The Romance of American Communism by Vivian Gornick: Review

For every single day since leaving the International Marxist Tendency, I have felt anger. Anger courses through my veins like lava flowing through a volcano. My brain pulsates violently with rage as I comprehend the damage that was done to me. Leaving the cult was like being picked up and hurled out of a tall residential building, hurtling to the ground, covered in blood and broken window glass. Everything that I had built my world around for two and a half years crumbled to the ground, and my life was mercilessly upended. As I steadily picked myself up and sought to reorient myself, I surveyed the damage done to the landscape of my existence, and I was filled with disgust, contempt, shame, but most of all, vigorous fury. How could I have allowed myself to be tricked? How could they have brainwashed and abused me so? How could I have thrown away so many months of precious time, which could have been truly happy years for me, on this nonsense? And how would I go about rebuilding?

I recount the many slights and indignities I bore throughout those two and a half years – the betrayals, the lies, the slanders, the propaganda, the manipulation, the abuse – and how I accepted all of this as the price to be paid for seeking to do the great work of revolution. I rationalised my own torment and subjugation. I was taught to see this enslavement as a sort of emancipation from my bourgeois self. I now realise how much my real self was suppressed, how the free-spirited individual beneath was shackled and demeaned. I appreciate how much this loathsome sect did to eradicate my personality and destroy my mind, and I am filled with fury. It is a righteous fury against those who behaved iniquitously towards me, and I will not be told that I do not deserve to feel this way. All of my long-suppressed doubts and resentments poured forth from me after I left, and I could finally see that I had given my service to an organisation that did not deserve me, or my mind. It had exploited my idealism and good nature, my intelligence and creativity, my loyalty and dedication, and it had made me its useful idiot and token black fool. I was determined not to let that happen again. But I had to educate myself first on what had been done to me, so that I could press forward with my recovery.

Reading helps, especially reading about the experiences of others who were members of similar organisations. I am currently reading Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism. Gornick, the daughter of American Communists, who ended up disavowing the ideology in favour of New Left feminism, interviewed dozens of former members of the party in a bid to recapture the emotional experience of joining, being in and then leaving such an organisation. The similarities to my own experience are striking. The book was slammed by critics at the time for its romanticising of communism, and, having come close to the end, I must agree. Yes, Gornick is critical of the party – its dogmatism, its authoritarianism, its corruption – but for most of the book, she is gushing about the ‘passion’ and commitment of these Communists, and nostalgically seeks to recreate the experience, and even find something positive in it. Most of those she interviews say that, despite the misfortunes they suffered, they miss their time in the party, that they felt more alive than they had ever been, and that they felt bereft and purposeless without it. Some said they were relieved to be out. A particularly bitter ex-Communist was among those interviewed, and it feels as though Gornick deliberately put him in the book simply to paint disgruntled ex-Communists in the worst possible light. They do not have a proper interview, but he leads her around the nose for two days, delaying any proper conversation, before giving a short but bitter tirade about how ‘Communism is the devil’, then escorting her to the train station. He is even given the pseudonym ‘Bitterman’ by Gornick, just to hammer home the point. There was no need to include this farcical episode in the book at all, except to make ex-Communists look bad.

I am afraid I must agree with the criticisms of the book made by the likes of Irving Howe and Ron Radosh. Whilst the insights the book provides of life in the party are valuable, Gornick’s overly sympathetic account grates on me, as it did Howe and many other critics. There is hardly any mention of politics or of the role played by Marxist doctrine in justifying the oppression and dehumanisation of all those ‘class enemies’ who did not have the honour of belonging to the party. Instead, Gornick’s focus is largely on the positives, of how wonderful it felt to be part of this band of brothers and have this sense of ‘community’ and ‘comradeship’, as well as how easily this could all be lost when you left or were expelled. She fails to draw the logical conclusion of her own analysis – that yes, the party represented ‘community’ of some kind, but a warped, unhealthy and utterly cultish one, of the kind we are all better off without. I am sure that the Nazis felt a great sense of comradeship and community in their ranks, yet that does not change the fact that their cause was monstrous and totalitarian, and that we are all better off without Nazism. Yet Gornick is able to recount some truly horrendous experiences in her book, without fully accepting that this cause was so utterly corrupt and degenerate as to be unworthy of redemption, even if the Communists told themselves they had ‘good intentions’. Here are a few of the examples I found in the book that parallelled my own experiences:

