Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth

by Steven G. Kellman

Henry Roth (1906-1995), author of the great immigrant novel Call It Sleep, is one of the giants of American literature, yet for years he has lacked a biography. After completing his first book in 1934, Roth lapsed into a legendary six-decade silence, only to reemerge with Mercy of a Rude Stream, hailed as "a landmark of the American literary century" (David Mehegan, Boston Globe) and "as provocative as anything in the chapters of St. Augustine" (Stefan Kanfer, Los Angeles Times Book Review). In following Roth's tortured life from his childhood on the Jewish Lower East Side to his twilight years in New Mexico, literary critic Steven Kellman has uncovered FBI files, spoken with family members and friends, and gained access to the tape in which Roth discussed the long-buried incest of his youth. Redemption is the Shakespearean saga of a great writer doomed to a life of psychological torment, but saved in the end by his search for deliverance.

Genres: Biography

384 pages, Hardcover

First published August 15, 2005

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many literary biographies attempt to draw resonance from the author's body of work and find similar bubbles of meaning e.g. compare/contrast in the artist's life. Other efforts challenge the purity of aesthetic achievement with sordid list of crimes, establishing a delicious tension. Redemption is easily in the latter camp. This isn't like Paul Theroux's one-sided version of events agon V.S. Naipaul. No, Mr. Kellman likely didn't need to probe very deep to uncover the misogyny, the incest, the hectoring which stain his adult life.

I loved Call It Sleep, its palette of voices the snarl of misunderstandings, the hopeful bend towards assimilation and the knackered xenophobia both within and outside the shoebox homestead. Joel bought me the biography the following Christmas and it duly disturbed me.

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This could have been better written, with less assertions of Roth's talent and more proof, and less repetition. (But then, I dislike Call It Sleep, so Reader, beware of this review.) The empty years (so to speak) from 1940 to 1963, when Roth wrote little and published less, are quickly dealt with. It's hard to cover stagnation (the hard upbringing Roth provided his two children is certainly clear), but Kellman manages this era well.

Roth was a minor writer, author of one early novel that shows new york city (and only a small part of it) that would be of interest to, well, people who like new york city, and the historical nyc at that. This biography will probably be the last word for quite some time, unless further correspondence or manuscripts emerge to change or complicate Roth's life story.

[David Partikian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Novelist Henry Roth faded into anonymity in the mid-1930’s soon after publishing his Modernist American immigrant masterpiece, Call It Sleep* which—though not poorly received—did nothing to line the struggling writer’s pockets with any revenue during the Great Depression. Roth pretty much completely disappears to rural Maine, where he slaughters waterfowl for a meager living. There were no bookshelves and no literary works on the shelves in his home. His two sons did not even know he had written a book.

After rediscovery in the mid-60’s, Roth lives modestly, moving to Albuquerque with his wife, a composer, and gains recognition for his initial novel, so long after the fact that he begrudgingly renewed the copyright shortly before it would lapse. It is only in his last few years, as a rickety octogenarian, that he emerges from his six-decade long writer’s block to finish a tetralogy of autobiographical works that pick up where Call It Sleep left off.** The last two volumes are published posthumously. In the second volume he confesses to incestuous affairs with both his sister and his cousin. Thus is the extremely intriguing life of Henry Roth, much of which is largely chronicled in his own later autobiographical works, the latter tetralogy appearing almost sixty years later than his masterpiece.

So why write a biography on a writer who chronicled his own life so obsessively? Perhaps because the subjectivity needs to be pared back to get an accurate accounting. Perhaps because the path “chosen” by this author is so bizarre and idiosyncratic that we need help in interpreting it. And then there is that staggering confession of incest, with not one, but two family members, which is best analyzed with a critical and non-judgmental eye. For the majority of human history, incest has been the rule rather than the exception, and to attempt to understand requires not rendering judgment.

Finally, there is the added flavoring of a life in the Village among a cavalcade of Bohemians, all while supported by a poet and faculty member of the NYU English department with whom he had a long love affair that has similarities to that of Thomas Wolfe’s. There is the inevitable break after a fruitless stop at the even then fashionable Yaddo, fruitless except for finding his wife and life partner. There is also the inevitable infatuation with communist ideology and the requisite police surveillance, even for a forgotten author, which was so common in the 30’s-50’s.

In short, Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth is a book that after research, is just begging to write itself. The tale is so fascinating and intriguing that Roth’s biographer, Steven Kellman, need only relate the facts as he uncovers them to make the book extremely compelling. And, by withholding judgment and refraining from a close literary analysis of an author’s books, Kellman accomplishes what is so hard in literary biographies: a book where an exasperated reader does not end up skipping pages, at least until the very end.

Of course, the refraining from over-analysis was, perhaps, not by design. After all, the author was living in a most non-literary, non-descript fashion in bizarre obscurity for most of his life. However, it is precisely the non-literary details of Roth’s life that are so fascinating and enigmatic. So instead of a book by an author who gains renown and is feted and adored, we get descriptions of a resilient man living in rural Maine a step above abject poverty. We get descriptions of him being expelled from Stuyvesant HS (my alma matter) for theft after one semester in 1920. We get the motley characters and brilliant intellectuals who fueled his creativity in 1930’s Greenwich Village; this biography is fun and much more entertaining than a kaleidoscopic chronicle of life in the Village.

In short, this biography could keep someone who hasn’t even read Call It Sleep entertained. It is a brilliant chronicle of a poor immigrant coming of age in the 20’s and 30’s who barely escapes the fate of Herman Melville, since a group of assiduous afficianados rediscover Roth before he might lay in some tomb in the Bronx like the embittered author of Moby-Dick. From the slums of the Lower East Side, to immigrant Harlem, to Greenwich Village, to rural Maine, to Spain and, finally, Albuquerque Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth is a rarity: a literary biography that is a page turner.

* https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
**I have not yet tackled the tetralogy written at the end of his life, but those volumes are now beckoning from my basement library.

[Bookmarks Magazine]

Irving Howe's 1964 description of Roth's Call It Sleep as "one of the few genuinely distinguished novels written by a 20th-century American" catapulted Roth to fame. Yet the author's decades-long silence became legendary. In the first book-length biography of Roth, Kellman sensitively probes this mystery. He posits Roth as his abusive father's psychological victim__and as a result, paranoid, self-loathing, and vengeful__which seemed to sit well with critics. Although reviewers praised the way Kellman never failed to connect Roth's life to America's larger cultural milieu, many sensed a lingering secrecy to the writer's life. Most agreed, however, that this birth-to-life chronicle is "a trenchant exploration of the relationship between the horrors of life and the saving power of art" (San Francisco Chronicle).

This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.

[Cyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kellman's prose is smooth and erudite, surpassing that of his subject in its readability.

H. Roth was a fascinating man whose writing career was cut short by his inability to address his guilt at incest with his sister and younger niece. For an autobiographical fiction writer whose life is his work, this was nearly the end of his career. However, near his death, Roth churned out volumes of thinly-veiled fictional biography that addresses his "bondage."

[Mark]

Because Henry Roth's novels are essentially biographical, a literary biography of him was long overdue. Fortunately, this one is better than I would have expected: Steven G. Kellmann writes the life of Henry Roth with sensitivity and psychological insight, while never losing control of the latter category of analysis. First rate for those interested in this important American author.