I Married a Communist (31 page)

"What about you?" I asked him. "What about
The Free and the Brave?
"

"We've got a lot of progressive-thinking people on our show, sure. And the way they're going to be described to the public now is as actors 'who cunningly sell the Moscow line.' You're going to hear a lot of that—a lot worse than that. 'The dupes of Moscow.'"

"Just the actors?"

"And the director. And the composer. And the writer. Everyone."

"You worried?"

"I can go back to the record factory, buddy. If worse comes to worst, I can always come up here and grease cars at Steve's garage. I've done it before. Besides, you can fight them, you know. You can fight the bastards. Last I heard there was a Constitution in this country, a Bill of Rights
somewhere.
If you look with your big eyes into the capitalist shop window, if you want and you want, if you grab and you grab, if you take and you take, if you acquire and you own and you accumulate, then that is the end of your convictions and the beginning of your fear. But there is nothing that I have that I can't give up. Y'understand? Nothing! How I ever got from my miserable father's shit-eaten house on Factory Street to being this big character Iron Rinn, how Ira Ringold, with one and a half years of high school behind him, got to meeting the people I meet and knowing the people I know and having the comforts I have as a card-carrying member of the comfortable bourgeoisie—that is all so unbelievable that losing everything overnight would not seem so strange to me. Y'understand? Y'understand me? I can go back to Chicago. I can work in the mills. If I have to, I will. But not without standing on my rights as an American! Not without giving the bastards a fight!"

When I was alone and on the train heading back to Newark—Ira had waited at the station in the Chevy to pick up Mrs. Pärn, who, on the day I left, was traveling all the way from New York again to work on those knees of his, aching terribly after our football game of the previous day—I even began to wonder how Eve Frame could stand him, day in and day out. Being married to Ira and his anger couldn't have been much fun. I remembered hearing him deliver virtually the same speech about the capitalist shop window, about his father's miserable house, about his one and a half years of high school, on that afternoon the year before in Erwin Goldstine's kitchen. I remembered variants of that speech being delivered by Ira ten, fifteen times. How could Eve take the sheer repetition, the redundancy of that rhetoric and the attitude of the attacker, the relentless beating from the blunt instrument that was Ira's stump speech?

On that train back to Newark, as I thought of Ira blasting away with his twin apocalyptic prophecies—"The United States of America is about to make atomic war on the Soviet Union! Mark my words! The United States of America is on the road to fascism!"—I didn't know enough to understand why suddenly, so disloyally, when he and people like Artie Sokolow were being most intimidated and threatened, I was so savagely bored by him, why I felt myself to be so much smarter than he. Ready and eager to turn away from him and the irritating, oppressive side of him and to find my inspiration far from Pickax Hill Road.

If you're orphaned as early as Ira was, you fall into the situation that all men must fall into but much, much sooner, which is tricky, because you may either get no education at all or be oversusceptible to enthusiasms and beliefs and ripe for indoctrination. Ira's youthful years were a series of broken connections: a cruel family, frustration in school, headlong immersion in the Depression—an early orphaning that captured the imagination of a boy like me, himself so fixed in a family and a place and its institutions, a boy only just emerging from the emotional incubator; an early orphaning that freed Ira to connect to whatever he wanted but also left him unmoored enough to give himself to something almost right off the bat, to give himself totally and forever. For all the reasons you can think of, Ira was an easy mark for the Utopian vision. But for me, who was moored, it was different. If you're
not
orphaned early, if instead you're related intensely to parents for thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years, you grow a prick, lose your innocence, seek your independence, and, if it's not a screwed-up family, are let go, ready to begin to be a man, ready, that is, to choose new allegiances and affiliations, the parents of your adulthood, the chosen parents whom, because you are not asked to acknowledge them with love, you either love or don't, as suits you.

How are they chosen? Through a series of accidents and through lots of will. How do they get to you, and how do you get to them? Who are they? What is it, this genealogy that isn't genetic? In my case they were men to whom I apprenticed myself, from Paine and Fast and Corwin to Murray and Ira and beyond—the men who schooled me, the men I came from. All were remarkable to me in their own way, personalities to contend with, mentors who embodied or espoused powerful ideas and who first taught me to navigate the world and its claims, the adopted parents who also, each in his turn, had to be cast off along with their legacy, had to disappear, thus making way for the orphanhood that is total, which is manhood. When you're out there in this thing all alone.

