Mercy of a Rude Stream: The Complete Novels

Mercy of a Rude Stream #1-4

by Henry Roth, Joshua Ferris (Introduction)

Sixty years after the publication of his great modernist masterpiece, Call It Sleep, Henry Roth, a retired waterfowl farmer already in his late eighties, shocked the literary world with the announcement that he had written a second novel. It was called, he reported, Mercy of a Rude Stream, the title inspired by Shakespeare, and it followed the travails of one Ira Stigman, whose family had just moved to New York’s Jewish Harlem in that "ominous summer of 1914."

"It is like hearing that… J. D. Salinger is preparing a sequel to The Catcher in the Rye," the New York Times Book Review pronounced, while Vanity Fair extolled Roth's new work as "the literary comeback of the century." Even more astonishing was that Roth had not just written a second novel but a total of four chronologically linked works, all part of Mercy of a Rude Stream.

Dying in 1995 at the age of eighty-nine, Roth would not live to see the final two volumes of this tetralogy published, yet the reappearance of Mercy of a Rude Stream, a fulfillment of Roth's wish that these installments appear as one complete volume, allows for a twenty-first-century public to reappraise this late-in-life masterpiece, just as Call it Sleep was rediscovered by a new generation in 1964.

As the story unfolds, we follow the turbulent odyssey of Ira, along with his extended Jewish family, friends, and lovers, from the outbreak of World War I through his fateful decision to move into the Greenwich Village apartment of his muse and older lover, the seductive but ultimately tragic NYU professor Edith Welles. Set in both the fractured world of Jewish Harlem and the bohemian maelstrom of the Village, Mercy of a Rude Stream echoes Nabokov in its portrayal of sexual deviance, and offers a harrowing and relentless family drama amid a grand panorama of New York City in the 1910s and Roaring 20s.

Yet in spite of a plot that is fraught with depictions of menace, violence, and intense self-loathing, Mercy of a Rude Stream also contains a cathartic, even redemptive, overlay as "provocative as anything in the chapters of St. Augustine" (Los Angeles Times), in which an elder Ira, haunted by the sins of his youth, communes with his computer, Ecclesias, as he recalls how his family's traditional piety became corrupted by the inexorable forces of modernity. As Ira finally decides to get "the hell out of Harlem," his Proustian act of recollection frees him from the ravages of old age, and suddenly he is in his prime again, the entire telling of Mercy his final pronouncement.

Mercy of a Rude Stream is that rare work of fiction that creates, through its style and narration, a new form of art. Indeed, the two juxtaposed voices—one of the "little boys swimming in a sea of glory," the other of one of those same boys "in old age being rudely swept to sea"—creates a counterpoint, jarring yet oddly harmonious, that makes this prophetic American work such an lasting statement on the frailties of memory and the essence of human consciousness.

Mercy of a Rude Stream: The Complete Novels includes A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, A Diving Rock on the Hudson, From Bondage, and Requiem for Harlem.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, American, Novels, Contemporary

1312 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Yes, it was more than these now mundane observations that had enthralled him as a young man. Despite the carping of the dour, refractory old codger who, because he had himself reunited with Judaism in the form of Israel (and thereby had sharpened his once dull consciousness of being a jew), had become the adversary of his renowned preceptor, and kept injecting his present bias, his revisions and reservations, into the impressions of the youthful reader that was once himself, the Ulysses was more than that. It was an immensely liberating experience for the as yet pre-embryonic literary man, the amorphous, larval novelist. Oh, it was not merely because of the trail it blazed, the conventions broken, the daring situational and verbal precedents it set, Bloom sitting on the crapper, Molly’s monologue while menstruating.

