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In 1938, Henry met Muriel Parker at Yaddo, an élite artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. Henry had been invited as the promising young author of Call It Sleep; Muriel as a rising star in music. By the end of the summer, they were a couple—a relationship formed just in time. Roth would later claim that Muriel saved his life. In a lifelong battle with depression, Henry had reached a new low, and only Muriel pulled him out.
Kellman admirably acknowledges Muriel's beneficial role in Roth's life. Still, her influence figures in the narrative chiefly as an additional factor that enabled Roth to write again. Other factors include his sudden fame in 1964, with the paperback reissue of Call It Sleep, and his renewed interest in Jewish identity, spurred by the Israeli-Arab war of 1967. Under Kellman's analysis, each of these factors achieves significance only insofar as it leads the artist back to his art.
But that is not the only way to tell the story. In fact, that isn't the way Roth seems to tell it himself. For Roth, regeneration was nothing less than a new sense of selfhood enabled through Muriel's love; after that, his writing could only highlight what she had already accomplished. In A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, the first volume of Mercy and the book that sets the tone for those that follow, Ira Stigman reflects:
From the ends of the world they came and met … and she, despite his psychic deformity caused by woe and guilt, loved him enough to cleave to him, made their day-to-day life, their domestic quotidian, a means to his salvation. One could vary the statement a multitude of ways; it came down to the same thing: If life, his life, were worth living, it was she who made it so.
In Kellman's version, redemption is Roth's quest, his goal, something that he must achieve. Helped along the way, he is nevertheless responsible for his own rebirth. "In one final, mighty torrent of language," Kellman writes in his final paragraph, "Roth put to rest the monsters that had tormented him for eight decades." In that statement, Muriel disappears. For Kellman, it is finally Roth's writing that redeems him—and nothing else.
In the story as told by Roth himself, however, redemption finds him. Muriel Parker, despite Roth's "psychic deformity," chooses to love him, to heal him, to give up her own artistic ambitions in order to nurture him into some kind of wholeness. Roth lives not so much by determination as by gratitude: "In one way, I look forward to dying," Ira reflects; "in another I am filled with too great a sense of gratitude to M to yield, even in the mind, to the wish of having my life come to an end. Other than that, what's the use of living?" Because of her prior action, because of her love, he is now enabled to write; the writing does not so much achieve redemption as record it.
These contrasting accounts matter not only for how we read Roth but also for how we read Muriel. In Kellman's world, art is all. The temporary life of the artist must be sacrificed for the lasting life of art—a choice Muriel refused: "[D]espite an auspicious debut at Town Hall," Kellman sighs, "she abandoned music in order to be a wife and a mother." In fact, Kellman's interest in Muriel Parker seems to revive only with the revival of her own artistic career—his interest measured by the value of her art. But then, in this regard, Kellman seems not to stand alone. After all, culture celebrates those who wrote well, not those who loved well: we have a biography of Henry Roth, but none exists of Muriel Parker.
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