The Life of the Party

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE ROMANCE OF AMERICAN COMMUNISM by Vivian Gornick; Basic Books; 265 pages; $10

In his multivolume history, The Age of Roosevelt, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote of those radicals who compared the New Deal to aspirin and Bolshevism to heroic surgery. He underscored this passion to cut with three lines of Depression verse: " We care not if Thy flag be white or red/ Come, ruthless Savior, messenger of God,/ Lenin or Christ, we follow Thy bright sword."

World War II gave nearly everyone the opportunity to be employed by the savior of his choice. Christian swords and Marxist sickles drew the blood of a common enemy. For many, the war was good for the soul. In a U.S. economically galvanized by the conflict, it was good for the stomach as well. Unemployment vanished, and the unspent wages of war work compressed like a powerful spring. The economy suddenly began to look like a jack-in-the-box poised for peace. When it came, the future sprang up in vistas of well-lighted suburbs and grinning grillwork.

Members of the American Communist Party, who never numbered more then one million, must have felt jilted by history. The beloved proletariat, so requiting during hard times, had, at first opportunity, run off with capitalism's traveling salesman. As the cold war closed in, Communists were once again looked on as the seducers of godless foreign power. "We ought to drop one of these automatic bombs on the Communists," said one Midwestern farmer during the early '50s. The prescription for homegrown Reds was McCarthyism, which threatened democracy more than the encapsulated cells of the American Communist Party. In the end, the beleaguered party withered away, stunned by Khrushchev's anti-Stalinism and sadly watching the proletariat leap over the threshold to the middle class. Marxist rhetoric could not compete with the ad-gab of prosperity.

Vivian Gornick takes a considerably more dramatic--indeed romantic--view of what she calls the "romance" of American Communism: "Marxism was for those who became Communists what Helen was for Paris. Once encountered, in the compelling persona of the Communist Party, the ideology set in motion the most intense longings." These, writes Gornick, became a consuming passion, "that was in its very essence both compellingly humanizing and then compellingly dehumanizing."

This is a fair example of the author's wafting prose style. Phrases like "an awesome move toward humanness" and such gauzy generalizations as Communists "were like everybody else, only more so" swell throughout her pages. Yet the book does have a vital core. Gornick, an essayist for New York's Village Voice, stages her psychopolitical Liebestod with a living chorus of former Communist activists whom she interviewed in various parts of the U.S.

In New York, there are aging Jewish immigrants whose ideas of social justice were formed by the Russian Revolution, and whose heated arguments Gornick remembers from her own Bronx childhood. The East Side of Manhattan was politically unique to an Italian who grew up there. "The right-wingers were the New Dealers," he wrote, "and the political conjugation went on from there: Social Democrats, Socialists, Communists, Trotskyists, Anarchists."

On Cape Cod, Gornick talked to a 70-year-old Polish-born Catholic, a former labor organizer and Spanish Civil War volunteer, who today is a folk hero to vacationing liberals. There are old Wobblies from Idaho, miners from West Virginia, women who left their families to go "underground," fiery daughters of dirt farmers, rebellious sons of the rich, and even an ex-Communist who now works for organized crime.

Many recall their days of party membership as the most exciting periods of their lives. "The world was all around you all the time, " says a psychologist in her mid-50s. "Every time I wrote a leaflet or marched on a picket line or went to a meeting I was remaking the world." Some had less ambitious goals. Says a California woman: "Of all the emotions I've known in life, nothing compares with the emotion of total comradeship I knew among the fruit pickers in the Thirties, nothing else has ever made me feel as alive, as coherent. It was for that, for the memory of that time, that I hung on. For that I lived with the narrowness and the stupidity of the party." For others, mem ory is obscured by disillusionment, bitter ness and cynicism.

If Gornick's women have some of the most fervent lines, it is probably because Communism offered them an occupation other than household drudgery. But not always. One party wife, weary of feeding her husband's comrades, finally exploded:

"While you sit on your ass making the revolution, I'm out there in the kitchen like a slavey. What we need is a revolution in this house. " The author acknowledges that her book grew out of her own intense commitment to feminism. Until the late '60s, she says portentously, "I was profoundly depoliticized, unable to see my own image reflected in the history of my times." As reflected in The Romance of American Communism, that image is sympathetic, generous but not clearly focused. She takes the complexities of idealism and motivation and submerges them into a provocative simile for destructive sexual desire. Even the selected evidence of her own interviews cannot adequately support such a grand moral vision.

To be convincing, Gornick, not to mention her powerless elite, would have had to exhibit a sense of values considerably more discriminating than paradoxical effusions about the "sorrow and glory" of American Communism.

To speak passionately of radicals as simply "alive to the beauty and raw ness of self-creation" avoids confronting the hard question: Radical for what be yond the self? Such intellectual software could just as easily be used to glorify Hitler's National Socialists or the Manson family.

--R.Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

"Rindzer falls silent. Glances I Bout his window. Plays with the Venetian blind behind him. Looks around his book-lined office. Then he says:

'So for me there's no politics anymore. The years when I was a Communist, bar none, were the best of my life. The relation for me between the personal and the historical was intense, deeply felt, fully realized. Now, I live an entirely personal life, removed from the larger world. I feel no interest in anything beyond my work. I work hard, I'm proud of the work I do, I consider it an obligation to take as much responsibility for the medical profession as I can, but that's it. The world is smaller, colder, darker by far for me than it was when I was a Communist ... That's a funny thing to say here, isn't it?' He laughs, waving his hand toward the brilliant Arizona afternoon. 'I've made my peace with my life, but I have no illusions that I live a life larger meaning.' "

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