by Philip Roth
'"Everyone who has read the classical authors,'" read Leo, '"knows how many things a Caesar could try out in order to kill time. In the same way the public keeps a dog to amuse it. That dog is the scum of the literary world. If there is someone superior to the rest, perhaps even a great man, the dog is set on him and the fun begins. The dog goes for him, snapping and tearing at his coat-tails, allowing itself every possible ill-mannered familiarity—until the public tires, and says it may stop. That is my example of how the public levels. Their betters and superiors in strength are mishandled—and the dog remains a dog which even the public despises.... The public is unrepentant—it was not really belittling anyone; it just wanted a little amusement.'"
This passage, which meant far more to Leo than it could begin to mean to me, was nonetheless Leo Glucksman's invitation to join him in being "someone superior to the rest," in being, like the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard—and like himself, as he could one day soon envision himself—"a great man." I became Leo's willing student and, through his intercession, Aristotle's willing student, Kierkegaard's willing student, Benedetto Croce's willing student, Thomas Mann's willing student, André Gide's willing student, Joseph Conrad's willing student, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's willing student ... until soon my attachment to Ira—as to my mother, my father, my brother, even to the place where I'd grown up—was, I believed, thoroughly sundered. When someone is first being educated and his head is becoming transformed into an arsenal armed with books, when he is young and impudent and leaping with joy to discover all the intelligence tucked away on this planet, he is apt to exaggerate the importance of the churning new reality and to deprecate as unimportant everything else. Aided and abetted by the uncompromising Leo Glucksman—by his bile and manias as much as by that perpetually charged-up brain—this is what I did, with all my strength.
Every Friday night, in Leo's room, the spell was cast. All the passion in Leo that was not sexual (and a lot that was but had to be suppressed) he brought to bear on every idea that I had previously been made of, particularly on my virtuous conception of the artistic mission. Leo went at me on those Friday nights as though I were the last student left on earth. It began to seem to me that just about everybody gave me a shot. Educate Nathan. The credo of everybody I dared say hello to.
Occasionally now, looking back, I think of my life as one long speech that I've been listening to. The rhetoric is sometimes original, sometimes pleasurable, sometimes pasteboard crap (the speech of the incognito), sometimes maniacal, sometimes matter-of-fact, and sometimes like the sharp prick of a needle, and I have been hearing it for as long as I can remember: how to think, how not to think; how to behave, how not to behave; whom to loathe and whom to admire; what to embrace and when to escape; what is rapturous, what is murderous, what is laudable, what is shallow, what is sinister, what is shit, and how to remain pure in soul. Talking to me doesn't seem to present an obstacle to anyone. This is perhaps a consequence of my having gone around for years looking as if I needed talking to. But whatever the reason, the book of my life is a book of voices. When I ask myself how I arrived at where I am, the answer surprises me: "Listening."
Can that have been the unseen drama? Was all the rest a masquerade disguising the real no good that I was obstinately up to? Listening to them. Listening to them talk. The utterly wild phenomenon that is. Everyone perceiving experience as something not to have but to have so as to talk about it. Why is that? Why do they want me to hear them and their arias? Where was it decided that this was my use? Or was I from the beginning, by inclination as much as by choice, merely an ear in search of a word?
"Politics is the great generalizer," Leo told me, "and literature the great particularizer, and not only are they in an inverse relationship to each other—they are in an antagonistic relationship. To politics, literature is decadent, soft, irrelevant, boring, wrongheaded, dull, something that makes no sense and that really oughtn't to be. Why? Because the particularizing impulse is literature. How can you be an artist and renounce the nuance? But how can you be a politician and allow the nuance? As an artist the nuance is your task. Your task is not to simplify. Even should you choose to write in the simplest way, a la Hemingway, the task remains to impart the nuance, to elucidate the complication, to imply the contradiction. Not to erase the contradiction, not to deny the contradiction, but to see where, within the contradiction, lies the tormented human being. To allow for the chaos, to let it in. You must let it in. Otherwise you produce propaganda, if not for a political party, a political movement, then stupid propaganda for life itself—for life as it might itself prefer to be publicized. During the first five, six years of the Russian Revolution the revolutionaries cried, 'Free love, there will be free love!' But once they were in power, they couldn't permit it. Because what is free love? Chaos. And they didn't want chaos. That isn't why they made their glorious revolution. They wanted something carefully disciplined, organized, contained, predictable scientifically, if possible. Free love disturbs the organization, their social and political and cultural machine. Art also disturbs the organization. Literature disturbs the organization. Not because it is blatantly for or