Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (52 page)

Much of this text’s flavor is found in sequences of this stripe. “Going out too far” is a modest formulation for hubris, for overreaching, and there is evidence in the text to support a kind of Greek reading of this sort, even as there are pointed Christlike echoes of sacrifice and redemption. But just as Santiago has little time to waste worrying about sin, so too is this meditation interrupted by the pressing material business at hand: lashing the knife to ward off the sharks. Again the mind interrupts, chastising its holder for not bringing a stone, and again we see the riposte: a stone is not the only thing he forgot to bring, but the game is about making do with what you have. One is
bricoleur
all one’s life, most especially toward the end, when the bits and pieces you can use are themselves used up. All of which is capped off with the lovely notation that this kind of verbal Ping-Pong—the thing Hemingway does so very nicely—is just so much twaddle, and it’s tiring to boot. One feels in the hands of a stylistic master here, a laconic rhetorician, someone out to measure the respective purchases of brainpower, muscle power, fish power, food power, and word power. Again I want to call this the discourse of maturity, the final weighing of resources, gauging what our final assets are when we are stripped to the essentials. What’s left?

What’s left is exactly the arsenal that one sees being marshaled on that small skiff—a body that is no longer what it was, a mind that often threatens to go, a heart that is unfaltering, and a tongue that gets its licks in. Santiago has been tested and comes through it. Some critics have lambasted the old man for not burying his fish at sea, but I think there is a reverence in this book for remains, for what’s left. Hemingway closes the text by returning Santiago to his dreams of lions on the beach. He has earned his vision. The great marlin may be devoured by sharks, but this old man’s doggedness—the climactic embrace of a lifetime with the great fish; the nonstop ingenuity and moral fiber enlisted to hold up his end, not to fail; the bittersweet return home—is nonetheless a beacon in my study, offering a view of aging that is shot through with grace. He did not falter. He stayed. He returned. He was worthy of DiMaggio.

Some reviewers who admired the taut, unvarnished reporting of violence and pain in the early Hemingway works choked a bit on the “softness” of this late text. One cannot quite imagine Nick Adams or Jake Barnes regarding the animals or the stars as “brothers”; theirs is a darker, more hostile world. But the hero is now an old man past his prime. And his great bout with the marlin acquires, in my view, a kind of poetry and vibrancy that are beyond the charge of sentimentalism. As I’ve tried to show, there is nothing easy in this late work, but there is a luminous sense of purpose and fit, of utilizing the resources you’ve gained by a lifetime of experience (so that the long years are additive, not merely corrosive), of actualizing one’s self to the uttermost via courage and art against a disaster you cannot prevent, that confers on
The Old Man and the Sea
a place of pride in this study of growing old. I see greatness of soul here. Many believe that the old man lying in bed dreaming of lions at the book’s close is a man who is dying, who will not wake up. If that is true, and I tend to think it is, he has exited well. He has given his measure.

Philip Roth is our most Rabelaisian writer. Whether it be the antics of the frustrated Alexander Portnoy growing up or Mickey Sabbath performing his sovereign and exalted erotic rites, Roth understands flesh, knows it to be imbued with needs and rewards and sheer autonomy that go a long way toward defining who we are as a species: not always pretty, but always vital, always pumping. If chemical help is needed in the form of Viagra, as we see in the aging Coleman Silk’s acrobatics in
The Human Stain
, so be it. Animal appetite has authority. The show must go on.

Not that Roth has not written about death. But
Everyman
seems to be in a category by itself. From beginning to end, it is stamped by an almost Greek awareness of the body’s fragility, its absolutely guaranteed role as time bomb. Hence the narrative not only begins with the protagonist’s funeral but goes on to register an astonishing number of other funerals and breakdowns: the deaths of both parents; the strokes suffered by Gerald, the husband of his art student, and by his second wife, Phoebe; the intolerable migraines experienced by Phoebe; the unsurvivable pain meted out to Millicent (Gerald’s wife), so severe that she commits suicide; the triple somatic undoing of his friend Brad (suicidal depression), colleague Ezra (terminal cancer), and boss Clarence (death of old age, after lunch).

All this funereal material flaunts the story’s obsession with mortality, yet Roth wants us to realize that these incursions do not wait until old age to make their appearance: nowhere is this more evident than in the protagonist’s vivid, often recalled memory of his childhood stint in the hospital to treat his hernia, a visit reeking of terror and leaving a lifelong scar. The child’s surgery receives full honors: maniacal attention to the doctor, eerie exposure to another hospitalized child who very possibly dies during the night before our boy’s procedure, memory of a drowned seaman’s body that washed up on the Jersey shore. So there is a grim sense of coherence and continuity toward the book’s end as we learn of the protagonist’s continued failing health, involving catherizations, defibrillator, shunts put into his vascular system, heart disease, and two surgeries on his right carotid artery, the second of which proves fatal and closes the book.

