One of the most acclaimed Communist poets lived her intimate life and forged her career as a modern feminist, but in her cultural theory and practice she professed to eschew loyalties based on gender difference. The avowed meager investment of Genevieve Taggard in gender identity is perplexing but not anomalous among the Literary Left. Her poetic credo is concordant with the antiromantic stance of her critical statements:
The reader will misunderstand my poems if he thinks I have been trying to write about myself (as if I were in any way unique) as a biographer might—or as a Romantic poet would, to map his own individuality. Since the earliest attempts at verse I have tried to use the “I” in a poem only as a means of transferring feeling to identification with anyone who takes the poem, momentarily, for his own. “I” is then adjusted to the voice of the reader.1
Yet Taggard did write several poems strictly about female life experiences, such as “To My Mother,” recalling her mother’s domestic labor, and “Proud Day,” about the Black singer Marian Anderson, which begins: “Our sister sang on the Lincoln steps.”2 She also proclaimed forthrightly in the book-jacket blurb of her Collected Poems that “Many poems in this collection are about the experiences of women. I hope these express all types of candid and sturdy women.”3 Taggard’s intricate and perhaps contradictory approach to gender can only be fathomed in the context of the particularities of her personal and political evolution.
Born in Washington State in 1894, Taggard was the eldest of three children whose parents were schoolteachers of Scotch-Irish and French Huguenot lineage. They were pietistic members of the Disciples of Christ Church, and occupied her childhood with the Bible and hymns.4 Until the age of two she lived on an apple farm in Washington, after which her parents moved to Hawaii to work in the public schools and start a missionary program. There, Taggard grew up among children of Hawaiian, Chinese, Portuguese, and Japanese descent, an experience that created a sense of racial equality and community amidst a refined indigence. Her remembrance of this childhood would differ vividly from her experiences on the mainland when the family twice returned for visits to their erstwhile domicile in Washington due to her father’s lung ailment and for economic reasons. The racism and class exploitation she beheld in Washington shaped her impression that she had been momentarily cast out of Eden.5 At the age of thirteen, back in Hawaii, Taggard became engrossed in Keats, writing imitations of his poems. For eighteen years she lived in a setting she would later idealize for its guile-lessness and for the rectitude of her family’s courtly pauperism. Thus her artistic discernment became molded around contrasts branded by repulsive realities (Washington State) and the intimation of a finer life (Hawaii), with her poetry constituting the transit between the two.
In 1914 Taggard was granted a scholarship to attend the University of California at Berkeley. Her father was by now too afflicted to work, so her family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where her mother ran a boardinghouse for students, with her assistance. Genevieve took assorted jobs to raise money for family expenses, which lengthened her undergraduate career to six years. Superior in literature, Taggard became editor of the college literary magazine, Occident. Inflamed by writers who had been associated with Occident, such as Frank Norris (1870–1902) and Jack London (1876–1916), she began thinking of herself as a socialist. Her writing teachers included Leonard Bacon (1887–1954) and Witter Bynner (1881–1968). In these years, Taggard was lofty and slender, with delicately sculpted features and brown hair. She spoke and read poetry with a rich, warm voice, and decades later Bacon remembered her as sweet-natured, radiantly pretty, and full of vital energy.6
With her verse published in a few national publications, Taggard came to New York in 1920 to work in the publishing house of B. W. Huebsch. Soon Van Wyck Brooks (1865–1963) was asking her to review for the Freeman. Taggard then initiated her own little poetry magazine, the Measure: A Magazine of Verse, with Maxwell Anderson (1888–1959), Elinor Wylie (1885–1928), Louise Bogan (1879–1970), and others, which lasted for six years. In 1921 she married a Jewish radical from Cleveland, Robert Wolf, and their daughter, Marcia, was born soon after.
Five books of her poetry appeared in the 1920s, amalgamating love lyrics, exotic recollections of Hawaii, and a Marxist sensibility: For Eager Lovers (1922), Hawaiian Hilltop (1923), Words for the Last Chisel (1926), and Traveling Standing Still (1928). In 1930 she published an acclaimed scholarly volume, The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson, concentrating on the Dickinsons’ father-daughter kinship. The volume had takenTaggard eight years to research and write, and was grounded in abundant primary materials and interviews. This substantial achievement was succeeded by more poetry: Remembering Vaughan in New England (1933), Not Mine to Finish (1934), Calling Western Union (1936), Collected Poems: 1918–1938 (1938), Long View (1942), Falcon (1942), A Part of Vermont (1945), and Slow Music (1946). In the late 1920s Taggard was temporarily an instructor at Mount Holyoke College. In 1931 she was honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship to pursue her poetry writing, which permitted her to take her daughter to Capri and Mallorca. She booked passage back to the United States to become one of the first faculty members at Bennington College. After 1934 she taught permanently at Sarah Lawrence College. That same year she divorced Robert Wolf and a year later married Kenneth Durant, the U.S. director of the Soviet news agency TASS. All through the 1930s Taggard’s books received complimentary reviews, and she enlarged her creative work to encompass collaboration with composers who put her poetry to music.
By the late 1940s Taggard began to show multiplying marks of illness due to hypertension; she retired from teaching in order to concentrate on her writing while living in the Vermont home she shared with Durant. In May of 1948 she was given an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters but failed to appear at the presentation ceremony. Taggard died in a New York hospital that November, shortly before her fifty-fourth birthday.
Taggard was able to intermix a career as a remarkably flourishing writer and teacher with a split personal life: initially, as a free-spirited bohemian radical; later, as a resolute and constant Communist fellow-traveler. Following her landing in New York, “Jed,” as Taggard was nicknamed by her friends, was introduced to the Masses and Liberator circle by Max Eastman, who would afterward be among her lovers, as would Joseph Freeman and playwright Maxwell Anderson (1888–1959). Her relation to Robert Leopold Wolf was tempestuous and convoluted. Wolf, born in 1895 to a wealthy Cleveland family, graduated from Harvard and made national news in 1916 with his first marriage, to a Bryn Mawr student, which was ratified by a signed contract in which both parties “promise to faithfully perform to the community all the duties and obligations of marriage necessary to the community’s welfare.”7 From the time Wolf divorced his first wife and married Taggard, monogamy was not a priority for Wolf, and for some time he doubted that he was the father of their daughter.8 After the child was born, Taggard conjectured that Wolf was angry because the new responsibility encroached on his dream of becoming a novelist. She also hypothesized that Wolf suffered a severe inferiority complex due to his self-hatred of his Jewish background.9 Later Wolf participated in a menage à trois with Josephine Herbst, who was Anderson’s lover as well.
A tall, nervously alert, wiry slim man with dark eyes, Wolf began his literary career as a disciple of D. H. Lawrence and Floyd Dell. In the 1920s, he issued a book of poems and some erotic stories about group sex and wife swapping. He then evolved into an early proponent of proletarian literature and traveled to the Soviet Union.10 Dell was initially announced as the godfather of Wolf’s daughter, but this status was afterward rescinded when their intimacy cooled. By the end of the decade Wolf was showing signs of psychological illness; institutionalized, he attacked a guard and was committed for life.
Taggard, devastated by Wolf’s retraction from her, was drawn to Kenneth Durant (1899–1972) during the late 1920s, when Durant was still married to Ernestine Evans, an editor at J. Lippincott. Joseph Freeman, employed by TASS at that time, mediated among the various parties as Durant’s marriage unraveled. Durant was born to a wealthy Philadelphia family in 1889; his grandfather had made money by investing in railroads in Russia. Durant graduated from Harvard in 1912, where he was friends with radical journalist John Reed, and then held jobs with the Philadelphia Bulletin and the Federal War Information Agency. Through a friendship with the American diplomat William C. Bullit, Durant assumed the post of aide to Col. Edward M. House, the adviser to President Woodrow Wilson, and was asked to attend the Versailles Peace Conference.
Roused by the Russian Revolution, Durant returned to the United States to become press secretary to the then unrecognized Soviet envoy. After publishing an official Soviet English language magazine for several years, he opened a bureau for the Soviet news agency TASS in 1923. Durant managed the TASS bureau for two decades until the onset of Taggard’s illness in 1944. Brokenhearted by her death, he retired to Vermont to write articles on outdoor subjects and a book about the Adirondacks. Durant became the director of the Blue Mountain Museum and married Helen Van Dongen, previously the wife of the Communist filmmaker Jorge Ivens. In 1972, Durant was stricken by a fatal heart attack.
