A Mysterious Love Affair

...In spite of being a published writer (whose fiction had appeared in the New Yorker) and a highly-paid promotions manager at Life by the age of 27, Davis is very much the pliant female, looking to be imprinted with male enthusiasms: "Still, I was a child of the '20s, when only a man's word carried the real authority...

...Great Day Coming suffers from a somewhat fuzzy narrative structure...

...It is the least defensive account I have read to date of what it meant to be a member of the American Communist Party—conveying the dire seriousness of that commitment and its ensuing consequences in a way that leaves no doubt as to how harrowingly real it was...

...Davis is torn between wanting to keep her husband close by so that he can be lulled back to his old self, and advice that it would be best to get him away...

...Once there she discovers that "some essential" in her sexual connection with Cockburn "had gone," and that when it came to his wife and daughter—to himself, that is—his Marxism was disconcertingly sidestepped: "One day he took us to Kew Gardens, even buying a camera to record the trip...

...In the Soviet Union, according to the only Party-approved psychiatrist, Dr...

...Brunck compares the President to "a blind sculptor...

...All of it begins to seem like something out of a novel or a movie—chilling entertainment conjured up for our pleasure, rather than the violent and profoundly distorting piece of history it actually was...

...I wanted what a woman has traditionally askedof a lover going off to war?his qualities, his heritage...

...But in the end, the messages that have shaped the author's own psychological makeup—passed on by a perfectionist, deeply religious mother—don't allow her to act on her instincts when there are people in positions of authority telling her otherwise, be they renowned doctors or self-expiating Communist loyalists: "I accepted all this as means to an end, in the unquestioning way Mother accepted what she took to be divine guidance...

...the KGB, and the CIA obsession with Communist infiltration...

...Because Party strategy dictates that comrades are to maintain an impeccably conventional life while planning for the overthrow of the American way, Davis goes so far as to order yellow uniforms for the maid and mono-grammed towels for their new home...

...Understandable as such reticence may be in the post-Communist era, it is also a bit bewildering, since it leaves anyone who was not around in the heady days when Marxism and the workers' struggle were debated in American living rooms at a loss as to what the fuss was about...

...Interestingly, although the connection between personal and political pathology—between the mental breakdown of her second husband, Hermann Brunck, and the raging paranoia within the Party itself—is implicit throughout, Davis resists overemphasizing the link...

...Just as her Christian commitment made that her duty, membership in the Party made it my duty not to think for myself...

...She attends her first Party meeting with Brunck ("To passersby we must have appeared as we were meant to—just one more strolling pair of lovers"), and within short order the two of them sign on as members...

...I found myself going back and forth repeatedly, checking on what happened when within its compacted time-scheme of fouryears...

...With lapidary skill, the author sets the scene for what will turn out to be a fateful encounter, re-creating the subliminal power it exerted on the participants with quick, incisive strokes: "I am trying now to imagine what the stranger saw when he stood outside the screen door in the glare of the August sun...

...The writers in style—even female—showed a woman acting not only most romantically but most honorably as a faithful handmaiden to an irresistible male...

...The analyst refers to her as "my dear young woman" and has quickly discerned that Brunck is "incapable of love," even though his and Davis' romantic-sexual life continues to thrive in his "monastic cell" of a room at Chestnut Lodge...

...Frankwood Williams, this had already happened...

...Part of the reason for this has to do, I think, with a sense of shame about the less attractive aspects of that romance—plus an accompanying need to depict what was, for some, a lengthy and tragic love affair as no more than a brief, inconsequential flirtation...

...If you get the habit now, what will you do when the revolution comes?' 'Ah,' he said, 'the big shots will have cars and drivers.'" Davis returns to the loyal lover waiting for her, and to her work in Washington...

...Much the most affecting part of Great Day Coming has to do with the events that transpire in the latter two-thirds of the book...

...This book would be of interest if for no other reason than the depiction it offers of the early, arrogant days of psychoanalysis (shortly after being admitted to Chestnut Lodge, Brunck is reduced to sitting on the floor, naked and masturbating, the better to reveal his "inner hostility"), and the nonidealized portrait Davis paints of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (who appeared replete with halo in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden...

...Davis is particularly good at conveying the uneasy atmosphere that prevailed at weekly Party meetings, where an imposed egalitarian ethos rubbed up against an almost reverential sense of hierarchy...

...It was not until long afterward that I wondered...

...While I powdered the crevices in the baby's solid pink body, he talked about Moscow, the parks of Culture and Rest...

...My realizingthis led to Project Revolutionary Baby," Davis writes...

...And, of course, the impulse to minimize the hold the Party had on people of discernment in this country has become stronger with the collapse of what Ronald Reagan, who thought in neat Manichean terms, referred to as the Evil Empire—which was dying, it turned out, for an injection of good old capitalism...

...The baby's father is the rising young Left-wing British journalist, Claud Cockbum, who had agreed to marry the mother a year earlier less out of romantic conviction than out of pride in being asked to pass on his pedigree to an as yet unconceived child before being swept up into "the chancy life of a revolutionary...

...contributor, "New Yorker;' "Partisan Review," New York "Times Book Review" THE DECADES-LONG romance with Communism on the part of otherwise cynically-inclined American intellectuals is, to my mind, among the great uncracked mysteries of our time...

...Later I would see other meanings...

...Joseph McCarthy and the Hollywood Ten...

