Politics and Private Lives
DAVIS, HOPE HALE
Politics and Private Lives Natural Light By Ethel Gorham Zoland. 295 pp. $18.95. Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" The natural light of Ethel Gor-ham's title...
...I don't understand," she says after he tells her the news...
...The news of a baby coming finally warms the atmosphere, a change perhaps more necessary when Mary meets Joe's Brooklyn family...
...Vietnam is vague to the girl...
...Still, with a baby on the way they feel compelled to drink a schnapps together...
...Tom, one of the honored guests at the Lincoln Brigade affair, is revealed to have written a letter to the New York Times criticizing the Communists' treatment of the Anarchists defending the Spanish Republic...
...Her parents are ultra-wasps guilty of good works Marx would damn as reformist, and even lean toward the Socialist Party...
...His brother, a Zi-onist whose Jewishness is "the center of his being, a crusade," taunts him about the Daily Worker's two-day delay in acknowledging the pact's existence...
...Friday night in Brooklyn Joe cannot meet his father's eyes...
...War," she says, "is the final pollution...
...What's there to understand...
...The events of the next few decades —Hungary, the Khrushchev revelations, Czechoslovakia, Vietnam—have a profound impact on him, pushing him toward a conservative stance as extreme as his earlier radicalism...
...he asks impatiently...
...She wants nothing more than to get back in...
...As a doctor I can see the value of a bandage," he says...
...Meanwhile Molly, due to a chance assignment to cover a Harlem race riot, becomes a Pulitzer-prize photographer...
...The Sunday of that Labor Day weekend Joe and Molly are picnicking at the Bronx Botanical Gardens with two of Joe's acquaintances?Ivy League types with high connections...
...He quarrels brutally with Molly, then goes out to drink with comrades...
...As he searches for an answer, Hester interjects: "We don't know goyishe...
...Early in Joe and Mary's first visit her father questions the value of the WPA art project she works for...
...This long, furious scene is so accurate and convincing, it could serve almost by itself as a primer on the ideological clashes among Leftists in those crucial years...
...Joe suggests that surgery may be required...
...The Soviet Union has to protect itself...
...At Dalton Emily longed for something to believe in...
...He insists it had to be fought...
...And with Joe she does...
...Hester is pleased to learn that Mary's father is not only a doctor but a pediatrician—her grandchild's care is assured —and for Joe's sake Mary agrees to change her name to Molly...
...Meanwhile, his mother is already inquiring into Mary's background...
...It suggests, too, the unsparing light of history that exposes and sometimes clarifies the turmoil in her characters' lives...
...That's enough...
...Everyone old enough can remember the moment they heard about Pearl Harbor and John F. Kennedy's assassination...
...A great way to put it, replies Molly...
...Parents, whatever their wishes, can never quite rule out religion in the lives of their children...
...He must go with Frank, the functionary, to headquarters...
...In response, Joe tries to speak of what is good for peace and democracy...
...They call it peace in our time...
...Joe, I feel dumb...
...Joe returns from the War a decorated hero...
...It don't mix...
...Nat counters, "What happened to the fight against war and fascism...
...Just minutes earlier, Joe himself had been rebuked for questioning a Communist Party stalwart who denounced the anti-Stalinist poum as scum, renegades, vermin to be crushed...
...She is in tears following a conversation with her mother, who calls the pact a betrayal of those who believed the Soviet Union was a "reflection of their hopes...
...That's for the birds," says Joe...
...But what I'd like to see is a cure...
...Mary had been put down for asking naively, "Wouldn't it be better to join forces with the various groups in Spain, all on our side, instead of fighting one another...
...When her attraction to Joe's "enormous black eyes in a very white, long, Talmudic face" becomes apparent, she is warned off by a fellow art student: "Forget it...
...She has come to New York, by way of Vas-sar, from Great Barrington, Massachusetts...
...Almost unwittingly, Joe and Molly find themselves living in a style neither of them had envisioned...
...Some of us with haunted memories can never forget learning about the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact in August 1939...
...they go to New York's pricey private Dalton School...
...It's not so good for the Jews, huh Joe...
...Held at home by the baby, Molly tries to answer frantic phone calls from friends...
...Isn't Franco the enemy...
