Call It Sleep

As the current publishers realize, Call It Sleep's history is its finest selling point. To those who equate failure with artistic integrity, three decades of neglect suggests more than ordinary merit. And for culture-snob and intellectual alike, the book's underground reputation has immense appeal. A friend recommended the novel to me, but I probably wouldn't have read it if he hadn't added that it first appeared in 1934 and sold only 4,000 copies, that Henry Roth has written almost nothing since then, that he now raises chickens on a farm in Maine. And I've found myself providing anyone who asks me about the book with the same pertinent information.

But the legend is more than good advertising, and not just because Call It Sleep is as fine as it's supposed to be. The legend increases our appreciation of the book. For we approach a neglected classic with a bit of deference. Remembering that others have missed its peculiar excellence, we overlook what seem to be mannered treatments of certain characters and situations. Forgetting to study the technique, we read the book on its own terms.

Call It Sleep is a narrative of the life (between ages six and nine) of David Schearl, a Jewish immigrant in New York in the early part of this century. The story is told in the third person, but almost exclusively from David's point of view. At the end of the book, there is a dramatic climax, where hints dropped earlier are explained, and towards which the action of the book might be said to build. But the basic concern throughout is with David's growing awareness.

Roth makes the most of the few incidents he does describe, and he weaves them together skillfully. Time passes as invisibly in the novel as it does in childhood. One's breath is never taken away by a neat revelation, but the sense one gets of a gradual process of discovery is nearly perfect.

David builds fantasies for himself, notices a few months later that he had forgotten them, and finds they recur in a moment of fear. Observant as any bright child, he nevertheless partially misunderstands what he sees--or understands it only to the extent that he can. Though the book ends with David more or less at peace with the world, there are questions left unanswered in his mind.

Roth is a natural novelist--as opposed to those whose real forte is the short story--and the effect of his writing is cumulative. Those accustomed to the spare prose and one-sentence characterizations of Hemingway and O'Hara may find his style wordy and flamboyant. But where the more journalistic writers can sum up a situation with a single detail, Roth creates a richer world by his very lack of conciseness.

One escapes from a novel by watching the author's tricks; if a writer is too obviously skillful he distracts one's attention. Roth has the sense not to do this. He woos the reader instead of impressing him. What seems at first overwriting comes to convey the emotional intensity of the story. But we feel it rather than perceive it. Roth's technique of alternating paragraphs of description and introspection takes a little getting used to. But once we accept it, it overwhelms us.

In delineating David's relations with his parents, Roth seems at first a bit obvious. The Freudian psychology is too much in evidence. But remembering that Roth wrote the book over a generation ago, we impute to him greater innocence than to novelists of today. It may be condescension, but it helps. Unbending a little, we discover that the psychology is kept below the surface, and that the most painful matters are gracefully hinted at.

Roth is by no means a shoddy craftsman, but he ought not to be read too critically. He communicates indirectly, and if we focus on apparent awkwardness we miss the point. He makes us keep our distance, yet be involves us in his tale more fully that the sharpest plot-maker. The hideous din of a guilty thought, the whirling of noise and action about a point in time, a sense of inexplicable release--all these Roth evokes with mysterious ease. Call It Sleep is a quiet masterpiece that grows in the mind even after one puts it down. To read it is to wander half awake through a world as strange and familiar as the one we live in.