After Half a Century, a Writer Returns to His Craft

Just three blocks from the 18th-Century adobe church and the haciendas converted into restaurants and curio shops that make up touristy Old Town can be found another kind of historical monument. Eighty-one-year-old writer Henry Roth has been living in near obscurity for the last 20 years with his wife, Muriel, in a modest and manicured mobile home court bordered by a rough edge of town, close to the Rio Grande.

Roth published the critically acclaimed “Call It Sleep”--his very personal, Joycean novel of the tightly knit world of an immigrant Jewish boy on New York’s dense Lower East Side--in 1934 at age 28. Now he is back with a new book--his second--”Shifting Landscape: A Composite, 1925-1987” (Jewish Publication Society) after a nearly 53-year silence.

“Shifting Landscape” at a mere 300 pages contains the sum of what Roth has produced--and what he didn’t destroy--in the last 50-odd years. There are fragments, short stories, brief political and religious statements, all welded together with letters and excerpts from taped conversations by editor Mario Materassi.

On a chilly, cloudy November afternoon, Roth, clad in sneakers and a worn sweater, warmly greets his guests--a reporter and a photographer--in his homey, cluttered mobile home. He’s a stocky man with a moon-round face framed by a halo of receding wisps of white hair. He offers a firm handshake despite knotted, work-hardened, arthritic hands and a broad smile that promises easy access to laughter.

Actually, his guests first encounter Muriel Roth, a composer and pianist whose Baldwin grand dominates the narrow living room of the mobile home. Muriel, 79, presents an elegant, angular figure in a slim wool skirt and sweater and she’s just swinging out the door to run errands.

Roth settles down in the kitchen-dinette area. He doesn’t seem fazed by the photographer shooting and moving about the tiny room for more than an hour. He acts as if giving interviews were second nature to him--hardly the case for most of this man’s life.

Materassi, a professor of American literature at the University of Florence, translated Roth’s novel into Italian in the 1960s, turning Roth into nearly a household name among readers in Italy. And it is Materassi who was instrumental in bringing Roth back into the fold of American publishing with “Shifting Landscape.”

Last February, Roth found himself lionized by the paparazzi in Italy where he went to accept Italy’s literary prize, the Premio Nonino, for “Chiamalo Sonno”--”Call It Sleep”--in Materassi’s second translation. Roth believes that Italian readers identified with the Jewish sensibility, the emphasis on family in his book.

Roth still speaks with a gruff, Lower Eastside accent and when he’s animated, his voice booms. He also refers to himself frequently in the third person--”this guy, the writer.”

‘You Act as Nobody’

“I would have liked to have written another book and another and gradually become maybe known as a novelist. But since I didn’t I became used to the life of being anonymous again, and I liked it. . . . So you act as nobody and when you act as nobody you understand what nobody feels like.”

Roth was born in a Polish town called Tysmenicz (now a part of the Soviet Union, at that time absorbed into the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and brought to New York’s Lower East Side as a toddler. He grew up very close to his mother and comfortable in what was then a completely Jewish enclave of Manhattan. Then, the family moved uptown to Irish-Italian Harlem. The rents were cheaper (“$12 a month”) and there was a little more space than in the downtown ghetto. But Roth recalled feeling traumatized by the strangeness, the foreignness of his new neighbors. He felt defensive, even ashamed of his Jewishness.

In “Shifting Landscape” there’s one story entitled “Petey, Yotsee and Mario” (1956) in which the new boy on the block, the Jewish boy, swimming in the river, nearly drowns and is saved by a trio of non-Jewish neighborhood kids. The Jewish boy’s mother decides to bake a cake for the rescuers out of gratitude:

“ ‘Don’t bake them no cake.’

“ ‘Why not?’

“ ‘You bake Jewish cakes.’

”. . . She baked them a spicecake. It was embossed with walnuts, dark with crystallized honey, and full of raisins--our typical holiday spice cake.

” ’. . . You were afraid they wouldn’t like Jewish cake. What kind of people would they be if they didn’t like Jewish cake? Would they have even saved you?’ ”

Poor as they were, Roth’s mother influenced Henry to finish high school rather than apply for working papers after graduating from the eighth grade. “From there I went on to CCNY (City College of New York). I won a scholarship to Cornell. But I was too much of a Jewish mama’s boy to break loose . . . I can still see myself writing a letter declining the (scholarship) . . . they wrote and said that you could get cash easily, there were all kinds of jobs to be had in the kitchen and on the grounds . . . I wanted to stay home.”

