Henry Roth: Call It Sleep

[Mirabell]

Wiki

Henry Roth (8 February 1906 - 13 October 1995) was an American novelist and short story writer.

Roth was born in Tysmenitz near Stanislav, Galicia, Austro-Hungary. His first published novel Call It Sleep (originally published in 1934) achieved a second life since its re-publication and critical re-appraisal in the 1960s when it sold 1,000,000 copies and was hailed as an overlooked Depression-era masterpiece and classic novel of immigration. It is widely regarded as a masterpiece of Jewish American literature. Call It Sleep was dedicated to his then mistress and muse, Eda Lou Walton.

After the book's publication, Roth began and abandoned a second novel and wrote several short stories. In the early 1940s he abandoned writing, and moved from New York to Maine and later New Mexico, and worked as a firefighter, laborer, and teacher, among other occupations, before retiring to a trailer park in Albuquerque.

Roth originally didn't welcome the new-found success that Call It Sleep received, valuing his privacy instead. However, he soon began to write again, at first short stories. At the age of 73, he began work on a series of novels that grew to six volumes, with final editing completed shortly before his death. The first four of these were published (two of them posthumously) as a cycle called Mercy of a Rude Stream while the last two manuscript volumes remain unpublished. He died in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States in 1995.

Roth failed to garner the acclaim some say he deserves, perhaps because he failed to produce another novel for sixty years. His massive writer's block after the publication of Call it Sleep is often attributed to Roth's personal problems, such as depression, political conflicts, or his unwillingness to confront events in his past that haunted him, such as having incestuous relationships with both his sister and cousin, which are written about in the later work.

on the novel

http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.p...true&UID=11036

Call It Sleep exemplifies Henry Roth’s fascination with modernist technique; the influence of James Joyce is apparent throughout the novel, as are typical modernist themes of alienation and isolation. As a cultural portrait, Call It Sleep paints a vivid picture of immigrant life in early twentieth century New York, specifically that of the very large immigrant Jewish population. As a commentary upon the struggles of a minority group, Call It Sleep offers a poignant tale of a young boy and his often unsettling experiences both at home and in his community.
When Henry Roth began working on Call It Sleep in the summer of 1930, his intent was to write autobiographically. He wrote the first 75 pages of his draft in the first person, strictly adhering to the facts of his own life. Yet Roth admits that a struggle arose - a struggle between the factually-oriented autobiographer and the novelist who wanted to present different ideas and the freedom to imagine. Consequently, the resulting novel presents what Roth felt was an embellished portrait of his soul: an honest portrayal of his own childhood that reflects a young Jewish boy’s perceptions of his world and of his faith.
The young Jewish boy who serves as Roth’s double in Call It Sleep is David Schearl who is a mere toddler when he arrives with his mother Genya at Ellis Island in 1907, both of them immigrants from Austria-Hungary who have been sent for by Genya’s husband Albert. The novel depicts David as he passes through seven or so years of childhood and deals with personal doubts and fears, volatile family relationships, difficult social adjustments, and a restrictive yet paradoxically liberating religion.
Part of the lyrical excellence of Call It Sleep derives from Roth’s mix of Yiddish and English within his narrative. Yiddish phrases, as used in the Schearl home, represent the purity of both religion and culture, while the broken English phrases that David learns “on the street” represent not only the encroachment of the American, Christian society but also the beginning of a loss of cultural identity. Additionally, the inclusion of Hebrew and Polish terms - the latter which the young David barely understands at all - serve to heighten a sense of mystery about forbidden things within the novel, including a tantalizing question about David’s parentage.
Another memorable aspect of the novel is Roth’s use of Hebrew texts as structural elements: among the texts Roth quotes or alludes to are Isaiah, the Haftorah Jethro, and the Chad Gadya - all well-known Jewish texts. The use of these texts emphasizes the strong Jewish faith that is under fire in the novel and points the contrast with the Christian milieu into which David is thrust as soon as he enters school.
Lewis Gannett writes that Call It Sleep is suggestive of “the great Russians or German Romantics”

[Mirabell]

I posted these quotes because words fail me when it comes to this incredible novel. It's obviously indebted to Joyce, but it's different in many ways. It's a religious novel, I have rarely read such clear and inspired passages on revelations and on a young mind's coming to terms with spirituality. It's a realist novel, brilliantly evoking the streets where Roth was raised. And it's a linguistically inventive and sparkling novel, changing between yiddish, standard (american) english and ny dialect back and forth, invoking the confusion of someone stranded in a foreign tongue with only his ears to guide him.

[lionel]

Originally Posted by Mirabell

It's a realist novel, brilliantly evoking the streets where Roth was raised.

