by Philip Roth
"Pamela went to Eve and told her that one summer day two years back she'd run into Ira in the Village. He was in the station wagon, on his way to the country, and he told her Eve was already there and asked why she didn't hop in and come out to spend the day. It was so hot and awful that she didn't bother to think things through. 'Okay,' she said, 'I'll go get my bathing suit,' and he waited for her and they drove out to Zinc Town, and when they arrived she discovered that Eve wasn't there. She tried to be agreeable and to believe whatever excuse he made and even got into her suit and went for a swim with him. That's when he took the photograph and tried to seduce her. She burst into tears, fought him off, told him what she thought of him and what he was doing to Eve, and then she got the next train back to New York. Because she didn't want to make trouble for herself, she had kept his sexual advances secret. Her fear was that if she didn't, everybody would blame her and think she was a slut just for having got into the car with him. People would call her all kinds of names for letting him take that picture. Nobody would even listen to her side of the story. He would have crushed her with every conceivable lie had she dared expose his treachery by telling the truth. But now that she understood the scope of his treachery, she couldn't, in good conscience, remain silent.
"What happens next is that one afternoon, after my last class, I get to my office and there's my brother waiting for me. He's in the corridor, he's signing his autograph for a couple of teachers who've spotted him, and I unlock my door and he comes into the office, and he throws on my desk an envelope with 'Ira' written on it. The return address is the Daily Worker. Inside is a second envelope, this one's addressed to 'Iron Rinn.' In Eve's handwriting. It's her blue vellum stationery. The office manager at the Worker was a friend of Ira's, and he'd driven all the way out to Zinc Town to deliver it to him.
"It seems that the day after Pamela went to Eve with her story, Eve does the strongest thing she can think of, for the time being the strongest punch she can throw. She gets all dressed up in her lynx jacket and a million-dollar black velvet dream of a dress with white lace trim and her best open-toed black shoes, and she puts on one of her stylish black veiled felt hats, and marches over, not to '21' for lunch with Katrina, but to the Daily Worker office. The Worker was down on University Place, only a few blocks from West Eleventh Street. Eve takes the elevator to the fifth floor and demands to see the editor. She's led into his office, where she removes the letter from her lynx muff and places it on his desk. 'For the martyred hero of the Bolshevik revolution,' she says, 'for the people's artist and mankind's last best hope,' and turns and walks out. Racked and timorous as she was in the face of any opposition, she could also be impressively imperious when she was tanked up with righteous resentment and having one of her delusionary grande-dame days. She was capable of these transformations—and she didn't go in for half measures, either. At whichever end of the emotional rainbow, the excesses could be persuasive.
"The office manager was given the letter, and he got in his car and he carried it out to Ira. Ira had been living alone in Zinc Town since he'd been fired. Every week he'd drive to New York to confer with lawyers—he was going to sue the network, sue the sponsor, sue Red Channels. In the city he'd stop by and visit Artie Sokolow, who'd had his first heart attack and was confined to bed at home on the Upper West Side. Then he'd come to Newark to see us. But by and large Ira was out at the shack, infuriated, brooding, devastated, obsessed, making dinner for his neighbor who'd been in the mining accident, Ray Svecz, eating with him and sounding off about his case to this guy who was fifty-one percent not there.
"It was later on the day that Eve's letter was delivered to him that Ira shows up at my office, and I read it. It's in my file with the rest of Ira's papers; I can't do it justice by paraphrasing it. Three pages long. Scorchingly written. Obviously zipped off in one draft and perfect. Real bite to it, a ferocious document, and yet very competently done. Under the pressure of her rage, and on monogrammed blue note paper, Eve was quite the neo-classicist. I wouldn't have been surprised had that lambasting of him concluded in a fanfare of heroic couplets.
