Private needs and public acts are inextricably joined... with disastrous consequences. Iron Rinn (born Ira Ringold): Newark roughneck, radio actor, idealistic Communist, and educated ditch digger turned popular performer. A six-foot, six-inch Abe Lincoln look-alike, he emerges from serving in World War II passionately committed to making the world a better place and instead winds up blacklisted, unemployable, and blighted by a brutal personal secret from which he is perpetually in flight. His life is in ruins. On his way to political catastrophe he marries the nation's reigning radio actress and beloved silent film star, Even Frame (born Chava Fromkin). Their marriage evolves from a glamorous, romantic idyll to a dispiriting soap opera of tears and treachery. Eve's dramatic revelation to gossip columnist Briden Grant of her husband's life of "espionage" for the Soviet Union soon spirals their relationship from private drama into national scandal. I Married a Communist is an American tragedy as only Philip Roth can conceive-fierce and funny, eloquently rendered, and deadly accurate.
Private needs and public acts are inextricably joined... with disastrous consequences. Iron Rinn (born Ira Ringold): Newark roughneck, radio actor, idealistic Communist, and educated ditch digger turned popular performer. A six-foot, six-inch Abe Lincoln look-alike, he emerges from serving in World War II passionately committed to making the world a better place and instead winds up blacklisted, unemployable, and blighted by a brutal personal secret from which he is perpetually in flight. His life is in ruins. On his way to political catastrophe he marries the nation's reigning radio actress and beloved silent film star, Even Frame (born Chava Fromkin). Their marriage evolves from a glamorous, romantic idyll to a dispiriting soap opera of tears and treachery. Eve's dramatic revelation to gossip columnist Briden Grant of her husband's life of "espionage" for the Soviet Union soon spirals their relationship from private drama into national scandal. I Married a Communist is an American tragedy as only Philip Roth can conceive-fierce and funny, eloquently rendered, and deadly accurate.
I Married a Communist (American Trilogy #2)
I Married a Communist (American Trilogy #2)
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Overview
Private needs and public acts are inextricably joined... with disastrous consequences. Iron Rinn (born Ira Ringold): Newark roughneck, radio actor, idealistic Communist, and educated ditch digger turned popular performer. A six-foot, six-inch Abe Lincoln look-alike, he emerges from serving in World War II passionately committed to making the world a better place and instead winds up blacklisted, unemployable, and blighted by a brutal personal secret from which he is perpetually in flight. His life is in ruins. On his way to political catastrophe he marries the nation's reigning radio actress and beloved silent film star, Even Frame (born Chava Fromkin). Their marriage evolves from a glamorous, romantic idyll to a dispiriting soap opera of tears and treachery. Eve's dramatic revelation to gossip columnist Briden Grant of her husband's life of "espionage" for the Soviet Union soon spirals their relationship from private drama into national scandal. I Married a Communist is an American tragedy as only Philip Roth can conceive-fierce and funny, eloquently rendered, and deadly accurate.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 2000003447534 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Phoenix Books, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 02/06/2007 |
| Series: | Nathan Zuckerman Series |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
About the Author
Philip Milton Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933, the son of American-born parents and the grandson of European Jews who were part of the nineteenth-century wave of immigration to the United States. He grew up in the city's lower-middle-class section of Weequahic and was educated in Newark public schools. He later attended Bucknell University, where he received his B.A., and the University of Chicago, where he completed his M. A. and taught English. Afterwards, at both Iowa and Princeton, he taught creative writing, and for many years he taught comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He retired from teaching in 1992
Hometown:
ConnecticutDate of Birth:
March 19, 1933Place of Birth:
Newark, New JerseyEducation:
B.A. in English, Bucknell University, 1954; M.A. in English, University of Chicago, 1955Read an Excerpt
1
Ira Ringold's older brother, Murray, was my first high school English teacher, and it was through him that I hooked up with Ira. In 1946 Murray was just back from the army, where he'd served with the 17th Airborne Division at the Battle of the Bulge; in March 1945, he'd made the famous jump across the Rhine that signaled the beginning of the end of the European war. He was, in those days, a crusty, brash, baldheaded guy, not as tall as Ira but rangy and athletic, who hovered over our heads in a perpetual state of awareness. He was altogether natural in his manner and posture while in his speech verbally copious and intellectually almost menacing. His passion was to explain, to clarify, to make us understand, with the result that every last subject we talked about he broke down into its principal elements no less meticulously than he diagrammed sentences on the blackboard. His special talent was for dramatizing inquiry, for casting a strong narrative spell even when he was being strictly analytic and scrutinizing aloud, in his clearcut way, what we read and wrote.