Sarah Gordon clutches her head and moans: “My God! How I hated selling the Worker! I used to stand in front of the neighborhood movie on a Saturday night with sickness and terror in my heart, thrusting the paper at people who’d turn away from me or push me or even spit in my face. I dreaded it. Every week of my life for years I dreaded Saturday night. And then canvassing! Another horror. A lady would shut the door in my face before I’d gotten three words out – and if she was a socialist she’d slam the door – and I’d stand there sick. I’d tell myself a thousand times: It’s not your face she’s shutting out…God, I felt annihilated. But I did it, I did it. I did it because if I didn’t do it, I couldn’t face my comrades the next day. And we all did it for the same reason: we were accountable to each other. It was each other we’d be betraying if we didn’t push down the gagging and go do it. You know, people never understand that. They say to us, ‘The Communist Party held a whip over you.’ They don’t understand. The whip was inside each of us, we held it over ourselves, not over each other.”-p.110

Whilst I never developed the hatred for paper sales other members of the sect did, I know that they were hardly popular, and for good reason. There was one thing I did resent doing – in the run-up to strikes that took place on campus, we would go around leafleting different accommodation blocks in order to raise awareness and encourage ‘solidarity’. These were a gigantic waste of my spare evenings and I look back with disgust that I wasted so much time on them. Gordon expresses what Janja Lalich calls ‘bounded choice’ – the notion that, once in the cult, you internalise its ‘discipline’ and its morality to the point where you do what is expected of you without questioning it and without even needing the threat of physical punishment, or even the presence of another cult member. One compels oneself, because you have internalised the group’s demands on you.

One of the most irritating things about the book was Gornick’s romanticisation of the ‘wholeness’ felt by members of the party – the sense that their life had a transcendent purpose, that they had an ideology that explained everything and connected even the most mundane aspects of their lives to the radiant socialist future. She adopts an anti-anti-Communist attitude at some points, sniping at people like Koestler for ridiculing and criticising this infantile attitude. But there is nothing healthy about such a black-and-white perspective, an excessively simplistic worldview that takes all of the nuance and colour out of human existence. It is the very notion of life’s complexity that is, if anything, infinitely more exciting and compelling than the thought that everything fits into a neat little prism of Marxist ideology. Still, her book does go over those for whom this ‘wholeness’ was in many ways stifling:

This, too, was the “wholeness” of the CP. And there were many people for whom this wholeness was anathema. They did not laugh – not then, not now – over directives; the writhed inside themselves. They lived as Communists in uneasy relation to inner divisions that were at one and the same time attracted to and repelled by CP wholeness, recognizing always, by virtue of original consultation, the irreconcilable nature of much in human experience that orthodox Communism not only made no room for but whose very existence it vehemently denied. One of these people was Esther Allen.

…Immediately, she entered into a state of conflict from which she never seemed to emerge: when she was playing the piano she felt guilty because of all the people starving to death in the world, and when she was at Party meetings she felt uneasy because she knew she wasn’t really very good at being a Communist and longed to be back at her piano. She couldn’t talk about Beethoven with anyone in the Party, and she couldn’t put the Party out of her mind when she was listening to Beethoven. The split in her hovered on a scale of evenly balanced tension. Then the scale tipped: she gave up music.

