I Married a Communist

by Philip Roth

  "Keep it in," Sokolow replied, "and we stand to lose more than we gain."

  "Bullshit! Let the bastards know we mean business! lust put the fucking thing back in!"

  I said to Ella, "Shouldn't we do something?"

  "I've heard men arguing all my life," she told me. "Men having one another's carcasses for the sins of omission and commission that they don't seem able to avoid perpetrating. If they were hitting each other it would be something else. But otherwise, your responsibility is to stay away. If you enter where people are already agitated, anything you do will fuel the fire."

  "If you say so."

  "You've led a very protected life, haven't you?"

  "Have I?" I said. "I try not to."

  "Best to stay out of it," she told me, "partly out of dignity, to let the guy cool down without your intervention, and partly out of self-defense, and partly because your intervention is only going to make it worse."

  Meanwhile, Ira hadn't stopped roaring. "One fucking punch a week—and now we're not even going to get that in? So what are we doing on the radio, Arthur? Advancing our careers? A fight is being forced upon us, and you are running! It's the showdown, Artie, and you are gutlessly running away!"

  Impotent though I knew I would be if these two powder kegs were to start swinging, I nonetheless jumped up and, with Ray Svecz trailing behind me in his goofy way, ran toward the pond. Last time I'd pissed in my pants. I couldn't let that happen again. With no more idea than Ray had of what could be done to avert a disaster, I ran directly into the fray.

  By the time we reached them, Ira had already backed off and was pointedly walking away from Sokolow. It was clear he was still furious with the guy, but it was also evident how hard he was trying to bring himself down. Ray and I caught up with him and then walked along beside him while, intermittently, beneath his breath, Ira carried on a rapid conversation with himself.

  The admixture of his absence and his presence so disturbed me that I finally spoke. "What's wrong?" When he didn't seem to hear, I tried to think of what to say that would get his attention. "It's about a script?" All at once he flared up and said, "I'll kill him if he does it again!" And it was not an expression he was using merely for dramatic effect. It was difficult, despite my resistance, not to believe one hundred percent in the meaning of his words.

  Butts, I thought. Butts. Garwych. Solak. Becker.

  On his face was a look of total fury. Pristine fury. Fury, which along with terror is the primordial power. All that he was had evolved out of that look—also all that he was not. I thought, He's lucky he's not locked up, an alarmingly unexpected conclusion to occur spontaneously to a hero-worshiping kid interlinked for two years with the virtuousness of his hero, and one I dismissed once I was no longer so agitated—and one that I was then to have verified for me by Murray Ringold forty-eight years on.

  Eve had made her way out of her past by impersonating Pennington; Ira had made his way out of his by force.

  Ella's twin boys, who'd fled from the edge of the pond when the argument flared up, were lying in her arms on the picnic blanket when I returned with Ray. "I think daily living may be harsher than you know," Ella said to me.

  "Is this daily living?" I asked.

  "Wherever I've lived," she said. "Go on. Go on about Howard Fast."

  I did my best, but it continued to unsettle me, if not Sokolow's working-class wife, to think of her husband and Ira squaring off.

  Ella laughed aloud when I was through. You could hear her naturalness in her laugh as well as all the crap that she had learned to put up with. She laughed the way some people blush: all at once and completely. "Wow," she said. "I'm not sure now what I read. My own evaluation of My Glorious Brothers is simple. Maybe I don't do enough deep thinking, but I just think, Here's a bunch of rough, tough, and decent guys who believe in the dignity of all men and are willing to die for it."

  Artie and Ira had by then cooled off enough to make their way up from the pond to the picnic blanket, where Ira said (trying, apparently, to say something that might ease everybody, himself included, back into the original spirit of the day), "I gotta read it. My Glorious Brothers. I gotta get that book."

  "It'll put steel in your spine, Ira," Ella said to him, and then, opening wide the big window that was her laugh, she added, "not that I ever thought yours needed any."

  Whereupon Sokolow leaned over her and bellowed, "Yes? Whose does? Just whose does?"

