more than just the events it depicts. "Ars brevis, vita longa" (104), reflects the narrator about the melancholy spectacle he has just witnessed. It is not immediately clear what art has to do with the scene, unless viewed as a fatal demonstration of the transience of equestrian accomplishment. However, as odd as it is to find classical aesthetics invoked to treat horse racing as an "art," it is odder still that Roth, who tutored Latin to local schoolchildren in Maine, inverts the familiar aphorism ars longa, vita brevis to read "ars brevis, vita longa." If anything, the horse's sudden collapse would seem to illustrate the brevity of life, not art. Yet the reader of "At Times in Flight" is alerted to look to this straightforward account of the death of a horse to learn something about the tenuousness of art and its relationship to the span of a life. Musing a great deal on this story means contemplating the role of the Muses in the affairs of mortal human beings, for whom times are always in flight.

6 In classical mythology, Pegasus was the favorite horse of the Muses. Though the horse that takes a tumble in the story remains unnamed, Roth himself invoked the famous winged figure of antiquity in a conversation that his Italian translator, Mario Materassi, taped on February 8, 1986. In his terse remarks, included within the collection Shifting Landscape, which reprinted "At Times at Flight," twenty-seven years after its publication in Commentary, Roth summarizes the story as "the killing of Pegasus, so to speak, the shooting of Pegasus" (105). The author does not mention, and may or may not have been aware of, the Greek tradition that Pegasus created Hippocrene, the fountain on Mount Helicon that is the source of poetic inspiration, when a blow

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from his hoof broke through the ground. However, the emphasis within the story on the salubrious natural waters in Saratoga Springs reinforces the parallels to Pegasus, the soaring steed who in the visual representations of ancient Greece is seen at times in flight. Set in an artists' colony and narrated by a frustrated writer, "At Times in Flight" employs a Pegasus figure to ponder the death of creativity. Contrasting "reality" with "art," the narrator, witnessing the horse's defeat, which he takes personally–"I felt a sense of loss," he tells Martha (104)–, suggests the prevalence of the "real" and the failure of flight. In the story's final words, "a horse destroyed when the race became real," he is reconciled to the extinction of Pegasus and the triumph of "reality." Realizing that he cannot soar above the quotidian, he is ready to abandon his literary calling.

7 In its very title, "At Times in Flight" makes a mockery of the conventional use of art to evade the ravages of time. The story, which begins with a statement in the imperfect tense–"I was courting a young woman, if the kind of brusque, uncertain, equivocal attentions I paid her might be called courting" (99)–, is narrated by a man looking back on an earlier episode in his life. His prose is punctuated with chronological markers, phrases and terms such as "in those days" and "then," that emphasize the passage of the years–how, despite the desperate stratagems of art, he is ineluctably immersed in time. The narrator tells Martha that he had not bet on the hapless horse, but in a sense, by pinning his hopes on the power of art, the thwarted author had. The death of the Pegasus figure leaves the blocked novelist bereft and adrift. Like Dante, he finds himself in a dark wood, "the narrow and rather somber band of trees that bordered the racetrack," (104) in immediate need of guidance. "Well, lead the way back," he tells Martha. "You've got a better sense of direction than I have" (104).

8 In the gloss he provided in 1986, Roth states: "The story implies that the art itself no longer had any future" and "that it also implies that in the death of the art there is a beginning of the acceptance of the necessity to live in a normal fashion, subject to all the demands and all the exigencies and vicissitudes that life will bring" (105). But beyond the story's power to embody universal aspirations and disappointments, "At Times in Flight" is a personal parable, a thinly disguised recollection of Roth's own experiences twenty-one years earlier. Almost all of Roth's fiction not only draws directly from the author's life but is modified autobiography. Call It Sleepbegan, at the suggestion of Eda Lou Walton, as a straightforward memoir, a project to occupy Roth after she deposited him at the Peterborough Inn in New Hampshire while she took up residence at the nearby MacDowell Colony. As he explained to Irit Manskleid-Mankowsky for her 1978 M.A. thesis, "the very original conception of the book was to include my entire trajectory–from ghetto child to Greenwich Village" (Manskleid-Mankowsky 114). However, after seventy-five pages, Roth abandoned his factual first-person narrative and began instead to fictionalize his life, focusing entirely on his experiences from arrival at Ellis Island until the age of eight.

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Though it presents its young protagonist, David Schearl, as an only child, while Roth himself had a younger sister named Rose, Call It Sleep is nevertheless faithful to much of its author's own immigrant childhood on New York's Lower East Side. In Mercy of a Rude Stream, the fictional tetralogy that Roth composed during the last of his eighty-nine years, the protagonist is called Ira Stigman rather than Henry Roth, but he, too, is an arthritic octogenarian living in Albuquerque and recalling his family's move from the Lower East Side to Harlem, his disgraceful expulsion from Stuyvesant High School, and his romantic attachment to a New York University professor twelve years his senior. Roth changes her name, slightly, from Eda Lou Walton to Edith Welles, and he calls Stigman's wife M rather than Muriel, his older son Jess instead of Jeremy, and his younger son Herschel instead of Hugh. But he does not even bother to alter his parents' names, Chaim and Leah, or his mother's maiden name, Farb. The autobiographical basis of Roth's final volumes is so transparent that his sister, Rose Broder, successfully extracted $10,000 from him as indemnity for his depiction of incest between the protagonist and his sister. Calling her Minnie instead of Rose did nothing to placate her outraged prototype.

9 In "At Times in Flight," Roth calls the woman whom the narrator is courting Martha, but his description of her–"a very personable, tall, fair- haired young woman, a pianist and composer, a young woman with a world of patience, practicability, and self-discipline–bred and raised in the best traditions of New England and the Middle West" (99-100)– corresponds exactly to Muriel Parker, a descendant of New England gentry who grew up in Illinois and who would be Roth's wife from 1939 until her death in 1990. Like the story's narrator, Roth himself spent the summer of 1938 at an artists' colony in upstate New York; naming the place "Z" does little to disguise the fact that he is writing about Yaddo when he recalls "playing charades in the evening in the darkly furnished, richly carpeted, discreetly shadowed main room, the ample servings of food, the complaints of constipation" (100) and of course the proximity to Saratoga Springs and its famous racetrack. Oblique reference in the story to "the missives that were wont to be sent by the hostess to her guests calling attention to some minor infraction of the rules or breach of propriety" (100) is an allusion to Elizabeth Ames, the formidably fastidious executive director of Yaddo with whom Roth clashed more than once.

10 During the summer of 1938, when Henry Roth and Muriel Parker both witnessed a horse race–for free, from the edge of Yaddo– for the first time, Seabiscuit, the scruffy equine underdog who became the hero of Depression-weary Americans, was receiving more news coverage than FDR, Hitler, Clark Gable, or anyone else. But Roth had placed his bets on Pegasus, the emblem of artistic inspiration. He had been admitted into Yaddo largely on the strength of a deceptive recommendation from Walton, who had herself spent the summer of 1929 there. In a letter that she sent on February 3, 1938, Walton urged Elizabeth Ames to offer Roth a place. Inflated beyond the usual conventions of testimonial

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puffery, Walton's reference made spurious claims about Roth's productivity. "Henry Roth is on the last lap of his book now which is supposed to be out for fall publication if things go right," she assured Ames, who accepted Walton's word and her protégé (Walton).

11 But Walton's contention that publication of Roth's second novel was imminent was inaccurate by fifty-six years, and Roth found himself unable to do any significant writing throughout the weeks he spent at Yaddo. Writing "At Times in Flight" in 1959, a year before the re- publication of his only book, Call It Sleep, was a way for Roth to ponder the truncation of his literary career–his own failure to take artistic flight and his flight from the writing life. At the time he wrote "At Times in Flight," Roth was still less than halfway through the longest writer's block of any major figure in American literary history–sixty years between the publication of his first novel, Call It Sleep, in 1934, and his second, A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, in 1994. In 1959, long before he began work on that first volume of Mercy of a Rude Stream, the series he counted on to redeem a wasted life, Roth could of course have had no way of knowing if or when the block would be broken. However, when, eager to recover Call It Sleep and discover what its vanished author had written since, Ribalow tracked him down in rural Maine, Roth responded with a slightly fictionalized memoir that examines parabolically his own creative paralysis. An example of emotion recollected in anxiety, "At Times in Flight" is at once an apologia pro vita sua and a palinode, a renunciation of the author's art that is nevertheless itself a forceful affirmation of that art.

12 Though Call It Sleep is dedicated to Eda Lou Walton, she is mentioned nowhere in Roth's short story. When he began his stay at Yaddo, at her behest and with her assistance, he had been living with Walton in her Greenwich Village apartment for ten years. Throughout the Depression, she provided Roth with shelter, food, and clothing. Pygmalion to his Galatea, the NYU instructor plucked the uncouth immigrant student out of his family's Harlem tenement and introduced him to the leading thoughts and thinkers of the day. At her 61 Morton Street salon, Roth met such cultural luminaries as Louise Bogan, Kenneth Burke, Hart Crane, James T. Farrell, Horace Gregory, Mark Van Doren, Margaret Mead, and Thomas Wolfe. Outfitting him with a Dunham pipe and English tweeds, Walton took on the task of reinventing her young urban savage as an urbane intellectual. She accompanied him to performances of Carmen, Petrushka, and Tristanund Isolde. She spurred him on to autodidactic forays into Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Goethe. Together they attended readings by Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and William Butler Yeats and saw Arturo Toscanini conduct at Carnegie Hall.

13 Roth never ceased to acknowledge that, without Walton's support and encouragement, Call It Sleep would not have been written. However, as grateful as he was for the crucial role she played in his personal transformation, Roth also grew increasingly frustrated in his

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relationship with Walton, whose abundant sexual attentions he could not begin to monopolize. And he chafed at the role of kept man. "She was both a mistress and a mother," he later recalled. "It was good, and it was bad. It was maybe good for the writer, but it was bad for the person. He fell in the habit of not being an independent, mature individual who was willing to face the world on his own and make his own living" (Shifting 295). By 1938, Roth was anxious to free himself of his dependency on the sophisticated older Walton. "It was a real continuation of infancy to be supported by a woman so long," Roth, long insecure about his manhood, would later tell an interviewer (Lyons 162).

14 When he drove up to Saratoga Springs, in a Model-A Ford purchased by Walton, Roth was troubled by the irregularity of his domestic arrangements. He would later sometimes fault his demeaning dependency on a generous older woman for his inability to follow up on Call It Sleep. But he was also suffering under another burden of guilt that he dared not acknowledge either in 1938 or 1959; it was only with the publication of A Diving Rock on the Hudson–the second of the four volumes of Mercy of a Rude Stream–in 1995 that Roth confessed obliquely to having had incestuous relations with both his sister, Rose, and his first cousin, Sylvia. By the time he arrived in Yaddo, where he hoped to write his way out of a literary impasse, a second novel that for four years had refused to take flight, Roth yearned to lift himself out of bondage to what he regarded as abnormal, degrading alliances. In a talented, sensible stranger named Muriel Parker, he embraced the opportunity for a normal life.

15 Without mentioning his sister, his cousin, or his benefactor, "At Times in Flight" provided a way for Roth to grapple with problems that still plagued him two decades after his summer in Yaddo. The character he names Martha, as a surrogate for Muriel, represents "the most wholesome traditions" (100). Though she, too, came to "Z" as an aspiring artist, she is, the narrator suggests, much more sensible and stable than he is. He at first does not believe that she, a hale antithesis to the neurotic scribe that he is, would be at all interested in him romantically. "I was so committed to being an artist–in spite of anything" (100), he says. One of the compelling mysteries of Roth's life is what happened to that commitment in the late 1930s. "At Times in Flight" is its author's retrospective attempt to explain how and why he relinquished his dedication to writing. Approached by Ribalow and others to account for his abandonment of the literary calling after Call It Sleep, he created the story both to explicate and break his notorious silence.

16 At the time he wrote his story, Roth, who joined the Communist Party of the United States shortly after completing Call It Sleep, still considered himself an atheist and universalist with little sympathy for tribal identities. Though he was later celebrated as a pioneering master of American Jewish literature, he would still, in 1963 in a short piece in

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the Zionist magazine Midstream, declare: "I can only say, again, that I feel that to the great boons Jews have already conferred upon humanity, Jews in America might add this last and greatest one: of orienting themselves toward ceasing to be Jews" (Shifting 114). It was not until the outset of the Six-Day War of 1967 that, fearing the imminent annihilation of the state of Israel, Roth renounced Marxist anti-Zionism and reaffirmed his Jewish identity. But the narrator of "At Times in Flight" does not explicitly identify himself as a Jew or, apart from the reference to her "wholesome traditions," Martha as the scion of Protestant Yankee gentry that Muriel Parker in fact was. However, his brief recollection of "the seltzer man on the East Side laboring up the many flights of stairs with his dozen siphons in a box" (100) hints at a Jewish background that might have made Martha seem even more unattainable, and desirable.

17 By 1987, Roth was attributing his writer's block to estrangement from his own Jewishness. "Detach the writer from the milieu where he has experienced his greatest sense of belonging," Roth told an audience in Italy, "and you have created a discontinuity within his personality, a short circuit in his identity. The result is his originality, his creativity comes to an end. He becomes the one-book novelist or the one-trilogy writer" (Shifting 299). But in 1959, Roth was still detached and still blocked. His inability to erase his Jewishness entirely from "At Times in Flight," as evidenced by the image of the seltzer man, is another symptom of the author's lingering anxieties. Twenty-one years after his troubled stay at Yaddo, the Roth who wrote the story is still unable to assuage his guilt over denying his people, abusing his sister, and squandering his creativity.

18 The final phrase of the story, "a horse destroyed when the race became real," opposes the Pegasus figure, the symbol of art, to "reality," which seemed to Roth, who suffered bouts of depression throughout his long life, to signify the kind of ordinary, unencumbered existence that he had never known. Pegasus has no place in that world. An immigrant Jew in Christian America, the victim of an abusive father, an incestuous degenerate, a failed writer enmired in a demeaning domestic situation, Roth agonized over the aberrancy of his existence. "At Times in Flight" is a fantasy of assimilation that, as in Freud's early theory of the artist as neurotic, conceives of creativity and normalcy as polarities. If so, balanced maturity is achieved by renouncing art. In 1938, Roth felt that the only way to release himself from his multiple burdens was to reject Walton and her literary world and embrace marriage to someone also willing to abjure art. Muriel Parker gave up a promising musical career as a performer and a composer in order to become Mrs. Henry Roth. And "At Times in Flight" is an attempt to justify the artistic sacrifice that both its author and the woman he met at an artists' colony made two decades earlier, in 1939, by becoming husband and wife. It is a story that concedes the virtue of matrimony in a wilful renunciation of artistic virtuosity.

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19 According to the familiar modernist myth of creative alienation, the artist is a solitary, tormented freak endowed with a talent that is inseparable from the torment and the aberrancy. Charles Baudelaire claimed that, though the poet is at times in flight, he is a pathetic, maladroit creature when brought to earth. Likening the poet to a sea bird that is magnificent when soaring through the maritime skies but awkward and ugly when grounded among common sailors, Baudelaire's poem "L'Albatros" concludes: "Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées/ Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer;/ Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,/ Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher" (The Poet is like the prince of the clouds/ Who haunts the tempest and jests at the archer;/ Exiled on the ground amid jeers/ His wings of a giant prevent him from walking). The rare bird's special endowment, the very wings that permit him to rise above the earth, are also his handicap. Like Roth's unfortunate racehorse, in flight one moment and inanimate the next, the bird moves abruptly from majesty to misery.

20 In his lonely splendor, Baudelaire's Albatross is similar to the Greek warrior whom Edmund Wilson, in an influential 1941 essay, "The Wound and the Bow," interpreted as the archetypal artist. Philoctetes possessed a magic bow without which the Greeks could not defeat the Trojans, but he also suffered from a suppurating wound so loathsome no Greek could bear to be around him. And Wilson links Philoctetes to "the idea that genius and disease, like strength and mutilation, may be inextricably bound up together" (Wilson 289). For Roth to accept this idea meant that the only way to cure himself of his disease was to relinquish his gift, to abandon writing.

21 As a youngster haunting Harlem's Mt. Morris branch of the New York Public Library, Roth was indifferent to anything but fairy tales, legends, and myths. Commenting on his autobiographical short story "Somebody Always Grabs the Purple," Roth remembered himself as "a mopey, withdrawn kid who spent most of his time reading fairy tales.... I read every fairy tale, every myth there was in the library" (Shifting 66). It is likely that he became acquainted with Pegasus, stallion of the Muses, long before the more arcane, conflicted figure of Philoctetes. Pegasus is a positive archetype, an affirmation of the power and value of art, and it was not until after his failed attempts to follow up on Call It Sleep that Roth was ready to accept–and even endorse–the death of the mythological horse.

22 Roth saw himself as dropping out of the literary race in order to marry. He always credited Muriel, "the dearest and most precious person in my life, the one who made mine possible, the one who regenerated mine," (Roth “Batch 2” 1906) with having rescued him from despair. The marriage lasted more than fifty years, until her death in 1990. Written at the time of their twentieth wedding anniversary, "At Times in Flight" is the story of a man who renounces the madness and insecurity of art for the conventional stability of marriage. In his gloss on the killing of the race horse, Roth stresses the return to normality through

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the death of art: "When I say normal, I mean that now he's willing to accept marriage, he's willing now to accept the getting of a livelihood and all that that would imply, and so forth" ( Shifting 105). At the conclusion of "At Times in Flight," the narrator is led away from the fallen horse by Martha. Though the story stops short of recounting Roth's bitter exchange of valedictions with Walton, it prefigures his marriage to Muriel, the birth of their two sons, and the family's removal to rural Maine, where, slaughtering waterfowl, picking blueberries, chopping wood, fighting forest fires, collecting maple syrup, and working in a mental hospital, he seemed to accept "the necessity to live in a normal fashion, subject to all the demands and all the exigencies and vicissitudes that life will bring." For Roth, as for the unnamed narrator of his story, the race had become "real," which for him meant abjuring the rough magic of literary art. "At Times in Flight" is a parable of its author's own flight from the writing life, a gloss on how he lost the will to create fiction, except of course in this short tale of love and death at an artists' colony.

