BY G. CONNOR SALTER

Until roughly 2000, little information was available on Joy Davidman and her first husband, William Lindsay Gresham. They continued to be known in popular culture: Davidman’s second marriage to C.S. Lewis was dramatized into the play, TV movie, and theatrical movie Shadowlands; and Gresham’s noir novel Nightmare Alley fell in and out of print but always attracted a small cult audience. However, outside of Lyle W. Dorsett’s short biography on Davidman, And God Came In, information was scarce.

Paul Duncan helped to start a shift in 2000 when he published a profile of Gresham in Noir Fiction: Dark Pathways (still one of the most cited resources on Gresham). More recently, academic work (especially Abigail Santamaria’s biography of Davidman and Don W. King’s collections of her letters and poetry) has made great strides in filling in the gaps about their lives. But much remains underexplored.

For example, many don’t know that Davidman played a prominent role in 1930s-1940s literary left circles. She served as an editor for New Masses magazine for several years, published the poetry collection Letters to a Comrade, and contributed to the noted anthology Seven Poets in Search of an Answer. While Davidman and Gresham distanced themselves from the American Community Party in the later 1940s, their political interests continued to inform their work and their lives in various ways.

Dr. Alan M. Wald (PhD, University of California at Berkeley) is a noted authority on literary members of the mid-twentieth-century American Left. He is the professor emeritus of English Literature and American Culture at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and has written many books, including The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s and Writing From the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics. He discusses Davidman and Gresham in his books Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left and American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War.

He was kind enough to answer a few questions.

Interview Questions

When did you first become aware of Joy Davidman and William Lindsay Gresham in your research?

As you say in your introduction to this interview, there was sparse information about Davidman and Gresham during the period in which I conducted my research—mostly the late 1980s and early 1990s.

If you look at the footnotes for my chapter on Davidman in Exiles From a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth Century Literary Left (2002, pp. 238-52), you will see references to most of what I could find. But I first came across Joy Davidman about 20 years earlier when I was researching my second book, The Revolutionary Imagination (1983), which was about the Marxist (but not Communist) poets John Wheelwright and Sherry Mangan. There had been a valuable, but neglected, anthology edited by Jack Salzman in 1978 called Social Poets of the 1930s in which Davidman was included. As a result of that encounter with a selection of her verse, I cited Davidman in the Introduction to my own book as a figure who deserved to be studied in relation to literary modernism.

However, for several years more my focus was still on independent Marxists critical of the Communists.  That changed in the mid-late 1980s when, looking more carefully at the radical writing of the 1940s-50s than the 1930s, I came to realize that the Communist experience was larger, more diverse, and more complex than their adversaries—and a Great Depression-fixation—had allowed. So that’s when I began looking at lesser-known Communist figures and people like Davidman and Gresham came more clearly into view.

Unfortunately, there were hundreds of them, many of whose political histories had been hidden or obscured, and research before the internet was grueling. One couldn’t look up references online or email people with questions. If one wanted to know if someone was still alive one had to find reference books with obituaries in the libraries, and search through phone books to get addresses. Most of the archival work had to be done in person.

For over thirty years I traveled all over the US as well as Western Europe with a mini-cassette recorder, interviewing veterans of the experience or their friends and relatives, and rummaging through archives in many cities as well as private homes. I did pick up a number of facts about Gresham and Davidman, at least enough to sketch out preliminary portraits, but it was difficult to confirm many aspects and uncertainty persists about a number of things to this day.

Were you able to meet any figures who knew them personally?

Yes, there were about half-a-dozen, all former Communists, and I talked to them about Davidman or Gresham in person.

