I Married a Communist

by Philip Roth

  From the beginning, the difference between O'Day's speech and Ira's was unmistakable to me. Perhaps because there was nothing contradictory in O'Day's aims, because O'Day was living the life he proselytized, because the speech was a pretext for nothing else, because it appeared to rise from the core of the brain that is experience, there was a tautened to-the-point quality to what he said, the thinking firmly established, the words themselves seemingly shot through with will, nothing inflated, no waste of energy, but instead, in every utterance, a wily shrewdness and, however Utopian the goal, a deep practicality, a sense that he had the mission as much in his hands as in his head; a sense, unlike that communicated by Ira, that it was intelligence and not a lack of intelligence that was availing itself of—and wielding—his ideas. The tang of what I thought of as "the real" permeated his talk. It wasn't difficult to see that the something Ira's speech was a weak imitation of was O'Day's. The tang of the real ... though also the speech of someone in whom nothing ever laughed. With the result that there was a kind of madness to his singleness of purpose, and that also distinguished him from Ira. In attracting, as Ira did, all the human contingencies that O'Day had banished from life, there was sanity, the sanity of an expansive, disorderly existence.

  By the time I got back on the train that evening, the power of O'Day's unrelenting focus had so disoriented me that all I could think about was how I was to tell my parents that three and a half months was enough: I was quitting college to move down to the steel town of East Chicago, Indiana. I wasn't asking them to support me financially. I would find work to support myself, menial work, more than likely—but that was just as well, if not the whole idea. I could no longer justify continuing to accede to bourgeois expectations, theirs or mine, not after my visit with Johnny O'Day, who, despite all the soft-spokenness concealing the passion, came across as the most dynamic person I had ever met, more so even than Ira. The most dynamic, the most unshatterable, the most dangerous.

  Dangerous because he didn't care about me the way Ira did and didn't know about me the way Ira did. Ira knew I was somebody else's kid, understood intuitively—and had been told by my father for good measure—and didn't try to take from me my freedom or take me away from where I came from. Ira never tried to indoctrinate me beyond a certain point, nor was he desperate to hold on to me, though all his life he was probably love-hungry enough and love-starved enough to be always yearning for close attachments. He just borrowed me for a while when he came to Newark, occasionally borrowed me to have somebody to talk to when he was lonely visiting Newark or by himself up at the shack, but never took me anywhere near a Communist meeting. That whole other life of his was almost entirely invisible to me. All I got was the rant and the raving and the rhetoric, the window dressing. He was not just unrestrained—with me there was tact in Ira. Fanatically obsessive as he was, toward me there was a great decency, a tenderness, and a consciousness of a kind of danger that he was willing to face himself but didn't wish to expose a kid to. With me there was a big-bodied good-naturedness that was the other side of the fury and the rage. Ira saw fit to educate me only to a point. I never saw the zealot whole.

  But to Johnny O'Day I wasn't anybody's son he had to protect. To him I was a body to be recruited.

  "Don't trifle with the Trotskyites at that university," O'Day had told me at lunch, as though Trotskyites were a problem I'd come to East Chicago to talk over with him. Huddled head to head, we ate hamburgers in the booth of a dark tavern where his credit was still good with the Polish proprietor and where a boy like me, a sucker for manly intimacy, found the situation much to his liking. The little street, not far from the mill, was all taverns except for a grocery on one corner and a church on the other and, right across the way, an open lot that was half scrap heap, half garbage dump. The wind was strong from the east and smelled of sulfur dioxide. Inside, the smell was of smoke and beer.

  "I'm unorthodox enough to contend that it's all right to play with Trotskyites," O'Day said, "as long as you wash your hands afterward. There are people who handle venomous reptiles every day, going so far as to milk them of their poison in order to provide an antidote to it, and few of them are fatally bitten. Precisely because they know the reptiles are venomous."

  "What's a Trotskyite?" I asked.

  "You don't know about the fundamental divergence of Communists and Trotskyites?"

  "No."

  For the next few hours he told me. The story was replete with terms like "scientific socialism," "neo-fascism," "bourgeois democracy," with names unknown to me like (to begin with) Leon Trotsky, names like Eastman, Lovestone, Zinoviev, Bukharin, with events unknown to me like "the October Revolution" and "the 1937 trials," with formulations beginning "The Marxian precept that the contradictions inherent in a capitalist society..." and "Obedient to their fallacious reasoning, Trotskyites conspire to keep the aims from being achieved by..." But no matter how abstruse or complicated the story's ins and outs, coming from O'Day every word struck me as pointed and not at all remote, not a subject he was talking about to talk about it, not a subject he was talking about for me to write a term paper about it, but a struggle whose ferocity he had suffered through.