...Most of all, Great Day Coming casts a penetrating light on one of the lingering political mysteries of the 20th century—the fervent belief held by so many in the great day that never came...

...Evidently it still held, untouched by Party teachings of respect for the working class...

...The sash was tied around my head to hold my hair back in the heat...

...the Rosenbergs...

...The author offers her story so without guile and special pleading that one relaxes, unafraid of stepping on hidden agendas, into reading what turns out to be an astonishing tale of self-deception and escalating damage...

...Then again, it must be said that the author's need to boldly stare down the demons of her past is such that it seems to have overtaken any impulse to protect herself...

...she seems perfectly prepared to sell herself down the river in the pursuit of the truth: "My mother, poor and upright, had armed me with what she would not have admitted was snobbery...

...Hope Hale Davis' Great Day Coming: A Memoir of the 1930s goes a long way toward rectifying this strange imbalance in perspective...

...It is only after one has finished reading the book that the full implications of the connection become apparent...

...Although a spate of memoirs have shed some light on the complex process whereby noble beliefs in the rights and worth of the masses were made to obscure and ultimately justify the hideous atrocities perpetrated against those same masses, there remains a signal lack of illumination...

...The lure of the Soviet system, which promised a classless world with nary a shadow of political corruption orpersonal gain to darken the picture, was indeed seductive...

...and why we cannot save those we love...

...Davis adroitly parrots the true-believer position: "Once we had corrected the large social problems, the small personal ones would disappear...

...Hermann went on to say that we members of the lower ranks couldn't keep questioning policies...

...The description of the initial meeting between godlike therapist and humble patient—in which Fromm-Reichmann addresses Brunck as if he were a bright but errant child, asking him how old he is in his native German and talking about him in the third person—is a devastating depiction of the subtle and well-meaning abuse of power...

...Sometimes since then I've looked back on this picture—all the light from the small window caught in a dazzle from the splash of water around the baby's glistening body—as a sort of entrapment...

...Davis paves the way for her indictment of radical Leftist politics by focusing on her own witting collusion, not by pointing fingers...

...There, in a cabin of her own overlooking the Potomac Valley, she writes newsy letters to Cockburn (which go mostly unanswered) and unexpectedly meets a man whose political instincts are less flashy than her faraway husband's and whose passion runs deeper...

...Their new absorption in secret missions and "conspiratorial techniques" notwithstanding, Davis and Brunck find time to marry—before a disapproving minister who chews jelly beans while performing the ceremony—and to hire a nanny for Claudia...

...the New Deal is being put into place but has not yet routed the Depression, and the author has just given birth to a blue-eyed daughter, Claudia...

...Stalin and his purges...

...Hermann Brunck's gradual disintegration, hospitalization, questionable psychoanalytic treatment, and eventual suicide are made all the more horrifying by the fact that his psychotic imaginings have some kernel of corresponding reality in the Party's own fanatically conceived "us" versus "them" approach to the world—and, too, by the fact that the Party is "against" psychoanalysis...

...Great Day Commgopens in 1933...

...Davis continues to have qualms about the direction of her husband's treatment, going so far as to confront the patronizing Fromm-Reichmann at home...

...which gives it more of an aura of being written by an intellectual ingenue than entirely serves its purposes...

...The book also relies far too heavily on the use of proleptic irony?If I had only known...

...He would have seen a young woman in a faded blue sundress bathing a baby...

...But Hope Hale Davis has written an immensely moving memoir that deals with other issues as well: Why we feel compelled to worship idols of our own making...

...All I asked of Claud was a marriage certificate—necessary then for the child's sake...

...It will eventually be strong enough to topple Davis' allegiance to Cockburn, who has dabbled in innumerable affairs of his own since going off to England...

...It played to the most optimistic of childhood ideals while at the same time managing to accommodate the most rigid of adult needs for a guiding ideology...

...This being a politicized time and the two of them—Davis and "the stranger," Hermann Brunck, a German economist—being zealously politicized types, the couple's opening conversation is, naturally, about politics...

...they are described in a slightly dazed, slow-to-dawn fashion...

...When her husband's symptoms worsen, she relies on the confident judgment of a female analyst friend (and rejected admirer) of his, who arranges for him to be admitted into Chestnut Lodge, a private psychiatric hospital, and treated by the highly regarded Frieda Fromm-Reichmann...

...From that rather dry beginning?Brunck's first gesture of romantic interest is to send Davis a copy of The Coming Struggle for Power by John Stra-chey—a relationship blossoms between the melancholic, constitutionally second-guessing European and the sunny, trust-ing-to-the-point-of-naivete American...

...But even after having established a domestic life with Brunck, and immersing herself in a new job at the Department of Agriculture, the high-minded Davis feels it necessary to test her love for the father of her child by briefly sailing to England with Claudia...

...Within months of their marriage, "the baby well begun," Cockburn is off to London as a foreign correspondent, leaving his admiring young wife behind...

...why the lure of power is strongest to those who claim to abjure it...

...When he called a taxi I protested that we could easily have goneby Underground...

...Brunck, who has been engaged in a collective research project (his contribution will later be singled out for praise when the findings are published in book form), begins to suspect his colleagues?both in and out of the Party—of plotting his downfall, and himself of having perpetrated a professional fraud...

...Left to her own devices as a single mother and recently out of another plummy job, Davis decides to go and stay with her sister's family in Virginia...

...They go on to discuss Roosevelt's "grand schemes," about which both of them entertain doubts...