Leo Glucksman was also an ex-GI, but he had served
after
the war and was now only into his mid-twenties, rosy-cheeked and a little round and looking no older than his first- and second-year college students. Though Leo was still completing his dissertation for a literature Ph.D. at the university, he appeared before us at every session of the class in a three-piece black suit and a crimson bow tie, more formally attired by far than any of the older faculty members. When the weather turned cold he could be seen crossing the quadrangle draped in a black cape that, even on a campus as untypically tolerant of idiosyncrasy and eccentricity—and as understanding of originality and its oddity—as the University of Chicago's was in those days, titillated students whose bright (and amused) "Hi, Professor" Leo would acknowledge by sharply whacking the pavement with the metal tip of the cane he sported. After taking a hasty look late one afternoon at
The Stooge of Torquemada
—which, to kindle Mr. Glucksman's admiration, I'd thought to bring to him, along with the assigned essay on Aristotle's
Poetics—Leo
startled me by dropping it with disgust onto his desk.

His speech was rapid, his tone fierce and unforgiving—no sign in that delivery of the foppishly overdressed boy genius plumply perched back of his bow tie on his cushioned seat. His plumpness and his personality exemplified two very different people. The clothes registered a third person. And his polemic a fourth—not a mannerist but a real adult critic exposing to me the dangers of the tutelage I'd been under with Ira, teaching me to assume a position less rigid in confronting literature. Precisely what I was ready for in my new recruitment phase. Under Leo's guidance I began to be transformed into the descendant not just of my family but of the past, heir to a culture even grander than my neighborhood's.

"Art as a
weapon?
' he said to me, the word "weapon" rich with contempt and itself a weapon. "Art as taking the right
stand
on everything? Art as the advocate of good things? Who taught you all this? Who taught you art is slogans? Who taught you art is in the service of
'the people'?
Art is in the service of
art
—otherwise there is no art worthy of
anyone's
attention. What
is
the motive for writing serious literature, Mr. Zuckerman? To disarm the enemies of price control? The motive for writing serious literature is
to write serious literature.
You want to rebel against society? I'll tell you how to do it—write
well.
You want to embrace a lost cause? Then don't fight in behalf of the laboring class. They're going to make out fine. They're going to fill up on Plymouths to their heart's content. The workingman will conquer us all—out of his mindlessness will flow the slop that is this philistine country's cultural destiny. We'll soon have something in this country far worse than the government of the peasants and the workers—we will have the
culture
of the peasants and the workers. You want a lost cause to fight for? Then fight for the
word.
Not the high-flown word, not the inspiring word, not the pro-this and anti-that word, not the word that advertises to the respectable that you are a wonderful, admirable, compassionate person on the side of the downtrodden and the oppressed. No, for the word that tells the literate few condemned to live in America that you are on the
side
of the word! This play of yours is crap. It's awful. It's infuriating. It is crude, primitive, simple-minded, propagandistic crap. It
blurs
the world with words. And it reeks to high heaven of your virtue. Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than an artist's desire to prove that he's
good.
The terrible temptation of idealism! You must achieve
mastery
over your idealism, over your virtue as well as over your vice, aesthetic mastery over everything that drives you to write in the first place—your outrage, your politics, your grief, your love! Start preaching and taking positions, start seeing your own perspective as superior, and you're worthless as an artist, worthless and ludicrous. Why do you write these proclamations? Because you look around and you're 'shocked'? Because you look around and you're 'moved'? People give up too easily and fake their feelings. They want to have feelings right away, and so 'shocked' and 'moved' are the easiest. The stupidest. Except for the rare case, Mr. Zuckerman,
shock is always fake.
Proclamations. Art has no
use
for proclamations! Get your lovable shit out of this office, please."

Leo thought better of my Aristotle essay (or, generally, of me), for at my next conference he startled me—no less than he had with his vehemence about my play—by ordering my presence at Orchestra Hall to hear Raphael Kubelik lead the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Beethoven on Friday night. "Have you ever heard of Raphael Kubelik?" "No." "Beethoven?" "I've heard of him, yes." I said. "Have you ever
heard
him?" "No."

