Q and A with Willing Davidson

Issue of August 20, 2010/ 10 Elul 5770

Henry Roth's life is the stuff novels are made of. Roth was in his twenties when he published his masterpiece "Call it Sleep" in 1934. The story of David Schearl, a Jewish boy on the Lower East Side, the book received mixed reviews and little commercial attention. In 1964, a reprint of the book was given a glowing review on the cover of The New York Times Book Review and sold over a million copies. By then, Roth was in his forties living in Maine as a water fowl dresser and dealing with a case of writer's block that prevented him from publishing anything. Shortly before his death in 1995, Roth published his second work, a four-volume fictionalized account of his own life called "Mercy of a Rude Stream." The set, which included two volumes that were published after his death, received critical acclaim and Roth was hailed as having one of the greatest literary comebacks in history This past year saw the release of "An American Type," a book culled from a 2000 page manuscript Roth left over, put together by Willing Davidson, the fiction editor of The New Yorker.

Michael Orbach: What do you think caused Roth's writer's block?

Willing Davidson: We could speculate endlessly about what caused his writer's block, but certainly the mixed critical reception [to "Call it Sleep"] was a factor. Roth was a very anxious insecure person and to have his work in public and to not be received completely well was [devastating].

MO: What was Roth's relationship towards Zionism and Judaism?

WD: Roth was not a Zionist in his early life; he did not subscribe to the notion of being Jewish as having a sort of nationalist aspect to it. He wasn't enthusiastic about the creation of Israel, but then starting in the 60s he became much more sensitive to the Zionist project. The Six-Day War was when he first started to identify with the Jews as a nation and not just as his cultural background. After that he became increasingly devoted to Israel and the idea of Israel. He was never particularly religious [but] he began to view the idea of a Jewish homeland as important to him, as an important aspect of his identity.

MO: Why is "Call it Sleep" considered such a classic?

WD: "Call it Sleep" is really the first great novel that applies modernist sensibilities to the immigrant experience. What I mean by modernist is the idea that plain language is not sufficient to describe reality as it's actually lived. Henry Roth had to invent a mode of expression that would adequately convey what it means and feels to be a young Jewish immigrant at the turn of the century. [The novel's] rapturous passages and its sort of delight and terror in the actual English language and the way it fuses English and Yiddish into this new, extraordinary energetic dialect - it was something that had never been seen on the page. I think that's part of what makes "Call it Sleep" such a good novel. It's just a terrific evocation of what it feels like to be a child.

MO: How do you think Roth's later works compares to "Call it Sleep"?

WD: "Call it Sleep" is a long book, an extremely intensely focused book, and it takes place over a very short time span. "Mercy of a Rude Stream" is a much more sprawling epic novel; it turns its attention outwards. Where "Call it Sleep" was about interiority, "Mercy of a Rude Stream" turns its attention to New York and the America that surrounded Roth. It's much more observational when it comes to viewing the outside world.

MO: Does "An American Type" continue that?

WD: ["An American Type"] reaches outside of New York and examines America and what it means to be an immigrant in America. You can see a progression from very tightly focused on the few blocks of David Schearl's childhood to "Mercy of a Rude Stream" which broadens its focus to encompass New York and a time span of growing up to "An American Type" which views America as a whole and to be a Jewish immigrant as a whole. In this book, Roth's narrator travels across America and encounters all these various archetypes. The narrator rides freight trains across America, he goes to L.A., he's on welfare, he sees just such a large swath of Depression-era America.

MO: Where does the title come from?

WD: In the book, the narrator refers to someone or something as an American type. He describes his future wife, a Protestant New England woman as an American type and all these different people as classical types. The irony is a Jewish immigrant who comes over from Europe at the turn of the century and becomes a writer and also a manual laborer, who is Jewish but marries a Protestant.

MO: Is there anything left of Roth's that hasn't been published?

WD: I think this is the last we'll hear of Roth. The well is dry as far as I know.