Are editors polishing away Henry Roths neurotic genius?
I can’t think of another novelist as skinless as Henry Roth. The author of Call It Sleep (1934), a triumphantly bruised account of a greenhorn’s childhood on the Lower East Side, was a shy man, Galician-born, who never developed the hide that would have protected him against fame and its expectations. Instead of publishing a second novel, he fell more or less silent. When he managed to write again after 50 years of poverty and anonymity, he released a stream of confessional narrative that feels like it built up during a lifetime of being rubbed raw. Self-revelation, for Roth, was a matter of compulsion, not policy. Had he been cannier, savvier, a better career manager, he would have cleaned up these late-in-life effusions before the machinery of posthumous literary reputation went to work cleaning them up for him. The first four volumes extracted by an editor from that flow were published as Mercy of a Rude Stream. Roth saw, and was pleased with, three of the volumes, though he lived t
