<i> Janet Lewis and the Untranslatable Heart</i>

Gently objecting to the notion that writers should be sheltered from and supported by society, Janet Lewis once told an interviewer: “The poet should be immersed in living, which is not always easy. If he’s too much set aside and taken care of, possibly he may miss something. What comes out of a rich and normally lived life is what is probably most valuable to other people. Poetry’s a byproduct.”

This observation illuminates Lewis’ own remarkable verse and prose. The excellence of her work results partly from the simple fact that she writes very well, hers being a style that combines clear speech with distinctive and personal inflection and perception. Lewis’ achievement, however, involves not merely stylistic properties, but sympathies that issue from a life richly and thoughtfully experienced. To read her is to read someone who has been a child, sibling, friend, spouse and parent, and who has clearly cared as deeply about these aspects of her life as she has about those aspects connected with her art.

Lewis’ biography may be briefly summarized. Born outside Chicago in 1899, she grew up in the Chicago area. She attended high school in the suburb of Oak Park, where one of her fellow students was Ernest Hemingway. Her father, who was an English professor, encouraged her early interest in literature and writing, and after enrolling in the University of Chicago in 1918, she joined the university’s Poetry Club. Through her membership in the Poetry Club, she met other young writers, among them Glenway Wescott and Elizabeth Madox Roberts and the poet and critic Yvor Winters, whom she married in 1926.

After a brief period of working for the American Consulate in Paris and a stint of teaching in Chicago, Lewis was in 1922 diagnosed as having tuberculosis. She spent much of the next five years in a sanitarium in New Mexico. This difficult time was not without benefit; during her long convalescence in the Southwest, she became interested in the culture of the pueblos, about which she was later to write memorable poems. This interest in turn reinforced an already longstanding concern with native American societies, a concern that had developed during the summers of her youth when she and her family vacationed in Ojibway country in upper Michigan. Indeed, Lewis’ first novel, “The Invasion” (1932), is a vivid account of the coming of white settlers to the Old Northwest Territory in the late 18th and early 19th Century; and the book records, at times in heartbreaking terms, the attempts of the Indians and the various “invaders”--French, English and American--to understand and live in peace with each other.

Having married while still at the sanitarium, Lewis moved with her husband in 1927 to Palo Alto, where he became a graduate student and later a professor of English at Stanford University. The move proved lasting. Lewis and Winters settled permanently in the Bay Area, rearing their two children and working and writing their books. After Winters died in 1968, Lewis edited and guided to publication his “Collected Poems,” while at the same time continuing with her own work.

About that work, one should perhaps first note its variety. In addition to the novels and poems for which she is best known, Lewis has written short stories, books for children and opera librettos. Yet it is the novels and verse that compose her major achievement. The novels are five in number. As well as “The Invasion,” she has published “The Wife of Martin Guerre” (1941), “Against a Darkening Sky” (1943), “The Trial of Soren Qvist” (1947) and “The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron” (1959). Lewis’ several collections of verse have been gathered together in “Poems Old and New” (1981). All these books, it may be added, are in print and available from Swallow/Ohio University Press.

Because her writing is so restrained and clear-sighted, one might almost overlook the fact that much of Lewis’ work is about sex. The subject commonly receives gaudy treatment, and a jaded reader may not recognize it in Lewis’ plainer settings. Marianne Larcher, of Lewis’ “The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron,” is an individual who, by failing to resist infatuation with the feckless Paul Damas, brings about her moral annihilation, not to mention the physical annihilation of everybody around her. Bertrande de Rols, the young heroine of “The Wife of Martin Guerre,” a beautiful short novel based on a legendary case in French law that also served as the basis for a recent film, is both betrayed and ennobled by her love for a clever and affectionate adventurer who poses as her long-lost husband. (Lewis’ novel, which anticipates by several decades many of the motifs of the feminist movement, presents the story in a way considerably different from that of the movie.) Bertrande’s initial acceptance of the imposter is a triumph of understandable but misguided desire over instinct and reason alike. Her ultimate rejection of him is a triumph of courage over deception and self-deception, though the cost of the triumph is heavy, for Bertrande must see her lover condemned to execution and herself to public shame and dishonor.