23 Just as Emily Dickinson has been mythologized into the Eremite of Amherst, Henry Roth has become the Rip Van Winkle of American novelists, the author who produced a youthful masterpiece and then disappeared for sixty years, reemerging on the verge of death with a massive parting testament, a manuscript that sprawls beyond the four volumes that were published as the cycle Mercy of a Rude Stream. In fact, the silent years were never entirely silent, as "In Times of Flight" itself demonstrates. Roth continued to write and market fiction even after departing Yaddo, leaving Walton, and marrying Parker. He sold the short story "Broker" to The New Yorkerin 1939, and throughout the 1940s and 1950s submitted as many as a dozen pieces, including a play called Oedipus, Meet Orestes, to that magazine. "Somebody Always Grabs the Purple" appeared there in 1940, "Petey and Yotsee and Mario" in 1956. "Many Mansions" was published in Coronet in 1940. In 1960, the year that a new hardbound edition of Call It Sleep appeared, to little reaction, Commentary published "The Dun Dakotas." In 1966, two years after the bestselling Avon paperback of Call It Sleep dispelled Roth's obscurity, The New Yorker published "The Surveyor."

24 But Roth's literary output between 1934 and 1994 was meagre. Even as it surveyed some of the reasons for his retreat from art, "At Times in Flight" marked the beginning of his return, his attempts to resuscitate Pegasus. The final tetralogy, Mercy of a Rude Stream, would revert to the themes of the earlier short story. Ira Stigman, its aging narrator, agonizes repeatedly over the question of why he failed to follow up on a famous early book. But it was not until the publication of A Diving Rock on the Hudson, the tetralogy's second volume, in 1995, that Roth felt able to confront in print the guilty memories of incest that contributed significantly to his creative paralysis. But that is another, longer story.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lyons, Bonnie. Henry Roth: The Man and His Work. New York: Cooper Square, 1976.

Manskleid-Makowsky, Irit. "The 'Jewishness' of Jewish American Literature: The Examples of Ludwig Lewisohn and Henry Roth." M.A. thesis, John F. Kennedy-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin, 1978.

Roth, Henry. “Batch 2.” Henry Roth Papers, American Jewish Historical Society.

______. Shifting Landscape: A Composite, 1925-1987. Mario Materassi, ed. and introd. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1987.

Walton, Eda Lou. Letter to Elizabeth Ames, February 3, 1938. Yaddo Papers. New York Public Library Rare Books and Manuscripts Division.

Wilson, Edmund. The Wound and the Bow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1947.

NOTES

1. Roth, Shifting Landscape, 99. Further page references are to this edition, and are given in parentheses after the quotation.

ABSTRACTS

D’inspiration autobiographique, "At Times in Flight" évoque l’expérience de Henry Roth à Yaddo, colonie d'artistes où l’auteur a fait la connaissance de sa future épouse, Muriel Parker. Démuni et incapable d’écrire, il s'était, ensuite, retiré de la scène publique dans l’isolement rural de la province du Maine. "At Times in Flight" nous présente ainsi un homme qui renonce aux risques d’une vie d’artiste pour la stabilité d’un mariage qui le fait « retourner dans les normes ». Cette évocation de l’auteur face à son échec propose une réflexion sur les limites de l'inspiration. Pégase, le cheval ailé que l’auteur utilise ici comme symbole, représente la fin de la faculté créatrice chez Roth mais aussi son renoncement à la vie d’écrivain. Cependant, cette même nouvelle, qui explique comment et pourquoi l'auteur de Call It Sleep a abandonné sa vocation littéraire, signale un nouveau début dans sa carrière. Le sous-titre "A Parable," rend d’ailleurs "At Times in Flight" doublement « parabolique » : sa composition qui marque la fin de la longue période de blocage qu’elle décrit, annonce aussi une nouvelle période de création chez Henry Roth.

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AUTHORS

STEVEN G. KELLMAN Steven G. Kellman is professor of comparative literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio and author of The Translingual Imagination (Nebraska) and The Self-Begetting Novel (Columbia). His biography of Henry Roth, Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth, will be published by W. W. Norton in 2005.

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Against Oblivion: Henry Roth’s “The Surveyor”

Virginia Ricard

1 “The Surveyor” was written in Spain during the winter of 1965-1966 and was first published in The New Yorker in August 1966.1 It is the story of a wreath, a wreath that two American tourists, Mary and Aaron Stigman, attempt to lay at a forgotten historical site in Seville, and which is itself finally forgotten in a café.

2 To Mario Materassi, his Italian translator and friend, Henry Roth wrote with enthusiasm in January 1966: “I’m in the midst of a story I should like to show you… It’s the first deliberately objective one I’ve done in about twenty years, deliberately concocted.” A few weeks later, in another letter to Materassi, Roth mentioned the story again: “something really concocted—totally fiction.” In July he wrote: “the story we concocted in Spain is due in print the sixth [of] August.”2 To concoct, according to the O.E.D., is to “make up of mixed ingredients (soup, drink; story, plot).” Repeated self- deprecatingly in these letters, the word appears to be used by Roth as a synonym for both ‘objective’ and ‘fiction.’ Since Roth at the time had been keeping a journal and writing long descriptive letters to friends and family in the United States, we can only suppose that he is opposing “concocted” to a more autobiographical account. The story, Roth seems to insist, is invented, or at the very least, stitched together from miscellaneous bits. However, although his description of “The Surveyor” as “deliberately objective” and “totally fiction” may leave some readers sceptical, it is undeniably a carefully elaborated and complex composition.3 The following analyses some of the ingredients.

3 In “The Surveyor,” Aaron and Mary Stigman manage, with the help of rented surveying instruments, to find the exact site on which Jews condemned by the Inquisition were burnt at the stake.4 Their activity attracts the attention of bystanders and they depart in a taxi just as a policeman arrives on the scene. Later they return with a wreath which they lay in the middle of a flower bed on a spot which they had marked earlier in the morning. The same policeman reappears and questions Aaron, who answers that the surveying is just a “private matter.” The policeman then escorts the couple — Aaron with the wreath in hand once again — to a police station where they are questioned

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until a state attorney tells the inspector that there is no need to detain them. The attorney offers to accompany the Stigmans to their hotel. In a café, where the three drink brandy and talk, Miguel Ortega, the attorney, tells the Stigmans that he knows what they were looking for simply because he is himself the descendent of Marranos.5 Aaron and Mary then find their way back to the hotel.

4 “The Surveyor” has a strikingly dramatic form which is perhaps a residue of Roth’s earlier intention to write a play about a Marrano, the Inquisition and the conquistadores. Roth’s correspondence shows how the idea of a novel became the idea of a play. In January 1965, he wrote to Mario Materassi: “I have been seized by a truly— to me—gigantic idea, a stunning novelistic idea that has literally seized me.”6 In July the same year he wrote that he had “dreams, cucoo [sic] dreams of writing another ‘great’ novel. (I’ll keep dreaming that till I die.) And the locus of my present fiction, my present envisagings, is and has been for some time, Mexico and Spain. I see a wonderful connection between the Inquisition and the Conquistadores.”7 Then, in December 1965, Roth wrote again to Materassi: “But all this bears on what I’ve been dreaming about, on and off: The Inquisition, the Jew, Mexico. I think I’ve indicated at least as much to you before. Not a novel this time but a play.”8 A month later, at the end of January 1966, he had written twenty pages of “The Surveyor.”9

5 Certainly, the idea of writing a play appears to have been an important element in the genesis of the story, one of the ingredients with which it was “concocted.” Like a play in five acts, it is divided into five parts, clearly distinguished by a blank space on the page and by the descriptions of the specific settings which are, consecutively, early Sunday morning on the Avenida del Cid in Seville, late Sunday morning in the same place, a police station, a café, and the Barrio de Santa Cruz or old town. The descriptions in each of these scenes pay particular attention to layout as well as to significant objects; they could be read as if they were so many stage directions or instructions for the properties man on a set. At the police station, for example, we know exactly who is standing and who is sitting, whose portrait is on the wall (Franco’s), and which maps, clocks and keys hang there (144). In the café we learn that there are espresso machines, barrels of wine and sherry, “ranks of colorful bottles on shelves,” wrappers of sugar cubes on the floor, a small provision shop to the right of the bar, aging hams as well as “an assortment of sausages, equally aged,” “basins of chick-peas visible on the small counter, lentils, rice, a large slab of brown quince jelly, and a crock of olives” (147). Clearly, the reader is meant to visualize these scenes. The descriptions of characters too are limited to outward observations of dress and posture, gestures and facial expressions. Aaron, for instance, is slight and middle-aged and has unruly grey hair. Mary is “also middle-aged, but taller and more slender than the man, with a gentle face and a high forehead” (137). She “seems more self-possessed than he” (137). The policeman, who appears later, is grey-clad, polite, stalwart, he has a large pink face which shows extreme perplexity and a scarlet-ribboned military cap, “His competence and good judgement were manifest” (142).

6 The reader then is very much an observer. Various strategies are at work here: the recurrence of verbs which draw attention to the visible as in the examples above (see, show, be manifest); the constant provision of the details we need in order to visualize the scene. In case anyone is not yet aware that this is a show, there is a mise en abyme with an audience actually inscribed in the text in the form of bystanders who watch Aaron and Mary’s surveying activities and ask questions. Aaron, like an actor, has come

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prepared: “He seemed to work as though he were doing something he was not thoroughly practiced at but something he had rehearsed” (136 emphasis added). Finally, “The Surveyor” seems almost designed for the theatre in that the essential information, the information which propels the plot forward, is to be found in the dialogue. Characters are revealed through speech and gesture. The story opens with Aaron and Mary in the midst of hasty and semi-furtive activity: the reader will learn only later what exactly they are doing. The dialogue between the as yet unnamed surveyor and his assistant consists at first mainly of instructions, but it reveals that these two are probably man and wife, that this is the excitable Aaron’s idea, and that Mary is his not uncritical, “more self-possessed” amanuensis. When Aaron takes out his notebook, for example, he mutters “No, I don’t need that now” (137). When he repeats information he has already given her, Mary says, “Don’t get rattled, Aaron” (139). So, although “The Surveyor” is a short story, there is the perceptible presence of a legacy, an atavistic resemblance to its ancestor in Roth’s imagination, the play he had once intended to write.10

7 The second important ingredient is the language of the story. It will surprise no reader of Henry Roth that language should be foregrounded in a number of ways. The attention to cadence, the frequent use of alliteration (“on both sides of the surveyor and his assistant stretched a low stone wall that fronted a deep, wide, waterless moat, overgrown with grass, which ran parallel to the façade of the Fabrica de Tabaco behind them” [137]), the alternation of long and short sentences, all enhance the almost palpable rhythm of the prose so that the reader hears the words on the page.

8 A more obvious foregrounding device is the use in the story of both Spanish and the professional language of surveying, an instance of what Mikhail Bakhtin termed heteroglossia.11 From the very first line, the reader is faced with a barrage of mostly unfamiliar vocabulary describing the paraphernalia of the surveyor who apparently requires a transit, a plumb bob, a telescoped levelling rod, a tape, a protractor, a vernier, a tripod, screws which need levelling, and a notepad with numbers. The dialogue too is seeded with technical terms: “‘OK. Now hold it up so I can sight it’” (137) or “‘you cross. I’ll compute the angle’” (138 emphasis added). Later, Aaron says “‘I could have triangulated it to be absolutely certain’” (141 emphasis added). The cumulative effect is one of defamiliarization. The reader’s awareness is heightened by the strangeness of the language. We are, in a sense, disoriented by Aaron’s attempt to orient himself; we lose our bearings as he tries to find his, simply because we are immersed in the details of measurements, precision, accuracy.

9 This is also true of the Spanish used throughout the story. At the beginning of “The Surveyor” glorieta, paradas, and buenos días are each repeated three or four times in the space of a page and a half. Roth does translate for the reader, however, using both gloss (for example the first occurrence of glorieta is followed by “or traffic circle” [137]) and contextualization (paradas appears in a sentence which makes its meaning clear: “There were one or two people waiting for buses at various paradas along the Avenida” [138]). Sometimes no effort at all is made to translate (as with “buenos días” which is neither translated nor explained). Roth’s implied reader is apparently expected to be able to guess meanings. Most of the Spanish in the rest of the story is elementary.12

10 Another device familiar to readers of Call It Sleep is the manner in which English is made to feel like a foreign language. In the conversations with the Spanish police officers, the reader experiences the dialogue as Spanish although it is written almost entirely in

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English. This is achieved in a number of ways. The policeman begins by addressing Aaron and Mary in Spanish. This is rendered as “‘buenos días, señores’” (142). Aaron answers the policeman’s questions, “speaking in Spanish” we are told, although the conversation is transcribed in English. Further on, the reader is again reminded that this is Spanish, when Aaron “revert[s] to English” (143). Three other devices are used. First, there is a sprinkling of (unitalicized) Spanish words such as “Señor.” Then, the formality of the language used by the policeman (“‘what place is that, Señor?’” or “‘Señor, surveying in public places among public establishments is no private matter. I could point out further that you laid a measuring tape…’” [142]) sounds distinctly foreign. Thirdly, the impression is reinforced by the translation into English of Spanish idioms. For example, the police inspector addresses himself to Aaron, saying “we are not at that pass, Señor” rather than, say, “it hasn’t come to that yet” (145).

11 The presence of so many technical terms and so much Spanish in “The Surveyor” is all the more striking when the story is placed next to “The Wrong Place,” Roth’s non- fictional account of his stay in Seville, in which there are almost no technical terms and there is very little Spanish.13 Apart from immersing the reader in a foreign world, the inclusion of Spanish in the story can also be seen as an economical manner of evoking Spain, as if a few words in Spanish, or the syntax and diction of a Spanish policeman could stand for the whole of Spain, or could make the reader feel the radical strangeness of its culture and history. Polylingualism in “The Surveyor” appears then to have a mimetic function in the sense that it seeks to imitate the reality of a multilingual and multicultural world, a world in which American tourists, busy at surveying, visit Spain and are confronted with its long and complex history. The repeated use of Spanish place names (Fabrica de Tabacos, Glorieta de San Diego etc.) and the names of historical events and Spanish heroes (Don Juan de Austria, El Cid Campeador) adds to the reader’s sense of being plunged into Spain’s past.

12 This leads to a third and the most important aspect of Roth’s story: the question of the past – more specifically the Jewish past – and its survival in the present. Aaron Stigman, like Kafka’s surveyor, is not merely taking measurements, but in a sense taking stock, and the past, too, belongs to the world he wishes to understand.14 In a town like Seville, there are traces of history everywhere: in the place names and monuments, of course (Avenida del Cid, the monument to Columbus, etc.), but also in the architecture with its observable strata belonging to different epochs. The city is a sort of palimpsest containing hidden layers of history: the University was once a Tobacco factory, and the sixteenth century Catholic weathervane is supported by a twelfth century Moorish minaret. More obviously, past and present mingle in the city streets. Noisy traffic rumbles along “the ancient walls of the Alcazar deploying its series of pyramidal caps” (144). The modern city (this is the sixties) — with its radial cranes, its new arteries (where scooters and motorcycles race past bicycles and horse- drawn cabs) and its tall buildings under construction — lies next to the old. In “The Wrong Place,” Roth describes the way a visit to a third-century amphitheatre in the outskirts of Seville affects his imagination: Dens are still fairly intact, and a few arches are still standing; the portals are discernible where the fans rushed in. You are they and they are you, and someone else will mark the lizard on the wall that you mark, and someone else has. For a moment you extend both ways, like the waist of an hourglass (243).

13 This coexistence of past and present is a complex system, “a maze” says Aaron at the end of the story, referring to the Barrio but also, implicitly, to the whole of Seville, to

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all of Spain and its labyrinthine history. There is an apparent order, however, a form of harmony even, in this juxtaposition of the old and the new. The ubiquitous Church appears to be the mortar which holds the various fragments together. “The Surveyor” is threaded with allusions to Catholicism: the story takes place on a Sunday morning as people come and go to church, two monks are among the passers-by, and even the radial crane is “like a red, ungainly cross” (138). Mary (in spite of her name) thinks there are “too many cathedrals, too many retablos, stained-glass windows, saints, crucifixes, Virgins— Virgins!” (140) Even the secular monuments such as the statue of El Cid are freighted with memories of religious victories: “Horse and rider were poised on a massive granite pedestal.… There was no mistaking what the bronze statue was meant to portray: Spain’s martial valor and audacity, the prowess that had rewon the peninsula from the Moors and later subjugated a new world” (138). And all of this takes place in the shadow of la Fe, faith, the weathervane: “Faith stood on her high pinnacle above the Cathedral, pointing at every wind with her palm branch of triumph” (151). Pointing in every direction, the monolithic presence of victorious Catholicism appears, from its panoptic position, to control every possible perspective, watching — surveying — not only the past but also the future.15

14 Still, something is missing. Part of the past has been erased. The quemadero, the place where Marranos were burnt, is no longer on the map.16 Miguel Ortega says “I have old maps on the wall of my study. They are not maps, no. They are views of Seville.… In two of these, there is a certain landmark of the city, outside the walls. Where El Cid now stands. Approximately” (148). Everyone but Ortega is evidently ignorant of the existence of the quemadero, although it is “part of the Spanish heritage,” as he puts it. This absence of any palpable survival of the city’s Jewish past grates on Aaron Stigman’s sensibility, and even Mary objects: “even a Protestant mind like mine rebels at it…. It’s just too much.” To which Aaron answers, “Yes, too many martyrs of their faith. None for mine—or what used to be mine. Why shouldn’t there be some acknowledgement?” (140) It will require a different kind of surveying to locate what the Church has attempted to obliterate.

15 As any historian knows, the past is made up of events which cannot all be retrieved, so remembering the entire past — even the entire Jewish past — is unthinkable. Commemoration demands radical selection and therefore radical simplification. Aaron (who is not a surveyor, but a retired science teacher) deliberately chooses to find out about a specific historical event (“I had a good deal of research to do” [149]) and then to place a wreath on the exact spot where it occurred. As he and Mary — still carrying their wreath — follow the policeman, all those who notice them can see they are “tourists bent on a commemorative act” (143). In this particular case, however, the event to be commemorated has long since been effaced from the onlookers’ memories. This creates a difficulty since commemoration requires the presence of others, some sort of public recognition — the acknowledgement that a particular past event is meaningful for the present. This is what Aaron means by the question “Why shouldn’t there be some acknowledgement?” (140). In his last book, La Mémoire collective, the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs showed that memory is never a private affair. It requires the presence of others, and can only occur within a social framework — is in fact structured by the social framework within which it occurs.17

16 In “The Surveyor” the boundaries between ‘public’ and ‘private’ are continually blurred. When Aaron draws a measuring tape across a main road in order to find the

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exact place on which to lay his wreath, he shows that commemoration can never be entirely private, although he says just the opposite: “It is a private matter.” It is difficult not to agree with the policeman when he answers, “Señor, surveying in public places among public establishments is no private matter” (142). Later, when the policeman complains that “there are too many private matters involved here” (143), he draws our attention to the contradiction in the story: the so-called private question of laying a wreath in a public place with the object of recalling a public event. The officer at the police station agrees that “surveying operations on a public thoroughfare” are not a private matter, although Aaron says twice that the wreath is something he does not “care to discuss” (145). It is only because Miguel Ortega has his own “personal reasons” (149) for remembering the quemadero that the Stigmans are allowed to leave without further fuss. Finally, the debate about what is private and what is public is also an ironic echo of an essential historical fact: with the Inquisition, all forms of Jewish public life came to an end in the Iberian peninsula. Marranos were spied upon in order to ascertain whether they wore their best clothes on a Saturday or whether they fasted during Yom Kippur. Their private lives, in other words, had become a public concern.

