I Married a Communist

by Philip Roth

  "That same self-blinding that led to so much pain with Pennington, with Freedman, with Sylphid, with Pamela, with the Grants, even with Helgi Pârn—in the end, that self-blinding was the worm that destroyed her. It's what the high school Shakespeare teacher calls the tragic flaw.

  "A great cause had taken possession of Eve: her own. Her cause, presented in the grandiose guise of a selfless battle to save America from the Red tide. Everybody has a failed marriage—she herself has four of them. But she also has the need to be special. A star. She wants to show that she also is important, that she has a brain and that she has the power to fight. Who is this actor Iron Rinn? I am the actor! I am the one with the name, and I possess the power of the name! I am not this weak woman whom you can do anything you want to. I am a star, damn it! Mine isn't an ordinary failed marriage. It's a star's failed marriage! I didn't lose my husband because of the horrible trap I'm in with my daughter. I didn't lose my husband because of all those kneeling 'I implore you's.' I didn't lose my husband because of his drunken whore with the gold tooth. It has to be grander than that—and I must be blameless. The refusal to own up to what it is in the human dimension turns it into something melodramatic and false and sellable. I lost my husband to Communism.

  "And what that book was really about, actually accomplishing, Eve hadn't the faintest idea. Why was Iron Rinn served up to the public as a dangerous Soviet espionage agent? To get another Republican elected to the House. To get Bryden Grant into the House and put Joe Martin into the speaker's chair.

  "Grant was ultimately elected eleven times. A considerable personage in Congress. And Katrina became the Republican hostess of Washington, the sovereign of social authority throughout the Eisenhower years. For someone riddled with envy and conceit, no position in the world could have been more rewarding than deciding who sat across from Roy Cohn. In the hierarchical anxieties of the Washington dinner party, Katrina's capacity for rivalry, the sheer cannibal vigor of her taste for supremacy—for awarding and depriving the ruling class itself of their just desserts—found its ... imperium, I think the word would be. That woman drew up an invitation list with the autocratic sadism of Caligula. She knew the enjoyment of humiliating the powerful. She sent a tremor or two through that capital. Under Eisenhower and again, later, under Bryden's mentor Nixon, Katrina straddled Washington society like fear itself.

  "In '69, when there was that spurt of speculation that Nixon was going to find Grant a place in the White House, the congressman husband and the hostess-novelist wife made the cover of Life. No, Grant never got to be Haldeman, but at the end, he too was capsized by Watergate. Threw his lot in with Nixon and, in the face of all the evidence against his leader, defended him on the floor of the House right down to the morning of the resignation. That's what got Grant defeated in '74. But then, he'd been emulating Nixon from the start. Nixon had Alger Hiss, Grant had Iron Rinn. To catapult them into political eminence, each of them had a Soviet spy.

  "I saw Katrina on C-SPAN at the Nixon funeral. Grant had died some years before and she's died since. She was my age, maybe a year or two older. But out there at the funeral at Yorba Linda, with the flag waving at half-mast among the palm trees, and Nixon's birthplace in the background, she was still our Katrina, white-haired and wizened but still very much a force for the good, chatting it up with Barbara Bush and Betty Ford and Nancy Reagan. Life seemed never to have forced her to acknowledge, let alone to surrender, a single one of her pretensions. Still wholeheartedly determined to be the national authority in rectitude, stringent in the extreme about the right thing's being done. Saw her talking there to Senator Dole, our other great moral beacon. She didn't look to me to have relinquished one bit the idea that every word she spoke was of the utmost importance. Still oblivious to the introspection of silence. Still the righteous watchdog over everyone else's integrity. And unrepentant. Divinely unrepentant and brandishing that preposterous self-image. For stupidity, you know, there is no cure. The woman is the very embodiment of moral ambition, and the perniciousness of it, and the folly of it.

