I Married a Communist

by Philip Roth

  "You ever read Common Sense?" Iron Rinn asked me. "Ever read Paine's writings?"

  "No," I said.

  "Read 'em," Iron Rinn told me while still leafing through my book.

  "There's a lot of Paine's writing quoted by Howard Fast," I said.

  Looking up, Iron Rinn said, "'The strength of the many is revolution, but curiously enough mankind has gone through several thousand years of slavery without realizing that fact.'"

  "That's in the book," I said.

  "I should hope so."

  "You know what the genius of Paine was?" Mr. Ringold asked me. "It was the genius of all those men. Jefferson. Madison. Know what it was?"

  "No," I said.

  "You do know what it was," he said.

  "To defy the English."

  "A lot of people did that. No. It was to articulate the cause in English. The revolution was totally improvised, totally disorganized. Isn't that the sense you get from this book, Nathan? Well, these guys had to find a language for their revolution. To find the words for a great purpose."

  "Paine said," I told Mr. Ringold, "'I wrote a little book because I wanted men to see what they were shooting at.'"

  "And that he did," Mr. Ringold said.

  "Here," said Iron Rinn, pointing to some lines in the book. "On George III. Listen. 'I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man.

  Both quotations from Paine that Iron Rinn had recited—employing his The Free and the Brave people-bound, in-the-rough voice—were among the dozen or so that I had myself written down and memorized.

  "You like that line," Mr. Ringold said to me.

  "Yes. I like 'a whore of my soul.'"

  "Why?" he asked me.

  I was beginning to perspire profusely from the sun on my face, from the excitement of meeting Iron Rinn, and now from being on the spot, having to answer Mr. Ringold as though I were in class while I was sitting between two shirtless brothers well over six feet tall, two big, natural men exuding the sort of forceful, intelligent manliness to which I aspired. Men who could talk about baseball and boxing talking about books. And talking about books as though something were at stake in a book. Not opening up a book to worship it or to be elevated by it or to lose yourself to the world around you. No, boxing with the book.

  "Because," I said, "you don't ordinarily think of your soul as a whore."

  "What's he mean, 'a whore of my soul'?"

  "Selling it," I replied. "Selling his soul."

  "Right. Do you see how much stronger it is to write 'I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul' rather than 'were I to sell my soul'?"

  "Yes, I do."

  "Why is that stronger?"

  "Because in 'whore' he personifies it."

  "Yeah—what else?"

  "Well, the word 'whore'...it's not a conventional word, you don't hear it in public. People don't go around writing 'whore' or, in public, saying 'whore.'"

  "Why don't they?"

  "Shame. Embarrassment. Propriety."

  "Propriety Good. Right. So this is audacious, then."

  "Yes."

  "And that's what you like about Paine, isn't it? His audacity?"

  "I think so. Yes."

  "And now you know why you like what you like. You're way ahead of the game, Nathan. And you know it because you looked at one word he used, just one word, and you thought about that word he used, and you asked yourself some questions about that word he used, until you saw right through that word, saw through it as through a magnifying glass, to one of the sources of this great writer's power. He is audacious. Thomas Paine is audacious. But is that enough? That is only a part of the formula. Audacity must have a purpose, otherwise it's cheap and facile and vulgar. Why is Thomas Paine audacious?"

  "In behalf," I said, "of his convictions."

  "Hey, that's my boy," Iron Rinn suddenly announced. "That's my boy who booed Mr. Douglas!"

  So it was that I wound up five nights later as Iron Rinn's backstage guest at a rally held in downtown Newark, at the Mosque, the city's biggest theater, for Henry Wallace, the presidential candidate of the newly formed Progressive Party. Wallace had been in Roosevelt's cabinet as secretary of agriculture for seven years before becoming his vice president during Roosevelt's third term. In '44 he'd been dropped from the ticket and replaced by Truman, in whose cabinet he served briefly as secretary of commerce. In '46, the president fired Wallace for sounding off in favor of cooperation with Stalin and friendship with the Soviet Union at just the point when the Soviet Union had begun to be perceived by Truman and the Democrats not only as an ideological enemy but as a serious threat to peace whose expansion into Europe and elsewhere had to be contained by the West.

