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In Pursuit of Clancy Sigal
A writer’s radical life
Gitlin, Todd http://yalereview.org/article/in-pursuit-of-clancy-sigal?fbclid=IwAR1YDKkChAXNJBX2vmR3_9YtZwSOQjl-VLJaAofEklxsMyoF4eh8n-4dRXI
Publisher: Yale Review
Date Written: 20/09/2021
Year Published: 2021
Resource Type: Article
I first encountered Clancy Sigal, in a manner of speaking, in 1963, during my last semester in college. That's when I picked up, and devoured, Doris Lessing's novel The Golden Notebook, which featured a character named Saul Green who was widely known to have been based on Sigal. At the time, I was a fervent and brooding left-wing activist with two years of political organizing under my belt (mostly trying to ban the bomb). So I was, unsurprisingly, enthralled by Lessing's book, which took left-wing politics and writing seriously, as human facts, not "background."
Abstract:
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Excerpt:
Clancy's radicalism was more consistent than his novelistic ambition. Through it all, until he died at ninety in 2017, he tried to keep the eternal flame lit. Stay in fighting trim. Choose sides. Make the most of defeat. He had no illusions about Stalinism. [...] It was a matter of primal identity. For him, communism was insurgency and solidarity—a way of life and a morality, not an economic or political arrangement. "It was the essence of what we believed that Communism was men standing up on their own two feet and, for the first time in history, ordering their lives in imperfect consultation but in perfect awareness."
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