by Philip Roth
He discovered reading. "One day—it must have been one of the worst mistakes the army ever made-—they sent us a complete library. What an error," he said, laughing. "I probably read every book they had in that library eventually. They built a Quonset hut to house the books, and they made shelves, and they told the guys, 'You want a book, you come in here and get one.'" It was O'Day who told him—who still told him—which books to get.
Early on, Ira showed me three sheets of paper titled "Some Concrete Suggestions for Ringold's Utilization" that O'Day had prepared when they were in Iran together. "One: Always keep a dictionary at hand—a good one with plenty of antonyms and synonyms—even when you write a note to the milkman. And use it. Don't make wild passes at spelling and exact shades of meaning as you have been accustomed to doing. Two: Double-space everything you write in order to permit interpolation of afterthoughts and corrections. I don't give a damn if it does violate good usage insofar as personal correspondence is involved; it makes for accurate expression. Three: Don't run your thoughts together in a solid page of typing. Every time you treat a new thought or elaborate what you're already talking about, indent for a new paragraph. It may add up to jerkiness, but it will be much more readable. Four: Avoid clichés. Even if you have to drag it in by the tail, express something you've read or heard quoted in other than the original words. One of your sentences from the other night at the library session in point of demonstration: 'I stated briefly some of the ills of the present regime...' You've read that, Iron Man, and it isn't yours; it's somebody else's. It sounds as if it came out of a can. Suppose you expressed the same idea something like this: 'I build my argument about the effect of landed proprietorship and the dominance of foreign capital on what I have witnessed here in Iran.'"
There were twenty points in all, and the reason Ira showed them to me was to assist with my writing—not with my high school radio plays but with my journal, intended to be "political" where I was beginning to put down my "thoughts" when I remembered to. I'd begun keeping my journal in imitation of Ira, who'd begun keeping his in imitation of Johnny O'Day. The three of us used the same brand of notebook: a dime pad from Woolworth's, fifty-two lined pages about four inches by three inches, stitched at the top and bound between mottled brown cardboard covers.
When an O'Day letter mentioned a book, any book, Ira got a copy and so did I; I'd go right to the library and take it out. "I've been reading Bower's Young Jefferson recently," O'Day wrote, "along with other treatments of early American history, and the Committees of Correspondence in that period were the principal agency by which the revolutionary-minded colonists developed their understanding and coordinated their plans." That's how I came to read Young Jefferson while in high school. O'Day wrote, "A couple of weeks ago I bought the twelfth edition of Bartlett's Quotations, allegedly for my reference library, actually for the enjoyment I get from browsing," and so I went downtown to the main library, to sit among the reference books browsing in Bartlett the way I imagined O'Day did, my journal beside me, skimming each page for the wisdom that would expedite my maturing and make me somebody to reckon with. "I buy the Cominform (official organ published in Bucharest) regularly," O'Day wrote, but the Cominform—abbreviated name of the Communist Information Bureau—I knew I wouldn't find in any local library, and prudence cautioned me not to go looking.
My radio plays were in dialogue and susceptible less to O'Day's Concrete Suggestions than to conversations Ira had with O'Day that he repeated to me, or, rather, acted out word for word, as though he and O'Day were together there before my eyes. The radio plays were colored, too, by the workingman's argot that continued to crop up in Ira's speech long after he'd come to New York and become a radio actor, and their convictions were strongly influenced by those long letters O'Day was writing to Ira, which Ira often read aloud at my request.
My subject was the lot of the common man, the ordinary Joe—the man that the radio writer Norman Corwin had lauded as "the little guy" in On a Note of Triumph, a sixty-minute play that was transmitted over CBS radio the evening the war ended in Europe (and then again, at popular request, eight days later) and that buoyantly entangled me in those Salvationist literary aspirations that endeavor to redress the world's wrongs through writing. I wouldn't care to judge today if something I loved as much as I loved On a Note of Triumph was or was not art; it provided me with my first sense of the conjuring power of art and helped strengthen my first ideas as to what I wanted and expected a literary artist's language to do: enshrine the struggles of the embattled. (And taught me, contrary to what my teachers insisted, that I could begin a sentence with "And.")
The form of the Corwin play was loose, plotless—"experimental," I informed my chiropodist father and homemaking mother. It was written in the high colloquial, alliterative style that may have derived in part from Clifford Odets and in part from Maxwell Anderson, from the effort by American playwrights of the twenties and thirties to forge a recognizable native idiom for the stage, naturalistic yet with lyrical coloration and serious undertones, a poeticized vernacular that, in Norman Corwin's case, combined the rhythms of ordinary speech with a faint literary stiltedness to make for a tone that struck me, at twelve, as democratic in spirit and heroic in scope, the verbal counterpart of a WPA mural. Whitman claimed America for the roughs, Norman Corwin claimed it for the little man—who turned out to be nothing less than the Americans who had fought the patriotic war and were coming back to an adoring nation. The little man was nothing less than Americans themselves! Corwin's "little guy" was American for "proletariat," and, as I now understand it, the revolution fought and won by America's working class was, in fact, World War II, the something large that we were all, however small, a part of, the revolution that confirmed the reality of the myth of a national character to be partaken of by all.
