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to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man.
    Both quotations from Paine that Iron Rinn had recited—employing his
The Free and the Brave
people-bound, in-the-rough voice—were among the dozen or so that I had myself written down and memorized.
    "You like that line," Mr. Ringold said to me.
    "Yes. I like 'a whore of my soul.'"
    "Why?" he asked me.
    I was beginning to perspire profusely from the sun on my face, from the excitement of meeting Iron Rinn, and now from being on the spot, having to answer Mr. Ringold as though I were in class while I was sitting between two shirtless brothers well over six feet tall, two big, natural men exuding the sort of forceful, intelligent manliness to which I aspired. Men who could talk about baseball and boxing talking about books. And talking about books as though something were at stake in a book. Not opening up a book to worship it or to be elevated by it or to lose yourself to the world around you. No,
boxing
with the book.
    "Because," I said, "you don't ordinarily think of your soul as a whore."
    "What's he
mean,
'a whore of my soul'?"
    "Selling it," I replied. "Selling his soul."
    "Right. Do you see how much stronger it is to write 'I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a
whore
of my soul' rather than 'were I to
sell
my soul'?"
    "Yes, I do."
    "Why is that stronger?"
    "Because in 'whore' he personifies it."
    "Yeah—what else?"
    "Well, the word 'whore'...it's not a conventional word, you don't hear it in public. People don't go around writing 'whore' or, in public, saying 'whore.'"
    "Why don't they?"
    "Shame. Embarrassment. Propriety."
    "Propriety Good. Right. So this is audacious, then."
    "Yes."
    "And
that's
what you like about Paine, isn't it? His audacity?"
    "I think so. Yes."
    "And now you know
why
you like what you like. You're way ahead of the game, Nathan. And you know it because you looked at one word he used, just one word, and you thought about that word he used, and you asked yourself some questions about that word he used, until you saw right through that word, saw through it as through a magnifying glass, to one of the sources of this great writer's power. He is audacious. Thomas Paine is audacious. But is that enough? That is only a part of the formula. Audacity must have a purpose, otherwise it's cheap and facile and vulgar. Why is Thomas Paine audacious?"
    "In behalf," I said, "of his convictions."
    "Hey, that's my boy," Iron Rinn suddenly announced. "That's my boy who booed Mr. Douglas!"

    So it was that I wound up five nights later as Iron Rinn's backstage guest at a rally held in downtown Newark, at the Mosque, the city's biggest theater, for Henry Wallace, the presidential candidate of the newly formed Progressive Party. Wallace had been in Roosevelt's cabinet as secretary of agriculture for seven years before becoming his vice president during Roosevelt's third term. In '44 he'd been dropped from the ticket and replaced by Truman, in whose cabinet he served briefly as secretary of commerce. In '46, the president fired Wallace for sounding off in favor of cooperation with Stalin and friendship with the Soviet Union at just the point when the Soviet Union had begun to be perceived by Truman and the Democrats not only as an ideological enemy but as a serious threat to peace whose expansion into Europe and elsewhere had to be contained by the West.
    This division within the Democratic Party—between the anti-Soviet majority led by the president and the "progressive" Soviet sympathizers led by Wallace and opposed to the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan—was reflected in the split within my own household between father and son. My father, who had admired Wallace when he was FDR's protégé, was against the Wallace candidacy for the reason Americans traditionally choose not to support third-party candidates—in this case, because it