Nemesis by Philip Roth

This memoir style piece has all the makings of a well-crafted short story.  And I’m sure that’s what he intended, originally.  Roth fell somewhere between mine and my mother’s generation.  He went through this stuff as a fearless teenager; but his mother could remember back through two world wars.  The effects of polio and the fear surrounding it are almost forgotten now, except for people seventy and above, like his and my age group.  I’ve heard the stories of the war time fear all my life from my mother. 

Roth does a good job of capturing the parental fears, but also blends in a stronger, secondary human foible: pride. 

PRIDE.

It’s hubris [ ὕβρις ] in Greek.

It goeth before a fall –“ Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”

Proverbs 16:18

The seventh, and worst, deadly sin.  Classic.

Roth develops a character that is tainted with the humiliation of being rejected by his male peers as a warrior symbol.  So the response of his male lead character is to make himself even more perfect in every other physical attribute -- an icon -- an idol of the other boys around him. This is gray area -- Does he become obsessive? -- even arrogant about his abilities -- an arbiter of perfection in others -- the perfect dive -- the perfect javelin throw -- the perfect body of muscles -- doesn't an arbiter of these things have tendencies to arrogance.?

It's that subtle over-reach that turns this into hubris. Maybe it's just a cultural thing, some sort of Greek or Catholic or Jewish thing – a Roman or an Ohioan White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant would never worry about the problem of being an arbiter of other people's perfection. Mitt Romney is a case in point -- he thought there was nothing wrong with saying that England and America had a "special bond", because of their white, Anglo-Saxon heritage: Long live the king.

The Bucky character, to his eventual end, was plagued by this all being some sort of hideous, monstrous test. He had been destined for greatness, but denied all forms of pleasure here on Earth. God speaks to him. God gives him seven challenges.  My main point is that he should have kept it to 10-15,000 words.

Then we get the Philip Roth/Woody Allen classically conflicted character, making a 36-hour decision, which he spends the rest of his long, tormented life regretting.  Not like Frankie S.,

“Regrets  I've had a few  But then again too few to mention  I did what I had to do  And saw it through without exemption.”

O.K., so we’ve learned a little bit about Polio, but mostly anecdotal, like Mama told us. 

We’ve been told again and again how fear causes panic. – “There is nothing to Fear, but Fear itself.!!”

And we’ve watched a man, not unlike Oedipus, deconstruct in all aspects of his life, over what: indecision?, lack of commitment?, faith?, bad genetics?, bad hygiene?.

I would give “Nemesis” a 5 out of 10 points.  After all, it is a Philip Roth book – hopefully his last.

I’ve included my own little memoir of Polio on the next page.

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My family moved from Detroit (Industrial core of the WW-II effort) to San Jose in 1948.  My tenth year and I was coming into the fifth grade.  I was good friends with two fellows, Tremaine Adrian (L) and Skip Smith (R).  Our common interest was secondarily mathematics, but mainly our youthful and beautiful mathematics teacher, Mrs. Pat Bergna.  We all three had a crush on her.  She had announced her engagement to be married before classes ended that year, 1949.  I don't remember her maiden name, because she married the soon-to-be 30-year career District Attorney for San Jose.

Undaunted, we volunteered to mow her lawn all summer in exchange for math lessons.  I'm sure she realized that we all had this crush on her.  We dutifully arrived at her little house every Saturday morning on our bicycles and spent a few hours trimming the yard so that it looked like it had been to the barber shop.  She kept her part of the bargain and when we were done, she would serve us lunch and give us an algebra lesson.  Life moved on in the sixth grade and we put our efforts into Boy Scouts rather than Mrs. Bergna that year. 

The next year was when, first time in my life, I thought about myself as a unique individual who would live and die.  Sort of like Descartes, "I think, therefore I am."  I had this thought while walking home from an evening Boy Scout Troop meeting at the school.  These days you wouldn't let a twelve year old kid walk the streets in the dark.  In my English class, for a book review, I choose "Of Time and the River" by Thomas Wolfe.  [No, not the current author, this one died in 1938.]  My teacher was astounded and unbelieving, since it was almost 900 pages and weighty writing like Faulkner's stories about the South. 

In the summer, between sixth and seventh grades, the word came to my mother, who was good friends with Tremaine's mother that he had been diagnosed with Polio and was in an Iron Lung.  I was kept away from all that early trauma.  The mothers must have shared their agony.  I know my mother had a great fear of Polio, stemming back to our early days {1944} in Detroit.  I started to visit Tremaine once a week after school.  I was not forced, nor even encouraged to do this.  I had to take a bus over to what is now the Valley Medical Center on Bascom and Moorpark and back again.  It took a whole afternoon.  I didn't know, or comprehend, at the time what the prognosis was. 

My visits dwindled to once every two weeks during the eighth grade and once a month during the ninth grade, by then I'd figured out that there was no hope and it would be over soon.  Each year I would twist the arms of various singing groups at Christmas time to come with me to the hospital.  I love to sing Christmas Carols, although I have no real voice for it.  But that was something I could do and it elated everybody for a while.  It's strange how some of these sorts of things stick with us.  I still join in with Christmas groups that will have me, shouting out, "God Rest ye Merry Gentlemen."  A favorite time of life was when my good friend Donna Roberts used to have annual Christmas parties in Bernal Heights and drag out the sheet music for all to join in and sing carols.  I joined a hospital choir group when I returned to Tucson for graduate studies.

Tremaine died during the spring term of the ninth grade.  We had slowly lost an oral connection for speaking about current events.  This was understandable with all that goes on in a young life between twelve and fifteen.  We still talked about feelings, wishes (his to get out of that lung), and the future (me - cars, him - girls).  I know that at the end, he understood that he wasn't going to live much longer, but how does a 15-year-old relate to that?  I'm sure there were other deaths around me during the preceding 15 years, but this was the first that affected me so personally.