One was one-time Daily Worker editor Sender Garlin, married to the poet Martha Millet. When I met with him May 1982, in Boulder, Garlin recalled that Davidman’s name came up when he saw poet Alfred Hayes at the 1942 memorial meeting for poet Sol Funaroff. Sender inquired as to why Hayes was no longer appearing in the New Masses and Hayes replied, “Ask Joy Davidman.” Sender then explained to me that “she was the poetry Czarina [of the New Masses] at that time, and they were in some feud.” It is possible that there are some details about this in Hayes’ letters to his wife at that time, recently surfaced and in private possession of their daughter, Josephine Hayes Dean.

However, when I talked to poet Norman Rosten, also a poetry editor of the New Masses, he didn’t recall Davidman having anything like total power in the selection of poetry. And that seems confirmed by what I saw in letters from Rosten to poet John Malcolm Brinnin at the University of Delaware/Newark Archives that discuss the selection of poetry for the New Masses, between 1937 and 1939. In one of them, Rosten explains that it is Joy Davidman who is doing the selecting at that moment, but in another, he explains that he is in charge and she is only assisting. Rosten also praises Davidman as the poetry star of the future. 

Franklin Folsom, who was a Communist in charge of running the League of American Writers, told me of a visit to one of the Davidman-Gresham homes in upstate New York. He said that it looked like it a drawing of a haunted house by New Yorker cartoonist Charles Adams. A bleak old mansion. Inside, the chairs seemed to be a long way from each other, making it difficult to carry on a conversation.

Together with his wife, Mary Elting, also a Communist writer, Folsom gave me physical descriptions of Davidman and Gresham: Davidman at that time (1940s) was very skinny with long dark hair—and she also looked like she could have been drawn by Charles Adams. This was a change, as earlier she had been cheerful. Gresham was tall, gaunt, scrawny, with a sandy mustache and sharp eyes. In fact, when he looked at you, you felt he was really looking at you. He seemed to be an amusing person. And before the religious phase began, he was an entertaining guy. But in the 1940s he became aggressively non-political, but still polite.

The poet Aaron Kramer, who appeared with Davidman in Seven Poets in Search of an Answer, was very bitter toward Davidman. A lot of it had to do with his feeling that she was hostile to his kind of poetry (formally conservative with rhymes) as well as disputes they had about his translations for a Heinrich Heine collection. I think details about this can be found in Kramer’s correspondence in his papers at the University of Michigan. However, Kramer agreed with Davidman that Alexander F. Bergman (Alexander Frankel) was a talented poet, and Kramer published some of his own writing about Bergman.

I don’t have details on this, but the subject of Gresham must have come up briefly in my interview with the Communist documentary filmmaker Leo Hurwitz. He told me that his sister had been Gresham’s psychoanalyst. I tried to pursue this further, but Hurwitz had two somewhat famous sisters who were psychoanalysts and I’m not sure which one it was. But we know that a female psychoanalyst is important in Nightmare Alley.

There’s some debate on when Davidman met Gresham. Any idea when that happened?

So far as I know, they met at the 1942 national gathering of the League of American Writers.[1] I believe they were both on panels there. Of course, it is not impossible that they had encountered each other earlier, in Communist cultural circles. But that was when the connection appears to have been made.

There’s been some discussion about an FBI file on Gresham and his earlier romantic partner, Jean Karsavina, which reported they were common-law spouses. Any idea whether the file exists?

When I talked to various individuals about Gresham, several said that he was “married” to her—and none mentioned his 1933 marriage to his first wife, Beatrice McCollum, who was also a Communist. My main source for the marriage was probably Hope Hale Davis (who collaborated with Karsavina in writing radical pulp fiction). Of course, on the Left, the term “marriage” was used loosely, but they all gave me the impression that it was legal. Maybe, too, I saw it mentioned in passing in a letter from one of their sons at Wheaton. I know that the late Nick Tosches told me that Renée Gresham said that Bill previously had “three wives.”

 In books about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and C.S. Lewis, I think was stated that Gresham was “married” to a “wealthy woman” and left for Spain to get out of it, although the divorce occurred after he returned—and I probably assumed (incorrectly) that this was Karsavina. I didn’t have a way of checking this out at the time, but I have since seen abundant documentation to indicate that the relationship to Karsavina was, at best, an informal marriage, perhaps a common-law marriage.