They were of immeasurable importance in breaking down conventional barriers in literary representation. But more important than anything else, of supreme importance to Ira: the Ulysses demonstrated to him not only that it was possible to commute the dross of the mundane and the sordid into literary treasure, but how it was done. It showed him how to address whole slag heaps of squalor, and make them available for exploitation in art. Equally important was Joyce’s tutelage in the sorcery of language, how it could be made to fluoresce, to electrify the mood and rarify the printed word. No more awesome master of every phase of syntax, no more authoritative mentor—nay, taskmaster!—of subtlest effects, subtlest distinctions of word or phrase, had Ira in his desultory way ever encountered than Joyce. Wryly, Ira remembered the old saying about the Chicago Packing houses: that they used every part of the pig except the squeal. Joyce elucidated ways to use even the squeal: lingo as well as language, the double entendre, the pun, the homely squib, the spoonerism, the palindrome, pig Latin and pig Sanscrit...

...Weren’t fourteen years of school, from kindergarten to college, the raw material of literature? Didn’t it qualify for alchemical transformation? … If that was latent wealth in the domain of letters, why, he was rich beyond compare: his whole world was a junkyard. All those myriad, squalid impressions he took for granted, all were convertible from base to precious, from pig iron to gold ingot."

[he says "the" Ulysses by the way because he is referring to a particular first edition smuggled into the county and lent to him while the ban was still in force]

In perusing reviews of this, one finds the same two points repeated ad nauseum: first, this novel appeared after a lifetime of silence and writer’s block; second (connected to the first) Roth had sex with his sister and his cousin.

Neither of these facts is relevant to the text. They do explain the “how” of its formation, and explain some of Roth’s structural decisions (we only learn in the second volume of the existence of the sister – she is blocked out, unbearable, until he has written enough to summon up the courage to speak of her), but it is depressing to find again and again “reviews” of this that spend a significant portion of their time picking through the biography. It is a cliche to remark that all art is autobiographical (no offence Mr Fellini), yet somehow we remain obsessed with the idea of uncovering the "real" writer behind the text. Note, in the quote above, it is "him", not "me". Ira is not Roth, though the material Roth fashioned Ira from is that of Roth's own experience. But is that not always the case anyway?

So let’s, instead, take the book as it stands within its covers. What is it, on its own terms?

It is a text purportedly being written by an elderly author about his childhood. We hear that author speak about his writing, as well as his contemporary life, his wife, his aches and pains, his children, his concerns about political events. The novel is that author’s attempt to understand his past, and how it shaped him. It is about tracing the origins of his sense of alienation, both as a Jew and as a child of an abusive home who abused others. It is also a process whereby that author exposes (does not justify, does not explain away) the most shameful parts of this past, those things he has spent an entire life burying and fearfully keeping from others. That the author’s sister and cousin are prepubescent when the (what, molestation?) begins adds, of course, a level of illegality and fear of judgment to the confession. Though Ira is just 16 when the incest starts, and his sister is 14. And, at least in Ira's memory, his sister is not unwilling - she even starts charging him 3 bucks a go.

But again, see how difficult it is not to be drawn to the cheap, the tabloid aspects of this?

What is powerful in this novel is this sense of trying to write against one's fear, one's shame – trying to produce something human and truthful regardless of the pain. The sense of being fractured from, broken apart from, the society one lives in - antisemitism, yes, but also the loneliness within one's community, one's family. It is a novel that is very much process, and explicitly meta at times for that reason, though it still manages to retain the "immediacy" of the childhood present.

Ira steals fountain pens at school at one point and, when caught, is unable to explain why he confessed, rather than making easy excuses that would have got him out of trouble. For the reader, however, the psychology is obvious - the need to be punished stemming from the damage an abusive childhood (and being a cultural outsider, part of a group considered Other and less-than) caused.

This is a book about being 79-86 years old, not a teenager. Ira's wife and children, his rheumatism, his arguments with his computer (named Ecclesias), are the real focal point of the narrative, not the childhood in Harlem. Each story of his youth is there to provide explanation for the present, it only has meaning when viewed in the rear-view mirror.

And, yes, of course his sister and cousins are "victims" and, of course, their voices are (relatively) unheard. For it to be otherwise would be to lie - what arrogance would Ira have to have in order to presume to speak for his sister's experience?