"Remember Hamlet cursing out Claudius? The passage in the second act, just after the player-king gives his speech about Priam's slaughter? It's in the middle of the monologue that begins 'O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!' 'Bloody, bawdy villain!' Hamlet says. 'Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain! / O! Vengeance!' Well, the gist of Eve's letter is more or less along those lines: You know what Pamela means to me, I confided one night to you, and to you alone, all that Pamela means to me. 'An inferiority complex.' That's what Eve described as Pamela's problem. A girl with an inferiority complex, far from home and country and family, Eve's ward, Eve's responsibility to look after and protect, and yet, just as he uglified everything he had ever laid his hands on, he cunningly undertook to turn a girl of Pamela Solomon's background into a striptease artist like Miss Donna jones. To lure Pamela out to that isolated hellhole under false pretenses, to salivate like a pervert over her picture in her bathing suit, to fasten those gorilla paws of his on her defenseless body—for the sheer pleasure of it, to turn Pamela into a common whore, and to humiliate Sylphid and herself in the most sadistic way he could contrive.
"But this time, she told him, you went too far. I remember your telling me, she said, how, at the feet of the great O'Day, you had marveled at Machiavelli's The Prince. Now I understand what you learned from The Prince. I understand why my friends have been trying for years to convince me that in every last thing you say or do, you are, to the letter, a ruthless, depraved Machiavellian who cares not at all for right or wrong but worships only success. You try to force to have sex with you this lovely, talented young woman struggling with an inferiority complex. Why didn't you try having sex with me as a means, perhaps, of expressing love? When we met, you were living alone on the Lower East Side in the squalid arms of your beloved lumpenproletariat. I gave you a beautiful house full of books and music and art. I provided you with a handsome study of your own and helped you to build up your library. I introduced you to the most interesting, intelligent, talented people in Manhattan, offered you entrée into a social world such as you'd never dreamed of for yourself. As best I could, I tried to give you a family. Yes, I have a demanding daughter. I have a troubled daughter. I know that. Well, life is full of demands. For a responsible adult, life is demands ... On and on in that vein, uphill all the way, philosophical, mature, sensible, wholeheartedly rational—until she ended with the threat:
"Since you may recall that your paragon brother wouldn't allow me to talk to you or to write to you when you were hiding in his house, I went through your comrades to reach you. The Communist Party would appear to have more access to you—-and your heart, such as it is—than anyone. You are Machiavelli, the quintessential artist of control. Well, my dear Machiavelli, since you don't seem to have understood yet the consequences of anything you have ever done to another human being in order to have your way, it may be time you were taught.
"Nathan, remember the chair in my office, beside my desk—the hot seat? Where you kids sat and sweated while I used to go over your compositions? That's where Ira sat while I went over that letter. I asked, 'Is it true you made a pass at this girl?' 'For six months I had an affair with this girl.' 'You fucked her.' 'Many times, Murray. I thought she was in love with me. I'm astonished that she could do this.' 'Are you now?' 'I was in love with her. I wanted to marry her and have a family with her.' 'Oh, it gets better. You don't think, do you, Ira? You act. You act, and that's it. You shout, you fuck, you act. For six months you fucked her daughter's best friend. Her surrogate daughter. Her ward. And now something happened and you're "astonished."' 'I loved her.' 'Speak English. You loved fucking her.' 'You don't understand. She'd come to the shack. I was mad for her. I am astonished. I am absolutely astonished by what she has done!' 'By what she has done.' 'She betrays me to my wife—and then she lies in the process!' 'Yes? So? Where's the astonishing part? You've got a pro
blem here. You've got a big problem with that wife.' 'Do I? What's she going to do? She did it already, with her pals the Grants. I'm fired already. I'm out on my ass. She's making it into a sexual thing, you see, and it wasn't that. Pamela knows that isn't what it was.' 'Well, that's what it is now. You're caught, and your wife is promising new consequences. What will those be, do you think?' 'Nothing. There's nothing left. This stupidity,' he said, waving the letter at me, 'a letter hand-delivered by her to the Worker. This is the consequence. Listen to me. I never did a thing Pamela didn't want. And when she didn't want me anymore, it killed me. I dreamed of a girl like this all my life. It killed me. But I did it. I walked down those stairs and out into the street and I left her alone. I never bothered her again.' 'Well,' I said, 'be that as it may, honorable as you were in gentlemanly taking your leave of six months of fancy fucking with your wife's surrogate daughter, you're in a bit of hot water now, my friend.' 'No, it's Pamela who's in hot water!' 'Yes? You going to act again? You going to act once again without thinking? No. I'm not going to let you.'
