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Simon Cooke
posted 23 June 2006

Anyone’s story, taken to its logical conclusion, ends in death (so Hemingway sternly asserted). In the case of Philip Roth’s Everyman, it’s no spoiler to reveal that the story is taken to its ‘logical conclusion’. His protagonist’s ‘ending’ is the narrative’s point of departure.

Everyman opens ‘around the grave’ in a ‘rundown’ Jewish cemetery in New Jersey where a few of the unnamed deceased’s colleagues, friends and family are gathered for his burial. And it is towards this inevitable destination – his death – that his journey through a life ‘haunted by thoughts of dying’ and plagued (in old age especially but not exclusively) by frequent life-threatening hospitalisations is then retrospectively told. Twenty-two years of ‘excellent health and the boundless reassurance that flows from being fit’ are despatched in just eight lines. As Roth assured one interviewer, with the same stoic, comic bathos that percolates throughout his twenty-seventh book: ‘You get your money’s worth, if you want death’.

Not wanting death is, of course, the point of the joke, and the impulse for the book, as well as what will be revealed as the protagonist’s central preoccupation. Roth has, in several of his later works – from Sabbath’s Theatre to The Dying Animal - turned his attention directly on coming to terms with what Henry James called, on his death-bed, ‘the big thing’. But Everyman stages a less characteristically raging protest against the ‘injustice’ of ‘the knowledge that we are born to live and then we die instead’. ‘Everyman’s’ resolute maxim, repeated (and, in terms of the narrative, preceded) by his daughter at his funeral, is that ‘there’s no remaking reality. Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes.’

Despite the irony of such a maxim in the context of a novel (it is a novelist’s business to remake reality), for some reviewers, this has come as a disappointment. In the Guardian, John Banville calls it a ‘remarkably low-key performance’. Nicholas Spice, in the London Review of Books, describes his experience as akin to that of ‘a groupie who has paid his entrance fee to see a favourite performer, only to find that the guy has decided to preach a sermon instead’. But the form must be adapted for the task in hand, and no authors worth their salt perform party-pieces. ‘Everyman’ reaches the point at which, not the rage, but ‘the tenderness was out of control. As was the longing for everyone to be living. And to have it all over again’. Screaming into the abyss might not be the order of the day.

Disappointment with the structure of the story is also only a short step away from refusing to reconcile with its mirror in life – rather like ‘Everyman’ himself. Roth, however, is both uncompromising and nuanced in his approach. Within the first few funereal pages, the architecture of the nameless ‘Everyman’s’ life and death is sketched out through the eulogies of his daughter, Nancy, and his ‘triumphantly healthy’ older brother, Howie: his proud, doting mother and father and his childhood in a Jewish Newark neighbourhood; a successful career as an art director at an advertising firm at the expense of a vocation as a painter, taken up again, intermittently, in retirement; three failed marriages (and only one ex-wife in attendance) resulting in two unforgiving sons and one adoring daughter; numerous affairs; and near-lifelong skirmishes with illness. The story is, simultaneously, over before it has begun, and manifestly not finished off by his death (pace Hemingway). And, precisely through the almost Senecan form of this circular story foretold from the start, the novel achieves the urgency of a kind of suspense.

Life told through the lens of its own end places deadlines, as it were, on whether, through the course of his life, the protagonist will come to terms with the fact of his own mortality, and also on accounting for the ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ that led to a death over which, ‘though many were grief-stricken, others remained unperturbed, or found themselves relieved, or, for reasons good or bad, were genuinely pleased’. Much of the book follows the advice ‘Everyman’ imagines his parents might have given him on being astonished to be seventy-one: ‘“Good. You lived,” his mother replied, and his father said, “Look back and atone for what you can atone for, and make the best of what you have left.” Like so many Christmas stories in which the life is measured according to the memories of those left behind, the tone of the book is often that of an appeal. Randy and Lonny, his sons, ‘the source of his deepest guilt’, ‘prompt a fugue of questions’ – only half-rhetorical – ‘with which he attempted to defend the story of his life’:

Was their steadfast posture of unforgivingness any more forgivable? Or any less harmful in its effect? He was one of the millions of American men who were party to a divorce that broke up a family. But did he beat their mother? Did he beat them? Was he ever once severe? Had he not made every overture toward them that he could? What could have been avoided?