17 Aaron’s wreath itself testifies to these unresolved tensions. True, it is only a small, ephemeral token, made of fern and boxwood, and hardly noticeable beside the “massive granite pedestal” next to which Aaron lays it: “A little tribute where it was due. It is scant enough, isn’t it?” he says (141).18 And, of course, its meaning is not entirely clear: “The gardener or somebody will find a wreath here and wonder why. He’ll probably move it to El Cid,” says Aaron with resignation (142). Furthermore, Aaron’s agency is limited, as he admits when he adds, “there’s nothing I can do about it. There’s little one can do against oblivion anyway” (142). Nevertheless, Aaron has done something: “I have made my gesture, for whatever it was worth,” he says. And this in itself surprises Ortega, who says to him, “You intrigue me enormously…. That any man would be so—I hesitate to use the word—so naïve” (148). Clearly, for Ortega, the wreath is a sign of American innocence.

18 In his encounter with Miguel Ortega, Aaron is surprised to discover a very different form of memory. During their conversation in the café, Ortega tells the Stigmans that his grandfather had told him that “his father, when he became very old, would light a candle on Friday nights—would do it as a matter of compulsion” (149). Ortega, in other words, is the bearer of a living memory transmitted from generation to generation — the memory which the Hebrew Bible repeatedly exhorts Jews to preserve, and which has been the very condition of the survival of Judaism.19 Ortega is not, however, merely a passive receptacle of memory. He also has an interest in history. When Aaron asks him if he still lights a candle himself, Ortega shakes his head “as if disdaining the thought” and says “A candle in consciousness is enough, is it not?” (150) Knowledge, in other words, has replaced ritual, which is why Ortega understands what business Mary and Aaron are about. His stance is that of the antiquarian, the collector perhaps. For him, the quemadero is a curiosity, a part — but not the whole — of his complex heritage. Even his physical appearance evinces complexity. He is out of place in his surroundings, “uncommon,” both in height and in the way he holds his body. Those who died were “Spaniards who were also Jews,” he says (150). Like the city of Seville, he contains several layers of identity, all of which appear to coexist in him in relative harmony.

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19 Except for the tell-tale twitch. Miguel Ortega has a nervous tic to which there are no less than nine references — some of them slightly incongruous: … his features seemed to wince (144) … wincing and unwincing (146) … his features became lighter (146) … [his] face cleared (146)… his face unkinked (147) … Ortega’s face knit and darkened (148) … the man’s face, wrinkling and unwrinkling (148) … Ortega’s squint might have been a smile (149)… Ortega grimaced (149) … for once his uncertain features seemed at rest (150)

20 We also learn that Ortega twitches “as if his face were too close to a hot fire” (144). In the light of what the reader learns later — that some of Ortega’s own ancestors might well have been burnt at the stake — the proximity of a “hot fire” appears to be less metaphorical than it at first seems. Later, the “wincing and unwincing” make his face “belong at times to two different individuals” (146 emphasis added). Thus, the metaphor of the “hot fire” connects Ortega’s nervous tic directly to the quemadero and the facial spasms clearly express the duality which was, of course, the principal attribute of Marranism. Marranos were not renegades in the sense that they did not abandon their faith through deliberate choice. Conversion was imposed from the outside, by the predominantly Catholic world which sought to impose unity and homogeneity; for ‘new Christians’ a new vision of the world did not entirely replace the old. Instead two visions, the Catholic and the Jewish, although often contradictory, penetrated the very heart of the individual. Miguel Ortega’s appearance displays signs of this secret duality. 20

21 The body then, is also a vector of memory. The reader is led to see Ortega’s nervous tic as a symptom, and, like the compulsive movements of the hysterics studied by Freud, a sign of the existence of repressed memory.21 It is surely significant that the symptom abates at the end of the conversation with Stigman, when Ortega refers to “the heroic constancy of Spaniards who were also Jews,” and Aaron corrects him, saying “Jews who were also Spaniards!” After this, Ortega’s “uncertain face” remains motionless, “for once,” at rest (150). The simple fact of designating those who were burnt at the stake as Jews is apparently sufficient for the symptom to disappear momentarily. Whereas Aaron actively seeks the historical past, for Ortega, memory arrives unbidden. It comes to him as a legacy and reveals itself in the form of a twitch.

22 Ortega’s agitation is all the more remarkable when compared with the tranquillity of the other Spaniards in the story. The first policeman is “stalwart” and “pink” and goes calmly about his job. The second police officer is seated and frog-like, while Ortega is standing. The patrons of the café in the Barrio are “Spaniards with placid faces” (148). Only Aaron resembles Ortega from this point of view: his “rashness” and haste are repeatedly compared to Mary’s equanimity. It is as if the two Jewish characters express energy, although hidden energy in the case of Ortega. Aaron, with his wreath, naïvely — and perhaps clumsily — appears to want to make public what has, until the moment the two men meet, remained a private affair. His desire to commemorate the martyrdom of Spain’s Jews creates a disturbance on an otherwise quiet Sunday morning.

23 Faith is the tutelary angel here. At the end of the story, it serves as a landmark and guide in the form of la Fe (“Yes, there it is. You found it… Now I know where the hotel is,” says Stigman [151]). The word is present in all its major meanings. Represented by la Fe, faith means the one and only faith — Catholicism. It also means ‘beliefs’ as in “martyrs of their faith,” or “I left the faith of my ancestors many years ago” (150) —

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and in these two instances, Judaism. But the emphasis shifts in the course of the story, and faith becomes instead a synonym for loyalty or constancy. This is the faith or rather faithfulness — the “heroic constancy in the hour of trial” (149) — which both Aaron Stigman and Miguel Ortega say they admire. In “The Surveyor,” most things circulate and change (the quemadero becomes a statue of El Cid, Moorish monuments become Catholic). More importantly perhaps, no specific community has traits which are fixed forever: El Cid, the symbol of chivalry, has no monopoly of honour, as it is Aaron, the American Jew, who is concerned with behaving nobly: “Señor Inspector, what would you think of a person who was a guest in your house and insulted you—a guest who insults his host?” (145)22 Neither are languages owned by a single people (Mary, not Aaron, proposes the toast in Hebrew: “I think the word now should be l’chaim” [150]). Constancy is represented by Judaism alone, simply because Judaism lasts; it outlasts the Inquisition, and makes its way through history. Aaron learns from Ortega that it is even possible to remain faithful by being unfaithful. Marranism was, after all, not only a historic phenomenon which modified the history of a community. It was also a stance, a position adopted by the Jew in a hostile world as an answer to the problem of how to ensure the survival of Judaism. A stance designed to guarantee continuity in the guise of discontinuity. Aaron also learns that where there is faithfulness, commemoration becomes superfluous.23 Which is why he forgets the wreath.

24 “There’s little one can do against oblivion anyway,” says Aaron (142). It is difficult not to hear Roth speaking in this statement, the Roth who was embarking on a new writing life, attempting to leave some lasting mark. But also, perhaps, the Roth who was trying to find a past and a place in history. Like Aaron, Roth was looking for a place — a recognizable place, a place in geography this time — which would signify, would represent his place in history. In the years which followed the publication of “The Surveyor,” Roth made up his mind that that place was Israel, although he decided in the end not to settle there. In the winter of 1965-1966, he was still looking. And in the last line of the letter Roth wrote to Iven Hurlinger from Seville he says: “Evidently, I was still a Marrano, a latter-day one without the shema” (249).24 Since Marranism implies the absence of all outward signs of belonging to any form of Jewish culture or heritage, one might ask what is left to a Marrano “without the shema.” This is what “The Surveyor” sets out to explore, and it is a question which remains unanswered at the end of the story.

25 Roth may have accepted his status as a “latter-day” Marrano and the placelessness that he felt went with living in Diaspora, but he did not accept oblivion. Like Aaron, he made his gesture. In “The Surveyor” the wreath in the end proves to be too fragile, too ambiguous a token to be worthwhile. Only the story can fulfil the role Aaron has bestowed on it. “The Surveyor” then is not the story of a wreath forgotten in a café, but instead, it takes its place. In a sense it is the wreath, a tomb for those died on the quemadero and a tribute to those who remembered them.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eakin, Paul John. Touching the World. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.

Ferraro, Thomas J. Ethnic Passages. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1993.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Aetiology of Hysteria” and “Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence,” in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol III (43-61 and 189-221). London: The Hogarth Press, 1962.

Halbwachs, Maurice. La Mémoire collective. Paris: Albin Michel, [1950] 1997.

Nora, Pierre (ed.). “Entre mémoire et histoire : la problématique des lieux”, in Les Lieux de mémoire, vol 1 (xv-xlii). Paris: Gallimard, 1984.

Roth, Henry. Shifting Landscape. New York: St. Martin’s Press, [1987] 1994.

------. Call It Sleep. New York: The Noonday Press, [1934] 1991.

Wirth-Nesher, Hana. “Between Mother Tongue and Native Language in Call It Sleep,” in Call It Sleep(443-462).

Yerushalmi, Yosef. Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory.Seattle: Washington UP, [1982] 1996.

NOTES

1. Reprinted in Shifting Landcape (136-51). (Further page references are to this edition and are given in parentheses following the quotation.) 2. These letters, dated January 3 1966, January 31 1966 and July 25 1966 respectively, are all partially reproduced in Shifting Landscape (136). A copy of the third letter (July 25 1966) can be found in the Roth archives at the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), Series I, “Correspondence,” Box 5, Folder 9. 3. The categories of ‘total fiction’ and ‘objectivity,’ like that of autobiography, are, of course, not always as clear-cut as Roth presents them. Writing is always a composition, a reorganization. Even autobiography, as Paul John Eakin observes in Touching the World, is “always a kind of fiction” (30). 4. In 1481, over a period of ten months, three hundred Jews were burnt at the stake in Seville. 5. ‘Marrano’ was the pejorative name given to recently converted Christians who continued to observe Jewish law and customs in secret. 6. Evidence (an article on Henry Roth was published in Life on January 8, 1965and Roth says in the letter that it is due imminently) shows that this letter to Materassi, dated “Jan. 4 ’64,” was in fact written in 1965 (AJHS, Series I, “Correspondence,” Box 5, folder 11). 7. This letter to Materassi, dated “July 6 ’65,” is partly reproduced (and corrected —‘locus’ becoming ‘loci’ and punctuation added) in Shifting Landscape (134). 8. This letter to M. Materassi, dated “12-14-65,” is partly reproduced (with corrected punctuation) in Shifting Landscape (135). In another letter, to Harold Ribalow, dated “Jan 31 ‘65” (AHJS, Series I, “Correspondence”, Box 7, folder 4), Roth writes: “I plan on spending part of the summer, or parts of it investigating approaches to a project of my own--I think I mentioned it to you--a novelistic idea that has taken hold of me, to ascertain whether it kindles…”. 9. “Have a short story myself, about twenty pages as I believe I told you…”. See letter dated January 31 1966 and partly reproduced in Shifting Landscape (136).

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10. As Thomas J. Ferraro pointed out in his essay “Oedipus in Brownsville,” the “Prologue” of Call It Sleep was also staged, “suggesting Roth’s immersion in the psychodrama of O’Neill” (97). 11. “All languages of heteroglossia whatever the principle underlying them and making each unique, are specific points of view on the world, forms of conceptualizing the world in words, specific world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings and values.” Mikhaïl Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin, 1981) 292, quoted by Hana Wirth-Nesher “Between Mother Tongue” (445). 12. Except perhaps for agrimensor, the Spanish for ‘surveyor.’ In Shifting Landscape, there is an added difficulty for the reader due to a misprint, the word being reproduced as “A grimensor.” 13. “The Wrong Place” was published in 1978. It was based on a letter Henry Roth wrote to his friend Iven Hurlinger in October 1965 (and therefore before “The Surveyor”), although, in the published version, Roth modified the ending. The new ending is in keeping with the Roth’s later analysis of his stay in Seville. At the end of “The Wrong Place” Roth asks “Why had I come to Spain? Ostensibly to familiarize myself with the background of my Marrano central character. But that wasn’t the reason I had come here. It was evident now, though all this while I had concealed it from myself. I had come to Spain to reunite with Judaism—via a side door!” (Shifting Landscape 247-48, emphasis added). The new ending clearly is a product of hindsight. As is the title: ten years after his trip to Spain, Roth felt he had gone to “the wrong place” — the “right” place, one can only suppose, being Israel. Both “The Wrong Place” and the ending of the letter to Iven Hurlinger have been reproduced in Shifting Landscape (238-250). Roth stuck to this vision of his stay in Seville. In 1985, he published “a segment of a journal kept during the Six-Day War” in Rothiana: Henry Roth nella critica italiana, which has also been reproduced in Shifting Landscape (172-174). As Roth begins in the past tense (“When the June ’67 War broke out…”), it is difficult to believe that this was not written at a later date. In any case, Roth goes on to describe the novel he hoped to write “about a Marrano, a crypto-Jew who had managed to slip through the net of the Spanish Inquisition” and then adds: “Nor did I realize that in seeking to write that sort of book, I was all unwittingly groping toward a return to Judaism” (173 emphasis added). Copies of this letter can also be found at the AJHS, Series I, “Correspondence”, Box 4, folder 2 and in Series III, “Manuscripts by Roth”, Box 23, folder 5. There is also a copy of “The Wrong Place” in Series III, “Manuscripts by Roth,” Box 38, folder 19. 14. In Kafka’s last novel The Castle, K. arrives in a village claiming to be a surveyor, but no one seems to require his services, least of all anyone from the castle. K. spends most of his time in the village trying to understand the relationships between the villagers and the mysterious castle. 15. At the end of his letter to Iven Hurlinger, Roth describes his reaction to the omnipresence of the Church: “One suffers at length a kind of reaction to it all, to the overpowering religiosity that surrounds one—at any rate I did. I awoke Monday morning with a terrible feeling of despair. It seemed to me there was no escaping from the fearful conformity of Catholicism. It pervaded everything” (Shifting Landscape 248). 16. The quemaderowas the place of execution built by the first inquisitors at Seville in 1481. It was not destroyed until 1809, when the material was used for fortifications during the French invasion of Andalusia. 17. La Mémoire collective, begun in 1925, was unfinished in 1944 when Halbwachs was deported by the Nazis. See in particular chapter I, “Mémoire collective et mémoire individuelle”. 18. In “The Wrong Place,” Roth mentions another modest commemoration of those history has forgotten: “in an obscure corner next to one of the Cathedral entrances there is a small marble headstone, and if I have made out the inscription aright, it says three peones lie buried here, three hodcarriers who lost their lives in the construction of the sacred edifice. I do them reverence” (242). 19. In Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Yosef Yerushalmi reminds us that the verb zakhor — to remember — is used 169 times in the Hebrew Bible (5). He shows that ritual and liturgy

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were the essential mechanisms through which memory — although incomplete — was preserved in the post-Talmudic period (and not only after the expulsion from Spain). See in particular his comments on the Seder and the way in which observance stokes the Jewish collective memory. In “The Wrong Place”, Roth, who is attempting to see what it would have felt like to be a Marrano, remarks on the effect certain gestures (in this case going through the motions of being a Christian) have on the mind. When he drops a coin into the slot to light up a chapel in the Cathedral he writes, “The act sets in motion a train of waves, a sort of alteration of frames of mind, of tentatively accepting and not quite rejecting… One thing I haven’t done yet but intend to, and that is to cross myself before one of these fanes” (246). 20. In “The Wrong Place”, Roth, describing himself pretending to be a Marrano youth, has this to say about the inner struggle of Marranos: “I am aware of myself in dispute: protest all you like that you’re a Catholic or a Christian, my Marrano friend, consume pork ostentatiously, or the wafer; but unless, unless polarities are truly reversed and faith replaces, nay displaces faith… unless the change takes place within the soul almost allotropically…, so that you’re alien to the being you were, then you remain what you are, and the other man’s beatitudes and epiphanies roll off you like surf off a rock” (245). In other words, except for those who were truly converted, Christian “beatitudes and epiphanies” were not effective. Thus the duality with which the Marrano had to live. 21. See in particular “The Aetiology of Hysteria” (1896) and “Further Remarks on the Neuro- Psychoses of Defence” (1896). 22. In “The Wrong Place,” Roth, when he mentions the statue of El Cid, goes to the trouble of copying a line from El Poema del Cid, which he then translates and explains in a note. Here is Roth’s note: “‘In your hands are the chests, Messers Raquel and Vidas’ (247). With these words (from El Poema del Cid), El Cid’s ‘expediter’ tricks two Jewish moneylenders into lending El Cid a large sum of money, collateral for which is locked up in a couple of fancy chests, arcas. Instead of the fine gold the chests were alleged to contain, they contain sand.” Clearly, Roth is keen to show that the famously chivalrous El Cid was capable of dishonourable behaviour. 23. According to Pierre Nora, “il y a des lieux de mémoire, parce qu’il n’y a plus de milieux de mémoire” (Nora xvii). In other words, it is only when there is discontinuity, only when there is a rift, “du sentiment de la mémoire déchirée”, that we become interested in commemoration, in lieux de mémoire. “Habiterions-nous encore notre mémoire, nous n’aurions pas besoin d’y consacrer des lieux”, writes Nora (xix). Or, as Maurice Halbwachs put it in La Mémoire Collective,: “In general, history begins at the point where tradition ends, at the point where social memory vanishes or begins to disintegrate” (translation mine). “En général l’histoire ne commence qu’au point où finit la tradition, au moment où s’éteint ou se décompose la mémoire sociale” (130). 24. The shema or sh’ma is the prayer “Hear Israel, The Lord is our God, the Lord is one”, Deuteronomy 6:4.

