I Married a Communist by Philip Roth

When I finished reading American Pastoral a few months ago, I had read two of the three novels that make up Roth’s so-called, American Trilogy, along with The Human Stain which I read several years ago and is still one of my favorite Roth novels. Completing the trilogy rose to high on my reading list.

The three novels came out in 1997 to 2000. All three take place in post-World War II America. All three are narrated by Roth’s often-used stand-in, Nathan Zuckerman. All three are grounded in Newark, New Jersey. But it’s not a trilogy of shared characters or continuous story, but a trilogy of perspectives on America seen through three lenses of our defining national concerns. American Pastoral comes first, in 1997. The focus is the Vietnam War and the self-critique of American values and institutions that arose because of it. I Married a Communist covers the McCarthy era. The Human Stain concerns racism. In each of the three novels the main character hides a secret that colors his actions and choices. For Swede Levov, in American Pastoral the secret is his daughter who went into hiding after joining a domestic terrorist group protesting the war. In The Human Stain, the secret is that Coleman Silk, falsely accused of racism by a student at the University where he teaches, is himself black and has been passing for white.

In I Married a Communist, the secret is more violent, but is less central to the novel. As a boy, Ira Ringold, the main character, killed another boy after being jumped in an alley. The other boy had gang connections that led to Ira having to lay low. The threat that the gang might find him, or that the story would be exposed, plus the self-knowledge of his capacity for violence, follows Ira the rest of his life. But it isn’t that long-ago killing that makes Ira’s story a tragedy or that eventually brings him down. (From the first page of the novel where the Rhine river is mentioned and the name Ringold is introduced, I wondered if Roth was intending to connect Ira Ringold to Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungen, a treasure that confers great power but brings destruction to those who wield it.)

During World War II, Ira serves in the military. He meets up with a soldier named Johnny O’Day. O’Day is a committed communist who converts Ringold. After the war, Ringold follows O’Day to Illinois where he joins him in labor organizing. One of his roles is to dress up as Abraham Lincoln at labor rallies, reflecting on labor questions in the character of Lincoln. So popular is Ringold’s impersonation that it leads to being cast on a radio show out of New York City called The Free and the Brave. He uses the stage name Iron Rinn The radio show leads to a marriage with the actress Eve Frame, who had once been a successful film star. Ringold is Eve Frame’s third husband. With the second, a man named Carlton Pennington, she had a daughter, named Sylphid. After that marriage ended, Pennington, who was homosexual, moved to France and Eve is raising the daughter. Eve dotes on Sylphid. Sylphid plays the harp and together they imagine a music career for her. But mostly Sylphid extorts love and support from her mother. Once Ringold enters the family, he instantly sees the unhealthy dynamic, but the two side up against him.

Ringold continues his political interests. He works with the radio show writer to slip communist themes into the scripts. Frustrated with his wife and daughter, he also begins an affair with Sylphid’s best friend. When the marriage falls apart, Eve Frame takes revenge by releasing a book, ghost-written by a friend of hers who is a theater critic, titled I Married a Communist. (I kept wondering through the first two thirds of the novel, who is the “I” in the title? – it’s Eve Frame.) The expose, even though much of it is false, ruins Ringold’s career, while the book jump starts the political career of the theater critic who then wins a seat in Congress.

Roth’s novel has been called a revenge novel because the character of Eve Frame is clearly based on Roth’s ex-wife, the actress Claire Bloom. After a long relationship they married in 1990 and divorced in 1995. Bloom then published, in 1996, a memoir titled, Leaving a Doll’s House, that includes unflattering details of Roth’s personal life and character. Like Eve Frame, Claire has a daughter from a previous marriage (Anna Steiger, daughter of Rod Steiger). Like Sylphid the harpist, Anna is an opera singer. Roth’s portrait of Eve Frame is certainly ugly, but you can’t blame Roth for using the events of his life as material for his fiction. That’s what writer’s do.

The book has an interesting double narration technique. The narrator is Nathan Zuckerman, who is, of course, Philip Roth. Nathan grew up in Newark, and shares some of the same memories and circumstances that Nathan described in American Pastoral. He mentions, again, that he’s reading John R. Tunis, the author of The Kid from Tomkinsville. Zuckerman, in 1948, as a teenager, meets Ira Ringold, because Ira is the brother of Murray Ringold who is Nathan’s high school English teacher who Nathan idolizes. A chance meeting with Ira when Ira is visiting his brother, leaves Ira impressed by Nathan’s political awareness and Ira introduces young Nathan to leftist politics during the Truman presidential campaign when Ira supports the more progressive Democratic nominee, Henry Wallace. There’s an early scene at a Wallace rally where young Nathan gets to shake the hand of Paul Robeson. The impressionable young man gets swept up for a time with Ira, and their paths continue to cross, occasionally, for years.

But Ira’s story is told not by Nathan but by Murray Ringold. In the present day, 1997, Nathan has become a successful writer, living alone in western New England (like Philip Roth). His old English teacher shows up in town to attend a summer course for seniors offered at a local community college. Nathan recognizes Murray when he sees him in town and invites him back to his house for dinner. Then they spend the rest of the night, and every night that week, out on the back porch with Murray relating the story of his brother. Much the way American Pastoral begins with a scene where Nathan begins to learn the story of Swede Levov after a run-in at a high school reunion with Swede’s brother, I Married a Communist is the story of one brother as told by another, as told to Nathan Zuckerman, who tells it to us.

The story is quite detailed, complicated, rich. There are scenes at a cabin get-away that Ira goes to in New Jersey to get away from New York, and his wife. There’s a scene near there at a rock mine. Dinner parties with theater folks in New York. Murray tells his own story of losing his job as a teacher after Ira is brought down as a communist. Nathan also is affected by Ira’s fall because the Feds suspect he’s a sympathizer and as a college student they turn him down for a Fullbright he applied for. Nathan adds a story of his own of a trip he made to visit Johnny O’Day when Nathan was at college in Chicago. The narrative structure is strained by imagining that one man could know or remember this much about another man’s life, and tell it so artfully over several nights, and that Nathan could recall Murray’s recitation and their dialogue well enough to transcribe it into a 323 page novel. I was impressed, though, how scrupulously Roth retains the plausibility that Murray really does know all of this, by placing Murray on the scene during important incidents, unlike the last book I read, Their Eyes Were Watching God, where the similar narrative technique of one character telling the story to another doesn’t quite fit.

I read the novel mostly on a plane ride to Waynesville, North Carolina, where I had to go to help my father move into a skilled nursing facility and take care of emptying out the house where he had lived alone since my mother died and preparing the house for rent. I finished Roth’s book while there but it took me several weeks to get around to writing it up. Now that I have, I can finally return my copy to the library.