Along with the brawn and the conspicuous braininess, Mr. Ringold brought with him into the classroom a charge of visceral spontaneity that was a revelation to tamed, respectablized kids who were yet to comprehend that obeying a teacher's rules of decorum had nothing to do with mental development. There was more importance than perhaps even he imagined in his winning predilection for heaving a blackboard eraser in your direction when the answer you gave didn't hit the mark. Or maybe there wasn't. Maybe Mr. Ringold knew very well that what boys like me needed to learn was not only how to express themselves withprecision and acquire a more discerning response to words, but how to be rambunctious without being stupid, how not to be too well concealed or too well behaved, how to begin to release the masculine intensities from the institutional rectitude that intimidated the bright kids the most.
You felt, in the sexual sense, the power of a male high school teacher like Murray Ringold-masculine authority uncorrected by piety-and you felt, in the priestly sense, the vocation of a male high school teacher like Murray Ringold, who wasn't lost in the amorphous American aspiration to make it big, who-unlike the school's women teachers-could have chosen to be almost anything else and chose instead, for his life's work, to be ours. All he wanted all day long was to deal with young people he could influence, and his biggest kick in life he got from their response.
Not that the impression his bold classroom style left on my sense of freedom was apparent at the time; no kid thought that way about school or teachers or himself. An incipient craving for social independence, however, had to have been nourished somewhat by Murray's example, and I told him this when, in July 1997, for the first time since I graduated from high school in 1950, I ran into Murray, now ninety years old but in every discernible way still the teacher whose task is realistically, without self-parody or inflating dramatics, to personify for his students the maverick dictum "I don't give a good goddamn," to teach them that you don't have to be Al Capone to transgress-you just have to think. "In human society," Mr. Ringold taught us, "thinking's the greatest transgression of all." "Cri-ti-cal think-ing," Mr. Ringold said, using his knuckles to rap out each of the syllables on his desktop, "-there is the ultimate subversion." I told Murray that hearing this early on from a manly guy like him-seeing it demonstrated by him-provided the most valuable clue to growing up that I had clutched at, albeit half comprehendingly, as a provincial, protected, high-minded high school kid yearning to be rational and of consequence and free.
Murray, in turn, told me everything that, as a youngster, I didn't know and couldn't have known about his brother's private life, a grave misfortune replete with farce over which Murray would sometimes find himself brooding even though Ira was dead now more than thirty years. "Thousands and thousands of Americans destroyed in those years, political casualties, historical casualties, because of their beliefs," Murray said. "But I don't remember anybody else being brought down quite the way that Ira was. It wasn't on the great American battlefield he would himself have chosen for his destruction. Maybe, despite ideology, politics, and history, a genuine catastrophe is always personal bathos at the core. Life can't be impugned for any failure to trivialize people. You have to take your hat off to life for the techniques at its disposal to strip a man of his significance and empty him totally of his pride."
Murray also told me, when I asked, how he had been stripped of his significance. I knew the general story but little of the details because I began my own army stint-and wasn't around Newark again for years-after I graduated college in 1954, and Murray's political ordeal didn't get under way until May 1955. We started with Murray's story, and it was only at the end of the afternoon, when I asked if he'd like to stay for dinner, that he seemed to feel, in unison with me, that our relations had shifted to a more intimate plane and that it wouldn't be incorrect if he went on to speak openly about his brother's.
Out near where I live in western New England, a small college called Athena runs a series of weeklong summer programs for elderly people, and Murray was enrolled as a student, at ninety, for the course grandly entitled "Shakespeare at the Millennium." That's how I'd run into him in town on the Sunday he arrived-having failed to recognize him, I was fortunate that he recognized me-and how we came to spend our six evenings together. That's how the past turned up this time, in the shape of a very old man whose talent was to give his troubles not one second more thought than they warranted and who still couldn't waste his time talking other than to a serious point. A palpable obstinacy lent his personality its flinty fullness, and this despite time's radical pruning of his old athletic physique. Looking at Murray while he spoke in that familiarly unhidden, scrupulous way of his, I thought, There it is-human life. There is endurance.