  This division within the Democratic Party—between the anti-Soviet majority led by the president and the "progressive" Soviet sympathizers led by Wallace and opposed to the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan—was reflected in the split within my own household between father and son. My father, who had admired Wallace when he was FDR's protégé, was against the Wallace candidacy for the reason Americans traditionally choose not to support third-party candidates—in this case, because it would draw the votes of the left wing of the Democratic Party away from Truman and make all but certain the election of Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, the Republican candidate. The Wallace people were talking about their party polling some six or seven million votes, a percentage of the popular vote vastly greater than had ever gone to any American third party.

  "Your man is only going to deny the Democrats the White House," my father told me. "And if we get the Republicans, that will mean the suffering in this country that it has always meant. You weren't around for Hoover and Harding and Coolidge. You don't know firsthand about the heartlessness of the Republican Party. You despise big business, Nathan? You despise what you and Henry Wallace call 'the Big Boys from Wall Street'? Well, you don't know what it is when the party of big business has its foot in the face of ordinary people. I do. I know poverty and I know hardship in ways you and your brother have been spared, thank God."

  My father had been born in the Newark slums and become a chiropodist only by going to school at night while working by day on a bakery truck; and all his life, even after he had made a few bucks and we had moved into a house of our own, he continued to identify with the interests of what he called ordinary people and what I had taken to calling—along with Henry Wallace—"the common man." I was terrifically disappointed to hear my father flatly refuse to vote for the candidate who, as I tried to convince him, supported his own New Deal principles. Wallace wanted a national health program, protection for unions, benefits for workers; he was opposed to Taft-Hartley and the persecution of labor; he was opposed to the Mundt-Nixon bill and the persecution of political radicals. The Mundt-Nixon bill, if passed, would require the registration with the government of all Communists and "Communist-front" organizations. Wallace had said that Mundt-Nixon was the first step to a police state, an effort to frighten the American people into silence; he called it "the most subversive" bill ever introduced in Congress. The Progressive Party supported the freedom of ideas to compete in what Wallace called "the marketplace of thoughts." Most impressive to me was that, campaigning in the South, Wallace had refused to address any audience that was segregated—the first presidential candidate ever to have that degree of courage and integrity.

  "The Democrats," I told my father, "will never do anything to end segregation. They will never outlaw lynching and the poll tax and Jim Crow. They never have and they never will."

  "I do not agree with you, Nathan," he told me. "You watch Harry Truman. Harry Truman has got a civil rights plank in his platform, and you watch and see what he does now that he's rid of those southern bigots."

  Not only had Wallace bolted from the Democratic Party that year, but so had the "bigots" my father spoke of
, the southern Democrats, who had formed their own party, the States Rights Party—the "Dixiecrats." They were running for president Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a rabid segregationist. The Dixiecrats were also going to draw away votes, southern votes, that routinely went to the Democratic Party, which was another reason Dewey was favored to defeat Truman in a landslide.

  Every night over dinner in the kitchen, I did everything I could to persuade my father to vote for Henry Wallace and the restoration of the New Deal, and every night he tried to get me to understand the necessity for compromise in an election like this one. But as I had taken as my hero Thomas Paine, the most uncompromising patriot in American history, at the mere sound of the first syllable of the word "compromise," I jumped up from my chair and told him and my mother and my ten-year-old brother (who, whenever I got going, liked to repeat to me, in an exaggeratedly exasperated voice, "A vote for Wallace is a vote for Dewey") that I could never again eat at that table if my father was present.

  One night at dinner my father tried another tack—to educate me further about the Republicans' contempt for every value of economic equality and political justice that I held dear—but I would have none of it: the two major political parties were equally without conscience when it came to the Negro's rights, equally indifferent to the injustices inherent to the capitalist system, equally blind to the catastrophic consequences for all of mankind of our country's deliberate provocation of the peace-loving Russian people. Close to tears, and meaning every word, I told my father, "I'm really surprised at you," as though it were he who was the uncompromising son.

