Mercy of a Rude Stream by Henry Roth

First published: vol. 1, A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park, 1994; vol. 2, A Diving Rock on the Hudson, 1995; vol. 3, From Bondage, 1996; vol. 4, Requiem for Harlem, 1998

Type of plot: Autobiographical

Time of work: The 1920’s to the 1990’s

Locale: New York City and New Mexico

Principal Characters:

• Ira Stigman, the protagonist and narrator
• M., his deceased wife, a musician and composer
• Chaim Stigman, his disapproving father
• Leah Stigman, his adoring mother
• Minnie Stigman, his sister, two years his junior
• Edith Welles, a poet and teacher
• Larry Gordon, Ira’s best friend in college
• Ecclesias, Ira’s word processor, companion, secretary, and collaborator in old age

The Novel

Mercy of a Rude Stream is narrated by a fictitious character in his late eighties living alone in New Mexico. Stigman closely resembles the real author, who died in Albuquerque at eighty-nine. The octogenarian Stigman is writing about growing up in New York City. Young Ira’s life parallels what is known about Roth’s own early life. Mercy of a Rude Stream, a work of pure realism, is thinly disguised autobiography.

The narrator frequently interrupts his story to complain about his present life (which mirrors that of Roth himself). At other times, Stigman holds imaginary conversations with his word processor, which he nicknames “Ecclesias.” Roth incorporates these interchanges to illustrate his loneliness, unhappiness, physical pains, mental confusion, sense of hopelessness, compulsion to confess his sins, and fears that he will be unable to muster the fortitude to finish his monumental writing project, a combination of fiction and bitter truth.

A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park follows young Ira through the years of World War I to the beginnings of the 1920’s. By age fourteen, Ira has become self-reliant and street-smart as a result of his exposure to the tough, crowded Lower East Side. Meanwhile, the octogenarian Ira is carrying on a struggle with illness, writer’s block, and guilty conscience, continually intruding to complain and deliberately breaking the illusion he is trying to create.

A Diving Rock on the Hudson follows adolescent Ira from 1921 through 1925. He daydreams his way through high school (which his father considers a frivolous luxury), works part-time as a bus conductor and “soda hustler” at the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium, and discovers the pleasures of literature. With many misgivings, the narrator introduces the topic of incest. Ira began having sexual relations with his sister Minnie when he was sixteen and she was fourteen. Both live in fear of being caught by their parents. Ira considers drowning himself in the Hudson River. The aged Ira has been haunted by this fear all of his life; it has probably been the cause of the writer’s block that has kept him tongue-tied. At the end of the volume, the self-loathing young Ira discovers he has a talent for writing and decides to make literature his career.

From Bondage describes the love triangle that develops between Ira, his best friend Larry Gordon, and the older, more sophisticated Edith Welles. Larry is Edith’s lover, but they drag Ira into their world of hedonistic, agnostic intellectuals. Young Ira is still tormented with guilt because he is continuing an incestuous affair with his sister and is now sexually involved with his nubile cousin Stella.

Roth intended to have Mercy of a Rude Stream consist of six novels following Ira to end of the 1930’s, when he broke up with Edith Welles (the real-life Eda Lou Walton) and began a love affair with M. (Muriel Parker), who would become his wife. After Roth’s death, however, his publisher decided to close the series with Requiem for Harlem, which follows the hero through 1927, when he turns his back on Jewish Harlem and enters a long-term love affair with Edith Welles, who will support him financially and emotionally while he works on his first novel. The remaining two volumes, which follow Ira through the 1930’s, would be published separately.

Mercy of a Rude Stream is an “ugly duckling” story. Young Ira begins with a severe inferiority complex attributable to many factors, including his immigrant parents’ poverty and ignorance, his membership in a disdained ethnic minority, and his father’s unremitting verbal abuse. Through schooling, intensive reading, and the therapeutic influence of a few friends, he comes to realize that he is more intelligent and self-reliant than those he once regarded as superior. At the end of Requiem for Harlem, the aged narrator is still trying to make sense of his long life, indicating that there never can be and never should be an end to learning and self-discovery.

The Characters

Because Mercy of a Rude Stream is thinly disguised autobiography, the characters in the novel are all based on real people, and the events in which they figure are based on real events in Roth’s early life. The verisimilitude is enhanced by the fact that the reader knows the characters to be real people under fictitious names.

The only character who is fully rounded and continuously developing throughout the entire novel is young Ira Stigman himself. The other characters are rather sketchily presented, but such presentation is not bad craftsmanship in a novel of this type; the people and events are ostensibly being described by a very old man trying to recapture fragments of a past so distant that it seems almost mythical to the modern reader and even somewhat dreamlike to the aged, absentminded narrator himself. Roth’s theme has to do with a boy’s struggle to survive and to find himself in the crowded, competitive, often hostile environment of America’s biggest city, where the contrast between rich and poor is stark and painful. His characters represent either the narrow ghetto he is trying to escape or the dominant, native-born, English-speaking, middle-class culture full of intellectual stimulation and vocational opportunities into which he aspires to be assimilated.