Including me. I was a Jewish child, no two ways about that, but I didn't care to partake of the Jewish character. I didn't even know, clearly, what it was. I didn't much want to. I wanted to partake of the national character. Nothing had seemed to come more naturally to my American-born parents, nothing came more naturally to me, and no method could have seemed to me any more profound than participating through the tongue that Norman Corwin spoke, a linguistic distillation of the excited feelings of community that the war had aroused, the high demotic poetry that was the liturgy of World War II.
History had been scaled down and personalized, America had been scaled down and personalized: for me, that was the enchantment not only of Norman Corwin but of the times. You flood into history and history floods into you. You flood into America and America floods into you. And all by virtue of being alive in New Jersey and twelve years old and sitting by the radio in 1945. Back when popular culture was sufficiently connected to the last century to be susceptible still to a little language, there was a swooning side to all of it for me.
It can at last be said without jinxing the campaign:
Somehow the decadent democracies, the bungling bolsheviks, the saps and softies,
Were tougher in the end than the brownshirt bullyboys, and smarter too:
For without whipping a priest, burning a book or slugging a Jew, without corraling a girl in a brothel, or bleeding a child for plasma,
Far-flung ordinary men, unspectacular but free, rousing out of their habits and their homes, got up early one morning, flexed their muscles, learned (as amateurs) the manual of arms, and set out across perilous plains and oceans to whop the bejesus out of the professionals.
This they did.
For confirmation, see the last communiqué, bearing the mark of the Allied High Command.
Clip it out of the morning paper and hand it over to your children for safe keeping.
When On a Note of Triumph appeared in book form, I bought a copy immediately (making it the first hardcover I'd ever owned outright rather than borrowed on my library card), and over several weeks I memorized the sixty-five pages of free-verse-like paragraphs in which the text was arranged, relis
hing particularly the lines that took playful liberties with everyday street-corner English ("There's a hot time in the old town of Dnepropetrovsky tonight") or that joined unlikely proper nouns so as to produce what seemed to me to be surprising and stirring ironies ("the mighty warrior lays down his Samurai sword before a grocery clerk from Baltimore"). At the conclusion of a great war effort that had provided a splendid stimulus for fundamental feelings of patriotism to grow strong in someone my age—almost nine when the war began and halfway to thirteen when it came to a close—the mere citing, on the radio, of American cities and states ("through the nippy night air of New Hampshire," "from Egypt to the Oklahoma prairie town," "And the reasons for mourning in Denmark are the same as they are in Ohio") had every ounce of the intended apotheosizing effect.
So they've given up.
They're finally done in, and the rat is dead in an alley back of the Wilhelmstrasse.
Take a bow, G.I.,
Take a bow, little guy.
The superman of tomorrow lies at the feet of you common men of this afternoon.
This was the panegyric with which the play opened. (On the radio there'd been an unflinching voice not unlike Iron Rinn's assertively identifying our hero for the praise due him. It was the determined, compassionately gruff, slightly hectoring halftime voice of the high school coach—the coach who also teaches English—the voice of the common man's collective conscience.) And this was Corwin's coda, a prayer whose grounding in the present made it seem to me—already an affirmed atheist—wholly secular and unchurchy while at the same time mightier and more daring than any prayer I had ever heard recited in school at the beginning of the day or had read, translated in the prayer book at the synagogue, when I was alongside my father at High Holiday services.
Lord God of trajectory and blast...
Lord God of fresh bread and tranquil mornings...
Lord God of the topcoat and the living wage...
Measure out new liberties...
Post proofs that brotherhood...
Sit at the treaty table and convoy the hopes of little peoples through expected straits...
Tens of millions of American families had sat beside their radios and, complex as this stuff was compared to what they were used to hearing, listened to what had aroused in me, and, I innocently assumed, in them, a stream of transforming, self-abandoning emotion such as I, for one, had never before experienced as a consequence of anything coming out of a radio. The power of that broadcast! There, amazingly, was soul coming out of a radio. The Spirit of the Common Man had inspired an immense mélange of populist adoration, an effusion of words bubbling straight up from the American heart into the American mouth, an hour-long homage to the paradoxical superiority of what Corwin insisted on identifying as absolutely ordinary American mankind: "far-flung ordinary men, unspectacular but free."
Corwin modernized Tom Paine for me by democratizing the risk, making it a question not of one just wild man but a collective of all the little just men pulling together. Worthiness and the people were one. Greatness and the people were one. A thrilling idea. And how Corwin labored to force it, at least imaginatively, to come true.
