7 - “A world somewhere, somewhere else.”

Summary

Despising

For you the city, thus I turn my back;

There is a world elsewhere.

Shakespeare, Coriolanus III.iii

Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours

Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus

T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

The solution to my difficult situation seemed to be that “world elsewhere” of Coriolanus, the world of the arts, the world of art, in which Eda Lou Walton figures so much because she gave me the opportunity to enter the world of the artist of that time, the detached artist.

Henry Roth to Mario Materassi

The second novel … would have treated of just that theme: the youth's search for the world elsewhere: how the immigrant urchin who had lost the primacy of his ghetto haven and jettisoned faith … won another haven, a superior one, he thought, in the world of letters, in the world of art. Not to be. Shortcircuited. Aborted.

Henry Roth, “Itinerant Ithacan”

I am grateful to Hana Wirth-Nesher for inviting me to write this essay, Tanya Ponton and Breda O'Keeffe for their energetic and resourceful research assistance, to Steve Love at the Hilles Library, Harvard University, to the Interlibrary Loans Office at the Zimmerman Library, University of New Mexico, to William M. Roberts at the University Archive of the University of California at Berkeley, to Thomas Berman at the University Archives of New York University, to Nancy Kandoian, Map Collections, and Stephen Crook, Henry W. […]