The Awakening of Henry Roth-A Generation after Call It Sleep
Levenberg, Diane
TheAwakening of Henry Roth A Generation After Call It Sleep DIANE L EVEN BERG Call it Slap, Henry Roth's Joycean evocation of the terrors of childhood, is the son of novel whose images become pan...
...Why the disappearance into the woodlands of Maine, where Roth applied his creative genius to figuring out how to defeat her waterfowl...
...Not sure how long they would stay, they bought a trailer...
...Roth began Call It Sleep in 1930 as a young man of 24 who had never really been on his own...
...This time, he left the Jews behind...
...For ten years, though aware of his dependency on her and triangulated by her other relationship to David Ballou, a publisher, Roth let her support him through the desperate years of the Depression...
...He suffers from rheumatoid arthritis and does not find it easy to move around...
...he asks me ruefully...
...A short time later, Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem, invited Roth to stay at Mishkanot Sha'ananim, an artists' colony...
...She encouraged his talent, and in her Village townhouse, Roth met Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict and Horace Gregory...
...The evening the review of Shifting Landscape appears on the front page of The New York Times Book Review section, I call to congratulate the Roths...
...Roth is fascinated by gadgets— a paternal and inquisitive man, he helped me set up my Nec laptop when I first interviewed him, and in New York, taught me the intricacies of microcassette technology...
...Two years after meeting Parker, Roth entered into a profound depression, but declined offers of psychoanalysis by a member of Parker's family...
...What energized her, however, was her dream that her "sonny boy" would go to college...
...Would Roth, in person, be at least a mrmcft, if not a hero...
...The fame of the moment seems to disturb his equilibrium less than the shifting landscape of a Manhattan almost unrecognizable since his days as a student at Clinton High School...
...When he was eight, he was separated from his Jewish friends on the Lower East Side in a move to "rowdy, heterogeneous Harlem," a dislocation of self and spirit from which he never fully recovered...
...Our fecundity is the word...
...To move from the kitchen to his study, he used his cane...
...He and his wife moved to Maine, where, as he says,' 'We never really made good Yankees...
...The personal saga of Henry Roth, author of probably the greatest American Jewish novel of the 20th century, his first and only novel, has for his readers all the drama, conflict and mystery of a talc told by one of his younger colleagues—Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, or even the nt)w-dectased Bernard Malamud...
...The proof is to be read in his spiritual autobiography, Shifting Landscape...
...My father was a pathetic screwball," Roth says...
...My major regret is that I can't remember...
...While Walton was writing poetry at the MacDowell Art Colony, Roth began his own work at the nearby Peterborough Inn in her blue exam booklets...
...Like a baseball player," recalls Roth, "I was traded to Scribner's...
...We had about a hundred maple trees on our 110 acres...
...There were many beautiful things about that experience," he recalls...
...For long hours, surrounded by New Mexico's snowcapped mountains, Roth started writing again every day in his journal...
...We spent three afternoons together discussing his previous life with Eda Lou Walton and his reflections on his current life— "Henry Roth at Eighty," we called those chats...
...There, the inspiration that had been asleep since 1934 except for occasional spurts of awakening was finally rejuvenated...
...Being a Jew in Maine afforded Roth the isolation he craved...
...Roth had been raised in Brownsville and, later, on the Lower East Side, as an Orthodox Jew...
...Either Roth was confused about what he actually believed or he had simply lost his inspiration...
...He looks younger now than when I first met him nearly two years ago...
...Henry Roth has finally succeeded both in his career as an author and as a mensch of letters...
...Literary history is replete with talcs of one-novel writers...
...Instead, his central character was an illiterate German-American named Dan Loem who was based on the life of a man Roth knew...
...What do you think...
...I thought a lot about the dissidents and people with whom I had great sympathy whom he had sent to their death...
...I promised him that Shifting Landscape, which I had read the previous day and had fallen in love with, would help launch a series at the Jewish Publication Society that would be open to the best Jewish writers writing today...
...A member of the Communist party until 1956, Roth remembers being followed by men in snap-brim hats...
...Roth said he would be proud to be published by a Jewish house...
...I'm not a political writer but I try to infuse a sense of humanity in the midst of these throes in which we're caught up...
...Adhering to the party's demand that one write objectively about social realism, and probably hurt by the party's rejection of Call It Sleep, Roth tried writing another, strictly proletarian, novel...
...Those notebooks are Muriel's—hers to publish if she chooses, after I die...
...When Ribalow asked Roth if he wanted the book reissued, Roth, not wanting to get caught up in the "razzle-dazzle," replied, "You do it...