  "All that mattered to the Grants was how to make Ira serve their cause. And what was their cause? America? Democracy? If ever patriotism was a pretext for self-seeking, for self-devotion, for self-adoration ... You know, we learn from Shakespeare that in telling a story you cannot relax your imaginative sympathy for any character. But I am not Shakespeare, and I still despise that hatchet man and his hatchet wife for what they did to my brother—and did so effortlessly, employing Eve the way you do a dog to fetch the paper from the front porch. Remember what Gloucester says of old Lear? 'The king is in high rage.' I came down with a bad case of high rage myself when I spotted Katrina Van Tassel at Yorba Linda. I told myself, She's nothing, nobody, a bit player. In the vast history of twentieth-century ideological malevolence, she's played a clownish walk-on role and no more. But it was still barely endurable for me to watch her.

  "But the whole funeral of our thirty-seventh president was barely endurable. The Marine Band and Chorus performing all the songs designed to shut down people's thinking and produce a trance state: 'Hail to the Chief,' 'America,' 'You're a Grand Old Flag,' 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic,' and, to be sure, that most rousing of all those drugs that make everybody momentarily forget everything, the national narcotic, 'The Star-Spangled Banner.' Nothing like the elevating remarks of Billy Graham, a flag-draped casket, and a team of interracial pallbearing servicemen—and the whole thing topped off by 'The Star-Spangled Banner,' followed hard upon by a twenty-one-gun salute and 'Taps'—to induce catalepsy in the multitude.

  "Then the realists take command, the connoisseurs of deal making and deal breaking, masters of the most shameless ways of undoing an opponent, those for whom moral concerns must always come last, uttering all the well-known, unreal, sham-ridden cant about everything but the dead man's real passions. Clinton exalting Nixon for his 'remarkable journey' and, under the spell of his own sincerity, expressing hushed gratitude for all the 'wise counsel' Nixon had given him. Governor Pete Wilson assuring everyone that when most people think of Richard Nixon, they think of his 'towering intellect.' Dole and his flood of lachrymose clichés. 'Doctor' Kissinger, high-minded, profound, speaking in his most puffed-up unegoistical mode—and with all the cold authority of that voice dipped in sludge—quotes no less prestigious a tribute than Hamlet's for his murdered father to describe 'our gallant friend.' 'He was a man, take him for all and all, I shall not look upon his like again.' Literature is not a primary reality but a kind of expensive upholstery to a sage himself so plumply upholstered, and so he has no idea of the equivocating context in which Hamlet speaks of the unequaled king. But then who, sitting there under the tremendous pressure of sustaining a straight face while watching the enactment of the Final Cover-up, is going to catch the court Jew in a cultural gaffe when he invokes an inappropriate masterpiece? Who is there to advise him that it's not Hamlet on his father he ought to be quoting but Hamlet on his uncle, Claudius, Hamlet on the conduct of the new king, his father's usurping murderer? Who there at Yorba Linda dares to call out, 'Hey, Doctor—quote this: 'Foul deeds will rise / Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes'?

  "Who? Gerald Ford? Gerald Ford. I don't ever remember seeing Gerald Ford looking so focused before, so charged with intelligence as he clearly was on that hallowed ground. Ronald Reagan snapping the uniformed honor guard his famous salute, that salute of his that was always half meshugeh. Bob Hope seated next to James Baker. The Iran-Contra arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi seated next to Donald Nixon. The burglar G. Gordon Liddy there with his arrogant shaved head. The most disgraced of vice presidents, Spiro Agnew, there with his conscienceless Mob face. The most winning of vice presidents, sparkly Dan Quayle, looking as lucid as a button. The heroic effort made by that poor fellow: always staging intelligence and always failing. All of them mourning platitudinously together in the California sunshine and the lovely breeze: the indicted and the unindicted, the convicted and the unconvicted, and, his
towering intellect at last at rest in a star-spangled coffin, no longer grappling and questing for no-holds-barred power, the man who turned a whole country's morale inside out, the generator of an enormous national disaster, the first and only president of the United States of America to have gained from a handpicked successor a full and unconditional pardon for all the breaking and entering he committed while in office.

  "And Van Tassel Grant, adored widow of Bryden, that selfless public servant, reveling in her importance and jabbering away. All through the service, the mouth of reckless malice jabbering on and on in her televised grief over our great national loss. Too bad she wasn't born in China instead of the USA. Here she had to settle for being a best-selling novelist and a famous radio personality and a top-drawer Washington hostess. There she could have run Mao's Cultural Revolution.