...Mary turns from the implacable Hester and appeals to Joe's father, reminding him that neither family is religious, "So what difference does it make...
...Barrett then cites the Soviet Union as an example, and Joe promptly forgets all of his promises...
...Mary is shocked by the language, but ignores the advice...
...His father concedes that Neville Chamberlain is a shmendrik (translated for Mary as a "nincompoop"), but argues that war is invariably bad for Jews...
...That's a real 180-degree turn...
...she had not even been born then...
...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" The natural light of Ethel Gor-ham's title refers to the great advantage of the studio her heroine acquires when she becomes a professional photographer...
...Upon learning the awful truth, Hester is dumbfounded: "I never thought I'd have a Gentile in my house...
...Joe involves himself with a magazine that could be Commentary...
...But difficult as Emily's choice is for Molly to accept, upon reflection it seems to have been inevitable...
...The story is told during a day that Mary spends at a pro-choice rally in Washington, where she seeks out for the first time the name of her son on the Vietnam War Memorial...
...He reminds the Barretts that their leader, Norman Thomas, has a few reactionary bedfellows among the isolationists, and goes so far as to argue with Mary's mother about the American Civil War...
...He has lost his appetite for dinner, however...
...Her long, passionate and adversarial marriage to Joe forms the time span of Gorham's novel...
...She must take frequent rest periods and place a nitroglycerin pill under her tongue to rouse her faltering heart...
...Asked whether he means revolution, he "plunges in" and admits he does...
...On these occasions, her mind returns to the politically telling moment she met Joe and their subsequent life together...
...Emily and her younger brother, Tommy, do not attend public school...
...Unlike most women's fiction, though, Natural Light focuses most intensely not on their private lives but on the political events that affect them...
...And adds, "So what was the matter when Norman Thomas said the same thing, only him I trust...
...In Joe's case the struggles are compounded by his marriage to Mary...
...Eventually, she falls in love with Peter Apple, a rich young man who has taken a year off between Groton and Harvard to work in a kibbutz...
...It is the fall of 1938, and Joe sparks an exchange over Munich...
...At a party in the late 1930s to welcome back two members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from their year of fighting in Spain, Mary Barrett watches Joe Levin as he tunes a radio to William L. Shi-rer's Vienna broadcast describing Hitler's takeover of Austria...
...Germany's invasion of Poland has nearly as shattering an impact as the non-aggression treaty...
...And because it is, because words can help, she is able to laugh...
...she believes no war is justifiable...
...Everyone there is as dumbstruck as Molly—including Joe, though as a writer for the Daily Worker he refuses to admit it...
...Now, as she sees Tom leave in disgrace, "the hero drummed out of the corps, the pariah, the unclean," she looks in sudden panic at "the solid phalanx" of the faithful, "the crystalline netlike honeycomb...
...He's everyone's dream lay...
...But Gorham elaborates further through Molly's lively and often amusing arguments with her friends...
...Barrett replies, leads to bloody dictatorship...
...What's to understand...
...This precipitates a dramatic scene wherein Joe, doing what all good Communists must do, may send a shiver through idealistic readers...
...Bloody revolution, Dr...
...The loss of her daughter stirs lasting bitterness in Molly—perhaps more so than Joe's support of Tommy in his fatal decision, against the protests of the rest of the family, to enlist for Vietnam...
...Hitler's attack on the USSR triggers the Party's abrupt switch to patriotism...
...On the way back from the rally, Molly turns to her young seatmate and tells her about Tommy...
...Maybe it is...
...Accompanying them is Tom, the discredited Brigade veteran, who sniffs "the stench of the Hitler-Stalin pact" in Molly and Joe's refusal to drink to England...
...Joe's sister Sylvia says he sounds like an America Firster...
...Molly, back from her job, is cooking supper in the August heat for her husband and an expected Party functionary when the phone rings...
...The Party's hold is strong: Mary manages to resist actual membership, but she cannot avoid the torment ahead for bewildered Communists...
...Desperate, Molly leaves the sleeping Emily to join Joe at the Party offices...
...This is hardly surprising, since the author, the Jewish widow of wasp liberal novelist Charles Gorham, is herself a veteran of the old battles within the Left...
Vol. 75 • April 1992 • No. 5
