Great Day Coming: A Memoir of the 1930s - Hardcover

Davis, Hope Hale

9781883642174: Great Day Coming: A Memoir of the 1930s

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1883642175 ISBN 13: 9781883642174

Publisher: Steerforth Pr, 1994

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Scarcely a word about feminism...yet a feminist classic. --The Boston Globe

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From Kirkus Reviews:

An outstanding memoir of young motherhood, love, political dedication, and madness in the 1930s. What Hettie Jones did for the New York bohemian scene of the 1960s, Davis (The Dark Way to the Plaza, 1968) has done for the leftist 1930s. Her tale begins in 1933, when her daughter Claudia is born in New York City. Her husband, British journalist Claud Cockburn, has already returned to Europe to cover the struggle against German and Spanish fascism for his insider bulletin, The Week, soon to become an indispensable source of war news for the English-speaking left worldwide. For a time Davis, herself a published writer and magazine promotion manager, hopes for their reunion; while waiting, she and Claudia go to stay with her sister in Virginia. There she gradually builds a life working for the Department of Agriculture and is introduced to Washington's intellectually dynamic liberal-left world. She falls in love with economist Hermann Brunck, and they move in together. Then they join the American Communist Party, and Davis's account of that experience is masterful; she captures the intrigue of underground culture and the seductive, even irresistible, logic of Communist solutions, as well as Party operatives' frightening refusal to see contradictions or hear dissent. Brunck has a sudden breakdown, described by Davis in intimate, painfully stirring detail--from his paranoid delusions (which came to seem increasingly sane with the unfolding of the intricate webs of conspiracy spun by the Party, government Red-baiting, and world politics) to their moments of sexual passion in the mental hospital. Her conversations with both Freudian doctors and Party comrades reveal intelligent people participating in terrifyingly rigid thought systems, yet she reduces no one to caricature. Davis's memoir of her struggle to think for herself while buffeted by love and ideology is an agonizingly human account of one of history's most tormented decades. -- Copyright �1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Booklist:

Few reminiscences are as beautifully written and thoughtfully shaped as this one, and few are as interesting. Davis recounts the passion and the urgency of the Communist Party in the 1930s, with its certainty that the revolution would come and change the world, and the ultimate disillusionment when it failed to deliver its bright, populist promise. As much as she renders a portrait of the decade's politics, Davis also portrays a landscape of the writers, intellectuals, and idealists who populated pre-World War II Europe and America; such names as H. G. Wells, Christopher Isherwood, Ernest Hemingway, Nathanael West, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Evelyn Waugh crop up casually. More interesting, however, is how Davis weaves their stories with hers. Her descriptions of her loves, her child, and the events of her life are so exquisite and tuneful that her prose dances like the best poetry. Read her memoir for the writing, read it for the history, but read it--it's a treat. Mary Ellen Sullivan

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