  But a greater surprise was coming. Late on Saturday afternoon he told me that he would rather I didn't go down to the Mosque that evening to attend the Wallace rally. If I still wanted to after we had spoken, he wouldn't try to stop me, but he at least wanted me to hear him out before I made my decision final. When I'd come home on Tuesday from the library and triumphantly announced at dinner that I had been invited to be a guest of Iron Rinn, the radio actor, at the Wallace rally downtown, I was obviously so thrilled at meeting Rinn, so beside myself with the personal interest he'd shown in me, that my mother had simply forbidden my father from raising his reservations about the rally. But now he wanted me to listen to what he felt he had a duty, as a parent, to discuss, and without my flying off the handle.

  My father was taking me as seriously as the Ringolds were, but not with Ira's political fearlessness, with Murray's literary ingenuity, above all, with their seeming absence of concern for my decorum, for whether I would or would not be a good boy. The Ringolds were the one-two punch promising to initiate me into the big show, into my beginning to understand what it takes to be a man on the larger scale. The Ringolds compelled me to respond at a level of rigor that felt appropriate to who I now was. Be a good boy wasn't the issue with them. The sole issue was my convictions. But then, their responsibility wasn't a father's, which is to steer his son away from the pitfalls. The father has to worry about the pitfalls in a way the teacher doesn't. He has to worry about his son's conduct, he has to worry about socializing his little Tom Paine. But once little Tom Paine has been let into the company of men and the father is still educating him as a boy, the father is finished. Sure, he's worrying about the pitfalls—if he wasn't, it would be wrong. But he's finished anyway. Little Tom Paine has no choice but to write him off, to betray the father and go boldly forth to step straight into life's very first pit. And then, all on his own—providing real unity to his existence—to step from pit to pit for the rest of his days, until the grave, which, if it has nothing else to recommend it, is at least the last pit into which one can fall.

  "Hear me out," my father said, "and then you make up your own mind. I respect your independence, son. You want to wear a Wallace button to school? Wear it. It's a free country. But you have to have all the facts. You can't make an informed decision without facts."

  Why had Mrs. Roosevelt, the great president's revered widow, withheld her endorsement and turned against Henry Wallace? Why had Harold Ickes, Roosevelt's trusted and loyal secretary of interior, a great man in his own right, withheld his endorsement and turned against Henry Wallace? Why had the CIO, as ambitious a labor organization as this country had ever known, withdrawn its money and its support from Henry Wallace? Because of the Communist infiltration into the Wallace campaign. My father didn't want me to go to the rally because of the Communists who had all but taken over the Progressive Party. He told me that Henry Wallace was either too naive to know it or—what was, unfortunately, probably closer to the truth—too dishonest to admit it, but Communists, particularly from among Communist-dominated unions already expelled from the CIO—

  "Red-baiter!" I shouted, and I left the house. I took the 14 bus and went to the rally. I met Paul Robeson. He reached out to shake my hand after Ira introduced me as the kid at the high school he'd told him about. "Here he is, Paul, the boy who led the booing of Stephen A. Douglas." Paul Robeson, the Negro actor and singer, cochairman of the Wallace for President Committee, who only a few months earlier at a Washington demonstration against the Mundt-Nixon bill had sung "Ol' Man River" to a crowd of five thousand protesters at the foot of the Washington Monument, who'd been fearless before the Senate Judiciary Committee, telling them (when asked at their hearings on Mundt-Nixon if he would comply with the bill if it was passed), "I would violate the law," then answering no less forthrightly (when asked what the Communist Party stood for), "For complete equality of the Negro people"—Paul Robeson took my hand in his and said, "Don't lose your courage, young man."