  With that, the Sokolow twins burst into tears, and this in turn caused poor Ray to do the same. Angry herself now for the first time, in something like a mad rage, Ella said, "Christ Almighty, Arthur! Hold yourself together!"

  What had lain beneath the afternoon's eruptions I understood more fully that evening when, alone with me in the shack, Ira started in angrily about the lists.

  "Lists. Lists of names and accusations and charges. Everybody," Ira said, "has a list. Red Channels. Joe McCarthy. The VFW. The HUAC. The American Legion. The Catholic magazines. The Hearst newspapers. Those lists with their sacred numbers—141, 205, 62, 111. Lists of anybody in America who has ever been disgruntled about anything or criticized anything or protested anything—or associated with anybody who has ever criticized or protested anything—all of them now Communists or fronting for Communists or 'helping' Communists or contributing to Communist 'coffers,' or 'infiltrating' labor or government or education or Hollywood or the theater or radio and TV. Lists of 'fifth columnists' busily being compiled in every office and agency in Washington. All the forces of reaction swapping names and mistaking names and linking names together to prove the existence of a mammoth conspiracy that does not exist."

  "What about you?" I asked him. "What about The Free and the Brave?"

  "We've got a lot of progressive-thinking people on our show, sure. And the way they're going to be described to the public now is as actors 'who cunningly sell the Moscow line.' You're going to hear a lot of that—a lot worse than that. 'The dupes of Moscow.'"

  "Just the actors?"

  "And the director. And the composer. And the writer. Everyone."

  "You worried?"

  "I can go back to the record factory, buddy. If worse comes to worst, I can always come up here and grease cars at Steve's garage. I've done it before. Besides, you can fight them, you know. You can fight the bastards. Last I heard there was a Constitution in this country, a Bill of Rights somewhere. If you look with your big eyes into the capitalist shop window, if you want and you want, if you grab and you grab, if you take and you take, if you acquire and you own and you accumulate, then that is the end of your convictions and the beginning of your fear. But there is nothing that I have that I can't give up. Y'understand? Nothing! How I ever got from my miserable father's shit-eaten house on Factory Street to being this big character Iron Rinn, how Ira Ringold, with one and a half years of high school behind him, got to meeting the people I meet and knowing the people I know and having the comforts I have as a card-carrying member of the comfortable bourgeoisie—that is all so unbelievable that losing everything overnight would not seem so strange to me. Y'understand? Y'understand me? I can go back to Chicago. I can work in the mills. If I have to, I will. But not without standing on my rights as an American! Not without giving the bastards a fight!"

  When I was alone and on the train heading back to Newark—Ira had waited at the station in the Chevy to pick up Mrs. Pärn, who, on the day I left, was traveling all the way from New York again to work on those knees of his, aching terribly after our football game of the previous day—I even began to wonder how Eve Frame could stand him, day in and day out. Being married to Ira and his anger couldn't have been much fun. I remembered hearing him deliver virtually the same speech about the capitalist shop window, about his father's miserable house, about his one and a half years of high school, on that afternoon the year before in Erwin Goldstine's kitchen. I remembered variants of that speech being delivered by Ira ten, fifteen times. How could Eve take the sheer repetition, the redundancy of that
rhetoric and the attitude of the attacker, the relentless beating from the blunt instrument that was Ira's stump speech?

  On that train back to Newark, as I thought of Ira blasting away with his twin apocalyptic prophecies—"The United States of America is about to make atomic war on the Soviet Union! Mark my words! The United States of America is on the road to fascism!"—I didn't know enough to understand why suddenly, so disloyally, when he and people like Artie Sokolow were being most intimidated and threatened, I was so savagely bored by him, why I felt myself to be so much smarter than he. Ready and eager to turn away from him and the irritating, oppressive side of him and to find my inspiration far from Pickax Hill Road.