The author transmits a sense of young Ira’s character through detailed descriptions of his innermost thoughts and feelings. The other characters are portrayed mainly through dialogue. Roth sprinkles the dialogue of his Jewish characters with Yiddish words and phrases, which he defines in a glossary at the end of each volume. The Yiddish enhances the realism while at the same time demonstrating the speakers’ handicaps as non-English-speaking immigrants in a strange, frightening new environment to which they will never fully belong.

The most striking technique used in the work is the dual point of view of Ira Stigman. He is both an octogenarian ready and even willing to die and a boy just starting out in life, dazzled by the drama and spectacle of a mighty city still, like himself, in the process of growth. The contrast between the two aspects of the same character makes the old Ira seem sadder, older, wiser, and more disenchanted while making the young Ira seem ignorant, confused, and naïve but still possessed of the strength, ambition, and potential of youth.

Young Ira’s embittered, abusive father gives the boy a strong motivation to escape from his home and achieve independence. At the same time, his mother’s affection and admiration give him the encouragement he needs to strive to improve his condition. He realizes early that his only hope of escaping from the suffocating atmosphere of the ghetto is through education. People he meets in school, particularly in college, have a major effect on his development. They see his intelligence, creativity, and originality better than he can see these qualities in himself. He learns by imitating them; more important, he learns to appreciate himself through their acceptance, admiration, and affection.

Critical Context

Roth had one of the strangest careers of any well-known writer. His 1934 autobiographical novel Call It Sleep came to be recognized as an American classic, but he then suffered from writer’s block for nearly six decades. In old age, he began Mercy of a Rude Stream, but he did not want it published until after his death, as he believed that it contained too many sensitive revelations. After his wife died, Roth decided to publish one volume per year, as he thought that he had by then outlived everyone who mattered.

The novel can be read as autobiography, psychology, sociology, philosophy, or American history and as an example of both modernism and realism. Realistic fiction deals with ordinary events in the lives of ordinary people, but realism is no more “real” than romanticism; realism is an illusion produced by avoiding the sensational while emphasizing the mundane matters that make up most lives. Realism, however, can be dull and episodic. The highly literate Roth was influenced by such works as James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy (1932-1935), Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), and Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose (1971). The most conspicuous influence is Marcel Proust’s masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927; Remembrance of Things Past, 1922-1931), another multivolume autobiographical novel in which an elderly narrator struggles to recapture the past.

Most significant is the modernistic way Roth adds drama by bringing himself into the foreground as narrator. The drama revolves around whether he can continue writing about painful subjects while suffering physical pain and whether he can finish his masterpiece before he dies. He highlights this dramatic conflict by having his fictitious narrator converse with Ecclesias. Roth only barely managed to finish before he died, but he writes with a lifetime of accumulated wisdom, truly heroic candor, and the “high seriousness” Matthew Arnold, the influential nineteenth century English critic, identified as the distinguishing characteristic of all great writers.

Bibliography

Halkin, Hillel. “Henry Roth’s Secret.” Commentary 97 (May, 1994): 44-47. Attempts to deduce reasons for Roth’s sixty-year silence.

Lyons, Bonnie. Henry Roth: The Man and His Work. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1977. The first book-length study includes a revealing interview with Roth. Lyons incorporates discussion of Judaism, Jewish mysticism, symbolism, and psychoanalysis.

Roth, Henry. Call It Sleep. New York: Avon Books, 1934. Roth’s autobiographical first novel, which after long neglect came to be recognized as an American classic. Numerous critics of Mercy of a Rude Stream compared it, favorably and unfavorably, with Call It Sleep.

Roth, Henry. Shifting Landscape: A Composite, 1925-1987. Edited with introduction by Mario Materassi. New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1987. Roth’s miscellaneous writings published between 1925 and 1987: public statements, memoirs, articles, a poem, a speech, short stories, and a chapter from an unfinished novel.

Weil, Robert. “Editor’s Afterword.” In Henry Roth: Requiem for Harlem. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. A portrait of Roth in old age. Recounts the history of Mercy of a Rude Stream from inception to completion; by Roth’s friend and editor. Essential reading.

Wirth-Nesher, Hana. “The Modern Jewish Novel and the City: Kafka, Roth, and Oz.” Modern Fiction Studies 24 (Spring, 1978): 91-111. Examines how literary styles of three Jewish novelists were influenced by social interaction and competition for living space. Describes the variety, anonymity, density, and degradation of Roth’s world on the East Side of Manhattan.

Wirth-Nesher, Hana, ed. New Essays on “Call It Sleep.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Scholarly studies of Roth’s life and times pertinent to understanding and appreciating Mercy of a Rude Stream.