  Standing backstage with the performers and speakers at the Mosque—enveloped simultaneously in two exotic new worlds, the leftist milieu and the world of "the wings"—was as thrilling as it would have been to sit down in the dugout with the players at a major league game. From the wings I heard Ira do Abraham Lincoln again, this time tearing into not Stephen A. Douglas but the warmongers in both political parties: "Supporting reactionary regimes all over the world, arming Western Europe against Russia, militarizing America..." I saw Henry Wallace himself, stood no more than twenty feet away from him before he went onto the stage to address the crowd, and then stood almost at his side when Ira went up to whisper something to him at the gala reception after the rally. I stared at the presidential candidate, a Republican farmer's son from Iowa as American-looking and American-sounding as any American I had ever seen, a politician against high prices, against big business, against segregation and discrimination, against appeasing dictators like Francisco Franco and Chiang Kai-shek, and I remembered what Fast had written of Paine: "His thoughts and ideas were closer to those of the average working man than Jefferson's could ever be." And in 1954—six years after that night at the Mosque when the candidate of the common man, the candidate of the people and the people's party, raised gooseflesh all over me by clenching his fist and crying out from the lectern, "We are in the midst of a fierce attack upon our freedom"—I got turned down for a Fulbright scholarship.

  I did not and could not have made a scrap of difference, and yet the zealotry to defeat Communism reached even me.

  Iron Rinn had been born in Newark two decades before me, in 1913, a poor boy from a hard neighborhood—and from a cruel family—who briefly attended Barringer High, where he failed every subject but gym. He had bad eyesight and useless glasses and could barely read what was in the lesson books, let alone what the teacher wrote on the blackboard. He couldn't see and he couldn't learn and one day, as he explained it, "I just didn't wake up to go to school."

  Murray and Ira's father was someone Ira refused even to discuss. In the months after the Wallace rally, the most Ira ever told me was this: "My father I couldn't talk to. He never paid the slightest bit of attention to his two sons. He didn't do this on purpose. It was the nature of the beast." Ira's mother, a beloved woman in his memory, died when he was seven, and her replacement he described as "the stepmother you hear about in the fairy tales. A real bitch." He quit high schoo
l after a year and a half and, a few weeks later, left the house forever at fifteen and found a job digging ditches in Newark. Till the war broke out, while the country was in the Depression, he drifted round and round, first in New jersey and then all over America, taking whatever work he could get, mostly jobs requiring a strong back. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the army. He couldn't see the eye chart, but a long line of guys were waiting for the examination, and so Ira went around up close to the chart, memorized as much of it as he could, then got back in line, and that was how he passed the physical. When Ira came out of the army in 1945, he spent a year in Calumet City, Illinois, where he shared a room with the closest buddy he'd made in the service, a Communist steelworker, Johnny O'Day. They'd been soldier stevedores together on the docks in Iran, unloading lend-lease equipment that was shipped by rail through Teheran to the Soviet Union; because of Ira's strength on the job, O'Day had nicknamed his friend "Iron Man Ira." In the evenings, O'Day had taught the Iron Man how to read a book and how to write a letter and gave him an education in Marxism.

  O'Day was a gray-haired guy some ten years older than Ira—"How he ever got into the service at his age," Ira said, "I still don't know." A six-footer skinny as a telephone pole, but the toughest son of a bitch he'd ever met. O'Day carried in his gear a light punching bag that he used for his timing; so quick and strong was he that, "if forced to," he could lick two or three guys together. And O'Day was brilliant. "I knew nothing about politics. I knew nothing about political action," Ira said. "I didn't know one political philosophy or one social philosophy from another. But this guy talked a lot to me," he said. "He talked about the workingman. About things in general in the United States. The harm our government was doing to the workers. And he backed up what he said with facts. And a nonconformist? O'Day was so nonconformist that everything he did he did not do by the book. Yeah, O'Day did a lot for me, I know that."

  Like Ira, O'Day was unmarried. "Entangling alliances," he told Ira, "is something I don't want any part of at no time. I regard kids as hostages to the malevolent." Though he had but a year's education more than Ira, on his own O'Day had "skilled himself," as he put it, "in verbal and written polemics" by slavishly copying passage after passage out of all sorts of books and, with the aid of a grade school grammar, analyzing the structure of the sentences. It was O'Day who gave Ira the pocket dictionary that Ira claimed remade his life. "I had a dictionary I read at night," Ira told me, "the way you would read a novel. I had somebody send me a Roget's Thesaurus. After unloading ships all day, I would work every night to improve my vocabulary."