Everyman
By Philip Roth


Sequestering himself in his writing studio and sticking to a strict regime of diet, exercise and work, Philip Roth has regularly turned out award winning literature. In 1997 he won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel American Pastoral. In 1998, he received the National Medal of Arts and Letters at the White House. In 2002 he was given the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal. Roth has won the National Book Award, the PEN/ Faulkner Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award twice. In 2004 he published a disturbing, yet reflective novel of revisionist history, The Plot Against America for which he was given the Society of American Historians’ prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004”. The Plot Against America was named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book World, Time, Newsweek and many other periodicals.
Roth’s latest addition to his impressive body of work is the short, but artistically accomplished novel, Everyman. Available sometime in May, Everyman is published by Houghton Mifflin Company 2006 at $24.00. It is Roth’s 27th book and the fifth book he has written in the 21 century. Everyman, a novel about aging and death originated when Roth attended his friend and fellow writer, Saul Bellow’s funeral and is a response to Bellow’s last book, Ravelstein. At 73 years old Roth understands all too well the deterioration of the body caused by aging. Because of back problems Roth writes while standing at a lectern. He tries to stay in peak physical condition to maintain the long hours that are demanded by his work.
Roth begins his novel at his nameless main character Everyman’s funeral. A circle of friends, family and colleagues gather around to pay their final respects or celebrate his death. Roth writes, “Of course, when anyone dies, though many were grief-stricken, others remained unperturbed, or found themselves relieved, or, for reasons good or bad, were genuinely pleased.” Roth cleverly crafted this subtle expositional funeral scene where we are introduced to the Everyman character through the feelings, thoughts and eyes of those who knew him best. Then effortlessly, Roth slides the reader into a type of vignette segue of the Everyman’s thoughts right before he passes on, and with more sneaky expositional material that is vital to the story, Roth flashbacks to the Everyman’s youthful experiences with death. The first time, he stumbles across a body that has washed up on a beach, and the second, while he’s in the hospital waiting for a hernia operation a boy in the hospital bed next to him dies. Roth writes, “Looking across at the other bed, he saw that it was stripped of its bedding. Noting could have been clearer to him what had happened than the sight of the bare mattress ticking and the uncovered pillows piled in the middle of the empty bed…Memorable enough that he was in the hospital that young, but even more memorable that he had registered a death.”
The novel progresses chronologically from that point. We follow Everyman through occupational successes, marriage, children, accolades, triumphs, deaths, sadness, sickness, mistresses and infidelities, divorce, another marriage and another child. John Lennon said that life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. Meanwhile, Roth shows us that mortality is in the wings, like light breath upon the neck and shoulders, needling whispers of pain and doubt slowly chip away pieces of being. At the same time these inklings are creating a false sense of comfort and inspiring thoughts of living forever. Two completely different, contradictory themes can occupy the same mind at the same time, forming a paradox where experiences stored in short term memory and long term memory are nullified. The aliveness and deadness are forgotten because humanity is too stupefied and too busy just trying to exist day by day in a fugue. Everyman’s daughter Nancy repeats to him his life’s maxim, ““There’s no remaking reality,”” she told him. ““Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes.”” As a comfort zone is reached within existence mortality releases its full wrath upon Everyman, and as such, that which is life is over.
Some readers maybe tempted to think that the Everyman is an aged Alexander Portnoy, from Roth’s 1969 novel, Portnoy’s Complaint or even Philip Roth himself. This isn’t so. Roth took the title Everyman from the 15 century medieval morality play of the same name that dramatizes the moral melee of a Christian individual’s path to redemption. The character Death summons the Everyman to inform him that his life has reached its end. Everyman seeks the companionship from those around him to accompany him on his final journey, of course, his false friends: his casual companions, his kin, and his wealth refuse to go with him. So he relies upon himself, his Good Deeds, his Strength, his Beauty, his Intelligence, and his Knowledge. These allow him to pay-off his accountability, but only his Good deeds follow him into the afterlife.
Roth applies the idea of accountability from the Everyman morality play to his Everyman character. Using the Everyman morality play as an example each character in Roth’s novel, Everyman’s brother Howie, Everyman’s two sons, Randy and Lonny, his daughter Nancy, his parents and his three ex-wives serves a dual purpose besides interacting with the Everyman, they’re also symbolic. Everyman’s occupation, dream of becoming an artist, his mistresses, friends, wealth and business achievements Roth shows are all finite like the characters in the Everyman morality play when the reaper comes calling. Everyman loses the strength of his body, his mind is helpless and useless, beauty is a distraction but insignificant and his talent as an artist can not save him. But then, Roth departs from the Everyman morality play. Roth’s accountability for his Everyman is not in a Christian sense of good versus evil, right or wrong, nor uses the idea of heaven as an incentive to seek redemption. God and religion do not figurer into the Everyman’s equation. Roth writes, “Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life, and he found all religions offensive, considered their superstitious folderol meaningless, childish, couldn’t stand the complete unadultness--the baby talk and the righteousness and the sheep, the avid believers. 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--he’d come upon it early and intuitively and however elemental, that was the whole of it.”
Roth’s Everyman’s accountability is the outcome of exercising free-will. Does he take responsibility for his actions? Roth doesn’t judge, accuse or try to make an ethical example of his Everyman. Neither does he allow rationalization to become Everyman’s ‘get-out-of-jail-free-card’. After his first infidelity and becoming estranged from his two sons, Everyman continues to give into the urges of his body and repeats his cycle of marriages, mistresses and divorces. He no longer apologizes or gives explanations to anyone, including his adult sons. Roth writes, “Randy and Lonny were the source of his deepest guilt, but he could not explain his behavior to them…It was inexplicable to him-the excitement they could seriously persist in deriving from his denunciation…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 divorce that broke up a family…nor could they ever understand that he had lost the same family they did.”
Everyman is not for everyone. Philip Roth is a keen observer of reality and even keener at reducing humanity down to its essence, physicality without the governor of intellect, or fear of damning an immortal soul. Roth writes about the human animal. Some might take umbrage or even a moral outrage at his representations. Everyman is brutally honest, ‘there’s no remaking reality we live, and we take it as it comes, we hold our ground and take it as it comes.’ And we die.



