I Married a Communist by Philip Roth

It may add up to jerkiness, but it will be much more readable. Four: Avoid clichés. Even if you have to drag it in by the tail, express something you've read or heard quoted in other than the original words. One of your sentences from the other night at the library session in point of demonstration: 'I stated briefly some of the ills of the present regime...' You've read that, Iron Man, and it isn't yours; it's somebody else's. It sounds as if it came out of a can. Suppose you expressed the same idea something like this: 'I build my argument about the effect of landed proprietorship and the dominance of foreign capital on what I have witnessed here in Iran.'"
    There were twenty points in all, and the reason Ira showed them to me was to assist with
my
writing—not with my high school radio plays but with my journal, intended to be "political" where I was beginning to put down my "thoughts" when I remembered to. I'd begun keeping my journal in imitation of Ira, who'd begun keeping his in imitation of Johnny O'Day. The three of us used the same brand of notebook: a dime pad from Woolworth's, fifty-two lined pages about four inches by three inches, stitched at the top and bound between mottled brown cardboard covers.
    When an O'Day letter mentioned a book, any book, Ira got a copy and so did I; I'd go right to the library and take it out. "I've been reading Bower's
Young Jefferson
recently," O'Day wrote, "along with other treatments of early American history, and the Committees of Correspondence in that period were the principal agency by which the revolutionary-minded colonists developed their understanding and coordinated their plans." That's how I came to read
Young Jefferson
while in high school. O'Day wrote, "A couple of weeks ago I bought the twelfth edition of
Bartlett's Quotations,
allegedly for my reference library, actually for the enjoyment I get from browsing," and so I went downtown to the main library, to sit among the reference books browsing in
Bartlett
the way I imagined O'Day did, my journal beside me, skimming each page for the wisdom that would expedite my maturing and make me somebody to reckon with. "I buy the
Cominform
(official organ published in Bucharest) regularly," O'Day wrote, but the
Cominform
—abbreviated name of the Communist Information Bureau—I knew I wouldn't find in any local library, and prudence cautioned me not to go looking.
    My radio plays were in dialogue and susceptible less to O'Day's Concrete Suggestions than to conversations Ira had with O'Day that he repeated to me, or, rather, acted out word for word, as though he and O'Day were together there before my eyes. The radio plays were colored, too, by the workingman's argot that continued to crop up in Ira's speech long after he'd come to New York and become a radio actor, and their convictions were strongly influenced by those long letters O'Day was writing to Ira, which Ira often read aloud at my request.
    My subject was the lot of the common man, the ordinary Joe—the man that the radio writer Norman Corwin had lauded as "the little guy" in
On a Note of Triumph,
a sixty-minute play that was transmitted over CBS radio the evening the war ended in Europe (and then again, at popular request, eight days later) and that buoyantly entangled me in those Salvationist literary aspirations that endeavor to redress the world's wrongs through writing. I wouldn't care to judge today if something I loved as much as I loved
On a Note of Triumph
was or was not art; it provided me with my first sense of the conjuring
power
of art and helped strengthen my first ideas as to what I wanted and expected a literary artist's language to do: enshrine the struggles of the embattled. (And taught me, contrary to what my teachers insisted, that I could begin a sentence with "And.")
    The form of the Corwin play was loose, plotless—"experimental," I informed my chiropodist father and homemaking mother. It was written in the high colloquial,