The Romanticizing of American Communism

...her voice growing honey-rich, whiskey-rich"—says: "They were great years, the best of my life, they gave me meaning and focus, and nothing like that is ever gonna come my way again...

...Where did Gornick get this figure...

...The first attempt in the genre, Report on the American Communist, by Morris L. Ernst and David Loth, came out in 1952...

...A fair example is a passage stating that the Communist party "ever embodied the need within the human spirit to say no to the judgment of man upon man that is the pol-iticalness of life...

...Even when 1 made all possible allowances, 1 ended up with no more than half of Gornick's figure...

...Reviewed by Theodore Draper Author, "The Roots of American Communism," "American Communism and Soviet Russia" This book is based on an ostensibly good idea—to study the American Communist movement through the testimony of ex-Communists—that has had two previous incarnations...

...By making the former represent an esoteric or internal version, and the latter an exoteric or external version of the Communist ideology and propaganda, he came to the remarkable conclusion that "a person who has simply assimilated the pattern of political action represented in the American Daily Worker has no conception whatever of what the Communist movement really is...

...classically chic with only an accessoried touch of current fashion"—has this to say: "The Party people were the brightest, the most serious, the most moral people I knew and yes, they made me bright, serious, and moral...

...Then it occurred to her, she relates, that "it was the memory of the Communists beginning to work half-con-sciously in me that was giving me such a detailed vision of the horrors of dogma...

...Those years in the Party, they made me a human being," says one...

...Another discusses the question of how to make life larger, richer, something to place oneself in: "Well, in my adult life, nothing has spoken to that problem as much as the Communist party ever did...

...if fervor is the sole quality held that matters, there need be little distinction between the two...

...The comparison is wildly wrong...

...the "horrors of dogma" have little to do with most of The Romance of American Communism...

...It operated on the basis of questionnaires given to a sample of 64 American "cases" (as well as some British, French and Italian ones), but the actual numbers of meaningful answers were far fewer, as 1 had reason to know at the time...

...Similarly, the reader is blithely assured that "more than a million Americans were Communists at one time or another during these forty years" of what she calls the party's "affective life...

...In fact, like Gornick's title, the opening chapter and the bulk of her interviews convey the message that the horrors were not very horrible...

...In any case, those who want to find out what life in the Communist movement was like, in any knowledgeable detail and concreteness, will be disappointed by this book...

...It would also have been helpful if Gornick had been a little better equipped for her task factually...

...An ardent feminist, she was increasingly repelled by the movement's rhetoric and dogmatism...

...Almond invented the distinction between "esoteric and exoteric communication" in the Communist movement through a comparison between the language used in an international Communist periodical and the American Daily Worker...

...1 once tried to calculate the number of people who had ever joined the Communist party on the basis of its own records and never came up with more than 350,000...

...While she is troubled by the inexorable tendency of the "brilliantly humanizing" vision to become a "soul-destroying" dogma, she does not tell us how it could have been so good in the first place...

...She refers at least five times to Alexander Meikle-john, the head of the Experimental College at the University of Wisconsin, as "Micklejohn...

...His book once endeared itself to me for this sort of magisterial nonsense...

...In one respect, however, she did not change...

...In 1968, her political interest was reawakened when the women's liberation movement led her to see Communism in a new light...

...As a result, she has eonfected one more product of the how-did-you-feel school of journalism...

...next, Jews and Gentiles...

...Yet I can testify that she ludicrously failed to understand him...

...Not surprisingly, most of Gornick's ex-Communists give her what her thesis demands...

...Since Gornick's ex-Communists generally look back at their years in the party as the best and brightest in their lives, the stories of their disillusionment, typically set off by the Khrushchev revelations, never carry as much conviction as their testimonials to the "wonderful" life in the movement...

...The initial chapter is about herself and the four other chapters present over 40 ex-Communists talking about themselves, bul ultimately the reader learns far more about the interviewer than about the interviewed...

...No conception whatever...

...Whatever the reason, her misunderstanding of him and his attitude toward Communism makes me skeptical of her political judgment...

...More often, though, they keep telling how much better it was in the party than it could ever be outside...

...She wants to see both sides of that passion—in her words, the "compellingly humanizing" and the "compellingly dehumanizing"—but it is the first that preoccupies her...

...He happens to have been one of my oldest friends and a former comrade...

...She gives us what may be called the Village Voice version, as befits a regular contributor to that high-minded journal of low life...

...Her point of view, as the title suggests, is different from Ernst and Loth's FBI-formula anti-Communism and from Almond's academic pretensions...

...A second woman—this one "cheerful, boozy, overweight, her eyes a rich, startling blue...

...But she is a selective passion-lover...

...Evidently Gornick does not know the difference between German and Yiddish...

...Gornick largely celebrates the temptation and seduction because they produced what she considers to be of overriding importance—passion...

