It is not very often that something stirs a deep emotion in me.  That creates a churning within, so much so, that your eyes well up.  When I read ‘’ I Married a Communist’’, I underwent the same emotions and some more.  Besides examining one of the most paranoid period in American history, when almost every member of any society was being scrutinized for his or her suspected involvement with the communist party, through our narrator and Rothian alter ego Nathan Zuckerman’s reminiscences, we also chart the topography of human desire and the sheer folly of it.

When, after many years, Mr. Murray Ringold, who was Nathan’s high school teacher of English literature, tells him about the tragic unmaking of his kid brother Ira Ringold, with whom Nathan shared a very special relationship when he was one of Mr. Murray Ringold’s pupil in school.  At some point our narrator lost touch with Ira and moved on in life and is now himself over sixty years old writer, living a reclusive life in rural New England.  What Ira meant to Nathan, but more importantly, what Nathan meant to Ira, has been dealt with most poignantly.  Both Ira and our narrator could not be more dissimilar beside their significant age difference.  Ira was this giant of a man who, with the help of his older brother Murray, literally raised himself from the gutter to become this famous radio star.  To say that Ira had a harsh upbringing, would be a gross understatement.  As Mr. Ringold relates to Nathan that he himself found the civilising path in life and became a teacher, it was never clear to him what Ira, this giant sized brother of his was running away from or running after.  He would try to find solace in Communist ideology, and then he married one of the biggest movie stars, if for nothing else, than just to inhabit a world as far removed from his own as could possibly be.  And then the annihilation began.  An annihilation that was so spectacular and grand in its scope that the mind reels.

But let me not digress.  The purpose here is not to delve deeply into the plot of the book, but to examine why I felt the way I did.  When I see in my mind’s eye the two old men sitting there on the patio in the deck chair, one in his sixties and the other in his nineties, who in another life were pupil and teacher respectively.  As old Mr. Ringold sits there night after night, six nights in a row and only because he knows that he will find a patient listener in his favourite pupil, who shared something subliminal with Ira.  As I see in my mind’s eye, the old age has done its job on Mr. Ringold good and proper.  It has pruned away at his vitality.  The thing about the old age is that you can bludgeoned by life into submission.  You have been exorcising the ghost for so long that you don’t know what it is like not to be surrounded by the shadows all the time.  This conversation between two lonely people makes you realise a few fundamental truths about human beings.

You will betray and be betrayed.  Betrayal is not static, but is in constant motion.  Just when you thought that you have controlled it in one place, it leaks out of another place.  We are a betrayal factory.  You can deal with the cynic and con artist, but a hypocrite is a dangerous liar for he doesn’t even know when he is lying and betraying.  You have got rid of every illusion, God, ideology, politics, but the one thing that will finally get you is your own idealism and unhinge you.  As Nathan Zuckerman reflects on these in the middle of night long after Mr. Ringold is dead and gone, long after everybody is dead and gone.  I tend to think there is no such thing as happily ever after and you will be punished no matter what.