HENRY ROTH
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of us. When so many people are affected in the same way and each
one is groping for his own diagnosis you have to look for a broader
explanation.
To those of us who were committed to the Left, the Soviet Union
was the cherished homeland; but that homeland had become an estab–
lishment which was interested in consolidating itself.
In
the Moscow
trials the establishment was destroying the revolution, although at the
time we were still loudly professing our allegiance. Events often do not
become comprehensible until long after they have occurred.
I am throwing out these ideas as possibilities. The scholar who
some day will be making a formal study of the question will undoubted–
ly find other things to single out. One interesting facet he will have to
investigate is the influence such historical factors exert on the artist.
How do they get into the writer's bloodstream and affect his creative
sensibility? How are his potentialities inhibited? The world around him
after all remains largely intact, but something inside of him has
changed.
In
1938, when I was despairing of ever writing again, my rela–
tionship with Eda Lou Walton deteriorated. We separated, and almost
immediately afterwards I met Muriel Parker at Yaddo, an artist's
colony at Saratoga Springs. The following year we were married, but
the only livelihood we had came from the WPA and relief. They had
me working with pick and shovel laying sewer pipes as well as repair–
ing and maintaining streets.
In
1940 I wrote "Somebody Always Grabs
the Purple," a story of a boy's visit to the public library, which was
published in
The New Yorker.
When I notified the relief agency that
I had received three hundred dollars for the publication I was re–
classified as being no longer indigent, and promptly removed from the
rolls.
Shortly after that I obtained a steady job as a substitute teacher at
a high school in the Bronx. I decided that jobs offer security, that I
would have to accept the obligations and compulsions that came my
way and forget I had been a writer. When I discussed this with my
wife we both agreed that I would never write again. I told myself I
had done so many different things in the meantime that there would be
no more suffering, yet there was some hidden reservation that lingered
on and continued to crop up in moments of introspection.
By 1940 Europe was at war and the American economy was speed–
ing up. I learned that people were being trained as craftsmen to turn
out the immense volume of war material that was beginning to come off
the assembly lines, and the thought of a skilled trade appealed to me.