While never a member of the Communist Party, Durant was dogmatically pro-Soviet and never demonstrated an autonomous or critical outlook. Taggard, although a free spirit in the 1920s, appears to have adapted to Durant’s political stance in the 1930s. Her correspondence at the time of the Moscow Trials with two close friends and literary mentors, Charles Erskine Scott Wood (1852–1944) and Sara Bard Field, reveals a zealous obstinacy in her devout credence in the guilt of the framed-up victims of the Moscow Trials. She accredited every allegation about Trotsky and his followers colluding with the Nazis.11 Her poetry collection Falcon was devoted utterly to pro-Soviet effusions, hinting at the manner in which her utopian fantasy about Hawaii had become reworked to cohere around a set of sites and symbols in the Soviet Union, including geographical ones such as Stalin’s birthplace (Tiflis) and a rest home on the Black Sea. At the peak of the Moscow purge trials she venerated the Soviet Union as “A country come forever past the shade / The dark, the stormy death that on this planet lies.” Its resolute action in defeating its enemies is “good news”:
The worker and the idle worker hear
The simple facts that crooks cannot confuse.
See, on this planet one large patch is changed.
The other areas work like chemical dyes
To blot the color out... maps daily ranged
In new alliance with new elaborate lies.12
While the utopian longings for a world they would never see were corroded by pessimism in the poetry of Herman Spector, cut short by the premature death of Sol Funaroff, and transmuted into nostalgia and guilt by Alfred Hayes, the example of Taggard suggests a trajectory in which vestiges of intellectual and moral doubt are increasingly absolved by a political piety of the emotions. Within this framework, the poems that Taggard came to cherish most were those optimistic about the hopeful possibilities of Communism.
In 1937, when Granville Hicks disapprovingly reviewed the poetry and prose selections in Horace Gregory’s volume New Letters in America, he assailed many selections for negativism. Nonetheless, he initiated his comments with a statement recalling his early training for the ministry: “Communism is good news.” From her desk at Sarah Lawrence, Taggard dashed off a letter to Hicks fully endorsing this uplifting sentiment, and urging him to look at her recent Collected Poems: “Some time ago I said what you only partly said in your New Masses piece. I said it well; I put it into portable form, I wished it to be used.” She then identified five key poems—“Image,” “Remembering Vaughan,” “Funeral in May,” “Definition of Song,” and “Lark”—as her legacy to the Left.13
The reigning themes of the first four poems are that joy comes in response to death and suffering, “reality” is what one discerns in the beauty and clarity of moonlight, and the duty of poetry is to infuse speech and movement with hope. Yet it was with the fifth poem, “Lark,” that she chose to close her collected works:
O lark, from great dark, arise!
O, lark of light,
O, Lightness like a spark,
Shock ears and stun our eyes
Singing the day-rise, the day-rise, the great day-rise.14
The proposition, that poetic optimism is the antidote to mental despair, seems to have evolved initially in the early 1930s when Taggard may have suffered a breakdown. During those years she also made her pledge to Communism and consolidated her relationship with Kenneth Durant. By the time of her death, it was her anthem.
Ruth Lechlitner was one of the most intellectually exacting of the poets who were pro-Communist. In her contribution to the 1935 Partisan Review discussion of revolutionary poetry conducted prior to the First American Writers’ Congress, she assented to many of the shortcomings of Left poets that had been cited in the introductory statement by Edwin Rolfe. Lechlitner, however, offers an alternative explication for the problems Rolfe noted of “static, fragmentary, repetitional and superficial” work. In her view, these deficiencies were the result of a lack of seriousness in the poets’ political absorption of the theory of the revolutionary movement. Lechlitner provides a minilecture on Hegel and dialectics, beseeching a greater understanding of the laws and processes governing the universe. Returning to the mid-nineteenth century for analogies, she reasons that the typical Left poet of the early Depression resembled John Greenleaf Whittier, who focused on the abolition of slavery and sought practical solutions to immediate problems. A superior model could be found in Whitman, she argues, who “saw also above and beyond [the immediate problems], finding a symbolical significance in the force actuating a group movement that is as true and applicable to our time as is his.” Lechlitner demurs from citing an exemplar of her own time, but affirms a series of watchwords as her closing advice to “the young revolutionary poet”:
think first; use the findings of philosophy, history, science as body and background for your own perceptions; learn that separate persons, objects, or places as subjects have no significance except as related to the force that has brought them into being; finally, don’t exploit your subject for all it is worth: bring something of rational and vital worth to it.15
Lechlitner had been born on 27 March 1901 in Elkhart, Indiana, the daughter of a builder named Martin Lechlitner, of Pennsylvania Dutch–German background, and Jessie Wier James Lechlitner, of Irish ancestry. She initially wrote poetry in high school and began publishing while achieving her B.A. in English at the University of Michigan. She secured the degree in 1923, by which time she was already persuaded by radical ideas. After teaching high school in Michigan, Lechlitner was hired in New Mexico but then fired for teaching Flaubert. She was afterward employed as Midland magazine’s editorial assistant and she also enrolled at the nearby University of Iowa.
While working to complete her M.A. degree in 1926, Lechlitner met a literary-minded undergraduate, Paul Corey. Concurrently they moved to New York’s Greenwich Village to embark on their writing careers and were married there in 1928. For their honeymoon they voyaged to Europe and then spent time living and writing in France, Spain, and England. After a second sojourn in New York, where they held office jobs, they moved in the spring of 1931 to reside on a few acres of land on the Hudson River near Cold Spring, New York. There they began a life of erecting their own houses, raising their own vegetables and chickens, and living independently on $1,000 a year. Lechlitner and Corey saw themselves as revolutionaries who believed in ecology and a back-to-the-land ethos as key elements of the Communist project. Lechlitner did some editorial work in New York City and was a routine reviewer for the New York Herald-Tribune.
Although Lechlitner later claimed that she was “never a Communist” and only barely a fellow-traveler, this is deceptive.16 The politics of both Lechlitner and Corey were on the whole pro-Communist in both the ultra-revolutionary and the Popular Front days of the 1930s, although their main activities were literary. Lechlitner contributed to the New Masses and the early Partisan Review, where she appraised poetry from a revolutionary Communist perspective, and she afterward became an active member of the League of American Writers, chairing the Book Distribution Committee and teaching at league schools. At the time of the rupture of Partisan Review from the Communist Party, Lechlitner and Corey named two of their chickens, destined for the axe, Rahv and Phillips, after the Partisan Review’s main pro-Trotsky editors. Later, however, they felt that the Communist Party had gone overboard in its anti-Trotskyist polemics, and the couple moved toward independent radicalism, and, finally, toward liberalism.17
Ruth detested jewelry, perfume, furs, cosmetics, and hairdos. She kept her hair quite short and wore no-frill dresses. Meticulous about her poetic craft, she published a book of poems during each of four decades—Tomorrow’s Phoenix (1937), Only the Years: Selected Poems, 1938–44 (1944), Shadow of the Hour (1957), and A Changing Season (1973). Her husband, meanwhile, wrote an autobiographical trilogy of radical farm novels about Iowa—Three Miles Square (1939), The Road Returns (1940), and County Seat (1941). In 1946 he published Acres of Antaeus, a political novel about the strife of small farmers in the 1930s, with one of the characters, Smiley, modeled on the novelist-turned-organizer, John Herrmann (1900–1959). Later Corey became a prolific author of juvenile and young-adult fiction, often with conservationist themes.
In 1947 the two writers, accompanied by their only child, Anne, migrated to the Sonoma Valley in California, where they once more built a domicile, grew produce, raised chickens, and kept a house full of cats. Lechlitner occasionally worked as a substitute teacher in the Sonoma Valley Unified School District. She organized local literary groups and even contributed poetry to the New Left Marxist journal Praxis in the 1970s. After a long illness in a convalescent hospital, she died in 1989 at the age of eighty-eight. Corey passed away two years later.
Lechlitner’s poetry is consecrated to the deliverance of humanity from superstition, fear, and cheap escapist sedatives in which it has been indoctrinated by the state, religious leaders, and industrialists. A lament that closed her first collection, “To a Future Generation,” concerns the failure of her own contemporaries, “who walked in the shadow/ Of a world ending.” She fixes the discrepancy between objective need and the blindness inculcated in people by the social order:
The mind found
In desperate confusion
Waste, poverty, greed;
But our habits
Were gardened, familiar; the new road
Unposted (we thought) unpaved.
And we answer:
The mind knew our need,
But the hands, long bound
To an accustomed task, a charted yesterday,
Were not young hands to hold
Firm to the changing course:
Another way.