  "In my ninety years I've witnessed two sensationally hilarious funerals, Nathan. Present at the first as a thirteen-year-old, and the second I saw on TV just three years ago, at the age of eighty-seven. Two funerals that have more or less bracketed my conscious life. They aren't mysterious events. They don't require a genius to ferret out their meaning. They are just natural human events that reveal as plainly as Daumier did the unique markings of the species, the thousand and one dualities that twist its nature into the human knot. The first was Mr. Russomanno's funeral for the canary, when the cobbler got hold of a casket and pallbearers and a horse-drawn hearse and majestically buried his beloved jimmy—and my kid brother broke my nose. The second was when they buried Richard Milhous Nixon with a twenty-one-gun salute. I only wish the Italians from the old First Ward could have been out there at Yorba Linda with Dr. Kissinger and Billy Graham. They would have known how to enjoy the spectacle. They would have hurled themselves on the ground with laughter when they heard what those two guys were up to, the indignities to which they descended to dignify-that glaringly impure soul.

  "And had Ira been alive to hear them, he would have gone nuts all over again at the world getting everything wrong."

  8

  "ALL HIS RANTING Ira now directed at himself. How could this farce have wrecked his life? Everything to the side of the main thing, all the peripheral stuff of existence that Comrade O'Day had warned him against. Home. Marriage. Family. Mistresses. Adultery. All the bourgeois shit! Why hadn't he lived like O'Day? Why hadn't he gone to prostitutes like O'Day? Real prostitutes, trustworthy professionals who understand the rules, and not blabbermouth amateurs like his Estonian masseuse.

  "The recriminations started to hound him. He should never have left O'Day, have left the UE shop at the record factory, have come to New York, married Eve Frame, grandiosely conceived of himself as this Mr. Iron Rinn. In Ira's own estimation he should never have done any of the living he did once he left the Midwest. He shouldn't have had a human being's appetite for experience or a human being's inability to read the future or a human being's propensity for making mistakes. He shouldn't have allowed himself to pursue a single one of a virile and ambitious man's worldly goals. Being a Communist laborer dwelling alone in a room in East Chicago under a sixty-watt bulb—that was now the ascetic height from which he had fallen into hell.

  "The pile-on of humiliation, that was the key to it. It wasn't as though a book had been thrown at him—the book was a bomb that had been thrown at him. McCarthy, you see, would have the two hundred or three hundred or four hundred Communists on his nonexistent lists, but allegorically one person would have to stand for them all. Alger Hiss is the biggest example. Three years after Hiss, Ira became another. What's more, Hiss to the average person was still the State Department and Yalta, stuff far, far away from the ordinary Joe, while Ira's was popular-culture Communism. To the confused popular imagination, this was the democratic Communist. This was Abe Lincoln. It was very easy to grasp: Abe Lincoln as the villainous representative of a foreign power, Abe Lincoln as America's greatest twentieth-century traitor. Ira became the personification of Communism, the personalized Communist for the nation: Iron Rinn was Everyman's Communist traitor in ways that Alger Hiss could never be.

  "Here's this giant who was pretty damn strong, in many ways pretty damn insensitive, but the calumny heaped upon him he finally couldn't take. Giants get felled too. He knew he couldn't hide from it and he thought, as time passed, he could never wait it out. He began to think that now that the lid was off there would always be something coming at him from somewhere. The giant couldn't find anything effectual to deal with it, and that's when he caved in.

  "I went up and got him, and he lived with us until we couldn't handle the situation anymore, and I put him in the hospital in New York. He sat in that chair for the first month, rubbing his knees and rubbing his elbows and holding his ribs where they ached, but otherwise lifeless, staring into his lap and wishing he were dead. I'd go to see him and he would barely speak. Every once in a while he'd say, 'All I wanted to do...' That was it. Never went any further, not out loud. That was all he said to me for weeks. A couple of times he muttered, 'To be like this ..."I never intended...' But mostly it was 'All I wanted to do ...'

  "They didn't have much to help mental patients in those days. No pills other than a sedative. Ira wouldn't eat. He sat in that first unit—the Disturbed Unit, they called it—eight beds there and Ira in his robe and pajamas and slippers, looking more like Lincoln with each passing day. Gaunt, exhausted, wearing Abraham Lincoln's mask of sorrow. I would be visiting, sitting beside him holding his hand and thinking, If it weren't for that resemblance, none of this would have happened to him. If only he hadn't been responsible to his looks.

