A Pilgrim’s Digression

I’ve decided that I need to read something. All my life, from the time I was very small, reading has been good medicine for me. As a complement to reading, writing also used to benefit me psychologically and spiritually.

Lately, however, I feel like my love of both reading and writing have succumbed to whatever psychic malaise plagues me. Depression is like a cloud of disease spreading through every crevice of my mind and soul. All the things I once loved–from memories of family and friends, to activities that once kept me sane–everything this funk touches turns into a piece of gray, rotting meat that turns my stomach. I have no interest in reading anymore, not like I once did. But I know I need to read.

I tried to find a book to read over Christmas, but nothing caught my interest. My attention span is short, so I have to read small books, generally. I can no longer hold my nose to the grindstone long enough to read a large tome such as Thomas Pynchon’s new novel.

Thus after many false starts on several books, I believe I have found the book that will help me: Philip Roth’s Everyman. I picked it up at the Trover bookstore, here in Washington last week. It’s quite brief, only 182 pages, but it will take me a few weeks to read it. Really, I only read on the train and bus, which amounts to maybe ten or fifteen pages a day. This is a far cry from the amount of reading I could achieve as a kid and young adult; and when I was a freshly minted English grad student, I could have devoured 182 pages in a single day.

But I am happy with reading a dozen pages a day. I like this book, and in some ways I prefer reading a good book slowly, savoring it and preserving the divine experience of reading for long periods of time.

Everyman is, appropriately, about death. It begins with the protagonist’s funeral and then Roth takes us back for an overview of the character’s life, from his wartime childhood in New Jersey to his adulthood and finally to decrepit old age, when he begins slowly dying of heart disease.

Roth is an author I have rediscovered only recently. When I was a teenager, I read him for the sex. I remember my rather stodgy, stout 10th grade English teacher telling me about Portnoy and the scandal surrounding it; I don’t recall how the subject came up. Despite her opposition to censorship, Mrs. B. would not recommend that I read the book. She would only go so far as to say it was a controversial book that I should read in that light; I should not expect it to be great literature.

In fact, as she said “it’s not great literature,” she had a rather disgusted look on her face, as if smelling something foul. That look of disgust alone pretty much determined that this was a book I would have to read.

After reading the book through, I read selected parts of Portnoy’s Complaint and then Goodbye, Columbus over and over throughout my teen years, not so much because Roth is a good erotic writer–he’s not, except to fifteen year old boys–but because of his honesty about sex. Roth’s frankness was what I found refreshing, as a teenager. Roth was the first writer I read who wrote about masturbation as a normal activity of normal males, not as something slightly deviant or embarrassing.

There’s a scene in Portnoy’s Complaint in which Portnoy masturbates into his sister’s underwear while his Mom is screaming for him to hurry up and get out of the bathroom. It’s a funny scene, and it’s the kind of scene that made the novel scandalous in its day, but it’s also a scene remarkable for its bold honesty. I remember reading it and thinking, “Finally! Proof that there are males out there as perverted as I am!”

More remarkable to me was that Portnoy (and Roth) are my Grandparents’ age. Born in the thirties, they grew up in during the war and came of age mid-century, a time I always thought of as particularly stade and unerotic. Lucy and Desi slept in separate beds, fer crying out loud.

Reading of Portnoy’s sexual adventures, I was reminded of my first exposure to pornography when I was about three years old. My Grandmother had a hall tree in her bedroom, a kind of high-backed chair with a mirror in the back of the chair and a hollow seat for storage. I remember being in the bedroom with Grandma for some reason, and lifting up that seat and discovering my Grandpa’s stack of pornos. I didn’t have time to look before Grandma slammed the seat down, almost on my fingers, and told me to never, ever look in there again. I think Grandpa must have gotten an earful, too, because some time later I sneaked in there to look again, and the secret stash was gone.

From that incident, I took away the subliminal suggestion that the erotic life of adults is something mysterious, forbidden, and maybe just a bit disgusting–but no less exciting, for all those negative qualities.

Roth exposed us all, grandparents and parents alike, for the secret lechers we are. He stripped much of the mystery (ironically, I mis-typed that word as “mysery,” at first) from sex. Some would say for the worse, since mystery is supposedly what makes for great sex (thus the use of blindfolds and hoods in some sexual activities). However, to my mind, the profusion of erotic knowledge and pornography in our modern world does not seem to have in anyway dampened peoples’ libido.

I don’t read Roth for sex these days, however. Anyway, his books have become less and less sexy as he has aged. Death is to me the chief preoccupying subject. A couple years ago, I started reading Roth again beginning with The Human Stain. Having grown up thinking of him as a comic writer, I was surprised how brooding he had become.

I’ve always thought that humor and depression are lovers, if not spouses, given the number of comedians who die as suicides. Consider Mark Twain, one of the darkest, most brooding personalities in American literature, and one of the funniest. Roth also seems to prove the point.