Not the mind, but the hand failed us:
And the heart—bond-slave to childhood—
Looking back, betrayed us.18
Even in her occasional literary criticism that addresses fiction, Lechlitner dwelled on the need for an author to devise symbols aimed at disclosing causal connections to the reader, as in her observation about John Herrmann’s The Salesman (1939):
This is not just a book about a salesman—though the publishers seem to think so. It is (or rather should be) a book about a house [in the novel, that belonging to the mother-in-law of the salesman Crawford]. The one weakness of the novel lies in the fact that this theme is almost buried: the house as a symbol is only vaguely hinted at, not logically, cleanly used to knit together and give depth and meaning to the book as a whole. By so doing, Herrmann could have shown us more surely the forces behind Crawford’s failure as a salesman; and why the young couple, bound to the values of the past, emerge with no new set of values on which to build their future.19
In Lechlitner’s philosophy, “wholeness” is to be regained by contact with nature, the forging of community, and the development of creative reason. In a familiar Left-wing gesture, she eschews individuality to the extent that, even in a poem called “Notes for a Biography,” she becomes the voice of the entire nation, urging the United States to pass into a maturity of brotherhood. In a further poem, “This Body Politic,” she designates “the great I” as the servant of fascism.20 Lechlitner, however, in several poems dealt with women’s oppression more explicitly, and with greater rage, than had Genevieve Taggard. “Lines for an Abortionist’s Office” is written in the form of a prayer addressed to the state:
Close here thine eyes, O state:
These are thy guests who bring
To gods with appetites grown great
A votive offering.
Know that they dare defy
The words of law and priest—
(Better to let the unborn die
Than starve while others feast.)
The stricken flesh may be
Outraged, and heal; but mind
Pain-sharpened, may yet learn to see
Thee plain, O state. Be blind:
Accept love’s fruit: be sleek
Fat and lip-sealed. (Forget
That Life, avenging pain, will speak!)
Thrust deep the long curette!21
The bitter sarcasm of the verse is intensified by the tightly controlled stanzas with a perfect ABAB rhyme scheme. The female speaker, depicted as the voice of an individual but actually responding on behalf of a community of women who are “guests” in the abortionist office, sardonically urges the rulers of society to persist in their pretense of ignorance about the suffering they enforce. Religious references—the votive offering, the stricken flesh, the achievement of wisdom through suffering, the ironic use of “love’s fruit” to refer to the aborted fetus—powerfully accumulate to explode in the disconcerting image of the abortionist’s curette as the male phallus about to “thrust deep.”
Lechlitner’s “Case Recruit” magnifies the critique of patriarchy as the male ego is placed on full display. Desperately apprehensive of relying on its own resources, the ego finds gratification only in an audience that is nothing less than a maternal surrogate: “O—/ The womb-encircling mother.” Lechlitner’s attacks on an ego so steadfastly male-identified indicates that her project may indeed have been a complex revision of Eliot’s modernist call in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In that essay, Eliot called upon the poet to eschew individual feeling in favor of a certain kind of historical consciousness, to achieve a perspective from “the mind of Europe.”22 Lechlitner, in contrast, repeatedly assumes the voice of an omniscient consciousness, but one that is frankly partisan and collectivist, as if her antipatriarchal attitude led logically to a rethinking of the material and natural world in revolutionary terms. Thus she concludes “Garland for Spring, 1937” with a ringing declaration that fuses female fecundity and proletarian utopia: “Spring is an international season.”23
Joy Davidman was far more engrossed in Communist literary institutions than either Taggard or Lechlitner. Born Helen Joy Davidman in 1915, she was descended from Jews who had emigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe in the latter part of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.24 Her father, Joseph, came to the United States with his family at the age of six from Poland. He was the son of a street merchant and religious zealot who died of pneumonia contracted while making the somewhat unusual effort to convert Christians to Judaism in the street during the winter. Joseph, in direct response, became an atheist, a biology teacher, and ultimately a junior high school principal. In 1909 he married Jeannette Spivack, who was college educated and came from a liberal intellectual family. After a change of residence to a middle-class neighborhood in the Bronx, their two children, Helen Joy and Howard, were born immediately before World War I.
The parents, known as “Joe and Jen,” afforded a comfortable household, even during the Depression. But Joe was infamous for his parsimony and exactitude; he even liked to convene his children by sounding a metal whistle, expecting them to run to him instantaneously as if they were trained dogs. Moreover, he was unmerciful in his requirement for intellectual achievement; when Joy broke the scale on an I.Q. test he was content, but when Howard only scored 147 he was acutely displeased.25 To satisfy her father, Joy read H. G. Wells’s Outline of History at the age of eight, and then avowed that she was an atheist. At the age of twelve she professed her design to become a writer. There was also ample stress in the household due to encounters with anti-Semitism, the most painful occurring while on their seasonal vacations, where they encountered the ubiquitous threat that they might be refused lodgings once their ethnicity was known.
Joy was beset furthermore by health uncertainties from an early age. These drove her into a preoccupation with fantasy, not only the study of ghost and science fiction stories but actual clandestine visitations to the zoo at night where she supposed that she was communing with the giant felines. Frequent traumas influenced her to imaginatively picture a sheltered hideaway. Her first trauma may have been caused by her mother’s sudden separation for several weeks immediately after Joy’s strenuous birth; a physician had counseled her to go to a dude ranch alone to recuperate from the tribulation. Then, while still quite small, Joy began to feel discomfort when she went to bed. This turned out to be the consequence of a crooked spine, which troubled her for years before it was correctly diagnosed. Next, her parents became anxious about her protruding eyes. The reason was ascertained to be hyperthyroidism, which, after many misdiagnoses, was treated with a radium belt arranged around Joy’s throat for twenty-four hours once a week over the passage of a year. The procedure seemed to work at the time, but it was presumably the cause of the cancer that would riddle her body following her fortieth birthday. A more instantaneous side-effect of the radium-belt strategy was that Joy began to sicken from exorbitant insulin secretion inducing a low sugar level in her blood that generated tremors, cold sweats, fainting, and a major appetite increase.
After attending Public School 45, where one of her classmates was Julius Garfinkle, subsequently the actor known as John Garfield, she enrolled in Evander Childs High School. There two more infirmities, scarlet fever and anemia, obliged her to forego classes for drawn-out periods. In these years she began to have a persistent dream that continued into her early thirties, when she finally reproduced it in a poem called “Fairytale”:
At night, when we dreamed,
we went down a street
and turned a corner,
and there, it seemed,
there was the castle.
Always, if you knew,
if you knew how to go,
you could walk down a street
(the daylight street)
that twisted about
and ended in grass;
there it was
always, the castle.
Remote, unshadowed,
childish, immortal,
with two calm giants
guarding the portal,
strong to defend,
stood castle safety
at the world’s end.
O castle safety,
love without crying,
honey without cloying,
death without dying!
Hate and heart break
all were forgot there;
we always woke,
we never got there.26
This yearning for personal security, with the idealized likeness of parents before the family home (“two calm giants/ guarding the portal” of the “castle safety”), eerily invokes Franz Kafka’s The Castle (1926); it is also easily comprehensible in light of Davidman’s incessant illnesses. Yet her judgment to publish the verse as a contribution to a collection of antifascist poetry in the early days of World War II insinuates that the imagery resonated with political concerns for her as well.
A feeling of fragility merged with her need to satisfy her imperious father, not to mention her anxiety as a small woman (five feet two inches tall) and a Jew. Her uneasiness about her Jewish identity should not be deprecated; her earliest mental connections with the name “Christ” tended to be dread. Moreover, she felt “cold chills” at the mention of “Jews,” who had become in the hands of Christians the object of “floggings and burnings, ‘gentleman’s agreements,’ and closed universities.”27 This terror accounts for the inordinate total of allusions to Christ, crosses, and the New Testament found in her poetry, beginning with her very first contribution, “Resurrection.” Her poem “Waltzing Mouse” exhibits the fear of death that stemmed from her sundry insecurities as well as from the brittle health of her youth:
Impulse as I was when I was born,
caught upon time’s nether horn,
murdered through and through with birth,
cankered with corrupted earth....
Every hour of sunlight I
watch my body partly die....
... I see my painful track
blotted out behind my back
till I die as I was born,
slain upon time’s other horn.28
In this specimen the conventional form and formal diction once more manifest the need for a brawny and stable structure, a kind of backbone, to bear the tormented body and mind of the poet.