ABSTRACTS

Dans la nouvelle “The Surveyor”, deux touristes américains séjournant à Séville, Aaron et Mary Stigman, cherchent à poser une couronne à l’endroit où se trouvait autrefois le bûcher sur lequel furent brûlés des Juifs condamnés par l’Inquisition. Le lieu ne figure sur aucun plan de la ville. Cet article examine d’abord le projet de pièce de théâtre qui se dessine à travers la nouvelle, puis l’effet de défamiliarisation produit par la langue de la nouvelle, en particulier l’emploi de

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l’espagnol et du lexique technique de l’arpentage. Enfin, il se concentre sur les figures de la mémoire et de la commémoration. Aaron, suivant peut-être l’injonction biblique invitant à se souvenir, voudrait ressusciter un événement presque oublié. Il rencontre le descendant d’un marrane pour lequel la mémoire prend une forme très différente et commence à s’interroger sur le sens de la foi, de la fidélité, de la connaissance et de la survie du judaïsme.

AUTHORS

VIRGINIA RICARD Virginia Ricard teaches at the University of Bordeaux-3. She has published a number of articles on Henry Roth including “Which Way from Norridgewock? Homes and Heterotopias” in Studies in American Jewish Literature, volume 22, 2003 and “Saving Yesterday’s Days” in Cahiers Charles V, n° 36, July 2004.

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Writing and Parricide in Henry Roth’s “Final Dwarf”

Lene Schøtt-Kristensen

For the briefest moment David felt a shrill, wild surge of triumph whip within him, triumph that his father stood slack-mouthed, finger-clawing, stooped… In the kitchen, he could hear the policeman interrogating his father, and his father answering in a dazed, unsteady voice. The sense of triumph that David had felt on first being brought in, welled up within him again as he listened to him falter and knew him shaken. (Call It Sleep) It was ridiculous to bear a grudge against the old guy. There was nothing left of him. A little old dwarf in a baggy pair of pants. The final dwarf. Kestrel smiled. (“Final Dwarf”)

1 “Final Dwarf”, originally published in The Atlantic in 1969, later included in Shifting Landscape, is arguably Henry Roth’s most accomplished short story. The explicit theme of the story is a problematic father-son relationship; the implicit theme is writing. “Final Dwarf” can be read as an allegory of writing, which demonstrates how for Roth parricide and writing were inextricably linked together.

2 What did writing Call It Sleep mean to Roth, the Jewish slum kid from Harlem? Suggesting that all of Roth’s work can be read as portraits of the artist, and thus as allegories of writing, I believe that this question is an important key to the author’s work, including his monumental writer’s block. Freud figures prominently in this article because Roth’s work is saturated by Freudian ideas. Roth has made contradictory remarks about his own knowledge of and the possible influence on him by Freud but these questions appear all but irrelevant; theoretical knowledge and influence aside, Freud is in Roth’s bloodstream, as it were.1 Call It Sleep is an elaborate oedipal drama, as most critics have noted, as is Mercy of a Rude Stream, but more than

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that, Roth’s entire work reads as a dramatization of Jewish civilization and its discontents. Moreover, Roth, consciously or unconsciously, perceived his art and his artist’s role in traditional Freudian terms. The following discusses some central Freudian aesthetic ideas that help to shed new light on Roth’s work in general and on his writer’s block in particular.

3 Freud never formulated a coherent aesthetics, let alone a theory of literature.2 He seems, wisely, to have had strong reservations about such a project. But some concepts stand out as basic Freudian aesthetic ideas. One is the central idea that the work of art represents a wish-fulfilment, typically of infantile sexual and therefore shameful desires. Another is the idea that, although inextricably bound together, the form and the content of a work of art can be treated as two separate things. Both thoughts are expressed in “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming”: The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously – that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion – while separating it sharply from reality… The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfilment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality. (131-32, 134)

4 Similarly: The writer softens the character of his egoistic day-dreams by altering and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal – that is, aesthetic – yield of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his phantasies. (140-41, emphasis added)

5 Suffice it here to note that Freud seems to perceive of art as a pretext, a cover and a substitute for something else. His attitude is that of the skeptical scientist, the moralist, and perhaps the puritan. The traditional psychoanalytical reading aims to retrieve the latent content behind the manifest statements of the text and to disclose the intimate personality of the artist – an approach which must be characterized as rather hostile, and in some fundamental way suspicious of art. This suspicion is of course built into the (problematic) Freudian distinction between content and form; to read is to unmask, to learn to see through the glitter of the surface.

6 The third basic Freudian concept which we shall touch upon is that of sublimation. Freud sees art as sublimated sex drive. Sublimation is the redirection of the libido rather than the repression of the drive and as such it is viewed favourably by Freud. It is a socially acceptable way of handling an unacceptable drive, an activity which fuses the pleasure principle and the reality principle. The artist may have the disposition of a neurotic but because of his remarkable capacity for sublimation and because of his strong sense of reality, he does not become ill. And yet, Freud also expresses doubt as to the ultimate value of sublimation as a healthy solution: art may at least partly be a substitute for the unacceptable sexuality but it remains associatively related to the repressed drive. The fact that the sublimated activity is never freed from its source means that it will never be able to replace it completely.

7 Freud seems to be uncertain about the nature of artistic creativity. Should we admire the artist or pity him? Is artistic creativity a healthy activity or a neurotic symptom? The result of a perfect fusion of the pleasure principle and the reality principle? Or a kind of cowardly escapist activity? Is the artist’s project really hopeless, bound to cause him dissatisfaction because it is a substitute for something else? This uncertainty may have its roots in a doubleness which Freud seems to see as being inherent in the creative process. On the one hand, the artist controls and rules in the sense that he

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rearranges reality to his own liking. He creates a fantasy world with himself as the centre and the ruler, and thus achieves the wish-fulfilment which reality has denied him. On the other hand, the artist is still driven by his infantile wishes and desires (Møller26-27). But this uncertainty may also have its roots in Freud’s own confusion. We find at least two conflicting images of the artist in Freud’s aesthetic speculations. One is of the artist as someone endowed with an advanced knowledge of the unconscious: “creative writers are valuable allies” of the psychoanalyst (“Delusions and Dreams”34). Freud considers the artist with awe, and sees art as a valuable opening into our knowledge of the human mind. The other image is of the neurotic patient, or the infantile and primitive person. One very interesting aspect of the primitive nature of the artist has to do with his apparent belief in the omnipotence of thoughts, that is the belief that one’s thinking can affect and alter the world. In Totem and Taboo, Freud explains that this belief normally characterizes the developmental stage of the child’s first three years, that is, the stage of primary narcissism. But in art this belief is preserved (Møller 33).

8 There is, then, a doubleness inherent in the creative process as Freud sees it – but there is certainly also a doubleness and ambivalence in his own valuation of art and the artist.His valuation seems to cover a range of feelings from respect and awe to suspicion and skeptical disdain. He “appears both to mock the impotence of fantasy and to fear its power.”3 The same ambivalence seems to be true of Roth’s attitude to art.

9 Roth seems similarly to have understood his own writing and his writer’s role in Freudian terms. Several passages in Call It Sleep suggest that Roth saw David, his artist figure, as a child at play behaving like a creative writer, fulfilling his wishes by creating a world of fantasy. The wishes that David fulfils for Roth are parricidal and incestuous, as is underlined by the disturbing final image of the boy in the family bedroom. It is a complex and highly ambiguous image which suggests victory as well as defeat. David has triumphed in the sense that he has realized his secret infantile desire; he has killed the father and now has his mother all to himself. But he has lost in the sense that he has won too great a victory. Perhaps suggesting a retreat into neurosis, the final image pictures David as a little Oedipus, almost in bed with his mother, his throbbing foot an allusion to Oedipus’s name, which means swollen foot, and which is an allusion to an erect penis (Rudnytsky 20). Roth’s final image of the artist reflects his bleak, Freudian outlook; it suggests the impossible nature of the artist’s sublimation project in alluding to Freud’s insight that the sublimated activity, art, will never be able to replace the underlying drive completely. Similarly, it reflects Freud’s conception of the artist as a potentially neurotic, infantile, primitive person.

10 The Freudian (and Rankian) concept of the neurotic’s family romance adds an extra dimension to the idea that art should represent a wish-fulfilment. The neurotic’s family romance is a fantasy, a stage in the development of the neurotic child’s estrangement from his or her parents. Normal children, as well as neurotic children, will inevitably become gradually dissatisfied with their parents as they grow up; comparing their parents to others, they will feel that they are slighted, they may regret that they have to share their parents’ love with a sibling. Such disappointments are inevitable, but the neurotic child cannot bear them: “His sense that his own affection is not being fully reciprocated then finds a vent in the idea, often consciously recollected later from early childhood, of being a step-child or an adopted child” (Freud, “Family Romances” 221).4 The child replaces his parents or the father alone because he longs for the

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“happy, vanished days when his father seemed to him the noblest and strongest of men and his mother the dearest and loveliest of women (“Family Romances” 224-25). Moreover, Freud writes that if there are any other particular interests at work they can direct the course to be taken by the family romance: for its many-sidedness and its great range of applicability enable it to meet every sort of requirement. In this way, for instance, the young phantasy-builder can get rid of his forbidden degree of kinship with one of his sisters if he finds himself sexually attracted by her. (224)

11 The concept of the family romance is thus wonderfully open.

12 In Call It Sleep there is one very powerful scene which dramatizes quite concretely the idea of the neurotic’s family romance: it is the scene in which David breaks down in the cheder, the Hebrew school, and lets the two rabbis in on his secret fantasy that his mother is dead and that his real father is a Christian organist from the old country. With this fantasy David denies his parents, he commits a symbolic patri- and matricide, and reinvents himself as a Gentile and as an American. At one strike he seems to have freed himself; he has escaped the Jewish world of commandments and restrictions and erased his old identity as the fearful, guilty Jewish son. He has killed the Jewish father and he has banished his forbidden degree of kinship with his mother, whom he, of course, desires sexually.

13 David’s family romance, his fantasy that he is somebody else, may be read as an analogy to Roth’s own desire to escape his Jewish origins - as has also been suggested by Werner Sollors and Hana Wirth-Nesher.5 In her reading of the climactic electrocution scene in “The Rail,” Wirth-Nesher suggests that it is “as if David dies out of his immigrant life and is born into the world of English literacy and culture, the world of Henry Roth’s literary identity, but at the cost of killing both the father and the mother” (“Between Mother Tongue” 485).

14 Although never using the term, Roth does actually describe the creation of Call It Sleep in terms similar to that of the family romance.6 The author’s treatment of his sister, for instance, seems quite literally to fit into the scheme of the neurotic’s family romance. She does not appear in Call It Sleep, and Roth, in 1971, attributes her elimination to his jealous egotism. Later he will refer to a sexual motive. Interestingly, both motives, jealousy and sexual shame, act in accordance with the idea of the family romance. Roth has also made several interesting comments about the autobiographical sources of David’s mother. He has explained that Leah Roth was the source of both Genya and Bertha (“these contrasting female figures” [Bronsen 268]), and, complicating the picture, he has also pointed out that Genya is modeled partly on Eda Lou Walton. All of which suggests that Aunt Bertha may represent a truer and certainly less idealized portrait of Roth’s real mother. Accepting Roth’s second explanation we may speculate that Roth through his family romance denies certain aspects of his real mother by relegating them to an aunt, namely the Jewish greenhorn Aunt Bertha, and by modelling David’s mother, Genya, at least partly after Eda Lou Walton. In his fantasmatic reinvention of his origins Roth effectively erases his Jewish family, his parents and sister by descent, claiming that his true parents, his parents by consent, are, in effect, Eda Lou Walton, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot.7

15 The following statement from Roth about Call It Sleep seems to reflect the author’s awe- struck fear of the magic power of the novel, the meaning it held for him not just as a writer but as a man: “I often said to myself while I was writing the novel that some day

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I’d pay for it, and of course I did” (Freedman 154). For Roth, Call It Sleep came to represent an awesome act of transgression, the symbolic fulfilment of forbidden wishes. To Roth, the Jew, the novel represented apostasy from Judaism, a denial and betrayal of the Jewish family, the Jewish people and the Jewish past. His act of self- creation was an act of parricide and Jewish heresy.8

16 In an interview with Bonnie Lyons, Roth talks about his (real) father’s reaction to Call It Sleep. It appears that Herman Roth was affected – he felt “remorseful” – but apparently the parricide that Roth committed with Call It Sleep did not really sink in: “The reaction of my father was: ‘I shouldn’t have beat him so much’” (Shifting Landscape 167). To all appearances, Herman Roth actually thrived on his son’s success as a writer. The Henry Roth Collection in the Special Collections at Boston University attests to this impression. The collection, which is very small, seems to have been created largely by virtue of Herman Roth’s contributions. It includes some of his personal papers, a Yiddish play, Sin of Divorce, written by him around 1940, and the information that he offered to help Boston University financially. One postcard dated 1965 from Henry to Herman reads: “Dear Pop: Had enough of fame? I have.”9

17 Roth did not succeed in killing the father – neither the real father nor the internalized one. In keeping with the suggestion that Roth himself understood the role and function of art in Freudian terms, his writer’s block can also be understood in Freudian terms. In Writer‘s Block, Zachary Leader attempts to construct a Freudian theory of writer’s block, a subject about which Freud himself wrote very little.10 Freud’s theory of writer’s block, as it is rendered by Leader, is fairly crude and cannot be said to be universally true; rather, it seems to have been tailored to the specific case of Henry Roth. Leader claims that Freud would label writer’s block as inhibition. In Freudian terms writer’s block would be conceived of like any other inhibition, as a restriction that the ego imposes on itself so as not to arouse anxiety symptoms. Writers usually have a special flexibility or looseness of repression; compared to non-creative people they are in closer contact with their unconscious. The blocked writer, however, has lost this flexibility of repression: The strength of the repressive mechanism prevents the blocked writer from releasing powerful instincts and wishes, and writing takes on the character of a dangerous transgression, one which, because the fantasies that motivate it are usually or ultimately Oedipal, is associated with the parent. The writer’s anxiety about the release of his wish… is thus a version of castration anxiety… The need to repress simply reasserts itself, overpowering the sublimative compensations of art and resulting, if not in silence, then in other presumably more thorough sublimations. (48-49)

18 Art is basically seen as a symbolic parricide, with everything that such an act entails, and writer’s block in consequence is seen as castration anxiety – the blocking agent is the internalized image of the father. In his (highly speculative and not very convincing) attempt at psychoanalysing Leonardo da Vinci, Freud suggests that the painter’s blockage or inhibition is brought about by the reassertion of repressive forces, that it is a product of the increased pressure from the impulses that are being repressed: the repressed wish for the mother, or the infantile past. However dubious Freud’s analysis of Leonardo, we may suppose that Roth’s writer’s block is of a similar kind and that the factor which reactivated his infantile past is his relationship with Walton, a relationship which appears to have had semi-incestuous undertones for Roth himself. Walton, who was his senior by eleven years, appears to have fulfilled several functions for the young

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man: artistic mentor, bread winner, lover and surrogate mother. The need to repress reasserted itself and resulted in several thorough sublimations, among which I suggest that we can count Roth’s joining the Communist Party and his escape to Maine.11 Freud suggests that There are clearly also inhibitions which serve the purpose of self-punishment… The ego is not allowed to carry on those activities, because they would bring success and gain, and these are things which the severe super-ego has forbidden. So the ego gives them up too, in order to avoid coming into conflict with the super-ego. (Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety 240-41)

19 As Leader suggests, the self-punitive inhibition is really a version of inhibition as such. In “Dostoevsky and Parricide,” Freud shows how the writer could only allow himself some success in his writing once he had debased himself by losing at the gambling tables. Similarly, Roth seemed to be ready to allow himself to write Mercy only after he had punished himself with prolonged abstention from writing (or at least from publishing), his recovered flexibility of repression also probably partly brought on by old age. Moreover, the actual writing of the Mercy series can be seen as an act of self- punishment. As most readers will know, Mercy is a confessional work. The work is aimed at countering and negating Call It Sleep, at turning art back into life, a project which involves the revelation of an incestuous relationship between the author, or his alter ego the character Ira Stigman, and his sister. It is a work of repentance and self- abasement, presenting the author figure as an abominable apostate, yearning for forgiveness and for his lost Jewish world. Moreover, Mercy represents the author figure as a moral masochist. A moral masochist is a victim of suffering, a person who exists only in suffering. It is someone, who, on account of a guilt complex, is driven by a need for punishment.12

20 Let us round off the Freudian account with a hilarious passage from Freud’s Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, which suggests that to the blocked writer writing can become so strongly eroticized that the very physical act in itself provokes anxiety: Analysis shows that when activities like playing the piano, writing or even walking are subjected to neurotic inhibitions it is because the physical organs brought into play – the fingers or the legs – have become too strongly eroticized… As soon as writing… assumes the significance of copulation, or as soon as walking becomes a symbolic substitute for treading upon the body of mother earth, both writing and walking are stopped because they represent the performance of a forbidden sexual act. The ego renounces these functions, which are within its sphere, in order not to have to undertake fresh measures of repression – in order to avoid a conflict with the id. (240)

21 Undoubtedly, writing came to represent a forbidden sexual act to Roth, because it was inextricably associated with parricide and incest. In Call It Sleep David’s, and Roth’s, anxieties about the release of their wishes are personified in Albert Schearl, the great castrator, complete with hammer or whip in hand. In Shifting Landscape the castrator, or the blocking agent, can be recognized in the dybbuk,which would come to haunt the author when he attempted to write. In his account of the writing process which led to the short story “Broker” (1939), Roth speaks of experiencing anxiety and an “approximate nervous breakdown”: Somewhere around one or two in the morning I became aware of a terrible feeling of anxiety; I think it was real fear. Sweat broke out on my brow, and I had a desire to just scream… The anxiety, by the way, persisted. I seemed to be sort of disembodied… It seemed to return whenever I seriously thought to write

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commercially or anything but a letter… The thing would sort of attack me. (Shifting Landscape 60)

22 “Final Dwarf” can be read as Roth’s attempt to confront both his real father and his dybbuk, his writer’s block, again. If Call It Sleep is Roth’s portrait of the artist as a boy – and a young man – “Final Dwarf” is a portrait of the middle-aged artist and as such also an implicit allegory of writing. “Final Dwarf” can be understood as a reenactment of the parricide that Roth committed with Call It Sleep, and a far more aggressive one because the story is so evidently autobiographical. In this barely disguised day-dream Roth brings the latent desires out in the open.

