But Ira turns out to be disastrously flawed, and Nathan’s ardor expires before he’s out of high school. From the excitement of listening to Ira’s colorful workman’s lingo—expressions like “yellow-dog contract” are as compelling to the budding writer as Drenka’s language is to Sabbath—and of admiring his camaraderie with actual working-class men, Nathan comes to see Ira less as a hero than as a psycho: uncontrollably angry, potentially violent, and wearyingly predictable in his political harangues. And that’s long before he learns that Ira murdered someone, at sixteen, and was a diehard member of the Communist Party—an apologist “for Stalin’s every villainy.” The analogy with Roth’s personal predicament doesn’t hold, of course, since Ira is guilty of the charge of being a Communist, if not of further trumped-up charges of being a Soviet spy. (No one ever catches up with him for the murder.) It would have been too pat a story, Roth informs me—and too familiar—if Ira were completely innocent. It’s the feeling of the era that Roth was after: the end of the golden age of heroism and the retreat into an ever-looming American darkness of irrationality, demagoguery, and lies.
Yet Nathan has learned that, even in a golden age, not all soldiers were heroes. That’s part of his growing up, too. And Ira himself is finally shown to be no more a villain than he was a hero. He is, above all, a Roth protagonist of the late nineties: a man caught up in the grinding machinery of history. As Murray sees it, his brother was “an action machine,” entirely gullible both politically and morally, and barely capable of self-reflection: “another innocent guy co-opted into a system he didn’t understand.”
Roth has once again set himself a narrative problem that clearly fascinated: how to render the consciousness of a man who is not entirely aware that he has one. The solution, this time, is even more complex than it was in American Pastoral, involving not one narrator but two. The discussion between Murray and Nathan turns out to be the book’s controlling structure, straight to the end. The former student and teacher have run into each other after some forty years, when Murray, still avid for learning, enrolls in a summer course at a college in the Berkshires: Athena College, where E. I. Lonoff once taught, although either Roth or its administrators have modified its name, which used to be Athene. It’s just a short distance from Nathan’s isolated hillside home.
Nathan remains much as we last saw him: living alone in a modest two-room cabin, largely cut off from human contact, devoted to writing and nothing else. (The spartan cabin is based on Roth’s writing studio, which stands a couple of hundred feet from his beautiful, spacious house; that’s just one of the many differences between character and author.) Nathan is afraid even to invite his ancient friend to spend the night, out of fear of undoing his determined indifference to the intimate presence of another person. But he invites Murray back to talk—mostly about Ira—for six long summer evenings. Nathan himself takes over the tale from time to time, filling in his own experiences and at times inventing what he cannot possibly have known. Roth tells me that he sees Murray and Nathan “like two basketball players bringing a ball down the court, each dribbling for about fifteen seconds before passing the ball to the other,” each adding pieces of the story to form a whole.
Two voices sounding in the dark. It’s an ingenious scheme for a story that rests on memories of radio, and the book contains affecting tributes to the conjuring powers of speech—tributes that, to judge from Roth’s oeuvre, are personal and heartfelt. (“The book of my life is a book of voices,” Zuckerman tells us. “When I ask myself how I arrived at where I am, the answer surprises me: ‘Listening.’”) In practice, however, the scheme does not really work. I don’t believe there is a book by Roth in which the voices are dimmer or less engaging, and in which, at the same time, they obscure the characters and actions they describe. Including Ira: the murder and the rages and the intractable beliefs are all painstakingly detailed but never dramatized. Saul Bellow complained to Roth, in a lecturing letter about the book, that Ira was “the least attractive of all your characters”—but the greater problem is that he never comes alive.
The book contains one wonderfully vibrant scene at a New York party; a couple of strong appearances by Nathan’s always invigorating father; and a few occasions when Nathan and Ira make visits to local workmen—a taxidermist, a guy selling rocks outside a mine, an ex-GI with a mattress factory—whose distinctive voices make an impact and help bring the book to life. But there are too few such scenes of human commingling, or direct action, and returning to the narration feels like returning to a cage.
This is because, for the most part, Murray’s side of the story consists of expositional chunks enclosed in quotation marks. He does not pass the ball back after fifteen seconds; his virtual monologues go on for ten or more pages at a time. And while Nathan initially tempts us with the promise that Murray, as a teacher, had a special talent “for dramatizing inquiry, for casting a strong narrative spell”—this is on page one—he later acknowledges that the voice has become “totally dispassionate,” “more or less unvaried, mild,” and marked by “a certain blandness.” It is also stiff and oddly literary, even for a former English teacher. (It was so difficult to imagine a ninety-year-old saying, “His recourse to violence was the masculine correlate of her predisposition to hysteria—distinctive gender manifestations of the same waterfall,” that I bought the audiobook to hear Ron Silver speak the part. Silver is marvelously adept, giving Murray a faintly Yiddish urban wise-guy edge that relieves his blandness. Much of the book, in fact, is aided by Silver’s reading, which provides vocal tics and colors not seen on the page, although this particular line remains impossible.) Nathan’s stories of his adolescence bring a steady pulse to the book, assured and energized. But when he joins in about Ira, he sounds hardly different from Murray: measured, calm, flat. There is a lot of wisdom in these pages, on subjects from families to utopianism, and some passages of profound beauty, but they are muffled by the steady narrative drone.