With a high school diploma at the age of fourteen, Joy was admitted to Hunter College in the Bronx in the fall of 1930. At the time she had penetrating brown eyes, short dark hair, and an exquisite complexion. But she was also slightly chubby and infamous for her inferior refinement in clothes. She briskly became an English major and peerless friends with Bel Kaufman, the granddaughter of Sholem Aleichem, afterwards known for her novels Up the Down Staircase (1964) and Love, Etc. (1979). Concurrently they plunged themselves into literary activity. Joy became associate editor of the Hunter College Echo, where she published short fiction, poems, and translations. She also embarked on a love affair with a professor, a Phi Beta Kappa with a Ph.D. from Columbia who was mature enough to be her father.
Davidman’s recurrent dream of a quest for sturdy security that always stays out of reach foreshadows her drift toward older men. It furthermore augurs the manner in which she eventually related to Communism, as well as her ultimate religious conversion. Moreover, a prize-winning story she wrote at Hunter College, “Apostate,” portends additional aspects of her life and work. Appearing in the November 1934 issue of the Echo, the narrative concerns the Jewish daughter of a miserly father in a Russian village. Up in arms against her parents’ scheme to marry her to a weak-willed Jewish man, the young woman contracts a furtive arrangement of her own to marry a strong-appearing Christian, with the contingency that she must be baptized and forswear Judaism. At the instant her conversion is to take place, her father and brothers emerge and start thrashing and kicking her, while her Christian fiancé stays inert and the Christian spectators chortle. The unrefined substance of “Apostate” came from accounts that her mother told her about her mother’s native village in the Ukraine, but her story also reveals an apprehension that her obsession with finding a person of strength might lead to her perpetrating some species of elementary disloyalty.29
Davidman radicalized in the same mode as did many other students during the Depression, dazed by the inequalities and hardship that surrounded them. In the spring of 1934, near graduation, she was profoundly shaken when she eyewitnessed a young woman, driven by the desperation of destitution, leap to her doom from a rooftop. That autumn, Davidman started teaching high school English while also matriculating at Columbia in an M.A. program in literature. When her thyroid problem returned, she continued the familiar treatment, abandoned teaching, wrote poetry, and completed her degree with honors in December 1935. In the fall of 1936 she discovered herself in the classification of “permanent substitutes” when she endeavored to continue her public school vocation, which meant low salaries and supplementary distasteful tasks, such as floor scrubbing.
In the summer of 1937 Davidman resigned as a substitute and, encouraged by the presentation of an assortment of her poems in the January 1936 and March 1937 issues of Poetry, determined to take advantage of her parents’ munificence to write full-time. Later that year, with the aid of Poetry editor Harriet Monroe’s devising for her to meet the poet Stephen Vincent Benét (1899–1943), Davidman proffered a collection of her poems, mostly unpublished, to the Younger Poets Series that Benét edited for Yale University Press. Letter to a Comrade, eighty pages of verse, appeared in 1938 with an introduction by Benét. The reviews, mostly by women, were approbatory. Her association with Benét led Davidman to a lifetime alliance with the Brandt and Brandy literary agency, and also with the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, where Davidman passed the summers of 1938, 1940, 1941, and 1942. In July 1940, Davidman published her novel Anya, also grounded, like “Apostate,” in her mother’s yarns about her youth in Eastern Europe. The main figure in Anya is a sexually emancipated woman who has affairs before and after marriage, asserting that “no man shall have power over me.”30 The dust-jacket blurb likened Davidman’s work to the fiction of D. H. Lawrence. What is unusual is that Anya’s sensuality stems mainly from the zest of her senses, which brook no limitations or constraint, rather than from promiscuity or lust. The response of reviewers was again approving; they applauded the deftness of the writing as well as the depiction of the main character.31
Although Davidman took pleasure from her literary successes during the late 1930s and her fraternization with the artists with whom she was now in touch, she continued to be obsessed by the experiences of the Depression and, step by step, apprehended that her opinions were like those of a Communist. The most attendant issue provoking her to join the Communist Party was the Spanish Civil War, which became the topic of various of her poems. Yet she also felt obliged to take some kind of personal activity on behalf of her beliefs. Years afterward she recollected that, when a Communist acquaintance asked her if she was joining the Party to aid others (hinting at a sort of paternalism), or out of her own self-interest, she “lied” and explained that it was the latter.32
After several efforts to join the Communist Party at large gatherings, she achieved membership in a Manhattan Party unit and briefly used the party name “Nell Tulchin”; Tulchin was the name of the village in the Ukraine from which her mother had emigrated, which she also used in Anya. Her parents were aghast at the news, but slightly palliated shortly there after when Letter to a Comrade won $1,000 in a prize from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.33 Davidman was then solicited to work (with no salary) at the New Masses as the poetry critic. Among her first determinations, she bragged, was to reject submissions by Oscar Williams (1900–1964), a popular anthologist who had extended one adverse observation in his otherwise positive review of Letter to a Comrade.34
Hardly had she made her mark at the New Masses before the Hollywood studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which had requested names of possible screenwriters from one of Davidman’s Hunter College professors around the same time that Anya had been accepted for publication, proffered her an invitation to come to Hollywood to try writing screenplays at fifty dollars a week for six months. She concurred, but the Hollywood experience brought only rebuff of her work by the studio as well as a miserable love affair. She spent much of her time in Hollywood at Communist Party social and political events. Back in New York by the fall of 1939, she rejoined the New Masses in time to bolster morale at the magazine with her fervid support of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. She also became active in the League of American Writers. Her major contribution to the League, War Poems of the United Nations (1943), was a collection of 300 poems by 150 poets from different countries, for which she did many translations on a haphazard basis and allegedly devised two poets from England for the selections to reinforce that country’s representation.35 She edited, as well, the posthumous poems of Alexander F. Bergman (1912–1941, born Alexander Frankel), a staunch young Communist whose writings were collected in They Look like Men (1944). In 1941 and 1942, Davidman taught a class on poetry at the league’s New York Writers’ School. Due to her Hollywood experience, Davidman was habitually assigned films to review, and she proved to be a harsh judge of popular Hollywood entertainment while virtually uncritical of Soviet productions. Soon her New Masses job became salaried.
At a 1941 meeting of the League of American Writers, Davidman first saw a radical folksinger, William Lindsay Gresham (1909–1962). Less than two years later in August 1941 they were married. Almost instantaneously she found herself less interested in attending Communist Party functions, which afterward led her to reflect that a good part of her motivation and that of other young people to join the Party was to find a mate. Moreover, Gresham was already personally demoralized about prospects for the Left, and, once Davidman gave birth to her first son, she recognized that children came before everything else. By 1943 she was no longer reviewing films, and her contributions to the New Masses diminished to poems and book reviews, ceasing altogether in the summer of 1945. In 1944, she contributed seven poems, most of which were militantly antifascist, to the landmark volume edited by Thomas Yoseloff, Seven Poets in Search of an Answer. In April 1946 her name was dropped from the New Masses masthead, and she no longer showed up at any Communist Party meetings.
Davidman had always subordinated herself to older men and strong authority figures, rebelling mainly by swapping loyalties from one to another. But in Gresham, approaching his mid-30s, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and already divorced, the twenty-seven-year-old Davidman had found someone far more complicated than she had anticipated.36 At the time they met he was six feet tall, lean, with dark eyes, a deep baritone voice, and demonstrative body language that proclaimed sensuality.
Born in Baltimore in 1909, of a southern family, he had lived in Fall River, Massachusetts, and then graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. Gresham was thus able to baffle people by affecting a Southern accent and impersonating a backwoods preacher even as he fit comfortably into Manhattan’s East Side. He began to support himself in the early 1930s by taking odd jobs and singing folksongs in night clubs. After two years in the Civilian Conservation Corps, he met and married Jean Karsavina (1908–1989), an unrestrained bohemian from a well-to-do Jewish family who was embarking on a career as a pulp writer and life-long Communist.37 Gresham was a reviewer for the New York Evening Post for a while, and also worked writing advertising copy while he made an initial foray into pulp writing. About 1936 he joined the Communist Party, but he was feeling disconsolate in his marriage. When he learned that a friend of his was killed fighting the fascists in Spain, he felt moved to volunteer for the International Brigades in which he served as a medic for a year and a half. When he returned to New York he was alcohol dependent, on the threshold of a nervous breakdown, and still embroiled with Karsavina in a marriage that was basically over, although not officially so until the beginning of 1942. After a blundered suicide attempt—he had hung himself with a leather belt in his closet, but the hook broke—a Communist Party friend devised for him to undergo a psychoanalysis that continued for several years.