23 “Final Dwarf,” then, comes out of Roth’s nearly silent period, his middle age, or the Maine years, a period which is not very well documented in the author’s published work but which is represented in detail in the unpublished “Maine Sampler,” a 755- page-long manuscript, which is based on Roth’s journals from a period spanning the years 1947-65.13 It covers the bulk of the years Roth and his family, his wife Muriel and his two sons, spent in Maine, primarily the years in the farmhouse outside Augusta, where the Roths lived from 1949 to 1965. This is roughly the period in Roth’s life which began with his relinquishing all hope of writing again and ended with his being rediscovered as the author of Call It Sleep, the period in his life in which he was supposedly not writing. Roth’s escape to the cultural backwater of rural Maine, to a life as, among other things, a waterfowl farmer, this creation of a new “persona” for himself, smacks of self-dramatization and can be seen as a drastic ritualization of his need to purge himself and create a new life. Roth seems to have escaped to Maine in order to be reborn as someone other than a (Jewish) literary man. His escape can be understood in Freudian terms, as a self-punitive restriction or inhibition, as an unconscious need to repress the creative urge, that forbidden parricidal desire. But Roth could not suppress the desire altogether. Nor could he, however, come to terms with his dybbuk or with his real father.

24 The overall theme of the “Maine Sampler” is that of the rebirth of the writer, which is quite ironic considering that Roth apparently went to Maine in order to be reborn as someone other than a literary man. In keeping with the theme of rebirth and regeneration Roth makes subtle references to Thoreau’s Walden as a model for his own work. In the opening story Kestril, Roth’s alter ego, is engaged in the project of moving a cabin from somewhere else to place it in his back garden so that his father, Pop, who has his permanent address in New York, can come to stay there in the summer time. Thus the opening seems very ominous as regards the prospect of beginning a new life; the mythical Thoreauvian cabin is not for Kestril, it will be inhabited by Pop, by his dybbuk. Not even in Maine could Roth escape his father.

25 “Final Dwarf” dramatizes one of these visits by Pop. It depicts a seemingly trivial shopping trip – the middle-aged son is driving his old father Pop around while taking care of some of his own errands – but is a beautiful example of Roth’s ability to turn an everyday event into a drama of murderous intensity. The story plays on two principal themes: the theme of stinginess and the theme of the artist’s vision and desires.

26 At first, the reader is unaware that Pop is present in the story. The opening scene of “Final Dwarf” presents us with the son who is picking up a new pair of glasses which he has obtained through a Sears mail-order catalogue, it shows Kestrel’s pleasure and triumph: “He was so pleased with the reading glasses he had ordered through the catalog and he was so ingenuous in his enthusiasm that the woman behind the counter,

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the Sears mail-order clerk, asked his permission to try them on” (emphasis added).14 He gloats over his bargain: “He smiled, placed a five-dollar bill on the counter… At least fifteen bucks to the good, he thought triumphantly: that’s how much more the unholy alliance of opticians and the American Optical Society would have soaked him” (156 emphasis added). Not only pleased, but triumphant; he almost got something for nothing. As noted, stinginess is a key theme in the story; it is a trait which Kestrel despises in his father, but which he has inherited from him, as becomes clear in the following scenes. Kestrel’s mood falls as he remembers that “his father was waiting for him in the car” (157) – the father who is the origin of all his own character traits, including his stinginess and his artist’s vision and desire.

27 Roth once talked about “the side of Judaism that you had come to dislike in the first- generation Jews who had to subordinate everything in order to make some kind of economic base for themselves” (Lyons, “Interview” 55). For Roth, his own father clearly represented “this side of Judaism”; he seems to have understood stinginess or a general obsession with money as a specifically Jewish characteristic. In fact, some passages in the “Maine Sampler” can be read as the author’s reproduction and affirmation of ugly anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jews and money. Pop appears as someone who has turned “bargain shopping” into a way of life.15 At first glance, Pop is not very much like Albert Schearl of Call It Sleep. The older father figure is a more recognizable Jewish character, his language identifiable as that of a Jewish immigrant. But their cheapness, and the Freudian character traits associated with cheapness, such as “repressed,” “retentive,” “anal,” even “anal-sadistic,” unite them, establish continuity between them. Thus it seems appropriate that Roth should (re)-create a (bargain) shopping tour to represent a day in the life of Kestrel and Pop and to explore his father’s and his own stinginess. In keeping with the Freudian characterology, Pop has problems with favours; he cannot bear being indebted to other people, so he constantly manipulates them into doing things for him, constantly conceals his real wishes and motives, as is clear throughout the story.

28 The second central theme or motif of “Final Dwarf” is vision, more precisely the artist’s vision and desire: “True, the lenses weren’t prescription lenses and did nothing to correct his astigmatism” (156); they do, however, offer the seer a special vision. The clerk, who tries them on, is bewildered and disturbed by what she sees through the glasses and she quickly takes refuge behind her own (prescription, we assume) bifocals. The glasses are not for her. The non-prescription glasses symbolize the special vision and desires of the artist, here resembling the Freudian artist who is endowed with a special knowledge of the unconscious and of our forbidden desires and motives. The two themes, stinginess and the artist’s vision, are elegantly fused in the symbolic glasses. Kestrel’s artistic vision is forever shaped, or warped, by the fact that he is his father’s son; stinginess made him buy these glasses rather than prescription glasses – and stinginess is a trait which he has inherited from his father. Throughout the story Kestrel oscillates between triumph and defeat as he realizes that everything he is, he is by virtue of his patrimony.

29 Father and son go through the shopping tour, Pop trying half-heartedly to be the selfless father who does not want to be a nuisance, Kestrel trying harder to play the role of the solicitous son. What father and son are really engaged in is a compulsory ritual of punishment and revenge. Kestrel, who is aware of his own filial hatred, tries to check himself, keeps urging his father to put on his seat belt as a protective measure,

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that is, as a measure to protect him from his son’s designs. Kestrel is trying to be civil, knows that he should bear with his old father, because he himself is the one with the upper hand; but this rational thought develops into an ugly feeling of triumph, and leads him to rejoice in the fact of his father’s frail old age. He actually sees that his father is dying: Oh, hell, Kestrel thought as he waited. He never could do anything to please his father. Ever since childhood it had been that way. Still, he had to get over it. It was ridiculous to bear a grudge against the old guy. There was nothing left of him. A little old dwarf in a baggy pair of pants. The final dwarf. Kestrel smiled. (160)

30 Kestrel parks the car inconveniently for Pop, who is on his way to get (cheaper) day-old cookies at Arlene’s, and as he watches his father, he feels that “There seemed to be a special emphasis about the way he hobbled, as though he were trying to impress the pain he felt on his son” (160). Is Pop acting – exaggerating his pain in order to gain his son’s sympathy and thus indirectly punishing him for his inconsiderate behaviour? Is he, in other words, punishing Kestrel with his own suffering? Or is it only Kestrel who sees the special emphasis in Pop’s hobbling because he feels guilty about his inconsiderateness and about his feelings of hatred? One problem in this father-son relationship seems to be that they are too much part of each other to be able to see each other as separate individuals – a complex which appears to be a symptom and a product of the incestuous family, which Roth treats in detail in Mercy of a Rude Stream.

31 Driving homewards to Kestrel’s Maine farmhouse, Pop tries to engage his son in a political discussion about black Americans. He reveals a shocking racism, claiming that he wished John Kennedy had been shot before he became president: Yeh, the Niggehs! What they [Robert and John Kennedy] made such a good friend from the Niggehs! You’re such a good friend from the Niggehs? There! ... You know, you can’t talk to a Niggeh no more since the Kennedys? ... Not to a man, not to a woman, not to a child. Even a child’ll tell you: go to hell, you old white fool. (163)

32 Pop’s attack, of course, is primarily an attack on his son; what he is essentially saying is that he would not mind seeing him shot. And he goes on pointing to the worst imaginable scenario: You’ll be just like me. Wait. I seen already philospohes like you. Your cousin Louis Cantor when he lived was a philosophe, a socialist. Every time he came to the house he brought the socialist Call. So what happened in the end? He laughed from it. “What a fool I was,” he used to say. (165)

33 Kestrel, in retaliation, plays with the idea of killing his father: “Two inches to the right, he thought, two inches that way with the steering wheel, and it would all be over with the old fool. Just two inches now; he’d go through the windshield like a maul, he’d slam that rusty granite [of the ledge]” (164). But, as before, he checks himself, realizing that killing his father this way would in all likelihood result in his own death, too. This is Kestrel’s bitter insight into the oneness of father and son.

34 Throughout the story it seems that Pop is unaware of his son’s parricidal feelings; only when eventually trying on the symbolic mail-order bifocals can he see what is going on. He sees his son is going right into the stone wall and he finally puts on his seat belt. Here Roth elaborates on the symbolic meaning of the glasses; they work as a symbol of the artist’s vision and in this particular case it is the Freudian artist’s vision, the vision which insists on focusing on the semi-unconscious ugly feelings below the surface, such as parricidal desires. Kestrel’s oneness with his father is further cemented in the symbolic connotations of the glasses. As already noted, Kestrel bought these particular

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non-prescription glasses because he is his stingy father’s stingy son. He has, in a word, inherited everything from his father, including his artist’s vision. As Roth points out in the interview attached in Shifting Landscape, the story is prophetic because it “meant the shrinking of the liberal” (166). In an ironic reversal the final dwarf becomes not Pop, who is approaching death, but Kestrel, who will end up like him.

35 As Bonnie Lyons suggests, the “brilliance of this savage story depends largely on the complex connections between the images of the final dwarf and Kestrel’s glasses” (Henry Roth 154). Both the final dwarf image and the glasses involve the “transposition of selves… Wearing Kestrel’s glasses, the old man sees through Kestrel’s eyes. What he sees is an image of Kestrel’s murderous fantasy, the magnified approach of the stone wall.” And we end up with a “double transformation of father to son and son to father” (Henry Roth 154).

36 As suggested, both Call It Sleep and “Final Dwarf” can be read as allegories of writing. Roth indirectly dramatizes the Freudian insight that art is a pretext, a substitute for something else, namely the forbidden infantile parricidal wish. Moreover, his story can be seen as reflecting the Freudian ambivalence about art, an ambivalence which is also his own. The artist appears as a figure offering a valuable opening into the human mind, as someone who is endowed with a special knowledge of the unconscious. But he also appears as a semi-neurotic person, as infantile and primitive in his savage desires. In both Call It Sleep and “Final Dwarf” the parricidal sons experience a triumphant moment when they see their fathers defeated: Albert Schearl stands “slack-mouthed, finger-clawing, stooped” (433), Pop becomes a “little old dwarf in a baggy pair of pants. The final dwarf” (160). Both victories, however, are equivocal. As suggested, the final image of David may reflect a retreat into neurosis and, accordingly, it can be seen as a reflection of Roth’s ambivalent feelings about art. “Final Dwarf” reflects the middle- aged man’s awareness of the impossibility of killing the father, as suggested by the insight into the oneness of father and son and by the reversal, his suspicion that he will end up being like his father. Moreover, Kestrel, or Roth, sees that his special artist’s vision is inextricably – and unbearably – linked with his patrimony: he bought the special glasses because he is his stingy father’s stingy son. He became the writer Henry Roth by virtue of his patrimony.

37 The final image of Pop in “Final Dwarf” suggests that he is defeated; it is an image of the old man groping beside him for the seat-belt buckles. And, as suggested by Roth’s interview with Lyons, “Final Dwarf” was not only prophetic as to the fate of Henry Roth, it was also a kind of eye-opener to Herman Roth: “In this story, he began to understand the essential and irreconcilable animosity that existed between us” (Shifting Landscape 167). Moreover, there is a powerful note of triumph in Roth’s letter dealing with the story, which is included in Shifting Landscape. Characteristically Roth does not seem to distinguish between the fictional “Pop” and his own father16: “the son has for all intents and purposes killed his father, as in fact he should. The mere physical continuity of the old boy is of no great account. (And it so happens that when he left, as he did within the week, I felt he was… crawling off to die)” (166, ellipsis in original). As if the story did, in fact, fulfil the forbidden wish. As if Roth sees himself as the primitive Freudian artist who believes in the omnipotence of thoughts; as if words could kill.

38 But the final image of Kestrel himself also suggests defeat. “Final Dwarf” began on a note of pleasure and triumph: Kestrel’s gloating over his bargain, his new glasses, can be read as an image of the artist’s triumph, an affirmation of art. But the story ends on

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a note of defeat: “Kestrel sighed. He felt shriveled. He removed a hand from the wheel, replaced the glasses in his pocket” (166). The glasses were no good, after all. This gesture reflects Roth’s despair at art. The story illustrates the ambivalence that Roth seems to have felt about art in general; it shows him as an artist who fears the power of art just as he mocks its impotence.

39 Just as Roth never resolved his relationship with his father, so he never resolved his ambivalence about art. Albert Schearl, Pop, and Herman Roth represent the source of Roth’s art, but they simultaneously represent the dybbuks, or the blocking agents which forbid the creative desire. Moreover, “Final Dwarf,” like Call It Sleep, suggests that killing the father is to win too great a victory, since parricide is also suicide. “Final Dwarf” reads as the middle-aged man’s bitter realization of the same paradox. The story also points to other works: to the unpublished “Maine Sampler” and to Mercy of a Rude Stream whose father figure has more in common with Pop of ”Final Dwarf” than with Albert Schearl. Moreover, it seems likely that Ira Stigman of Mercy got his name from “Final Dwarf,” from Roth’s imaginative use of the symbolic meanings of the complex of astigmatism. And Roth, of course, continued to speculate about the parricidal implications of writing. In Mercy he represents his young artist, Ira Stigman, as Freud’s primal man. Ira’s desires go beyond the nuclear family to include both sister and cousin; his parricidal designs are directed against his father as well as the older patriarch, his grandfather Zaida.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude. London: Penguin, 1988.

Bronsen, David. “A Conversation With Henry Roth.” Partisan Review 36.2 (1969): 265-80.

Crews, Frederick. The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes. New York: Oxford UP, 1966.

Freedman, William. “Henry Roth in Jerusalem: An Interview.” The Literary Review 23.1 (1979): 149-57.

Freud, Sigmund. “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming.” 1908 [1907]. The Pelican Freud Library 14: Art and Literature. London: Penguin, 1988.

--- . “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva.” 1907 [1906]. The Pelican Freud Library 14: Art and Literature. London: Penguin, 1988.

--- . “Dostoevsky and Parracide.” 1928 [1927]. The Pelican Freud Library 14: Art and Literature. London: Penguin, 1988.

--- . “Family Romances.” 1909 [1908] The Penguin Freud Library 7: On Sexuality. London: Penguin, 1991.

--- . Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. 1925. Penguin Freud Library 10: On Psychopathology. London: Penguin, 1993.

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Leader, Zachary. Writer’s Block. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991.

Lyons, Bonnie. Henry Roth: The Man and His Work. New York: Cooper Square, 1976.

--- . “Interview With Henry Roth, March 1977.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 5.1 (1979): 50-62.

Møller, Lis. Freuds Litteraturteori. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1984.

Rank, Otto. The Myth of the Birth of the Hero: A Psychological Interpretation of Mythology. Trans. Dr. F Robbins and Dr. Smith Ely Jelliffe. New York: Robert Brunner, 1957.

Roth, Henry. Call It Sleep. (1934). London: Penguin, 1977.

--- . Shifting Landscape: Selected Essays and Short Stories. 1987. New York: St. Martin’s, 1994.

--- . The Henry Roth Collection in the Special Collections at Boston University.

Rudnytsky, Peter L. The Psychoanalytic Vocation: Rank, Winnicott, and the Legacy of Freud. New Haven: Yale UP, 1991.

Schøtt-Kristensen, Lene. “The Leydn Jar: A Study of Henry Roth.” Diss. Copenhagen U, 2002.

Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

--- . “‘A world somewhere, somewhere else.’ Language, Nostalgic Mournfulness, and Urban Immigrant Family Romance in Call It Sleep.” Wirth-Nesher, New Essays. 127-88.

Wirth-Nesher, Hana. “Between Mother Tongue and Native Language in Call It Sleep.” Afterword. Call It Sleep by Henry Roth. New York: Noonday, 1997.

--- . (ed.) New Essays on Call it Sleep. New York: Cambridge UP, 1996.

NOTES

1. See, for example, Werner Sollors “A world somewhere, somewhere else” page 164, note 2 for Roth’s comments on Freud. 2. I am indebted to Lis Møller for the following explication. 3. The words are from Frederick Crews, who in his Freudian analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne, speculates that Hawthorne “appears both to mock the impotence of fantasy and to fear its power” (73). 4. See alsoOtto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero: A Psychological Interpretation of Mythology, 61ff. 5. Sollors and Wirth-Nesher read the ending of Call It Sleep in a similar way, although Sollors uses the term “family romance”, whereas Wirth-Nesher does not. See Wirth-Nesher, “Between Mother Tongue and Native Language in Call It Sleep” and Sollors, “‘A world somewhere, somewhere else.’” 6. As is also noticed by Sollors in “A world somewhere” pp.164-65, note 164. 7. I draw here on Sollors’s useful terms of consent and descent. See his Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. 8. Roth had many reasons to feel guilty about his master-piece. To Roth, the Communist, the novel was an act of political heresy, modernism being anathema to the “proletarian movement”; it reflected a special kind of bourgeois decadence. Moreover, he could not forgive himself that he had shut himself up in the sheltered ivory tower which Walton provided for him during the worst years of the Great Depression. Ever since he completed Call It Sleep, Roth guiltily attempted

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to leave that tower of privilege. Finally, Roth had presented an idealized picture of himself in the novel; he had lied about his personal history, most importantly about his sexual history. 9. The Henry Roth Collection in the Department of Special Collections, Boston University, Box 3. 10. Assuming that the writer’s block is a neurotic symptom, and that the curing of the block equals the curing of the person, Leader contradicts one of Freud’s theoretical premises – the idea that the healthy do not write – but he follows the idea that the writer is endowed with an advanced knowledge of the unconscious. 11. Roth, who had joined the Communist Party as he was finishing Call It Sleep, often spoke of his political affiliation and conviction as a kind of superego demanding “that you write as a social realist and that you write objectively and that you write about the proletariat and the revolution and so forth.” The Party’s demand had the effect of “pinning me against the wall. Since it was the last thing I could really do, it had the effect of making me overly conscious about myself as a writer. Trying to write, you might say, with an eye on the revolution, or on the Party, trying to write with the maximum of social consciousness was not the kind of thing that I was cut out for. Nevertheless, I felt a compulsion to do so.” (Shifting Landscape 46). In “No Longer at Home” (1971), Roth speaks in Freudian metaphors, suggesting that his social or political consciousness represents his superego, his writer’s talent or urge his libido. See Shifting Landscape 169-70. 12. See my thesis “The Leydn Jar: A Study of Henry Roth” for a more detailed definition of moral masochism and for a reading of Roth as a moral masochist. 13. The “Maine Sampler” can be found in the Henry Roth Papers at the American Jewish Historical Society, New York City. 14. Shifting Landscape 156. All further quotations from “Final Dwarf” are taken from this reprint of the story and are denoted by page numbers in parentheses. 15. The term comes from Paul Auster, who, in his autobiographical The Invention of Solitude,interestingly portrays his (second generation) Jewish father as a man who, in some ways, resembles Roth’s father. Like Herman Roth, Auster’s father was a hard worker, who dreamt of becoming a millionaire, and he was a man who turned “bargain shopping” into a way of life: “He did not want to spend [money], he wanted to have it, to know that it was there. …At times, his reluctance to spend money was so great it almost resembled a disease” (53). 16. At least the reader cannot tell from the excerpt of the letter which has been included in Shifting Landscape.

