Leslie Evans's Revealing and Brilliant American Radical Memoir
by Julia Stein
May 10, 2010, 11:05 am
Leslie Evans' recently released memoir Outsider's Reverie: A Memoir (Boryana Books) is a fascinating look at how American radicals in the post World War II generation transformed from alienated '50s teenagers to '60s radicals to late '70s radical intellectuals to '80s leaving radical politics. The books is also a wonderful Los Angeles memoir.
The first seven chapters wonderfully captures Los Angeles and the 1950s and early 1960s youth counterculture there. Evans describes his feelings of being a teen outsider stemming from his parents' belief in spiritualism and seances; his family's poverty; and his parents' disintegrating marriage. He grew up in a tough working class neighborhood of Beverly and Temple just west of downtown Los Angeles. During high school Evans stumbles upon Colin Wilson's The Outsider, a 1950s cult book among the intellectually alienated. The Outsider gave Evans an intellectual identity as well as a reading list-- Camus, Sartre, Blake, et al. Evans as well as thousands of other 1950s outcasts devoured these books developing their outsider identity.
I was growing up in Los Angeles a little younger than Evans also read Wilson and many of these same books. My old friend Lionel Rolfe published Evans' book with his small press Boryana Books; Rolfe's previous press California Classics published my 2nd book of poetry and also Bread and Hyacinths, a book about Job Harriman and the 1912 socialist movement of Los Angeles. Rolfe has long written and published books which are a rebel as well as a intellectual history of Los Angeles in the 20th century.
Evans' memoir has wonderful chapters about his time at Los Angeles City College participating in the civil rights movement and coffee house scene around LACC and then his recruitment into the youth group of the Socialist Workers Party, the dominant U.S. Trotskyist party. He wonderfully describes being the party's first organizer at UCLA and the UCLA radical scene of the early 1960s. He aptly summarizes this time with the Wordsworth quote, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven."
The heart of this book is Evans's 22 years in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), starting in Los Angeles and then over a decade and half in New York during the SWP's glory years when it was central to building a huge anti-war coalition mobilizing huge numbers in the anti-Vietnam War marches. Evan's book is looking back after he was expelled when the party became a cult in the early 1980s. This memoir is much like The God that Failed, the book of essays by 1930s writers including Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone, Arthur Koestle-- Communists who wrote about became disenchanted with the Communist Party.
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