***
After the war, for the first time, Ira consciously entered the class struggle. He'd been up to his neck in it his entire life, he told me, without any idea what was going on. Out in Chicago, he worked for forty-five dollars a week in a record factory that the United Electrical Workers had organized under a contract so solid they even had union hiring. O'Day meanwhile returned to his job on a rigging gang at Inland Steel in Indiana Harbor. Time and again O'Day dreamed about quitting and, at night in their room, would pour his frustration out to Ira. "If I could have full time for six months and no handcuffs, the party could really be built here in the harbor. There's plenty of good people, but what's needed is a guy who can spend all his time at organizing. I ain't that good at organizing, that is true. You have to be something of a hand holder with timid Bolsheviks, and I lean more to bopping their heads. And what's the difference anyway? The party here is too broke to support a full-timer. Every dime that can be scraped up is going for defense of our leadership, and for the press, and a dozen other things that won't wait. I was broke after my last check, but I got by on jawbone for a while. But taxes, the damn car, one thing and another ... Iron Man, I can't handle it—I have to go to work."
I loved when Ira repeated the lingo that rough union guys used among themselves, even guys like Johnny O'Day, whose sentence structure wasn't quite so simple as the average workingman's but who knew the power of their diction and who, despite the potentially corrupting influence of the thesaurus, wielded it effectively all his life. "I have to take it on the slow bell for a while ... All this with management poising the ax ... As soon as we pull the pin ... As soon as the boys hit the bricks ... If they move to force the acceptance of their yellow-dog contract, it looks like blood on the bricks...."
I loved when Ira explained the workings of his own union, the UE, and described the people at the record factory where he'd worked. "It was a solid union, progressively led, controlled by the rank and file." Rank and file—three little words that thrilled me, as did the idea of hard work, tenacious courage, and a just cause to fuse the two. "Of the hundred and fifty members on each shift, a hundred or so attended the biweekly shop meetings. Although most of the work is hourly paid," Ira told me, "there's no whip swinging at that factory. Y'understand? If a boss has something to tell you, he's courteous about it. Even for serious offenses, the offender's called into the office together with his steward. That makes a big difference."
Ira would tell me all that transpired at an ordinary union meeting—"routine business like proposals for a new contract, the problem of absenteeism, a parking-lot beef, discussion of the looming war" (he meant war between the Soviet Union and the United States), "racism, the wages-causes-prices myth"—going on and on not just because I was, at fifteen and sixteen, eager to learn all that a workingman did, how he talked and acted and thought, but because even after he cleared out of Calumet City to go to New York to work in radio and was solidly established as Iron Rinn on The Free and the Brave, Ira continued to speak of the record plant and the union meetings in the charismatic tongue of his fellow workers, talked as though he still went off to work there every morning. Every night, rather, for after a short while he had got himself put on the night shift so that he could have his days for "missionary work," by which, I eventually learned, he meant proselytizing for the Communist Party.
O'Day had recruited Ira into the party when they were on the docks in Iran. lust as I, anything but orphaned, was the perfect target for Ira's tutorials, the orphaned Ira was the perfect target for O'Day's.
It was for his union's Washington-Lincoln birthday fund-raiser his first February out in Chicago that somebody got the idea to turn Ira, a wiry man, knobbily jointed, with dark, coarse Indian-like hair and a floppy, big-footed gait, into Abe Lincoln: put whiskers on him, decked him out in a stovepipe hat, high button shoes, and an old-fashioned, ill-fitting black suit, and sent him up to the lectern to read from the Lincoln-Douglas debates one of Lincoln's most telling condemnations of slavery. He got such a big hand for giving to the word "slavery" a strong working-class, political slant—and enjoyed himself so much doing it—that he continued right on with the only thing he remembered by heart from his nine and a half years of schooling, the Gettysburg Address. He brought the house down with the finale, that sentence as gloriously resolute as any sounded in heaven or uttered on earth since the world began. Raising and wiggling one of those huge hairy-knuckled, superflexible hands of his, plunging the longest of his inordinately long fingers right into the eyeball of his union audience each of the three times, he dramatically dropped his voice and rasped "the people."
"Everybody thought I got carried away by emotion," Ira told me. "That that's what fired me up. But it wasn't emotions. It was the first time I ever felt carried away by intellect. I understood for the first time in my life
what the hell I was talking about. I understood what this country is all about."
After that night, on his weekends, on holidays, he traveled the Chicago area for the CIO, as far as Galesburg and Springfield, out to authentic Lincoln country, portraying Abraham Lincoln for CIO conventions, cultural programs, parades, and picnics. He went on the UE radio show, where, even if nobody could see him standing two inches taller even than Lincoln, he did a bang-up job bringing Lincoln to the masses by speaking every word so that it made good plain sense. People began to take their kids along when Ira Ringold was to appear on the platform, and afterward, when whole families came up to shake his hand, the kids would ask to sit on his knee and tell him what they wanted for Christmas. Not so strangely, the unions he performed for were by and large locals that either broke with the CIO or were expelled when CIO president Philip Murray began in 1947 to rid member unions of Communist leadership and Communist membership.
But by '48 Ira was a rising radio star in New York, newly married to one of the country's most revered radio actresses and, for the moment, safely protected from the crusade that would annihilate forever, and not only from the labor movement, a pro-Soviet, pro-Stalin political presence in America.