THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020 21
women had internalized this lesson to
the point of losing track of its source.
The rot was the system, and systems
could be changed. “The exhilaration I
experienced once I had the analysis! I
woke up with it, danced through the day
with it, fell asleep smiling with it,” she
writes. “After all, what more did I need
than the denial of women’s rights to ex-
plain me to myself? What a joyous lit-
tle anarchist I then became!”
“Joyous” is the key word. If the sub-
stance of Gornick’s revelation was novel
to her, its effect wasn’t. Radical socialism
had been a religion in her parents’
house—a source of faith and celebration.
Every Sunday, her uncles—“capitalists
and Zionists,” she said—came over to
ritually argue politics. (They owned the
factory where her father worked.) Her
parents never lit Shabbos candles, but
they pulled Vivian from school to cele-
brate May Day. They were humble work-
ing people, and she saw how having a
politics made them dignified and proud.
More than proud—it gave them a sense
of purpose in the world. It made them
come alive to themselves.
In 1977, Gornick published a work of
oral history called “The Romance of
American Communism.” After years
out of print, it is being reissued in April
by Verso Books. “Before I knew that I
was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a
member of the working class,” the book
begins. Gornick interviewed members
of the American Communist Party,
charting, through them, the organiza-
tion’s rise, in the nineteen-tens, to its
effective collapse, in 1956, after Nikita
Khrushchev, speaking at the Twentieth
Congress of the Soviet Communist Party,
acknowledged the nightmarish abuses
of Stalin’s rule. At the heart of Gornick’s
account is a single, penetrating thesis:
There’s a certain kind of cultural hero—the
artist, the scientist, the thinker—who is often
characterized as one who lives for “the work.”
Family, friends, moral obligations be damned,
the work comes first. The reason the work
comes first in the case of the artist, the scien-
tist, the thinker is that its practice makes flare
into bright life a sense of inner expressiveness
that is incomparable.... That conviction of
centeredness irradiates the mind, heart, and
spirit like nothing else. Many if not most of
the Communists who felt destined for a life
of serious radicalism experienced themselves
in exactly the same way.
The American Communists, to Gor-nick, were heroic not because of their
politics—that would sentimentalize
them, and sentimentality is anathema
to her—but because of their sense of
absolute purpose and conviction that
those politics gave them in a country
hostile to their interests and indiffer-
ent to their lives. (That is also what
dooms them, as her title implies: all
romances must mature, or die.) She
presents her interview subjects like
characters in literature, as the protag-
onists of their own experience, and, for
that reason, the book is not simply doc-
umentary but a work of literature, too,
rich, moving, and contradictory.
Such a book could hardly arrive in
a more receptive climate, but Gornick
is nervous. When it first came out, crit-
ics accused her of ignoring the politicsof Communism while glorifying its ad-
herents. “The reviews shocked and
frightened me,” she told me. “I didn’t
dream that it was such a live issue still
in 1978.” Even now, she can quote phrases
from Irving Howe’s oddly suggestive
takedown in The New York Review of
Books. (“Alas, where her book should be
dry, it is damp; where hard, soft.”) “I
went to bed for a week after I read that
one,” she said. Still, she agrees with the
assessment. Her own work is hardly im-
mune to her instinct for literary reap-
praisal. She thinks her writing in the
book is bad, the language blowsy and
artificially heightened, and she says so,
in an anxious new introduction. “I was
persuaded against my better judgment”
to republish, she told me. It’s true that
you can hear Gornick working out her“Quick—tell us who you’re wearing!”