The Romance of American Communism

In this incredible collection of highly sympathetic interviews Vivian Gornick sheds light on what compelled Americans from different walks of life to become a part of CPUSA: be it loneliness of human condition, intense need to be a part of history or desire to understand their place in the world. At the centre of the book she places the contradiction between “the visionary discovery of the self”, the hunger for a new method of knowing life that made Americans into Communists in the first place, and deadening dogma that often accompanied them on the way out of CPUSA and that unmade them. She asks if CPUSA and its achievements were at all possible if not for the stifling straightjacket of organisation and discipline (qualities that the modern day left wing scene seems to lack) and if those qualities were only the logical continuation of the nineteen century radicalism – precisely, the spirit of time looking at itself in the mirror.

These longings haunted the Communists, arising as they did out of one of the great human hungers, a hunger that finally had a life of its own; so that while at first Communists fed the hunger, at last the hunger fed off them.