  "It was four weeks before they moved him up to the Semi-Disturbed Unit, where the patients got dressed in their clothes, and they had recreational therapy. Some of them went off to play volleyball or to play basketball, though Ira couldn't because of his joint pain. He had been living for over a year with pain that was intractable, and maybe that undid him more than the calumny. Maybe the antagonist who destroyed Ira was physical pain, and the book would not have come close to defeating him if he hadn't been undermined by his health.

  "The collapse was total. The hospital was awful. But we couldn't have kept him at the house. He would lie in Lorraine's room cursing himself and crying his heart out: O'Day told him, O'Day warned him, O'Day had known back on the docks in Iran ... Doris sat beside Lorraine's bed and she held him in her arms and he wailed away. All of the force that was behind those tears. Awful. You don't realize how much plain old misery can be backed up inside a titanically defiant person who's been taking on the world and battling his own nature his whole life. That's what came pouring out of him: the whole damn struggle.

  "Sometimes I felt terrified. I felt the way I felt in the war when we were under bombardment at the Bulge. Just because he was so big and arrogant you had the feeling that there was nothing to be done for him by anyone. I saw that long, gaunt face of his, distorted with desperation, with all that hopelessness, with failure, and I was myself in a panic.

  "When I would get home from school I'd help him dress; every afternoon I'd force him to shave and I'd insist on his going for a walk with me down Bergen Street. Could any city street in America have been friendlier in those days? But Ira was surrounded by enemies. The marquee on the Park Theater frightened him, the salamis in Kartzman's window frightened him—Schachtman's candy store frightened him, with the newsstand out front. He was sure every paper had his story in it, weeks after the papers had finished having their fun with him. The Journal-American ran excerpts from Eve's book. The Daily Mirror had his kisser all over the front page. Even the stately Times couldn't resist. Ran a human-interest story about the suffering of the Sarah Bernhardt of the Airwaves, took all that crap about Russian espionage completely seriously.

  "But that's what happens. Once the human tragedy has been completed, it gets turned over to the journalists to banalize into entertainment. Perhaps it's because the whole irrational frenzy burst right through our door and no newspaper's half-baked insinuating detai
l passed me by that I think of the McCarthy era as inaugurating the postwar triumph of gossip as the unifying credo of the world's oldest democratic republic. In Gossip We Trust. Gossip as gospel, the national faith. McCarthyism as the beginning not just of serious politics but of serious everything as entertainment to amuse the mass audience. McCarthyism as the first postwar flowering of the American unthinking that is now everywhere.

  "McCarthy was never in the Communist business; if nobody else knew that, he did. The show-trial aspect of McCarthy's patriotic crusade was merely its theatrical form. Having cameras view it just gave it the false authenticity of real life. McCarthy understood better than any American politician before him that people whose job was to legislate could do far better for themselves by performing; McCarthy understood the entertainment value of disgrace and how to feed the pleasures of paranoia. He took us back to our origins, back to the seventeenth century and the stocks. That's how the country began: moral disgrace as public entertainment. McCarthy was an impresario, and the wilder the views, the more outrageous the charges, the greater the disorientation and the better the all-around fun. Joe McCarthy's The Free and the Brave—that was the show in which my brother was to play the biggest role of his life.

  "When not just the New York papers but the Jersey papers, too, joined in—well, for Ira that was the killer. They dug up whomever Ira knew out in Sussex County and got them to talk. Farmers, oldsters, local nobodies the radio star had befriended, and they all had a story about Ira coming around to tell them about the evils of capitalism. He had that great geezer pal out in Zinc Town, the taxidermist, and Ira liked to go around and listen to the guy, and the papers went to the taxidermist and the taxidermist gave them an earful. Ira couldn't believe it. But this taxidermist allows how Ira had pulled the wool over his eyes until one day when Ira came in with some young kid and the two of them tried to turn him and his son against the Korean War. Spewing real venom against General Douglas MacArthur. Calling the U.S.A. every bad name in the book.