Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth. By Steven G. Kellman. New York: Norton, 2005. Pp. 371. $25.95.

In 1958, New York City resident Harold U. Ribalow trekked to rural Maine to converse with Henry Roth, a literary curiosity whose only book to that date, the exceptional 1934 immigrant novel Call It Sleep, had been long out of print. Ribalow, an advocate for contemporary Jewish-American literature and culture, offered to help Roth get the novel republished; at the very least, Ribalow explained, Roth needed to renew his copyright on the book, which would soon slip into the public domain. Acting as Roth’s unofficial representative, Ribalow successfully placed the novel first with Pageant Books in 1960 and then with Avon, a paperback imprint, in 1964. Ironically, the unprecedented popularity of the Avon edition necessitated Roth’s hiring a professional agent. Relieved of his representational duties, Ribalow suggested that he might continue to serve the novelist, but as his biographer. Roth declined the offer. “That involves material I would rather not disclose—yet,” Roth told him.

It took another three decades, Steven G. Kellman writes in Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth, before the novelist disclosed that upsetting material. In 1994, one year prior to his death at age eighty-nine, Roth resumed publishing book-length autobiographical fiction. Throughout the four-novel sequence Mercy of a Rude Stream, Roth tackled the question that had dogged him for sixty years: Why had he suffered a debilitating silence following the initial appearance of Call It Sleep? Prior to the 1990s, Kellman explains, Roth alternated between two standard answers, the first stemming from his Communist Party membership: “The seductive abstractions of socialist realism had lured him from the human basis of his art,” the biographer recites. “And alienation from the Jewish community severed his ties with the muse,” he continues, repeating Roth’s second stock response. But throughout the bulky manuscript that Roth delivered to his editor at St. Martin’s Press near the end of his life, Roth offered a very different and, Kellman argues, more compelling reason for his legendary writer’s block: he was subject for decades to paralyzing guilt owing to a prolonged history of incest committed with his sister, beginning when she was ten years old and continuing into early adulthood, and with a thirteen-year-old cousin.

This guilt explains why numerous journalists who interviewed Roth at the height of his republished novel’s popularity in 1965 encountered an oddly reluctant literary celebrity who seemed to resent and even fear exposure. It also sheds light on Roth’s rebuffing of Ribalow and, later, novelist Leonard Michaels when each suggested writing a biography of the author. That duty has now fallen to Kellman, who manages to recount Roth’s full litany of excuses and musings about silence while never neglecting Rose Broder (née Roth) and her central role in this painful drama. Kellman’s main task is to determine the precise extent to which Roth reshaped his own experiences in his five autobiographical novels—which draw heavily on Roth’s childhood, teenage years, and early twenties—and in “Batch 2,” a 2,000-page unpublished manuscript that continues the narrative of Ira Stigman, Roth’s debased alter ego in Mercy of a Rude Stream, from his time as an aspiring novelist in Greenwich Village through the mid-1940s when, as had Roth, he departs New York City to serve out a nonliterary life in rural New England. (As for “Batch 1,” that became the four volumes of Mercy of a Rude Stream.)

Kellman is on safest ground when making general observations such as: the character Larry Gordon from Mercy of a Rude Stream is a slightly altered version of Roth’s high-school friend Lester Winter, an assimilated Jew whose polish and worldliness put Roth to shame. Or: Larry’s mature lover, Edith Welles, is a stand-in for New York University literature professor Eda Lou Walton, who later also became Roth’s lover and literary mentor. (Call It Sleep is dedicated to Walton.)

Typically, Kellman is careful when shifting his inferences from the general to the specific as well. “Much of Roth’s continuing resentment toward his own father would be reflected in his description of Ira Stigman’s father as ‘a mean, stingy, screwy little louse,’” Kellman writes, making both a comparison and a distinction between Roth’s father and his literary counterpart. Referring to a scene from “Batch 2” set in 1944, by which time Roth had married the composer Muriel Parker, Kellman concludes, “While it is unlikely that the dialogue he conjured up to recreate the tense confrontation with his in-laws is accurate verbatim, it surely captures the sad drama that was being played out that summer.”

