Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth - Hardcover

Kellman, Steven G.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393057798 ISBN 13: 9780393057799

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005

Synopsis

A penetrating biography of an unheralded master of American fiction.

Henry Roth (1906-1995), author of the great immigrant novel Call It Sleep, is one of the giants of American literature, yet for years he has lacked a biography. After completing his first book in 1934, Roth lapsed into a legendary six-decade silence, only to reemerge with Mercy of a Rude Stream, hailed as "a landmark of the American literary century" (David Mehegan, Boston Globe) and "as provocative as anything in the chapters of St. Augustine" (Stefan Kanfer, Los Angeles Times Book Review). In following Roth's tortured life from his childhood on the Jewish Lower East Side to his twilight years in New Mexico, literary critic Steven Kellman has uncovered FBI files, spoken with family members and friends, and gained access to the tape in which Roth discussed the long-buried incest of his youth. Redemption is the Shakespearean saga of a great writer doomed to a life of psychological torment, but saved in the end by his search for deliverance. 16 pages of illustrations.

About this title

About the Author

Steven G. Kellman teaches English at the University of Texas at San Antonio and is the co-author of Into the Tunnel: Readings of Gass's Novel, a study of poet William Gass.

Reviews

Irving Howe’s 1964 description of Roth’s Call It Sleep as "one of the few genuinely distinguished novels written by a 20th-century American" catapulted Roth to fame. Yet the author’s decades-long silence became legendary. In the first book-length biography of Roth, Kellman sensitively probes this mystery. He posits Roth as his abusive father’s psychological victim—and as a result, paranoid, self-loathing, and vengeful—which seemed to sit well with critics. Although reviewers praised the way Kellman never failed to connect Roth’s life to America’s larger cultural milieu, many sensed a lingering secrecy to the writer’s life. Most agreed, however, that this birth-to-life chronicle is "a trenchant exploration of the relationship between the horrors of life and the saving power of art" (San Francisco Chronicle).

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

What happened to the Jewish novel?

Answer: It assimilated.

If you were an English major in the '60s or '70s, chances are you took a course in the Jewish novel and read books by Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth. These days, Bellow's not politically correct enough for many professors, Malamud's largely forgotten, Philip Roth is just a novelist, not a Jewish one, and few of those teaching the dozens of younger novelists who happen to be Jewish would identify them that way.

Besides, as far as classroom focus goes, most of those coming of age in literature these days are women, whether Jewish or Gentile. Students used to read about young Jewish guys on the way up, but Augie March and Alexander Portnoy have been replaced by the heroines of Candace Bushnell, both in books and, thanks to student interest in film and TV, in such forms as the "Sex and the City" series, which gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "on the make." This curricular shift is as it should be, given the current concern with the role of women, even if it minimizes the more parlous place of the Jew in the Western canon (there's no play called "The Desperate Housewife of Venice").

If the chapter in U.S. literary history called The Jewish Novel has closed, Steven G. Kellman brings us back to its strange beginnings in his lucid, highly readable biography of a writer whose life is as peculiar as anything in his fiction. Bellow, Malamud and company needed an ancestor to add gravitas to their mid-century Renaissance, and they found him in Henry Roth, who wrote Call It Sleep in 1934 and then lapsed into six decades of nearly total silence, spending most of those years as a waterfowl farmer in Maine and erupting in his eighties in a volcanic flood of prose that yielded thousands of pages just before his death.

Born Herschel Roth in 1906 in Galicia, a region of Austro-Hungary, the future novelist crossed the Atlantic as a babe in his mother's arms, traveling in steerage as part of the massive Jewish immigration that eventually made New York the capital of the Diaspora. The family moved around New York, spending just four years on the Lower East Side, which would become the cosmos of Call It Sleep. His mother never really learned English, and his father was a failure at making a living and at fatherhood. (Late in life, after Roth married Muriel Parker and had a family of his own, the father described him as "a schmo who had married a shiksa and didn't amount to anything.") An indifferent student, Roth profited from City College of New York's populist admissions policy. But his real literary education came from bohemian friends who introduced him to writers like James Joyce and T.S. Eliot.

The ennui and alienation of Eliot's personae appealed to Roth, and Kellman points out that, in composing Call It Sleep, the novelist took from Joyce the goal of transforming the quotidian into art, the idea for the self-portrait of the artist as a young man and the stream-of-consciousness technique. Call It Sleep tells the story of six years in the life of an immigrant boy named David Schearl just prior to World War I. David is protected by a loving mother, but his increasingly paranoid father can't hold down a job and makes life hell for them all. The squalor Roth depicted offended some critics, though others praised the gritty details as true to life. But in 1934, when unemployment exceeded 20 percent, relatively few readers were interested in throwing their disposable cash at an unknown writer, especially one with so troubling a story to tell, and within two years Call It Sleep was out of print.

