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Diana rises from the couch and walks across the room to pour herself another drink. She stands in silence with her back to me. Then she turns around, leans against the mahogany bar, and says: “I was vain, shallow, pretty, and energetic. Mad for sexual success and popularity, and yes, secretly wanting bourgeois comfort and bourgeois success. But,” her head goes back, the dark helmet-like hair swinging out in a graceful, defiant arc, “I was a Communist. And being a Communist made me better than I was. It was the great moral adventure of my life. I wouldn’t—not then, not now—have traded it for anything. There’s been nothing else in my life of which I can say that.”
[...] Communists remember the credo very much as Orwell remembers Spain: as characteristic of a time and a place when men and women experienced genuine comradeship, and were equalized by the deeper socialist definition of value and being; an experience closely parallel to that of the pioneer societies in which work loses the hierarchical value towards which all middle-class societies tend, and becomes subordinate to the fact that all work has the same value—i.e., that it is being done in the service of the new society, the one being built, the one to come. I think it is safe to say that for most Communists this sense of things dominated “living it out.”
Eric was a very smart kid. The force of his personality, coupled with his brains and drive, destined him to live out the life he has indeed lived out, a life filled with event and focus, large and dramatic doings. He won a scholarship to Brown University at a time when it was unthinkable for someone like him to go to an Ivy League school. At Brown, he says, he was drawn to drama and literature. But even as he speaks the words, one feels the unreality behind them—literature like a luxurious dream, a wistful longing around the edges of a consciousness pulled even before it knew it was being pulled toward politics and an overriding sense of class struggle. He graduated from Brown in 1935 and won a scholarship to Oxford; on his way to Oxford in 1936 he thought he’d just stop off in Spain and see what that was all about.
i just like the phrasing
As for the individual Communist at the branch level, four-fifths of the time he followed Party directives, one-fifth of the time he was on his own; on his own, he was supposed to respond to whatever happened in the course of a day in the neighborhood. (“What exactly does that mean?” I ask Lanzetti. “Oh,” he replies, “if there was a tenant conviction, or a sick comrade, or if he was needed to join a picket line, or canvas during an election. Or if the neighborhood needed a traffic light, or a shopkeeper was having trouble with the Fire Department. You know,” he grins, “just like the neighborhood Democratic Party would have operated—only we always got there first.”) The branch member’s other duties consisted of contributing a week’s wages to the Party once a year, selling the Daily Worker, and running off weekly leaflets.
the dream
“One night after a meeting she asks me if she can talk to me. I nod sure, she sits down and starts to tell me, very hesitantly, that there’s this man she’s in love with. I think she’s about to tell me she’s afraid to sleep with him, and I start to tell her if you’re in love there’s nothing wrong with. . . . ‘Oh no, no, no,’ she interrupts me, ‘it’s nothing like that. Of course, we’ve been sleeping together. It’s that he’s Chinese. I’m terrified to tell my father we want to get married.’
“I stare at her. What the hell do I do with this? Finally, I say to her, ‘Look, if you’re afraid to tell him alone I’ll go with you.’ ‘You’ll go with me?’ she says. ‘Not only me,’ I say, ‘we’ll take a delegation if that’ll make you feel any better.’ ‘A delegation?’ she says. ‘Sure,’ I say, getting into the swing of it, ‘we’ll take the whole damned Communist Party. Why not? You got a right.’ ‘I’ll think it over,’ she says, and she goes away.
“Well, of course, I forgot all about it, the work went on, and a month later, after another meeting, Lilly suddenly comes up to me again, and she’s beaming from ear to ear. What happened?’ I say. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘it took me all this time to get up the nerve to say anything to my father, but last week I came home from work one night and I marched into his room and I stood in the doorway and I said: “I’m getting married.” He looked up at me and he just stared at me for a long time. Then he said: “Is he Jewish?” “No, Pa,” I said, “he’s not, he’s Chinese.” My father stared at me in such a way I knew he was thinking one of us had lost his mind and he wasn’t sure which one it was. But after a while he was sure. “I’ll kill you,” he said. My knees started to buckle. Then all of a sudden it was like you were there in the room with me. I saw you and my branch organizer and all the people I work with and I felt like the whole Communist Party was right there in the room with me. I looked at my father and I said to him: “If you kill me, who’ll cook your eggs?” He hasn’t said a word to me since. Li and I are getting married next week.’
love this story
When I ask her if she feels she sacrificed her life to the Communist Party, Maggie’s face loses its now-blurred appearance, the blue eyes clear and spark. She leans forward on the couch, one hand on her hip, her mouth breaking into her irrepressible smile, and she says: “Sacrificed my life! Of course not. Hon, we were in the world-changing business. You can’t get much better than that. What’s better? Money? Position? Are you kidding?”
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.
sad
“And, of course, you mustn’t forget, the life was exciting, very exciting. We felt—he did, and I did, too—like we had our hands on ‘the throttle of history,’ as we used to say. That’s an extraordinary feeling. When Hitler rose to power and all those lost, floundering liberals were wandering around saying ‘How could it happen in cultured, civilized Germany?’ we knew. That was a tremendous comfort. We were inside the circle of light, unlike those poor benighted others in the dark outside. They had to contend with the existential dilemma of a crumbling civilization. Not us. That, of course, was the other side of the coin. Not one of us knew what the hell was going on inside ourselves, but we all could explain the world.
“But there is one thing about those days I am sure of, one memory I have that sticks like glue. I began haunting the movies on Forty-Second Street like every other miserable unemployed bum in New York in those days. I never even looked at the marquee to see what was playing. I simply bought a ticket every day and plunged into that fabled darkness. Then not only was ‘realife’ suspended, but very soon I began feeling wonderfully anesthetized. One day a Russian movie came on the screen. It was Eisenstein’s Strike. Inside of ten minutes I felt something electrifying was happening on that screen. And inside of twenty minutes I realized I was in the presence of a new world, a place where some new sense of human life was stirring. And it stirred me, it stirred me deeply. I came out of that movie feeling alive for the first time in months, maybe years, maybe my whole life.
“I went back to City, walked into the library, and got out every book I could find on contemporary Russia. Then I calmly walked out of the school, went back to my room, holed up, and began reading. I don’t think I came out of that room for a week.
Rindzer falls silent. Glances out his window. Plays with the venetian blind behind him. Looks around his book-lined office. Then he says:
“So for me there’s no politics anymore. The years when I was a Communist, bar none, were the best of my life. The relation for me between the personal and the historical was intense, deeply felt, fully realized. Now, I live an entirely personal life, removed from the larger world. I feel no interest in anything beyond my work. I work hard, I’m proud of the work I do, I consider it an obligation to take as much responsibility for the medical profession as I can, but that’s it. The world is smaller, colder, darker by far for me than it was when I was a Communist. . . . That’s a funny thing to say here, isn’t it?” He laughs, waving his hand toward the brilliant Arizona afternoon. “I’ve made my peace with my life, but I have no illusions that I live a life of larger meaning.”