‘Purity is Petrefaction’: Liberalism and Betrayal in Philip Roth's I Married A Communist

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between fiction and the post-war intellectual history of American liberalism. The theme of betrayal which operates at a number of levels, both political and personal, in Philip Roth's I Married A Communist is shown to convey the ways in which Cold War liberalism first began to define itself against the liberal ethos articulated by Henry Wallace in the 1948 presidential election. In particular the various paternal relationships—both literal and figurative—established and abandoned by Nathan Zuckerman, the novel's narrator, are perceived as the central means by which the relations between liberal ideology and betrayal are negotiated. Finally, the place of this work of fiction within Roth's trilogy of political novels (including American Pastoral (1997) and The Human Stain (2000)) is considered with reference to the emergence of various neo-conservative themes and motifs towards the close of I Married A Communist. More specifically, attention is drawn to the way in which the outlines of a ‘chastened’ liberalism emerge in response to the events depicted in the novel—events that portray the damage inflicted upon a democratic liberal ethos by various political forces, both radical and conservative, preoccupied with the idea of purity.

Keywords:

• Hutchison
• Roth
• I Married a Communist
• Literature
• Fiction
• History

Notes

The decision by Strom Thurmond to challenge Truman on behalf of ‘Dixiecrats’ dismayed by the President's support for civil rights legislation was also, of course, significant for liberalism but it is the emergence of a new ‘Cold War’ liberalism (against which Wallace's campaign was effectively a last stand) that I am interested in here.

Zuckerman appears in Roth's novel The Counterlife and the works anthologized in Zuckerman Unbound as well as in each novel of the more recent trilogy.

Despite Kristol's acknowledgement that he made the remark some time in the 1970s its provenance remains uncertain.