Poignant biography of a writer’s pain

FEW novelists have drawn more directly on their own lives than Henry Roth, first in his powerful portrait of an immigrant family on New York’s Lower East Side, “Call It Sleep” (1934), and much later, after decades of writer’s block, in the four published novels of his even more overtly self-revelatory roman-fleuve, “Mercy of a Rude Stream.” Why then do we need a biography?

The same question occurred to the author of this one. A literary critic who’s written on Camus, Steven G. Kellman says he was reluctant to take on the job when Roth’s editor, Robert Weil, and agent, Roslyn Targ, approached him: “For a year and a half, I pondered the many reasons that I, originally trained in the New Criticism to trust the tale and not the teller, ought not to proffer chatter about the author of ‘Call It Sleep.’ ” In some ways, as Kellman notes, “all literary biography is redundant. Dante already delivers himself, more than anyone else could, in his ‘Commedia.’ ” But in Roth’s case, the connection between characters and incidents in life and those in his novels is so direct, a biographer well may wonder what there is to add.

Fortunately, as Kellman goes on to demonstrate in his thoughtful and enlightening “Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth,” there is much that a good biographer can do to enhance our appreciation of literature and our understanding of the circumstances of a writer’s life. One of the most valuable things that Kellman brings to the story of this fiercely emotional, painfully self-analytical writer is distance and objectivity: a sense of perspective as welcome as flowers that bloom in the spring.

Not only does Kellman track down details, enabling us to discern the difference between what happened and Roth’s often overblown, more lurid fictional versions of the past, but this biographer’s calm, orderly and generally sympathetic manner of telling Roth’s story serves as a nice balance to the anguished, self-lacerating, tortuous convolutions of Roth’s later work.

Roth’s life (1906-1995) was a hard road, pretty much from beginning to end. The only son of an ill-matched Jewish couple from Eastern Europe, Henry came to America as an infant in his mother’s arms. His most poignant early memories were of New York’s crowded, squalid Lower East Side, the setting of “Call It Sleep.” Although enveloped in the love of an overprotective mother, his childhood was far from secure. His father was hot tempered and unpredictable, and, like countless other immigrants who came to America dreaming of a better life, he did not find it.

The first big upheaval of Henry’s life, however, was the family’s move to Harlem -- to the outward eye, a somewhat better neighborhood. For Henry, then in the third grade, the move was traumatic, uprooting him from a secure, safely all-Jewish environment, to a more threatening one featuring tough Italian and Irish kids. Thanks to public schools and libraries, Roth received a good education, including a degree from City College of New York. And thanks to the love and support of an extraordinary woman, Eda Lou Walton, a denizen of Greenwich Village who introduced him to the Modernist masterpieces of T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, Roth was inspired by Joyce’s example to turn the dross of his childhood woes into the gold of art in “Call It Sleep.”

Contrary to the myth that later developed, Kellman points out, Roth’s first novel, far from being ignored, garnered critical praise even then. Roth, however, was unable to supply his publisher with a second book. A significant factor that Kellman slights may have been money: The book didn’t make much, despite good reviews. Not coincidentally, that same year, 1934, Roth joined the Communist Party and became caught up in misadventures that didn’t even furnish him with the ideologically appropriate material he’d hoped for.

Roth’s life became a succession of menial jobs, some skilled, some not, although he had enough of a literary reputation to be invited to the prestigious writers colony Yaddo in 1938, where he met Muriel Parker, a promising composer and Mayflower descendant who became a devoted wife. A hard life it was for them both, but Roth was entirely faithful.

Roth was resurrected, so to speak, in 1964 with the reissue of “Call It Sleep” and Irving Howe’s front-page piece in the New York Times Book Review enshrining it as “one of the few genuinely distinguished novels written by a 20th-century American.” Returning after so much time to his lost literary vocation, Roth spent his final years probing the causes of his writer’s block and getting on with the task of transforming his life story into art. Ruthlessly honest, he dredged up homosexual anxieties, guilty memories of (heterosexual) incest, Jewish self-hatred and anger at himself for his naive involvement with communism.

Many writers have only managed to write a first novel based on their own experience because they lack the imagination and inventiveness to go beyond that. Bernard Malamud once suggested that what caused some prolific writers, like Hemingway, to decline into shallowness in their later years was a failure to confront their personal demons. Kellman’s book shows us, more simply and clearly than Roth himself, how this courageous and cantankerous man resurrected himself as a writer by returning to his roots and engaging with those demons.

Merle Rubin is a contributing writer to Book Review.