Roth claims that I Married a Communist is a favorite among his books, giving as his reason the fact that Ira Ringold is such an uninhibited, explosive character: “a hothead,” as Roth likes to put it. He explains that there’s a lot of freedom in writing about such a figure, a lot of open emotional space. But he may also have something of a protective attitude toward a work that was not received with the seriousness that he had poured into it—because of its incitement to exactly the sort of gossip that he had sought to avoid by leaving the city, and which the book roundly mocks in an aside about “the unifying credo of the world’s oldest democratic republic. In Gossip We Trust.” Roth’s outrage over Bloom’s book did not end with the evocation of an accusatory age. He went much further than that, and he must have known that no reviewer could resist the bait.
Ira Ringold is undone by his marriage to a beautiful actress with perfect diction and an insufferable daughter—“a big adult baby who is still living at home,” and who cannot stop demanding that her mother pay for maternal crimes long past. They are a closed family of two, with emotional room for no one else. The daughter is a bully, verbally and physically; the mother merely cowers in response. Ira is warned that this monstrous child’s unappeasable rage “will doom your household from the start.” And it does. But it is the wife, named Eve Frame, who dooms everything else: culturally pretentious and a secretly Jewish anti-Semite, she is giddily submissive to any show of strength. When the marriage fails, she is persuaded by crusading right-wing snobs to write a lurid exposé titled I Married a Communist—in which the term “Machiavellian” appears large.
The book is published in 1952, and Ira is blacklisted. A few years later, Murray is hauled before a panel of the House Un-American Activities Committee, convening in Newark, and loses his teaching job. (This was the actual experience of Bob Lowenstein, several years after he was Roth’s homeroom teacher; like Murray, he refused to “talk,” and was reinstated only several years later, as the result of a lawsuit.) In one of the book’s more animated scenes, Murray is
defended in a courtroom outburst by his fourteen-year-old daughter, Lorraine, a boldly virtuous counterpart to Eve’s wretchedly spoiled daughter, Sylphid—just as Murray’s Bronx-born wife, Doris, is a salt-of-the-earth counterpart to Eve. It was in the interests of a realistic world picture that Roth created this second mother-daughter pair, he says: “It’s not all betrayal.”
There is a long if not quite noble tradition of literary revenge, from D. H. Lawrence’s malevolent portrait of Ottoline Morrell in Women in Love and Doris Lessing’s acid portrayal of her former lover Nelson Algren in The Golden Notebook (Lessing even keeps his distinctive first name) to a fair number of pages of the collected works of Mary McCarthy. Certainly, Roth meant to get his own back. But he neglects the vengeful program for a while when it comes to Sylphid—Roth, one recalls, likes to give his opponents the best lines—and she becomes, briefly, the most engaging presence in the book. (“We learn from Shakespeare that in telling a story you cannot relax your imaginative sympathy for any character,” Murray tells Nathan, then adds, “But I am not Shakespeare.”) Sylphid is the main reason that the New York party scene is so lively and engrossing. Seen in action, at last, and in a large ensemble, she is sly, honest, and very funny as she guides Nathan through a roomful of phonies who happen to be her mother’s treasured guests. She’s also extremely kind to poor “Nathan of Newark,” bewildered by the cutlery and the doubtful edibility of his first artichoke. One anticipates further escapades, but it’s not to be; the narrative corrals her back into her one-note relationship with her mother. Surely an author has the right to choose his subjects, but here the desire for revenge seems to contract Roth’s novelistic freedom.
Reviews carried titles like “The Wrath of Roth” and “Roth Bites Back.” Few failed to mention Bloom; Publishers Weekly dismissed the whole three-hundred-plus-page effort as “a thinly disguised vendetta.” More than one reviewer pointed out that Roth had done himself more damage than Bloom had, and that he had gone a good way toward proving her charges. The word “misogynist” was back in common use, as even the most steadfast of Roth’s admirers among female critics registered complaints. (No surprise, perhaps, that Roth got off easier with the men—Robert Kelly, in The New York Times Book Review; Todd Gitlin, in the Chicago Tribune—who saw the book largely as a “gripping novel” about politics.) In The Boston Globe, Gail Caldwell found a good deal to praise—including, I should say, the novel’s joint narration—but found that the “caricatured demons” of Bloom and her daughter entirely overwhelmed the rest. In The Guardian, in Great Britain, Linda Grant went so far as to say that she would “rather read a dozen books of Rothian misogyny” than “a single page of Alison Lurie or Carol Shields or Margaret Atwood or Annie Proulx”—but make no mistake: “If there ever was a misogynist, Roth is one.” (One cannot help recalling Harold Bloom grumbling over Doris Lessing’s “crusade against male human beings.”) And in a generally skeptical review in the daily Times, Michiko Kakutani—who had welcomed American Pastoral with ardent, ungrudging praise—found the new book “hogtied to a narrow, personal agenda” and a retreat to Roth’s old “sexual wars and mirror games.” Her review was titled “Manly Giant vs. Zealots and Scheming Women.”
