Read Online I Married a Communist by Philip Roth - Free Book Online Page B

tough-talking guys truncated from their politics, as he explained it to me, in order to make their anger permissible: "the proletariat Americanized for the radio by cutting off their balls and their brains." It was all this work that propelled him, within months, onto Sokolow's prestigious weekly hour-long show,
The Free and the Brave,
as a leading player.
    Out in the Midwest, there had begun to be physical difficulties for Ira to cope with, and these, too, furnished a motive for him to try his luck back east in a new line of work. He was plagued by muscle pain, soreness so bad that several times a week—when he didn't have to just endure the pain and go off to play Lincoln or do his missionary work—he'd head right home, soak for half an hour in a tub of steaming water down the hall from his room, and then get into bed with a book, his dictionary, his notepad, and whatever was around to eat. A couple of bad beatings he'd taken in the army seemed to him the cause of this problem. From the worst of the beatings—he'd been pounced on by a gang from the port who had him down for a "nigger lover"—he'd wound up in the hospital for three days.
    They'd begun baiting him when he started to pal around with a couple of Negro soldiers from the segregated unit stationed at the riverfront three miles away. O'Day was by then running a group that met at the Quonset hut library and under his tutelage discussed politics and books. Barely anybody on the base paid attention to the library or to the nine or ten GIs who drifted over there after chow a couple of nights a week to talk about
Looking Back
ward
by Bellamy or
The Republic
by Plato or
The Prince
by Machiavelli, until the two Negroes from the segregated unit joined the group.
    At first Ira tried to reason with the men in his outfit who called him nigger lover. "Why do you make derogatory remarks about colored people? All I hear from you guys about the Negro is derogatory remarks. And you aren't only anti-Negro. You're anti-labor, you're anti-liberal, and you're anti-brains. You're anti every goddamn thing that's in your interest. How can people give their three or four years to the army, see friends die, get wounded, have their lives disrupted, and yet not know why it happened and what it's all about? All you know is that Hitler started something. All you know is that the draft board got you. You know what I say? You guys would duplicate the very actions of the Germans if you were in their place. It might take a little longer because of the democratic element in our society, but eventually we would be completely fascist, dictator and all, because of people spouting the shit you guys spout. The discrimination of the top officers who run this port is bad enough, but
you
people, from poor families, guys without two nickels to rub together, guys who are nothing but fodder for the assembly line, for the sweatshop, for the coal mines, who the system
pisses
on—low wages, high prices, astronomical profits—and you turn out to be a bunch of vociferous, bigoted Red-baiting bastards who don't know..." Then he'd tell them all they didn't know.
    Heated discussions that changed nothing, that, because of his temper, Ira admitted, made things only worse. "I would lose a good deal of what I wanted to impress them with because in the beginning I was too emotional. Later I learned how to cool down with these kind of people, and I believe that I impressed a few of them with some facts. But it is very difficult to talk to such men because of the deeply ingrained ideas they have. To explain to them the psychological reasons for segregation, the economic reasons for segregation, the psychological reasons for the use of their beloved word nigger'—they are beyond grasping such things. They say nigger because a nigger
is
a nigger—I'd explain and explain to them, and that's what they'd answer me. I pounded home about education of children and our personal responsibility, and