Yuh wanna play bad?

Christopher Tayler

• Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth by Steven Kellman
  Norton, 372 pp, $16.99, September 2005, ISBN 0 393 05779 8
• Call It Sleep by Henry Roth
  Picador US, 462 pp, $15.00, July 2005, ISBN 0 312 42412 4

For a long time, Henry Roth’s silence was considered one of the most resonant in modern American literature. Ralph Ellison and J.D. Salinger were his only competition. When Call It Sleep (1934), Roth’s first novel, became a bestseller, thirty years after it first appeared, reporters found him scraping a living in Maine, gloomily slaughtering ducks and geese with equipment he’d made out of parts scavenged from discarded washing-machines. There had been no second novel. ‘As far as literature is concerned,’ he told an interviewer in 1969, ‘I am in reality no longer alive.’ Although he had managed to sell four short stories to the New Yorker during the intervening decades, the most eye-catching part of his post-Call It Sleep output was a short guide to setting up a home-butchering operation, written for a waterfowl trade magazine in 1954. He composed it, he informed an admirer years later, with uncharacteristic zest: ‘It was my first intimation that maybe I was coming out of this terrible, terrible bog.’