There are times, however, when Kellman is less meticulous. About Roth’s lady friends, he writes: “Walton thought of Parker as a prim midwesterner, and she railed against her rival, insisting that the liaison would mean the extinction of all Roth’s literary ambitions.” But the only documentation Kellman cites here is Roth’s unpublished manuscript, which leaves unresolved whether this description applies to Roth’s mentor and his fiancée, to their fictional approximations, or both.

This is an important distinction. Roth hoped that by making his grand sexual confession in Mercy of a Rude Stream he could redeem himself as a writer and human being, but he made no secret of the fact that he was often fictionalizing the books’ details. In 1994, he told his editor that, unlike Ira Stigman, he never contemplated suicide when caught stealing an expensive pen from a high-school classmate, though the plot of A Diving Rock on the Hudson, volume two of Mercy of a Rude Stream, pivots on precisely such a scene. He also testified that his fictional accounts of Ira Stigman’s sexual activities with his sister were exaggerated “to intensify the revulsion he felt over his own behavior with Rose.” Further complicating matters is the fact that the final two volumes of Mercy of a Rude Stream were published posthumously, after considerable editing by Robert Weil of St. Martin’s Press and Roth’s long-time assistant, Felicia Jean Steele, who collaborated on pruning and shaping the bloated manuscripts and even drafted the concluding paragraph of volume four—a passage, Kellman notes, that was singled out for praise by reviewers.

Clearly, Roth’s fictional oeuvre offers a textbook example of the obfuscated author figure whom Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault pronounced dead or, at the very least, irrelevant to the literary world of the 1960s. Yet a biographer has no choice but to look closely at the central figure inhabiting and sometimes narrating Roth’s fiction. “Roth wrote most powerfully when stimulated by his own personal memories,” Kellman informs us. It follows, then, that Roth’s haunted recollections of violating the incest taboo did not in isolation block his writing career for half a century; rather, his guilt and self-loathing first had to mesh with his innately autobiographical artistic impulses, thereby leading any fictional narrative Roth might devise back to the angst-ridden episodes in his life that he most feared revisiting, shutting down the creative process.

Evidence from both Roth’s fictionalized manuscripts andhis writing life is consistent with this interpretation. The original narrative design of Call It Sleep was to have included Roth’s entire autobiographical trajectory from ghetto childhood to Greenwich Village artist. But as Kellman explains, that would have meant confronting harsh truths about sexual abominations and other disgraces, which the young artist was not prepared to do. Instead, Roth ended his masterpiece with the protagonist still safely prepubescent.

Even so, Roth sought to follow publication of Call It Sleep immediately with a successor novel about an immigrant teenager. But when he arrived chronologically at the episodes of incest in his personal history, he abandoned the project. Predictably, an attempt to write a proletarian novel about a pugnacious blue-collar gentile took the author too far afield from his deepest personal concerns and ended in a manuscript bonfire. A second attempt at an autobiographical sequel to Call It Sleep in 1952 also culminated in flames. Not until Roth reached his advanced years did he accept that personal memories both drove and blocked the composition of his fiction, and that not only could he risk awakening the monsters from his adolescence but he would need to if he were ever to weave a thread of continuity through what Kellman calls his “patchy life” and thereby find redemption.

Kellman’s book is a perilous biographical project for a number of reasons, including the fact that many Roth scholars as well as his editor openly reject Roth’s ultimate explanation for his silence, professing loyalty instead to the stock explanations Roth offered while still hiding his shameful secret. Kellman at first resisted entreaties from Roth’s editor and agent to write about their deceased client’s life. But he ultimately threw himself fully into the project, scouring numerous archives, interviewing most of Roth’s surviving relatives and acquaintances, and consulting unpublished dissertations and M.A. theses as well as FBI reports on Roth. As a result, the book manages both to maintain its focus on the truncation of Roth’s career and to reveal a trove of fascinating anecdotes about the author’s publication record.

