Mercy of a Rude Stream Volume 1: A Star Shines Over Mt Morris Park by Henry Roth Weidenfeld & Nicolson $272 HENRY Roth's career as a writer is surely one of the most peculiar in literary history. He was born in Austro-Hungary in 1906 and emigrated to America at the age of three.
At 28, in 1934, he published Call It Sleep, a novel which earned mixed reviews but which became an underground, then acknowledged, classic when it was reissued in the 60s. Shortly after the publication of Call It Sleep, Roth began a second novel. This work produced an appalling writer's block, one which persisted for 45 years.
Not until 1979, at the age of 73, did he return to his craft and undertake the massive six-volume Mercy of a Rude Stream.
This first volume, A Star Over Mt Morris Park, we might imagine, was written by a man possessed. The novel is so devotedly autobiographical that it can barely pretend to the name novel. Roth has changed the names of the characters who populated his childhood, but the tenor of the book suggests that he has not altered a single fact, detail, description, character trait, or event.
This sense of verisimilitude lends a good deal of charm to the book, but it plays havoc with the narrative thread. Indeed, the only substantial glue to the book is that it follows the protagonist's life from one year to the next. Thematically, aside fromthe inescapable quality of growing up, the book develops very little.
The story belongs to Ira Stigman (read Henry Roth) a young Jewish boy forced by his erratic father and doting mother to grow up in Jewish Harlem in the days before Harlem became synonymous with ''black ghetto''.
Here, surrounded by the Irish boys who taunt him, he feels his way toward adolescence (where the book leaves off), goes to school, learns about the mysteries of sex through encounters with a tramp, a homosexual teacher, classmates who experiment incessantly with masturbation, and his mother, with whom an incestuous moment is suggested but not confirmed.
