Fine, Clear Vitriol
SHECHNER, MARK
A Fine, Clear Vitriol I Married a Communist By Philip Roth Houghton Mifflin. 323 pp. $26.00. Reviewed by Mark Shechner Professor of English, State University of New York,...
...Which is why when nitty meets gritty in I Married a Communist, it isn't the Red scare that bubbles to the surface: not Red Channels, not Senator McCarthy, but Eve's daughter from an earlier union, Sylphid Pennington, who emerges as the Caliban of this book...
...His political creed is little more than a blind obedience to the God that failed...
...Reviewed by Mark Shechner Professor of English, State University of New York, Buffalo...
...Both Eve and Ira are masked and inaccessible...
...Claire Bloom, by contrast, resides in the marrow, in the bone of marriage...
...Iron Rinn, and Eve Frame, née Chava Fromkin...
...Once Ira does go down, a victim of his own delusions and of the work his wife has had ghostwritten for the occasion (called I Matrieda Communist), he seems to be a tragic figure in the Shakespearean mold, self-betrayed by a blind and obstinate will...
...There is neither conscience nor its absence...
...Sylphid accuses her mother of having destroyed her childhood by leaving Pennington, who, despite being gay and parading a string of boys through the house, was a good father...
...There are no falsehoods...
...Ira's older brother Murray, the Tiresias of this book who saw it all with the compound eyes of a great fly on the Ringold/ Frame wall, remembers her to Nathan with a cruel and unsparing intelligence: "She could go along parallel to life for a long time...
...Roth's novel is resolved in a vision of Nathan Zuckerman himself, up in rural Connecticut on a starry night, lying on his deck, looking up at the stars, content to not have a story of his own...
...There are no mothers and daughters, no fathers and stepfathers...
...What is it worth...
...Its long dying fall takes place between 1948 and 1952, between, that is, Henry Wallace's abortive campaign for President under the banner of the Progressive Party and the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the anti-Communist witch-hunt...
...Despite a clunker of a plot, in which all is narrated to the listening (and recording...
...Ringold, a Jewish laborer from Newark, New Jersey, with an imposing physique and a hot temper, has recently become a radio actor on a program called The Free and the Brave...
...And who in 1998 gets worked up over Stalinism anyway...
...She is a "a spiritual woman with décolletage" and a distinct delicacy about her own Jewishness...
...She knew all the moves, the benign smile, the dramatic reserve, all the delicate gestures...
...Didn't she know that when payback time rolled around—and a good working novelist can counter a betrayal in two years—he would recite his lines ever so much more cunningly...
...And the rancor...
...In these works, Roth takes swipes at two generations of Leftists, whom he portrays as victims of their own agitprop vocabularies and dogmatic sensibilities...
...Eve Frame is not cut out for Henry Wallace or Earl Browder, let alone Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev and Leon Trotsky...
...Eve Frame despises the Chava Fromkin in herself and has thrown up theatrical disguises to shield herself from the one identity she finds insupportable: the shayne maydel from Brooklyn...
...What privacy...
...There are no actors...
...The collaborations of toughness and delicacy, panic and rhapsody, indecent exposure and quivering sensitivity that mark Roth's style have never been more evident...
...What does it do...
...Readers of Claire Bloom's Leaving a Doll's House (why was it not titled I Married a Maniaci) will remember her complaint that Roth once declared in an angry letter (mailed from his room to hers) that he would no longer suffer Bloom's daughter, Anna Steiger, in the same house with them...
...Didn't she remember how he savaged a far more formidable adversary, Irving Howe, in The Anatomy Lesson...
...Like Dawn's liberationist handbook, Ira's is a prison house of language...
...Her book is unmasked in the Nation as having been ghostwritten and she is revealed to be a Jewish girl from Brownsville, not a sea captain's daughter from New Bedford...
...The unhappy marriage here is that between Ira Ringold, a.k.a...
...Stalinism is but part of a cultural moment Roth knows only secondhand: the history of vestigial Trotskyism watered down into liberal anti-Communism that is the legacy of the Partisan Review intellectuals...
...It is the true spirit of I Married a Communist as well: the heat and the turbulence, the pain and the mess down here beneath the orbit of the moon...
...To turn against his wife's child...
...Or, rather, as Goneril and Regan rolled into one, in a version of King Lear without a Cordelia...
...But then she'd veer off that parallel course of hers, the thing that looked so much like life, and there'd be an episode that could leave you spinning...
...The story has the implacability of a Shakespearean tragedy without the flash of insight that comes with horror...
...an aversion "for the Jew who was insufficiently disguised...
...He reminds us of Dawn Levov, the teenage incendiary of American Pastoral, Roth's previous novel, who bombs a post office out of rage at bourgeois America...
...Not in life—parallel to life...
...She could be quite convincing in that ultracivilized, ladylike role she'd chosen...
...Contemplating the stars and their great flames of hydrogen, he imagines a place where there is no betrayal: "There is no idealism...
