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Odyssey of a Liberal: Memoirs By Freda Utley National Press Inc., 319 pp., $10.00 Freda Utley, according to Pearl Buck, had the misfortune to have “a brilliant mind, rigorously truthful in its working, though born unhappily in the body of a woman.” This judgment may have some value, but it doesn’t quite get at the source of the interior conflict that has dogged a remarkable character ever since her days at one of those expensive old-time English boarding schools where the social code frowned on “brainy” accomplishments. The fact is that Freda Utley’s running battle with the four or five Establishments under which she was doomed to live in various parts of the world had little to do with her sex. She was fortunate in her loving parents; and her marriage to Arcadi Berdischevsky, a non-party employee of the Soviet Promexport, or foreign sales organization, in Moscow, was something of an idyll even in the midst of hardship. She has also been fortunate in her son, Jon, a most successful businessman. Her troubles have all derived from a continually renewed clash between an all-out temperament and the tentative mind of the scientist who insists that judgments must be held lightly lest one be locked into hypotheses long after they have failed to meet the tests of experience.

It was the all-out temperament that sent Freda Utley into the Communist Party after the fiasco of the 1926 General Strike in Britain. But once Freda had lived for a while in Moscow, her mind told her that socialism was, in practice, a horribly antisocial thing. By this time she was trapped; though she had kept her British passport, and had her son conveniently listed on it, she had to keep quiet about her real feelings lest she compromise her husband. In the end the NKVD moved in on Arcadi Berdischevsky anyway, probably because he had jested once too often about the quality of life in Russia.

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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Odyssey of a Liberal: Memoirs By Freda Utley National Press Inc., 319 pp., $10.00 Freda Utley, according to Pearl Buck, had the misfortune to have “a brilliant mind, rigorously truthful in its working, though born unhappily in the body of a woman.” This judgment may have some value, but it doesn’t quite get at the source of the interior conflict that has dogged a remarkable character ever since her days at one of those expensive old-time English boarding schools where the social code frowned on “brainy” accomplishments. The fact is that Freda Utley’s running battle with the four or five Establishments under which she was doomed to live in various parts of the world had little to do with her sex. She was fortunate in her loving parents; and her marriage to Arcadi Berdischevsky, a non-party employee of the Soviet Promexport, or foreign sales organization, in Moscow, was something of an idyll even in the midst of hardship. She has also been fortunate in her son, Jon, a most successful businessman. Her troubles have all derived from a continually renewed clash between an all-out temperament and the tentative mind of the scientist who insists that judgments must be held lightly lest one be locked into hypotheses long after they have failed to meet the tests of experience.

It was the all-out temperament that sent Freda Utley into the Communist Party after the fiasco of the 1926 General Strike in Britain. But once Freda had lived for a while in Moscow, her mind told her that socialism was, in practice, a horribly antisocial thing. By this time she was trapped; though she had kept her British passport, and had her son conveniently listed on it, she had to keep quiet about her real feelings lest she compromise her husband. In the end the NKVD moved in on Arcadi Berdischevsky anyway, probably because he had jested once too often about the quality of life in Russia.