against, or even subtly for or against. It disturbs the organization because it is not general. The intrinsic nature of the particular is to be particular, and the intrinsic nature of particularity is to fail to conform. Generalizing suffering: there is Communism. Particularizing suffering: there is literature. In that polarity is the antagonism. Keeping the particular alive in a simplifying, generalizing world—that's where the battle is joined. You do not have to write to legitimize Communism, and you do not have to write to legitimize capitalism. You are out of both. If you are a writer, you are as unallied to the one as you are to the other. Yes, you see differences, and of course you see that this shit is a little better than that shit, or that that shit is a little better than this shit. Maybe much better. But you see the shit. You are not a government clerk. You are not a militant. You are not a believer. You are someone who deals in a very different way with the world and what happens in the world. The militant introduces a faith, a big belief that will change the world, and the artist introduces a product that has no place in that world. It's useless. The artist, the serious writer, introduces into the world something that wasn't there even at the start. When God made all this stuff in seven days, the birds, the rivers, the human beings, he didn't have ten minutes for literature. 'And then there will be literature. Some people will like it, some people will be obsessed by it, want to do it...' No. No. He did not say that. If you had asked God then, 'There will be plumbers?' 'Yes, there will be. Because they will have houses, they will need plumbers.' 'There will be doctors?' 'Yes. Because they will get sick, they will need doctors to give them some pills.' 'And literature?' 'Literature? What are you talking about? What use does it have? Where does it fit in? Please, I am creating a universe, not a university. No literature."'
Uncompromising. Tom Paine's irresistible attribute, Ira's, Leo's, and Johnny O'Day's. Had I gone down to East Chicago to meet O'Day on my arrival in Chicago—which was what Ira had arranged for me to do—my life as a student, perhaps all life thereafter, might have fallen under different enticements and different pressures and I might have set out to abandon the secure strictures of my background under the passionate tutelage of a monolith quite different from the University of Chicago. But the burden of a Chicago education, not to mention the demands being made by Mr. Glucksman's supplemental program to deconventionalize my mind, meant that it wasn't until early December that I was able to take a Saturday morning off and travel by train to meet Ira Ringold's army mentor, the steelworker whom Ira had once described to me as "a Marxist from the belt buckle both ways."
The tracks of the South Shore Line were at Sixty-third and Stony Island, only a fifteen-minute walk from my dormitory. I boarded the orange-painted car and took a seat, the conductor sounded off the names of the dirty towns along the line—"Hegewisch ... Hammond ... East Chicago ... Gary ... Michigan City... South Be
nd"—and I was as stirred up again as if I were listening to On a Note of Triumph. Coming as I did from industrial north Jersey, I confronted a not unfamiliar landscape. Looking south to Elizabeth, Linden, and Rahway from the airport, we too had the complex superstructure of refineries off in the distance and the noxious refinery odors and the plumes of fire, up at the top of the towers, burning off the gas from the distilling of petroleum. In Newark we had the big factories and the tiny job shops, we had the grime, we had the smells, we had the crisscrossing rail lines and the lots of steel drums and the hills of scrap metal and the hideous dump sites. We had black smoke rising from high stacks, a lot of smoke coming up everywhere, and the chemical reek and the malt reek and the Secaucus pig-farm reek sweeping over our neighborhood when the wind blew hard. And we had trains like this one that ran up on embankments through the marshes, through bulrushes and swamp grass and open water. We had the dirt and we had the stink, but what we didn't have and couldn't have was Hegewisch, where they'd built the tanks for the war. We didn't have Hammond, where they built the girders for bridges. We didn't have the grain elevators along the shipping canal coming down from Chicago. We didn't have the open-hearth furnaces that lit up the sky when the mills were pouring steel, a red sky that on clear nights I could see, from as far away as my dormitory window, way down in Gary. We didn't have U.S. Steel and Inland Steel and Jones Laughlin and Standard Bridge and Union Carbide and Standard Oil of Indiana. We had what New Jersey had; concentrated here was the power of the Midwest. What they had here was a steelmaking operation, miles and miles of it stretching along the lake through two states and vaster than any other in the world, coke furnaces and oxygen furnaces transforming iron ore into steel, overhead ladles carrying tons of molten steel, hot metal pouring like lava into molds, and amid all this flash and dust and danger and noise, working in temperatures of a hundred degrees, sucking in vapors that could ruin them, men at labor around the clock, men at work that was never finished. This was an America that I was not a native of and never would be and that I possessed as an American nonetheless. While I stared from the train window—took in what looked to me to be mightily up-to-date, modern, the very emblem of the industrial twentieth century, and yet an immense archeological site—no fact of my life seemed more serious than that.