Lee Gooden 4-25-2006

Sacred Work: Planned Parenthood and Its Clergy Alliances (Rutger University)
Written by Tom Davis

Reviewed by Lee Gooden

"When I am confronted with arguments against Birth Control, arguments that are as a rule presented by learned theologians or indefatigable statistician, the dim far off chorus of suffering and pain begins to resound anew in my ears. How academic, how anemically intellectual and how remote from throbbing, bleeding humanity all these prejudiced arguments sound, when one has been brought face to face with the reality of suffering!"
-Margaret Sanger, from Motherhood in Bondage 1928

1997, A Washington DC Planned Parenthood open the doors to a new clinic in an area church. After the opening, the Washington Post printed an article with the headline, ‘Unlikely Alliance for Planned Parenthood’ “The Washington Post was merely reflecting the popular understanding that the work of Planned Parenthood is opposed by all religious institutions.” writes Tom Davis, an ordained minister with the United Church of Christ and chair of the Clergy Advisory Board of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Davis, also, a chaplain emeritus and associate professor of religion at Skidmore College blows apart this myth in this rich tome on the history of Planned Parenthood and the organization's so-called unlikely partnership with the clergy. “An alliance between churches and synagogues, temples and Planned Parenthood has existed for over seventy years,” explains Davis, “Below public radar, mainline Protestant and Jewish Clergy in their alliance with Planned Parenthood, have played a major role in achieving respectability for birth control in a nation whose religious convictions always involve social and moral issues and never more than when the subject at hand involves women's sexuality.”
Sacred work involves the easing of suffering. The clergy recognized that Planned Parenthood performed sacred work by easing the suffering of women by providing other options than having unhealthy multiple births, raising children in poverty or seeking illegal and dangerous abortions. "In the biblical view, sacred work is love and in practical social realities, sacred work is justice,” writes Davis, continuing, “nowhere was injustice more clearly present than in the twentieth-century battle over contraception.” If women were given the right to choose whether they wanted to have children or not, would jeopardize the position of the status quo of men in power. “Since spiritual realities cannot be separated from social and political life,” reasons Davis, “the pursuit of the sacred work of justice takes clergy into the public arena. The realm of justice is a realm of hard, sometimes tragic choices. As Planned Parenthood and the clergy each tried to stand with women making those hard choices a bond was formed.”
Davis goes on to explain how Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood in 1913 searched for six months for information about birth control in the United States. Sanger had worked as a maternity nurse and saw the awful results of generations of women ignorant of birth control or any sex education. Davis writes. “She saw women having frequent illegal abortions, women overwhelmed by poverty and too many children, women dying because they had no knowledge of how to prevent one pregnancy after another.” Sanger was shocked to discover that even in the Library of Congress and some of the best libraries in the country she couldn’t find anything written about contraception. Sanger then went to Europe and learned about different types of contraception. When she returned home she published a magazine called The Woman Rebel and shared her finds with American women and traveled around the country giving speeches, she was immediately a target of the law and she knew she needed the aid of the clergy. In Cleveland Sanger made a speech in the First Unitarian Church. Later, the Unitarians supported her cause. "To their credit, a number of clergy joined Sanger in her urgency for the freedom to choose contraception,” writes Davis, “From the 1930s on, clergy support for Planned Parenthood grew steadily. In city after city, affiliates found that some clergy were more than willing to speak out publicly in defense of clinics. By the 1960s it was precisely the religious and moral authority of these supportive clergy that changed public opinion about birth control."
