Thursday, May 04, 2006

SANTOS DA CASA
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Everyman -- Phillip Roth, 2006

Life doesn’t turn out the way that we wanted. Impulsive acts come to be regretted even when they seem to have been the right, only way.

Impulsive stupidity prevails.

Everyman’s black side expressed itself during his younger years. He gave up a family, hurt his wives and children, and ended up alone. Although he had tried to reach out to a few friends; it is too late, each is on his death bed, or had already been buried. He finds some solace in a small conversation with a simple gravedigger; who is modeled on the gravedigger in Hamlet.

Alone, He visits the cemetery where his grandparents and his parents are buried. The cemetery is overgrown, the entrances are broken, gates rusted, graves abandoned, names forgotten. Three generations previous the cemetery was founded (by his grandfather) on raw, bucolic land blessed by God and nature. Now it has become a wreck, it has been vandalized; it is rarely used, and not kept up. Tranquility can never be restored.

And then the reader remembers Ozymandius.

Industry and Commerce have crowded and polluted what once was a silent place of memorial. Thruway sounds overwhelm the prayers and thoughts of the bereaved and invade the graves of the buried. The dead are honored only by The Honorable Gravedigger who tries to do a good job of digging, almost carving, a “squared up, flat bottomed” grave, a final resting place for those persons who are brought to lie for eternity in the Jersey dirt.

Most of his life in retirement is spent alone even when he begins to teach a painting class to other retired men and women of his generation. But all his students speak of is their sicknesses and the sicknesses of their friends. He spots one possible companion but she soon takes enough pills to end her life which had become racked with pain.

Everyman is not ready to die; even when he realizes that he has crippled the lives of his children and wives. He wants to make amends but it is too late; just as it was too late to visit his old pals from the agency where he spent his life. His children just can’t bring themselves to see him in any other way than the man who left them. They despise him...

At the end of his life, after retirement, he does have a loyal, loving daughter. Nancy (modeled on Cordelia in Lear) checks on him, cares for him. His sons don’t speak to him... He cannot bring himself to explain himself to his sons. He has lost the fight that once was in him. He had tried to do “the right thing” for them and their mother, Phoebe, but had failed in both reality and in the eyes of those sons. They were lost to him. They could only “minimize his decency and magnify his defects.”

He has had several operations. He is weak in body as well as spirit. He can’t even delight in the swimming that once filled his happiest hours. When he was working he had dreamed of painting, so now he paints everyday, and fills his daughter’s apartment with paintings. But soon, he loses interest in even that.

He bitterly compares himself to his immensely successful, strong, buoyant, healthy older brother. His brother continues to lead a full, busy, engaging life; while he rusts at a Jersey Shore end-of-life stopping off point. He had always looked up to his brother and when needed, he had to admit that his brother was always there for him.

He becomes sick and seeks out a caregiver with whom he had had a brief fling. He remembers her loving care, and wants it back. She was young when he knew her; now she would be in her sixties. He can’t find her.

When he dies, in a room full of strangers, under the bright, sterile light of an operating room, he is surrounded by people and still alone. He doesn’t expect to die, but his body separates itself from life and he lets go. No one is with him.

But it didn’t matter who might have been with him. Even his children had become strangers, and he didn’t know his wives anymore.



Thanks to Gross for pointing out the Hamlet and Lear references in the novel.
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792-1822