Call It Sleep was simply a book that had died when another man by the name of Henry had perished decades ago. Didn’t they have something else to ask, he questioned the parade of interrogators? When asked why he was writing the Mercy series, he prided himself in telling people that it was simply “for the dough,” and that this newly found income was required to pay for his nurses, doctors, and the cornucopia of medications that rested on the kitchen table.
It was only after Roth’s death, and with the publication of the third volume, From Bondage, that over a dozen critics and reviewers hailed the third book as a masterpiece in its own right, not a novel that had to be reviewed in the context of a distant literary antecedent. As Call It Sleep is arguably one of the finest American novels that has ever depicted childhood, so too can the four volumes of Mercy of a Rude Stream now be viewed not only as a necessary complement to the prior work, but as a unified body of literature that stands on its own. No less a scholar and critic than Mario Materassi, who for many years was Roth’s closest friend and soulmate, and who deserves singular credit for transforming Roth into a writer of such huge international stature, has written that “Call It Sleep can be read as a vehicle through which, soon after breaking away from his family and his tradition, young Roth used some of the fragments of his childhood to shore up the ruins of what he already felt was a disconnected self. Forty-five years later, Roth embarked on another attempt to bring some retrospective order to his life’s confusion: Mercy of a Rude Stream, which he has long called a ‘continuum,’ can be read as a final, monumental effort on the part of the elderly author to come to terms with the pattern of rupture and discontinuity that has marked his life.” My own personal feeling is that there are few works in this decade, much less in this century, that have come like Mercy to reflect as acutely the internal dislocation of the intellectual and the society at large.
Just when we think we know what Roth as a writer is up to, what course he has charted for his journey home, he twists and turns, and changes his mind, and with each new volume, we must constantly reassess our agile narrator as his epic proceeds. As Materassi has commented in his insightful essasy, “Shifting Urbanscape: Roth’s ‘Private’ New York,” Roth “has never been interested in any story other than the anguished one of a man who, throughout his life, has contradicted each of his previously held positions and beliefs.” A superb holder of secrets, Roth as a novelist does not even alert his readers (there is a one-line hint in the first volume, however) that Ira Stigman has a fictional sister until one-third of the way through the second volume, A Diving Rock on the Hudson. The revelation must be a surprise.
I once asked Henry if his wife Muriel, with whom he shared a compact one-bedroom trailer home, had ever read any of the early drafts of Mercy. “She never asked, and I never offered to show her,” he told me, as if it were completely natural for a writer’s wife not even to get one glimpse of the thousands of pages that lay on each side of the computer whom he chose to call Ecclesias. Although I cannot think of a human being who was more honest with me than Henry, Roth’s varying accounts of his life’s story, as Materassi has suggested, did shift frequently over time. For example, after having told reporters for decades that it was his Communist experience, and the resulting disillusionment, that prevented him from writing again, Roth suggested in the last few years of his life that his sexual preoccupations and obsession lay more at the root of his unwillingness to continue writing for more than forty years. Yet on other occasions, he maintained that the block was caused by his early break with Judaism and his family’s departure in 1914 from the hermetic, shtetl-like world of New York’s Lower East Side.
Like their creator, these modern books effortlessly mutate in tone and sensibility, and while the arc is unerringly tragic, the seismic waves registered throughout are unpredictable, and deliberately so. While A Diving Rock on the Hudson is purposefully scandalous and confessional in its often Augustinian tone, From Bondage, despite the brilliant sexual tension of the last third of the book (Roth called the Ira-Stella-Zaida section a “novella” in its own right), is largely redemptive, as if Roth were indeed seeking deliverance in this penultimate work. Yet the final volume, Requiem for Harlem, contains a sexual wantonness and “depravity,” a word favored by Roth, that seems surprising for a man of eighty-nine laboring to finish the epic of his life. As his close friend and literary executor, Larry Fox, once explained to me, “Henry could not die false. He was a truth seeker, and only when he could review the truth about himself could he become free. In fact, he remained alive to unburden himself so that he could die free and perhaps free all of us. Once Muriel died, Henry could finally tell the truth, and then it was only between him and his Maker.”
Roth would have been the first person to note that nothing in any of his books was gratuitous, so why would he so deliberately debase his alter ego Ira? Few people like seeing their idol so compromised or disgraced; no one indeed wants to see his revered novelist revealed to be a predator, an agent of incest, and victimizer himself. So why then did Roth in his eighties become so emotionally patulous, or why did he begin to flirt with Nabokovian flights of fancy, choosing to make Ira as sexually compulsive and loathsome as possible? Having known Henry quite well, I would refute anyone’s contention that this octogenarian’s “need” to eroticize his life was merely a way to jolly himself as his body disintegrated. This quite conscious decision to debase himself — to make his “rude stream” as repellent as possible — as he depicted “the last onerous lap” of his life, was meant, I suspect, to bring about a spiritual salvation in the only way that he knew how. In any given interview or even in the text of this work, Roth, however, would have been the first to negate any such redemptive refuge. Listen to his own words: “What a sinister cyst of guilt that was within the self, denigrating the yuntiff, denigrating everything within reach, exuding ambiguity, anomaly, beyond redemption now.” And so, Requiem for Harlem is a work fraught with often unimaginable family cruelty, the young man emerging from his adolescent chrysalis the very tyrant his father Chaim was. Indeed, we revisit more so than in any previous volume the unprecedented violence of Call It Sleep. At last, the abuse that the young boy witnessed so viscerally when his father beat his mother gets replayed here with equal ferocity — the cup of scalding tea hurled in Leah’s face, for example, or the horrific way in which Chaim torments his wife after she has caught him flagrantly fondling their lustful niece. It must be her fault after all, so Leah is led to believe.