A Move Downtown

Roth entered CCNY in 1924. He made the acquaintance of an English professor, Eda Lou Walton, 12 years his senior, and the woman who would eventually become his creative mentor and lover. He made the emotional break with family and home, moving downtown to the bohemian world of Greenwich Village. There he attended literary readings and gatherings sponsored by the Arts Club (Walton was one of its founders) where he ran into the likes of Hildegard Flanner and Mabel Dodge Luhan. It was Walton who in 1925 smuggled into the United States a copy of the banned “Ulysses” and loaned it to Roth to read.

“Read it like hell. I floundered and I fumbled and wondered what the hell are they talking about but I got through the idea somehow that you could take that squalid surrounding in which you were raised, which you moved in and you could develop by dint of sheer artistry and language and arrangement a work of art.”

Roth was profoundly influenced by Joyce: “It’s unfortunate that it did (happen) at such an early age because it presented the artist as autonomous, as cutting society off, cutting his own people off . . . The worst of it is (“Ulysses”) influenced me subconsciously. More than it did intellectually. . . .”

By 1930, Roth was living with Walton, and under her guidance, was writing a piece in a straightforward, autobiographical vein. “All kinds of promptings began to arise in me that amounted to ideas of how to expand, fictionalize it . . . if I did this . . . how much more interesting it would be.”

It took Roth four years to complete “Call It Sleep.” Ballou and Co. published it in 1934. The first printing sold out, within weeks. Ballou was on the verge of bankruptcy, however. The second edition was belatedly released and the book moved slowly. The copyright was picked up by Charles Scribner’s Sons, at the time publishing such new luminaries as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe.

Roth’s sentiments about the Jazz Age didn’t exactly mirror those of Fitzgerald. “America was very mercenary, all business and money. . . .”

In 1933, Roth joined the Communist Party. “Along came this tremendous force . . . Marxism, Leninism . . . a new type of world . . . a world in which Jews and Gentiles merged and there was no longer any difference and that (was) the way to go. And a whole generation of us went that way.”

“Call It Sleep” was well reviewed nearly everywhere. But what happened inside the party was a different story. Said Roth: “Both the Daily Worker and the New Masses took a very dim and adverse, critical view of ‘Call It Sleep.’ There was one review that essentially said--this man with this kind of ability doesn’t devote himself to the larger social questions . . . unionization of workmen, building of unions, going on strike for better conditions. . . .”

While Roth was completing “Call It Sleep,” he was already looking ahead to his next book: “The maturing, also individualist, subjective writer now moving from slums to Greenwich Village, living with an older woman . . . that’s what I had envisioned anyway as I was writing--that’s going to come next.”

But the critical reception in the Communist Party publications cut deep. Roth was compelled to deny himself his own subject matter out of his moral commitment to his new-found political sympathies. He indeed started a second novel and sold it to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s. But something was wrong.

The surviving fragment of “If We Had Bacon,” which appears in “Shifting Landscape,” indicates what an unlikely kind of book it would have been to follow the ethnic and personal “Call It Sleep.” Roth tried to step way outside his personal frame of reference. He based his main character, Dan Loem, on an acquaintance named Bill Clay. Loem is described as a non-Jewish German-American and his was to be the story of a Midwestern union man who loses his hand in an industrial accident. Roth eventually abandoned the project, and along with that, his budding literary career.

Headed West

In 1938, Roth had met his future wife Muriel Parker, at the Yaddo artist’s colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. He was both struggling with the second book and trying to break off his relationship with Eda Lou Walton at the time. Roth dropped the book and lit out for the West Coast.

“I went out to Los Angeles . . . thought maybe there was something for me in the movie industry. I went to an agency to ask for a job; the people there . . . asked me for samples of my work. So I gave them ‘Call It Sleep’ and when I came back it was almost (with) horrified expressions that they pushed (it) back toward me as being the last thing in the world that they could possibly use in the way of writing. After all, this was 1938, ’39. You wouldn’t want anything like ‘Call It Sleep’ in Hollywood, would you? That was apparent.”

Roth returned East and married Muriel. The Roths left New York for Boston and eventually moved to Maine. Roth had abandoned writing in the late ‘30s. With war looming, he trained as a machinist. He worked as a night-school teacher, a psychiatric aid and as a tool-and-dye maker. The Roths moved to an isolated part of Maine where Muriel taught school and Roth settled into a career as a waterfowl farmer.