The conflict, of course, did not resolve itself, it merely went underground. And whenever it rose up to swamp her, she dealt with it by becoming more dogmatic, more doctrinaire, more Marxist-Leninist self-assured than she had been before.-pp.131-132

I felt the exact same way Esther Allen felt – torn between her music and the party. I was torn between my dedication to the International Marxist Tendency, and my instincts as a ‘petty-bourgeois intellectual’, who was drawn to ideas in general. Before joining the sect, I had been in thrall to Nietzsche, Stirner, Carlyle. Now I was supposed to turn myself into a fanatical Trotskyist, and impose homogeneity on my thought. But the monolithic structure of Marxist-Leninist doctrine did not satisfy me. Deep down, I knew I was still a petty-bourgeois intellectual who admired Nietzsche and Hitchens and other such ‘reactionaries’, even though I told myself their ideas were false and that only the IMT and its interpretation of Trotskyist doctrine could save the planet. I was a student at university, yet was indoctrinated to look upon ‘bourgeois’ academics with contempt. I would write essays trying dogmatically to defend the organisation’s line on any given issue, yet would also experience moments of doubt and a willingness to grapple with rival viewpoints and try to understand them rather than haughtily dismiss them. We were supposed to conduct ‘entrism’ in the Labour Party, yet I loathed most Labour Party members for being corrupted by identity politics, and secretly maintained my old anti-idpol views from my conservative days, even though I now had new rationalisations for them, borrowed from Marxist doctrine – that it was a deviation from the class struggle, etc.

I was at heart a romantic who was burning from within with emotion, and who yearned for a romantic relationship with another person, but, frustrated in love, I channelled my frustrated sexual energy into the fight for socialism, and told myself that I was corrupted by a bourgeois ideal of romance that would always elude me. I thought self-denial might make me a better revolutionary. All it did was twist my soul. Whilst at university, I became enthralled with the world of 1960s adult contemporary and country music, which served as a private distraction from my difficulties fitting in with the cult. I would sometimes feel guilt for liking this ‘bourgeois’ music, which celebrated romantic love and bitterly recounted its miseries, as opposed to stirring, revolutionary anthems or even the folk music that was so popular among the left of those days. Jim Reeves, Bing Crosby, Dean Martin and Eddy Arnold became my cultural idols, even as I adopted Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky as my political idols. There was a clear clash. I ignored the contradiction, but it existed. I even allowed myself to dream of becoming a singer. Somehow, I would still be able to serve the revolution and follow in the footsteps of my favourite artists. Of course, there was no chance of that happening.

In the aftermath of her departure, Ellen said:

“Now all I have is relief. Relief that it’s over. Relief that I don’t ever have to go to another goddamn meeting, have another goddamn discussion, nod my head at things I only half agree with or half understand.”-p.135

I couldn’t agree more. Sadly, Ellen was not the only person who felt the creative and intellectual side of himself being undermined by his membership of the sect. Mason Goode felt the same way:

What he also shares with her is a deep-seated memory of the profound distaste he felt in his educated middle-class soul for the intellectual and emotional crudities of life in the Party.

…He always felt vaguely ill at ease among apparatchik Communists. It seemed as though the men most devoted to the Party were also the narrowest; he remained in a state of emotional reserve and doubt. He kept telling himself that these doubts were the residual effects of his bourgeois background and in time, as his inner merger with the Party became more complete, they would evaporate.

The doubts never did evaporate. They continued to plague him. As the years went on they often nearly made him ill. He could not bear the Party hacks, the petty despots, his increasing unhappiness over the dictatorial characteristics of democratic centralism. He also hated his immediate political superior: a charming, intelligent, tyrannical man whose method of criticism was pure attack and humiliation.

There were hundreds of instances in Party life that caused Mason outright dismay. One night, for example, a meeting was opened by a speaker who said: “The subject for tonight’s meeting is self-criticism. The first item on the agenda is the self-criticism of Mason Goode.”

…His love of painting began to live in a secret part of himself – a reserve part of himself, he thought. In time he came to realize the painter in him was not living in reserve, it was dying in exile.

…One night in 1948, Mason attended a district meeting in Yonkers. The subject of the meeting was the expulsion of Earl Browder from the Communist Party USA.

…The meeting began. The speaker talked passionately for more than an hour about Browder’s betrayal of the Party. He went on and on about how this was the right, the necessary, the only thing to do. Everyone in the room began to look painfully uncomfortable.

…Mason looked around the room at all those faces he knew so well. Everywhere, the faces looked increasingly more torn, confused, hesitant. The voice of the speaker ploughed on. Everyone knew the decision had already been made, and each person who didn’t rise to his feet when the moment came would be fixed in Party memory. The speaker called for a vote.

