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surface and symbol of New York's lower East Side, unleashed was a psy–
chic intensi ty and a lyrical stream of consciousness that put Freud and
Joyce squarely on native American ground.
But when it became clear that one could resurrect a nearly-forgotten
novel more easily than its aging author, I was hardly alone in concluding
that
Call It Sleep
contained everything Roth had to say about his psycho–
logically battered childhood-and, in the process, nearly everything worthy
of note about the immigrant Jewish experience. I was, of course, dead
wrong, just as many critics were wrong when they concluded that Roth
had fallen silent after his effort to write a conventionally proletarian novel
failed. Just recently we learned that Roth's literary executor (Manhattan
attorney Larry Fox) found seventy-five thick file folders containing thirty–
five hundred pages of journal entries, finished stories, letters, and sketches
among Roth's effects. So much for the apocryphal, much-repeated story
that he burned his papers in a bonfire during the late 1940s, when the nag–
ging pain of writer's block could no longer be borne.
Indeed, what we have with Roth is the case of legend piled atop leg–
end, each presenting, at best, a partial truth. Sorting out the various "Henry
Roths" will keep literary scholars and critics (to say nothing of a future biog–
rapher) busy well into the next century. Meanwhile, what we have before us
are the first volumes of
Mercy
of
a Rude Stream,
a work that not only means
to alternate between an elderly narrator (who seems in attitude and essential
detail to be Roth himself) and a fictionalized protagonist, but also the larger
patterns ofJewish-American assimilation from the 1920s onward.
Mercy oj a Rude Stream's
essential techniques were set forth in
A Star
Shines over Mr. Morris Park,
an installment that introduces us to memories
of those times, those places as recollected in the concentrated intensity of
advanced age. Setting, character, and incident are thus summoned back to
life by an act of sheer narrative will as the corrosive forces of history join
hands with those of guilt-ridden memory:
Midsummer. The three incidents would always be associated in his mind,
more durably, more prominently than anything else during that sUl11l11er
of 19] 4, his first summer in Harlem. How remarkable, too, that the com–
ing of Mom's kin, the move to Harlem, and the ominous sununer of
1914 should all have coincided-as if all his being and ways were under–
mined by the force of history disguised in the simple fact of the
accession of new relatives. A thousand times he would think vainly: If it
had only happened a few years later. Everything else could be the same,
the war, the new relatives; if only he could have had, could have lived a
few more years on the Lower East Side, say, until his Bar Mitzvah.