In the course of his therapy Gresham was compelled to face his painful youth. In particular, he focused on the summer of his sixteenth year when he seemed to experience an intellectual and artistic awakening, finding himself astonished by his responsiveness not only to poetry but to the “loveliness of each blade of grass and dandelion.”38 The moment was broken by his parents’ divorce, resulting in a disaffection from his father whom he did not see for the next seven years. He postulated that the trauma produced a case of acne so hideous that people on the subways seemed to be edging away from him. As a consequence, Gresham stood in front of the mirror performing for hours how to be winning, studying to sing and play the guitar, and immersed himself into the world of magic tricks and carnival lore.39
His marriage to Davidman did not terminate Gresham’s love of the fellowship of carnival people, who used to congregate at the Dixie Hotel in Manhattan. Nor did it end his heavy drinking and his ardor to continue therapy, paid for by Davidman’s twenty-five-dollars-a-week salary from the New Masses. After moving to Sunnyside in Queens, where many other Leftists lived, Davidman gave birth to two sons, David in 1944 and Douglas in 1945. Then Davidman detected that Gresham was having an affair—she alluded to the incident in a poem published in the New Masses40 —and she requested firmly that they move out of the city, to Ossining, New York, on the Hudson River. After the move, the friction between them only grew worse. One day Gresham phoned from New York and declared that he was in the midst of a nervous breakdown; he professed that he was in a state where he couldn’t stay where he was and he couldn’t return home, and then hung up. David-man spent the rest of the day making phone calls in a frenzied attempt to locate friends to help find him, then put her sons to sleep. Alone in the dark, she experienced what she later claimed was a thirty-second visitation from God, which caused her to drop to her knees in prayer.
When Gresham returned after several days, he acknowledged her claim that she had a spiritual experience and together they began reevaluating their philosophy. Davidman, in particular, felt that she had to settle accounts with Marxism and for the first time read Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Ungratified, she felt she should give Judaism a chance, but found that what she read about Judaism did not harmonize with what she had felt in her instant of elation—“the conviction of sin followed by the assistance of God’s grace.”41
In the meantime, their resolve to set out on a new course seemed to acquire a helping hand when Gresham published his first novel, Nightmare Alley (1946), a grisly tale of carnival life which would become a pivotal text of roman noir. The central character, Stan, has many traits of Gresham as a youth, and the work was conceived with the conscious inspiration of Marx and Freud. The novel might conceivably be regarded as Gresham’s forecast of where he could end up without the ballast of a guiding philosophy—it climaxes with a now-alcoholic Stan earning money for booze as a geek biting heads off live chickens in a carnival show. The book was a commercial success beyond all expectations, and even brought an unanticipated $60,000 movie contract.42
Before Gresham could drink up the money, Davidman induced him to invest it in a southern-style mansion on twenty-two acres of land in Pleasant Plains, New York. It was there that she and Gresham became enchanted by the writings of the English Christian apologist C. S. Lewis, and then drawn to his most illustrious disciple in the United States at the time, the poet, priest, and Beloit College professor Chad Walsh. In the summer of 1948 Davidman and her sons, with Gresham’s blessing, were baptized at the nearby Presbyterian church that they had all been attending. Soon after, however, the family switched from this Calvinist denomination to an Episcopalian congregation. Davidman then initiated a correspondence with Chad Walsh that would last to the end of her life; she also began writing a novel that would reveal her new faith. Concurrently, Davidman collaborated with Oliver Pilat, a journalist for the New York Post, in a long series that appeared from October to November 1949 called “Girl Communist,” covering her Communist Party experiences. Davidman was adamant that most Party members were merely well-meaning people who were self-deluded, but her account was spiced with hilarious as well as outrageously unfair anecdotes and observations about her former comrades. Meanwhile, Gresham published his second novel, Limbo Tower (1949), dedicated to the poet Alexander Bergman, depicting life in a hospital with the main character a zealous revolutionary dying of tuberculosis.
At Walsh’s recommendation, Davidman inaugurated a correspondence with C. S. Lewis, writing to him as “Mrs. W.L. Gresham,” in which she advanced inquiries about his notions. The two rapidly became ardent pen-pals. In the meantime, although Gresham and Davidman had publicly announced their conversions from Marxism to Christianity in the 1951 book These Found the Way, Gresham had further evolved to become an enthusiast of L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics. This new obsession coexisted with his Christianity for a brief time, but his next infatuation—Zen Buddhism—was clearly incongruous. That was followed by an enthrallment with the I Ching, Tarot cards, and yoga.
In the 1940s, Gresham joined Alcoholics Anonymous and seemed to have his drinking under control, but there next emerged a profound strain with Davidman over their rivalry as writers. Gresham also habitually pontificated male chauvinist ideas about how to handle women, including crackpot theories about the menstruation cycle and the uprightness of the double standard in sexual life. When Gresham lost his temper, he would go down to his basement and shoot a rifle.43 Davidman, in the meantime, plugged away on the work of fiction that would reflect her new philosophy. In 1952 she published Weeping Bay, a revamped proletarian novel with a religious worker-hero. Set in Canada, the novel depicts a Catholic union organizer who defies an alliance of the religious hierarchy and businessmen. Although there were strongly positive reviews, Davidman believed that distribution of the novel was undermined by a Catholic sales manager at Macmillan’s publishing house who was affronted by her handling of the church establishment.44
In 1952 Joy’s younger first cousin, Renée Pierce, came to live in the Gresham home with her two children. She was in concealment from a drunken and brutal husband in the South. With this new domestic situation, Davidman announced that she needed to make an expedition to England to confer with C. S. Lewis in person, leaving Renée in charge of the household. The story of Davidman’s meetings with Lewis in England, her gradual enchanting of Lewis and his brother, and the circumstances leading to the stunning marriage of Davidman to the life-long bachelor Lewis in 1956, received widespread notoriety in the 1992 motion picture Shadowlands. The film also depicts Davidman’s up-and-down battle with cancer before she died at the age of forty-five in the summer of 1960.
A less-idealized consideration of the circumstances of the break-up of her marriage with Gresham suggests that Davidman probably arranged the domestic situation so as to precipitate a turn of events allowing her to absolve her obligation, as an Episcopalian, to resist divorce. She may well have conspired to leave her attractive younger cousin—who was herself in the midst of a break-up of a marriage—alone for months in the same house as the charming and womanizing Gresham. Based on past experience, Davidman must have known that this would lead Gresham to temptation. Moreover, Renée, in contrast to Davidman, was of a predilection to dedicate herself exclusively to her husband and offer no intellectual rivalry; this rendered her especially tantalizing as a long-term surrogate for Davidman. Not surprisingly, while in England Davidman received a letter from Gresham proclaiming his resolution to divorce her and marry Renée. Davidman showed the letter to Lewis, who gave her on-the-spot guidance to go ahead and concur in the divorce offer, then he told her to bring her children to England.
After Davidman’s death, Lewis was shattered; he followed her to the grave within three years. Gresham’s descent was even more pathetic. Surviving by writing articles on carnivals and magic in men’s magazines, he also lectured on side-show acts where he would demonstrate fire-eating. One of his most popular performances over the years, sometimes done at local libraries, was “The Human Volcano.” For this act, Gresham took a sip of lighter fluid and sprayed it at the lighted torch “with a satisfying woosh! that scared the pants off some of the old folks.”45 A chemical in the lighter fluid apparently induced cancer of the tongue, and by the early 1960s Gresham was in constant pain and able to consume food only through a straw. On 14 September 1962, Gresham checked into the Dixie Hotel, a carnival workers’ hangout in Manhattan, under a false name. He downed a bottle of sleeping pills and this time successfully killed himself.
Gender issues are manifested complexly in Davidman’s poetry. In public statements made after she left the Communist Party, she described Party women as “feminists.” Her grounds were that the women mainly wanted equality with men. Davidman also derided Party efforts to root out male chauvinism as petty and ridiculous.46 This, however, was written retrospectively, during her Christian phase, and the attitude Davidman satirized may well have been more her own than that of others. Despite her fascination with strong faiths and strong men, it should be recognized that the faiths she chose were enveloped by a considerable intellectual apparatus, and her erotic attractions were evident in all phases of her evolution—from her early affairs and the celebration of infidelity in Anya to her obsession with the womanizing Gresham, and to her romantic infatuation with her religious mentor C. S. Lewis.47
A plea for women’s independence is clearly intended by the tough, clean, pure image of her poem “This Woman” in its call for women to forsake ribbons and ornaments in order to “go bare, go bare.” Moreover, since the phrase “This Woman” comes from the marriage ceremony, the poem must be taken as a declaration of emancipation from conventional marital expectations. Nevertheless, Davidman as a poet has to be apprehended as one who negotiates cross currents; that is, she moves against some patriarchal conceptions of gender construction but reconstitutes others. As she shifts her loyalty among various authority figures, she is simultaneously disobedient and obedient. This is evidenced in her poem “Letter to a Comrade.” The piece is dedicated to a woman (Ellen Weinberg), and its invocation of the “wanderer” seems to conjure up an empowering female quest-figure. Yet the world is seen through ostensibly “genderless” eyes, and conventional images of masculinity and femininity abound.
