In My Own Sweet Time: A Memoir - Hardcover

Blanche and James Cooney met in the 1930s in Greenwich Village. She was seventeen, an art student, a Russian-Romanian first-generation Jewish New Yorker bound for radical freedom. He was twenty-seven, an Irish-American writer, a lapsed Catholic expelled from the Communist Party for anarchist "tendencies." Disparate pair, imperative union. They married and left New York forever; left her outraged parents, his distraught lover, for frontier life in rural America with no 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. In spite of their isolation the cast is rich: Frieda Lawrence, Henry Miller, Anais Nin. Lepke, Czar of the underworld; a constant stream of European expatriates; artists and rebels and poets of all ages and persuasions. For fifty years they lived together, farming, raising their four children; close to the heart of things. Though never achieved, their vision of community remained alive.
Blanche Cooney tells stories from her life of exploration.