ABSTRACTS

D’inspiration autobiographique, la nouvelle « Final Dwarf » reflète les difficultés relationnelles d’Henry Roth avec son père, Herman. Le drame oedipien qui est au cœur de Call it Sleep, de Mercy of a Rude Stream et de l’inédit « Maine Sampler », se manifeste ici en tant que désir parricide pour constituer une représentation de l’acte d’écrire. La nouvelle se présente alors comme une allégorie de la création littéraire. Freudienne et intertextuelle, cette approche tente d’explorer le redoutable blocage de l’écrivain : si pour Roth l’écriture est synonyme de parricide, le blocage pourrait être perçu comme une peur de la castration.

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AUTHORS

LENE SCHØTT-KRISTENSEN Lene Schøtt-Kristensen is an assistant professor of American Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark. She graduated from Copenhagen University in 2002 with a Ph. D. degree in English. The title of her Ph.D. dissertation is “The Leydn Jar: A Study of Henry Roth. She has published articles in Scandinavian journals on Abraham Cahan, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth. Forthcoming: “Allegra Goodman’s Kaaterskill Falls: A Liturgical Novel” in Studies in American Jewish Literature.

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Henry Roth’s Short Fiction (1940-1980): A Geography Of Loss

Martín Urdiales Shaw

1 If one is called on to cite the most repeatedly addressed topic in relation to Henry Roth as a fiction writer, both by Roth himself and by his scholarship, this is undoubtedly the peculiar progress of his writing career. Author of the masterpiece Call It Sleep at only 28 years of age, Roth stumbled on a creative block which lasted forty years, in the course of which the manuscript of a second novel was burned and only a handful of stories – by the standards of a writer who had published a demanding first novel of over 400 pages – were published. As is well known, Roth finally achieved his ‘redemption’ with fiction, over the last twenty-five years of his life, with the writing of the Mercy of a Rude Stream four-volume work, published in the 1990s.

2 The reasons for this early stilted career, as set down by Bonnie Lyons in a section of Henry Roth: The Man and His Work, were complex. As Lyons points out, crucial to Roth’s inability to produce a second novel after Call It Sleep were two key factors: on the one hand, Roth was financially sustained by his lover and patron Eda Lou Walton during the writing of his work; on the other, the intellectual climate at the height of the Depression was so sensitive to politicalization that reviews of Roth’s novel – both favourable and unfavourable – were construed exclusively in political terms (see Lyons 15-19), critics paying scarce or no attention to the work’s accomplishment in terms of its modernist aesthetics. These two factors combined in working up Roth’s guilt at the final outcome of Call It Sleep, and triggered his subsequent desire to write a ‘social novel,’ an event which was the onset of his loss as a writer, and which was added on to the earlier trauma of having lost his place as a Jew.1 Roth’s gradual recovery of a literary voice was the corollary in a chain of events initially triggered by the critical reappraisal of Call It Sleep in 1956, when Alfred Kazin and Leslie Fiedler both pointed it out in an issue of The American Scholar on “The Most Undeservedly Neglected Book of the Past 25 Years,” this being the only novel mentioned twice. This eventually led to the rediscovery of Henry Roth, who had retired to a farmland in rural Maine, to the renewal of the copyright, and to the reissuing of the novel in paperback in 1964, with astonishing success and sales (Lyons 27). The atypical history of Roth’s literary career

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as a novelist has been frequently addressed by the author himself and his interviewers, and would eventually become a source for reflection for the mature artist in Mercy of a Rude Stream, who, in dialogue with his other self across time, laments the lost years of creative stagnation following the publication of this novel of youth.

3 The following highlights how a significant part of Roth’s short fiction (and certain related pieces) within the period 1940-1980, can shed light on Roth’s perpetual discomfort with a sense of place, both as an artist and as a Jew, by providing a highly idiosyncratic, and often symbolic, geography of loss.2 My use of the term ‘loss’ here aims at conveying Roth’s uneasiness with his sense of place in both aesthetic and ethnic terms, but also because this concept reflects the sense of trauma attendant to such uneasiness. This loss seems to me codified within a geography, because taken as a body of work, most of Roth’s stories, and some later non-fictional pieces, recurrently portray protagonists – or Roth himself – trying to reach or move into other places across socio- economic, ethno-cultural, historical or political maps. In this respect, it is interesting to note that recent criticism of Roth similarly emphasises geographical instability in labelling the two main parts of the writer’s oeuvre: Mario Materassi’s anthology of the short works is entitled Shifting Landscape3, while Werner Sollors’ thorough essay on Call It Sleep foregrounds in its title Roth’s sentence “A world somewhere, somewhere else” (Wirth-Nesher, New Essays 127-88).

1. David Schearl’s geography of loss and the loss of Henry Roth

4 A brief reminder of the importance of place for the boy David Schearl in Call It Sleep may be relevant here, since it is in this complex first novel that Roth provides unresolved tensions that seem to persist beyond the ambiguity of the novel’s ending. David Schearl, having survived a near-fatal electrocution, is on the verge of sleep in a closing paragraph where the welter of impressions is aesthetically convincing, yet leaves unclear what significance (if any) the rail’s revelation – the blast of electric power – has had for David, or, for that matter, what “it” is that the boy “might as well call… sleep” (Call It Sleep 441), as he lies in bed in the ensuing, final, scene.

5 Sollors describes this passage as a “masterpiece at sustaining ambiguity” and goes on to compile over a score of different critical readings for David’s “it” (156-57). The ambiguity of the novel’s ending echoes the pervasive instability of meaning throughout the novel, continuously instanced at both the audial and the visual levels, through, for example, the juxtaposition of languages or the significance attributed to physical environment, which is in a constant state of flux. In David Schearl’s experience, the interpretation of physical space is polarised in terms of continuous, sudden and unexpected shifts between contentment/wonder/relief and fear/awe/guilt: home or the cheder vs. the East Side streets, the old country vs. East Side, a Christian household vs. a Jewish environment, the cellar vs. the river, and even the streetcar rails. None of these is eventually endowed with a stable meaning. Home, for example, is initially related to contentment and security through the presence of David’s mother, yet it is here that his father’s violence reaches a climax at the end, driving him out. The streets are often a source of wonder and discovery, but these feelings suddenly change into fear and trauma when David becomes lost or is chased by a gang. A similar instability applies to other environments, such as the river, where David is enjoying a solitary

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reverie, only to be suddenly taunted by three Irish boys, or to the streetcar rail, where the terrified David is first made to cause an electrical discharge which ironically elates him, and yet is later almost killed by a similar event. No order seems eventually to be established for David in his physical and perceptual universe. His association of Isaiah’s burning coal in the Old Testament to the electric flash of light and heat as a means of redemption, reveals the imaginative leap of an over-sensitive, intelligent boy, but in itself remains arbitrary and devoid of further meaning.

6 As Leslie Fiedler has pointed out (23) there is certainly the indication, in the sequence of David’s recovery of consciousness, that the new voice, which intermittently starts gaining strength amid the multicultural Babel surrounding him, is that of the artist’s that will some day write the novel we have been reading.4 However, the passage of the boy into the young artist – suggested by the aesthetic vision of the closing paragraphs – did not work for Roth outside the fictional boundaries of Call It Sleep. Roth himself admitted that the end of his book “begins to open up, to shoot out in all directions” (Freedman 152-53) and indeed David’s near-death ultimately seems to reveal a failed attempt at an act of closure of a traumatic period in Roth’s past.5

7 In an illuminating discussion on autobiographical self-representation in Joyce’s and Proust’s Bildungsroman, Paul Jay highlights the relevance in these texts of “putting to death [the writer’s] own past and his own past self,” which at the same time “represents his rebirth as an artist” (144). Regardless of the degree to which Call It Sleep may lend itself to analysis as an autobiographical text, it seems clear that Roth attempted this kind of closure through David’s accident, yet failed on account of not having really told all.6 Thus he could not, at that point, lay the past “to rest in the very act of giving it life in a fictional form” (Jay 146). Primarily, Roth had not told all, because in its final form Call It Sleep is not, strictly speaking, a Bildungsroman, and the David who reawakens from the electric shock is still years away from becoming the artist.7 Secondly, Roth had not told all, because in Call It Sleep he modified the representation of David’s familial relationships by choosing to omit a sister, who was significantly related to anxieties which become clear in A Diving Rock on the Hudson.

8 In this respect, it comes as no surprise that Roth’s attempt at ‘another place’ as a novelist, seeking out an overtly social emphasis and a non-autobiographical subject, would ultimately fail, the manuscript of this novel being burnt by the author himself in 1946.8 Roth was not only distancing himself from the continuity Call It Sleep demanded, but also yielding to external pressures he could not negotiate as an artist: the Party’s demand that you write as a social realist and that you write objectively and that you write about the proletariat and the revolution and so forth had the effect of pinning me against the wall. Since it was the last thing I could really do it had the effect of making me overly self-conscious as a writer. Trying to write, you might say, with an eye on the revolution, or on the Party, trying to write with a maximum of social consciousness was not the kind of thing that I was cut out for. (46)

9 Roth’s quest for another literary place had begun. This quest, often ending in paralysis or arrested movement, would project itself in a number of stories, and would only be resolved with a re-doubling of the self-representational theme in Call It Sleep: the mature unfulfilled artist vis-à-vis the aspiring artist in Mercy of a Rude Stream, the long- deferred closure that Call It Sleep had originally called for. In an overview of Henry Roth’s oeuvre one might label the stories, as well as some story-related memoir fragments included in Shifting Landscape, as a huge interruption of what Roth would

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have wanted to do throughout his writing career: an extended Bildungsroman which, as he finally managed it, opens with Call It Sleep in 1934 and continues with Mercy of a Rude Stream in the seventies and eighties.

2. The Early Stories (1940): Places Beyond

10 Two of Roth’s first stories following Call It Sleep, “Somebody Always Grabs the Purple” and “Many Mansions,” both published in 1940, implicitly hint at an estrangement from socio-economic or cultural milieus. Unlike Roth’s first published story (“Broker,” 1939), these two stories have a clearly recognisable autobiographical subject, an imaginative and sensitive boy, very much a less shy David Schearl. “Somebody Always Grabs the Purple” is a brief sketch of Sammy Farber’s reactions at finding the Purple Fairy Book he wants to read taken by another boy at the local library. His attempts at cajoling first the librarian and then the boy to let him have the book fail, and the story ends with the other boy actually checking it out in defiance, while Sammy watches helplessly.

11 One of the main strengths of this story is Roth’s skill in subtly conveying the negative weight that Sammy’s Jewish background has in both encounters. Feelings of cultural and ethnic alienation are hinted at from the start, as Sammy enters for the first time the 123rd Street Branch Library and awkwardly addresses the librarian as “teacher,” asking if his library card address should be now updated, since he has recently moved. The librarian, stereotyped as “a spare woman, graying and impassive, with a pince-nez” (63) checks the cleanliness of his hands, apparently after recognising the boy’s ex- address as a Jewish neighbourhood. Sammy’s request for the ‘Purple Fairy Book’ follows, together with a spontaneous outburst about his mother’s remarks that he’s too old to read “stories with a bear” (fairy tales), a reference to Yiddish folklore which baffles the librarian. Regretting the cultural difference his remark has inadvertently revealed, Sammy concludes apologetically, “Yeah, she don’t know English good” (63). To the librarian’s later suggestion that he read an adventure book, “very popular with boys” (64), Sammy retorts “I don’t see what’s popular about them. If a man finds a treasure in an adventure book, so right away it’s with dollars and cents. Who cares from dollars and cents? I got enough of that in my house” (64). Roth’s contextualization of this story in a 1983 interview sheds further light on the relationship between ethnic identity and the cultural values attached to the two literary genres: Moving to Harlem [in 1914] was a disaster. Judaism was my framework, and striving for material success was a vital, visible aspect of it on the East Side. But this was exactly what my little Gentile cronies mocked: Money! Money! Their scorn helped make Judaism repugnant. And once that happened, my identity disintegrated too… I read every fairy tale, every myth there was in the library. In other words, it became kind of a dream world, a fantasy world, I’m sure. Whereas the other kids at that time, Jewish and non-Jewish, were reading Horatio Alger’s From Bootblack to Millionaire or what have you, with me, that no longer had any appeal. That was Jewish. (66)

12 The other story, “Many Mansions,” published later in 1940, is in significant ways complementary to “Somebody Always Grabs the Purple.” Although Roth asserted in a 1985 interview that it is based on an account of his boyhood friend Gus (73), the story is a first-person narrative whose general tone and feeling suggest a strong degree of identification with the anonymous boy protagonist. In this respect, Mario Materassi highlights in Shifting Landscape Roth’s regret “at not having creatively appropriated his

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friend Gus’s interesting life” for a whole novel (73-74). Opening with a Fitzgeraldian statement, “When I was ten years old I became a collector of mansions” (69) this tale focuses on a boy’s fascination with another unknown realm, that of the New York rich, which has led him to memorise the owners and exteriors of all the mansions on ‘Millionaires’ Row.’ When one Senator Stover – dweller of the “wonderfullest” (72) of these mansions – offers to show him in, the boy is enthused but runs away as they are about to cross the threshold, oppressed by “the prospect of beholding in reality all that I had read in the newspapers and all I had conjured out of daydream and music… I felt as if there was something I already possessed that I might lose if I entered” (72).

13 As in “Somebody Always Grabs the Purple,” there is again the fascination, to reuse Sollors’s essay title, of “A world somewhere, somewhere else” painfully literalized by the physical proximity – yet socio-economic distance – of the houses on Fifth Avenue which the boy regards with awe. Interestingly, there is no clear reference in the story to the boy’s background, and his speech is adolescent slang rather than Yiddish- inflected, but one might surmise that this is a Jewish East Side son of immigrant parents – as were Gus and Roth themselves – fantasising on how the (Gentile) other half lives. Like the contents of the Purple Fairy Tale book, the inside of Senator Stover’s house remains a space to be fantasised upon, a place apart and beyond the Jewish commonplace, and the boy’s last-minute refusal to enter remains linked to his inclination to visualise this ‘world elsewhere’ exclusively in mythical terms: his first impression of Senator Stover is that “he looked like the old fisherman in the Arabian Nights who had opened the vase and let out the Djinn” (70) and he later describes his organ as having “wood in it from Sherwood Forest where Robin Hood used to live” (72). Within the boy’s mind, American material wealth, largely an exclusive Gentile domain before 1945, is thus drawn in terms of that mythical Other which also informs the protagonist’s anxieties in “Somebody Always Grabs the Purple,” and the two stories ultimately underscore the anxiety cum desire that these ‘places beyond’ the working- class Jewish consciousness generate.

14 But these two 1940 stories, composed shortly after Roth’s exertion and attendant guilt in the production of Call It Sleep, also seem to echo in different ways the predicament of a writer looking for, but unable to find, a different literary space. In its exchange between the librarian and Sammy Farber, “Somebody Always Grabs the Purple” is centrally about literary genre and the opposition fantasy/reality (as embodied, in children’s literature, by fairy tales vs. adventure books). It can be read as allegorically encoding Roth’s predicament and guilt, which herald his imminent paralysis, resulting from having accomplished an experimental novel and not being able to produce the social fiction that would be expected of him as a writer from the Left. In a similar sense, the anonymous protagonist of “Many Mansions,” fantasising with an imagined world but unable to experience it perceptually, seems to enact Roth’s position vis-à-vis a creative block that was fundamentally conditioned by his maladjustment to social realism. When he affirms his choice of “all I had conjured out of daydream and music” (72) by fleeing from the threshold of the Senator’s mansion, the boy-hero of this story is largely endorsing the aesthetics of a subjective consciousness, with its related mythologising, at the expense of the (f)actual conditions of ‘the real.’

15 These two 1940 stories would mark the end of Roth’s career as a young writer. His famous writer’s block would set in, and the artist of the thirties became a waterfowl farmer in rural Maine. Roth’s next published story, “Petey and Yotsee and Mario”

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(1956), was described by Materassi as marking “a tentative, almost a groping comeback” (Shifting Landscape 93). This tale returns to the childhood material of Call It Sleep, through a radical revision of the anti-Semitic content of the Irish children riverside episode. In Call It Sleep, three Irish boys ridicule David’s Jewishness and eventually terrorise him into throwing a metal strip across the rails, whereas here, Petey, Yotsee and Mario become Fat’s rescuers when he starts floundering in the river, his mother then baking them a Jewish cake in gratitude. This subversion of content in a scene with identical, yet largely de-ethnicized, players evinces Roth’s attempts at revising Call It Sleep’s mystique of the Jewish child’s superior sensibility (and its attendant victimisation role)9. It thus moves towards socially-grounded fictions: “in the interim [between 1934 and 1959] my soul had been scrubbed by Marxism-Leninism and the new look about the proletariat” (Lyons 175). In fact, the tale goes so far in reversing the earlier episode’s linking of Jewishness to victimisation, that Roth has it conclude with an ironic line at the expense of the mother’s sense of Jewish particularity: “What kind of people would they be if they didn’t like Jewish cake? Would they have even saved you?” (96).

3. The End of the Fifties: Arrested Motions

16 The second stage of Roth’s particular quest for a literary space, this time more specifically expressed in terms of the ‘artist in the process of recovering his art’ emerges as the dismal McCarthy period comes to an end, with two stories which complement each other in a dialogic relationship while they shed light on Roth’s gradual liberation from writer’s block: “At Times in Flight: A Parable” (1959) and “The Dun Dakotas” (1960). Both pieces function in very much the same allegorical terms as “Somebody Always Grabs the Purple” and “Many Mansions,” although now the allegory is made explicit by Roth and the stress is laid more on a sense of arrested motion, rather than on an unrealisable transition. “At Times in Flight,” a first person narrative, opens with Roth’s explicit allusion to his creative problems in 1938: I was then engaged in writing a second novel, which I had agreed to complete for my publisher. I had already written quite a section, and this opening section had been accepted and extolled. It was only necessary for me to finish it, and that was all. But it went badly from then on; in fact it had gone badly before I reached Z [Yaddo] (99).

