It makes for a good story, that's for sure. At the age of 28, a poverty-stricken Jewish immigrant writes a book that's published to critical acclaim, then suffers from a decades-long writer's block, only to find his voice again in his old age with a monumental, four-part novel that picks up where the first left off. It reads like good fiction—so much so that Philip Roth nearly turned the story into a novel of his own. He never did, though, probably because Henry Roth, the man in question, had already written the story himself. Beginning with Call It Sleep in 1934 and concluding with Mercy of a Rude Stream in the '90s, Henry Roth wrote fiction composed of memory. In writing Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth, Steven Kellman has faced the difficult task of separating the one from the other: the story of David Schearl and Ira Stigman (Roth's alter egos) from the story of Roth himself.

For a good biographer like Kellman, however, that is not the only task—or even the primary one. As George Marsden has written, "The first goal of a good biographer … should be to tell a good story that illuminates not only the subject, but also the landscapes surrounding that person and the horizons of the readers."1 We don't just want to know what really happened; we want to know why it happened. And from the beginning of this biography—from the very title—Kellman tells us precisely why Roth's life took the shape it did: a "quest for redemption," he writes, connects a fragmented life, culminating in Roth's final return to words.

That Roth's life needed redemption, Kellman makes strikingly clear. In 1907, at the age of eighteen months, Henry arrived in New York in his mother's arms. They'd emigrated from Galicia—his father had gone ahead some time before—and Roth pictures his parent's reunion scene in the prologue to Call It Sleep: "But these two stood silent, apart; the man staring with aloof, offended eyes grimly down at the water … his wife beside him regarding him uneasily, appealingly.

And the child against her breast looking from one to the other with watchful, frightened eyes." The scene prefigures what will follow, both in the novel and in life. Stuck in an unhappy marriage and failing in every enterprise, Henry's father took out his frustration by beating his son. Henry, in turn, took on an increasingly heavy burden of guilt: near the end of Call It Sleep, David Schearl hands his father a broken horse whip, asking to be beaten, confessing to offenses he cannot understand.

Certainly Henry never deserved his father's beatings. But Henry's guilt was built upon more than physical abuse. At the age of 16, he began sleeping with his 14-year-old sister Rose; later, he added a relationship with his first cousin, Sylvia Kessler. Throughout his childhood, then, Henry lived within a world of physical, emotional, and psychological abuse—inflicted both upon him and by him. By the time he was twenty, his psyche was consumed by founded and unfounded guilt, his mind racked by the experiences of his past. From this childhood and from these memories, Roth sought redemption—and Kellman is right to insist upon it.

And yet, Kellman locates that redemption almost exclusively in Roth's writing. Perhaps that shouldn't surprise us. After all, for the biographer of a novelist, aren't the novels the point? And quite naturally Kellman focuses on Roth's writing block: why it came and how it finally, blessedly was lifted. Nonetheless, Kellman's story of writerly redemption has an unfortunate side-effect: it sweeps under the carpet a rather different, but equally important, redemptive story—one that centers not on Roth's writing but on his wife.

In 1938, Henry met Muriel Parker at Yaddo, an élite artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. Henry had been invited as the promising young author of Call It Sleep; Muriel as a rising star in music. By the end of the summer, they were a couple—a relationship formed just in time. Roth would later claim that Muriel saved his life. In a lifelong battle with depression, Henry had reached a new low, and only Muriel pulled him out.

Kellman admirably acknowledges Muriel's beneficial role in Roth's life. Still, her influence figures in the narrative chiefly as an additional factor that enabled Roth to write again. Other factors include his sudden fame in 1964, with the paperback reissue of Call It Sleep, and his renewed interest in Jewish identity, spurred by the Israeli-Arab war of 1967. Under Kellman's analysis, each of these factors achieves significance only insofar as it leads the artist back to his art.

But that is not the only way to tell the story. In fact, that isn't the way Roth seems to tell it himself. For Roth, regeneration was nothing less than a new sense of selfhood enabled through Muriel's love; after that, his writing could only highlight what she had already accomplished. In A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, the first volume of Mercy and the book that sets the tone for those that follow, Ira Stigman reflects:

From the ends of the world they came and met … and she, despite his psychic deformity caused by woe and guilt, loved him enough to cleave to him, made their day-to-day life, their domestic quotidian, a means to his salvation. One could vary the statement a multitude of ways; it came down to the same thing: If life, his life, were worth living, it was she who made it so.

In Kellman's version, redemption is Roth's quest, his goal, something that he must achieve. Helped along the way, he is nevertheless responsible for his own rebirth. "In one final, mighty torrent of language," Kellman writes in his final paragraph, "Roth put to rest the monsters that had tormented him for eight decades." In that statement, Muriel disappears. For Kellman, it is finally Roth's writing that redeems him—and nothing else.

In the story as told by Roth himself, however, redemption finds him. Muriel Parker, despite Roth's "psychic deformity," chooses to love him, to heal him, to give up her own artistic ambitions in order to nurture him into some kind of wholeness. Roth lives not so much by determination as by gratitude: "In one way, I look forward to dying," Ira reflects; "in another I am filled with too great a sense of gratitude to M to yield, even in the mind, to the wish of having my life come to an end. Other than that, what's the use of living?" Because of her prior action, because of her love, he is now enabled to write; the writing does not so much achieve redemption as record it.

These contrasting accounts matter not only for how we read Roth but also for how we read Muriel. In Kellman's world, art is all. The temporary life of the artist must be sacrificed for the lasting life of art—a choice Muriel refused: "[D]espite an auspicious debut at Town Hall," Kellman sighs, "she abandoned music in order to be a wife and a mother." In fact, Kellman's interest in Muriel Parker seems to revive only with the revival of her own artistic career—his interest measured by the value of her art. But then, in this regard, Kellman seems not to stand alone. After all, culture celebrates those who wrote well, not those who loved well: we have a biography of Henry Roth, but none exists of Muriel Parker.

I wonder, however, how much we must sigh in disappointment for a person who gave up art in order to nurture a single human life. "The intellect of man," Yeats declared, "is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work, and if it take the second must refuse a heavenly mansion, raging in the dark." Muriel's life with Henry Roth, however, could certainly not be described as a basking in the light. In fact, given Roth's past, her work might have entailed midnight raging that matched or even exceeded her husband's.

If we follow Roth's lead, that's precisely what we find. In A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, Ira comes to "the realization that the good heart, the kind and affectionate, the discerning, loyal and understanding heart was far more precious than artistic acclaim … [A]t last came this wisdom, accrued from the woman who would not be deterred from loving him." The miracle for Roth was not his writing but his wife's love.

In Redemption, Steven Kellman gives us his version of Henry Roth: a man redeemed through writing, transforming his tortured past into literature for the future. It is a story that hangs together well, narrated beautifully. But Kellman is intelligent enough to be modest, and in his introduction he admits, "Many versions of Henry Roth remain to be told."

Abram Van Engen is a graduate student in literature at Northwestern University.

1. George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (Yale Univ. Press, 2003), p. 10.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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