Dreams and Nightmares

Now I know why I flunked the test given by Vivian Gornick at lunch in a Chinese restaurant. It turned out that she was screening me for an interview to be used in a book she was writing on the romance of American Communism. But between the egg roll and the fortune cookie she apparently concluded that I was not among those who “walked the wire successfully and remained whole and strong.” Clearly, both her thesis and ideology were so neatly packaged in advance that she did not want to add my experience to that of an old, departed friend and comrade whom she had already interviewed.

My friend had been terribly disruptive of her idée fixe of Communism as creator of that “inner passion” and “inte...