These dual disappointments — the move to Harlem, the arrival of greenhorns — come swiftly at the start of Mercy and establish the central conflict of the remaining volumes: Ira is no longer sure of who he is or with whom he should identify. As he puts it many years later in conversation with Ecclesias, the move to Harlem was “the beginning of attrition of his identity.”
Beyond these opening moves, not much more happens in that first volume. My fear is that some earlier readers might have given up prematurely on Roth’s project. Its grand ambitions, its scope and life, flowered slowly, in installments.
With Mercy now presented in its entirety, the infelicities of A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park are easy to forgive. The preamble that once made a slight novel now serves beautifully as the prologue of an epic one. Where, and with whom, Ira belongs, is the book’s main business. Ira’s search for himself is what makes Mercy more than a sociological document, more than a panorama of the immigrant experience, more than a finely wrought reconstruction of a lost world, more than a portrait of the artist as a young man, and more than a diary of an old man looking back. Mercy is all of those things. But above all it’s a quintessentially American novel about the rootless individual forced to reinvent himself out of whole cloth and against great odds.
Much of the initial interest in Mercy came from two sources of curiosity, one artistic in nature and the other prurient. What would Henry Roth, the precocious genius who reworked the squalor of immigrant slums into a delicate masterpiece of high modernism, deliver after sixty years of drought? And did he really sleep with his sister?
Incest is the dark throb at the heart of the book—“earthmurks drowned in lust,” as Augustine put it, an apt phrase for an Augustinian hero — but the fact of it, its simple presence within an autobiographical novel, threatens to overshadow the psychological portrait of the individual marred and molded by it. Now that the gossipy murmur over Henry Roth’s real-life relationship with his sister has lost its initial shock value, we would do well to stick to news that stays news, and ask: How did Ira’s sexual deviance affect his search for himself in Henry Roth’s novel?
For starters, Roth suggests that that deviance might never have occurred had Ira found meaning in the religious devotion his Galitzianer grandfather brought with him from Austria-Hungary. The “attrition of his identity” would have been arrested by “the boundaries of Orthodox Judaism. . [its] shorings, stays, restraints.” But by the time he was ten, when the incest started, it was too late: Ira was already assimilated, naturalized, and could find no comfort in the ways of the old world. What did those greenhorns and their “outcry, their foreignness, their Yiddishkeit” have to do with Ira and his life? Wise to the American street and untethered from religious customs, he was no longer one of the clan. He had “pledged himself to a new resolve, to a new ‘pledge allegiance,’ a new covenant he couldn’t name, an American covenant.” Ira’s is an American search precisely because America itself has come between him and his inheritance of a stabilizing, inhibiting tradition.
But though he wills himself into a secular American, America refuses to let Ira Stigman repudiate his Jewishness. The Irishers remind him when he walks the street, and his teachers remind him when he goes to school, and his bosses and coworkers remind him when he works an odd job: despite all the country’s promises of freedom, he’s first and foremost — and nowhere so much as in his own self-consciousness — a Jew. This ontological burden follows him everywhere like an odious shadow and conspires to exclude him from everything good. “So everything beautiful was Christian, wasn’t it? All that was flawless and pure and bold and courtly and chivalric was goyish. He didn’t know how to feel sometimes: sadness; he was left out. .” Judaism becomes a vexing identification. It fixes Ira Stigman’s identity in stone and denies him “everything beautiful” while offering him no accommodating solace, living law, or sense of self.
But Ira’s alienation isn’t a simple matter of his Jewishness; he thinks himself corrupt in the soul for the sexual relationship he initiates with his younger sister, Minnie. The disclosure of incest is a surprising moment in the book; the fact that Ira even has a sister is coyly hidden until it can no longer be contained, and it bursts upon the page with the force of a sobbing confession. Everything we think we know about Ira must be recontextualized in light of his abrupt revelation, and everything that comes after lies under its black shadow. Roth never lets us forget it: for long stretches there’s a reminder every few pages, passages of confusion, self-flagellation, bleak regret. Roth presents the incest — and the burden of it, even foremost in his mind — as a vicious circle: deeply in thrall to its pleasures, Ira seeks it out hungrily; once it’s over, he’s beset by guilt; that guilt keeps him alienated from the rest of the world; in his alienation, he seeks out the stygian pleasures of incest. But not without consequence: this “canker in the soul” impedes all of his future friendships and potential love affairs. It blights him, forever foreclosing an American future free of guilt, disease, and self-hatred.
Roth suggests that the source of the incestuous act might reside in the “sad traces of his Judaism”; the link seems only natural to one for whom Judaism is bound up in the inbred filth of a slum. It’s a dismaying conclusion very much of its time. The cause is much simpler, and Roth dramatizes it again and again within the book — namely, the fact that Ira is prey as often he is predator. When still a very young boy, Ira is lured to Fort Tyron Park by a deeply menacing stranger called “Mr. Joe.” Mr. Joe is forced to abort his attempt to take Ira’s pants off inside the park when a young couple unexpectedly pops out of a nearby thicket. He makes Ira watch as he “pulls off” beside a tree, so thoroughly revolting his impressionable victim that masturbation is thereafter unavailable to Ira as an option of release. Even incest is preferable. Mr. Lennard, Ira’s junior-high Spanish teacher, proves worse than Mr. Joe. When Ira is forced to ask this terrible man’s permission to leave school early, Mr. Lennard removes his pince-nez and “breathe[s] on a lens, before delicately applying his silk handkerchief”—the menacing pause of a pederast operating with impunity. Soon he is molesting Ira on his desk, insisting the boy “make it stiff!” and ensuring Ira’s deep confusion about sexual matters as he enters adolescence.
How should one judge the sexual deviance of the abused innocent who has known only incest and predation? For in addition to being molested, Ira has witnessed firsthand his uncle Louis’s attempt to seduce his mother, overheard his mother’s account of her own incestuous relationship with her brother Moe, and has reluctantly shared a bed with his mother when his father travels to St. Louis. Roth repeatedly demonstrates how sex for young Ira is equated with perversion and violence. Consider even this passing scene: “Ira saw the big brute [his boss, Yeager] a few days later waylay one of the pretty girl clerks seeking an item in the cellar aisles, seize her, and force her over backward while he planted kisses on her. Her pleading—‘Please, Mr. Yeager! Let go! Mr. Yeager!’—went unheeded.” There is no sex in Mercy free of menace.
Roth doesn’t ask forgiveness for Ira — in fact, he exaggerated the incest to make his alterego more monstrous, more akin to his own distorted self-image — but he can’t help but dramatize the insular, alienating circumstances that could easily lead a young boy to prey upon his sister, and for brother and sister to take refuge in one another. The title of the book, from a passage in Shakespeare, imagines mercy for past crimes. Roth not only confesses those crimes — which were his own — but painstakingly re-creates them, perhaps in a final bid for mercy.