And when, finally, about 400 pages in, the dam bursts and he admits the incest, admits his sister into the narrative, the prose whirls and bubbles up:



"Though he strode, strode as rapidly as he could through the darkening street, in spirit, he leaped, he capered—no wonder they said "high spirits." "Ta-ra, ta-ra"—he broke his silence from time to time with low outcry. But he wished he could bellow, trumpet, blare out his relief. No, never again, not e'er again, no ne'er again. He'd throw the goddamn condoms away. Blow 'em up into big balloons till they burst. Pretty bubbles in the air. No, sir, he wouldn't throw them away either. He'd go to Theodora again. He knew the way. The price. Yes, yes, yes. Or somebody else. Maybe better-looking. Oh yeah, yeah, forgot. You goddamn liar. Oh, boy, oh, boy, was he ever made of—iridescence was the word: efflorescence, concupiscence. Hah, ha, ha. Effervescence. Boyoboy! What other essences were there? He was it, he was all of 'em. Gossamer. Downy little flames overlapped into plumed vanes beating in splendor. Gee whiz, the way the words spouted up inside you! Was it gossamer from Coleridge? Jeez, it was a Life-in-Death before, though, wasn't it? Jeez, only two people knew about it, he and Minnie. Not like some guy laid some bimbo, all blabber: hey, you ought to see that broad I laid last night, and maybe he was a lotta bull. And maybe he wasn't. But for him, Ira, silence. Silence. There was no brag, no parading, nothing but shame. Genie in a vase. Pandora's box. His sister's box! Can you imagine bragging about that? Jesus, it almost made him shut his eyes in the enormous twinge the very thought caused him. Hey, fellers, I thought I knocked up my sister! Was I scared. Boyoboy. Holy Jesus Christ, of all the things he had ever heard those guys say: pratt and blow and lap and go down on it, back scuttle, and every other goddamn thing he once believed was just make-believe, but even if it was true, nobody ever said I laid my sister. Yeah, the Italian kids said, aw, yer mudder's ass, yer sister's cunt—but what was that compared to: my sister's cunt?"



So, I would say, certainly the first book in the series should be read in this context - it is a writing through a blockage, frustrating for Ira and for us, it is by far the least successful of the bunch. But the pay-off is worth it.

This is not to say there were not times I felt over-stuffed, times I felt the stories going on and on, never lacking interest, just exhausting. It is hard to know whether the fault there is mine or the authors. He is right that there is so much in a life worth exploring, but it is hard to maintain ones momentum.

But the middle section in particular - being 1925/25 in Greenwich, the thrill of the new literature, that wonderful breaking-out from old forms - is wonderfully done, and a real straight-up pleasure to read. And parts of old-Ira's ramblings are some of the most depressingly real evocations of old age I have read. Reminded me of this incredible poem, as I mentioned in an update:

http://wonderingminstrels.blogspot.co...

I love this bit in particular:

...Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting
People you know, yet can't quite name; each looms
Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,
Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting
A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only
The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,
The blown bush at the window, or the sun's
Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely
Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live:
Not here and now, but where all happened once.
This is why they give

An air of baffled absence, trying to be there
Yet being here.



So, to sum up, not a perfect book (though no such book exists) but one well worth spending time with, despite its flaws.

[Lavender · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is very well written and poignant. Some topics in this novel may be triggering for some, so read at your own risk. I jumped into this series without having read the book that made this author initially famous. I will have to go back and read that one now as I really like the style of writing.

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't read this particular volume of Mercy of a Rude Stream, but over the course of a month read each of the four separate volumes (with a hiatus of two weeks in which I awaited the arrival of volumes 3 and 4).

However, because this collection deserves recognition and celebration, I have gathered up my four separate reviews of each volume. They don't make for an integrated statement about the novel as a whole, but there is enough overlap to show where my appreciation and admiration lies with Roth's accomplishment.

I harken to the title of the novel—Mercy of a Rude Stream—as it perfectly well describes the life Roth himself lived, an errant, tributary life, one that in its final debouchment into the wide sea of experience (life and literature) can enrich any sympathetic reader.