...Ira is a man of the Left, a Communist Party member, a righteous pontificator, and a believer in art as a weapon...
...In the cad's own rendition of events, the daughter is an overweight, sardonic, ruthless, and domineering young woman who refuses to leave the maternal nest so long as by staying she can make her mother wretched...
...By 1948 Ringold/Rinn, who once worked in the New Jersey zinc mines and honed his Lincoln act at union hall fundraisers, is a young star...
...The reader either stays on and becomes a guilty co-conspirator, or puts the book down—as a minuscule portion of the American reading public put down Independent Counsel Kenneth W Starr's salacious report in a spirit of affronted decency...
...Neither Ira nor Eve at any point stops to realize, "So that was it all along...
...The precise locution...
...Eve is a silent-film actress whose career has been in the dumpster since films began to talk...
...Where does all this go...
...Bohunk Ira, then, is Roth's stick to beat the old Stalinist Left, while the genteel Eve Frame is his stick to beat Claire Bloom...
...Well, she did it and now he's done it, and produced a striking novel in the bargain...
...She refers to Ira as "the Beast," and does one doubt for an instant that that was Anna's nickname for Roth...
...There is no class struggle...
...When he berates the black maid about the Negro community's failure to support Henry Wallace during a dinner party, the reader joins in praying for his fall to come swiftly...
...So here they are, Ira and Eve, the raw and the cooked, the bohunk and the grand dame, bound together at first by a desperate sensuality, then by illusion and perplexity, and finally by the desire to inflict injury: to strike hard and strike decisively...
...Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's venerable alter ego, the novel contains some gems of character analysis and a high-amp prose that pulls us in no matter what indecencies Roth happens to commit...
...In tabloid America all is material, and what is the envious writer of serious fiction to do but keep up as well as his sluggish medium will allow...
...We are, I think, supposed to take pity on his passionate naivete without taking him into our hearts, but we pity him as we do Othello, wishing mightily that he would wise up and get a life...
...Stars or no stars, that tincture of rancor is the fuel that has always driven Roth's writing...
...One might for a moment be skeptical and say this is merely Roth running his scales, trying out a five-minute adagio at the end of his 24-hour furioso, if only to demonstrate that he can do it and that he himself is not maddened with rage...
...In the end, Eve herself is undone...
...His character is a problem, since Roth cuts him no slack, slicing him down to the size of the prefabricated ideas he picked up from an Army buddy, a party functionary named Johnny ?'Day, who combined revolutionary asceticism with muscle and Marx...
...Do we care...
...Here it is blended with the prose in a fine, clear vitriol, every phrase measured by the milliliter, by the drop, by the atom...
...The starry coda of I Married a Communist, with its vision of "the vast brain of time, a galaxy of fire set by no human hand" is a bit spacey compared to the bracing last line of Sabbath's Theater, where Mickey Sabbath decides not to commit suicide because "Everything he hated was here...
...So, this is Roth's construction of the Anna story in gruesome closeup, give or take the normal liberties of the fiction writer...
...What a cad...
...Now that's the spirit...
...author, "After the Revolution: Studies in Contemporary American Jewish Imagination So why did she do it (she being Claire Bloom and it being her 1996 memoircum-disemboweling of ex-husband Philip Roth, Leaving a Doll's House...
...The soft voice...
...It does raise questions...
...All this furious striving and star-crossed destiny does not lead, I think, to revelation, either for the characters or for the reader...
...If the exwife is fair game, especially after she has gone in for the pre-emptive first strike and failed to knock out her target, is the rest of the family ground zero as well...
...Philip Roth has been our resident maestro of such bitterness for 39 years now (since Goodbye Columbus in 1959), and it might seem from this book that he spent the first 3 8 years just warming up...
...Ira and Eve are mismated...
...It is bootless to ask this of Roth, for whom decorum is a crime worse than McCarthyism...
...Privacy...
...I Married a Communist Scotchtapes the pathos of a marriage gone south onto the history of the Red scare and the assault upon the entertainment industry that took place in the early 1950s...
...And what are we left with at the end of any Roth novel but the prose, a feverish patter that can gear up from Jackie Mason to Henry James or slip into James Joyce overdrive at the drop of a comma...
...Did nobody point out that next to her meat cleaver verbal arsenal, his filleting knife, sharpened on decades of settling scores in fiction, would slice her into strips so transparent that she would make prosciutto look like brisket...
...Bloom recalls caving in to this wish...
...Is something shameful taking place here...
...But what a difference...
...Ira's own formula foraction is just that: muscle and Marx...
...But if his mask is the squarejawed face of the earnest proletarian, acting out a predestined role in the WPA mural of his life, hers is that of the exaggerated bourgeois, the genteel sea captain's daughter, the lady...
...Writing well is the best revenge...
...Under the name of Iron Rinn, he impersonates Abraham Lincoln and other voices of nationalist passion...
...Do we want to know this...
Vol. 81 • November 1998 • No. 12
