[“The grand dream of communism imbued day-to-day experiences, friendships, familial relationships and romances with political significance and thus seemed to elevate, inflate or heighten those experiences until they took on an almost world-historical aspect. While the The Golden Notebook and The Romance Of American Communism both situate crumbling kitchens as a synecdoche for crumbling worlds and crumbling senses of self, Lessing also describes how cramped and insalubrious kitchens in London could take on epic, global dimensions. As she explains, the atmosphere among her comrades “made every encounter, every conversation, important, because if you were a communist, then the future of the world depended on you—you and your friends and people like you all over the world.” As Gornick writes of the same period: “When these people sat down at the kitchen table to talk, Politics sat down with them, Ideas sat down with them, above all, History sat down with them.” Unlike in Anna Wulf’s psychoanalytic sessions, these ‘small’ experiences do not seem frivolous or insignificant because they are swept up in a grand historical movement, reaching outwards to other cramped kitchens of comrades around the world and stretching forwards to an imagined future of communal kitchens.
Within the miniature worlds of the CPGB and the CPUSA, friendships and romantic relationships were often experienced as though through a kind of magnifying glass, as if they were being conducted on a scale appropriate to the grandiosity of revolutionary political goals. A former Party member interviewed by Gornick recalled:
How can I really explain to you what it was like to fall in love in the Communist Party? I can’t. It’s impossible to capture the full flavour, to make you experience as we did emotions and circumstances that streamed together and were so strong you literally could not sort them out. Our love affairs blossomed, entirely entwined with the Party and Party affairs and our identities as Party members. We felt tremendous surges of comradeship, political excitement, the pity and beauty of human suffering, the mad wild joy of revolutionary expectation. We lived with these emotions daily. We shared them with each other. That was our intimacy. And, often, when a man and a woman shared these emotions things got all mixed up, and they took these feelings for romantic love.
“Things got all mixed up”; communism was a kind of love affair. Across many of the accounts collected by Gornick, former Communists describe their intellectual and political awakening as inspired by important relationships they formed with existing party members. Dick Nikowsski, a Polish first generation immigrant who became a Chicago slaughterhouse worker, recalls meeting Eddie, a man who introduced him to socialism and encouraged his reading of Marx. They became roommates and close friends; as Dick Nikowsski describes, their conversations were “so exciting it was almost a physical pain. I was high all the time. I was discovering I had a mind....You know, that’s one thing almost all Communists share, the memory of what it first felt like to read Marx, like fireworks exploding in your head, and the love you felt for the human intelligence.” Analysing these relationships, Dick Nikowsski goes as far to suggest that without Communism, he “would never have loved anybody in this life.” The metaphor of liquidity used by David Ross to describe the flow of Marxist thought that tragically dried up is reversed in an account provided by Will Barnes, a man born in a mining camp in Idaho who had been a hobo and a member of the IWW, before becoming a sailor. Whilst working onboard a ship, Will Barnes heard a CPUSA organiser speak. He describes this as precipitating a total transformation in his life, shifting the “lonely” “leaky misery” he had inside him into something “dry” and “light”, “soggy branches” suddenly becoming “kindling wood.” Like Nikowsski’s description of reading Marx, Will Barnes links his conversion to Communism with the fact that the Party enabled him to think, a process inspired by the friendship he developed with the organiser. Like fireworks or kindling, both of these accounts describe friendships as igniting transformative intellectual experiences that could collectively start a political blaze.”]
by Hannah Proctor, Larne Abse Gogarty // Works by Doris Lessing and Vivian Gornick on the fall-out around 1956 uncover the passion that's mi
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