In '55, almost four years after Ira was blacklisted from radio for being a Communist, Murray had been dismissed from his teaching job by the Board of Education for refusing to I cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee when it had come through Newark for four days of hearings. He was reinstated, but only after a six-year legal struggle that ended in a 5-4 decision by the state supreme court, reinstated with back pay, minus the amount of money he had earned supporting his family those six years as a vacuum salesman.
"When you don't know what else to do," Murray said with a smile, "you sell vacuum cleaners. Door to door. Kirby vacuum cleaners. You spill a full ashtray onto the carpet and then you vacuum it up for them. You vacuum the house for them. That's how you sell the thing. Vacuumed half the houses in New Jersey in my day. Look, I had a lot of well-wishers, Nathan. I had a wife whose medical expenses were constant, and we had a child, but I was getting a pretty good amount of business and I sold a lot of people vacuum cleaners. And despite her scoliosis problems, Doris went back to work. She went back to the lab at the hospital. Did the blood work. Eventually ran the lab. In those days there was no separation between the technical stuff and the medical arts, and Doris did it all: drew the blood, stained the slides. Very patient, very thorough with a microscope. Well trained. Observant. Accurate. Knowledgeable. She used to come home from the Beth Israel, just across the street from us, and cook dinner in her lab coat. Ours was the only family I ever knew of whose salad dressing was served in laboratory flasks. The Erlenmeyer flask. We stirred our coffee with pipettes. All our glassware was from the lab. When we were on our uppers, Doris made ends meet. Together we were able to tackle it."
"And they came after you because you were Ira's brother?" I asked. "That's what I always assumed."
"I can't say for sure. Ira thought so. Maybe they came after me because I never behaved the way a teacher was supposed to behave. Maybe they would have come after me even without Ira. I started out as a firebrand, Nathan. I burned with zeal to establish the dignity of my profession. That may be what rankled them more than anything else. The personal indignity that you had to undergo as a teacher when I first started teaching-you wouldn't believe it. Being treated like children. Whatever the superiors told you, that was law. Unquestioned. You will get here at this time, you will sign the time book on time. You will spend so many hours in school. And you will be called on for afternoon and evening assignments, even though that wasn't part of your contract. All kinds of chicken-shit stuff. You felt denigrated.
"I threw myself into organizing our union. I moved quickly into committee leadership, executive board positions. I was outspoken-at times, I admit, pretty glib. I thought I knew all the answers. But I was interested in teachers' getting respect-respect, and proper emoluments for their labors, and so forth. Teachers had problems with pay, working conditions, benefits . . .
"The superintendent of schools was no friend of mine. I had been prominent in the move to deny him promotion to the superintendency. I supported another man, and he lost. So because I made no bones about my opposition to this son of a bitch, he hated my guts, and in '55 the ax fell and I was called downtown to the Federal Building, to a meeting of the House Un-American Activities Committee. To testify. Chairman was a Representative Walter. Two more members of the committee came with him. Three of them up from Washington, with their lawyer. They were investigating Communist influence in everything in the city of Newark but primarily investigating what they called 'the infiltration of the party' into labor and education. There had been a sweep of these hearings throughout the country-Detroit, Chicago. We knew it was coming. It was inevitable. They knocked us teachers off in one day, the last day, a Thursday in May.
"I testified for five minutes. 'Have you now or have you ever been . . . ? 'I refused to answer. Well, why won't you? they said. You got nothing to hide. Why don't you come clean? We just want information. That's all we're here for. We write legislation. We're not a punitive body. And so forth. But as I understood the Bill of Rights, my political beliefs were none of their business, and that's what I told them-'It's none of your business.'
