Book Around the Corner

I Married a Communist by Philip Roth (1998) French title: J’ai épousé un communiste.

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.

I read I Married a Communist in August but didn’t have time to sit down and spend the necessary time to write about it. It is part of the Nathan Zuckerman series, where the narrator is Nathan Zuckerman, a Jew from Newark, born in 1933. He’s Roth’s doppelgänger. Nathan is now 64 and he spends several evenings with Murray Ringold, an old man who was his literature teacher in high school. Murray had a younger brother, Ira, and Nathan befriended him when he was a teenager. Ira is dead now and Murray is willing to tell Nathan what happened to Ira, how he died.

In this volume, Roth continues his exploration of America, while unveiling a bit more about Nathan and telling us a story. Grand fictional story, great coming-of-age soul-searching and great state-of-the-nation stuff: an all-in-one novel. I’m afraid I’ll have to write three billets to only scratch the surface of the thought-provoking material Roth put in his novel.

Murray and Ira were born in a poor family, with neglecting parents. Murray got out of it through school and a lot of studying. Ira was a wild one, hanging out with the mob, full of violent energy and unable to sit in school and learn. He did a lot of odd jobs, went away to war and met a Communist, Johnny O’Day. This man shaped Ira’s mind into Communism. When he came home, Ira started to support “progressive” political causes. He also had the physique to impersonate Lincoln and his shows led him into working for the radio in New York. It is there that he met Eve Frame, a former star from silent cinema. Eve had already been married twice, and not to standard men. One was a closeted homosexual and the other was violent. She has a daughter from her first marriage, Sylphid. When she marries Ira, Sylphid is already grown-up, she’s a musician and plays the harp.

Ira and Eve get married but their honeymoon is short lived. Two damaged souls can’t always heal each other, their worlds don’t mesh well and Sylphid hates Ira. He’s a roughneck and she’s an artist, on paper, they already are very different and you have a hard time imagining them bonding over anything. They could find a modus vivendi around Eve’s happiness but Eve and Sylphid have an unhealthy relationship. Eve feels guilty for not being a good enough mother. Sylphid exploits that guilt and bullies her mother everyway she can. She first refuses to attend Eve and Ira’s wedding, she picks fights with him and does everything she can to come between them. Ira tries to protect Eve, to put Sylphid in her place but he’s up against Eve’s opposition. She doesn’t welcome his help, she chooses Sylphid’s side.

This domestic hurdle is not the only one in their way to a Hollywood happily-ever-after. Ira and Eve are also involved in the New York radio microcosm. His political views aren’t welcome among Eve’s friends. She’s more looking for recognition from the rich and famous. She’s good friends with the Grants who are ambitious and using the anti-Communist climate of the McCarthy era to fuel their political ambitions. They manipulate Eve; Ira knows it but must be careful around them. He has political views opposite to them and he’s vocal about them in a buoyant, radical way that eradicates any civilized conversation. He’s a zealot of the Communist cause, extreme in his beliefs and Murray says:

By and large I believe he was—another innocent guy co-opted into a system he didn’t understand. Hard to believe that a man who put so much stock in his freedom could let that dogmatizing control his thinking. But my brother abased himself intellectually the same way they all did. Politically gullible. Morally gullible.

He was swallowed by O’Day’s thinking. He needed a father figure, O’Day provided it along with a ready-to-think vision of the world. He gave him a frame to explain the world, a structure to walk through life. Ira needed a system of values and focus; O’Day gave it to him.

Ira is a character larger than life. He’s like a character from a Russian novel: huge, passionate, extreme, violent sometimes, rough and unpredictable. He takes Nathan under his wing, like a little brother he never had or like the son he’d like to have. He settles with Eve and would like a stable family life, the one he envies to Nathan. But Eve is not the woman for that. She doesn’t want another child, she’s in her dysfunctional relationship with Sylphid.

Ira and Eve’s relationship is doomed from the start. He enjoys his rustic cabin in the woods, she enjoys socialite life in New York. They don’t have anything in common and can only end up hurting each other. He’ll do anything he can to hide his belonging to the Communist Party. She’ll betray him and ruin him out of spite.

I know it is said that this side of I Married a Communist was a way for Roth to get back to his ex-wife Claire Bloom for what she wrote about their marriage in her memoirs. I’m going to be harsh but if she exposed their marriage in her memoirs, she knew her novelist of an ex could retaliate. As a strong defender of one’s privacy, I dislike the display of personal lives on the public forum. I think that Churchill’s or Saint-Simon’s memoirs are worth reading because they had positions that made them invaluable witnesses to historical events. I’m not sure Claire Bloom’s memoirs are indispensable to the world, unless to satisfy the masses’ curiosity about Hollywood and do dirty laundry in a public wash house. To be honest, I don’t care about the personal material that went into the ingredients of this novel. All I see is a great piece of literature and I’m glad I read it blind to this ugly controversy.

Part II will be about the state-of-the-nation-side of the novel

Part III will be about the coming-of-age side of the novel.