“One by one,” Mason says, “and then two by two, and then six by six, everyone in that room rose to his feet. And then I, too, rose to my feet. Inside, I felt sick. Lost, betrayed, turned into an automaton. I watched my friend across the room. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

…In 1952 Mason Goode left the Communist Party. The doubts had not simply accumulated in him, they had accreted into a conviction of deformed life.-pp.136-138

The mindless conformism involved in the stage-managed expulsion of Earl Browder is no different from what I faced when I dared to question the party line. This is precisely what would have happened to me if I had gone ahead with an ‘internal debate’ about my differences. Like Goode and like Ellen, it got to the point where I could no longer handle the contradictions, and I had no choice but to desert the sect.

Karl Millens recalls the ‘loaded language’ of the party:

God! That language. This was supposed to be a movement of liberation, but every time I turned around I felt more and more constricted. Constricted by my language, which was either acceptable or nonacceptable. Constricted by my actions, which were definitely either acceptable or nonacceptable. Books I should or should not be reading, thoughts I should or should not be having…The Marxist-Leninist jargon was supposed to be evidence of high intelligence. But I found it put to uses of intimidation, and finally I felt it evidenced more a fear of life than it did of genuinely high intelligence. I remember when I left my wife and went into psychotherapy, I felt like a light had gone on inside my head. I saw a shape to my life I had not imagined before. When I tried to tell my oldest friend in the Party some of the things that were happening inside me, he talked to me as though I were counterrevolutionary vermin, fit only to be isolated in a laboratory or-under the right, the correct regime-taken out and shot.-p.148

This captures brilliantly how I felt in the IMT. I felt guilt for watching reactionaries on YouTube, guilt for reading their works, guilt for feeling down in the mouth (after all, Marxists should be optimists) and guilt for having wandered in bourgeois sin for so many years before finding this wonderful organisation I was now a part of. No normal or healthy group makes its members feel this way. But Gornick still thinks that the ‘passion’ shown by these fanatics, however warped or misplaced, or however much damage it did to their souls, should be commended.

Paula Sachman recounts a particularly tragic tale, which reminds me of something that happened to me in the IMT. It began when she was summoned to a meeting at the party headquarters:

I went in and there were all our friends from school plus a man I’d never seen before. I noticed immediately that the chairs were arranged oddly: all in a circle with one chair in the middle of the circle. The strange man directed me to sit on the chair in the middle of the circle. I started to tremble. I took my seat and it began.

“I was being brought up on charges of insubordination and divisiveness, the man told me. What did that mean? I asked. Who was bringing these charges? The man nodded to the leader of our group. I turned to him and said, ‘Jerry, you’re charging me?’ Jerry-I’d known him for years-didn’t answer me. His eyes were cold and his lips pressed together, I hardly recognized him. He nodded his head. ‘What does that mean?’ I asked. ‘I’ve never said or done anything.;

“Then one of the girls in our group took out a notebook and began to read from it. It was simply unbelievable. I thought I was going to lose my mind then and there. She read out whole conversations that had taken place in the cafeteria at school. Conversations I could barely remember saying, it all seemed so long ago and far away. She had been taking notes on my conversations for two years. Two whole years. I looked at her as though I’d never seen her before in my life. She had been m friend. We used to go back to the Bronx together on the subway. We’d talked about clothes and homework and our mothers, and all that time she’d been taking notes on me. It was like being in the middle of a nightmare I was never going to wake up from.”