I enjoyed The Plot Against America but found that in it, Roth is trying too hard to be topical without being topical. He wants to maintain plausible deniability against those conservative critics who will charge him with writing current, subversive political commentary. However, what he creates is a novel that satisfies no one. The conservative critics filleted him like a fish anyway, never having read his book. And liberals like myself read the book, but found it so vaguely suggestive that we really couldn’t find an angle to support our own political views, and his book by extension.

The idea that Americans could elect a fascist dictator who undermines American sovereignty and personal freedom in the name of “security” is not exactly a new idea. Sinclair Lewis did something quite similar in his dystopian novel It Can’t Happen Here.

The problem is that allegory needs to have some real-world correlative. I don’t think most Americans feel that George Bush is a fascist dictator. As Roth portrayed him, Charles Lindbergh is a rather naive simpleton whose innocence and personal story is exploited by forces in the Republican party in order to keep America out of World War II. To my mind, “naive simpleton exploited by the Republican party” is where the comparison to George Bush begins and ends. The paranoid, anti-Semitic fanatic that Lindbergh becomes once in office bears no resemblance to the 43rd President of the United States, and if the pogrom that Lindbergh institutes against the Jews is meant to be a warning to us, today, to treat Muslims with sympathy and understanding, it is probably a warning we don’t really need.

Today, President Bush is weak and passive on all fronts, hardly a nefarious strong man on the white horse riding roughshod over civil liberties, as liberals pictured him just a few years ago. He is on his way out of office. Roth’s book therefore now seems rather irrelevant.

Not so Everyman. This book is Roth doing what he does best: contemplating life and death, loneliness, old age, illness, sex, human relationships…all the reagents that stain us as particularly weak and peculiarly human.

Allow me to quote a passage that I found especially moving, and terrifying.

On page 29, Roth describes a particularly pleasant memory of the deceased protagonist. The year is 1967, and Henry is age 33. He has just went through a painful divorce in which his adulterous affairs were exposed, and he and his girlfriend are enjoying a long August vacation at Martha’s Vineyard.

“They’d swim across a bay to a ridge of dunes where they could lie out of sight and fuck in the sunshine and then rouse themselves to slip into their suits and swim back to the beach…The only unsettling moments were at night, when they walked the beach alone together. The dark sea rolling in with its momentous thud and the sky lavish with stars made Phoebe rapturous but frightened him. The profusion of stars told him unambiguously that he was doomed to die, and the thunder of the sea only yards away…made him want to run from the menace of oblivion to their cozy, lighted, and underfurnished house…Why must he mistrust his life just when he was more its master than he’d been in years? Why should he imagine himself on the edge of extinction when calm, straightforward thinking told him that there was so much more solid life come?”

In particular, I like the phrase “mistrust his life.” That is a striking arrangement of words. What does it mean to mistrust our life? And of course, it implies that we usually go through the years trusting our life, at least early on. Of course, I am with Henry, here. I am mistrustful of my life.

I can’t get out of my head the fact that one of my grandpas died of heart disease and emphysema when he was only 49. That he was a heavy smoker seems irrelevant. I’ve often thought I’d be dead before I reach fifty. In middle school in the mid-eighties, because of my ignorance about sex, I went through a period where I thought I’d die of AIDs around age twenty five or so.

Then at roughly the same time, my Grandma, a fundamentalist Christian, instilled in me the idea that we were living in the End Times. So even though I was horrible in math, I devoted a lot of brain energy calculating whether I was more likely to die of AIDs before the end of the world, or if I would be cast into hell at the Second Coming before the disease could overtake my immune system.

Although I haven’t finished the book yet, I suspect that the message of Everyman is that there is no succor from the fear of death. We can block it out for a time, but it remains with us, sometimes appearing at our happiest moments, as with Henry and Phoebe on the seashore.

For some authors, the beat of the ocean waves is the heartbeat of life. For others, such as Roth and Virginia Woolf, it is the tolling of our death knell.

“Doomed to die.” Doom is a word that Tolkien also uses frequently, in a more antiquated sense, meaning “fate” or “destiny.” I think it is precisely the doom of death, the lack of control, that frightens us most.

This morning on the radio, I heard a story about a toddler, two years old, who was crushed when an ATV rolled over on top of him. His mother had placed him on the machine, which is intended for children 6 years and older, and then remotely started the vehicle. It rolled forward, she stopped it abruptly, and the ATV flipped over on the child.

One can easily throw bucket-loads of blame on the mother in that accident. I won’t do so here. My own mother rode a motorcycle in her younger years, and even when I was an infant, she would take me on short rides. I sat on her lap, unrestrained except by her arms. One such ride resulted in a crash through a barbed wire fence and down over a hill that could have ended just as tragically.

That mother did not expect to lose her child yesterday when she took him out to “play.” Yet it was his doom. It is all our doom, Roth says.

Not particularly original, I know. Yet there are few subjects in literature that are wholly original. Rather, it is the commonness of experience that binds together literature and the humans who read it, down through the ages. From the medieval allegory Everyman to Philip Roth’s Everyman, we all face the same doom. How we bear up is the question. In that regard, literature can be our greatest comfort.