The God That Failed by Richard Crossman

Author:Richard Crossman [Crossman, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Crónica, Ensayo, Historia
Publisher: ePubLibre
Published: 1949-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

With the John Reed Clubs now dissolved, I was free of all Party relations. I avoided unit meetings for fear of being subjected to discipline. Occasionally, a Negro Communist—defying the code that enjoined him to shun suspect elements— came to my home and informed me of the current charges that Communists were bringing against one another. To my astonishment I heard that Buddy Nealson had branded me a “smuggler of reaction.”

Buddy Nealson was the Negro who had formulated the Communist position for the American Negro; he had made speeches in the Kremlin; he had spoken before Stalin himself.

“Why does Nealson call me that?” I asked.

“He says that you are a petty bourgeois degenerate,” I was told.

“What does that mean?”

“He says that you are corrupting the Party with your ideas.”

“How?”

There was no answer. I decided that my relationship with the Party was about over; I should have to leave it. The attacks were growing worse, and my refusal to react incited Nealson into coining more absurd phrases. I was termed a “bastard intellectual,” an “incipient Trotskyite”; it was claimed that I possessed an “anti-leadership attitude” and that I was manifesting “seraphim tendencies,” a phrase meaning that one has withdrawn from the struggle of life and considers oneself infallible.

Working all day and writing half the night brought me down with a severe chest ailment. While I was ill, a knock came at my door one morning. My mother admitted Ed Green, the man who had demanded to know what use I planned to make of the material I was collecting from the comrades. I stared at him as I lay abed, and I knew that he considered me a clever and sworn enemy of the Party. Bitterness welled up in me.

“What do you want?” I asked bluntly. ‘You see I’m il.”

“I have a message from the Party for you,” he said.

I had not said good day, and he had not offered to say it. He had not smiled, and neither had I. He looked curiously at my bleak room.

“This is the home of a bastard intellectual,” I cut at him.

He stared without blinking. I could not endure his standing there so stone-like. Common decency made me say, “Sit down.”

His shoulders stifened.

“I’m in a hurry.” He spoke like an army officer.

"What do you want to tell me?”

“Do you know Buddy Nealson?” he asked.

I was suspicious. Was this a political trap?

“What about Buddy Nealson?” I asked, committing myself to nothing until I knew the kind of reality I was grappling with.

“He wants to see you,” Ed Green said.

“What about?” I asked, still suspicious.

“He wants to talk with you about your Party work,” he said.

“I’m ill and can't see him until I’m well,” I said.

Green stood for a fraction of a second, then turned on his heel and marched out of the room.

When my chest healed, I sought an appointment with Buddy Nealson. He was a short, black man with an ever ready smile, thick lips, a furtive manner, and a greasy, sweaty look. His bearing was nervous, self-conscious; he seemed always to be hiding some deep irritation.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.