There can be no victory against such odds, even though some, like his older brother, Howie, blessed with brains and brawn, seem to have been given a free pass, much to our man’s envy and resentment; and those angry and petty emotions shame him, given the generosity and kindness shown him by Howie all his life. You live with (and die from) the hand you’ve been dealt, but only in the fullness of time does the full nature of that hand become clearer, for that is when the bills start coming in. The haunting episode of the childhood hernia announces with great clarity that we live under a sword from the moment we draw breath, even if the bulk of our sufferings is likely to take place in later years. That late reckoning is rendered in almost majestic tones toward the book’s close as the protagonist reflects on the multiple deaths and deprivations faced by his friends and loved ones at life’s end: stories of “regret and loss and stoicism, of fear and panic and isolation and dread,” of being parted “from that that had once been vitally theirs,” leading to an inescapable judgment: “Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.” We watch this once-vigorous man going down: his sexual fire is dimmed, his nerves are shot, his nightmares are on the rise, his awareness of looming disaster seems almost palpable; he knows he is approaching extinction.

But because this is Roth, he does not go out without a fight. In a fetching, moving late sequence, he approaches a young, shapely female jogger he’s been studying for days and tries to come on to her; not unresponsive, she is quite willing to hear him out, and for a moment the reader feels that maybe, just maybe, one more escapade may be in the cards. He asks her the operative question: “How game are you?” A good bit of Roth shows in that line: how
game
are you? For our sexual life is a game, a great game, and Roth’s players will stay at it right up to the moment they are removed from the field. She takes his address; she never calls. The game really is over.

But the reader understands that it was played with intensity, ranging from the young secretary who daily knelt on the floor in his office and raised her rear for him to the fateful, marriage-wrecking affair with the Dane Merete, whose regal body and little hole provided both of them such delight. Yet he comes ruefully to understand (after he’s married Merete) that a little hole is truly incommensurate with a whole life and that he has traded one for the other by wounding the one woman who was right for him, Phoebe his second wife, so deeply that their marriage dissolved on the spot. And he understands more still as the darker and more menacing chips start to land on the table: that his two sons from the first marriage, the ones who seemed to revel in hatred of him for ruining their childhood by divorcing their mother, those two sons may not have been wrong after all. (Up to now, he has been stubbornly persuaded that they are deranged in their spite.)

Seeing the end come—around you and building inside you—triggers something we’d have to call remorse, a kind of late recognition that he has truly fucked up his life in the places that matter and that now he’s on the verge of exiting it altogether, it can’t be fixed:

It is an astonishing athletic image: at the end, you are racing as fast as you can toward those whom you have not loved enough, but you can’t reach them. Worse still, you now realize you flunked the one lesson that mattered:
if only I’d known how to do it!
This is as close to self-knowledge and grace as he will come. It is not all that far. Yet it does betoken a widening of his most afflicted organ—his heart—in ways that no shunts or medications could possibly achieve. You die alone. The loved ones are destined to vanish, and it is always too late.

Roth closes his text in pitch-perfect fashion, I believe. This writer, who is so good at depicting flesh and carnal reality, who is the master of a zaftig tone and style, brings his doomed hero to the place where the book began: the cemetery. And in that place, in a prose that is reminiscent of the early Hemingway, as dry as ash, we are instructed about the life of bones. The bones of the dead—his dead, all the dead—lie there as the final community he is to join, and their cult is one of dignified and careful labor, as we learn through the words of the black grave digger, who explains in full the nature and tricks and turns of his craft. Roth is remembering
Hamlet
, to be sure, but there is no Yorick, no puns, no metaphysics in sight, just the artisanal discourse of earth and stones and shovels and readying the soil to receive its inevitable next guest to take up a final residence. Our man was prepared to leave his retirement community by the shore, hoping to move in with his beloved daughter, Nancy, but that was not to be: not only because the mother, Phoebe, was felled by a stroke and got there first but because our man is headed for another place, one of bones and cleanly cut soil.

He goes under the knife one more time and does not come back. But all the book’s beauty is caught in Roth’s account of his final thoughts:

Shakespeare and Rabelais join in this final tribute to the miracle of both the planet and our lives—wonderfully cast in the language of the jeweler and his loupe and his precious stones, the very profession of the protagonist’s dead father—yielding a tone that is anything but morbid. Even at the very end, actually under the knife, one is “eager yet again to be fulfilled.” The “good fight” must finally be lost, but appetite, zest, and verve are the creatural endowments we are born with, and if we are lucky, they never die. Roth does add two final sentences claiming that the trip to nowhere has begun and mentioning fear, but those last words seem weightless in contrast to the grandeur of the image of the child riding the wild ocean back to the shore and seeing the glory of the Creation displayed on a summer day in New Jersey.

Plenitude
may have a Latinate sound to it, but I invoke it in the hope that it will convey weight, pith, reach, and dimensionality. These terms all point to the sheer scale of a life, its spatiotemporal scope, its large tally sheet of works and days, its inevitable variety and gravity. I do not think anyone easily “possesses” who he or she is and has been, given the amplitude of the self’s journey through time. I have repeatedly urged literature itself as a precious resource along those lines, a script that helps us both widen and possess our own existences by dint of experiencing vicariously those of others.