An Open Letter to Michael Straight: The Communist Who Wasn't
TYLER, GUS
Perspectives A LETTER TO MICHAEL STRAIGHT: THE COMMUNIST WHO WASN'T BY GUS TYLER Dear Mike: I devoured your autobiography, After Long Silence (Norton, 351 pp. $17.50), in three great gulps. Then,...
...Although I refer to your book as an "autobiography," I think you will agree it is less that than an apologia pro vitamea...
...Probably the first thing you would want to know is whether you convinced me that you were not a "spy," as the media on an international scale has stated you were...
...There you were denouncing witchhunts while you yourself were riding a broomstick...
...You couldn't be a Communist for both intellectual and emotional reasons...
...Bill Rusher, publisher of the National Review, was one of the mystified when I told him, as we were waiting for the shuttle plane from Washington to New York, that he ought to read your book (several times), and that he would discover you were never a Communist...
...again as history, a piece of our political period...
...I suggested to Bill that there are millions of people who belong to an organization, who pay dues, but who nevertheless do not personify the cause the organization espouses...
...Your economics was Keynesian...
...You were just 17, too, and innocent as 17 days...
...Your head reeled with too many doubts to walk a straight party line...
...The religion you sought was "the sense of communion that transforms those who are bound together by a shared experience...
...Your words...
...But religion, as you know, can do without God...
...I mean "religion" in its etymological sense—drawn from ligere (to tie) and re (back)—where it is the bond between human and human and, if you are so inclined, between man and his maker...
...Like Socrates in his Apologia, you are defending yourself against your accusers not to escape any punishment but to let the world know the truth both about you and the many others who have similarly been caught in the conspiratorial coils of our times...
...So why did you join...
...But you were more than young, more than impressionable...
...The times were right and you were ripe...
...You do come through as a person, even as a mensch, exhibiting many dimensions I had not quite suspected despite the fact that we have known each other for almost 40 years...
...Bill, a quick wit, asked just how much more could one be a Communist than someone who confessed to being a member of a cell...
...I am convinced that you were neither a spy nor, indeed, a Communist—a conclusion that may mystify many, since you were a card-carrying member of the Communist Party and you were assigned to be a "mole" at the behest of Stalin himself...
...Each time I read the same words but a different book...
...You were even...
...Hitler was on the march...
...Then, like some ruminant creature, I began to chew it over and over internally as I reran my way through your confession...
...still again as a morality play, with Michael Straight in the role of Everyman...
...I am recommending your work to friends with the advice that they read it once as autobiography, the story of a man as he sees himself...
...next as a mystery, to discover whether you really committed any crime and why, if you didn't, you found it so difficult to clear yourself of the crime you did not commit...
...your politics did not flow from a belief in the class struggle...
...I know that when you were asked your religion in the Air Corps you said, "Unitarian," which was your private joke, your way of saying that you did not believe in God...
...Don't be offended...
...Intellectually, you were not a Marxist—ever...
...I'm left at the end not knowing if I myself am convinced by what I am saying...
...Emotionally you were unfit because you were a Hamlet, endlessly wrestling with yourself over whether to be or not to be, to do or not to do, to confess or not to confess...
...the Soviet Union, still seen by many young and hopeful as the embodiment of the egalitarian dream, was celebrating its 17th birthday...
...I spend an hour arguing with a non-Communist...
...in addition to Unitarians there are Buddhists...
...I was fascinated by your letter to your mother when you turned 18: "My actions are based upon my personal needs rather than my convictions...
...The year was 1934: Capitalism was in its most profound crisis...
...What you have given us is a skeletonized vita, with enough flesh and blood to make your manuscript much more than a lawyer's brief on behalf of himself...
...To me, Mike, you have always come across as a profoundly religious man...
...and finally, for the sheer appreciation of its gusto and grief and grace...
...you were looking for religion...
Vol. 66 • February 1983 • No. 4