A second, equally central concern in Lewis’ work is with the past. This is reflected generally in the historical materials on which four of her five novels draw. More particularly, the concern is reflected in the characters in the novels, a number of whom are people trying to establish, often under more difficult conditions, a sense of community and tradition. This is especially true of John Johnston and Neengay of “The Invasion.” In the wake of the ruin of his family’s fortunes, the young Johnston comes from his native Ireland to the New World, where he finds himself totally isolated from his heritage. Neengay is by no means isolated from hers, but she sees it being eroded by the encroachments of the fur trade and the military power of the Europeans. Johnston and Neengay’s marriage is in one respect an assertion of the hope that they will be able to found a new ancestry to replace the lost or dying lineages.

A similar theme is sounded in “Against a Darkening Sky,” which is set in a semi-rural community on the San Francisco Peninsula during the Depression. The novel’s plot involves Mary Perrault’s attempt to communicate stable values to her four children, whom she sees growing up in the rootless and anxious society of modern California. An immigrant from Scotland, Mary Perrault has herself great strength of character; but she realizes that this strength is owed to her having been reared in a world more ordered than that which her children occupy. As she observes, in words that will be readily appreciated by many current residents of this state, “The fault lay in the lack of faith, the lonely and independent lives--every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost--the shifting communities whose constant change made it impossible for anyone to live as she had lived as a girl, in a community as in the center of a family.”

Lewis’ concern with history appears as well in certain poems dealing broadly with the human condition--with the fact that our species, though subject to biological process, has somehow stepped from merely material existence into self-awareness and a recognition of time. One of the most interesting of these poems is “Fossil, 1975,” the opening lines of which describe a fossilized fern and affirm that durable patterns of existence can and do survive the ceaseless flux of things:

Changed and not changed. Three million years.

This sunlight-summoned little fern

Closed in a cenotaph of silt

Lies in my hand, secret and safe,

In quiet dark transformed to stone.

Cell after cell to crystal grown,

The pattern stays, the substance gone. ...

Faith is another central motif in Lewis’ work. Her belief that lacking spiritual support human beings are vulnerable to moral corruption or despair, is explored in detail in “The Trial of Soren Qvist,” a study of a decent but flawed parson whose faith is tested by a terrible personal catastrophe. And the theme is examined again in “The Candle Flame,” a poem in which Lewis suggests that only a kind of divine grace can counter the instability of human passions and behavior:

I feel myself like the flame

Of a candle fanned

By every passionate claim,

Flickering fast,

Or brought to an upright stand

In the curve of a hand. . . .

It remains to say that Lewis’ work, as somber as it sometimes is, maintains a joyful appreciation of the world in all its transitory loveliness. Nowhere is this appreciation more evident than in “Country Burial,” a poem distinguished by finely rendered physical details, such as that of the women following the casket out through the meadow: “The daisies bend and straighten / Under the trailing skirts.”

The poem concludes with the observation that the mourners can relate the mystery of death only to the wonder of life, the vital sum and limit of their experience:

Into this earth the flesh and wood shall melt

And under these familiar common flowers

Flow through the earth they both have understood

By sight and touch and daily sustenance.

And this is comforting;

For heaven is a blinding radiance where

Leaves are no longer green, nor water wet,

Milk white, soot black, nor winter weather cold,

And the eyeless vision of the Almighty Face

Brings numbness to the untranslatable heart.

For more than half a century, Janet Lewis has been writing verse and prose about “the untranslatable heart.” She has devoted readers and has been widely praised by her peers, among them Louise Bogan, Theodore Roethke and Tillie Olsen. Evan S. Connell has written of her: “I cannot think of another writer whose stature so far exceeds her public recognition.” Because of this situation, this year’s Robert Kirsch Award to Janet Lewis may rightly serve two functions: to honor a wonderful writer and to bring her to the attention of new readers.