To my right I saw block after block of soot-covered bungalows, the steelworkers' houses, with gazebos and birdbaths in the backyards, and beyond the houses the streets lined with low, ignominious-looking stores where their families shopped, and so strong was the impact on me of the sight of a steelworkers everyday world, its crudity, its austerity, the obdurate world of people who were always strapped, in debt, paying things off—so inspiring was the thought For the hardest work the barest minimum, for breaking their backs the humblest rewards—that, needless to say, none of my feelings would have seemed strange to Ira Ringold, while all of them would have appalled Leo Glucksman.
"What about this wife the Iron Man's got?" was almost the first thing O'Day said to me. "Maybe I'd like her if I knew her, but that's an imponderable. Some people I value have intimate friends to whom I'm indifferent. The comfortable bourgeoisie, the circle he now lives in with her ... I'm not so sure. There's a problem with wives altogether. Most guys who marry are too vulnerable—they've given hostages to reaction in the person of their wives and kids. So it's left to a little coterie of hardened characters on their own to take care of what's got to be taken care of. Sure, all this is a grind, sure, it'd be nice to have a home, to have a soft woman waiting at the end of the day, maybe to have a couple of kids. Even guys who know what it's all about get fed up once in a while. But my immediate responsibility is to the hourly paid workingman, and for him I'm not doing a tithe of the work I should be doing. Whatever the sacrifice, what you have to remember is that movements like these are always upwards, regardless of how the immediate issue turns out."
The immediate issue was that Johnny O'Day had been driven from the union and had lost his job. I met him at a rooming house where he hadn't paid rent in two months; he had a week more to come up with the money or be thrown out. His small room had a window onto some sky and was neatly kept. The mattress of the single bed rested not on a box spring but on metal webbing and was tightly, even beautifully, made up, and the dark green paint on the iron bedstead wasn't chipped or peeling—as it was on the noisy radiator—but was disheartening to look at all the same. Altogether the furnishings were no more meager than those that Leo lived among at International House, and yet the aura of desolation startled me and—until O'Day's quiet, even voice and his peculiarly sharp enunciation began very powerfully to mute the presence of everything except O'Day himself—made me think I ought to get up and go. It was as though whatever wasn't in that room had vanished from the world. The instant he came to the door and let me in and politely invited me to be seated across from him, on one of the room's two bridge chairs, at a table just large enough for his typewriter, I had a sense not so much of everything's having been torn away from O'Day except this existence but, worse, of O'Day's having, almost sinisterly, torn himself away from everything that was not this existence.
Now I understood what Ira was doing in the shack. Now I understood the seed of the shack and the stripping back of everything—the aesthetic of the ugly that Eve Frame was to find so insufferable, that left a man lonely and monastic but also unencumbered, free to be bold and unflinching and purposeful. What O'Day's room represented was discipline, that discipline which says that however many desires I have, I can circumscribe myself down to this room. You can risk anything if at the end you know you can tolerate the punishment, and this room was a part of the punishment. There was a firm impression to be taken from this room: the connection between freedom and discipline, the connection between freedom and loneliness, the connection between freedom and punishment. O'Day's room, his cell, was the spiritual essence of Ira's shack. And what was the spiritual essence of O'Day's room? I'd find that out some years later when, on a visit to Zurich, I located the house with the commemorative tablet bearing Lenin's name, and after bribing a janitor with a handful of Swiss marks, was allowed to see the anchorite room where the revolutionary founder of Bolshevism had lived in exile for a year and a half.
O'Day's appearance should have been no surprise. Ira had described him exactly as he still was, a man constructed like a heron: a lean, taut, blade-faced six-footer with close-cut gray hair, eyes that also appeared to have turned gray, a sharp, large knife of a nose, and skin—a hide—lined as though he were well beyond his forties. But what Ira hadn't described was how zealotry had bestowed the look of a body that had a man locked up inside serving the severe sentence that was his life. It was the look of a being who has no choice. His story has been made up beforehand. He has no choice about anything. To tear himself from things in behalf of his cause—that's all there is for him to do. And he is not susceptible to others. It isn't just the physique that is a filament of steel, enviably narrow; the ideology, too, is tool-like and contoured like the edgewise silhouette of the heron's fuselage.
I remembered Ira's telling me that O'Day carried a light punching bag in his gear and that in the army he was so quick and strong that, "if forced to," he could lick two or three guys together. I'd been wondering all the way down on the train if there'd be a punching bag in his room. And there was. It wasn't in a corner hanging at head height, as I'd been imagining it and as it would have been if we'd been in a gym. It was on the floor, lying on its side against a closet door, a stout tear-shaped leather bag so old and battered it looked less like leather than like the bleached-out body part of some slaughtered animal—as though to keep in fighting trim O'Day worked with the testicle off a dead hippopotamus. A notion not rational but impossible—because of my initial fear of him—to make go away.
