560
PARTISAN REVIEW
Fifteen or so years later, when my name is on a letterhead as a re–
spectable sponsor, I am in an office where I overhear a young woman, the
treasurer, saying to the secretary (now a professor of resplendent re–
spectability), a young man dressed in the left-wing uniform of the time,
tight jeans, an oversized sweater with a hole in the elbow, " It's time we
got some more money out of our respectable sponsors." With the same
sarcastic contempt.
Edward Upward, a British Communist, wrote a novel series that il–
lustrates, like a little time capsule, not only his experiences, but ours - and
a thousand other groups. The series title is
The Spiral Ascent.
In
those days
everyone still believed that we were living in a time when things could
only get better. Humankind was bound for general prosperity and
progress - if you were Red, then this by definition could only be
achieved by the Communists. Volume One is
In the Thirties.
That is,
when "everyone" was Communist, near-Communist, or was reacting
violently against Communism. Volume Two is
Th e Rotten Elements.
The
author's note says it aims "to give an historically accurate picture of the
policies and attitudes in the British Communist Party during the late
1940s." You put the book down thinking you have been reading about
the fate of nations, but it's a story of a tiny group of isolated people in a
provincial town, whose every word, decision, action, is given the impor–
tance they would have in Moscow. Exactly: we are reading about the
same psychological processes, the same group dynamics, that made and
unmade the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Heroes and traitors,
splits and heresies, martyrs and plots and intrigues - it's all the same.
Volume Three , not published until 1977, is
No Home But the Struggle.
The
titles alone are like a little potted report of socialist thinking of that time.