...History is full of fanatical, doctrinaire, all-consuming movements that were able to exploit the emotional need of a sometimes frighteningly large number of people for passionate belief...

...The second attempt was Professor Gabriel A. Almond's The Appeals of Communism, published two years later...

...She became a young Communist at the age of 15, left the movement five years later, and for the next 13 years had nothing to do with politics...

...Gornick tells us she was born in 1935 to a New York Jewish family of fellow travelers for whom the Communist party was "the indisputable center of the progressive world...

...And nothing, I don't think, ever will...

...She confides that her universe always had to be made up of friends and enemies, "us" and "them": first, her parents' "working-class socialists" (by which she squeamishly means Communists and fellow travelers) and all those outside this pale...

...And I think it's true of most of us...

...That it says no to "the politi-calness of life...

...That the Communist party says "no to the judgment of man upon man...

...It enjoyed a good deal of influence, possibly because it was filled with numerical tables and charts that made it seem to conform to the latest political science model of research and generalization...

...In her denunciation of this type, she lumps Lionel Trilling and Richard Crossman, who were never Communists, with Arthur Koestler, who was one...

...Only the latter gets her seal of approval...

...Even the dogma, which she professes to reject, comes in for apology on the ground that it is no different from "what all our lives are all about" and merits "compassionate recognition rather than scornful, alienated anger...

...Nothing else ever did, nothing else ever could...

...The most disillusioning gaffe, however, is linguistic...

...Some of her slips do not inspire confidence in her mastery of the subject...

...Now Vivian Gornick has made a third try with ex-Communists...

...What can this mean...

...if it were true, the Italian and French parties would not now be knocking on the gates of power...

...1 am sorry that I cannot be as respectful of her romanticization of American Communism...

...Her questions, as she tells us, turned on "the emotional meaning of the political experience," not the political experience itself...

...Passion in politics is a notoriously dangerous value when it is cherished for its own sake...

...Its form was very much like that of The Romance of American Communism—interviews with ex-Communists (Report's were said to total nearly 300), interspersed with the authors' own comments and reflections...

...It was, on the whole, a shoddy piece of work that was never taken very seriously...

...In this roundabout way, she set out to rediscover American Communism...

...Yet this passion for "passion" deserves a little more thought than the author seems to have at her command...

...She has changed his name and some minor details, but his identity is unmistakable...

...The explanation, offered at the end of the book, must have been written as an afterthought...

...Occasionally, one of her subjects complains about "those endless, fucking meetings" or about the absurdity of going underground in the early 1950s...

...Nostalgic ex-Communists are Gornick's favorites...

...The one kind that sends her into a temper tantrum she calls the "anti-Communist Communist" (and would call the "anti-Communist ex-Communist" if she were more careful with her language...

...The prose that carries this farrago is sometimes mind-destroying, if not soul-destroying...

...more recently, women and men...

...Perhaps this was inevitable, given a single encounter with someone who was then a dying man...

...One-shot interviews in a delicate area years after the event may, as in this case, result in absurd misjudgments and hurtful misrepresentations...

...She has an old-time Communist talking about the Communist Party Association, instead of the short-lived Communist Political Association...

...Hitler's words, voice and gestures were once believed in passionately by more people than we like to admit...

...After impressing the reader with her Jewish background, she has her old grandmother exclaiming "Wir sind hier frei...

...Elsewhere she tries to tell us about deities of her parents' kitchen: "Marx was their Socrates, the Party was their Plato, world socialism their Athens...

...Vivian Gornick cites my own work in this field twice, respectfully...

...The International Labor Defense comes out as the "International Defense League," the Unemployed Councils as the "Unemployment Councils...

...The main reason is that the author was interested in something else...

...And anyone for whom Communism was a "passionate ideal" get her absolution and admiration...

...These propositions are so absurd that Gornick must have wanted to say something else, although 1 cannot guess what it might be...

...A woman—described in Gornick's frequently slick-magazine style as "strikingly attractive," possessing an "air of expensive glamor...

...She starts out by attempting to get across the idea that Communism gives life a purpose and a vision that can never be recaptured outside the movement...

...Indeed, the book eulogizes "passion" rather than "romance," which appears only in the title...

...The ex-Communist in her collection who gets the most savage treatment is supposed to be the model of the species...

...Anyone capable of putting together Marx, who knew all the answers, and Socrates, who knew only questions, or of coupling the Communist party with Plato, clearly requires, among other things, a more critical and demanding editor...

...She claims that there were 3,000 Communists among the 250,000 people living in New York's Lower East Side, or about one out of 80, and imagines that this proportion is "roughly comparable to the Italian or French Communist parties today...

...Moreover, the anti-Communism that makes Gornick rise up in protest may, after all, be as passionately held as anyone's Communism...

...Visions that end in spiritual destruction, as we in this century well know, are most dangerous when they are most tempting and seductive...

...Not having been present at the interview, I have no way of knowing how accurate her account is...