by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
One of Roth’s admirers, the English critic Walter Allen, has elsewhere described this aspect of Call It Sleep very well: “David recreates, transmutes, the world he lives in not into any simple fantasy of make-believe—we’re a long way here either from Tom Sawyer or the young Studs Lonigan—but with the desperate, compulsive imagination of a poet. He is, indeed, for all the grotesque difference in milieu, much closer to the boy Wordsworth of ‘The Prelude.’”
Call It Sleep yields a picture of brutality in the slums quite as oppressive as can be found in any 1930s novel—and because Henry Roth has neither political nor literary preconceptions to advance, neither revolutionary rhetoric nor fatalistic behaviorism, his picture is more authoritative than that of most slum novels. Through the transfiguring imagination of David, Call It Sleep also achieves an obbligato of lyricism such as few American novels can match. David Schearl, in his besieged and quavering presence, exemplifies the force of G. M. Doughty’s epigram: “The Semites are like to a man sitting in a cloaca to the eyes, and whose brow touches heaven.”
“. . . a cloaca to the eyes.” That is the world of Brownsville and the Lower East Side into which the child is thrust. Quarrelsome grown-ups, marauding toughs, experiments in voyeurism and precocious sex, dark tenements with rat-infested cellars and looming stairways, an overwhelming incident in which David’s father, a milkman, whips two derelicts who have stolen a few bottles of milk, the oppressive comedy of Hebrew school where children cower before and learn to torment an enraged rabbi—all these comprise the outer life of the boy, described by Roth with deliberate and gritty detail.
One is reminded of Dickens’s evocation of childhood terrors, and Roth certainly shares with Dickens the vision of an unmeditated war between the child and society; but nothing in Dickens is so completely and gravely caught up, as is Call It Sleep, with the child’s vision of the world as nightmare. Yet—and this seems to me a remarkable achievement—Roth never acquiesces in the child’s delusions, never sentimentalizes or quivers over his David. In the economy of psychic life, the book makes abundantly clear, the outer world’s vitality and toughness have their claims too.
“. . . and whose brow touches heaven.” For David heaven is his mother’s lap, the warming banter of her faintly ironic voice. Genya Schearl, immigrant wife who speaks only Yiddish, a tall and pale beauty, fearful of her violent-tempered husband, yet glowing with feminine grace and chastened sexuality—this marvelous figure should some day be honored as one of the great women of American literature, a fit companion to Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne. Genya brings radiance and dignity to every page on which she appears. We cannot help share David’s craving for her, even as we recognize its morbid elements; we see her most powerfully through the eyes of the child, as the enclosing mother who provides total security, but we also sense what David has begun uneasily to sense, that she has a complex emotional and bodily life beyond the reach of the child.
As we would say in our contemporary glibness, it is a classical Oedipal situation: the troubled delicate boy, the passionate mother, the inflamed father whom the child looks upon as an agent of punishment and who, in turn, feels himself cut off from the household’s circle of love. An Oedipal situation indeed—but in our mindless jargon we forget that this phrase refers to one of the most sustaining experiences a human being can know. Henry Roth, who seems to have been happily innocent of Freudian hypotheses, provides in Call It Sleep a recognizable “case,” but far more important, an experience superbly alive and fluid. He writes:
“‘It is summer,’ she pointed to the window, ‘the weather grows warm. Whom will you refresh with the icy lips the water lent you?’
“‘Oh!’ he lifted his smiling face.
“‘You remember nothing,’ she reproached him, and with a throaty chuckle, lifted him in her arms.
“Sinking his fingers in her hair, David kissed her brow. The faint familiar warmth and odor of her skin and hair.
“‘There!’ she laughed, nuzzling his cheek, ‘but you’ve waited too long; the sweet chill has dulled. Lips for me,’ she reminded him, ‘must always be cool as the water that wet them.’ She put him down.”
