HENRY ROTH
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anywhere. For a time I made all kinds of excuses to myself, then I de–
cided I had made a mistake by limiting my perspective to the mid–
western proletarian that was turning revolutionary. I wanted the words
to come flowing out of me again, and I needed a fresh start; as a
physical demonstration of this recognition I burned the manuscript I
had shown Perkins and set to work on the next novel. I wrote the open–
ing chapters, which dealt with autobiographical material from Harlem,
but I felt I was not reaching the mark. My notes called for bringing
together a great many disparate aspects of society and weaving them
into an artistic whole. More than anything else I required a sense of
unity in the work I did, a unity that could almost be reduced to a
metaphor. I struggled with both the style and content, getting only so
far before once again running up against immobility and total frustra–
tion.
I found myself analyzing my views on progress and indulging for
hours and days in mental excursions on the subject of moral righteous–
ness. To my surprise I found myself in sympathy with the South and
its myths of tradition and languorous women. I carried on debates
with myself in which my intellectual judgment and my sensuous orien–
tation were at odds with each other. Common sense told me that my
principles required that I side with the more enlightened North, that
my phantasies were ignoring the disadvantaged Negro and the ugliness
of racism. To my horror I caught myself musing about the Nazi cult of
German brotherhood, and then I would shudder when I stopped to
think what they were doing to the Jews in Germany.
I suppose all this was a revulsion from the emphasis on the strug–
gle for social justice. The intellectual decision to identify myself with
the proletariat had created a crisis which brought into sharp focus my
dichotomy as a human being. I knew that justice was at stake, that
Jews were involved, that one had to do something about poverty. But
poverty is ugly and the proletarian bored me, with the result that the
sensuousness in my nature was pulling me in the opposite direction.
The artist in me had never gotten over the appeal of art for art's sake,
which had flourished in the twenties. With this war going on inside of
me I became immobilized to the point that I found myself incapable
of making a narrative decision. All this is subjective evidence that some–
thing was knocking the props out from under me, that in spite of my
tremendous creative urge something was working against me, stymieing
me, preventing me from doing what I desired most. My efforts to get on
with the novel petered out and the whole thing gradually shriveled and
withered away, until finally I destroyed that manuscript as well. I re-
