A short life of the author
Henry Roth is one of the most extraordinary cases in American literary history — a writer who produced a single novel of undeniable genius at the age of twenty-eight, then fell silent for nearly sixty years, living in obscurity as a waterfowl farmer, a hospital attendant, and a machinist before the world rediscovered his masterpiece and he returned, at the age of seventy-three, to write a massive, autobiographical novel sequence that reopened every wound his silence had been designed to heal.
Galicia to the Lower East Side
Roth was born in 1906 in Tysmenytsia, a small town in Galicia (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Ukraine), and was brought to the United States by his parents in 1907. The family settled first in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and then — when Roth was about eight — moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the teeming Jewish immigrant quarter that would become the setting of Call It Sleep. The move from the relatively homogeneous Jewish environment of Brownsville to the polyglot, dangerous streets of the Lower East Side was, by Roth’s own account, the traumatic experience that generated his novel.
He attended City College of New York, where he came under the influence of Eda Lou Walton, a New York University professor and poet who became his mentor, lover, and patron. It was in Walton’s Greenwich Village apartment, surrounded by the modernist literary culture of the late 1920s, that Roth conceived and wrote Call It Sleep.
Call It Sleep
Published by Robert O. Ballou in December 1934, Call It Sleep depicts roughly two years in the life of David Schearl, a Jewish immigrant child growing up on the Lower East Side between 1911 and 1913. David’s world is defined by the terrifying violence of his father, Albert — a paranoid, brutally strong printer who may not believe David is his son — and the tender, suffocating love of his mother, Genya. The novel follows David through the streets, tenements, cellars, and rooftops of the Lower East Side, rendering his consciousness with a fidelity and intensity that had no precedent in American fiction.
Roth’s technical achievement was to deploy the stream-of-consciousness techniques of Joyce and Woolf in the service of an immigrant child’s perception. David’s interior monologue moves between Yiddish (rendered as lyrical, grammatical English), English (rendered as broken, phonetically transcribed dialect), and Hebrew (encountered in the cheder, the religious school). The novel’s famous climax — David thrusting a zinc milk-ladle into the slot of a streetcar rail and producing a blinding flash of electric light — fuses realistic event with mystical symbolism in a passage of extraordinary power that synthesises all the novel’s themes of fear, illumination, and the search for God.
The novel received respectful reviews but sold poorly — roughly four thousand copies — and was quickly forgotten. Roth later blamed the timing: it appeared during the heyday of proletarian fiction, and its modernist technique and psychological focus were out of step with the literary politics of the 1930s left.
The Silence
After Call It Sleep, Roth began and abandoned several novels. By the late 1930s, he was suffering from a devastating creative block that he attributed to multiple causes: the exhaustion of the autobiographical material that had fuelled his first novel, the contradictions between his Communist Party allegiance and his literary instincts, and a personal crisis whose nature he would not fully disclose for decades.
He married Muriel Parker, a composer, in 1939, and the couple moved first to Boston and then to rural Maine, where Roth spent the next three decades in deliberate exile from literary life. He worked as a precision tool grinder, a substitute teacher, a psychiatric hospital attendant, and a waterfowl farmer. He raised ducks and geese. He was, for all practical purposes, an ex-writer.
Rediscovery
The redemption of Call It Sleep is one of the great stories of American publishing. In 1960, the critic Leslie Fiedler mentioned the novel in a survey of neglected American Jewish fiction. In 1964, Avon Books published a paperback edition with an introduction by Alfred Kazin and blurbs from Fiedler and Irving Howe. The book became a phenomenon, selling over a million copies in its first year of reprint. It was hailed as a lost masterpiece, compared to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Sound and the Fury, and installed permanently in the canon of American fiction.
Roth, then living in Augusta, Maine, was alternately gratified and discomfited by the attention. He gave interviews, accepted invitations, and — most significantly — began to write again.
Mercy of a Rude Stream
Beginning in the late 1970s and continuing until his death in 1995, Roth worked on a massive autobiographical novel sequence titled Mercy of a Rude Stream. Four volumes were published: A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park (1994), A Diving Rock on the Hudson (1995), From Bondage (1996, posthumous), and Requiem for Harlem (1998, posthumous). Two additional volumes remain unpublished.
The sequence picks up David Schearl’s story — now named Ira Stigman — from adolescence through young adulthood, covering his years at City College, his relationship with Edith Welles (the Eda Lou Walton figure), and the writing of his first novel. But the books’ most shocking and controversial content was Roth’s confession, embedded in the fiction, of an incestuous relationship with his younger sister during adolescence — the secret that, he suggested, had been the true cause of his creative paralysis.
The late novels are uneven — prolix, repetitive, and interspersed with metafictional commentary in which the elderly Roth addresses his word processor — but their confessional courage and their documentation of immigrant Jewish life in the 1920s give them a raw power that transcends their formal limitations.
Collecting Roth
First editions of Call It Sleep (Robert O. Ballou, 1934) are among the most sought-after American first novels, with fine copies in dust jacket commanding five-figure prices. The book’s small print run and obscurity upon publication mean that surviving copies, particularly in good condition, are genuinely scarce. The 1964 Avon paperback that launched the rediscovery is also collected as a significant publishing artefact. The Mercy of a Rude Stream volumes (St. Martin’s Press) were published in modest hardcover editions and are beginning to attract collector interest.