**A Star Over Mt. Morris Park**
It was only after fifty years had passed since the publication of his first novel, Call it Sleep, in 1934—and burning his second novel before it was to be published in 1938—that Roth began to wrestle with another novel, which he came to envisage as a six-volume narrative, Mercy of a Rude Stream. By the time he died in 1995, however, only four of the projected six volumes were finished, and the remaining notes and scraps (over 1700 pages) were edited/distilled into a single volume, An American Life, published in 2010.

I knew none of this when I undertook to read volume 1. I saw there was a second volume, so I read it immediately, but I was still unaware of volumes 3 and 4 till I’d finished reading volume 2. The story of Ira Stigman is Henry Roth’s story, very autobiographical, but this chronicle of the past is also an account of what measures he takes as a writer to shape the flotsam of the past in order to attain some meaning in the meanderings of his life.

The title is a clever appropriation from Shakespeare, when he has Henry VIII speak of being once on a sea of glory, but now, pride deflated and barely afloat, he is carried on by the mercy of a rude stream. The author himself quibbles at the very first about the aptness of this metaphor, and the tone of the book is set: the author recreating passages in his early youth—transforming himself into the character Ira Stigman, who like himself was born in 1906 in Galicia and was raised as a child by his immigrant Jewish parents in various locales in NYC—then kvetching about, even reneging on that portrayal as not being honest enough.

I found compelling the old man’s quest to reformulate his past, to understand the significance of his memories, to conjure with his skills something of substance and aesthetic merit, to understand his life. Roth is able to render vividly scenes and exchanges with friends, family, and school and work mates, and there are skillful evocations of pre- and post-WWI NYC settings. These are posted in a beguiling sequence, but at each posting there is demurral, doubt, and extenuation about what he is at the moment doing to render the past. I can imagine many readers finding fault with the postmodern authorial interventionism, wondering why Roth doesn’t simply get on with telling the story straight…

My pleasure in the book is that Roth is both recollecting and creating, and he is sharing the process with his readers. The interpolative writer “Roth”—alongside his sidekick Ecclesias—is itself a persona, but this writerly persona attains my confidence almost effortlessly, and I trust that he is not only the person creating (re-creating) the life of Ira Stigman, but that he is also the character of Ira Stigman. I believe (in) Roth’s efforts to explain his efforts, and I came to view during my reading that his exposing himself via different personae inhabiting different eras is akin to my own muddled thinking about what it is to know myself.

While I’ve just finished volumes 1 and 2 of the four-volume series, I am currently awaiting arrival of volumes 3 and 4. Depending on how long I wait for them to arrive—because I find Roth’s narrative and his account of his joinery so congenial—I may end up re-reading both 1 and 2 in order to read all without intermission.

**A Diving Rock on the Hudson**
Borrowing from my review of vol 1:
“I found compelling the old man’s quest to reformulate his past, to understand the significance of his memories, to conjure with his skills something of substance and aesthetic merit, to understand his life. Roth is able to render vividly scenes and exchanges with friends, family, and school and work mates, and there are skillful evocations of pre- and post-WWI NYC settings. These are posted in a beguiling sequence, but at each posting there is demurral, doubt, and extenuation about what he is at the moment doing to render the past. I can imagine many readers finding fault with the postmodern authorial interventionism, wondering why Roth doesn’t simply get on with telling the story straight…

“My pleasure in the book is that Roth is both recollecting and creating, and he is sharing the process with his readers. The interpolative writer “Roth”—alongside his sidekick Ecclesias—is itself a persona, but this writerly persona attains my confidence almost effortlessly, and I trust that he is not only the person creating (re-creating) the life of Ira Stigman, but that he is also the character of Ira Stigman. I believe (in) Roth’s efforts to explain his efforts, and I came to view during my reading that his exposing himself via different personae inhabiting different eras is akin to my own muddled thinking about what it is to know myself.”

