I Married a Communist: American Trilogy (2)
Philip Roth
Language: English
Pages: 323
ISBN: 0375707212
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
I Married a Communist is the story of the rise and fall of Ira Ringold, a big American roughneck who begins life as a teenage ditch-digger in 1930s Newark, becomes a big-time 1940s radio star, and is destroyed, as both a performer and a man, in the McCarthy witchhunt of the 1950s.
In his heyday as a star—and as a zealous, bullying supporter of "progressive" political causes—Ira marries Hollywood's beloved silent-film star, Eve Frame. Their glamorous honeymoon in her Manhattan townhouse is shortlived, however, and it is the publication of Eve's scandalous bestselling exposé that identifies him as "an American taking his orders from Moscow."
In this story of cruelty, betrayal, and revenge spilling over into the public arena from their origins in Ira's turbulent personal life, Philip Roth—who Commonweal calls the "master chronicler of the American twentieth century—has written a brilliant fictional protrayal of that treacherous postwar epoch when the anti-Communist fever not only infected national politics but traumatized the intimate, innermost lives of friends and families, husbands and wives, parents and children.
its full skirt puffed out with petticoats and cinched by a full sash tied at the back in a bow. Sylphid at forty-two pounds and six years of age, in white anklets and black Mary Janes. Sylphid not as Pennington's child or even Eve's but as God's. The picture achieving what Eve intended at the outset with the misty daydream of a name: the deprofanation of Sylphid, the etherealization from solid to air. Sylphid as saint, perfectly innocent of all the vices and taking up no room in this world
Ira said. "I didn't know one political philosophy or one social philosophy from another. But this guy talked a lot to me," he said. "He talked about the workingman. About things in general in the United States. The harm our government was doing to the workers. And he backed up what he said with facts. And a nonconformist? O'Day was so nonconformist that everything he did he did not do by the book. Yeah, O'Day did a lot for me, I know that." Like Ira, O'Day was unmarried. "Entangling alliances,"
provider, a protector, and I was now running off with another man. It is, morally as well as emotionally, a more dangerous game than one knows at the time, getting all those extra fathers like a pretty girl gets beaux. But that was what I was doing. Always making myself eminently adoptable, I discovered the sense of betrayal that comes of trying to find a surrogate father even though you love your own. It isn't that I ever denounced my father to Ira or anyone else for a cheap advantage—it was
he get it?" "She was true to her word. She sent him one, all right, by return mail. But because I wasn't going to allow my brother to further distort people's idea of what his life had meant, I took it from him and destroyed it. Stupid. Sentimental, priggish, stupid, and not very farsighted of me, either. Circulating the picture would have been benevolent compared to what happened." "He wanted to disgrace Eve with the picture." "Look, once upon a time all Ira thought about was how to alleviate
speech of the incognito), sometimes maniacal, sometimes matter-of-fact, and sometimes like the sharp prick of a needle, and I have been hearing it for as long as I can remember: how to think, how not to think; how to behave, how not to behave; whom to loathe and whom to admire; what to embrace and when to escape; what is rapturous, what is murderous, what is laudable, what is shallow, what is sinister, what is shit, and how to remain pure in soul. Talking to me doesn't seem to present an obstacle