…”I guess I did sort of lose my balance then for a moment,” Paula goes on. “I began to scream, ‘You’re all crazy, crazy! If there’s any justice in this lousy world it’s you who’ll be punished, not me.’ And then I ran out of the room. I threw myself into Maurey’s arms and said, ‘Take me out of here, take me out of here. And never bring me back. Never.’ Two days later I was expelled from the Communist Party.”-pp.151-152

This reminds me of the campaign my branch launched behind my back, months into my membership, to expel me. This was partly based on things I had said to one of the branch members in confidence about my mental health via Facebook Messenger. He had faked closeness to me all this time, all the while screenshoting things I had told him to use against me. I was disgusted and wanted to kill myself. Other accusations were made against me of things I had said or done in the past, and were either blown out of proportion or made up to assassinate me morally. This horrific act of psychological abuse, bordering on the sociopathic, is the reality of life in these gruesome organisations. I remained a loyal member of the organisation for another two years, despite what had been done to me, and despite being out of the branch for a year whilst I recovered mentally from this vicious act of betrayal. I should have stormed out then and there. This organisation, which sold me the illusion of brotherhood and comradeship, and instilled in us an attitude of high-mindedness and hope for a more human future, was filled with people who behaved in this utterly inhuman and despicable manner.

Paula’s husband, Maurey, recounts how he took advantage of the intellectual liberation brought to him by leaving the party:

“In Nineteen-Sixty-Three,” he said, putting the key in the ignition, “I went back to school. Boy, I hit those books like a madman, like a guy who’s been out in the desert suddenly drinking water again. For three years I read day and night. I couldn’t get enough. It was such a pleasure to be thinking again. I got the Ph.D. and here I am.” He switched on the ignition and grinned at me. “Still scratching around.” And he moved the car out of its space and onto the open road.-p.157

I am just like Maurey. In the days after leaving the IMT, I went back home to London from university and was ensconced in my living room, where I read non-stop for months. I bought a gargantuan amount of books from Amazon – literature, philosophy, politics, history – anything and everything. I read voraciously and insatiably. I seized the opportunity to read stuff that wasn’t just Trotskyist dogma. I devoured Arthur Koestler and Gore Vidal and Roger Scruton and Leszek Kolakowski. I grappled with new ideas, new thoughts and feelings. I didn’t have to cling to Marxist dogma like a life raft. I was free of the old, fake friendships from the cult, the old dogmas, the lies and slogans, and I could read critical literature entirely guilt-free. I wanted to free my mind and to cleanse it of the intellectual stain left by Trotskyist inanities.

The way in which people you knew and worked alongside could turn against you in a heartbeat is encapsualted not just by the example of what happened to Paula Sachman, but Sam Russell, who was accused of being a government agent:

Sam demanded a trial. It was granted him. One of the members of the trial board was Marian Moran. Sam pled his case successfully and was cleared of all charges: nominally. Sam wanted the board to publish the findings of the trial in the People’s World. The board refused. It also refused to readmit Sam to the Party unless he submitted himself to certain corrective measures. He was to join a “mass organization”; that is, he was to go to work for a number of years in a factory in order to “get back to the working class.” This he would not do. Get back to the working class? When the hell had he ever been in the working class? This order was nothing more than a directive to humiliate himself. Why was this necessary to prove he was a good Communist? He had been cleared. He was guilty of nothing. The trial board remained adamant on this demand. To them, Sam’s insubordination was proof that he was, after all, worthy of suspicion.

So it was all over, his life in the Communist Party at an end. “I could hardly believe this was happening to me,” Sam says softly, his face again taking on that expression of confused uncertainty, his large body suddenly seeming frail. “Fifteen years, and it was all over just like that. What stuck, bitterly, in my craw was that people I had known and worked with for fifteen years could so easily believe I was a government agent…How was this possible? There was absolutely no proof against me. Needless to say, there could not have been any proof against me. And yet all my friends, everyone, turned away from me without batting an eyelash. I went through hell after that. The McCarthy years were murder on me. I was called up before a state commission, asked to testify, give names, threatened with contempt of court, had to leave California, start all over again in another part of the country…But nothing was as terrible to me as that trial, it haunted my life for years. It still haunts me.”-p.174

Sophie Chessler experiened something similar:

“The morning after we quit I went to a grocery store to buy some milk and bread and I ran into a Party member on the street. When he saw me coming toward him he veered in his tracks and crossed the street. My first thought was: he forgot something back where he was coming from and didn’t have time to explain.

“The second time this happened I felt a curious little twist go through me and I remember thinking, ‘Is it possible…?’ And I rejected that thought immediately.