I met Leo on Michigan Avenue, outside Orchestra Hall, half an hour before the performance, my teacher in the cape he'd had made in Rome before being mustered out of the army in '48 and I in the hooded mackinaw bought at Larkey's in Newark to take to college in the icy Middle West. Once we were seated, Leo removed from his briefcase the score for each of the symphonies we were to hear and, throughout the concert, looked not at the orchestra on the stage—which you were supposed to look at, I thought, only occasionally closing your eyes when you were carried away—but rather into his lap, where, with his considerable concentration, he read along in the score while the musicians played first the
Coriolan
Overture and the Fourth Symphony, and after the intermission, the Fifth. Except for the first four notes of the Fifth, I couldn't distinguish one piece from the others.

Following the concert, we took the train back to the South Side and went to his room at International House, a Gothic residence hall on the Midway that was home to most of the university's foreign students. Leo Glucksman, himself the son of a West Side grocer, was slightly better prepared to tolerate their proximity on his hallway—exotic cooking smells and all—than he was that of his fellow Americans. The room he lived in was tinier even than his office cubicle at the college, and he made tea for us by boiling water in a kettle set on a hot plate resting on the floor and squeezed in among the clutter of printed matter piled along the walls. Leo sat at his book-laden desk, his round cheeks lit up by his gooseneck lamp, and I sat in the dark, amid more piles of his books, on the edge of the narrow unmade bed only two feet away.

I felt like a girl, or what I imagined a girl felt like when she wound up alone with an intimidating boy who too obviously liked her breasts. Leo snorted to see me turn timorous, and with that same disgusted sneer with which he had undertaken to demolish my career in radio, he said, "Don't worry, I'm not going to touch you. I just cannot bear that you should be so fucking conventional." And then and there he proceeded to initiate an introduction to Soren Kierkegaard. He wanted me to listen to him read what Kierkegaard, whose name meant no more to me than Raphael Kubelik's, had already surmised in backwater Copenhagen a hundred years ago about "the people"—whom Kierkegaard called "the public," the correct name, Leo informed me, for that abstraction, that "monstrous abstraction," that "all-embracing something which is nothing," that "monstrous nothing," as Kierkegaard wrote, that "abstract and deserted void which is everything and nothing" and which I mawkishly sentimentalized in my script. Kierkegaard hated the public, Leo hated the public, and Leo's purpose in his darkened International House room after that Friday night's concert and the concerts he took me to on the Fridays following was to save my prose from perdition by getting me to hate the public too.

'"Everyone who has read the classical authors,'" read Leo, '"knows how many things a Caesar could try out in order to kill time. In the same way the public keeps a dog to amuse it. That dog is the scum of the literary world. If there is someone superior to the rest, perhaps even a great man, the dog is set on him and the fun begins. The dog goes for him, snapping and tearing at his coat-tails, allowing itself every possible ill-mannered familiarity—until the public tires, and says it may stop. That is my example of how the public levels. Their betters and superiors in strength are mishandled—and the dog remains a dog which even the public despises.... The public is unrepentant—it was not really belittling anyone; it just wanted a little amusement.'"

This passage, which meant far more to Leo than it could begin to mean to me, was nonetheless Leo Glucksman's invitation to join him in being "someone superior to the rest," in being, like the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard—and like himself, as he could one day soon envision himself—"a great man." I became Leo's willing student and, through his intercession, Aristotle's willing student, Kierkegaard's willing student, Benedetto Croce's willing student, Thomas Mann's willing student, André Gide's willing student, Joseph Conrad's willing student, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's willing student ... until soon my attachment to Ira—as to my mother, my father, my brother, even to the place where I'd grown up—was, I believed, thoroughly sundered. When someone is first being educated and his head is becoming transformed into an arsenal armed with books, when he is young and impudent and leaping with joy to discover all the intelligence tucked away on this planet, he is apt to exaggerate the importance of the churning new reality and to deprecate as unimportant everything else. Aided and abetted by the uncompromising Leo Glucksman—by his bile and manias as much as by that perpetually charged-up brain—this is what I did, with all my strength.