It is to his ‘ordinariness’ that Everyman appeals in his attempt to assuage his guilt. And it is also his ordinariness with which he cannot reconcile his morbid preoccupation. In his early thirties, he is ‘not flamboyant or deformed or extreme in any way, so why then, at his age, should he be haunted by thoughts of dying?’ His ‘averageness’ is accentuated by his anonymity. Roth takes his title from the fifteenth-century allegorical play, Everyman, whose author is not known. So too the protagonist of Roth’s Everyman remains nameless. The ‘stroke of genius’ whereby his father names his watches and diamonds store ‘Everyman’s’ – to attract ‘ordinary’ people - is also the neat trick whereby Roth makes this plain (though not that obvious; many reviewers call him the ‘eponymous Everyman’.) With what subtlety, though, Roth refrains, in this novel about the ‘substantiality’ of life, from furnishing the reader with any physical descriptions of the man portrayed. And if the implication is of the universality of Everyman’s fate, ‘it’s the commonness that’s most wrenching, the registering once more of the fact of  death that overwhelms everything’.

Death shares with desire the characteristic that it is both that which we have most in common and that which insists most forcefully on our distance from others (lovers are described as a ‘cult of two’). And no writer, perhaps, is more qualified to explore this most immediately apparent antidote to the deathly than ‘The Professor of Desire’ (the novel-title often borrowed to describe the author himself). Following the funeral, Roth begins the ‘back-story’ with ‘Everyman’s’ attempt, the night before the surgery from which he will never awaken, at ‘remembering as exactly as he could each of the women who had been there waiting for him to rise out of the anaesthetic in the recovery room’. Even from childhood, death and sexuality are physically, indivisibly linked: the boy ‘Everyman’s’ first encounter with his own physical fragility, at nine years of age, is located in his groin: he is hospitalised by a hernia. As if a portent to the challenge to virility old age will later pose, when he goes in for his first operation, he ‘could have sworn that the surgeon, whoever he was, had whispered, “Now I am going to turn you into a girl.”’ Roth here points towards the question of a specifically male experience of mortality: the fear of death is contrasted by ‘Everyman’ to living ‘manfully’.  

But desire – even fulfilled – affords ‘Everyman’ only a temporary forgetting. And any coming to terms with mortality also decisively precludes the other most readily invoked consolation, the religious:      

Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life…. No hocus-pocus about death and God or obsolete fantasies of heaven for him. There was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us. If he could be said to have located a philosophical niche for himself, that was it. Should he ever write an autobiography, he’d call it The Life and Death of a Male Body.

This anti-theological approach to coming to terms with death signals, in one sense, that this is not a book about the absolute, ‘Death’. It impresses upon us the fact that Death is, biologically and philosophically, an idea. (We have no need to personify Life – various and particular as it is – as we do Death - the absolute embodied in cloak-and-scythe form.) It is not a coincidence that ‘Everyman’ is revealed at his most simplistic when contemplating the ‘menace of oblivion’: that ‘the profusion of stars told him unambiguously that he was doomed to die’ is not an especially revelatory observation for a 34-year-old man. It is the animal experience, rather than the metaphysical, that Roth is most concerned with, and ‘none of what he did or didn’t believe mattered on the day that his father was buried beside his mother in the rundown cemetery just off Jersey Turnpike’. The shock lies in the fact that ‘the space taken up by their bodies was now vacant. Their substantiality was gone.’