Prevailing gender representations are also characteristic of the extraordinary number of warlike poems that appear in Letter to a Comrade and her contributions to Seven Poets in Search of an Answer (1944), often featuring martyrs who are either historical males (the slave rebel Spartacus, the German Communist Ernst Thaelmann) or figured as males. In “The Princess in the Ivory Tower” she describes a male seeking to escape the horrors of the “real world” by climbing to utopia by way of the golden hair of the fairy-tale character Rapunzel. “Twentieth Century Americanism,” which memorably asserts “America” as urban and ethnic, speaks in a powerful voice in a huge arena. The poetic act may be that of a woman who has emerged from the private and protected world of conventional gender construction, but the voice aspires to be gender neutral. “Prayer against Indifference,” in a style recalling that of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950), moves away from Davidman’s more customary stance; the “I” is evidently the poet, swearing fidelity to a life of political commitment, and the opening references are in language associated with female experience:
When wars and ruined men shall cease
To vex my body’s house of peace.
And bloody children lying dead
Let me lie softly in my bed
To nurse a whole and sacred skin
Break roof and let the bomb come in48
Some of Davidman’s curious inversions in other of her poems upset customary gender depictions. In “Skeleton,” beauty, usually associated with a female, becomes a wolf who “has eaten out my soul / and left me empty.”49
In further poems there are several points at which a complex dialectic of gender in binary relations comes into action. “Obsession,” a compelling invocation of one’s erotic need for a recipient of hatred, presents the object of obsession as a male and the speaker implicitly a female. The object has power over the female—yet the female takes pleasure from the relationship while understanding the mutual dependency for what it is:
This hate is honey to my tongue
And rubies spread before my eye,
Sweet in the ear as any song;
What should I do, if he should die?50
In “Jewess to Aryan” the former is depicted in positive terms that are female, while the latter, in negative terms that are male:
I have resented you; a parasite worm
drinking the female....
Nevertheless there is the same eerie kind of indispensability of the “Jewess” for the Aryan as in “Obsession,” a disturbing form of love that will evaporate if the former is sapped in power. Hence the mysterious ending: “When I have no more strength / you might be afraid of me.” The contention here recalls that of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Hegelian essay Anti-Semite and Jew (1947) in which each element of the equation is defined only by its relation to the other.
Yet Davidman is hardly consistent in her reliance on such dialectical lines. Like Funaroff, and so many others on the Left, she could readily fall back on romantic pieties. “End of a Revolution,” for example, returns her to the tradition of familiar Whitmanian imagery:
When I am born again
I shall come like the grass-blade;
I shall be fertile and small
As the seed of grasses.
Rain shall breed me;
Earth shall bear me;
I shall smell of the sun over the green fields.51
Here the poet-seer breaks down in the face of imagining a post-revolutionary society, retreating to pastoral utopian clichés.
In a comparable manner Davidman’s love poems often cast males and females in customary roles:
Now under a rainstorm corn is come again
and it shall ripen into the body of my love.
Now birdseed scattered falling makes again the summer
burning with leaves, bringing the pollen grain,
the rain falling like seed the firseed fallen
the honey thick in trees and the smell of rain
and the bird crying alone. I for my lover
cook magic over woodfires to call him home
Such incantatory rhythms and erotic imagery have an aura of recorded dream sequences, hinting at mythologies and rituals of a collective unconscious. Yet there are also moments in her love poetry that her lines are full of sensuous, materialistic desire that come close to constituting acts of defiance against Communist poetic decorum. For example, in “Prayer Against Barrenness,” with echoes of D. H. Lawrence, she celebrates the liberating phallus: “Let passion / come in the shape of a sword against winter and set me free.”52 In “Prothalamion” she declares the need to
open the arms of the woman to him
that he may take possession;
open the body of the woman
that his seed may be acceptable into her womb.53
This species of poetry suggests that Muriel Rukeyser’s famous declaration in her 1935 Theory of Flight, “Not Sappho, Sacco,” should not be affirmed too schematically as evidence of the displacement of individualistic, female, and sensual concerns by class politics in the 1930s.54 Despite variations among the oeuvres of Genevieve Taggard, Ruth Lechlitner, and Joy Davidman, the sum total of their work suggests an axial tension—one that exists between their serrated expressions of feminist concerns and their steady loyalties to utopian visions of societies free of race and class oppression, visions usually suffused with natural beauty and often marked by untrammelled professions of erotic passion. Genevieve Taggard expounded this tension, with an ultimate subordination of gender, in maintaining that her most mature poems “hold a wider consciousness than that colored by the feminine half of the race. I hope they are not written by a poetess, but by a poet. I think, I hope I have written poetry that relates to general experience, and the realities of our time.”55
The poems of these three women are conspicuous examples of texts by females that actively structure the meaning of sexual difference in their society, cognizant to varying degrees that gender is a categorizing contrived through cultural and social systems. Such writings cannot be assigned to any particular feminist canon, such as the decades-old view that female anger is the key that unlocks women’s experience. Still, they afford historically critical materials for the analysis of the political implications of a number of possible intersections of feminist concerns and class loyalties in the mid-twentieth century. This achievement, however, took place under conditions where pro-Communist women writers were part of a political movement that devoted only limited theoretical attention to the origins and dynamics of women’s oppression. The contrast was dramatic in comparison to the Communist Party’s much more extensive analysis of the oppression of African Americans. Yet, despite the absence of a theory of gender oppression as compelling as that of national oppression, as well as the semi-autonomous organizational forms pioneered by Black Communists such as the League of Struggle for Negro Rights and the National Negro Congress, the aggregate of Left women writers within the cultural institutions led by the Communist movement was consequential and precursory.
The term “feminism,” prior to the “Second Wave” of the 1960s, primarily meant “bourgeois feminism”; that is, the battle for rights and equality for individual women within a capitalist framework. Such a standpoint was opposed by women in the Communist Party who believed that economic democracy, and the abolition of class and racial privilege, would be the context in which women would achieve liberation. The degree to which this perspective supported the autonomous struggle by women as women remained ambiguous, especially during the late 1930s when cross-class alliances against fascism were promoted. Certainly “the woman question” was recognized as a subject matter that raised consciousness about the differential treatment of women and the pervasive discrimination against them. “Male supremacy” was officially denounced, and occasionally efforts were made to advance women leaders as well as to institute organizations and publications that addressed women-specific matters. While it was accepted throughout the Communist movement that women’s oppression was a pressing question, it was also determined secondary to the emancipation of the working class and fighting racism.56 Within that framework, divers Communist women of note intermittently offered in the pages of the New Masses a range of critical analyses of the relationship of gender to class and revolution, including Grace Hutchins, Rebecca Pitts, Mary Inman, Ella Winter, Ruth McKenney, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.57
As was the case in the dominant culture, while some women creative writers aspired to adapt to patriarchal models, others found a range of ways of talking back to the masculinist paradigms. Regardless of the prevailing attempt to identify working-class life with the male experience, women invariably had an independent relation to work and the class struggle, and literary women forged their own portrayals and metaphors appropriate to their personalities and experiences. Meridel Le Sueur, for example, in her noted defense of Communist Party membership against Horace Gregory’s plea for the right to stand “outside” the Party, does not present the same kind of expected, logical argument found in Mike Gold’s ten-point manifesto in which he explained “why I am a Communist.”58 Instead, she pleads the case for a psychic break with the past and the need to strive for communal interaction. Using maternal and birth metaphors, she critiques bourgeois existence as impotent and infertile; if one can’t act on a full belief, one doesn’t “exude the warmth to hatch.”59
It is unlikely that this particular form of gendered language was the mode of expression preferred by the New Masses editors since it nowhere else appears in other discussions of Communist Party commitment by males, such as the one by Edwin Seaver.60 Indeed, the language used by Gregory was probably more in accordance with the magazine’s style, despite his heterodox stance. But Le Sueur’s position as the reliable defender of Communist Party commitment, against the stance of the vacillating Gregory, enabled her to employ language and ideas that might be seen as subversive to the masculinist gender-valorizing language normally published. As in the case of modernism, demonstrable political loyalty might earn one greater latitude in matters of literary style.
