Ending a 60-Year Silence

By Paul Gray

It has probably never happened before: two novels by the same author, separated by 60 years and with no book of fiction in between. The appearance of Henry Roth's Mercy of a Rude Stream (St. Martin's; 290 pages; $23) not only breaks an epochal case of writer's block; it comes with a subtitle -- Volume I, A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park -- and the astonishing dust-jacket information that this is only the first of six new novels that Roth, now 87, has completed. What he has apparently done, late in life, is tell the story of why he did not produce such books and such a story a long time ago.

Roth was 28 when his first novel, Call It Sleep (1934), was published. This intense, impressionistic account of a young Jewish boy's first years among the vibrant immigrant life of Manhattan's Lower East Side drew some favorable notices. It was also panned in a few left-wing and radical journals for being too poetic and personal, selfishly autobiographical and insufficiently attentive to the class struggle then being underscored by the Great Depression.

Unfortunately, Roth agreed with his hostile reviewers. He had developed strong Communist sympathies and gamely set about writing the proletarian novel his conscience demanded of him. That was where his long troubles began. Torn between his artistic instincts and his political beliefs, he produced only a small portion of his second novel and then sank into decades of painful silence. In 1939 Roth married Muriel Parker, a composer and pianist, a union that would last 51 years until her death in 1990. The couple had two sons, and Roth did what he could to support a family. During World War II, he worked as a tool- and gaugemaker. After moving to Maine in 1946, he held a variety of jobs, including hospital psychiatric attendant, roadside maple-syrup vendor and waterfowl farmer.

Meanwhile, Call It Sleep lived on chiefly in the memories of a few readers -- its publisher had gone bankrupt shortly after releasing it -- until 1964, when Avon reissued it in a mass-market paperback edition. After critic Irving Howe hailed it as a neglected American classic on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, Call It Sleep went on to sell more than a million copies. This unexpected windfall eased Roth's financial problems but did nothing for his creative deadlock. He was still stuck with an acclaimed first novel whose methods and intentions he had repudiated many years earlier.

Those who wondered not only whether but how Roth would resolve his dilemma now have at least an introductory answer. The first installment of Mercy of a Rude Stream displays documentary rather than novelistic ambitions. It takes its young hero, Ira Stigman, from his eighth year, in 1914, after he and his parents have moved from the Lower East Side to an apartment in Harlem, up to age 14. It also offers interpolated passages in which Ira as an aging man conducts imagined conversations with the computer on which he is writing his life story. Late in this novel, Ira taps out some musings on his own literary approach: "Best thing he could do -- maybe -- would be to excerpt sundry articles, dispatches, editorials from, say, the New York Times, and let it go at that, let the reader wade through the sociopolitical spate of happenings of the century's second decade in the appropriate studies of the period, and for his own impression." Then he adds: "Lazy man's way, way of default and ineptitude."

But Ira's way -- and Roth's as well -- takes the reader through a pretty grim, no-frills narrative. The order is relentlessly chronological. Ira, devastated by the loss of his East Side haunts and friends and upset by the anti-Semitic taunts he hears in heterogeneous Harlem, ages predictably year by year. He adores his mother and fears his irritable father. He changes schools. He develops a nascent interest in girls and feels ashamed of himself for doing so. The outbreak of World War I is noted on the first page; the armistice is mentioned on page 153. Transitions are utilitarian in the extreme: "Once more the school vacation had begun, once again it was summer, the early summer of 1919. Warm, but not so stifling as that August afternoon in 1914 . . ."

Even the dialogue seems abstracted, drained of felt emotion. Ira's immigrant relatives say book-talk things like "Woe is me" and "I would spit in his face, if I could but see him." Memories of his past have obviously obsessed Roth for most of his adult life, but he no longer seems willing -- as he did so memorably in Call It Sleep -- to let his readers experience and savor them firsthand. Perhaps when later volumes of Ira's story appear, the place of this first long chapter in the grand design will be clearer. For now, the book may strike all too many expectant Roth fans as an invitation to fall asleep.