What follows is one of the longer descriptive passages in the book, minutely attentive to the physical details of the environment, from the rusted lock to the Hebrew inscriptions on the gravestones. Like a Russian doll, the burial of his father initiates the story of his life according to the same formal structure of the novel entire: he is buried in the place where he will spend ‘even more hours than he’d spent selling jewelry…’ And so the story begins of his becoming the proprietor of Everyman’s Jewelry Store, seller of ‘Watches – Jewelry – Diamonds’: ‘“It’s a big deal for working people to buy a diamond,” he told his sons… “Because beyond the beauty and the status and the value, the diamond is imperishable. A piece of the earth that is imperishable and a mere mortal is wearing it on her hand!”’ That Roth gives the same name to his book as to the store suggests parallels with his theme. The watch: a symbol of time passing. The diamond: a symbol of the imperishable. 

Imperishable is also, like ‘Everyman’s’ final fate and the work of art, unchangeable. Umberto Eco, who has himself recently explored ageing and desire in The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, writes in Some Functions of Literature that ‘the function of “unchangeable” stories is precisely this: against all our desires to change destiny, they make tangible the impossibility of changing it. And in so doing, no matter what story they are telling, they are also telling our own story, and this is why we read and love them. We need this severe, “repressive” lesson… Stories that are “already made” also teach us how to die.’

In a sense the vitality of Roth’s book derives exactly from his unwillingness to learn this ‘repressive’ lesson, even as he embodies it in a decisively ‘unchangeable’ story. Roth’s novel – and, indeed, his continued prolific output - is a fine example of the ‘late style’ Edward Said called for, in his last published article: ‘artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty and contradiction.’ Nicholas Spice, disappointed at what he feels is a lack of ‘propulsive linguistic exuberance’, observes that ‘the novel’s governing tense is the pluperfect, the past tense of the past tense, the tense that declares everything to be unchangeable and finished with’. But, while the pluperfect embodies the knowledge that what is described is already past - not once but twice - and the story is shadowed by foreknowledge of its own pastness as it comes into being, it is also in the pluperfect that Roth achieves the pleading, yet powerful, call to the lasting value, not of what endures imperishable and recorded, but those manifest moments of freely chosen life:

He’d spent August in a semi-furnished ramshackle house on an inland road on Martha’s Vineyard with the woman whose constant lover he’d been for two years. Until now they’d never dared to chance living together…, and the experiment had been a joyous success … They’d swim across the 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 and collect clusters of mussels…

The knowledge this would pass is there at the outset, but the appeal is: for all this is past, is it not true that this was experienced, and always will have been? The pluperfect places it doubly in the past, but it can also be read as a double affirmation: ‘We had lived’. It is not despite his death, but because of it, that these episodes are charged with such urgency. That ‘Everyman’ dies is not as sad, or as difficult to accept, as the fact that he dies having lived a life, at times, against his will. Not death, but falling into ‘illness’s deadliest trap, the contortion of one’s character, had destroyed the last link to the dearest people he’d known.’ These links are ‘wiped out … against his every intention, against his will’.

The fatalism of the story may not offer ‘hope’. But hope, almost by definition, invests in forces beyond our control any chance of fulfilment, and this is anathema to his investment, instead, in the will of the living. Is it really death that ‘Everyman’ fears? It is difficult for us to know our deepest fear (because we are afraid of it); what we identify as the object of our fear might in fact be the protection we afford ourselves against it. The fear of death, Roth shows us, might be the fear of the life we could have, maybe should have led. Eco may be right that unchangeable stories ‘teach us how to die’, but in this, Roth’s unchangeable story might also teach us how to live. In the delicate exaltation of its closing pages, manifest moments of will, of the sense of freedom, survive. It may end just as he feared from the start, yet still it is true that:

The words spoken by the bones made him feel buoyant and indestructible. So did the hard-won subjugation of his darkest thoughts. Nothing could extinguish the vitality of that boy whose slender little torpedo of an unscathed body once rode the big Atlantic waves….