"And I didn't let him, and he didn't do anything. Now, how much impetus writing this letter gave Eve to rush into the book is hard to say. But if Eve was in search of a motive to really go all out and do the big irrational thing that she'd been born to do, the stuff she got from Pamela couldn't have hurt. You would think that having married a cipher like Mueller, followed by a homosexual like Pennington, followed by a sharpie like Freedman, followed by a Communist like Ira, she'd have fulfilled whatever obligation she had to the forces of unreason. You would think she might have worked off the worst of 'How-could-you-do-this-to-me?' just by going over to the Worker in her lynx jacket with the matching muff. But no, it was Eve's destiny always to take her irrationality to greater and greater heights—and this is where the Grants come in again.
"It was the Grants who wrote that book. It was double ghostwritten. It was Bryden's name they used on the jacket—'as told to Bryden Grant'—because that was almost as good as having Winchell's name on the jacket, but it's the talent of the pair of them that shines through. What did Eve Frame know about Communism? There were Communists at the Wallace rallies she'd gone to with Ira. There were Communists on The Free and the Brave, people who came to their house and had dinner and were at all the soirées. This little unit of people involved with the show was very interested in controlling as much of it as possible. There was the secrecy, the conspiratorial edge—hiring like-minded people, influencing the ideological bias of the script however they could. Ira would sit in his study with Artie Sokolow and try to force into the script every corny party cliché, every so-called progressive sentiment they could get away with, manipulating the script to stick whatever ideological junk they thought of as Communist content into any historical context whatsoever. They imagined they were going to influence public thinking. The writer must not only observe and describe but participate in the struggle. The non-Marxist writer betrays the objective reality; the Marxist one contributes to its transformation. The party's gift to the writer is the only right and true worldview. They believed all that. Crapola. Propaganda. But crapola is not forbidden by the Constitution. And the radio in those days was full of it. Gangbusters. Your FBI. Kate Smith singing 'God Bless America.' Even your hero Corwin—propagandist for an idealized American democracy. In the end it wasn't so different. They weren't espionage agents, Ira Ringold and Arthur Sokolow. They were publicity agents. There is a distinction. These guys were cheap propagandists, against which the only laws are aesthetic, laws of literary taste.
"Then there was the union, AFTRA, the battle for control of the union. A lot of shouting, terrible infighting, but that was nationwide. In my union, in virtually every union, it was right wingers and left wingers, liberals and Communists struggling for control. Ira was a member of the union executive board, he was on the phone with people, God knows he could shout. Sure, things were said in her presence. And what Ira said, he meant. The party was no debating society to Ira. It was not a discussion club. It wasn't the Civil Liberties Union. What does it mean, 'a revolution'? It means a revolution. He took the rhetoric seriously. You can't call yourself a revolutionary and not be serious in your commitment. It was not something fake. It was something genuine. He took the Soviet Union seriously. At AFTRA, Ira meant business.
"Now, I never saw Ira at most of this stuff. I'm sure you never saw Ira at most of this stuff. But Eve never saw anything of this stuff. She was oblivious to all of it. Actuality wasn't something that mattered to Eve. The woman's mind was rarely on what the people around her were saying. She was a complete stranger to the business of life. It was too coarse for her. Her mind was never on Communism or anti-Communism. Her mind was never on anything present, except when Sylphid was present.
"As told to' meant that the whole malevolent story was dreamed up by the Grants. And dreamed up not at all for Eve's sake, and not merely to destroy Ira, much as Katrina and Bryden hated his guts. The consequences for Ira were part of their fun but largely beside the point. The Grants dreamed it all up for Bryden to ride his way into the House on the issue of Communism in broadcasting.