17 These are vaguely framed by time-blurred recollections of Yaddo colony then and the early stages of his relationship with Muriel (Martha in the story). The second, and central, section of the story – by contrast much more graphically focused – projects Roth’s identification of his artist self with the tragedy of a racehorse that falls in mid- race, and is subsequently shot, having broken a leg. Roth performs this identification in deliberate and over-explicit terms, ending with the reflection of the horse’s fall and death as “a scene that I should muse on a great deal, of a horse destroyed when the race became real” (104).

18 As Bonnie Lyons observes, the reality of this race is an unclear symbol, which could enact an exclusively creative dilemma or the negative external influences that the socio-political panorama of 1938 then had for Roth.10 In a 1986 conversation with Materassi, Roth specifically clarified the symbolic value of the racehorse as equating art with the mythical Pegasus. Since Roth’s great achievement in fiction, Call It Sleep, had been so closely indebted to an immature financial and emotional dependence on Eda

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Lou Walton, in her multiple role as lover/patron/surrogate mother, Roth saw in his meeting with Muriel a transition into adulthood and responsibility, which he thought would necessarily entail the sacrifice of his artist self to the demands of a new committed and responsible life (105).

19 Paradoxically, however, “At Times in Flight” may also be hinting at a hopeful recovery in its closing dialogue. Even though the story is explicitly posited, as Materassi puts it, as “a ‘parable’ concerning the death of the artist as creator” (98), his last words to Martha (“lead the way back… you’ve got a better sense of direction than I have” [104]) convey a positive note of faith. Since this “parable” actually juxtaposes two chronological perspectives, the Yaddo experience in 1938 and its re-creation twenty- one years later, in Roth’s foreshadowing of Muriel’s role in redirecting his life there can also be a present (1959) intuition of her as redeemer of his art.11 This covertly amends his initial impression that life with Muriel would bring about the death of his artist self. The debt to M[uriel] is often foregrounded in the discourse of the senior Ira in Mercy of a Rude Stream, and can be justifiably traced to a period when, however tentatively, Roth is writing again and visualising a way out of his writer’s block, as the ensuing story undoubtedly makes evident.

20 The shorter “The Dun Dakotas” complements “At Times in Flight” in that it returns again to the symbolic projection of the writer’s block, but now to emphasise its eventual exorcising and final movement beyond. Roth’s own explanation of the story as “a recollection, in part, of both the prologue [of the aborted second novel] and the complete blocking” (111) sheds light on what is a peculiar exercise in allegorical and autobiographical metanarrative. Roth opens the story with reflections on his wasted life as a writer which then become allegorically embodied in “a story, a yarn” (108) which Roth re-members from the prologue in the manuscript of the destroyed novel. The yarn imbedded in the story deals with the attempted entry of white settlers into the territory of the Dakotas in order to carry out a topographical survey in the 1870s. Throughout several interviews (109-112) Roth insisted on the sense of the loss of history this fable conveys. In this connection, Lyons assumes the scene to be a metaphor for Roth and the writers of his generation, attempting “to find a way around or through the impasse of the waste land vision” (149) appropriately embodied in the emptiness of this mountainous terrain.12

21 Detained by the Dakota chief and his men, the scout leader parleys and lets the chief beat him at poker for the sake of getting ahead on their surveying mission. When the scout asks if they now may proceed, this story – itself an abridged reconstruction of the lost prologue – becomes an instant allegory of self-reflection, foregrounding Roth’s 1935 artistic predicament in a metafictional mode: “The chief… dreamed a long dream or a long thought – [of what]…I do not know. But that was as far as I got for over twenty-five years, waiting for the decision of the chief who had turned into stone or legend” (109). The scout becomes Roth, attempting to enter a new realm of creation in his second novel, but arrested into paralysis by and with the chief’s prolonged silence.

22 Speaking to Materassi in 1986, Roth admitted “who this chief is, or what he represents, I really don’t know. It’s a subconscious barrier of some kind” (112). Eventually Roth points at his artistic redemption by returning to the Chief Dakota ‘yarn’ for the concluding lines of the tale: “‘Will the chief let us pass?’ the scout repeated. ‘Always remember Great Chief.’ And the chief unfolded his arms and motioned them the way of their journey. ‘Go now,’ he said” (109). By using an openly geographical framework, this

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ending fully inscribes the story within Roth’s metaphors of arrested motions/ impossible transits for his own situation vis-à-vis the creative process. It does this more explicitly than in the 1940 tales, and more richly than “At Times in Flight,” where the horse-race remains either a too abstruse metaphor or an excessively narrow symbol of rivalry, to represent the loss of artistic powers. The particular geographical imagery in “Dun Dakotas,” the white settler entering Native lands, is rich in evocation, since it not only suggests the overcoming of a creative wasteland, but also heralds Roth’s will to enter and chart an unknown literary territory which may at the same time embody a return to the author’s sense of a “native self.” Both the Mercy of a Rude Stream saga and its forerunner, the tale “Itinerant Ithacan” (1977), would, in terms of form and content respectively, fulfil each of these premises.

4. 1960-1980: the way (back) to Jewishness and the novel.

23 If the stories in these first twenty years since Call It Sleep deal with Roth’s allegorical negotiation of his loss as an artist, up to a final exorcism in “Dun Dakotas,” a similar period, broadly ranging from 1960 to 1980, is devoted to a second coming to terms, that of his identity as a Jew. This concern is firstly embodied in the superb story “The Surveyor” (1966) and extends all the way up to “Itinerant Ithacan” (1977) but is also relevant in other very brief memoir pieces, mostly written in the late seventies, such as “The Wrong Place” (notes taken in 1965-66; published, 1978), “No Longer at Home” (1971), “Kaddish” (1977), “Report from Mishkenot Sha’ananim” (1977) and “Vale Atque Ave” (1977), most of which are only discussed briefly, as specific stages of Roth’s geographical and spiritual quest towards the location of Jewish identity.13

24 Like “The Dun Dakotas,” “The Surveyor” again involves a topographical mission, the location of a now-forgotten quemadero (stake) in Seville by a middle-aged American Jew and his wife, who plan to leave a symbolic tribute at the exact spot where relapsed or crypto-Jews were burned in Inquisition times. As the layering of history has it, the old stake is now, in the 1960s, next to a patriotic icon of Christian Spain, the statue of “El Cid.” Aaron Stigman cannot avoid the interrogation of Franco’s grises, but refuses an explanation, aware of the potential risks in a country where Church and government stand in close alliance. A knowledgeable city lawyer eventually intercedes before the police, later revealing to the Stigmans his memories of a grandfather lighting a candle on Friday nights, and thus his own Jewish ancestry. The idea for the story derives from Roth’s discovery of a medieval map of Seville, in the course of his six-month stay there in 1965-66, when he was hoping to gather material for a historical novel on a crypto- Jew joining the Spanish imperial venture in America. Roth’s factual Seville experiences, as they were reassembled, over a decade later, in a memoir piece entitled “The Wrong Place” (1978), merit some examination as an interesting counterpoint to “The Surveyor.” Whereas the story stresses the symbolic relevance of Stigman’s clandestine mission – the tribute to the medieval Jewish martyrs in a culturally alien territory – in “The Wrong Place” Roth devotes significant attention to the reverse process of his own peculiar fascination with Catholicism. This is mainly embodied in the aesthetic appeal of Seville’s Cathedral: “It’s easy, I muse, as I stand there raptly gazing up at the stained- glass windows that shine like ethereal retablos, it’s easy to accept Catholicism. It’s beautiful” (244). Roth later exits the Cathedral, wondering “What do I believe now?”

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(246), and this polarised state of mind on the subject of ethnicity and faith becomes evocative of earlier protagonists in his stories, attempting, but not quite achieving, transits into oppositional spaces.

25 Unquestionably, “The Wrong Place” is intended as an ironic reflection on having experienced Spain in order “to reunite with Judaism – via a side door!... What a detour” (248). Yet various aspects of the Catholic faith in Seville are highlighted almost obsessively, underscoring a morbid fascination with what, in reading “The Surveyor” alone, only emerges dimly as the faith of the oppressor. The two writings coalesce strangely, and in my view, illustrate the sinuous progress of a writer who, even as composing his first story on the rediscovery of Judaic roots, paradoxically becomes allured by its main religious Other.

26 A summary review of the pieces written throughout the seventies (all non-fictional except “Itinerant Ithacan”) further illustrates, even more graphically than the Spanish experience, the peculiarities of Roth’s winding geographical pilgrimage in search of a sense of ethnicity. A few years after the Seville sojourn, Roth composed a short piece, “No Longer at Home” (1971) in answer to a request from the New York Times to explain his prolonged silence. The piece opens with a familiar reference to the discontinuation of the East Side Jewish milieu as a result of the family’s move to Harlem and closes with the first public expression of his new commitment to Israel (168, 170). This commitment becomes intensified in the brief “Kaddish” (1977), again a memoir which traverses the key phases of the artist as a young man and the writer’s block, to conclude on a hopeful note: “it was Israel, a revitalized Judaism, that revitalized the writer, his partisanship a new exploration into contemporaneity” (190).

27 “Itinerant Ithacan,” published only months after “Kaddish,” is prefaced by this allegorical geographical image from Dante, suggesting completion or fulfilment: “O brothers, I said, who through a hundred thousand perils, Have arrived at the west” (Inferno, XXVI). Dante’s epigraph is symbolic of Roth’s having (re)discovered a strong literary voice, since the story clearly instances the literary technique of Mercy of a Rude Stream, the two-level narrative Roth was experimenting with in the later seventies. Thematically, however, the story’s duplex development relies on images of strain, fragmentation and loss which bind the two Roths across fifty years of existence, in the 1920s and in 1977, only resolved with R’s present reconciliation with M, following a crisis over her accompanying Roth to Holy Land, where the writer was invited to an artists’ centre in 1977. Only in this final expectation of the prospective visit to Israel does the writer/protagonist attain the contentment of Dante’s traveller, although, ironically, this is not a westward journey.

28 In the latter half of 1977, Roth wrote two brief related pieces from Jesuralem. In the first, “Report from Mishkenot Sha’ananim,” mainly descriptive of the new surroundings and acquaintances, Roth concludes with a reported conversation on the nature of aliya (moving to Israel) as a response to the unbearable ambivalence of galut (Diaspora), defined as retaining a sense of Jewish identity while conforming to the standards of a non-Jewish community. In Shifting Landscape, Mario Materassi provocatively frames the ending of the “Report” by appending two antithetical comments, by Roth in, respectively 1965 and in 1977: “I feel no cultural affinity for Austria, though I was born there, nor for Israel, though I’m a Jew”14; “I could be perfectly happy in Albuquerque, but the logic of my literary development seems to require that I live in Israel” (225).

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29 In the latter piece, the third-person “Vale Atque Ave,” written only days prior to the Roths’ return to the States, the writer asserts his commitment to aliya, “his choice to cast his lot with Israel” (227). Significantly, however, the particulars of this choice and its follow-up would illustrate yet again the predicament of a writer who was always envisioning “a world elsewhere.” Although it is the Mishkenot centre and the Jerusalem mayor who have hosted the writer and his wife, Roth expressed his preference for settling in the more cosmopolitan Tel-Aviv on the grounds that this was “the one city in Israel where he could still discern the vestiges of his boyhood. It was the one city that paralleled and evoked the East Side. For him, the keyword was not roots; the keyword was continuity” (227). Somehow, of course, such a statement was also foreshadowing that Henry Roth’s definitive journey could (and would) only be made in terms of literary imagination and artistic recovery. Roth finally accepted that neither could this Israeli metropolis be a substitute for the long-lost East Side, because the Otherness of the language, of the culture, and even of the landscape were ultimately impossible to bridge, in spite of his ideological and emotional attachment to Judaism. In an intense conversation with Materassi, Roth explained that he felt,

essentially, like a foreigner [in Israel]. I mean, here’s the land I espoused, here’s the land I identified with, here’s the people and so forth – but, as an individual, as a person, I’m a foreigner here… It is not the land, it is not the culture… it is not that profound, that wonderful, deep culture that the English language, that English literature, has given me… For me Israel is a new land… This is not my soil. But, again, one has to remember this is a Jew speaking, a Diaspora Jew. And that the only time he ever felt a sense of belonging to both a place and a people was during the short period when he lived in a Jewish mini-state, and he didn’t know it. (230)

30 Appropriately to the life-long sense of restlessness, that so often haunts his short story protagonists, and which the writer exorcised in his art more successfully than in his life, in the 1980s Roth and his wife Muriel were living in a mobile home in Albuquerque, perhaps the most expressive symbol of Roth’s attempts to negotiate a geography of loss. It was there that, finally, Henry Roth achieved his reconciliation with a sense of place and with a sense of continuity through fiction. With Mercy of a Rude Stream he returned, in an outstanding and totally unexpected fashion, both to the long-deferred completion of his Bildungsroman, only possible within the aesthetics of the novel, and to the crucial New York years which made – and yet also unmade – the artist from the boy, the divided David Schearl reincarnated into the still-traumatised Ira Stigman. Along with the critical rediscovery of Call It Sleep, a significant part of the author’s short works, by signifying in various modes Henry Roth’s motions and halts across the maps of artistic, social, cultural, historical and ethnic loss, became instrumental in the healing process that eventually made his return to a life-long fictional project possible.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baumgarten, Murray. City Scriptures. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.

Chametzky, Jules. Our Decentralized Literature. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1986.

Dembo, L. S. The Monological Jew. A Literary Study. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988.

Fiedler, Leslie. “The Many Myths of Henry Roth.” Ed. Wirth-Nesher, 1996. New Essays on Call It Sleep, 17-28.

Freedman, William. “A Conversation with Henry Roth.” Literary Review 18 (Winter 1975) 149-157.

Howard, Jane. “The Belated Success of Henry Roth.” Life 53 (Jan. 8, 1965) 75-76.

Jay, Paul. Being in the Text: Textual Self-Representation from Wordsworth to Barthes. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984.

Knowles, Sidney. “The Fiction of Henry Roth.” Modern Fiction Studies 11 (Winter 1965-66) 393-404.

Lyons, Bonnie. Henry Roth: The Man and His Work. New York: Cooper Square, 1976.

Pomerantz, Marsha. “A Long Sleep.” The Jerusalem Post Magazine 47 (Sept. 23, 1977) 8.

Roth, Henry. (ed. Mario Materassi). Shifting Landscape. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1987.

—. Call It Sleep. New York: The Noonday Press, 1991 (1934).

—. Mercy of A Rude Stream:

Vol. 1: A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park. New York: Picador, 1994.

Vol. 2: A Diving Rock on the Hudson. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

Vol. 3: From Bondage. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

Vol. 4:Requiem for Harlem. London: Phoenix Paperbacks, 1998.

Sollors, Werner. “‘A World Somewhere, Somewhere Else.’ Language, Nostalgic Mournfulness, and Urban Immigrant Family Romance in Call It Sleep.” Ed. Wirth-Nesher, 1996. New Essays on Call It Sleep. 127-88.

Wirth-Nesher, Hannah (ed.). New Essays on Call It Sleep. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Wisse, Ruth. The Modern Jewish Canon. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 2003.

NOTES

1. Lyons highlights Roth’s joining the Communist Party in 1933 as an instance of such guilt. Ironically, one of the (few) harsh attacks on Call It Sleep came from an early anonymous review in New Masses, a publication of the Communist press: “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” (quoted in Lyons 16-17). 2. This period, broadly speaking, ranges from the aftermath of Call It Sleep’s publication up to Roth’s devoting full attention to the Mercy of a Rude Stream manuscript. 3. All ensuing comments by Roth and references to Roth’s work are taken from this volume, unless otherwise specified.

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4. This section of Call It Sleep, with its juxtaposition of David’s inner voice and the external voices technically foreshadows the main formal feature of Mercy of a Rude Stream, although its purpose here is disruptive rather than dialogic. 5. L.S.Dembo notes: “It is significant that here…the climactic episode should come to [David] not as a single and unified vision but as a fragmentary rush of highly distinct and sharply perceived images. This is the Imagist way of perceiving reality; its triumph is… aesthetic, not epistemological” (82). 6. Roth started out writing Call It Sleep as straightforward autobiography, but was drawn to an aesthetic reconfiguration of his work, discarding the manuscript’s original 70 pages in the process (Lyons 12). 7. On Roth’s original aim to bring Call It Sleep up to the child’s adolescence, see Lyons 13. 8. Only the opening fragment of that novel, “If We Had Bacon”, accidentally survived through its publication in the small magazine Signatures: Works in Progress. (21-44). Cf. also Roth’s comments, throughout several interviews between 1967 and 1983, on the more specific details of his writer’s block, appended to this fragment by Mario Materassi in Shifting Landscape, pp. 44-47. 9. In the Call It Sleep scene (Book III, chapter 8) David remains an unnamed Jewish boy (a ‘sheeney’) for the three bullies, yet Roth makes a point of individualizing them as Pedey, Sweeney and Weasel, so that their primitive behaviour becomes unequivocally related to their Irish origin. 10. Lyons recalls Sidney Knowles’s angle: “Knowles suggested ... that Roth was unable to deal with more recent material; in [his] words, ‘As long as he wrote about childhood, there was a certain comfortable distance between Roth and his material. It was an art not quite grounded in reality, like the horses in training and ‘seemed at times in flight’’” (Lyons 148). 11. Although not exactly comparable to the technique in “Itinerant Ithacan” or in Mercy of a Rude Stream, this story is a precedent of this later fiction in that it employs the “two-level narrative” uniting an episode in the past with its perception from the present. 12. The influence that T.S. Eliot’s core text had on Roth’s sense of fragmentation and loss becomes evident in R’s attachment to it in “Itinerant Ithacan.” 13. Roth’s political pieces on international politics or the Arab-Israeli conflict will not be addressed in this essay, although they clearly do echo his increasing sensitization to Judaism throughout the period. 14. This attitude is explicated further in Roth’s brief contribution to the 1963 Midstream symposium, “The Meaning of Galut in America Today,” which concludes, “the fairly intensive conditioning of my own childhood with regard to Judaism…has been abandoned to the extent possible…. I can only say, again, that to the great boons Jews have already conferred upon humanity, Jews in America might add this last and greatest one: of orienting themselves toward ceasing to be Jews” (114).