Away from his mother, David is torn by fears; fears of the fingering sexuality he discovers in the street; fears—also hopes—that he is not really the child of his father, fears of the rabbi who curses a fate requiring him to teach the intractable young. At the climax of the book David runs away from home, fleeing the anger of his father who has caught him playing with a rosary and believes him implicated in an act of depravity.
There follows a brilliantly rendered flight through the streets, composed in a Joycean stream-of-consciousness that is broken with fragments of gutter talk, street noise and left-wing oratory. For David, in whose mind a scriptural passage about the fiery coal God put to the lips of Isaiah becomes linked to the terrifying flash of the live rail on a streetcar track, there is now an overmastering urge to sacrifice and cleanse himself. He thrusts the ladle of a milk can into the slot between the car tracks which carries the live rail, suffers a violent shock, and then, recovering, harbors a vision in which all guilts become assuaged and there may yet be a way of containing the terrors of the world.
The writing in Call It Sleep is consistently strong. When speaking in his own right, as disciplined narrator, Roth provides a series of powerful urban vignettes: slum kids fishing for pennies through the grate of a cellar, the ghastly little candy store in which David’s Aunt Bertha, a red-haired gargoyle, bitterly trades with urchins, the freedom of tenement roofs on which David learns to climb.
Roth is even better at rendering varieties of speech. With a hard impersonality he records the patois of immigrant children several generations back, and because he never condescends to them or tries to exploit them as local color, he transforms their mutilated language into a kind of poetry:
“My ticher calls id Xmas, bod de kids call id Chrizmas. Id’s a goyish holiday anyways. Wunst I hanged op a stockin’ in Brooklyn. Bod mine fodder pud in eggshells wid terlit paper an’ a piece f’om a ol’ kendle. So he leffed w’en he seen me.”
And here the rabbi curses his “scholars” with a brimstone eloquence:
“May your skull be dark! . . . and your eyes be dark and your fate be of such dearth and darkness that you will call a poppyseed the sun and a carroway the moon. . . . Away! Or I’ll empty my bitter heart upon you.”
But when Genya speaks, Roth transposes her Yiddish into a pure and glowing English, reflecting in prose the ultimate serenity of her character.
Intensely Jewish in tone and setting, Call It Sleep rises above all the dangers that beset the usual ghetto novel; it does not deliquesce into nostalgia, nor sentimentalize poverty and parochialism. The Jewish immigrant milieu happens to be its locale, quite as Dublin is Joyce’s and Mississippi Faulkner’s. A writer possessed by his materials, driven by a need to recapture the world of his youth, does not choose his setting: it chooses him. And to be drawn into Roth’s trembling world, the reader need have no special knowledge about Jewish life, just as he need have no special knowledge about the South in order to enjoy Faulkner.
Call It Sleep ends without any explicit moral statement. A human experience scoured to its innermost qualities can take on a value of its own, beyond the convenience of gloss or judgment. At the end of a novel like Call It Sleep, one has lived through a completeness of rendered life, and all one need do is silently to acknowledge its truth.
New Styles in “Leftism”
{1965}
I PROPOSE TO DESCRIBE a political style or outlook before it has become hardened into an ideology or the property of an organization. This outlook is visible along limited portions of the political scene; for the sake of exposition I will make it seem more precise and structured than it really is.
There is a new radical mood in limited sectors of American society: on the campus, in sections of the civil rights movement. The number of people who express this mood is not very large, but that it should appear
at all is cause for encouragement and satisfaction. Yet there is a segment or fringe among the newly blossoming young radicals that causes one disturbance—and not simply because they have ideas different from persons like me, who neither expect nor desire that younger generations of radicals should repeat our thoughts or our words. For this disturbing minority I have no simple name: sometimes it looks like kamikaze radicalism, sometimes like white Malcolmism, sometimes like black Maoism. But since none of these phrases will quite do, I have had to fall back upon the loose and not very accurate term “new leftists.” Let me therefore stress as strongly as I can that I am not talking about all or the majority of the American young and not-so-young who have recently come to regard themselves as radicals.