...What I can contribute," he says, "is to act as a voice saying, let's prepare ourselves for a more socialist system...
...I discovered that his silence had been broken with style and a uniquely universal humanity...
...he asks me, "Can I afford them...
...One of the best stories in Shifting Landscape, "Petey and Yotsee and Mario" (p...
...TheAwakening of Henry Roth A Generation After Call It Sleep DIANE L EVEN BERG Call it Slap, Henry Roth's Joycean evocation of the terrors of childhood, is the son of novel whose images become pan of one's inner life...
...A modest man, Roth thinks more about writing than he does about publishing...
...His mother, who appears in the novel as erotic, loving and protective, in real life "grew batty," he says, and eventually had a nervous breakdown...
...On her bookshelves Roth also discovered Eliot, Yeats and the forbidden Joyce, making it that much harder to leave this literary paradise...
...He was afraid to continue his intermittent attempts to write because one night, in the middle of writing a short story, ironically called "Broker," he was overwhelmed by a feeling of anxiety and an urge to scream...
...Like all talented people who value and hoard their time, they worry about the effects of too much exposure and are already planning their next escape...
...Certainly, the literary community had abandoned hope of ever reading more Roth...
...He thinks before he speaks and his everyday speech sounds like it might appear on the printed page...
...Roth was once again famous, and with the two cents a book he received from the sale of Call It Sleep, he and Muriel were able to travel...
...His father was much smaller in stature than the looming muscular figure in Call It Sleep...
...He had nothing to believe in and nowhere to turn...
...Fortunately, at the Yaddo Artist Colony, he met Muriel Parker, a composer and daughter of a Baptist minister...
...You tap those trees, you put in a spigot, you get the idea, you make mistakes and then correct them...
...In a rational human way, without the terrible cost it has taken...
...These questions had haunted me when I applied a Jungian analysis to Call li Sleep for my doctoral dissertation a number of years ago...
...This was the manuscript I had devoured during a late winter afternoon in the living room of his trailer home...
...Five years later, Peter Mayer, former taxi driver now turned editor, republished it in paperback...
...I don't remember all the razzle-dazzle...
...What will happen to Jewish writers...
...Ribalow received a large finder's fee when he convinced Pageant Press to reissue Call It Sleep in a new hardcover edition...
...For years, the Roths had been highly amused by the notion that most people thought Henry Roth was dead...
...Renouncing the Communist party, however, propelled Roth into a crisis of faith...
...They haunted me again in February 1986, when I sat on a plane bound for Albuquerque to celebrate Henry Roth's 80th birthday...
...What did they talk about...
...My career has been to become a mmicA," Roth says, holding my arm as we stroll around the area near the Shorcham Hotel in Manhattan in October 1987, the day after the publication party for Shifting landscape, his first book since Call ItStetp...
...The word fertility is wrong...
...But Ballou got $1,000 and bought himself a new Dodge...
...his father had barely spoken...
...This was a theme that would reemerge later in one of Roth's masterpieces, the short story "The Surveyor" (also in Shifting Landscape...
...Shifting Landscape, a composite of Roth's work and reminiscences, assembled by Mario Materassi, an Italian scholar who spent years gathering and documenting all of Roth's shorter pieces, has been reviewed and discussed in America's major newspapers and is into its second printing...
...He married her soon afterward, and for the rest of his life Roth would say that she was the woman who had saved him...
...Against Walton's advice, Roth had joined the Communist party...
...Why the 50-year silence...
...Instead, trying to enter the world of adulthood that eluded him in his fiction, he decided to leave Walton...
...And Maine springs—such a wonderful thing for a city guy-" In 1956, Roth discovered the truth about Joseph Stalin as it emerged in the Communist party's 20th Congress...
...Beginning in a naive way with the '67 war, I think I found it...
...When I first went to see him in Albuquerque to discuss the possibility of publishing a collection of his works, he was hesitant...
...In Mexico, in 1965, he contemplated writing another "great" novel, but the dybbuk that conjured up his writing block persisted...
...The notion of getting in maple syrup...
...As if to redeem himself from the hardships of the Depression he was not personally experiencing, and to recapture the mysticism and meaning of the Judaism he had renounced, Roth began Call It Sleep as straight autobiography...
...It sold modestly well and inspired Maxwell Perkins, the brilliant Scribner's editor who regretted having rejected it, to offer an advance on Roth's next novel...
...During World War II, Roth worked as a precision toolmaker...
