Since I had first become acquainted with him back in December of 1992, just after Roslyn Targ, his devoted agent of over thirty years, had sold me the first volume of Mercy of a Rude Stream, I had become inured to his expressions of gloom — his lugubrious moods that would descend on him for a day or two, sometimes even a month. Some of these depressive seizures were so intense that he would exclaim dramatically that he wished to die (“apothonein theilo,” he’d write in Greek), and that he would kill himself as soon as he turned ninety and had a big party.
But this night of October 9 was not like so many of those other nights. Gone was the gauze of melancholia, the “dark sullen telepathy” that had so often encumbered him, preventing him from continuing with the monumental task of writing, editing, and constantly revising the four books that form this quartet, which he had called Mercy of a Rude Stream, borrowing a phrase from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. That Monday night, he was genuinely pleased that I, together with his assistant and final literary muse, Felicia Steele (the last of three women who had enabled him to create literature throughout his life), had made so much progress completing the editing of From Bondage and Requiem for Harlem, the third and the final volume of the Mercy series, respectively. Even as his limbs and his bowels had failed him with increasing regularity throughout 1994 and 1995, he had worked compulsively to complete the arduous task of shaping and rewriting over 5,000 pages of text, which comprised the four volumes, a large portion of which had already been hailed by numerous American reviewers as a “landmark of the American literary century,” in the words of the critic David Mehegan. Even when Steele was no longer able to work with Henry, since she herself had gone off to graduate school in English at the University of Texas,* he had engaged another young University of New Mexico undergraduate, Eleana Zamora, and the two of them had worked on the various revisions that were required in the final editing and restructuring of the last two volumes.
That October evening, Henry politely asked me how my own father, his senior by a mere seven months, and physically in no better shape, was doing, as if the two old men were competitively engaged in a race to see which one would meet his maker first. Not wanting to alarm Henry with dire medical reports from California, I lied, of course, and said that my dad was holding his own, and Roth replied, “Carry on the good work, my friend,” as if he were a literature professor from one of his 1920s screwball plots. Four days later, on Friday, October 13, Henry was gone. He had died just after sundown, having made the Sabbath in the very nick of time, and to mix Hebrew and Greek images, as he was wont to do, just after Helias in his horse-drawn chariot had raced by Albuquerque on his nightly run.
Felicia, in touch with Henry’s two sons, Hugh and Jeremy, left the news of Henry’s passing both on my telephone machine at home and in the office, messages that I picked up in California soon after my plane had landed. My father was in worse condition than I had imagined — his head drooped so low, his consciousness so dim that the doctor advised the next afternoon that we not feed him intravenously. I sat that afternoon in the kitchen of my parents’ apartment, at work at the table, numbed, grief-stricken, with the manuscript pages of Mercy spread out willy-nilly before me, struggling with the editing of a particularly salacious description of sex between the fictional cousins Ira and Stella. Yet as stunned as I was about Henry’s death, I took great comfort in knowing that Roth, at least for me, had not died; in fact, the very pages before me represented his very tree of life, and what better way to show my love than to do just as Henry had commanded, “Carry on, . my friend.”
I am sure that I was concentrating so mightily on Henry’s prose because I wished to distract myself from my own father’s predicament — Dr. Reed’s pronouncement of gloom, and the knowledge that Henry’s departure was a harbinger of my own father’s imminent death. And as the doctor was packing his bag, my father suddenly struggled to lift his head — he even bolted — and like the stirring of a shroud, acknowledged my presence, speaking his first words in over two days. Casting his gaze on the messy sheaf of papers, my father suddenly uttered, with his thick, barely comprehensible German accent, the questioning words, “Henry Rot, Henry Rot?” “rot” being the German pronunciation of Roth, as in the color red, although Henry of all people was not unaware of the pun.
“Doctor Reed, did you hear that, he knows what I am working on, he said ‘Henry Roth,’” I exclaimed. The doctor was as stunned as I was; so was my mother, and although this was the only phrase my dad uttered that weekend, the doctor immediately called for an IV bag and an infusion of fluids, and arguably, because of Henry Roth, my father lived another sixteen days.
I felt that autumn that I had lost two giants, both men atavistic in wholly different ways. Having had the privilege of working with Henry, I can unequivocally state that my perception of the world has been remarkably altered. In fact, I can no longer walk the streets of Manhattan without feeling a far greater empathy for the poor. It is as if I had discovered a new Dostoevsky, and at the end of our stultifyingly narcissistic twentieth century at that. Despite our gap in age, I felt that Roth was writing about my city of New York in the 1990s, even though Henry’s stories detailed a far more technologically primitive world of a greenhorn generation long since vanished. Roth was perhaps the last voice of an era, yet his description in Requiem for Harlem of crosstown traffic on 14th Street—“shuffle and squeal. Glitter and gleam of windshield and hubcap”—save for the eloquence of his language, could easily pass for a street scene in 1997, so constant is the farrago of whirling images that New York manages faithfully to project. The immigrant Jews and Italians who were, of course, so hated in Roth’s youth have long since entered the mainstream, made complacent by the prosperity that education and middle classdom bring, yet the privations described endow us with a vision of poverty so compassionate and transcendent that we can never forget that there are millions of people in New York City alone who remain destitute. I as a reader have learned that behind the grimace of every street sweeper, behind the fretful countenance of every hot dog vendor, there exists a fellow journeyman, whose plaintive gaze or feral eyes bespeak a magnificent drama that remains untold. In listening to the story of a Pakistani taxi driver talking about his children at school in Queens, I am confronted by an immense pride and beauty, mine for the listening. Manhattan, despite the passage of seventy years, despite the incursion of television, graffiti, new racial tensions, and e-mail, has not changed at all — and the Rothian immigrant world of the 1920s remains as immanent today as it was when David Schearl, the young protagonist of Call It Sleep, was but a small boy on the Lower East Side.
There are, of course, numerous critics and countless readers who still continue to hold on to the notion that Call It Sleep is indeed the only masterpiece that Henry Roth ever wrote. As the first two volumes of the Mercy series came off press, most reviewers felt compelled to compare these new works to a book published in 1934 when its author was a mere twenty-eight years old, as if a man in his late eighties was simply expected to pick up writing in the exact manner as he had done as an unexamined young man. The notion was absurd, and this wretched form of comparison would be enough to dissuade any blocked writer, like J. D. Salinger, Harper Lee, or the late Ralph Ellison, from even contemplating a new work late in life. Yet Roth possessed in many ways an elephantine hide, and when he happened to glance at a review or two (most he never even looked at), he merely shrugged, and said, “Baah, she just didn’t get the book,” and that was that. His mission was manifest — it was ordained that he carry on his novels, as if writing were the only force that was keeping him alive, and a hostile review did not deter Roth in the slightest. It would often amaze interviewers who came to his home in the early 1990s to listen to the old man describe his one novel “from childhood.” He would tell not a few visitors that he had disavowed the first book — that it was a boy’s work no longer worth reading, a book that had been inspired under the spell of his erstwhile mentor and now necromancer James Joyce — and that he cared no longer to discuss it or its themes.