Saturday, June 12, 2010

Henry Roth's Sleepy Serenade


As mentioned before, I believe Roth may have lived at 749 E. 9th Street. The second image is of Henry with his father Hyman, his mother Lena and his sister Rose. It was taken in 1911.
Other images are representative of that era and area of the les from Berenice Abbott
below
an excerpt from the nytimes
Breathing Life Into Henry Roth
By CHARLES McGRATH
Published: May 23, 2010
The writer Henry Roth was a tortured, hard-luck case who at the end life enjoyed an unexpected redemption. Blocked for decades, full of doubt and self-loathing, he began writing again in his late 80s, even though crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, and finished four new novels, two of which he lived to see into print before his death in 1995. Now, almost miraculously, there is a fifth, “An American Type,” which W. W. Norton will publish on June 7.
That the book exists at all is largely due to the efforts of Willing Davidson, a 32-year-old fiction editor at The New Yorker, who in background and bearing couldn’t be less like the prickly, self-doubting Roth, but nevertheless felt a deep connection to his life and work.
“An American Type,” like everything Roth wrote, is autobiographical, and describes a trip he made to the West Coast and back in 1938, hitchhiking and riding on freight trains for part of the way. It’s by far the sunniest thing Roth ever wrote and ends with the marriage of Ira Stigman, his fictional alter ego, to a character called M, a stand-in for Muriel Parker, a composer who was married to Roth for 51 years of Job-like hardship.
Roth’s first novel, “Call It Sleep,” is now considered a classic, a luminous evocation of a Jewish immigrant childhood on the Lower East Side; but when it came out in 1934, it sold poorly and was attacked by left-wing critics for being too artsy and politically unaware. A chastened Roth, then an ardent Communist, determined to write a proletarian novel and worked on it unsuccessfully for years before finally burning most of it. In 1964 “Call It Sleep” was reissued in paperback, and in a front-page essay in The New York Times Book Review the critic Irving Howe called it “one of the few genuinely distinguished novels written by a 20th-century American.” Roth, however, tried to dissociate himself from the novel. “The man who wrote that book at the age of 27 is dead,” he said. “I am a totally different man.” He was living in self-imposed exile in rural Maine, where after a series of odd jobs and a stint as an attendant at the state mental hospital he was working as what he called a “waterfowl dresser,” slaughtering and plucking ducks and geese. He hadn’t published a word in years.

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