Speaking of volume 2 exclusively, I was taken aback in wonderment at the addition of a sister. Had I missed something? I read on to discover that Roth had re-instated his own sister’s existence, adding it to his story in order to more accurately explain his self loathing, to render it as the sense of shame and abomination that arose from his ongoing, years-long carnal relation with his younger sister. If anything is going to warp an adolescent’s sense of what a “normal” romantic relationship is going to be, it’s incest. But this confusion is only part of Ira’s growing awareness of all the ways he doesn’t fit in with his family, relatives, community, and society in general. Roth portrays Ira as a Jew without mercenary aspiration, but also without any sort of religious or spiritual ties.

The intimations of something bigger are twofold: one of this world—the ease and effortlessness of the natural American, exemplified by his two primary non-Jewish friends (Billy in high school, Larry at college); one of the mind/spirit—the way events, thoughts, and words can accrete to create a new thing, a gestalt. This latter intimation is both artistic and spiritual, and it is one of the reasons that I look forward to reading volumes 3 and 4.

**From Bondage**
Volumes one and two—A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park and A Diving Rock on the Hudson—were revelations, and I was eager to follow up with volumes three and four (which I hadn’t known existed). Volume three, From Bondage, continues to explore Roth’s persona’s relation with his past and the fiction of his past (and even the present). It sounds like a complex of layers, but the reading is clear and straightforward, even the digressive interludes where Roth’s in-the-present authorial persona is describing his present or his musings on the proper representation of his memories.

Roth continues the story of young Ira Stigman, now a college student in the company of mentors and friends whose lives and words advance his notions of the possible. In A Diving Rock on the Hudson, Roth twice alluded to Blake’s “mind-forged manacles” to describe the limitations young Ira Stigman imposes on himself, even as he begins to widen his thoughts and ken more than his Jewish-immigrant upbringing. In this third volume’s subtitle—From Bondage—we gather that Ira is becoming more aware and slipping off those mind-forged manacles.

However, Ira’s progress is not so clearly divided into stages, and this volume only incrementally shows the breaking of shackles, a process which only appears to become complete in volume four, Requiem for Harlem, when Ira at last moves away from his Harlem home to live with a college professor in her Greenwich Village flat.

In this volume, Ira’s friendship with the handsome, polished Larry Gordon begins to fray as each vies for the attentions of poet, critic, and professor Edith Welles. Ira continues to dwell on the abomination of his relations with both sister and cousin, and he is certain that these perversions of love will taint any normal relationship. However, the progress towards winning Edith’s affections and consummating a normal sexual relationship moves at a glacial pace, and even in volume 4, Requiem for Harlem, at the close of the novel, this is still only an intimation.

What keeps this novel moving is the interplay between the lively, well-crafted scenes of late 20s/early 30s NYC and the scenes of present-day Henry/Ira crafting his so-called novel in the mid- to late 80s. This interplay heightens for me one of the series’ greatest strengths, its evocation of the role of memory in shaping a person and his personality. Two other ongoing issues that kept me piqued were Roth’s present-day disaffection with Joyce (though Ulysses’ style was the basis for Roth’s 1934 novel Call It Sleep), and the prospect of seeing Ira become the author of Call It Sleep.

**Requiem for Harlem**
In this final volume of Henry Roth’s fictional account of himself as Ira Stigman—Requiem for Harlem—Ira is able finally to cut the apron strings vouchsafed by his mother. Ira’s mother is emblematic of his world in Harlem, good and bad, and it’s a world that through her history extends into the old world of Galicia, where he was born before coming to the United States as a two-year-old infant. The lower east side of NYC was his first bulwark in the new world, and it was with great reluctance that he left at age eight to move to Harlem, where his mother could be closer to relatives that had recently come over from Austria/Poland (all chronicled in the first volume, A Star Over Mt. Morris Park).

Ira Stigman’s life in the 20s and early 30s revolved around Harlem, with excursions into other parts of Manhattan via trolley, train, and subway. It was a first-generation immigrant’s life, where Yiddish was spoken as much as street-mangled English. Life in Harlem was shared with the raw, rough-neck Irish Catholics, who presented a powerful contrast to/influence on the generally more subdued, quietly industrious Jews.