The form I have felt obliged to use here—a composite portrait of the sort of “new leftist” who seems to me open to criticism—also creates some difficulties. It may seem to lump together problems, ideas, and moods that should be kept distinct. But my conviction is that this kind of “new leftism” is not a matter of organized political tendencies, at least not yet, and that there is no organization, certainly none of any importance, which expresses the kind of “new leftism” I am here discussing. So I would say that if some young radicals read this text and feel that much of it does not pertain to them, I will be delighted by such a response.
Some Background Conditions
A. The society we live in fails to elicit the idealism of the more rebellious and generous young. Even among those who play the game and accept the social masks necessary for gaining success, there is a widespread disenchantment. Certainly there is very little ardor, very little of the joy that comes from a conviction that the values of a society are good, and that it is therefore good to live by them. The intelligent young know that if they keep out of trouble, accept academic drudgery, and preserve a respectable “image,” they can hope for successful careers, even if not personal gratification. But the price they must pay for this choice is a considerable quantity of inner adaptation to the prevalent norms: there is a limit to the social duplicity that anyone can sustain.
The society not only undercuts the possibilities of constructive participation; it also makes very difficult a coherent and thought-out political opposition. The small minority that does rebel tends to adopt a stance that seems to be political, sometimes even ideological, but often turns out to be little more than an effort to assert a personal style.
Personal style: that seems to me a key. Most of whatever rebellion we have had up to—and even into—the civil rights movement takes the form of a decision on how to live individually within this society, rather than how to change it collectively. A recurrent stress among the young has been upon differentiation of speech, dress, and appearance, by means of which a small elite can signify its special status; or the stress has been upon moral self-regeneration, a kind of Emersonianism with shock treatment. All through the fifties and sixties disaffiliation was a central impulse, in the beatnik style or the more sedate J. D. Salinger way, but disaffiliation nevertheless, as both a signal of nausea and a tacit recognition of impotence.
I say “recognition of impotence” because movements that are powerful, groups that are self-confident, do not opt out of society: they live and work within society in order to transform it.
Now, to a notable extent, all this has changed since and through the civil rights movement—but not changed as much as may seem. Some of the people involved in that movement show an inclination to make of their radicalism not a politics of common action, which would require the inclusion of saints, sinners, and ordinary folk, but, rather, a gesture of moral rectitude. And the paradox is that they often sincerely regard themselves as committed to politics—but a politics that asserts so unmodulated and total a dismissal of society, while also departing from Marxist expectations of social revolution, that little is left to them but the glory or burden of maintaining a distinct personal style.
By contrast, the radicalism of an earlier generation, despite numerous faults, had at least this advantage: it did not have to start as if from scratch; there were available movements, parties, agencies, and patterns of thought through which one could act. The radicals of the thirties certainly had their share of bohemianism, but their politics were not nearly so interwoven with and dependent upon tokens of style as is today’s radicalism.
The great value of the present rebelliousness is that it requires a personal decision, not merely as to what one shall do but also as to what one shall be. It requires authenticity, a challenge to the self, or, as some young people like to say, an “existential” decision. And it makes more difficult the moral double-bookkeeping of the thirties, whereby in the name of a sanctified movement or unquestioned ideology, scoundrels and fools could be exalted as “leaders” and detestable conduct exonerated.