Davis continues with the history of the clergy's involvement with Planned Parenthood and discusses how the Roman Catholic Church made sure hospital funds were taken away when women were informed of different contraceptive techniques, let alone that contraception or even abortion was an option. The Vatican wanted to enforce a gag order that other clergy fought. Davis writes, "This issue remains alive as it was in 1952-53. The controversies that currently embroil Planned Parenthood and the women's movement involve government attempts to impose "gag rules" both internationally and domestically. These rules state that no government funding can go to clinics that inform a pregnant woman that abortion is one of her choices. That is forbidden speech. Those clergy who oppose gag rules invoke the right of freedom of speech."
Sacred Work is an epic on hope and human nature. One such as Margaret Sanger although secular in her beliefs understood that women needed to enlist the aid of the clergy and invoke their faith and belief that sacred work is justice and love. Sanger challenged the clergy to protect women from a male dominated society that demeans and subjugates women by taking away their reproductive rights. Davis has defined and set a standard for those that wish to do sacred work in the twenty-first century and beyond. Unfortunately today, this new era called the 21 century that was supposed to be cutting-edge and advanced is still grounded in an archaic ‘good old boy’ mentality and a value system that perpetuates the myth that our once grand ‘God fearing’ country is in on decline and rotting from the inside out like the Roman Empire or Sodom and Gomorrah. “This myth of a lost golden age is used by radio stations and legions of cable pundits to denigrate modern social conditions, often implying that feminism and the changed conditions of women’s lives are largely responsible for our plight.” When Bill Clinton was president he changed “twelve years of presidential antiabortion measures.” President Bush has a different agenda then his predecessor. Davis writes “In September 2003 the web site of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive choice reported that “the President privately told leaders of catholic charities that his proposed massive new faith-based initiative will help them promote opposition to a woman’s right to chose. Bush also promised the group he would immediately oppose abortion rights through ‘legislative initiatives…Beyond that, he said, ‘there’s a larger calling’ which he described as ‘changing the culture of the country.’”

When Roe v. Wade was passed by the Supreme Court it was a 7 to 2 decision, a landmark time in a woman’s right to choose. The 1992 Casey decision narrowed the margin of Roe 5 to 4. Samuel Alito, a newly appointed Supreme Court Justice wrote a paper earlier in his career that he wanted to overturn Roe v Wade. When our current Supreme court Chief Justice John Roberts was a Deputy Solicitor General in 1991 he co-authored a brief for the government in the case Rust v. Sullivan to overturn Roe v. Wade. He also questioned the right to privacy that was a 1965 Supreme Court decision Griswold v. Connecticut defeating a state law that the use of birth control–pills by married women was illegal. Many states in our country had laws on the books that made abortion illegal. The Roe v. Wade decision made these laws invalid. Some states like Indiana are all ready jumping on the band-wagon to try to take advantage of the more conservative leanings of the new Supreme Court to impose a stipulation to only abort when the ongoing pregnancy is a threat to the woman’s life or the chance that the woman might become profoundly impaired. Some states are trying to make it mandatory that a woman must view an ultrasound of the fetus and talk over with a counselor the pain it might feel during an abortion. As of February 11 2006, according to The Orlando Sentinel Florida has passed a law that a doctor must inform a minor girl’s parents before an abortion.
If Roe v. Wade is overturned will the last thirty-three years of a woman’s autonomy be buried similar to the way the Taliban enslaved Muslim women in Afghanistan who were former doctors, scientists, teachers and lawyer among many other professions? Will American women have to go back to the days of guilt over taking pleasure in sex and be humiliated by their friends and family for becoming ‘knocked up’? Will they seek back alley abortionists or pay exorbitant prices to physicians that perform secret abortions in private practices? Hopefully, there will always be somebody like Margaret Sanger and Tom Davis to continue their sacred work and do the right thing even when it is illegal. While being asked by the court in New York State not to violate Section 1142, a Penal code that made it a crime to give out birth control information, Margaret Sanger said, “I cannot promise to obey a law I don’t respect.”