  If you're orphaned as early as Ira was, you fall into the situation that all men must fall into but much, much sooner, which is tricky, because you may either get no education at all or be oversusceptible to enthusiasms and beliefs and ripe for indoctrination. Ira's youthful years were a series of broken connections: a cruel family, frustration in school, headlong immersion in the Depression—an early orphaning that captured the imagination of a boy like me, himself so fixed in a family and a place and its institutions, a boy only just emerging from the emotional incubator; an early orphaning that freed Ira to connect to whatever he wanted but also left him unmoored enough to give himself to something almost right off the bat, to give himself totally and forever. For all the reasons you can think of, Ira was an easy mark for the Utopian vision. But for me, who was moored, it was different. If you're not orphaned early, if instead you're related intensely to parents for thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years, you grow a prick, lose your innocence, seek your independence, and, if it's not a screwed-up family, are let go, ready to begin to be a man, ready, that is, to choose new allegiances and affiliations, the parents of your adulthood, the chosen parents whom, because you are not asked to acknowledge them with love, you either love or don't, as suits you.

  How are they chosen? Through a series of accidents and through lots of will. How do they get to you, and how do you get to them? Who are they? What is it, this genealogy that isn't genetic? In my case they were men to whom I apprenticed myself, from Paine and Fast and Corwin to Murray and Ira and beyond—the men who schooled me, the men I came from. All were remarkable to me in their own way, personalities to contend with, mentors who embodied or espoused powerful ideas and who first taught me to navigate the world and its claims, the adopted parents who also, each in his turn, had to be cast off along with their legacy, had to disappear, thus making way for the orphanhood that is total, which is manhood. When you're out there in this thing all alone.

  Leo Glucksman was also an ex-GI, but he had served after the war and was now only into his mid-twenties, rosy-cheeked and a little round and looking no older than his first- and second-year college students. Though Leo was still completing his dissertation for a literature Ph.D. at the university, he appeared before us at every session of the class in a three-piece black suit and a crimson bow tie, more formally attired by far than any of the older faculty members. When the weather turned cold he could be seen crossing the quadrangle draped in a black cape that, even on a campus as untypically tolerant of idiosyncrasy and eccentricity—and as understanding of originality and its oddity—as the University of Chicago's was in those days, titillated students whose bright (and amused) "Hi, Professor" Leo would acknowledge by sharply whacking the pavement with the metal tip of the cane he sported. After taking a hasty look late one afternoon at The Stooge of Torquemada—which, to kindle Mr. Glucksman's admiration, I'd thought to bring to him, along with the assigned essay on Aristotle's Poetics—Leo startled me by dropping it with disgust onto his desk.

  His speech was rapid, his tone fierce and unforgiving—no sign in that delivery of the foppishly overdressed boy genius plumply perched back of his bow tie on his cushioned seat. His plumpness and his personality exemplified two very different people. The clothes registered a third person. And his polemic a fourth—not a mannerist but a real adult critic exposing to me the dangers of the tutelage I'd been under with Ira, teaching me to assume a position less rigid in confronting literature. Precisely what I was ready for in my new recruitment phase. Under Leo's guidance I began to be transformed into the descendant not just of my family but of the past, heir to a culture even grander than my neighborhood's.