Quite. But your next sentence begins with 'And' rather than 'But', in spite of the fact that the narrator makes a leap from realism to modernism, or simply that he's melding the two (which is of course the most interesting part). You note:

Originally Posted by Mirabell

And it's a linguistically inventive and sparkling novel, changing between yiddish, standard (american) english and ny dialect back and forth, invoking the confusion of someone stranded in a foreign tongue with only his ears to guide him.

So what's happening here? I've spent a considerable time trying to understand British working-class literature (mainly about 30 almost unknown authors in the interwar years but many more outside that period too), and have a passing knowledge of American and French working-class fiction, but I won't go into more detail as this is not the place, and anyway I intend to put out a broader appeal for working-class examples of working-class fiction in other countries.

But – and this is the main interest for me – what you see in Henry Roth is certainly the influence of Joyce (as Steven G. Kellman notes in passing), but maybe most of this is by cultural osmosis rather than through reading the actual books. Who cares? It's still there.

It's generally still assumed that (British) working-class fiction is realist, almost by definition, and such is the case in the vast majority of British working-class books I've read (before the coming of the amazing James Kelman, please note), but in a number of works – notably those by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, James Hanley and perhaps above all Lionel Britton – there is an existence (huge or tiny) of modernist elements that work against the social(ist) realist norm. It doesn't seem to fit, but there are many reasons for this.

I just wonder if working-class literature in other languages operates under a different aesthetic, because the French model looks a little different to start with. Dunno, just feeling around.

[Mirabell]

Realism and naturalism are like few other movements in literature vastly different from culture to culture. There have been copious comparisons between for instance Zola and Gissing.

However. You conflate "realist" and "working class". There is IMO no reason why realism should not mean linguistically inventive. The inventiveness in many ways can enhance the realist element, and it does in "Call it sleep". Roth found a perfect way to illustrate the linguistic predicament of immigrants in his use of English.This is in the service of a rather strong realism, and for instance German naturalists have used a similar tack. Hauptmann's early plays often only seem to contain 'just' dialect. Actually he is using several different layers of language and translation.

No, the "and" is well placed where it is.

The 'fantastic', modernist elements are a different kettle of fish, of course, but the linguistic inventiveness isn't part of them. largely.

[lionel]

Originally Posted by Mirabell

However. You conflate "realist" and "working class".

I don't at all, I was talking about a (somewhat false) assumption, which has always existed with critics and readers, that working-class fiction should be realist: certainly in the British 1930s books I was mainly talking about, with, for instance, their endless descriptions of work in mines and mining acccidents, where some books tend to merge into one.

The annus mirabilis of modernism came in 1922 (Ulysses, The Waste Land, etc), and by the beginning of the 1930s in England it had given way to the Auden generation, with more of an emphasis of realism and political reality. In the thirties, that reality was strongly left-wing, and modernism was considered by influential marxists such as Lukács to be bourgeois. To stand a chance in the market place, and perhaps of being translated into Russian, a 'proletarian' novel had to be realist: otherwise, it would be ignored or critically condemned. And to add to that, many English critics (such as Connolly and Swinnerton) thought modernism elitist, which was a slightly different criticism. The working-class modernist writer really didn't stand a chance, although a few books (or, to be more exact, small parts of them) slipped through the net and were accepted as towing the socialist line.

Yes, there are very strong realist elements in Call It Sleep (1934), along of course with strong moments of interiority (not at all usual in a realist novel), and in my Noonday Press edition it's interesting that Afred Kazin, in his Introduction, describes this novel in general as 'written out of the full resources of modernism'. Certainly working-class modernist literary production in America wasn't subjected to the same scorn as it was in Britain.

[Mirabell]

Originally Posted by lionel

I don't at all, I was talking about a (somewhat false) assumption, which has always existed with critics and readers, that working-class fiction should be realist: certainly in the British 1930s books I was mainly talking about, with, for instance, their endless descriptions of work in mines and mining acccidents, where some books tend to merge into one.

The annus mirabilis of modernism came in 1922 (Ulysses, The Waste Land, etc), and by the beginning of the 1930s in England it had given way to the Auden generation, with more of an emphasis of realism and political reality. In the thirties, that reality was strongly left-wing, and modernism was considered by influential marxists such as Lukács to be bourgeois. To stand a chance in the market place, and perhaps of being translated into Russian, a 'proletarian' novel had to be realist: otherwise, it would be ignored or critically condemned. And to add to that, many English critics (such as Connolly and Swinnerton) thought modernism elitist, which was a slightly different criticism. The working-class modernist writer really didn't stand a chance, although a few books (or, to be more exact, small parts of them) slipped through the net and were accepted as towing the socialist line.

... Certainly working-class modernist literary production in America wasn't subjected to the same scorn as it was in Britain.

The things you write about British mechanisms are very fascinating indeed. A sign of how little of British 1930s goings-on (?) I am aware of is that I know none of the critics or writers you cited in this or the last post. Hugely irritating. Whence your interest in that period?

