Joy Davidman - Early Life

Early Life

Helen Joy Davidman was born into a secular middle class Jewish family in New York City, of Polish and Ukrainian background. Her parents, Joseph Davidman and Jeanette Spivack (married 1909), had immigrated to America from Europe in the late 19th century. Davidman grew up in the The Bronx with her younger brother, Howard, and with both parents employed, even during the Great Depression, she was provided with a good education, piano lessons and family vacation trips. Davidman wrote in 1951: "I was a well-brought-up, right-thinking child of materialism... I was an atheist and the daughter of an atheist;"

Davidman was a child prodigy, who scored above 150 on IQ testing, with exceptional critical, analytical and musical skills. She read H. G. Wells's The Outline of History at the age of eight and was able to play a score of Chopin on the piano, after having read it once and not looking at it again. At an early age, she read George MacDonald's children's books and his adult fantasy book, Phantastes. She wrote about the influence of these stories: "They developed in me a lifelong taste for fantasy, which led me years later to C. S. Lewis, who in turn led me to religion." A sickly child, suffering from a crooked spine, scarlet fever and anemia during various intervals throughout her school years, and attending classes with much older classmates, she later referred to herself at this time as being "bookish, over-precocious and arrogant".

After finishing high school at Evander Childs High School at fourteen years old, she read books at home until she entered Hunter College in the Bronx at the age of fifteen, earning a B.A. degree at nineteen. In 1935, she received a master's degree in English literature from Columbia University in three semesters, while also teaching at Roosevelt High School. In 1936, after several of Davidman's poems were published in Poetry, editor Harriet Monroe asked her to work for the magazine as reader and editor. Davidman resigned her teaching position to work full-time in writing and editing.

During the Great Depression, several incidents, including witnessing the suicide of a hungry orphan jumping off a roof at Hunter College, are said to have caused her to question the fairness of capitalism and the American economic system. She joined the American Communist Party in 1938.

For her collection of poems, Letter to a Comrade, she won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition in 1938. She was chosen by Stephen Vincent Benét, who commended Davidman for her "varied command of forms and a bold power." In 1939, she won the Russell Loines Award for Poetry for this same book of poems. Although much of her work during this period reflected her politics as a member of the American Communist Party, this volume of poetry was much more than implied by the title, and contained forty-five poems written in traditional and free verse that were related to serious topics of the time such as the Spanish Civil War, the inequalities of class structure and male-female relationship issues. Davidman's style in these poems showed an influence by Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

She was employed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1939 for a six month stay in Hollywood writing movie scripts. She wrote at least four, but they were not used and she returned to New York City to work for The New Masses where she wrote a controversial movie column, reviewing Hollywood movies in a manner described as "merciless in her criticisms." Her acclaimed first novel, Anya was published in 1940. Between 1941 and 1943, she was employed as a book reviewer and poetry editor for The New Masses with publications in many of the issues.