1 of 3
It makes for a good story, that's for sure. At the age of 28, a poverty-stricken Jewish immigrant writes a book that's published to critical acclaim, then suffers from a decades-long writer's block, only to find his voice again in his old age with a monumental, four-part novel that picks up where the first left off. It reads like good fiction—so much so that Philip Roth nearly turned the story into a novel of his own. He never did, though, probably because Henry Roth, the man in question, had already written the story himself. Beginning with Call It Sleep in 1934 and concluding with Mercy of a Rude Stream in the '90s, Henry Roth wrote fiction composed of memory. In writing Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth, Steven Kellman has faced the difficult task of separating the one from the other: the story of David Schearl and Ira Stigman (Roth's alter egos) from the story of Roth himself.
Redemption: |
For a good biographer like Kellman, however, that is not the only task—or even the primary one. As George Marsden has written, "The first goal of a good biographer … should be to tell a good story that illuminates not only the subject, but also the landscapes surrounding that person and the horizons of the readers."1 We don't just want to know what really happened; we want to know why it happened. And from the beginning of this biography—from the very title—Kellman tells us precisely why Roth's life took the shape it did: a "quest for redemption," he writes, connects a fragmented life, culminating in Roth's final return to words.
That Roth's life needed redemption, Kellman makes strikingly clear. In 1907, at the age of eighteen months, Henry arrived in New York in his mother's arms. They'd emigrated from Galicia—his father had gone ahead some time before—and Roth pictures his parent's reunion scene in the prologue to Call It Sleep: "But these two stood silent, apart; the man staring with aloof, offended eyes grimly down at the water … his wife beside him regarding him uneasily, appealingly.
And the child against her breast looking from one to the other with watchful, frightened eyes." The scene prefigures what will follow, both in the novel and in life. Stuck in an unhappy marriage and failing in every enterprise, Henry's father took out his frustration by beating his son. Henry, in turn, took on an increasingly heavy burden of guilt: near the end of Call It Sleep, David Schearl hands his father a broken horse whip, asking to be beaten, confessing to offenses he cannot understand.
Certainly Henry never deserved his father's beatings. But Henry's guilt was built upon more than physical abuse. At the age of 16, he began sleeping with his 14-year-old sister Rose; later, he added a relationship with his first cousin, Sylvia Kessler. Throughout his childhood, then, Henry lived within a world of physical, emotional, and psychological abuse—inflicted both upon him and by him. By the time he was twenty, his psyche was consumed by founded and unfounded guilt, his mind racked by the experiences of his past. From this childhood and from these memories, Roth sought redemption—and Kellman is right to insist upon it.
And yet, Kellman locates that redemption almost exclusively in Roth's writing. Perhaps that shouldn't surprise us. After all, for the biographer of a novelist, aren't the novels the point? And quite naturally Kellman focuses on Roth's writing block: why it came and how it finally, blessedly was lifted. Nonetheless, Kellman's story of writerly redemption has an unfortunate side-effect: it sweeps under the carpet a rather different, but equally important, redemptive story—one that centers not on Roth's writing but on his wife.
share this page
RSS Feed