"Earlier in the week they'd gone after the United Electrical Workers, Ira's old union back in Chicago. On Monday evening, a thousand UE members came over on chartered buses from New York to picket the Robert Treat Hotel, where the committee staff members were staying. The Star-Ledger described the picketers' appearance as 'an invasion of forces hostile to the congressional inquiry.' Not a legal demonstration as guaranteed by rights laid down in the Constitution but an invasion, like Hitler's of Poland and Czechoslovakia. One of the committee congressmen pointed out to the press-and without a trace of embarrassment at the un-Americanness lurking in his observation-that a lot of the demonstrators were chanting in Spanish, evidence to him that they didn't know the meaning of the signs they were carrying, that they were ignorant 'dupes' of the Communist Party. He took heart from the fact that they had been kept under surveillance by the 'subversives squad' of the Newark police. After the bus caravan passed through Hudson County on the way back to New York, some big cop there was quoted as saying, 'If I knew they were Reds, I'd of locked all thousand of them up.' That was the local atmosphere, and that was what had been appearing in the press, by the time I got to be questioned, the first to be called up on Thursday.
"Near the end of my five minutes, in the face of my refusal to cooperate, the chairman said that he was disappointed that a man of my education and understanding should be unwilling to help the security of this country by telling the committee what it wanted to know. I took that silently. The only hostile remark I made was when one of those bastards closed off by telling me, 'Sir, I question your loyalty.' I told him, 'And I question yours.' And the chairman told me that if I continued to 'slur' any member of the committee, he would have me ejected. 'We don't have to sit here,' he told me, I and take your bunk and listen to your slurs.' 'Neither do I,' I said, 'have to sit here and listen to your slurs, Mr. Chairman.' That was as bad as it got. My lawyer whispered to me to cut it out, and that was the end of my appearance. I was excused.
"But as I got up to leave my chair, one of the congressmen called after me, I suppose to provoke me into contempt-'How can you be paid by the taxpayers' money when you are obligated by your damnable Communist oath to teach the Soviet line? How in God's name can you be a free agent and teach what the Communists dictate? Why don't you get out of the party and reverse your tracks? I plead with you-return to the American way of life!'
"But I didn't take the bait, didn't tell him that what I taught had nothing to do with the dictates of anything other than composition and literature, though, in the end, it didn't seem to matter what I said or didn't say: that evening, in the Sports Final edition, there was my kisser on the front page of the Newark News, over the caption 'Red Probe Witness Balky' and the line "'Won't take your bunk," HUAC tells Newark teacher.'
"Now, one of the committee members was a congressman from New York State, Bryden Grant. You remember the Grants, Bryden and Katrina. Americans everywhere remember the Grants. Well, the Ringolds were the Rosenbergs to the Grants. This society pretty boy, this vicious nothing, all but destroyed our family. And did you ever know why? Because one night Grant and his wife were at a party that Ira and Eve were giving on West Eleventh Street and Ira went after Grant the way only Ira could go after somebody. Grant was a pal of Wernher von Braun's, or Ira thought so, and Ira laid into him but good. Grant was-to the naked eye, that is-an effete upper-class guy of the sort who set Ira's teeth on edge. The wife wrote those popular romances that the ladies devoured and Grant was then still a columnist for the Journal-American. To Ira, Grant was the incarnation of pampered privilege. He couldn't stand him. Grant's every gesture made him sick and his politics he abhorred.
What People are Saying About This
"A bitter, often funny, always engrossing story that wonderfully evokes a time and place in our common past.... The idealisms and hypocrisies of the postwar period [are] brilliantly resurrected." —Robert Stone, The New York Review of Books
"A remarkable work—remarkable in its stringent observation of American life...remarkable in its wisdom. Mr. Roth has the frantic politics of this frantic time—the McCarthy era—in exact pitch." —Arthur Schlesinger, The New York Observer
"As social history it bbreathes life. In Ira Ringold, Roth has created one of his singularly ripe, vigorous characters. Ira's dizzying rise and fall out of and back into the working class trace the trajectory of twenty years of American history." —Todd Gitlin, Chicago Tribune
"Philip Roth is an amazing writer.... I Married a Communist may very well become his classic work; perhaps a classic for all time."—The Plain Dealer
"Gripping.... A masterly, often unnerving, blend of tenderness, harshness, insight and wit."—The New York Times Book Review
"I Married a Communist is filled with passages as fine and sharp as anything Roth has ever written (which is to say, as fine and sharp as anything in contemporary American literature)."—The Village Voice Literary Supplement
"I Married a Communist leaves you—both dumbfounded and in awe."—Chicago Sun-Times
"[S]eals [Roth's] reputation as a writer at the very top of his game."—The Philadelphia Inquirer
Reading Group Guide
1. As Nathan's high school English teacher, Murray Ringold tells him that "In human society, thinking's the greatest transgression of all" [p. 2]. Do the events of his life, and his brother's, bear out this opinion?
