Years ago I made a bargain with myself that I would only consider troubles that I had the power to address. The larger issues in the world where people were starving, and dieing in the abattoirs of genocide, I set aside. I wrote the occasional letter and contributed when I could to worthy organizations that I hoped would fight in my place for decent living conditions and the right to live without terror. I joined Amnesty International. I gave money whenever anyone asked me for spare change, and protested for peace when the protest wasn’t too dangerous or too far away.
This bargain that I made was an uneasy one, and I finally recognized the deception and convenience of its strictures upon reading the short stories and novels of Kay Boyle. Kay Boyle, in her writings, takes a moral stance, and in full recognition of all the bewildering currents and complexities of daily living, forces the reader to make a choice. She assaults our sleep, said William Carlos Williams in early recognition of Boyle’s capacity to block off all routes of evasion. “And for that reason,” Williams said, her stories would “not succeed in America; they [would be] lost, damned.”
While it is true, however, that Boyle is not as frequently read as her contemporaries, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Joyce, those readers who do find their way to her works, whether through happenstance or recommendation, are invariably changed. Through an almost dogged persistence, Boyle makes us step out of the boundaries of who we are. This is not to say that her stories are simplistic. If they were, they would not have the power to affect us. Rather, through the juxtaposition of metaphor and counterpoint, she leads the reader to a dilemma and then trusts him to see the ramifications of failing to consider.
Because there is so much brutality in the world (brutality that Boyle witnessed in pre-war France and post-war Germany), brutality runs like a bright red thread through her stories. Because those who do see are often stymied by the enormity and complexity of the problems, Boyle’s protagonists are often ineffectual. Take for instance, the teacher in “Life being the Best,” who proffers biblical stories to combat the injustices in a peasant boy’s life. Take the administrator in Generation without Farewell who wishfully believes that creating a place where soldiers can listen to Beethoven will heal the scars of occupied Germany. There is “nothing so absolute as hope” in Kay Boyle’s stories, but there is a thoughtfulness and a determination not to look away.
Perhaps Boyle’s stance is best revealed in her story, “Seven Say You Can Hear Corn Grow.” Here, a boy named Dan recounts a newspaper story to his mother, relentlessly forging on even when she tells him she wants him to stop. A horse being transported in an airplane has gone berserk. He is rearing in terror, striking the enclosure with his hooves. The pilot cannot quiet him, and he fears the horse will bring the plane down. So he takes an axe and…. The mother breaks in and tells the boy that she doesn’t want to hear it. “You have to hear it,” the boy says. “If you don’t know whether you’re on the side of the horse they killed or on the side of the pilot, there’s no sense trying to work out your life. You have to decide first.”
Boyle’s early heroes were Eugene Debs, Lola Ridge, and Upton Sinclair, all strong champions of social causes, people who worked to give a voice to those who otherwise would not be heard. In her turn, Boyle covered the Nazi war criminal trials for the New Yorker, marched for civil rights, and protested the Viet Nam war. She led a turbulent life, transitioning from living in a spare one room apartment with her first husband, to having an affair with a poet dieing from tuberculosis, to living in Raymond Duncan’s commune. She was one of the “lost generation” in 1920s Paris and participated in all its excess and jaded dissolution. She was married three times and had six children and two step children. In her later years, she taught creative writing at San Francisco State College, though she, herself, had never had any formal education. Throughout all of these changes in direction, she never lost her direction. She never stopped asking the questions.
