“I Married a Communist” by
Philip Roth, 1998
Roth is an expert in
sociological and emotional fiction, tracking the life of Jewish people in Newark, New Jersey after
World War II and beyond. This book
describes the tumultuous events that befell a single radical who came back
leftist after the war and then collided with the McCarthy period. His name is Ira Ringold, a big loud
aggressive zinc miner who became a radio star.
Ira is one of those radicals who argues with everyone all the time. The story is told by a young friend of Ira’s,
Nathan, and Ira’s brother Murray. Murray is an observant
progressive high school teacher who thinks his brother is nuts. The device of the ‘rational’ brother observing the radicalism of his kin is common in American fiction and this is no
exception.
Ira becomes a leftist in the
Army when he meets an ascetic Communist Party hardliner, Johnny O’Day. Ira returns home, finds his way into doing Lincoln impressions, then
gets on a NY radio show as “Iron Rinn,” a show dominated by CP members. Oddly enough, instead of marrying a
working-class woman, he marries Eve Frame, a beautiful, neurotic film star and
they live together in their upscale home in Manhattan.
As the marriage breaks up as it predictably would, Eve writes a book
exposing Ira titled: “I Married A Communist,” under the authorship of two wealthy
Republican friends, the Grants. This
book helps Ira lose his job and ultimately he ends his days selling colored rocks
at a rock quarry in upstate New
Jersey until he keels over dead.
Like “American Pastoral,”
(reviewed below) Roth has a fascination with the intersection of left
radicalism and the Jewish experience in the U.S. Why this book was written in 1998 is somewhat
of a mystery. But the impact of the anti-communist
purges of the 1950s still holds sway in left/liberal circles, reflected in
recent films like “Trumbo” & “Good Night & Good Luck.” That fear is perhaps why so many of them
refrain from Marxism and live in a cocoon of comfortable liberalism, just as Roth
does. The rich do not come out well in this book
either, as the two central women, Eve and her harp-playing daughter Sylphid are
dreadful characters in their own way.
Eve’s reactionary Republican friends the Grants fare even worse.
The real impact of the
McCarthy period was not on the Hollywood 10
alone, as the liberal myth would have it. This book riffs on that slant, as the people fired were cultural workers.
It was primarily an assault on union members across the U.S. For instance, 3,000 longshoremen were deported
from the U.S.
under the terms of the Walter-McCarran Act for being alleged Communist Party
members. In the unions, the Taft-Hartley
anti-communist pledge was forced on unionists, which purged the unions of
open leftists and destroyed left-led unions.
The Communist Party and the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party
leaderships were jailed at different times based on the Smith Act. In 1954 membership in the CP itself was
outlawed in the U.S. All of this decimated American unionism and
left the anti-communist ‘business unionists’ in control. At this point we know the long-term results of that big business strategy - the defanging of U.S. unionism.
None of this is explicit in
this book, only hinted at. Roth is
basically anti-radical in his portrayal of a specific kind of communism, though through his
brother Murray Roth shows sympathy for Ira, flawed as Ira is. Ira does follow every twist and turn of Soviet policy like the CP, which indicates that the American CP had no independent thinkers or perspective. Roth in essence creates psychological depictions
of radicals in order to dismiss them. In
this book, he even adds a vicious surprise at the end, as Murray
reveals that Ira bludgeoned an anti-Semitic thug to death in an alley in Newark when he was
younger. To Murray, Ira had been running from his violent
temper since, so Ira’s story becomes a story of emotions run wild, not
politics. Many readers, however, might
not be as upset about this act of violence as the author is.
Let’s look at the two
primary and only Communists depicted in the book. Nathan finally meets the legendary O’Day, who
lives in a tiny spare room in South
Bend, Indiana,
handing out leaflets to steel-workers coming off the job. Nathan almost becomes converted into a labor
radical upon meeting O’Day, instead of just being a University of Chicago student
prey to a mentor who pushes ‘art for art’s sake’ and homosexuality. O’Day is portrayed as a poverty stricken but
relentless ‘monk’ of the revolution and indeed, there are communists like
this. When Murray calls O’Day to help Ira, O’Day
denounces Ira as a sell-out, proving his intractable sectarianism.
The other is Ira. Angry, quarrelsome, never shuts up,
physically threatening to his multiple enemies – the angry Jew as even Roth
calls him. There are communists like this as well. They figure if they argue or give their
opinion enough they’ll somehow convert people through their observations alone
– a sort of idealism gone personal. Nevertheless you feel Ira is a
down-to-earth, working-class man who is definitely kind to young Nathan and working class people in general.
But no mass movement is in evident in the book, just these two personality
types. The one event that breaks this
mold is when Ira takes Nathan to a mass Henry Wallace rally hosted by Paul Robeson
early in the book. Only here do you see
that something more is going on.
On reflection, the trauma of
the 1948 Wallace campaign loss was the last time the CP ever
endorsed anyone except a Democrat. The failed
independent Wallace campaign made them a permanent Popular Front party,
appended to the Democrats like a leach to the leg of a very fat, very rich man
– what we jokingly call at this point the ‘left wing of the impossible.’ For CPers being ‘close to the power’ in the
Democratic Party seems to substitute for many things, especially after the 1956
Khrushchev revelations when the party shrank from approximately 75,000 at its
height to 10,000 members. Who knows what
it is now, but it is far less than that. This nose for ‘power’ is important
because for a time the CP proclaimed communism as ‘20th Century
Americanism.’ They were coming off a war-block between the USSR and the U.S. and hence had respectability
and even some power in normal society, while also fancying themselves an arm of the
Soviet bureaucracy. All this was quickly
shattered after Hitler was crushed – an event ironically carried out mostly by
the Soviet Army.
This book reflects the destruction
of that movement but in a narrow way, obscuring the sweep of what happened,
turning it into an individual story about two communist ‘types.’ There is a telling statement in the book that
implies that ‘few have ever met a communist.’
And so the confabulated ‘images’ of communists on American television,
movies, in the papers or books substitute for people's real knowledge. Roth here, in spite of being sympathetic, has
not really contradicted that portrayal, so he helped build the prye too. Anyone in the Marxist movement long enough knows that communists come in all types of personalities, just like most people. The
title of the book is also the title of Eve’s book, and that is not an accident either. Though the title is also a sad reflection on the
destruction of a man by the 'Red' scare.
Prior Roth book reviewed
below, “American Pastoral,” which is now an even worse movie through no fault of his own.
P.S. - 4/2021 - Roth's hand-picked biographer Blake Bailey has been accused of sexual abuse of minors, which should please his subject, who was such a 'ladies man.'
Red Frog
November 6, 2016
No comments:
Post a Comment