"Final Dwarf"--final time (I promise ... sort of ...)

Henry Roth

The last few days I've written here about "Final Dwarf," a 1969 short story by Henry Roth, a story that appeared in The Atlantic that July. I recalled the story because until I read it, I'd not heard of the source of that title--Wallace Stevens' poem "The Dwarf," a poem I posted here late last week. It's a poem I now think I'm going to memorize ...

Henry Roth (1906-95). I first heard about him back at Hiram College in a course with Dr. Ravitz. He told us about Roth's novel--Call It Sleep (1934)--a powerful story about coming-of-age in NYC. After Roth published that novel, he pulled a kind of disappearing act, occasioned, say some, by a writer's block. He finally shook it off not long before his death when he wrote a four-volume novel called Mercy of a Rude Stream (volumes published in 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998). I own them. Haven't read them. And could not for the life of me tell you why.

Call It Sleep was re-published in 1964, and the book you see pictured here is the one I read--the very copy; its printing date is 1968, but I must have read it a little later because I've written DYERS inside the cover, and in 1968 I was not yet married--had not yet even met Joyce.

Okay. July 1969. I had recently finished my third year of teaching at the Aurora Middle School in Aurora, Ohio, and was taking my 2nd and 3rd courses toward my master's degree at Kent State University. Summer school.

That was the month that "Final Dwarf" appeared in The Atlantic, a magazine I was taking (and still take in digital form). I read the story, and, as I discovered last week (to my surprise), I'd torn it out of the magazine and filed it.

The story has been resting in that file since the summer of 1969. It has browned with age as this image shows. It was the summer that men first walked on the moon.

In one of those summer school classes--a course on American Transcendentalism--I met a young woman named Joyce who had just graduated from Wittenberg University.

That was late July; we married on December 20; we will celebrate anniversary #49 in four months.

Sometime in the flurry of our early relationship I read both Call It Sleep and "Final Dwarf," and last night, up in bed, I read "Dwarf" again--taking great care with the pages: They are as frangible as I am these days.

It is a story about a middle-aged man (the story is from his point of view) who is taking his aging father around on some quotidian errands. There is tension between them--never really articulated, but it boils beneath the surface like lava.

Roth quotes Wallace Stevens in the epigraph: "... the final dwarf of you / That is woven and woven and waiting to be worn ..."

And, later in the story, the son, musing, thinks in this short paragraph about his father, who is in a store looking for something while the son, Kestrel, waits outside in the car:

Oh, hell, Kestrel thought as he waited. He never could do anything to please his father. Ever since childhood it had been that way. Still, he had to get over it. It was ridiculous to bear a grudge against the old guy. There was nothing left of him. A little old dwarf in a baggy pair of pants. The final dwarf, Kestrel smiled (59).

All of this "final dwarf" stuff returned to me the other day because I was thinking of myself at the time. Thinking about what time and health do to all of us, if we live long enough.

I've lived long enough. I feel it. Sorrows are in my heart, cancer in my bones, but I still grip fiercely the hand of that young woman who went to Wittenberg, who smiled at me in July 1969, who is upstairs, right now, and who will smile again when I read this to her ...