Since I first saw mention of it I've understood that Jonathan Lethem's new novel Dissident Gardens isn't for me. It's yet another entry in the endless procession of anticommunist novels written by this country's petit-bourgeois-liberal literary darlings, published and promoted by the big multinational corporate monopolies that control U.S. literature. Specifically it is one of the also apparently endless stream of madness-of-the-60s novels, in this case with a multigenerational twist as the earlier generation, the 60s generation's parents, are themselves communists in this version. Communists with a big C, Communist Party members, that is. So what's not to like? Well, obviously—and really I could have just assumed this, taken it on faith, but the reviews do make it clear—Dissident Gardens is not to like, is to loathe in fact, because its 40s-50s Communists and 60s-70s radicals are portrayed as, variously, misguided, duped, betrayed, hypocritical, demented, damaged and damaging. Well intended as their political activities may originally be, we're shown, goodhearted as they may start out, the outcome is inevitable: they'll be wrecked and they'll inflict much wreckage, especially on their children and families.
OK so what else is new? This is the official story. This is
one way bourgeois consciousness is purveyed in U.S. culture, via fiction, which
can be relied upon to show readers the awful errors of characters' ways when
those ways lead toward working-class struggle.
However. Lethem's novel goes further than this. It commits
an inexcusable slander against the Communist Party USA. I don't belong to the
CP, I belong to a different party, nor do I have much respect for what's left
of the CP, reduced as it is to a wan left adjunct of the Democratic Party. I do
have much respect, however, for the admirable earlier history of the CP,
especially as regards its work against racism. This is the Communist Party of
W.E.B. Du Bois, of Paul Robeson, of Benjamin Davis, of Claudia Jones; the CP
that led struggles against lynch law, that organized the defense of the
Scottsboro defendants; the CP of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades where Black and
white together went to Spain to fight the fascists; the CP that organized
anti-eviction struggles in Harlem and the Lower East Side. Against this proud
anti-racist history Lethem conjures up a vile, abhorrent fiction: one of the
novel's main characters, a white woman, is expelled from the CP for having an
affair with a Black police officer. And, just so we're clear, not because she's
consorting with an armed enforcer for the capitalist state, no no no. Because
her lover is Black. WTF?!? One of the few if not for many years the only
organization in this country in which people of all nationalities worked and
struggled together, in which yes there were many "interracial"
couples, and Lethem thinks the reader will swallow such a smear against it?
Well yes he does and yes no doubt most will, since most people have no
other information to counter this fiction. Further, Lethem's literary lie is
helped along quite nicely by Yiyun Li's front-page review in the September
8 New York Times Book Review. Li has the unbelievable gall to write in her
review that "had they been allowed, these Communists would not have
hesitated to lynch their comrade for sleeping with a black man."
You see how it's done? A reviewer (in this case a staunch
anti-communist whose own first novel was a full-on screed against the People's Republic of China given similar front-page treatment when it came out) is handed the front-page slot in the country's leading book
review and gets to use it to spew utter nonsense. The Big Lie—just put the opposite
of the truth out there and, don't worry, it'll fly! The fighters against racism
portrayed as racists! The organizers against lynchings depicted as themselves a
wannabe lynch mob! Not only were interracial relationships much more common in the
CP than in U.S. society as a whole and much earlier, I actually found a record
of the Party expelling someone for making a racist comment against a
Black-white couple. Expelled for opposing it, not for doing it! But hoo-hah,
what the hell, Lethem is getting his usual plaudits and Li gets in her usual
digs against the struggle of the workers and oppressed, and the bourgie book
people go along their merry mendacious moneymaking way tra-la.
