HENRY ROTH
269
into the car track is an example. A couple
of
boys had enticed me into
doing that for the sake of a prank. The author turned the incident into
a personal statement: the impressionable boy living in hostile surround–
ings adopts as his own a destructive act to which he is instigated by
outsiders
to
whom he has no personal relationship.
After publication of
Call It Sleep
a number of critics pointed out
what they thought were its social implications. My own feeling was that
what I had written was far too private for me to have given much
thought to specific social problems. My personal involvement had ab–
sorbed my entire consciousness, leaving no room to focus on anything
else.
When I force myself to be objective I realize that if I had not
moved to Harlem I most likely would never have written the novel.
But during the anxieties and hardships of the intervening years I have
told myself that I would not hesitate to sacrifice
Call It Sleep
for a
happy childhood, adolescence and young manhood. Given the choice,
I would have stayed on the East Side until I was at least eighteen years
old. Then I would have gone forth.
Of course, I can see that moving to Harlem was a formative ex–
perience in its own right. It had the virtue of compelling an enlarge–
ment of vision and sympathy. I was presented at an impressionable age,
when everything becomes emotionally charged, with the problem of
trying to integrate in my mind a much greater diversity and many more
contrasting forces than I would have known otherwise.
If
we had
stayed on the East Side and I had gone on to write - two big ifs,
because I wanted to become a biology teacher when I was a boy–
it is possible that I might have written some honest portrayals of Jew–
ish life on the East Side. Such writing would necessarily have reflected
Jewish life
as
Jewish life, which is not the case with my novel; I do
not regard
Call It Sleep
as primarily a novel of Jewish life. There is
something positive in the writer striving for the broader awareness that
enables him to interrelate many more disparate elements in an art form;
such an aim, by
its
very nature, requires the consideration of a much
wider world than the one I originally came from.
As an illustration you can take the case of Robert Frost. From my
knowledge of his verse, Frost never broke through what might be called
the bucolic curtain. Emotionally and ideologically he played it safe by
never going out into the larger world to test his attitudes and views.
Had I stayed on the Lower East Side I also would have been spared
having to submit my feelings and beliefs
to
a wider experience and
understanding.
During the years in which I devoted myself to writing
Call
]1