This is a real and very impressive strength, but with it there goes a significant weakness: the lack of clear-cut ideas, sometimes even a feeling that it is wrong—or, worse, “middle-class”—to think systematically, and as a corollary, the absence of a social channel or agency through which to act. At first it seemed as if the civil rights movement would provide such a channel; and no person of moral awareness can fail to be profoundly moved by the outpouring of idealism and the readiness to face danger which characterizes the vanguard of this movement. Yet at a certain point it turns out that the civil rights movement, through the intensity of its work, seems to dramatize . . . its own insufficiency. Indeed, it acts as a training school for experienced, gifted, courageous people who have learned how to lead, how to sacrifice, how to work, but have no place in which to enlarge upon their gifts. There may in time appear a new kind of “dropout”—the “dropout” trained by and profoundly attached to the civil rights movement who yet feels that it does not, and by its very nature cannot, come to grips with the central problems of modern society; the “dropout” who has been trained to a fine edge of frustration and despair.
B. These problems are exacerbated by an educational system that often seems inherently schizoid. It appeals to the life of the mind, yet justifies that appeal through crass utilitarianism. It invokes the traditions of freedom, yet processes students to bureaucratic cut. It speaks for the spirit, yet increasingly becomes an appendage of a spirit-squashing system.
C. The “new leftism” appears at a moment when the intellectual and academic worlds—and not they alone—are experiencing an intense and largely justifiable revulsion against the immediate American past. Many people are sick unto death of the whole structure of feeling—that mixture of chauvinism, hysteria, and demagogy—which was created during the Cold War years. Like children subjected to forced feeding, they regurgitate almost automatically. Their response is an inevitable consequence of overorganizing the propaganda resources of a modern state; the same sort of nausea exists among the young in the Communist world.
Unfortunately, revulsion seldom encourages nuances of thought or precise discriminations of politics. You cannot stand the deceits of official anti-Communism? Then respond with a rejection equally blatant. You have been raised to give credit to every American power move, no matter how reactionary or cynical? Then respond by castigating everything American. You are weary of Sidney Hook’s messages in the New York Times Magazine? Then respond as if talk about Communist totalitarianism were simply irrelevant or a bogey to frighten infants.
Yet we should be clear in our minds that such a response is not at all the same as a commitment to Communism, even though it may lend itself to obvious exploitation. It is, rather, a spewing out of distasteful matter—in the course of which other values, such as the possibility of learning from the traumas and tragedies of recent history, may also be spewed out.
D. Generational clashes are recurrent in our society, perhaps in any society. But the present rupture between the young and their elders seems especially deep. This is a social phenomenon that goes beyond our immediate subject, indeed, it cuts through the whole of society; what it signifies is the society
’s failure to transmit with sufficient force its values to the young, or, perhaps more accurately, that the best of the young take the proclaimed values of their elders with a seriousness which leads them to be appalled by their violation in practice.
In rejecting the older generations, however, the young sometimes betray the conditioning mark of the very American culture they are so quick to denounce: for ours is a culture that celebrates youthfulness as if it were a moral good in its own right. Like the regular Americans they wish so hard not to be, yet, through wishing, so very much are, they believe that the past is mere dust and ashes and that they can start afresh, immaculately.
There are, in addition, a few facts to be noted concerning the relationship between the radical young and those few older people who have remained radicals.
A generation is missing in the life of American radicalism, the generation that would now be in its mid-thirties, the generation that did not show up. The result is an inordinate difficulty in communication between the young radicals and those unfortunate enough to have reached—or, God help us, even gone beyond—the age of forty. Here, of course, our failure is very much in evidence too: a failure that should prompt us to speak with modesty, simply as people who have tried, and in their trying perhaps have learned something.
To the younger radicals it seems clear that a good many of the radicals of the thirties have grown tired, or dropped out, or, in some instances, sold out. They encounter teachers who, on ceremonial occasions, like to proclaim old socialist affiliations, but who really have little or no sympathy with any kind of rebelliousness today. They are quick—and quite right—to sense that announcements of old Young People’s Socialist League ties can serve as a self-protective nostalgia or even as a cloak for acquiescence in the status quo. But it must also be said that there is a tendency among the “new leftists” toward much too quick a dismissal of those who may disagree with them—they are a little too fast on the draw with such terms as “fink” and “establishment.”