ABSTRACTS

Dans cet essai, je me propose d’examiner la plupart des nouvelles que Henry Roth a écrites entre 1940 et 1980 comme autant de signes de la difficulté qu’il éprouve alors à se situer et (se) représenter dans l’espace. Ce qui me permettra de tracer une « cartographie de la perte » chez lui. Par “perte” j’entends aussi bien le malaise de Roth par rapport à l’espace – dans des termes esthétiques, culturels et ethniques – que la douleur traumatique inséparable de ce malaise. Cette

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perte trouve sa source dans un espace géographique codifié : la plupart des nouvelles (et parfois quelques récits non-fictionels) présentent des personnages d’inspiration autobiograhique qui tentent la traversée de frontières socio-économiques, ethno-culturelles, historiques et politiques pour se déplacer sur le lieu de « l’Autre. » De manière générale, les nouvelles et récits brefs de Roth peuvent être lus comme un processus de réconciliation de l’écrivain avec l’esthétique et le sens de l’identité que Roth a d’abord perdus après la réception de Call It Sleep, puis retrouvés soixante ans plus tard à travers la création de Mercy of a Rude Stream.

AUTHORS

MARTÍN URDIALES SHAW Martín Urdiales Shaw is an Associate Professor, specializing in Jewish American literature within the Department of English at the University of Vigo, Spain. His doctorate was a study of ethnic identities in Bernard Malamud's fiction.

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Pieces of a Man: Considering Shifting Landscape as Autobiographical Critique

Simon Turner

1 Published in 1987 by the Jewish Publication Society, and appearing in a second edition in 1994, Shifting Landscape effectively broke the near-legendary creative block Henry Roth had been suffering since the publication of his semi-autobiographical debut novel Call it Sleep in 1934.1 Edited by Mario Materassi, Shifting Landscape collates all the shorter pieces that Roth wrote between 1925 and 1987 held together by a “connective tissue”2 of quotations from Roth’s letters and interviews. These are employed to frame the collection’s loose amalgamation of stories and autobiographical fragments within a biographical and historical context, lending, in Roth’s own words, “continuity” to “the desolating discontinuity” (xiii) of Roth’s post-Call It Sleep career.

2 For a number of reasons, Shifting Landscape operates as a highly apposite paradigm of the ways in which Roth’s work has been read and received within a biographical interpretative framework. In addition, it can be seen to contribute to an environment where the details of Roth’s life have become increasingly integral to an appreciation of his writing. More than this, however, Shifting Landscape’s formal characteristics, considered alongside the generic indeterminacy of the Mercy of a Rude Stream series published in its wake, suggest new critical frameworks in which Roth’s work might be appreciated as a shifting landscape in itself, critical frameworks that would evade the dogmatic and reductive autobiographical readings of Roth’s fiction which, at first glance, Shifting Landscape would seem to encourage. My purpose in this essay, then, is, on the one hand, to delineate some of the narratives – political, literary, personal – within which Shifting Landscape situates itself; and, on the other, to situate the collection, and Roth’s work as a whole, within new (and as yet tentative) critical paradigms. To this end, I consider the work’s ‘composite’ status, and the significance of the dual authorship of Shifting Landscape in relation to postmodern concerns with the permeable boundaries between fiction and autobiography.

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3 Firstly, however, Shifting Landscape’s context, and the manner in which it is presented and framed for its readership, needs to be delineated. If the first edition of 1987 seemingly came out of the blue, the second edition of 1994 was published at an entirely different juncture in Roth’s career, and must be understood in those terms. In 1987, Roth had been effectively (though not entirely) silent for over half a century. By 1994, however, the first volume of Mercy of a Rude Stream (entitled A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park) had been published, and much is made of this fact in Shifting Landscape’s jacket design and framing devices within the text proper. A banner on the second edition’s front cover proclaims Roth to be “Author of Mercy of a Rude Stream and Call It Sleep” (the subordinate placement of Roth’s most famous novel here is telling); whilst on the back cover, the hyperbolic blurb refers to “the sheer lyrical power and psychological brilliance of Roth’s two major novels” (emphasis added). The biographical information supplied on the jacket makes reference only to Roth’s date of birth, and notes that he “continues his work on his monumental autobiographical novel, Mercy of a Rude Stream.” Call It Sleep is not referred to.

4 In 1987, Shifting Landscape might easily have served as a full stop or a footnote to a tragically truncated career. By 1994, Roth’s fortunes had changed dramatically, emphasised by the fact that the St Martin’s Press edition of the text makes little or no attempt to trade off Roth’s fame as the author of Call It Sleep, giving greater weight instead to his later output. There could, of course, be an entirely mercantile reason for this – St Martin’s Press, as the publishers of the Mercy of a Rude Stream series in America, would inevitably have a vested interest in promoting it in preference to Roth’s earlier work – but this would be to ignore the extent to which Shifting Landscape situates itself within the narrative of Roth’s life, a narrative which has been supplied with a drastically different ending to the one predicted when Shifting Landscape was initially released.

5 This biographical impulse is similarly evidenced in the use of images in the second edition’s jacket design, images which are illustrative of the collection’s stated intention to recover some kind of narrative continuity from the discontinuity of Roth’s life. We are presented with two photographic stills, set side by side. The left-hand image shows a panoramic view of New York City, contrasted with a stark image of the New Mexico desert. Where the New York photograph emphasises the vertical plane, the New Mexico image draws the eye towards the horizontal, to a vast expanse of flat land and sky, its only remarkable feature a barren outcropping of rock placed at the left-hand extreme of the image. The discontinuity between the images is further emphasised by the colour scheme. New York is depicted in cool and stylish black and white which, when offset against the sepia tones of the New Mexico image (which suggest that the photograph has faded, lost its lustre), gives off a sense of modern, and Modernist, urban chic.

6 These juxtaposed images, then, offer an visual analogy to the received wisdom pertaining to Roth’s career: That Roth was at the height of his powers in the New York of the 1930s (the period of the production of Call it Sleep), and that his life in New Mexico can be seen as loosely contemporaneous with the gradual decline of his capacities as a writer. The New York-era Roth, the images imply, was possessed of a vibrant, bombastic, upward-thrusting modernity, whilst the Roth of the New Jersey period is washed out, arid and sterile. However, there is a further aspect to the images worth considering in relation to Shifting Landscape’s project to rehabilitate Roth’s mid- period work. For all their dissimilarities, they are aligned to suggest a kind of physical

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continuity. The top of the building at the very extreme edge of the New York image appears, at first glance, to line up with the top of the New Mexico image’s rocky outcrop, which, in the manner of a disorientating cinematic montage, gives the impression that New York and New Mexico blur into one seamless (shifting?) landscape, which is, in effect, precisely the intention of the collection as it stands.

7 The second edition of Shifting Landscape is also remarkable for the inclusion of an introductory essay by Leonard Michaels entitled “Life and Art in Henry Roth”, appropriate for a piece that acknowledges, rightly, that Roth’s case of writer’s block has potentially garnered greater fame (or infamy) than his “near-legendary” first novel (xvi). Michaels takes up and elaborates upon the narrative of rejuvenation which is merely implied by the jacket information and illustrations. After a stark opening portrait of the artist as an old man nearly crippled with arthritis (xv), Michaels goes on to outline the near-Herculean feat of Mercy of a Rude Stream’s production. This prodigious outpouring of material puts the lie to the notion that Roth, by the end of his life, was something of a spent force, an orthodoxy which is deliberately encouraged by the opening section of the introduction where Roth’s essential human frailty is painfully exposed.

8 An equally telling component of the narrative of desuetude and rejuvenation – I hesitate to say ‘resurrection’ – that Michaels describes is its relationship to broader political events. Roth’s attempts at producing a proletarian novel amounted, in Michaels’ emotive terms, to “a kind of artistic suicide,” a failure on Roth’s part to find a suitable “objective correlative” to his writing. Communism, according to Roth, “fell like a giant shunt” upon his writing career (xvii), and in the explanatory material for “If We Had Bacon”, the only extant portion of Roth’s aborted follow-up to Call it Sleep, Roth elaborates upon this theme to draw a direct relationship between the block and the ideological restraints of socialist realism: “Trying to write, you might say, with an eye on the revolution, or on the Party, trying to write with a maximum of social consciousness was not the kind of thing I was cut out for. Nevertheless, I felt a compulsion to do so, and since I couldn’t do it…” (46).

9 If Communism represented a stifling of Roth’s artistic temperament and ambition, and might be at least partially to blame for the decades of writer’s block, then Shifting Landscape’s narrative pattern also portrays, by way of contrast, a renascent interest in the particularities of the Jewish experience on Roth’s part as being among the motive forces behind his literary renewal.3 Roth cites the Arab-Israeli Six Day War in 1967 as the turning point in his political affiliations, where a critical conflict of interests emerged between Roth’s membership of the Communist party (which supported the Arab cause) and his Jewishness, which would have aligned him more readily with the Israelis. The ideological complications brought to the surface by the conflict effectively forced Roth’s hand, prompting “a resurgence of my long dormant literary vocation” (167). The narrative circle of the relationship between Roth’s life and writing as presented in Shifting Landscape is neatly closed by this confrontation. Where art and ideology clashed in the 1930s, Roth, by his own admission, essentially wrote himself into a corner in an effort to warp his style to the dictates of Soviet Communism; whilst in 1967, an analogous crisis point led, inversely, to his rebirth as a writer.

10 By framing itself within a continuum of narratives – autobiographical, historical, political – Shifting Landscape can be seen to facilitate a cogent, linear, even teleological interpretation of Roth’s life and work, moving from early success, through “sterility”

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(Roth’s own term), towards a redemptive final act in which the writer rediscovers his calling. Shifting Landscape does much, then, to situate Roth’s writing within a biographical context which greatly enhances the reader’s appreciation of the mid- period work. However, a reading of the collection – and Roth’s output considered collectively – merely as a working through of personal experience (as though it were, in effect, a glorified journal), would be highly reductive. If Roth’s writing is open to critical appraisal based upon an autobiographical or confessional model, then this is because Roth encourages such associative readings through his literary practice. Where Shifting Landscape deliberately (and problematically) frames Roth’s writing within an autobiographical context, the Mercy series takes this framing one step further, actively blurring the boundaries between fiction and autobiography, challenging, indeed, the fallacy of autobiographical ‘truth’ which might easily form the basis of an overly simplistic confessional reading of Roth’s work.

11 The problems inherent to such a critical appraisal of Roth’s later writings are clearly indicated in Mary Gordon’s New York Times review of the second volume of the Mercy series, A Diving Rock on the Hudson in 1995. Tellingly, Gordon goes out of her way to praise the novel’s “honesty”, as well as its “garrulity.” In short, those qualities displayed in A Diving Rock which most closely associate the work with a confessional mode of discourse – literature as unfettered emotional expression on the part of the author – are emphasised over and above any of its formal complexities or stylistic intentions. If style is acknowledged, it is to suggest a deadening of effect, a falling off of quality from Roth’s mid-thirties high watermark, which itself lazily replicates the orthodox reading of Roth’s post-Call it Sleep career as a traumatic sixty-year silence. Where Gordon deals with Roth’s formal decisions, the indeterminate nature of the Mercy series is acknowledged, but only as an indication of a kind of structural imperfection engendered by the ‘trauma’ Roth is perceived to be working through. So, for example, the conversations with his computer Ecclesias, which suggest Roth is engaging with a distinctly postmodern metafictional discourse, are reduced to expressions of literary confession: Ecclesias, in Gordon’s reading, is only employed so that Roth can ‘reveal’ his incestuous relationship with his sister.

12 What Gordon does hint at, but does not expand upon, is the extent to which Roth’s later work is set in opposition to the formal perfection and impersonality of high Modernism; though again Gordon fails or refuses to recognise authorial intention, asserting that Roth’s ideas of “rightness” have been devolved from the realm of the literary to the realms of the psychological and spiritual. The imperfections of the Mercy series, rather than simply being expressive of authorial trauma as Gordon asserts, must ultimately be understood in terms of the narrative shift between modernism and postmodernism; and Shifting Landscape is perfectly situated to bridge the gap between these two opposing periods in Roth’s career. Indeed, if part of the collection’s function is to wrest continuity from the discontinuity of Roth’s life, then it might equally operate as a means of revealing continuity in his aesthetic processes, especially when considering the degree to which Shifting Landscape suggests a concomitance between the two.

13 Where Mercy of a Rude Stream’s dialogue with postmodernism, signalled by its generic indeterminacy and stylistic devices (such as Roth’s conversations with Ecclesias and the incorporation of previously published material)4 can be ascribed to intentionality on the part of the author, the circumstances of Shifting Landscape’s production render any

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bold statements as to its ultimate aesthetic intent superfluous. The collection’s original subtitle, “A Composite”, suggests a fragmentary form, a hybrid of disjointed component elements stitched together within a loose autobiographical framework, and as such its design must be considered as essentially heterogeneous. A dialogue exists between the individual pieces and the material that contains them – fragments of interviews, letters and articles giving details about the original circumstances of the composition and publication in each instance – just as, comparably, a dialogue exists between Roth and his editor, Mario Materassi, throughout the work. It would be easy to discern a paradigmatic oedipal relationship between Roth ‘the father’ and Materassi ‘the son’ within Shifting Landscape’s pages, particularly considering Roth’s designation of Materassi as a “devoted surrogate son” in the foreword (xiv), and the tragic breakdown of the pair’s friendship in later years, which Materassi has couched in comparably familial terms.5 Easy, but reductive. Shifting Landscape should not be considered the fractured product of warring intelligences, but rather as an interesting experiment in dual authorship, even if Roth himself seems to have taken a back-seat role in the collection’s design.6

14 This perceived subordinate role is telling. Materassi states in his introductory piece to the collection that he believes the works must be judged on their literary merits, while simultaneously situating them within a broader autobiographical schema, claiming the shorter writings to be “invaluable documents of the existential pilgrimage of their author” (xxxii).7 Shifting Landscape as Materassi conceives it, then, acts as a paradigm for the subordination of Roth’s authorial intentionality within the reductive confessional model of criticism as exemplified by the Mary Gordon review cited above, with Roth’s voice being framed and elided by the autobiographical narrative imposed by the collection’s teleological design. However, the fact that Materassi deliberately draws the reader’s attention towards the autobiographical structure he had in mind when editing Shifting Landscape, suggests that caution should be exercised before assuming that his intentions are seamlessly compatible with such simplistic biographical readings of Roth’s fiction. Shifting Landscape is a “composite,” neither simply fiction, nor simply autobiography, but a complex and compelling hybrid of the two. As such, intentionally or not, it exposes the essential fallacy of reading Roth’s work as unproblematic confession, acknowledging as it does the degree to which autobiographical criticism is a self-perpetuating discourse. Put simply, autobiographical or confessional critiques insist upon readings of Roth’s work within the framework of his life, a critical appraisal which, in turn, encourages publishers to emphasise the autobiographical character of Roth’s writing, as Shifting Landscape illustrates.

15 My intention in this essay has been to delineate the ways in which Shifting Landscape is engaged with the autobiographical narrative of Roth’s writing, the extent to which the collection situates itself within, contributes to, and complicates a critical discourse which considers Roth’s work merely as “an aperture into the workings of a sample imagination” (xiv), a term Roth employs to describe Materassi’s achievement as an editor. If a definitive authorial intention is ultimately difficult or impossible to establish in Shifting Landscape, given its hybrid authorship and fragmentary form, then its potential effects are more easily discerned. On the one hand, Shifting Landscape’s insistence upon framing Roth’s work within the context of his life may potentially have the effect of encouraging and exacerbating reductive confessional readings of his fiction. On the other, however, its exposure of the workings of such discourse through

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its hybrid “composite” form, whereby the acknowledged imposition of a teleological biographical framework becomes an active, and problematic component of the text, may succeed in engendering a new self-consciousness in such readings in the future.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gordon, Mary. “Confession, Terminable and Interminable,” review of A Diving Rock on the Hudson. New York Times Book Review 26 Feb. 1995: 5+.

Kellman, Steven G. “Henry Roth: 1906-1995.” American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies. Supplement IX: Nelson Algren to David Wagoner. Ed. Jay Parini. New York: Scribner's, 2002.

Roth, Henry. A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park. London: Phoenix, 1995.

—. Shifting Landscape [2nd edition]. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

NOTES

1. The second edition of Shifting Landscape, published by St Martin’s Press, will be the primary focus of this essay. 2. Shifting Landscape (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994): xiv. Subsequent page references will appear in parentheses. 3. Michaels is more explicit in his associations between Judaism and art, and Communism and writer’s block, asserting that “when Roth’s mystical state of mind, an aspect of his Judaic identity, lost out to Communism, he lost his art” (xxvii). 4. This occurs most explicitly in A Star Shines in Mt. Morris Park (London: Phoenix, 1995), which includes the text of “Somebody Always Grabs the Purple,” a story Roth originally published in The New Yorker in 1940, and which was also republished in Shifting Landscape. See Shifting Landscape, 62-67, A Star Shines, 68-72, and Alan Gibbs’s article in this collection. 5. The American Jewish Historical Society’s collection of Roth’s papers includes letters to Roth written by Materassi during this period. See Collection P702, Box 5, Folder 10. 6. Roth asserts in his foreword that “the book is primarily Mario’s, not mine” (xiv). 7. Roth makes reference to a similar assertion of Materassi’s in his foreword, dubious about his editor’s claims that “the pieces [in Shifting Landscape] were interesting in their own right” (xiii).

ABSTRACTS

La carrière discontinue et la production littéraire minime de Henry Roth explique que sa biographie ait souvent suscité autant d’admiration de la part du public et des critiques que sa

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fiction. Publié en 1987 son recueil de nouvelles, Shifting Landscape, fait la jonction entre son blocage en tant qu’auteur (blocage devenu presque légendaire) et la reprise de son activité créatrice, soixante ans plus tard. Les nouvelles du recueil nous éclairent à la fois sur les éléments biographiques qui contribuent à la stérilité littéraire qui le frappe, et sur la facture particulière de l’écriture qui est la sienne dans la deuxième période de sa carrière. Le présent article tentera de montrer la place privilégiée qu’occupent les nouvelles de Roth par rapport aux deux temps de création, aux œuvres jumelles qui leurs sont associées (Call it Sleep et Mercy of a Rude Stream) et à cette rencontre entre œuvre et existence qu’elle met en scène. De même il proposera de nouvelles possibilités d’interprétation du recueil, utilisé ici comme unité de mesure pour réexaminer la façon dont art et confession constituent la trame de l’œuvre de Roth. Shifting Landscape et Mercy of a Rude Stream sont faits de récits métafictionnels. Ils sont conscients de la relation intrinsèque entre autobiographie et fiction et constituent des commentaires post- modernes sur l’écriture. Ce changement paradigmatique dans la production littéraire de l’auteur constitue un facteur que l’étude de l’œuvre de Roth devrait prendre en considération de manière générale.

AUTHORS

SIMON TURNER Simon Turner has been writing a doctoral thesis at the University of Nottingham since 2003. Research interests include the Vietnam War, twentieth century American literature, and cultural memory studies.

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