“But of course it not only was possible, it was what, in fact, was happening. I had become-literally overnight-nonexistent. The only people who remained our friends were the people who quit with us: at the same moment, in the same way, over the same issues. Everyone else disappeared. People stopped calling, stopped dropping by, crossed the street when we ran into each other. Sometimes, when they couldn’t cross the street they passed by or looked into my face with glazed, unseeing eyes.

“One day I was in the supermarket. As I turned into an aisle of the store a woman at the other end also turned in. We glanced up over our baskets and our eyes met. She was someone I’d known since I’d been a girl. We had worked together in the Party many times over the years. We’d been extremely warm acquaintances, on occasion friends, intimates. I had liked her for her lightheartedness and she had liked me for my seriousness. Now, as our eyes met her face instinctively lit up and her hand came out in a greeting. Then suddenly, visibly, I could see it right there in her face, she remembered who I had become. Her hand came down and her face closed. She wheeled in mid-aisle, and you know how hard it is to turn around in a supermarket, and practically ran. I remember I stood there staring after her. I felt paralyzed. And for the first time I said to myself: My God, how came we to do such things to each other?”

“…It seemed like the most terrible thing in the world, that people should have done this to each other, that we who were fighting capitalism because it dehumanized people had dehumanized ourselves in this way, and had lost the only thing that counts between people: the ability to see ourselves in each other.”-pp.176-178

This was pretty much my experience when I left – the ostracism, the abandonment by old friends and comrades. It was tough, but I expected it and I even embraced it. I was free of a toxic cult and I could finally move on with my life. As Arthur Chessler put it:

“I feel free. Free to think what I like, to accept or reject an idea, free to have a discussion that isn’t resolved, isn’t necessarily going some-Marxist-where, free to pursue my own thoughts.”-p.191

One of the people Gornick interviews recounts how an expelled member who was a friend of the family attempted to kill himself. At least one person says that if they had been expelled they would have committed suicide. Such a sense of ‘wholeness’ cannot be healthy, which makes Gornick’s approach to the whole thing utterly absurd. She glosses over these hideous episodes. To admire people for their passion is one thing, but if this passion drives them to annihilate their individuality by completely merging themselves into a controlling sect, to the point where they cannot imagine a life outside the group, that is quite another.

Gornick romanticises the diabolical experience these people had. It is understandable. Her own family’s history perhaps informed her motivation to try and find something redeeming in American Communism. In the very last pages of the book, Gornick makes the incredible argument that American Communism, for all its horrors, was ‘historically-necessary’, just as the errors of the early American feminists were historically-necessary for the movement to learn important lessons and win real influence in society. I do not see the two as equivalent. The Communist Party was a totalitarian cult which took its orders from a hostile foreign power, and plotted to overthrow American democracy, impose a copy-cat dictatorship inspired by Moscow and kill and imprison millions of innocents. For all their ‘passion’, dedication and self-righteous commitment, the cause for which they fought was inherently evil. By contrast, the feminist movement sought nothing more than basic equality for women. Communism is something American society could have done without, feminism, perhaps not. I don’t accept any historical necessity or inevitability about Communism and its excesses. Millions of Americans knew of the gulags, the purges, the famines, the tyranny under which millions of Soviet citizens groaned. The Communist Party uncritically defended all this when they should have known better. Even before 1917, there were intellectuals who had predicted what would happen if Marxism took control of a nation. Did millions of people really have to die, and did hundreds of thousands of Americans really have to endure the stultifying, abusive, morally corrupting environment of a totalitarian sect, for them to see the flaws inherent in the Marxist project? I think not. The American left has not been strengthened by the experience of Communism. If anything, it was set back. Think of all those talented organisers and intellectuals who wasted their lives on this monstrous project, when they could have involved themselves with the left of the Democratic Party, and worked to push the New Deal in an even more radical direction. Think of the propaganda boost that the conservatives in American society gained from using the party as a bogeyman to scare people away from any left-wing initiatives. Think of the ruined marriages, the broken families, the generations of people who became embittered towards leftism for life. I can’t accept any historical necessity. American Communism was no romance!