Content area
Full Text
Mario Materassi, the Italian critic, scholar and connoisseur of American letters, was, for over thirty years, the faithful friend and adviser of Henry Roth, the one-time author of Call It Sleep (1934) who suddenly became famous in the sixties when his only novel came out in paperback. Roth, whosecareer-withitssixtyyearsof"consumingsilence"-wassurelyone of the strangest in American literary history, went on to publish Mercy of a Rude Stream (1994-1998). Until their final falling out just three years before Roth died in 1995, Mario Materassi was also Roth's translator and editor. He knew both the man and the work intimately but, until now, has repeatedly refused to discuss his relationship with his former friend. This interview is the result of two days spent talking in Florence in August 2005, shortly after the publication of Steven G. Kellman's biography of Henry Roth, Redemption (W.W. Norton, 2005) as well as an ongoing exchange by letter and telephone. It is a moving testimony of friendship between an increasingly ailing, cranky and self-centred writer and a hard-nosed and yet admiring critic.
VR: How did you first come into contact with Henry Roth?
MM: By sheer accident. I was in New York, and I developed a toothache. While in the dentist's waiting room, I picked up an issue of Commentary. There was an article about Roth [Leslie Fiedler's "Henry Roth's Neglected Masterpiece" was published in Commentary in August 1960]. The next day, on Fourth Avenue-in those days it was chock full of second-hand bookstores-I found a copy of Call It Sleep. Just around the corner from the publishers, in fact.
VR: This was 1961.
MM: Right. At that time I was sort of scouting for Lerici Editori, a publisher in Milan.
VR: So, then you read Call It Sleep?
MM. Yes. And I realized that it was a masterpiece. I wrote to Roth, via the publisher, about translating it into Italian. We corresponded all through my translation.
VR: And when did you actually meet?
MM: In 1964. I went to Augusta, Maine, in the dead of winter. I think they put me up in a nearby motel. The three of us hit it off right away. I wrote an article about that meeting.
VR: Were his sons there?
MM: No, by that time they...