McCarthyism was casting its shadow even into the far reaches of rural Maine. Muriel found herself followed on occasion and Roth was worried that his journals contained “a lot of incriminating material. And I thought, well, you’re no writer anymore. Muriel agreed. That’s not to be critical of her. We both felt that, why do I need them anymore? And I made a big pile of the stuff right out where she had had a little garden that summer and put a match to it.”

“Call It Sleep” has remained in print since 1964, recognized as a quietly respected American masterpiece. In the late 1950s, critical praise began to appear in scholarly publications. Just before it was to fall into public domain, Avon picked it up and released it as a paperback in 1964. Reviews were adulatory. “Of course the first one appeared in the New York Times by Irving Howe. I think it was the first time that a paperback had ever appeared on Page 1 of the New York Times (Book Review). The book was all over the place. A plane went down, there were five books floating around on the water, that sort of thing.” A Life photographer appeared at Roth’s doorway on his rural farm and even wanted photos of him killing and dressing geese and ducks. (He refused.)

Roth accepted an invitation to come to the D. H. Lawrence Ranch in Taos, N.M., in the mid-1960s. He was not at work on a book, but encouraged by the critical response and sales of the paperback edition of “Call It Sleep,” he had taken to quietly writing some autobiographical sketches again.

An Inviting Environment

While visiting Taos, he and Muriel decided it was time to quit Maine and found both the weather and open, Western environment of New Mexico inviting. They sold their farm and settled in Albuquerque.

Then the 1967 war in the Middle East broke out and Roth found himself profoundly affected by the event. In thinking back to the Israeli war for independence in 1948 he did not share the enthusiasm for the newly emerging Jewish state most American Jews experienced. “I remember one man asking me, ‘Aren’t you excited about it?’ and I said ‘No, I don’t give a damn.’ That summed up my attitude.”

In looking back even further, Roth remains honest about his indifference toward the Jewish refugees streaming out of Europe after World War II. “The only family I had (in Europe) was my father’s. And he said that he had lost--he counted them up--20-odd relatives had disappeared. And even that didn’t make an awful lot of difference.”

About the time of the ’67 war, the Roths were traveling in Spain. Roth was researching a story he wanted to write about a crypto-Jew, a hidden Jew, who, after the Inquisition, manages to sneak over to the New World with Cortez. He didn’t complete the piece, but felt as if an internal change was taking place. “That story, ‘As a Surveyor,’ is a story that I wrote still under the impression I was as good a Marxist (and I am in a sense) as I ever was and that I was still as remote from Judaism as I ever was, especially Diaspora Judaism, and yet here I was in Seville looking for material for a story about a Jew.”

He followed the war news with increasing uneasiness and felt himself breaking away from the party line. “I sided with the Jews when I was supposed to side with the Arabs. A deep contradiction awoke in me, a deep conflict. Which way am I going? And that’s when I started to write . . . I now met with a problem. How to re-establish some kind of unified personality. In Yiddish they would say to be a mensch .”

Roth has been at work since 1979 on what could be considered a sequel to “Call It Sleep” entitled “Mercy of a Rude Stream.” He handwrote “Call It Sleep” in university blue-books; he writes now on a recently acquired word processor.

An avid reader of scientific writing, he doesn’t read contemporary fiction. He feels little kinship with Saul Bellow, for example, claiming that Bellow, who started writing in the ‘40s, was creating out of a completely different milieu than that of the ‘30s. “I had to establish some kind of continuity between that which I broke off and then, for many, many years, had stopped. So all these guys in between were not of interest to me.

“In the process of achieving what I consider some kind of adulthood at a late age came simultaneously a repudiation of my mentor, my caller, Joyce,” Roth attests. He continues to believe that the author of “Ulysses” is the greatest writer in the English language, but feels that Joyce remained an essentially immature man because he could never reconnect with his own Irish people.

“I would think that the best bet (for an aspiring writer) is to stay with one’s own sources, with one’s own people. . . . As soon as you leave that, I don’t care if your name is Thomas Wolfe or Henry Roth or Jimmy Farroll, you have lost the sources that supplied you in the first place. . . . I had to become an adult, a man in the society in which I lived. And until I did there was no hope for me to write anything that would be coherent or unified. . . . 1934 . . . 1987. It took all that time,” Roth reflects, a little surprised at himself. And he quietly laughs.