2. Murray describes Ira's private life as "a grave misfortune replete with farce" [p. 3]. Would this describe his public life as well? Which aspects of his public life were tragic, which merely farcical? How are Ira's private and public lives inextricably linked? What about Eve's? How does Roth link private betrayal with the public variety?
3. Ira becomes famous by impersonating Abraham Lincoln; he dies, eventually, from the same rare disease Lincoln suffered from. Why does Roth stress similarities and parallels between Ira and Lincoln? What things does he imply about Ira by making the comparison? Does Ira have any justification in likening himself to American revolutionaries like Lincoln, Paine and Jefferson?
4. The young Nathan, enthusiastic about the Progressive Party, sees his father as someone who has made fatal compromises, and Ira as uncompromising. What compromises has Ira, in fact, made? Does the author imply that compromise is inevitable, even good and necessary? If so, do you agree with him?
5. Nathan is attracted by Ira's early orphaning, by his social and familial unrootedness, largely because he himself is so very rooted in his own family and culture. What effect does a father, or the lack of a father, have on a young man's life? What purpose do surrogate fathers serve? Is Nathan correct to define manhood as "the orphanhood that is total" [p. 217]?
6. "As a Communist, " says Murray,"[Ira] should be irritated by her from the first second. So what explains this marriage with her and not with a comrade?" [p. 82]. What does explain it? Does the fact that Ira sees Eve as a "challenge" [p. 83] provide reason enough, or is the situation more complex than that?
7. Is Sylphid presented as a villain, or as someone to be pitied? How much sympathy do you have for her? How much sympathy do Nathan and Murray have for her? Who is most to blame in the self-destructive mother-daughter relationship, Eve or Sylphid, and how has Eve contributed to making Sylphid what she is? In what ways are mother and daughter similar?
8. Ira presents himself as a searingly honest man, and seems actually to believe that this is so. Yet he consistently lies about the two vital facts of his life: that he is a Communist, and that he is a murderer. Does your knowledge of these lies imply, to you, that he is dishonest about other things? That he is in fact dishonest by nature?
9. Several characters give blistering summaries of Ira as they perceive him. Katrina van Tassel calls him "an ignorant man, and a naive man, and a rude man, a bullying, simple-minded, arrogant man" [p. 149]; his former friend Goldstine says "Mankind at its stupidest doesn't come any stupider. I've always been scared of you. You're a wild man" [p. 97]; Johnny O'Day says "He wasn't a revolutionary, he wasn't a Lincoln, he wasn't anything. He wasn't a man" [p. 288]. Are these characterizations correct? Or are they too ruthless in their assessments? What valuable qualities does Ira possess, if any? Is he in fact, as Murray believes, "by and large, " "virtuous" [p. 181]?
10. How did Ira's childhood experiences turn him toward violence and murder? How, afterward, did his murder of Strollo shape the rest of his life? Murray says that Ira's "whole life had been looking for a way not to kill somebody" [p. 292]. Into what other arenas does Ira deflect his violent impulses? At what times is his violent nature most in evidence?
11. Do you agree with Nathan that both Ira and Murray are "historical casualties" [p. 318]? What does he mean by that term? How might their lives have unfolded if they had lived in more peaceful times?
12. "I believe I have made the least harmful choice, " Nathan says about his chosen way of life [p. 71]. Harmful to what, and to whom? Are there any clues in I Married a Communist, or in Roth's other novels, to indicate why Nathan lives in such a monastic fashion?
13. Iron RinnIra Ringold was the teenaged Nathan's hero. What does this imply about our youthful ideas of heroes? Who, if anyone, might be the real hero of this story? Of the historical era?
14. If you have read American Pastoral, the novel that preceded I Married a Communist, how would you compare the two "heroes, " Swede Levov and Ira Ringold? Are the two men similar, and if so, in what ways? How innocent is each of them, and how guilty? To what degree are both utopianists, and how realistic are their utopias?
15. What does I Married a Communist tell us about ourselves as Americans: about specifically American mores, values, fantasies, and character? In what ways were HUAC and the MacCarthy crisis characteristically American phenomena, possible only in this country?