  It was nearly three when he relaxed his hold on my attention. His way of having you listen was extraordinary and had much to do with a promise he silently made not to imperil you so long as you concentrated on his every word. I was exhausted, the tavern was all but empty, and yet I had the sense that everything possible was going on around me. I remembered back to that night, as a high school kid, when I'd defied my father and gone off to be Ira's guest at the Wallace rally in Newark, and once again I felt in communion with a quarrel about life that mattered, the glorious battle that I had been looking for since I'd turned fourteen.

  "Come on," O'Day said, after glancing at his watch, "I'm going to show you the face of the future."

  And there we were. There I was. There it was, the world where I had long secretly dreamed of being a man. The whistle blew, the gates opened wide, and here they came—the workers! Corwin's far-flung ordinary men, unspectacular but free. The little guy! The common man! The Poles! The Swedes! The Irish! The Croatians! The Italians! The Slovenes! The men who jeopardized their lives making steel, risked being burned or crushed or blown apart, and all for the profit of the ruling class.

  I was so excited I couldn't see faces, I couldn't really see bodies. I saw only the crude mass of them heading through the gates for home. The mass of the American masses! Brushing by me, knocking into me—the face, the force of the future! The impulse to cry out—in sadness, anger, protest, triumph—was overwhelming, as was the urge to join that mob not quite a menace and not quite a mob, to join the chain, the rush of men in their thick-soled boots, and follow them all home. The noise of them was like the noise of a crowd in an arena before a fight. And the fight? The fight for American equality.

  From a pouch slung over his hip, O'Day took a wad of leaflets and thrust them at me. And there, within sight of the mill, this smoking basilica that must have been a mile long, the two of us stood side by side giving a leaflet to any man coming off the seven-to-three shift who stuck out a hand to take one. Their fingers touched mine and my whole life was turned inside out. Everything in America that was against these men was against me too! I took the leafleteer's vow: I would be nothing but the instrument of their will. I would be nothing but rectitude.

  Oh yes, you feel the pull with a man like O'Day. Johnny O'Day doesn't take you fifty percent of the way and leave you alone. He takes you all the way. The revolution is going to wipe out this and replace it with that—the un-ironic clarity of the political Casanova. When you're seventeen years old and you meet a guy who has an aggressive stance and who has it all figured out idealistically and all figured out ideologically and who has no family and no relatives and no house—who is without all that stuff that was pulling Ira in twenty different directions, without all those emotions pulling Ira in twenty directions, without all that upheaval a man like
Ira takes on because of his nature, without the turbulence of wanting to make a revolution that will change the world while also mating with a beautiful actress and acquiring a young mistress and fiddling with an aging whore and longing for a family and struggling with a stepchild and inhabiting an imposing house in the show-business city and a proletarian shack in the backwoods, determined to assert unflaggingly one being in secret and another in public and a third in the interstices between the two, to be Abraham Lincoln and Iron Rinn and Ira Ringold all rolled up into a frenzied, overexcitable group self—who instead is claimed by nothing but his idea, who is responsible to nothing but the idea, who understands almost mathematically what he needs to live an honorable life, then you think as I did, Here is where I belong!

  Which was probably what Ira had thought on encountering O'Day in Iran. O'Day had viscerally influenced him the same way. Takes you and ties you to the world revolution. Only Ira had wound up with all that other inadvertent, undesigned, unpremeditated stuff, bouncing all those other balls with the same enormous effort to prevail—while all that O'Day had, was, and wanted was nothing other than the real thing. Because he wasn't a Jew? Because he was a goy? Because, as Ira had told me, O'Day had been raised in a Catholic orphanage? Was that why he could be so thoroughly, so ruthlessly, so visibly living nothing but the bare, bare bones?

  There was none of the softness in him that I knew was inside me. Did he see my softness? I would not let him. My life with its softness squeezed out, here in East Chicago with Johnny O'Day! Down here at the mill gate at seven A.M. and three P.M. and eleven P.M. distributing leaflets after each shift. He will teach me how to write them, what to say and how best to say it so as to move the workingman to action and make of America an equitable society. He will teach me everything. I am someone moving out of the comfortable prison of his human irrelevance and, here at the side of Johnny O'Day, entering the hypercharged medium that is history. A menial job, an impoverished existence, yes, but here at the side of Johnny O'Day, not a meaningless life. To the contrary, everything of significance, everything profound and important!