Chapter 12, “Back from Oblivion,” amusingly recounts desperate efforts by Avon and its education editor, Peter Mayer, to satisfy demand for their paperback edition of Call It Sleep once they had been notified that a glowing review penned by Irving Howe was scheduled to appear on the front page of the New York Times Book Review several weeks before the book’s publication date. Mayer’s scrambling paid off: within a month, a quarter million copies of the novel had been sold. “The dramatic effect of Howe’s review is without parallel,” Kellman writes, “except perhaps in the ability of Oprah Winfrey thirty-five years later to anoint a best-seller merely by discussing a book on her popular daytime TV show.” The twenty-six-year-old Mayer—“the most junior kid in the company”—spent $2,500 to acquire the title. (“What can I do that is creative and cheap?” he had asked himself.) He was soon appointed editor in chief of Avon.

Elsewhere, Kellman reports that the novelist Philip Roth (no relation to Henry Roth) gave serious consideration to writing a novel that would have drawn upon Henry’s personal history, including the debilitating effect of incest on his writing career. But the younger Roth abandoned the project after discussing the matter with Robert Weil. For his part, Weil acquired Mercy of a Rude Stream in 1992 over the objections of fellow editors at St. Martin’s who feared that publication of the shapeless manuscript would tarnish Roth’s literary reputation. The skeptics could not have been reacting to the manuscript’s incestuous content since Roth had shown them only parts of volume one, which announces merely that a shocking revelation is at hand. Weil therefore had no clear idea what he was signing on for when he acquired the tetralogy based on a four-hundred-page excerpt.

In fact, by early 1994 when St. Martin’s published volume one, titled A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park, Weil still had not read the manuscript of volume two. “As he pored over Roth’s text preparing the next installment for publication,” Kellman writes, “Weil discovered something bizarre. An only child in A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park, Ira Stigman has suddenly acquired a sister, two years younger. Called Ruth in the original manuscript, her name would be changed to Minnie in an attempt to satisfy legal concerns by distancing her from Roth’s own sister, Rose.”

A name change was insufficient to shield the publisher from legal action: Rose Broder, warned ahead of time about the inflammatory content of volume two, angrily demanded that tawdry passages involving Minnie be removed; when they were not, she asked for and received financial compensation. Of greater interest is the brazenly manipulative behavior resorted to by her brother in order to slip his shocking autobiographical material past the gatekeepers of the American publishing industry. No one can say with certainty that Weil would have rejected Mercy of a Rude Stream had he realized where the narrative would lead. But we do know he later expressed regret that he had been denied the opportunity to combine volumes one and two into a single book so as to play down the scandalous revelation and, in structural terms, strengthen volume one, which is widely viewed as the most disappointing of the four. As it turns out, then, Roth keenly understood the strategic need to hide the episodes of incest just to get the publication ball rolling and so that the bomb hinted at in volume one could most effectively destroy the existing Roth legend once it detonated in volume two.

As noted, though, many critics rejected Roth’s carefully revised author legend anyway. “If Roth believed that in Mercy of a Rude Stream he had ‘solved’ his writer’s block,” one scholar declared, “he is mistaken.” Four thick volumes of fiction published in rapid succession, after sixty years of silence, were insufficient evidence for some readers.

But the critical reception of his works was not nearly as important to Roth as the air-clearing effect of his belated confession. “We’re all headed for oblivion,” he told Weil. “It’s all vanity. We all share the same kind of obliteration.” Well into his eighties and facing his own immediate extinction, Roth felt an irrepressible urgency to confront his past. Besides, Kellman explains, “most of the people who could be hurt by his shocking revelations were gone.”

Alas, still with us was the one person who could be hurt most severely: the younger sister who typed the manuscript of Call It Sleep as a favor in the 1930s, who rejoiced at her brother’s belated celebrity in the 1960s, who voluntarily shared her inheritance when their father spitefully left his son a single dollar. Roth held off publishing Mercy of a Rude Stream while his wife was still alive. (He never permitted her to read the manuscripts, nor did he discuss their most scandalous contents with her.) But soon after Muriel’s death in 1990, Roth revised his plans for posthumous publication and managed to issue volumes one and two prior to his own demise, thereby freeing himself of his great psychic burden.