"That writing. That Journal-American prose. Plus Katrina's syntax. Plus Katrina's sensibility. Her fingerprints are all over the thing. I knew right off that Eve hadn't written it, because Eve couldn't write that badly. Eve was too literate and too well read. Why did she allow the Grants to write her book? Because systematically she made herself the slave of just about everyone. Because what the strong are capable of is appalling, and what the weak are capable of is also appalling. It's all appalling.
"7 Married a Communist came out in March of '52, when Grant had already announced his candidacy, and then in November, in the Eisenhower landslide, he was swept into the House as representative from New York's Twenty-ninth District. He would have been elected anyway. That radio show of theirs was a big Saturday morning favorite, and for years he had that column, and he had Ham Fish behind him, and he was a Grant, after all, the descendant of a U.S. president. Still, I doubt that Joe McCarthy himself would have traveled up to Dutchess County to appear by his side if it hadn't been for all the big-shot Reds 'Grant's Grapevine' had helped to expose and root out of the networks. Everyone was in Poughkeepsie campaigning for him. Westbrook Pegler was up there. All those Hearst columnists were his pals. All the haters of FDR who'd found in the Communist smear a way to drive the Democrats into the ground. Either Eve had no idea what she was being used for by the Grants or, more likely, she knew but didn't care, because the experience of being an attacker made her feel so strong and brave, striking back at the monsters at last.
"Yet knowing Ira as she did, how could she publish this book and not expect him to do something? This wasn't a three-page letter to Zinc Town. This was a big national best-seller that made a bang. The thing had all the ingredients to become a best-seller: Eve was famous, Grant was famous, Communism was the international peril. Ira was himself less famous than either of them, and though the book would guarantee that he would never work in radio again and that his accidental career was over, for the five or six months the book was at the top of the charts, for that season, Ira was conspicuous as he'd never been before. In a single stroke Eve managed to depersonalize her own life while endowing the specter of Communism with a human face—her husband's. I married a Communist, I slept with a Communist, a Communist tormented my child, unsuspectingly America listened to a Communist, disguised as a patriot, on network radio. A wicked two-faced villain, the real names of real stars, a big Cold War backdrop—of course it became a best-seller. Her indictment of Ira was of the sort that could win a large public hearing in the fifties.
"And it didn't hurt to name all the other Jewish Bolsheviks affiliated with Ira's show. The Cold War paranoia had latent anti-Semitism as one of its sources, and so, under the moral guidance of the Grants—who themselves loved the ubiquitous troublemaking left-wing few just about as much as Richard Nixon did—Eve could transform a personal prejudice into a political wea
pon by confirming for Gentile America that, in New York as in Hollywood, in radio as in movies, the Communist under every rock was, nine times out of ten, a jew to boot.
"But did she imagine that this openly aggressive hothead was going to do nothing in response? This guy who used to have these ferocious arguments at her dinner table, who used to storm around their living room shouting at people, who, after all, was a Coramunist, who knew what it was to take political action, who'd tenaciously gained control of his union, who'd managed to rewrite Sokolow's scripts, to bully a bully like Artie Sokolow—she thought he was now going to take no action? Didn't she know him at all? What about the portrait in her book? If he's Machiavelli, then he's Machiavelli. Everybody run for cover.
"I'm really angry, she thinks, I'm angry about Pamela and I'm angry about Helgi and I'm furious about the renovation of the shack and all the other crimes against Sylphid, and I'm going to get the attention of this lecherous, heartless Machiavellian bastard. Well, damn right she got his attention. But surely the obvious thing about getting Ira's attention by sticking a hot poker up his ass in public is that you're going to enrage him. People don't yield to that kind of shit cheerfully. People don't like seeing exposés on the best-seller list that falsely denounce them, and you wouldn't even have to be Ira Ringold to take umbrage. And to take action. Only that never occurs to her. The righteous resentment that fuels her project, the blamelessness that fuels her project can't imagine anybody doing anything to her. All she has done is to settle the score. Ira did all the horrible things—she is merely coming back with her side of the story. She gets last licks, and the only consequences she imagines are consequences she deserves. It has to be that way—what did she do?
