POLITICAL PASSAGES
Journeys of Change through Two Decades, 1968-1988
John H. Bunzel, editor
New York: The Free Press, 1988
354pp., $21.95
In 1950, Richard Crossman, a leading member of the British Labour Party, assembled a book that proved to be one of the political milestones of the postwar era. The God That Failed was a collection of riveting memoirs by six leading writers--including Arthur Koestler, Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone, and Andre Gide--who had been attracted to communism in the 1920s and 1930s but had eventually grown disaffected, even horrified, by what they had witnessed as communicants of this faith.
Unlike many cold warriors of this period, these authors had impeccable credentials as independent thinkers with radical or liberal sympathies. They also had the literary power to bring their bizarre experiences to life. Their accounts were not polemics so much as personal testimonies built around scenes that stay in one's mind as vividly as anything in Kafka. Who can forget Silone's wide-eyed incredulity, when, as a representative of the Italian Communist Party in Moscow, in the presence of Stalin, he and his colleagues were asked to condemn a document by Trotsky that no one had actually read? Who can forget the kangaroo court described by Wright, when the local party unit subjected one of its members to a humiliating auto-da-fé?
If Koestler's, Gide's, and Silone's memoirs have lost none of their force after nearly four decades, it is due to this quality of honest personal witness, free of all special pleading. "We were not in the least interested either in swelling the flood of anti-Communist propaganda or in providing an opportunity for personal apologetics," said Crossman. "Our concern was to study the state of mind of the Communist convert, and the atmosphere of the period--from 1917 to 1939--when conversion was so common."
Personal testimony
In Political Passages John H. Bunzel brings together twelve essayists who try to do for the sixties generation and the New Left what Crossman and his group did for the Old Left of the 1930s: to replace abstract political argument with strong personal testimony and to chronicle the stages by which an assorted group of New Left sympathizers were first attracted to radicalism, and then gradually deradicalized. Yet the differences from the earlier book stand out sharply. Crossman's book looked back to a period when many writers' work, including some of the greatest, took a sharply political turn. There's no exact equivalent in the writing of the 1960s. In addition, Bunzel's choices were far more limited: Few of his writers are well known, and none have the literary or imaginative gifts that could bear comparison with Crossman's crew. Furthermore, the whole conversion metaphor, while ideally suited to the dogmatism, sectarianism, and millennialism of the communist experience, has at best a limited application to the 1960s, when views shifted more gradually and radicalism was a more amorphous, even anarchic, climate of opinion. There was rarely a road to Damascus on the way to the sixties faith and usually no Kronstadt--no blinding moment of truth--that led away from it. As Bunzel says in his preface, "I soon realized that The God That Failed was not a good
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