WRITER, INTERRUPTED.(Henry Roth)(Biography)

In 1993, I went to visit Henry Roth, a man as famous for his decades of silence as for the great novel he had published almost sixty years earlier, "Call It Sleep." Roth was living in Albuquerque, in a converted funeral home (by then everything about him was symbolic), but his mind was bound by the geography of his childhood--Brownsville, the Lower East Side, Harlem. He was an eighty-seven-year-old man still fuelled by childhood dreams and traumas, powering around the house on a rolling walker, cursing and singing and explaining. At one point during my stay, Roth asked me to drive him to the doctor. "At least you'll be making yourself useful," he observed. He was in an expansive mood during the drive; when we stopped at a traffic light, he suddenly declaimed, "Keep up your bright swords for the dew will rust them." His voice had the crooning humor of a highbrow vaudevillian. But then I missed an exit and Roth's mood grew suddenly dark. "When you make one wrong turn," he said ruefully, "the errors tend to compound."

But Roth, despite his own dramatic detour, did not remain in outer darkness. When I visited him, he had shattered the block that had imprisoned him and was on the verge of publishing the first installment of a vast, multivolume work, "Mercy of a Rude Stream." His hands were warped by rheumatoid arthritis; the very touch of his computer keyboard was excruciating. But he still put in five hours a day, helped by Percocet, beer, a ferocious will, and the ministrations of several young assistants. Roth would not die like a pomegranate, with all his seeds inside.

The reasons for Roth's monumental block--which include but are not limited to Communism, Jewish self-loathing, incest, and depression--are ultimately as mysterious as the reasons for his art and are in some ways inseparable from them. In a new biography, "Redemption" (Norton; $25.95), Steven G. Kellman does an excellent job of exploring Roth's creative life, its grim cessation and its miraculous rebirth. The biography's title is perfect, not simply because Roth found in his fallow years an ultimate source of inspiration but because his life made sense to him only when seen in a religious light, as a story of sin and repentance, exile and return. "Righteousness, righteousness shalt thou pursue," Roth declared the first day I met him, quoting Deuteronomy as a kind of commentary on his entire life. In his own eccentric pursuit of it, he made one of the most haunting journeys in American literature.

Roth was born in 1906 in the Galician town of Tysmenitz, now part of Ukraine. His father, Chaim, left for America that same year, and little Herschel, as he was then called, and his mother followed in 1907. Chaim was the ne'er-do-well son of the manager of a distillery. Like Albert Schearl, the character based on Roth's father in "Call It Sleep"--a man who torments his wife and beats his son mercilessly--Chaim seems to have poisoned everything he touched with his bad luck and wrathful temperament. His wife had married him only under family pressure, after disgracing herself by falling in love with a Gentile.

The family spent two years in Brooklyn and then moved to the Lower East Side, in those days the most densely populated piece of land on earth and later the setting of Roth's novel. In "Call It Sleep," there are safe, sensual moments when young David Schearl is home alone with his mama in their walkup apartment, but below is the cellar, the home of rats, darkness, and forbidden sexuality. How this buried region seeps into the upstairs world is part of the drama of the novel. David is led into a clothes closet by a girl with a leg brace and a style of speaking memorably captured in the shackled lilt of Roth's phonetically rendered urban dialect:

"Yuh know w'ea babies comm from?", "N-no.", "From de knish.", "--Knish?", "Between de legs. Who puts id in is de poppa. De poppa's god de petzel. Yaw de poppa." She giggled stealthily and took his hand. He could feel her guiding it under her dress, then through a pocket-like flap. Her skin under his palm. Revolted, he drew back.

Nothing quite obliterates sentimental associations with the Lower East Side like the transformation of "knish" into slang for female genitalia. ...