Synopsis
Relates the story of the author's experiences in the American Communist Party, which began with her love affair with economist Hermann Brunck, and shows how the party refused to hear contradictions in its own beliefs or hear dissent
Reviews
The author and her husband, Hermann Brunck, an economist, were fervently devoted members of the U.S. Communist Party during the Depression. Their political experiences in New York City and Washington, D.C., are interesting, but the dominant theme of this haunting memoir is Davis's struggle to keep her husband in touch with reality. Party responsibilities combined with ominous happenings in the Soviet Union (Stalin's show trials, mass starvation, the Nazi-Soviet pact) triggered Brunck's mental deterioration and suicide attempts. Davis committed him to a sanatorium but disputes arose with the doctor in charge, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, a Freudian analyst who did not approve of insulin shock therapy. Brunck eventually killed himself. Davis, who is now in her 90s and teaches writing at the Radcliffe Seminars at Harvard, also spent years agonizing over her disillusionnment with the party. An elegantly written, intimate book.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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.
Now over 90 years old, Davis reviews her life and times as they unfolded six decades ago. Though she was an active member of the American Communist Party and had many high-ranking contacts, her travels down that road reveal surprisingly little about the radical movement at that time. The memoir comes to life, however, with Davis's account of her husband's mental illness. Enormously gifted, he collapsed beneath the weight of his party responsibilities and became the virtual prisoner of well-intentioned Freudian analysts. The decade that began with such joy, such a sense of commitment, concluded with Stalin's sellout to Hitler and the lonely suicide of Davis's husband. This is good mood stuff; comprehensive collections will wish to obtain it.
Mark R. Yerburgh, Fern Ridge Lib., Veneta, Ore.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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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