  "Art as a weapon?' he said to me, the word "weapon" rich with contempt and itself a weapon. "Art as taking the right stand on everything? Art as the advocate of good things? Who taught you all this? Who taught you art is slogans? Who taught you art is in the service of 'the people'? Art is in the service of art—otherwise there is no art worthy of anyone's attention. What is the motive for writing serious literature, Mr. Zuckerman? To disarm the enemies of price control? The motive for writing serious literature is to write serious literature. You want to rebel against society? I'll tell you how to do it—write well. You want to embrace a lost cause? Then don't fight in behalf of the laboring class. They're going to make out fine. They're going to fill up on Plymouths to their heart's content. The workingman will conquer us all—out of his mindlessness will flow the slop that is this philistine country's cultural destiny. We'll soon have something in this country far worse than the government of the peasants and the workers—we will have the culture of the peasants and the workers. You want a lost cause to fight for? Then fight for the word. Not the high-flown word, not the inspiring word, not the pro-this and anti-that word, not the word that advertises to the respectable that you are a wonderful, admirable, compassionate person on the side of the downtrodden and the oppressed. No, for the word that tells the literate few condemned to live in America that you are on the side of the word! This play of yours is crap. It's awful. It's infuriating. It is crude, primitive, simple-minded, propagandistic crap. It blurs the world with words. And it reeks to high heaven of your virtue. Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than an artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism! You must achieve mastery over your idealism, over your virtue as well as over your vice, aesthetic mastery over everything that drives you to write in the first place—your outrage, your politics, your grief, your love! Start preaching and taking positions, start seeing your own perspective as superior, and you're worthless as an artist, worthless and ludicrous. Why do you write these proclamations? Because you look around and you're 'shocked'? Because you look around and you're 'moved'? People give up too easily and fake their feelings. They want to have feelings right away, and so 'shocked' and 'moved' are the easiest. The stupidest. Except for the rare case, Mr. Zuckerman, shock is always fake. Proclamations. Art has no use for proclamations! Get your lovable shit out of this office, please."

  Leo thought better of my Aristotle essay (or, generally, of me), for at my next conference he startled me—no less than he had with his vehemence about my play—by ordering my presence at Orchestra Hall to hear Raphael Kubelik lead the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Beethoven on Friday night. "Have you ever heard of Raphael Kubelik?" "No." "Beethoven?" "I've heard of him, yes." I said. "Have you ever heard him?" "No."

  I met Leo on Michigan Avenue, outside Orchestra Hall, half an hour before the performance, my teacher in the cape he'd had made in Rome before being mustered out of the army in '48 and I in the hooded mackinaw bought at Larkey's in Newark to take to college in the icy Middle West. Once we were seated, Leo removed from his briefcase the score for each of the symphonies we were to hear and, throughout the concert, looked not at the orchestra on the stage—which you were supposed to look at, I thought, only occasionally closing your eyes when you were carried away—but rather into his lap, where, with his considerable concentration, he read along in the score while the musicians played first the Coriolan Overture and the Fourth Symphony, and after the intermission, the Fifth. Except for the first four notes of the Fifth, I couldn't distinguish one piece from the others.

  Following the concert, we took the train back to the South Side and went to his room at International House, a
Gothic residence hall on the Midway that was home to most of the university's foreign students. Leo Glucksman, himself the son of a West Side grocer, was slightly better prepared to tolerate their proximity on his hallway—exotic cooking smells and all—than he was that of his fellow Americans. The room he lived in was tinier even than his office cubicle at the college, and he made tea for us by boiling water in a kettle set on a hot plate resting on the floor and squeezed in among the clutter of printed matter piled along the walls. Leo sat at his book-laden desk, his round cheeks lit up by his gooseneck lamp, and I sat in the dark, amid more piles of his books, on the edge of the narrow unmade bed only two feet away.

  I felt like a girl, or what I imagined a girl felt like when she wound up alone with an intimidating boy who too obviously liked her breasts. Leo snorted to see me turn timorous, and with that same disgusted sneer with which he had undertaken to demolish my career in radio, he said, "Don't worry, I'm not going to touch you. I just cannot bear that you should be so fucking conventional." And then and there he proceeded to initiate an introduction to Soren Kierkegaard. He wanted me to listen to him read what Kierkegaard, whose name meant no more to me than Raphael Kubelik's, had already surmised in backwater Copenhagen a hundred years ago about "the people"—whom Kierkegaard called "the public," the correct name, Leo informed me, for that abstraction, that "monstrous abstraction," that "all-embracing something which is nothing," that "monstrous nothing," as Kierkegaard wrote, that "abstract and deserted void which is everything and nothing" and which I mawkishly sentimentalized in my script. Kierkegaard hated the public, Leo hated the public, and Leo's purpose in his darkened International House room after that Friday night's concert and the concerts he took me to on the Fridays following was to save my prose from perdition by getting me to hate the public too.