In regard to the FBI file, it makes sense that there should be one on Karsavina—from what I can tell, she was a loyal Communist to the end of her life and played a role in translating much material from the Russian for the Communist Party of the US (CP-USA). Robert Nedelkoff, who did research for the late Perry C. Bramlett, said that Perry had a 430-page FBI file on Karsavina (with 30 pages withheld), mostly covering the 1950s and 1960s and aimed at trying to prove that Karsavina’s translation business was a front for Soviet espionage.

I believe that I did see some pages from her file and one from around 1955 included a report of an interview with Gresham (in Florida) about her, where he acknowledged to agents her CP-USA membership, and his own, and described some meetings at her apartment. From what I could tell, Gresham did not reveal anything particularly surprising or damaging, and I think he also much abbreviated the CP-USA involvement of both of them. But the CP-USA would have regarded any giving of information to the FBI as outright betrayal, and he would have known that.

In addition, I should mention that Bramlett claimed that he had put in a Freedom of Information Act request for the FBI file of Gresham, but I don’t know whether he received it before he died.

Anything you can tell us about Karsavina’s novel White Eagle, Dark Skies?

I don’t remember the details very much after 35 years or so. She got the idea for White Eagle, Dark Skies after World War II, when she felt that so much of the Poland she had known had been destroyed, and she pursued the plan for a book for some time. It is heavily biographical, somewhat of a microhistory of her father’s experiences. I recall the style as being rather popularized, in a somewhat romantic vein (she was a pulp/romance writer, after all), although I think it has a very solid research base. This combines not only personal recollections, but information from Polish history, literature and song, as well as socialist history and more general European history. At one time I read a memorable MA thesis about it that her niece, Laura Schere, had submitted at the University of Minnesota. She argued convincingly that it spoke to the present generation about ethnicity and gender.

The Spanish Civil War had an important effect on Gresham—personally, and in writings like his poem “Last Kilometer.” I was surprised to find out that the topic also works its way into Davidman’s poetry. What are some ways that it informs her work?

Yes, Gresham wrote a number of unpublished poems and there could well be Spanish Civil War themes in a number of them. He also claimed to have drafted at least part of a novel about the war but burned it in the mid-1940s.

As for Davidman, someone characterized her approach as that of an “intellectual witness” to the war, a stance that was not unusual. At the age of 23 she published Letters to a Comrade (1938), which contains important material. For example, “Near Catalonia” envisions the war in a lyrical form in precise images. “Snow in Madrid” is another example, and “In Praise of Fascists” and “End of a Revolutionary” also refer to Spain.

I was discussing Nightmare Alley with someone recently, and it occurred to me that like a lot of noir stories, there’s a strong critique of capitalism going on in the story. It’s about trying to survive in show businesses, but the lust for wealth turns into an urge to get ahead by con games or whatever else works. Any thoughts on that?

Well, there’s no doubt that Nightmare Alley is anticapitalist and anti-individualist, and the standard approach is to focus on its exposé of “the American Dream” of acquiring wealth as the route to happiness. However, while it is often said that the novel is heavily autobiographical, expressing Gresham’s immersion in both Marx and Freud, I actually haven’t seen that much scholarship that pursues this angle as far as one might.

First of all, what was Gresham’s actual relation to Communism at that point? I’m not necessarily referring to CP-USA membership—many writers were pro-Communist but without joining—but some sources give 1949 as his departure date, the year he published Limbo Tower—which is about a dying Communist.