...But once he had given up his allegiance to the party, fate, as it would do a number of times in his career, sent him another believer in his work...
...For the occasion, Roth would don his chimayo vest and a string tie...
...He discovered a new genre—a memoir form, or autobiographical fiction...
...Roth is also very popular in Italy and last year was awarded that country's prestigious Premio Nonino Prize...
...As far back as he can remember, he's always had his large vocabulary— "just the tools of my trade," he says...
...He tutored youngsters in math, and read some Jewish magazines, but most of all, he was able to deny himself the continual and terrifying stimulation of New York City, which he felt he needed in order to write...
...In that first visit and in subsequent interviews, I learned some of the secrets of one of this century's most enigmatic literary careers...
...The party is, for me, the culmination of my plane trip two years earlier...
...I got loose from this blind adherence to a Communist Utopia," he says...
...I'm buying a Compaq computer for myself," he says, "and a piano for Muriel...
...Through a friend at City College, Roth met Eda Lou Walton, then a professor and poet at New York University...
...Even if I don't succeed, at least my work will be an example of one who happened to be Jewish and to whom it felt this way to be alive at this particular time, always searching for a place to stand...
...Ironically, in the same year he left the party, The American Scholar published a special feature called "The Most Neglected Books of the Past 25 Years...
...24), deals with this period in Roth's life...
...There's too much in those notebooks I don't want people to read yet," Roth says, pointing to a shelf of notebooks in his study...
...He rediscovered a heritage, a "place in the world" and an allegiance that inspired creativity instead of anxiously stifling it...
...To protect himself, he burned most of his journals and the manuscripts of several half-finished novels...
...Had David Senear), the autobiographical 8-year-old hero of Call it Sleep who had discovered a path to transcendence, nourished his creator in any way...
...Roth recovered, but after a few years he needed to escape from the scene of his psychic traumas...
...Harold Ribalow, a writer and critic, arrived in Maine to warn Roth that the copyright to Call It Sleep was about to expire...
...The computer, he says brings to him that "original feeling of intimacy I once experienced with my lead pencil, writing in those blue books...
...Roth wants to buy a portable computer for himself, and since Muriel has been composing music again and they are forced to leave the Baldwin grand piano at home, a portable piano for v her...
...Who were they reading...
...The Roths remained in New Mexico, preferring its climate to the harsh winters of Maine...
...Roth himself has collected their names in his notebook—"like scalps," he says, laughing, American Jewish literature has, thank God, a much smaller Hall of Non-Fame...
...Today, Henry and Muriel Roth are thrilled that his talent is again being acknowledged...
...Walton loved Call It Sleep and asked Ballou, her other lover, to publish it...
...On a good day, he works until almost evening...
...We were on an elevation from which you could see ahead to the coastline...
...Convinced that his literary career was over, he and his two sons raised waterfowl on a farm...
...Then, happily for literature, his "fabricating side took over...
...A warm and maternal woman, driven also by her obsessions with younger men, she took the much younger Roth as her lover...
...In 1968, Roth spent a summer as a fellow at another artists' haven, the D. H. Lawrence Ranch near Taos...
...At home his mother had spoken Yiddish...
...His weal her beaten face, surrounded by a corona of white hair, bears a perennially serene expression...
...From a monster like Stalin...
...Call It Sleep was the only book mentioned more than once...
...he could not complete the book...
...Israel's Six-Day War gave Roth the spiritual sustenance he had been hungering for since his childhood...
...The mystical glow that Roth felt from Call It Sleep was reignited in 1967...
...From entries in his journal, he progressed to more short stories, and eventually, he began Mercy of a Rude Stream, a sequel to Call It Sleep...
...Roth has maintained his practice of writing in the morning, composing on his word processor...
...Like Shifting Landscape, it too was reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review—a first for a paperback...
...When he began writing his first novel, he was again infused with the mystical gleam of his childhood...
...During another of our talks, Roth reflected on his concern that the number of Jews is diminishing at an alarming rate...
...For a while he worked as a psychiatric aide, but, as he says, sometimes after he had locked his charges in for the night, he wasn't quite sure who were the patients and who was their caretaker...
...They are both exuberant, Roth finally digesting the meaning of the fact that "orders are rolling in...
...At odd moments, when the light of an urban street corner transports you into an unaccountable nostalgia, it is a scene from (his novel that the mind's eye is recalling...
...Like many young Jews of his generation, Roth made the physical journey from the ghetto to Manhattan and its literary life—in his case, Greenwich Village...
Vol. 13 • April 1988 • No. 2
