The history of Communism and its standard-bearers in America is one of fascinating paradox and maddening waste. For the outcome of party membership, and even passing flirtation with its dogmas, was binary: either tragic delusion or sober retrospection. The movement’s finest accounts are exercises in the latter.
Any reading list ought to include Lionel Trilling’s 1947 novel, The Middle of the Journey (“Better, perhaps, to stay in the self-hatred of an enforced conformity than to enter the self-suspicion of even reasoned and justifiable treachery”), and the confessional essays of The God That Failed (1949), edited by Richard Crossman. “Having experienced the almost unlimited possibilities of mental acrobatism on that tight-rope stretched across one’s conscience,” Arthur Koestler reflected in the collection’s opening entry, “I know how much stretching it takes to make that elastic rope snap.” Maurice Isserman’s Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism belongs in their company.