Although many people have stereotyped ideas about what a Communist writer can or can’t write, my own research shows that there were plenty with eccentric ideas and attractions to religion (which in Gresham’s case seems to have happened just after the novel came out). Guy Endore was a Communist at that time whose work might be compared to Gresham’s for an attraction to mysticism and the occult. Then we have Nelson Algren, who wrote about people living in the lower depths and addicts in Never Come Morning (1942) and The Man With a Golden Arm (1949). Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock was published the same year as Nightmare Alley, and their political backgrounds had similarities.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that pro-Communist proletarian novelist Jack Conroy reviewed Nightmare Alley (in the Chicago Defender) favorably, and that pro-Communist Nelson Algren did the same for Limbo Tower in a Chicago newspaper. (Drafts of this review are in Algren’s papers.)[2]

I guess what I’m saying is that writing on Nightmare Alley has not been as deeply contextualized as it might be in regard to the Left. The fact that there is not an explicit argument for a collectivist solution does not mean he didn’t hold to one; Ann Petry’s The Street (also 1946) is an example of a pro-Communist book that implies a collectivist solution by its total absence. In Nightmare Alley there might be a suggestion of an alternative in Stan’s brief encounter with a Black union organizer at the end; this is a similar technique to Willard Motley’s Knock on any Door (1950) where a friend of Nick’s from reform school is said to be leading a strike at the end (while Nick is being electrocuted) and even James T. Farrell’s Judgment Day (1936), when a Communist parade is seen at the end.

Gresham’s second novel, Limbo Tower, opens with this interesting dedication “To the memory of Alexander F. Bergman. There was no Gallagher.[3] Alec died alone, writing in a notebook. His poems were published in a volume called They Look Like Men. He was a genius, a revolutionary, and an expert at handling small boats. God rest him, he’s dead now.” i believe Bergman was important to Davidman, but I’m not sure anyone knows why he could be important to Gresham. Any thoughts on that?

Biographical details about Bergman (1912-41), who was called “Alec” and whose real name was Alexander Frankel, are scarce. He was contributing poetry to the New Masses in the late 1930s, and got attention with a tribute to a close friend killed in Spain, Eugene Loveman. By 1941 he was diagnosed as being in the last stages of tuberculosis, at age 28, and was staying at Montefiore Hospital. Davidman, at the New Masses office, was told about this, and decided to visit even though they had never met in person.

She was surprised to discover that he had already been hospitalized for five years, having outlived all expectations, and her visits became regular. Amazingly, during this hospitalization, Alec, who had a working class background, had helped to organize a union for the hospital staff and edited the shop paper, at the risk of being evicted. He talked to Davidman disparagingly of “big name” poets, such as Edna Vincent Millay and Archibald MacLeish, and impressed her with his compassion for ordinary people. He also continued to write regularly, including work on a novel that has been lost.

Just before he died in the spring of 1941, Davidman had arranged for his poems to be published in a volume called They Look Like Men (1944). Gresham had been hospitalized with tuberculosis a bit earlier,[4] which provides a basis for a close identification, but I don’t think there exists documentation that they ever met. Clearly, though, he heard stories about him from Davidman, with whom he connected the following year.

Bergman seems to have been a prolific letter writer—Raphael Hayes, brother of the aforementioned poet Alfred Hayes, told me that he had received a ton of letters from Alec. I think there is some correspondence from and about Bergman in the Nelson Algren papers.

More information about Alan M. Wald’s work can be found on his Google Sites page and on the University of Michigan website.

(Article first published September 11, 2024).

Footnotes

[1] Editor’s Note: for a summary of this event, see Abigail Santamaria’s book Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Women Who Married C.S. Lewis, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015, pp. 122-125.

[2] Editor’s Note: Algren’s papers, with the exceptions of three typescripts kept at Bowling University, appear to all be stored in the Nelson Algren Collection at Ohio State University.

[3] Editor’s Note: Anne Gallagher is a Catholic nurse in Limbo Tower who falls in love with the main character, tuberculosis patient Benjamin Rosenbaum.

[4] Editor’s Note: Santamaria reports that Gresham was treated at Beth Israel Hospital and later at Hudson Country Tuberculosis Hospital in late 1939 through April 1940 (Joy p 122).