  From such emotions you would not imagine that I could ever find my way back. But by midnight I still hadn't phoned my family to tell them my decision. O'Day had given me two thin pamphlets to read on the train to Chicago. One was called Theory and Practice of the Communist Party, the first course in a "Marxist Study Series" prepared by the National Education Department of the Communist Party, in which the nature of capitalism, of capitalist exploitation, and of the class struggle were devastatingly exposed in just under fifty pages. O'Day promised that the next time we met, we would discuss what I'd read and he would give me the second course, which "developed on a higher theoretical level," he told me, "the subjects of the first course."

  The other pamphlet I took back on the train that day, Who Owns America? by James S. Allen, argued—predicted—that "capitalism, even in its most powerful embodiment in America, threatens to reproduce disaster on an ever widening scale." The cover was a cartoon, in blue and white, of a porky-looking fat man in top hat and tails, seated arrogantly atop a swollen moneybag labeled "Profits," his own bloated belly adorned with a dollar sign. Smoking away in the background—and representing the property expropriated unjustly by the rich ruling class from the "principal victims of capitalism," the struggling workers—were the factories of America.

  I had read both pamphlets on the train; in my dormitory room I read through them again, hoping to find in their pages the strength to phone home with my news. The final pages of Who Owns America? were entitled "Become a Communist!" These I read aloud, as though addressing me were Johnny O'Day himself: "Yes, together we will win our strikes. We will build our unions, we will gather together to fight at every step and stage the forces of reaction, of fascism, of war-making. Together we will seek to build up a great independent political movement that will contest the national election with the parties of the trusts. Not for one moment will we give rest to the usurpers, to the oligarchy which is bringing ruin to the nation. Let no one question your patriotism, your loyalty to the nation. Join the Communist Party. As a Communist, you will be able to fulfill, in the deepest sense of the word, your responsibility as an American."

  I thought, Why isn't this reachable? Do it the way you got on that bus and went downtown and attended that Wallace rally. Is your life yours or is it theirs? Have you the courage of your convictions or haven't you? Is this America the kind of America you want to live in or do you intend to go out and revolutionize it? Or are you, like every other "idealistic" college student you know, another selfish, privileged, self-involved hypocrite? What are you afraid of—the hardship, the opprobrium, the danger, or O'Day himself? What are you afraid of if not your softness? Don't look to your parents to get you out of this. Don't call home and ask permission to join the Communist Party. Pack your clothes and your books and get back down there and do it! If you don't, is there really any distinction to be made between your capacity for daring to change and Lloyd Brown's, between your audacity and the audacity of Brownie, the grocer's assistant who wants to inherit Tommy Minarek's seat out at the rock dump in Zinc Town? How much does Nathan's failure to renounce his family's expectations and battle his way to genuine freedom differ from Brownie's failure to oppose his family's expectations and battle his way to freedom? He stays in Zinc Town selling minerals, I stay in college studying Aristotle—and I end up being Brownie with a degree.

  At one in the morning I crossed the Midway from my dormitory through a snowstorm—my first Chicago blizzard blowing in—to International House. The Burmese student on desk duty recognized me, and when he unlocked the security door and I said, "Mr. Glucksman," he nodded and, despite the hour, let me through. I went up to Leo's floor and knocked on the door. You could smell curry in the hallway hours after one of the foreign students had cooked up dinner for himself on the hot plate in his room. I was thinking, Some Indian kid comes all the way from Bombay to study in Chicago, and you're afraid to live in Indiana. Stand up and fight against injustice! Turn around, go—the opportunity is yours! Remember the mill gate!

  But because I had been pitched so high for so many hours—for so many adolescent years, been overcome with all these new ideals and visions of truth—when Leo, in his pajamas, opened his door, I burst into tears and, by doing so, misled him badly. Out of me poured all that I hadn't dared show to Johnny O'Day. The softness, the boyness, all the unworthy un-O'Dayness that was me. Everything nonessential that was me. Why isn't this reachable? I lacked what I suppose Ira also lacked: a heart without dichotomies, a heart like the enviably narrow O'Day's, unequivocal, ready to renounce everyone and everything except the revolution.

  "Oh, Nathan," Leo said tenderly. "My dear friend." It was the first time he had called me anything other than "Mr. Zuckerman." He sat me down at his desk and, standing over me just inches away, watched while, still weeping, I undid the buttons of a mackinaw already wet and heavy with snow. Maybe he thought that I was preparing to undo everything. Instead, I began to tell him about the man I had met. I told him that I wanted to move down to East Chicago and to work with O'Day. I had to, for the sake of my conscience. But could I do it without telling my parents? I asked Leo if that was honorable.