Thus women poets participated in shaping Left cultural practice from a variety of angles. Scholar Charlotte Nekola, for example, has identified three types of women’s Left-wing poems in the 1930s. First, those that addressed the characteristic political issues of the day, which primarily afforded women an opportunity to write poems of larger scope than hitherto acceptable. Second, those that challenged moods of “ironic despair, aestheticism, and meaningless or elitist erudition” found in the works of such modernist poets as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound; these poems may have been implicitly feminist in the sense that males dominated the tradition under attack (female experimentalist poets such as Gertrude Stein were not indicted). The third and least constant type was “poems that dealt with issues of gender or celebrated specifically female traditions.”61 Of minimal significance, if written at all, were poems on women’s work, factory or domestic, women in power relationships with men, women’s community, and love relationships between women.
That male writers, overwhelmingly white and at least half of them Jewish, set the tone on the leading bodies of the official, New York–based publications of the Communist Left is indisputable. Within this framework, a dozen or so female poets and novelists have survived or else been revived as distinctive voices addressing the nexus between gender and class. What requires further illumination is the cultural practice of women among the rank and file of the Communist movement, the female counterparts of “Jimmie Higgins”—the Jenny Higginses of the Communist-inspired Literary Left.62
Of the twenty-nine poets included in Proletarian Literature in the United States, only Taggard and Muriel Rukeyser are female. The proceedings of The American Writers Congress (1935) published the speech of just one female participant, Meridel Le Sueur. Only Martha Gellhorn (1908–1998)63 and Frances Winwar appear, alongside fifteen men, in the volume generated by the Second Congress, The Writer in a Changing World (1937). The third volume in the series, a compendium of remarks from the 1939 Congress assembled by Donald Ogden Stewart under the title Fighting Words (1940), includes only three women—Hope Hale (b. 1903), Dorothy Parker (1893–1967), and Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978)—among the forty “Principal Contributors.”64
The authority of the Soviet writers’ organizations, which was inspirational rather than dictatorial, did little to promote women as a specific group within the cultural movement, although the contributions of female Soviet literary scholars were translated into English in International Literature, originally the organ of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers.65 The International Conference of Revolutionary Writers and Artists held at Kharkov in the Soviet Union in November 1930 produced a six-point program that opposed white chauvinism and “middle-class ideas in the work of revolutionary writers and artists,” but failed to mention the participation of females nor did it address the oppression of women.66 At the same time, the seven-point program of the Midwest Workers’ Cultural Federation, a broad umbrella group that included the John Reed Clubs, made a similar omission.67 Moreover, when the International Union of Revolutionary Writers headquartered in the Soviet Union issued a scathing thirteen-point critique of the work of the New Masses, the matter of women’s participation or contributions was not addressed.68
When the New Masses became a weekly in 1934, a publicity brochure with photographs, “Some Writers and Editors of the New Masses,” was widely distributed. In the photograph were four women (Marguerite Young [dates unknown],69 Josephine Herbst, Ella Winter, and Anna Rochester [1880–1966])70 in contrast to sixteen men. Another group photograph of “five leading figures of the New Masses” only depicted men. The new editorial board was entirely male, and the four quotations endorsing the new weekly were by men.
Poetry collections of the 1930s and 1940s followed a similar pattern of gender representation, which was probably no worse than the record of mainstream publications. International Publisher’s Salud! Poems, Stories and Sketches of Spain by American Writers (1938) contains exclusively the verse of thirteen males, although a brief essay at the end mentions that poems on Spain have also been written by Muriel Rukeyser, Genevieve Taggard, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Joy Davidman. In the February 1937 issue of Forum, Horace Gregory presents “Fifteen New Poets,” only four of whom were women. Only 10 percent of the fifty-five poets from the United States whose verse was included in Joy Davidman’s War Poems of the United Nations (1943), sponsored by the League of American Writers, are female. New Letters, issued in 1938 under the editorship of Horace Gregory, with Eleanor Clark as associate editor, featured only eight women among the thirty-eight contributors. The 1939 volume, This Generation, edited by George K. Anderson and Eda Lou Walton, climaxed in a section of nearly 150 pages of mostly radical poems, entitled “American Revolutionists”; yet Muriel Rukeyser was the only female present.
Despite these depressing numbers, especially in light of the growing presence of women generally in modern literature of the previous decade (H.D., Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, Amy Lowell), there are indications that fortunes for women writers in terms of their visibility and prominence improved as the Communist-led cultural movement moved from the Third Period to the Popular Front. In part, this was due to a rhetorical shift from the vocabulary of militant class struggle where the “proletariat” was usually assigned archetypal male characteristics and where “work” almost always meant occupations that primarily employed males. However, the advent of the Popular Front also saw a growth in the number of participants in the Communist-influenced literary movement, less stringent political criteria for membership in cultural organizations, and a broader range of topics that were acceptable for publication. Hence, writers from upper-middleclass economic circumstances, temperamentally unsuited to Communist Party discipline, such as Lillian Hellman (1905–1984) and Dorothy Parker (1893–1967), would become frequent headliners at Left-wing events, while a popular humorist, Ruth McKenney (1911–1972), would be given a weekly New Masses column with the highly un-Marxist title, “Strictly Personal.”
In 1932, the only women listed as members of the League of Professional Groups for Foster and Ford, the Communist candidates in the presidential election, were Leonie Adams (1899–1988), Fielding Burke (Olive Tilford Dargan), Miriam Allen de Ford (1888–1975), Grace Lumpkin, and Ella Winter, along with thirty-seven men.71 During these years of the ultra-revolutionary “Third Period,” the New Masses set a poor example in its publication of women poets, one little better than commercial and academic publications. In 1929, five of the thirty-six poets represented in its pages were women (Ellen Caye, M. A. de Ford, Helen Koppel, Lilith Lorraine, and Gale Wilhelm); moreover, while several of the male poets were represented by as many as nine contributions, women poets published only one poem each, a pattern that would continue. In 1930 there were twenty-seven poets represented, two of whom were female (Margaret Larkin and Regina Pedroso). In 1931 there were twenty poets, only one of whom was female (Dawn Lovelace). In 1932, there were eighteen poets, all male. In 1933, only three out of seventeen poets whose verse appeared in the New Masses were female (Anne Bromberger, Lillian White Spencer, Rose Pastor Stokes).72
Leftist little magazines across the country, often affiliated with John Reed Club chapters, carried some writing by women, most of whose names (possibly pseudonyms in some cases) are unknown today. To cite a few examples from the first issues of such publications, volume 1, number 1 of The Red Spark: Bulletin of the John Reed Club of Cleveland contains a long poem in the voice of a woman worker by Jane Steele;73 volume 1, number 1 of The John Reed Club Bulletin, published by the John Reed Club of Detroit, contains a poem, “Wage Slave,” by Ethel Roland; volume 1, number 2 of Revolt, published monthly by the John Reed Club of Paterson, New Jersey, contains no contributions by women; volume 1, number 1 of Proletcult, published by the John Reed Clubs of the Northwest, contains three contributions by Dawn Lovelace—a short story set in Portland, a prose poem about John Reed, and a book review about a study of the Soviet Union; volume 1, number 1 (Spring 1931) of The Left: A Quarterly Review of Radical and Experimental Art (Davenport, Iowa) includes the work of thirty-two contributors with Lola Ridge (1871–1941, an independent socialist poet of the earlier generation) being the sole female; Volume 1, Number 1 of Red Boston (Official Organ of the Boston John Reed Club) contains only one contribution by a woman, a report on a public meeting by Rivka Ganz.
Among such proletarian little magazines and local John Reed Club organs, the New Force published in Detroit featured women more frequently, probably because the managing editor, Paula Golden (dates unknown), wrote much of the material. In the May 1932 issue, Anita Pavlov contributes two poems in which she alternately assumes the voice of two women in the South, one white and the other Black. In her first poem, “Ella May Wiggins Sings,” Pavlov addresses the world from beneath the grave of Wiggins, the Gastonia strike martyr, transformed into a fertility symbol that will give birth to a new revolt:
All you workers,
don’t think me dead.