Despite his provocations, Roth was confounded by the renewed accusations of misogyny. He considers himself a man who loves women, and he counts many women among his close and lifelong friends. While Bob Lowenstein meant a lot to him as a teacher, his most important mentor in critical thinking was Mildred Martin, at Bucknell—who was one of those lifelong friends. He has certainly been angry at a few women in his life, but also at a few men. I Married a Communist is about many different things besides Eve and Sylphid. His books contain an immense variety of female characters, of every moral and emotional persuasion. And they are no more “good” or “bad” than his male characters; as a novelist, he couldn’t afford to present things otherwise even if he thought that way, which he does not. His work was being misread by some contemporary feminists as it had once been misread by Jews—and for reasons not so very different, involving the depiction of flawed or comically conceived characters. With Henry Miller dead and Norman Mailer faded from view, he had become their major foil—a useful and perhaps necessary foil.
He had jabbed back at his feminist critics, it’s true—but he championed the social and sexual freedom of women no less than he did that of men. Indeed, in his scheme of things, the freedom of men depended on women also being free. Surely that was clear if one read his books with an open mind, unimpeded by contemporary cant. And so he believed that he could explain himself—as he believed he could explain himself to a Yeshiva University audience in 1962—to a group of doubting and staunchly feminist college students in 1999. I Married a Communist is very much about the power of teaching, after all.
In the fall of that year, Roth agreed to join his friend Norman Manea in teaching a seminar on half a dozen of Roth’s novels at Bard, the classes already referred to here. Each week, Manea led a session on a given volume, and the next day Roth came in to speak and answer questions. Manea habitually told Roth about the subjects discussed during the previous session, so Roth was aware, on the day that he was to talk about I Married a Communist, that the book had generated considerable anger among the young women in the class. There were about fifteen students in all, and women were in the slight majority, or perhaps it only appears this way on the videos that I’ve seen of the classes, because they do more of the talking. This was not the first time that dissatisfaction with various female characters had been expressed; in fact, such dissatisfaction had been a constant theme of the discussions.
Roth begins the class by lecturing on several subjects—the postwar period, narrative techniques, Joe McCarthy—and reads a passage about Murray’s daughter, Lorraine, noting that her defense of her father is “the most touching single act of loyalty in the book.” He appears apprehensive, and he is clearly responding to the objections that Manea has conveyed. None of the characters in the book are meant to be “likable,” he tells the class; they are meant to be real. “I invented her,” he says of Eve Frame, who betrays her husband, “but I didn’t invent Linda Tripp.” Nor did he invent daughters who hate their mothers: “But let’s take a look at it. Don’t be frightened of it.” The class is relaxed, mostly quiet—there’s a laugh just at the mention of Monica Lewinsky—and it is now open to questions.
At first, the students seem intimidated. But then a young woman speaks up, expressing the belief that Roth’s male characters are “round” while his females are “flat”—or, at least, not as “grounded in complexity or sympathy.” Roth asks her if she feels that way about Amy Belette/Anne Frank in The Ghost Writer, and she retreats, but the subject has been broached, and another young woman, her face angelic and her ear studded with tiny rings, offers a reformulation: “We are never inside the heads of the female characters—it’s like a secondhand view.” Manea reminds her that, at the Sabbath’s Theater session, the students concluded that they could indeed get inside the mind of Drenka. (“I feel more about Drenka,” she admits. Roth notes with relief, “I wasn’t present at the Sabbath’s Theater battle.”) Roth asks to hear what was said during the previous session, and a male student ties himself in knots trying to explain something about “the nature and structure of gender relations … which I’ve taken very seriously.” Pressing a point about dogma, Roth reads from a book about the trial of two Soviet writers accused of slandering the People by failing to present their characters as “good” citizens. “We’re not putting you on trial!” the young women call out, comfortingly.
At times, though, the scene seems oddly like the satirical trial in Deception, particularly as Roth sums up and addresses complaints that have accumulated over several classes, yet seems never quite to be getting through. One student thought that Hope Lonoff was an “undeveloped character,” he notes, apparently because she did not leave an unsatisfying marriage; another said she didn’t find Maria Freshfield as “admirable” as she was mea
nt to be. The underlying rub with these characters, Roth surmises, is that they “don’t embody values that you respect”; like Eve Frame, they are “insufficiently forceful and assertive.” But such women exist. Many types of women exist. And why has Lorraine been censored out of everyone’s reading, he asks—because she doesn’t fit the theory? Writers write about individuals, not about types. And if this is really a literary issue of “flat” and “round,” why haven’t these questions been raised about any of the male characters? Why hasn’t anyone complained that Ira is a murderer? Finally, making no apparent headway, and exasperated: What if the women are flat? Or round? Why can’t they go on to another subject? “What I really don’t understand,” he says, “is how this discussion hijacks every class.”
Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books Page 29