As Kellman notes, in those days there was no elaborate infrastructure of teaching appointments, grants and reading tours to sustain writers financially and psychologically. Besides, Roth had always been drawn to the certainty of technical work as a counterbalance to the undependable art of writing; geometry was the only class that didn't bore him in high school, and even after Call It Sleep appeared, he took a course in precision grinding and worked in machine shops all over town. Haunted by the city that had broken his heart, the New York that had served as his model and then turned its back on him, he eventually took his wife and their two young sons to Maine, where they moved into a house without indoor plumbing or electricity, and the once and future novelist became a farmer. Nothing if not diligent, Roth salvaged junkyard materials and built a plant equipped to slaughter and process fowl.

The myth of Roth turning his back on literature is not entirely true, as Kellman points out. During his Maine years, he started and then burned the pages of a new novel and published work in the New Yorker, though fiction editor William Maxwell turned down more stories than he took. Then, improbably, devotees overcame Roth's indifference and saw a paperback edition of Call It Sleep into print in 1964. The New York Times not only published its first review of a paperback but ran it on the cover of the book section. The book became a bestseller 30 years after its first appearance.

Thanks mainly to a devoted young Italian academic named Mario Materassi, who became his translator, champion, editor and confidant for the next 30 years, Roth not only received international acclaim but began to write steadily again, launching a multi-volume series, Mercy of a Rude Stream, which was left unfinished at his death in 1995 at the age of 89. Some belligerent reviewers of the four volumes that made it into print drew blood, notes Kellman, though "most approached Roth with reverence for Call It Sleep."

Throughout his life, Roth was a handful, creating as many problems for others as for himself; he broke abruptly with his advocate Materassi following a silly disagreement over financial arrangements, and he upset his sister Rose late in life by writing graphically of their incestuous relationship as adolescents.

The Mercy of a Rude Stream novels were meant to relate the only story Roth was capable of telling, his own. Now Kellman has told that story masterfully; scarcely a page here doesn't deftly relate a bit of New York history or make a connection to the larger world of literature. Even better, Kellman tells the story in a way that Roth never could: briefly.

Reviewed by David Kirby
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

The obvious hurdle in writing a biography of Roth (1906–1995) is the 60-year gap between his first novel, the Jewish immigrant, stream-of-consciousness classic Call It Sleep (1934), and his second, the four-volume Mercy of a Rude Stream (1994–1998). Kellman, an English professor and author of seven previous scholarly works, makes a strong case against writer's block as the reason for the long silence, pointing out that Roth pitched short stories to the New Yorker for years (with intermittent success). Instead, he suggests, Roth deliberately withdrew from writing rather than allow his autobiographical fiction to confront his worst adolescent shames: expulsion from high school for stealing and a prolonged incestuous relationship with his sister. Kellman's account of Roth's early life draws extensively on the Mercy of a Rude Stream, created from thousands of manuscript pages Roth produced in his final years, and carefully details how they were prepared for publication, blaming editorial missteps for the slightly disappointed reaction of critics surprised by the author's new, more naturalistic voice. After the excitement of Roth's life before Call It Sleep—his Lower East Side childhood, the incest, involvement with an older woman—however, the long, often painfully frustrating decades that follow may make readers wish he'd hurry up and start writing again. Despite occasionally overplaying the drama, Kellman gives readers a thoughtful and objective perspective on Roth's life. (Aug. 15)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* Many artists create out of a deep need to exorcise pain, but few suffer the burden of a secret as shameful, or self-loathing as smothering, as that of novelist Henry Roth. Born in Galicia in 1906, Roth grew up on the Lower East Side, a place he imbued with mythic dimensions in his acclaimed novel Call It Sleep (1934). Despite the novel's initial critical success and its phenomenal popularity after it was republished in 1964, Roth, a victim of arrested development and overly dependent on the support of trailblazing poet and teacher Eda Lou Walton (a fascinating subject in her own right), suffered an epic writer's block. ?As Roth's first biographer, Kellman explicates with great delicacy and unfailing sympathy the shocking source of Roth's miserable, decades-long silence--corrosive guilt over incest with his sister--and expertly shapes the sad and disturbing story of Roth's painfully austere, conflicted, and depressed life. Yet for all his grimness, Roth was blessed in friendship and marriage, and he miraculously recovered his writer's voice in his final years, completing the powerfully cathartic quartet, Mercy of a Rude Stream (1994-98). Judiciously detailed in fact and analysis, Kellman's profoundly involving portrait of a tormented artist deepens our perception of the mystery and significance of art. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393057798
• ISBN 13: 9780393057799
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 384