That box in which a twelve-year-old was twelve years old forever. The rest of us live and grow older by the day, but he remains twelve. Millions of years go by, and he is still twelve.
For no good reason I came late to Philip Roth. In fact, I read my first of his thirty-one novels, The Human Stain, last October. I just finished reading my second Philip Roth novel, called Nemesis. I didn’t know until after I finished it that it was Roth’s last. It was published in October 2010 when he was 77.
In many of Roth’s novels his presence isn’t hard to find, down to a character, who is often the novel’s narrator, that bears a resemblance (even if only a moral one) to Roth. The hero in Nemesis has the unlikely name Bucky Cantor (no one calls him by his given name, Eugene), a short, extremely near-sighted twenty-three year old who made up for his height disadvantage and bad eyes by becoming a formidable athlete. Because his mother died in childbirth and his father was a criminal (“a very shady character”), he was raised by his grandparents in a nearly exclusively Jewish district of Newark, New Jersey called Weequahic. This town also features vitally in Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint. That novel’s complainer, Alexander Portnoy, was a graduate – like Roth – of Weequahic High School in 1950. So it wasn’t surprising that Roth would go back there in what became his last novel.
The story of Nemesis is told by Arnie Mesnikoff, but we don’t learn about him until the novel's third part, set in 1971. In the summer of 1944, the time in which most of the story is set, Philip Roth was 11 years old. Unlike Roth, Arnie was stricken with polio which left him wearing braces on his legs for the rest of his life.
The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in Bucky’s Junior year at Panzer College, but when he tried to enlist with his two best friends at the college, he was classified 4F because of his poor eyesight. He never quite got over his sense of his own inadequacy as a man from that day, not even when he landed a job as the summer playground supervisor at Chancellor Avenue School, which was next to Weequahic High School, where he planned to apply for a job as phys ed teacher.
Unlike flu viruses or Covid-19, polio always appeared in the hottest months of summer. And in that especially hot summer of 1944, there was an outbreak of polio in Newark. There had been polio outbreaks every year, in some parts of America, since 1916, and it was polio’s most famous victim, Franklin Roosevelt, who established the charity organization, The March of Dimes. Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine wasn’t available until 1955.
The novel’s scene stealers include Bucky attending the funeral for Alan Michaels, one of the boys in his charge on the summer playground. Already questioning the culpability of a God who would send polio to cripple and kill children, his resentment reaches a crescendo when they reach the cemetery:
They all joined the rabbi in reciting the mourner's prayer, praising God's almightiness, praising extravagantly, unstintingly, the very God who allowed everything, including children, to be destroyed by death. . . But what might not have occurred to the Michaels family had not been lost on Mr. Cantor. To be sure, he himself hadn't dared to turn against God for taking his grandfather when the old man reached a timely age to die. But for killing Alan with polio at twelve? For the very existence of polio? How could there be forgiveness—let alone hallelujahs—in the face of such lunatic cruelty? It would have seemed far less of an affront to Mr. Cantor for the group gathered in mourning to declare themselves the celebrants of solar majesty, the children of an ever-constant solar deity, and, in the fervent way of our hemisphere's ancient heathen civilizations, to abandon themselves in a ritual sun dance around the dead boy's grave—better that, better to sanctify and placate the unrefracted rays of Great Father Sun than to submit to a supreme being for whatever atrocious crime it pleases Him to perpetrate.
Also impossible to forget is Bucky’s “love interest,” Marcia Steinberg, a year younger than him and a first grade teacher at the Chancellor Avenue School. She had gone to a summer camp in the Poconos just before the polio outbreak in Weequahic. She was worried for Bucky, and she begged him to keep himself safe and come to work at her summer camp. He knows it’s his duty – perhaps the only one left to him – to stay where he is and not let the boys he supervises in the playground down by playing it safe and running away to the Poconos. Deep down, though, Bucky isn’t really cut out for such devoted self-sacrifice, and almost against his will he leaves Weequahic just as the epidemic is getting worse. Because of his guilt over this – as he sees it – act of desertion, and because there is an outbreak at the summer camp shortly after his arrival that afflicts him as well and that disfigures his athletic legs and one of his arms, Bucky renounces his engagement to Marcia.
Twenty-seven years later, he tells his story to Arnie Mesnikoff, who was one of his boys at the Chancellor schoolyard. He tells him about the letter Marcia wrote to him with two words, “My man,” written in perfect cursive two hundred and eighteen times down the front of the page and halfway down the back.
The letter was signed with just her initial, M, a tall, beautifully formed capital exhibiting a little flourish in the loop and the stem, followed by "(as in My Man)."
But then he tells Arnie about his last meeting with Marcia at the hospital, about how she entreated him to marry her because she didn’t care what the polio had done to him, that she loved him no matter what. But Bucky refuses to subject her to a life married to a “cripple,” and sends her away. But what she tells him is the truth, that it wasn’t polio that twisted him:
Bucky, you've always been this way. You could never put things at the right distance—never! You're always holding yourself accountable when you're not. Either it's terrible God who is accountable, or it's terrible Bucky Cantor who is accountable, when in fact, accountability belongs to neither.
Bucky ends it with Marcia anyway. The nemesis in the book’s title isn’t God or polio, but Bucky’s ill-formed character. And he destroys two lives with it. As Arnie concludes: "He has to find a necessity for what happens. There is an epidemic and he needs a reason for it. He has to ask why. Why? Why? That it is pointless, contingent, preposterous, and tragic will not satisfy him. That it is a proliferating virus will not satisfy him. Instead he looks desperately for a deeper cause, this martyr, this maniac of the why, and finds the why either in God or in himself or, mystically, mysteriously, in their dreadful joining together as the sole destroyer."
This sad, elegiac novel ends with a glorification – an apotheosis – of Bucky’s lost athletic beauty. He takes the boys onto an empty dirt field where the high school football team would practice and shows them his skill throwing a javelin. It is a beautiful, fleeting image from a lost summer, and all the more beautiful for being the last fictional moment in Philip Roth’s work.
(1) Comment made to Dick Cavett.
No comments:
Post a Comment