As Kellman records throughout his biography, Roth left behind a trail of morally obtuse statements from every decade, mostly generated by misguided political allegiances. In 1937, he published “Where My Sympathy Lies,” an essay affirming his belief that the Moscow show trials were legitimate. In 1939, he supported the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, aptly described by Kellman as “a Faustian agreement that extinguished the hopes of any Jews living on the European continent.” Later, Roth expressed admiration for Kim Il Sung, the North Korean dictator whose bizarre economic policies led to widespread famine. Perhaps most startling on a personal level: in the 1960s while his sons were both in uniform, Roth told a friend that he strongly identified with the Viet Cong. “The bigger the toll they take of us,” he wrote, “the better I like it.”

Still, Roth’s betrayal of his sister was categorically different from these objectionable episodes. He may have treated his younger son unfairly, admitting a clear preference for his first-born; he may have, in effect, forced his talented wife to abandon her promising careers as composer and musician; his adamantly boorish behavior toward his in-laws may have got Muriel excommunicated from her family. But the brutal way he treated Rose—his former lover of ten years—was especially objectionable in that he proffered his betrayal as an act of moral atonement. Kellman is aware of all this, yet he is loath to pile further condemnation on “a man who reveled in revulsion” and who “was harsher toward himself than any observer could be.” In that sense, Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth is unlike Katherine Anne Porter: A Life by Joan Givner or Ann Waldron‘s 1998 biography of Eudora Welty, two works widely criticized for their unsparing treatment of their subjects. And, yet, I am left wondering if Roth was nearly harsh enough in judging his own moral failings. I don’t condemn the confused twelve-year-old who found himself in a furtive sexual experiment with his sister. But the mature author, whose culminating gesture defiled his sister’s memory and assaulted her mental health, is an objectionable figure. “In the final months of a tormented life, Roth wrote only to tell the truth,” Kellman insists, “and the truth, he was convinced, is lacerating.” But the person who felt most sharply the lacerating whip of the truth was Rose Broder.

A final troubling aspect of Roth’s story is his insistence on likening his personal regeneration to that of the state of Israel, which he called “the midwife of his rebirth.” In June 1967, after the Israeli armed forces quickly captured Jerusalem and the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula, and part of the Golan Heights, Roth was overjoyed. “I felt at last that Jews had redeemed themselves with self-sacrifice and sheer valor,” he told an interviewer in 1977, the same year he published an essay that credited the swift rout of Israel’s adversaries with making possible “renascent Judaism” and the regeneration of the Jews as a nation. But as Kellman notes: “By 1967, the [Jewish] state was not exactly new, and [Roth’s] apocalyptic language is probably more appropriate to the 1948 War of Independence, about which Roth had said nothing.” Curiously, then—or appropriately—Roth failed to take inspiration from the attempt by desperate refugees to establish their own state and achieve security. Instead, he tied his regeneration to a pre-emptive war that, though arguably necessary in terms of survival, left Israel burdened with the Occupied Territories and the moral quandary they entail.

In playwright David Hare’s 1996 one-man show Via Dolorosa, which recounts a trip to Israel, the Briton quotes a Palestinian historian who says: “I do not discount what the Jews suffered. Nobody can. I know what they suffered in Europe. But to me it is as if they jumped from a burning building and they happened to land and break the neck of a man who was passing.” If we accept Roth’s claim that his personal regeneration mirrors that of the Jewish nation, it is clear that he discounts the suffering of the unfortunate person whose neck he has broken. And unlike the Holocaust survivors who fled to Palestine after World War II, Roth was escaping not a genocidal fire but the flame of a personal imperative lit by his own hand, which hardly qualifies his confession as valorous and self-sacrificing.

Of course, Kellman understands better than anyone alive the troubled life Roth led from earliest childhood. For this reason, perhaps, he withholds judgment in the hope that the biographical facts of Roth’s life will redeem him. But the material won’t cooperate. About Roth’s passing away on October 13, 1995, Kellman simply reports that the novelist’s death occurred on the ninety-first anniversary of the publication date of The Interpretation of Dreams, whose author, Sigmund Freud, had familial ties to the same Galician region as Roth’s parents. A long-time resident of Albuquerque, Roth stipulated that his body be donated to the medical school at the University of New Mexico. “However,” Kellman notes, “by the time he died, the corpse was so wasted that none of the organs served any scientific purpose.”