Ira’s life was circumscribed by these immediate influences, and it is through the course of this long, four-volume novel that we observe Ira take shape as a being that must, as Stephen Dedalus did, sheer himself from his folk in order to find himself. It is one of the novel’s chief ironies that the interpolative modern-day persona of Ira Stigman—“Henry Roth”—has come to disavow the selfish, isolationist credo of James Joyce in favor of a return to his roots and to a nationalist (and perhaps racial) identification.

In this final volume, the long, slow unraveling of the apron strings appears at novel’s end to be complete. There is some hope mixed with trepidation that Ira will be able to navigate the American world, one where people are able to act with poise and confidence. While incomparably gifted with language and insight, Ira’s education has been stunted by his surroundings, and at the same time enlarged in a way that the staid American paragon cannot grasp. It’s in the breadth of Ira’s experience that he comes to see things more clearly, more fully than his ideal American.

Ruefully, the modern-day Henry Roth comments on the wayward course his life takes, even as he plots with excruciating detail and exactitude the ways in which he wavered and hesitated, faltered and resisted his entrance into the wider world of NYC, literature, love, and life. The majesty of this series is Roth’s ability to recover the details of his perceptions sixty or more years in the past. This kind of memory is both boon and bane, as Roth makes it clear that there is no aspect of his life that is not fully, emotionally on tap, all the good and all the bad, and it sometimes overwhelms and cripples him. [Much easier, I thought as I read, to be a person of many parts (as I consider myself), with feeble memory, who only occasionally retrieves some mostly inchoate memory from the past.]

In this final volume, much to my annoyance, as everything seems to have led to the moment, Ira Stigman still does not compose the novel that in 1934 Henry Roth ushered into the world, Call it Sleep, a paean in Joycean stream of consciousness that recounts the perceptions and experiences of a young Jewish immigrant boy in years before World War I. What I would’ve paid to see how the modern-day Henry Roth recounted how his alter ego Ira Stigman had written that book under the aegis of his lover/mentor Edith Wells.

[Raúl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Henry Roth con menos de treinta años escribió una novela fascinante, "Llámalo sueño"... una novela acerca de la infancia de un niño judío, hijos de inmigrantes húngaros en Nueva York... para prácticamente no volver a escribir nada más. Hasta que finalmente, ya anciano, retomó la escritura en lo que podría ser la continuación de ese libro en "A merced de una corriente salvaje". Estas 100 páginas es el adelanto que brindó antes de que cerrara las 1500 páginas de su nueva novela, y que supone un reencuentro con una escritura fresca, ágil, atractiva, repleta de personajes variopintos y a través del punto de vista de ese niño y del día a día de su crecimiento.

[Dan Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

It saddens me to see bad reviews if this book, it’s complex yes, but deep and requires thought.
I absolutely loved this book, it’s simply brilliant and a factual account of immigration into the US. It is gritty, and doesn’t hide away or try and pretend it was an easy period. Because for most, this period was turgid, hard and lonely.

I cannot recommend this book more. Maybe because I’m not American, I see great beauty and honesty.

[The Jewish Book Council]

Review by Martin Green for the Jewish Book Council.

[Sharon Zink · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a page turner, but a soothing story of the childhood-turning into adolescence of a Jewish boy in New York before and during World War I.

[Allan Schwartz · Rating 5 out of 5]

A true masterpiece in every sense of the word. Henry Roth is one of the fiction giants of all time. I recommend this book to everyone who loves to immerse themselves in literature.

[Stefan Koepeknie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good writer but mostly a tough and depressing read. The 3d part ('From Bondage') where he tortures himself with regrets as he suffers badly from infirmities in his very old age is a singular grind. I highly recommend his 'Call It Sleep'.

[Nirmal · Rating 5 out of 5]

I listened to long audiobook version. But it was highly stimulating and enjoyable. Highly recommended. It makes us to see connections and concerns shown in Philip Roth's books.