Pandemics, luck and fate

Luck has been fundamental to humankind’s understanding of the world from time immemorial, although luck can’t be measured, quantified or even satisfactorily defined.

General George Armstrong Custer believed in "Custer's luck" until the June 1876 morning he encountered Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and their braves on the banks of the Bighorn River in Montana. Charles Lindbergh was known as "Lucky Lindy" after he flew the Atlantic non-stop from New York to Paris in 1927. Lindbergh may have been lucky, but he was also an exceptional pilot and meticulous aviation engineer.

Gamblers of all stripes testify to luck, although they also are the first to lament "My luck ran out." Composer Frank Loesser apotheosized the gambler's vision of luck in "Guys and Dolls" with the hit song "Luck Be a Lady Tonight."

Bluesman Albert King sang mournfully of luck in "Born Under a Bad Sign," "Been down since I began to crawl/ If it wasn't for bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all."

Has Alaska been lucky during the coronavirus pandemic? We have few deaths compared to the rest of the country; fewer confirmed cases, too, although the families of those who died and those diagnosed would certainly deny the notion of “Alaska’s luck.” If Alaska has luck, much it is of the Albert King variety. The tourism industry is in ruin, the oil industry depressed by $15 a barrel oil, and the Alaska Permanent Fund largely at the mercy of an unstable stock market.

It might be argued that Alaska is lucky to be isolated, difficult to reach by those who might spread the virus. But the distance between Anchorage and Seattle, where the coronavirus ruled the city early in the pandemic, is a matter of geography, not luck.

For centuries, writers, poets, preachers and moralists of one kind or another have warned, “Don’t tempt fate,” with fate (or fortune) cast as a supernatural power that intervenes in human affairs. The Greeks and Romans were sure fate was as much part of life as sunshine. So was Shakespeare. Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883), in a story about a Russian nobleman and his son who had fallen into near poverty, wrote “Nedopiuskin pere belonged to the number of those people whom fate persecutes with a ferocity that seems like personal hatred...” And of the son, Turgenev continues, “Fate, with which never a letup had been tearing with its fangs into Nedopiuskin the father, now tackled the son as well: Evidently it had acquired a taste for Nedopiuskins.”

Turgenev was a sophisticated, skeptical man. He used fate as an amusing literary conceit, not as a credible explanation of Nedopiuskin misery.

Fate is like luck in that it cannot be measured or quantified. No modern death certificate is going to have in the box "Cause of death," "Fate."

Novelist Philip Roth (1933--2018) lived through the persistent threat of polio as a boy, and as old man Roth wrote the novel, "Nemesis." set in Newark in the summer of 1944.The novel is not "about" a polio epidemic. Government reports, epidemiological findings, economic analyses are "about" plagues, epidemics, pandemics. Novels fictionally explore the human response to a spreading tragedy.

The title “Nemesis” comes from the Greeks. Nemesis was the goddess of divine retribution, although in the streets of Newark, “nemesis” would be more like a force that can never be escaped or defeated — as in, the Brooklyn Dodgers are never going to beat the New York Yankees in the World Series.

Reduced to its bones, the novel is the story of a young physical education teacher, Bucky Cantor, cast into the epidemic at an elementary school where he is director of the summer recreation program. Bucky is a fit, intelligent, even-tempered young man whose goal is to ensure the program continues safely throughout the summer.

The epidemic forces Bucky to confront much that has been beyond him. Why are there polio epidemics? Why do beautiful children die? Why does God allow such suffering? Roth’s writing can be unforgettable as in this bit describing a moment at a funeral for a polio victim.

“In front of the synagogue a row of cars was parked, one of them a black hearse ... Inside the hearse Mr. Cantor could see the casket. It was impossible to believe Alan was lying in that pale, plain, pine box merely from having caught a summertime disease. The box from which you cannot force your way out. The box in which a twelve-year-old was twelve years old forever.”

The novel continues as Bucky is offered a job in a summer camp far from sweltering Newark. This should be his ticket to escape the epidemic, but no. He develops the disease — and becomes a crippled, embittered survivor who lives on as a single man, his prospects for marriage to a fellow teacher destroyed.

Now, given the title of the novel, “Nemesis,” did polio willfully follow Bucky to the camp? The people of Roth’s Newark — his characters — had many explanations for where polio came from and was transmitted. These origin and dispersal explanations included the miasmic hog farms in nearby Secaucus, a dirty downtown luncheonette, the numerous flies that flew into homes and buzzed children’s beds, contaminated U.S. mail, germy paper currency, black cleaning ladies who daily came to white neighborhoods from the slums, witless Italian teenagers who spat in public places, Jews who — according to the small-minded, aren’t the Jews responsible for every calamity?

With uninformed, prejudicial belief rampant, It would not be hard to believe polio hunted down specific individuals.

In a recent issue of The Atlantic, Roth's friend Benjamin Taylor said of him "The happenstance that in retrospect turns epic" was essential to his storytelling. Thousands of Newark residents in "Nemesis" were exposed to polio. Some became ill and died. Some became ill and recovered. Some never experienced a symptom. Philip Roth never explained why. Not even the omniscient author of fiction knows everything.

Michael Carey is an Anchorage Daily News columnist. He can be reached at mcarey@adn.com.

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