Description
Blanche and James Cooney met within the 1930s in Greenwich Village. She was once seventeen, an art student, a Russian-Romanian first-generation Jewish New Yorker bound for radical freedom. He was once twenty-seven, an Irish-American creator, a lapsed Catholic expelled from the Communist Party for anarchist “tendencies.” Disparate pair, imperative union. They married and left New York ceaselessly; left her outraged parents, his distraught lover, for frontier life in rural The united states with out a money and limitless hope. The goal: a community of self-sufficient artists. The rallying point: The Phoenix, a literary quarterly, international, eclectic. The threat addressed: totalitarianism, technology, the crushing of the individual. Despite their isolation the cast is wealthy: Frieda Lawrence, Henry Miller, Anais Nin. Lepke, Czar of the underworld; a constant stream of European expatriates; artists and rebels and poets of every age and persuasions. For fifty years they lived together, farming, raising their four children; as regards to the heart of things. Though never achieved, their vision of community remained alive.
Blanche Cooney tells stories from her life of exploration.