The title of Vivian Gornick’s 2020 re-release of her 1977 book, The Romance of American Communism, isn’t quite right. It would be better titled as “The Romance of the American Communist Party.” To be sure, ideology and the Party overlap, significantly. But it is with the Party in particular that the romances described in the book are had—and with which they end. These romances mostly end bitterly, with the destruction of the Party’s living spirit in 1956. It died on February 25, 1956 to be exact, when Khrushchev delivered his “Secret Speech” to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union denouncing “The Cult of Personality and Its Consequences” under Stalin. The speech devastated the American Communist Party. It never recovered.
Gornick, a “red-diaper baby” raised in the communist hothouse of New York City in the 1930s and 1940s, interviewed scores of former Communists (and some continuing communists) active in the Party during the Party’s heyday during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. This is not a history of the Party, however, except indirectly. Gornick interrogates the inner lives of these Communists. What they felt, what they experienced. What motivated their membership and their work for the Party. Finally, why the romance ended; why they left the Party, or why they were kicked out.
Despite the rarefied focus on members of the Communist Party during a period decades old when originally published, and now over half a century ago, the focus on the inner lives and experiences of Communist Party members makes it a book more generally about humanity. By that I don’t mean the book evokes the humanity of these Communists in a sympathetic way, although Gornick intends her book to provide a sympathetic treatment.
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