I remembered the words that O'Day had spoken the night that he'd poured out his frustration to Ira about not being able to spend his days "building the party here in the harbor": "I ain't that good at organizing, tha
t is true. You have to be something of a hand holder with timid Bolsheviks, and I lean more to bopping their heads." I remembered because I had gone home and entered those words into my radio play then in progress, a play about a strike in a steel plant, wherein every last drop of the argot of Johnny O'Day emerged inviolate from one Jimmy O'Shea. Once O'Day had written to Ira, "I'm getting to be the official son of a bitch of East Chicago and environs, and that means winding up in Fist City." Fist City became the title of my next play. I couldn't help it. I wanted to write about things that seemed important, and the things that seemed important were things I didn't know. And what with the words at my disposal then, I instantly transformed everything into agitprop anyway, thus losing within seconds whatever was important about the important and immediate about the immediate.
O'Day was broke, and the party too broke to hire him as an organizer or to help him financially in any way, and so he was filling his days writing leaflets for mill-gate distribution, using the few dollars secretly contributed by some of his old steelworker buddies to pay for the paper and to rent a mimeograph machine and a staple machine, and then, at the end of each day, himself handing out the leaflets over in Gary. The change he had left he spent on food.
"My case against Inland Steel isn't finished," he told me, going right to the point, leveling with me as though I were an equal, an ally, if not already a comrade, talking to me as though Ira had somehow caused him to think that I was twice my age, a hundred times more independent, a thousand times more courageous. "But it looks as if management and the Red-baiters in the USA-CIO have got me fired and blacklisted for good. In every walk of life, all over this country, the move is on to crush the party. They don't know that it isn't Phil Murray's CIO that decides the great historic issues. Witness China. It's the American worker who will decide the great historic issues. In my occupation there are already more than a hundred unemployed ironworkers in this local union. This is the first time since 1939 that there haven't been more jobs than men, and even the ironworkers, the most obtuse section of the whole wage-earning class, are at last beginning to question the setup. It's coming, it's coming—I assure you it's coming. Still, I got hauled before the executive board of the ironworkers' local and expelled by reason of my membership in the party. These bastards didn't want to expel me, they wanted me to repudiate my membership. The rat press, which is zeroed in on me hereabouts—here," he said, handing me a clipping from beside the typewriter, "yesterday's Gary Post-Tribune. The rat press would have made a big thing out of that, and although I'd have retained my working card in the ironmongers', the word would have gone out to the contractors and the gang bosses to blacklist me. It's a closed industry, so expulsion from the union means that I'm deprived of work in my trade. Well, to hell with 'em. I can fight better from the outside anyway. The rat press, the labor fakers, the phony city administrations of Gary and East Chicago regard me as dangerous? Good. They're attempting to keep me from making a living? Fine. I've got nobody dependent on me but me. And I don't depend on friends or women or jobs or any other conventional prop to existence. I get along anyway. If the Gary Post," he said, taking back from me and neatly folding in two the clipping that I hadn't dared to look at while he spoke, "and the Hammond Times and the rest of them think that they're going to run us Reds out of Lake County with these kind of tactics, they're playing the wrong number. If they'd left me alone, I would probably have one day soon left under my own power. But now I've got no money to go anywhere and so they are going to have to continue to deal with me. At the mill gates the attitude of the workers when I hand them my leaflets is, on the whole, friendly and interested. They flash me the V, and it's moments like that when the books balance for a while. We got our share of fascist workers, of course. Monday night, the other night, while I was handing out my leaflets at the Gary Big Mill, a fat lug started calling me a traitor and a prick, and I don't know what all else he had in mind. I didn't wait to find out. I hope he likes soup and soft biscuits. Tell that to the Iron Man," he said, smiling for the first time, though in a distressing way, as if forcing a smile were among the more difficult things he had to do. "Tell him I'm still in pretty good shape. Come on, Nathan," he said, and it chagrined me to hear this unemployed steelworker utter my given name (that is, my new college obsessions, my budding superiority, my lapse from political commitment chagrined me) when I had just heard him describe, in the same quiet, even voice, with the same careful enunciation—and with an intimate familiarity that did not seem culled from books— the great historic issues, China, 1939, above all describe the harsh, sacrificial selflessness imposed by his mission to the hourly paid workingman. "Nathan" spoken in the very voice that had raised gooseflesh on my arms by saying It's coming, it's coming—I assure you it's coming. "Let's get something for you to eat," said O'Day.