But look to the rain
That soaks into my bed....74
In “Black Woman’s Lament” Pavlov becomes the voice of a Black woman who appears to have a perfect understanding of the Communist Party’s view that only rich whites are responsible for the death of her son and husband, and that the organized interracial working class will set everything right.75
Golden herself contributed a satire of commercial literature to the January 1932 issue of New Force, “What the World Is Writing About for the World to Read.” Depicting herself as paging through the Brentano’s holiday catalogue, Golden interpolates actual advertising quotations into the social reality of the Depression as she initially considers how the adventure tales of pirates might strike the millions of unemployed. Next she muses about how the war memoirs of General John J. Pershing, said to be “gleaming with swift humor,” will be received by maimed and crippled veterans. Finally, she relates a children’s book about “The Singing Dog” to youngsters who are desperate for more bread and milk.
When women’s issues receive special attention, they are almost always within the larger contexts of class war and the struggle against racism. In the same issue of New Force that carried Golden’s satire, a poem by Freda Rigby, “Shoemaker’s Children,” acknowledges the specific yet common features of women’s labor as she describes the work of fathers, daughters, and sons, all of whom toil to provide luxuries for the rich. The father builds tires for limousines all day, but to travel home he must hang exhaustedly from a strap “in a packed airless streetcar.” The daughter goes blind while making fur coats, then shivers on the street corner in her cheap coat while waiting for a bus. The son shovels coal in the “bowels of a ship,” while on deck the rich enjoy the sunlight as they drink and play cards.76
New Writers, which in Detroit succeeded New Force as a broader Left literary publication during the Popular Front, continued the earlier tradition of more extensive female representation. Typical of the publication’s short run are the February 1936 issue, where three of the eight contributors are women, and the March 1936 issue where there are four women contributors out of eleven. Another example of the depiction of female experience in a broader context is “The Dead Corporal” by Marion Holden, a war story told from the point of view of a nurse.77
At the close of its first year, The Partisan, organ of the John Reed Club of the West, published a striking poem by Irene Kilbourne, “Today’s Pioneer Women,” treating gender in a class as well as antiracist context. After two stanzas describing how “our young grandmothers” and “Our young mothers” all “followed their men” to the Midwest and then the far West, she calls upon “my sisters” to collaborate with their men by moving into “another new land, an untried era.” Reworking the images of conquest and colonization associated with the myth of the frontier, she declares a desire to
... break through the underbrush of ignorance,
Cut away the thickets of greed....
The hands that molded bullets for redskins
Have begotten hands
That can fight against the tomahawks of power
And the war-whoops of profiteers;
The slim arms that learned to use a musket
Have begotten arms that shoulder placards
On picket duty.
Draw up our workers’ unions
Like a circle of covered wagons—
Course, pioneer women!78
Thus the tradition of worker-poetry, vivified by a female perspective, could become a site for a composting of perception that moved in the direction of turning the national mythology of Indian hating on its head.
The imbalance between male and female writers registered in magazines was duplicated in the composition of literary symposia organized by the Left during the Depression. “What Is Americanism? A Symposium on Marxism and the American Tradition,” published by Partisan Review and Anvil during the brief fusion of these two magazines following the First American Writers’ Congress, included Josephine Herbst and nine men.79 The 1932 New Masses symposium “How I Came to Communism” solicited the recollections of six men.80 Likewise, the New Masses request for statements by writers in response to Hitler’s assumption of the German chancellorship in March 1933 resulted in another symposium, “Against the Fascist Terror in Germany,” featuring the publication of statements by fourteen men.81
The growth of the League of American Writers was accompanied by a steady increase in the role women played as activists, even if they were not featured at the league’s congresses. The Executive Committee elected at the First American Writers’ Congress (1935) included only Josephine Herbst and Genevieve Taggard, together with fourteen men. Elected at the Second American Writers’ Congress (1937) were Dorothy Brewster (1883–1979), Marjorie Fischer (1903–1961), Taggard, and Jean Starr Untermeyer, along with nine men.82 The title Executive Committee was changed to “National Board” at the Third American Writers’ Congress (1939), and the women elected included Nora Benjamin (1899–1988), Aline Bernstein (1881–1955), Brewster, Martha Dodd (1908–1990), Fischer, Lillian Hellman, Dawn Powell (1897–1965), Taggard, and Untermeyer, along with seventeen men (two of whom were African Americans—Sterling Brown and Richard Wright).83
Women elected to the National Board at the Fourth American Writers’ Congress in 1941, well into the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which indicated in many cases a stronger loyalty to Communist Party positions, included Georgia Backus (dates unknown), Brewster, Joy Davidman, Dodd, Muriel Draper (1886–1952), Eleanor Flexner (1908–1995), Lillian Barnard Gilkes (1903–1977), Jean Karsavina, Ruth McKenney, Myra Page, Viola Brothers Shore, Tess Slesinger, Christina Stead, and Taggard, plus twenty-three men, one of whom was an African American, Ralph Ellison.84 Nearly one-third of the teachers at the League of American Writers’ New York Writers School were women. However, only four prominent males are listed as sponsors, while the school board consisted of two men and four women, one of whom, Lillian Gilkes, was the director. The National Board for all the schools (in places such Hollywood, California, and Monteagle, Tennessee) was led by a male president; one female and four male vice presidents, two of whom were African Americans; and a general membership of seven women and twenty-two men, including one African American. These statistics, while incomplete, offer a partial picture of how talented female cultural workers engaged in activities on behalf of a future world without war and bigotry. Moreover, as in the case of the mostly Communist volunteers in Spain, some of whom would be classified as “pre-mature anti-fascists” by U.S. intelligence agencies when they later signed up to fight in World War II, certain of these women writers were “premature socialist-feminists”—politically in advance of their time.
Indeed, recent feminist critics of the Communist-led cultural movement have argued compellingly that the rhetoric of the class struggle represented the proletarian fighter in masculinist ways, reproducing the dominant patriarchal constructions of gender. Such a rhetoric, of course, was hegemonic in the early 1930s, and remained present in Popular Front culture in a more muffled form, fusing with the antifascist rhetoric of World War II during the 1940s.85 What is vexing is that class war texts of both periods tended to be texts that produce gender positions and valuations as well, with results that are not easily classifiable. Sometimes texts by women addressing women’s issues are incapacitated by the contradictory messages they convey due to their failure to recognize differential group experiences between men and women; rarely do gendered themes suggest patriarchy as a primary vehicle of women’s oppression. The insights of psychoanalysis, crucial to many writings of the Second Wave of feminism, in some instances are ridiculed as middle-class self-indulgence. Even when an author is a woman, her major focus might be on a male work experience (factory work, as opposed to domestic or service work), and the voice in a poem by a woman frequently might be gender neutral or even have masculine characteristics. An example of a such a gender-neutral text, in which the worker-protagonist’s sex is not disclosed, is Ethel Roland’s (dates unknown) “Wage Slave”:
Thirty cents an hour, just to be
A bloody cog in a driving speedup wheel.
Never to straighten tortured bones, or feel
Beyond a senseless sweat of agony...
Clara Weatherwax’s long poem in the February 1936 issue of Partisan Review and Anvil, “The Shape of the Sun,” is narrated by a young woman on a farm, but from a perspective that appears conventionally subordinate to her father.86
Nevertheless, the Left culture generated by pro-Communist women writers does anticipate and prefigure radical feminist and especially socialist-feminist writings of the 1960s and later. These pro-Communist writings confirm the contemporary view that there was not a gap between the First and Second Waves of feminism but rather an ongoing tradition that persevered as a component of the Far Left. In order to identify this tradition, one must discern that such pre-1960s cultural work mostly operated in relation to the evolving Communist world outlook; it rarely approached the explicit feminist agendas promoted by Adrienne Rich, Alice Walker, Marge Piercy, and other Second Wave writers who powerfully articulate as their primary concern the psychological, social, and cultural practices specific to women living in a patriarchal society. In the tradition between the two “waves,” women’s distinct forms of rage, the qualitatively distinctive characteristics of women’s collective experience, and even the perspective of viewing women as trapped between the two coordinated systems of oppression (capitalism and patriarchy) are more frequently implicit than directly represented.
Yet women cultural workers who were attracted to a revolutionary, anti-racist, and militantly antifascist movement gave voice to a treatment of conventional women’s subjects such as courtship and marriage from new perspectives, took fresh stances on the development of women’s consciousness, and devoted more attention to relations of female protagonists with other women, including characters from a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds. A dispassionate assessment of women’s Left culture during the mid-twentieth century can only occur if one concedes from the outset that it simply did not investigate the entire gamut of the female experience. Moreover, as the preponderance of their radical poems attest, in most cases a drive to reach a broad public with the message of opposition to class and race oppression tended to privilege realist narratives of a quest toward an integrated personality over modernist strategies organized around a fractured consciousness.