I don’t know much about Vivian Gornick—yet. I know that in 1977 she published The Romance of American Communism, an account of the progressive “urban Jews and Irish or Italian Catholics”—”honest dissenters”—whose affiliation with the Communist Party USA occasionally deposited them at the Gornick family dinner table in the Bronx. “Your parents were communists?” she recalls college classmates exclaiming. What does that even mean? How did an ideology birthed in Moscow seduce ordinary Americans into “a life of serious radicalism”? Gornick’s book attempts an explanation.
A caveat, however. “I did write the book—and I wrote it badly,” she now admits. This is one helluva way to introduce a reissued edition of your book to a new generation of readers. It takes courage and humility—not to mention an intrepid publisher—to suggest her past work is overwrought and “over-written,” and that in revisiting it she was “startled by all that I ignored.”
I’ll soon be able to judge for myself—I’ve only just embarked on the first chapter—but Gornick’s self-consciousness, whatever her brand of politics, is endearing. Her shortcomings as a writer and historian, which she says are numerous, are almost irrelevant; the subject of this slim volume—American communism, the glamour of its revolutionary aspirations, its starry-eyed apologists—is that compelling.
Why? Because a century removed from the Bolshevik coup d’etat there is still little consensus on issues of supreme social import—how to best organize and govern people, how to best implement justice, the duty of the individual to the state (and vice versa). In America—and (again!) in Europe—the ruling and intellectual classes have, by and large, rejected the tenets of e pluribus unum for those of a system that bears the hallmarks of communism. It is an ideology tireless in its search of a host, and, this time, the coddled American mind has seemingly obliged en masse.
I first learned of its quintessence—a cocksure materialism that, “in the name of rationalism,” denies “the instinct of [the] soul for God”—from another Vivian, one Jay Vivian “Whittaker” Chambers, whose autobiography Witness also examines (and, ultimately, eviscerates) the “romance” of American communism. Whether or not Gornick’s inquiry precipitates a transmogrification as illuminating as Chambers’—to seek instead the truth in eternity and to tell it in time—or simply documents a lost world (more vignette than vivisection) with the disinterested eye of the street photographer is also moot. Communism, as an idea, is au courant. We are discovering, in real time, if—in practice—it will remain so and what that portends for the future of the American experiment in radical liberty, self-governance and free-market economics.
Image: Lewis, Dick. “Communists marching in the May Day parade in New York in 1935.” The New York Times, New York Daily News via Getty Images, 20 October 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/opinion/new-york-american-communism.html.
Impolitic 