In GDR literature much of the scorn for non-realist literature is due to the fact that they wanted to not have merely an intellectual elite lording it over the workers, who, after all, have had no opportunity to educated themselves in a serious manner. And I do see the point. Witness this thread Is fiction important? with several people agreeing that literature is important and can affect minds and the society. But then they say: well you DO have to understand it first, do you. This shuts out the bulk of society and not just today, but even more so then. And if you note my own post on the topic there, the books I stressed were simple novels, easy to grasp and shattering in their effect. This is all so much blah but I wanted, from my pov, to try to explain the bias you described. Your post does suggest you already know this so if you do, I'm sorry.

[lionel]

Originally Posted by Mirabell

Whence your interest in that period?

Don’t apologise – that’s an interesting thread.

In between other things, I’m steadily working on a book – part (critical) biography, part novel – on the forgotten working-class modernist writer Lionel Britton (1887–1971). Britton’s only published novel, Hunger and Love (1931), is in part a representation of a trip inside the brain of Arthur Phelps, the (virtually only) character, and most of the 705 pages are taken up by ramblings about evolution, philosophical speculations, stream of consciousness, and Arthur eking out an existence on poverty wages.

Of inestimable help to me has been the Lionel Britton Collection at Southern Illinois University, which houses 45 cubic feet of space – in 90 boxes – of Britton’s correspondence and unpublished works: eventually, is you read enough letters, it becomes clear that, after three published plays and one novel, he would never have accepted being published by anyone but himself. But he never made it. I believe Hunger and Love was, and may even still be, the only first novel ever published without any emendations being made, not even a comma. (Britton insisted on it, or else he’d go elsewhere.) But then, the amazing five-page Introduction by Bertrand Russell, full of praise for the novel, no doubt helped to persuade the publisher a little.

For just a year now, I’ve been receiving emails almost daily from one of Britton’s great-nephews, who’s manically hunting down his family tree, and has also been a great help in fitting together so many pieces of Britton’s life.

Hunger and Love is not a major novel, by the way, but it’s certainly a major working-class British novel.

My (frequently slightly altered, of course) Wikipedia entry on him gives a few brief details, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

[Mirabell]

Originally Posted by lionel

Don’t apologise – that’s an interesting thread.

In between other things, I’m steadily working on a book – part (critical) biography, part novel – on the forgotten working-class modernist writer Lionel Britton (1887–1971). Britton’s only published novel, Hunger and Love (1931), is in part a representation of a trip inside the brain of Arthur Phelps, the (virtually only) character, and most of the 705 pages are taken up by ramblings about evolution, philosophical speculations, stream of consciousness, and Arthur eking out an existence on poverty wages.

Of inestimable help to me has been the Lionel Britton Collection at Southern Illinois University, which houses 45 cubic feet of space – in 90 boxes – of Britton’s correspondence and unpublished works: eventually, is you read enough letters, it becomes clear that, after three published plays and one novel, he would never have accepted being published by anyone but himself. But he never made it. I believe Hunger and Love was, and may even still be, the only first novel ever published without any emendations being made, not even a comma. (Britton insisted on it, or else he’d go elsewhere.) But then, the amazing five-page Introduction by Bertrand Russell, full of praise for the novel, no doubt helped to persuade the publisher a little.

For just a year now, I’ve been receiving emails almost daily from one of Britton’s great-nephews, who’s manically hunting down his family tree, and has also been a great help in fitting together so many pieces of Britton’s life.

Hunger and Love is not a major novel, by the way, but it’s certainly a major working-class British novel.

My (frequently slightly altered, of course) Wikipedia entry on him gives a few brief details, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

whoa.

The only in-depth stuff I did (wrote a couple of dumb essay on that) was a stint on early british naturalism, gissing, maugham, moore), so I am hugely interested the book is out of print, though, which is saddening.

[lionel]

Originally Posted by Mirabell

whoa.

The only in-depth stuff I did (wrote a couple of dumb essay on that) was a stint on early british naturalism, gissing, maugham, moore), so I am hugely interested the book is out of print, though, which is saddening.

As far as I know, there were only ever three impressions of the first English edition, all in 1931, plus an American edition and a Russian translation – some on the left gave it a mixed reception, but as it's a very long, and very loud, scream against just about every institution (particularly religion, capitalist government, and the business world), the Russians were very impressed with it, even if they didn't realise Britton was an anarchist.

But that reminds me – I've really got to get down to working on a proposal to relevant publishers to see about the possibility of another edition.

[Mirabell]

Originally Posted by lionel

as it's a very long, and very loud, scream against just about every institution (particularly religion, capitalist government, and the business world), the Russians were very impressed with it, even if they didn't realise Britton was an anarchist.

oh you are cruel.

[e joseph]

Anyone ever read anything by him other than Call it Sleep? Read it last year and was floored. Just curious how his other work holds up.