<i> A Radical Disguised as a...

Afew years ago, Kay Boyle showed me a caricature she had made of herself at the request of a journalist. What I saw was a long, slender female body gliding through the air, one elongated arm aimed straight ahead, the other straight behind, and resting in the palm of each hand, I saw what were unmistakably outsized bombs, their wicks short and smoldering, ready for dropping. Above this aeroballistic figure hovered a halo. The caption (by the author qua artist) read: “Since receiving several volumes of censored data through the Freedom of Information Act, I see myself as a dangerous ‘radical’ (they themselves put it in quotes) cleverly disguised as a perfect lady. So I herewith blow my cover.”

Boyle’s self-caricature represents both what she has always been and what she intends to go on being. She cannot remember a time, after age 6, when she was not for or against something, when she was not committed. Nor can she remember when she was not a writer. In her teens, she composed poems with titles like “Arise, Ye Women,” collected money for the defense of the jailed socialist Eugene Debs, and helped her mother feed and shelter the children of conscientious objectors who stopped in Cincinnati, her home from 1916 to 1922, on their long march to Washington to protest their fathers’ incarceration. From stalwart ancestors, including a general in George Washington’s army and an aunt who drew cartoons for the National Women’s Party, Boyle traces her pioneering spirit and penchant for free inquiry. From her mother, she inherited a devotion to literature and a dedication to social issues. “Because of my mother, who gave me definitions (she wrote in “Being Geniuses Together,” 1968), I knew what I was committed to in life; because of my father and grandfather, who offered statements instead of revelations, I knew what I was against.”

As a young American in France in the ‘20s (she was 21 when she settled in Brittany with her French husband in 1923), Boyle made writing her full-time commitment. Hers was a long, lonely apprenticeship, exacerbated by false starts and abandoned projects and wrenching personal crises. Occasionally, a little magazine in Paris, usually This Quarter or Transition, accepted one of her poems, or a story, or a review. In 1926, she met Ernest Walsh, an American poet dying of tuberculosis, lived with him until his death in October of that year, and five months later bore his child. After a brief reconciliation with her husband, she moved to Paris, supported herself as a ghost writer and saleswoman, consorted with expatriates, and, in 1929, joined Laurence Vail, a third-generation Paris-American artist and writer. Vail would become her second husband and father of three of her six children.

What Boyle had seen and done in the ‘20s became the substance of the stories and novels she wrote in the ‘30s. Personal experiences and public events have always

informed her work. Her first novel, “Plagued by the Nightingale” (1931), examines a marriage threatened by warring priorities and radical beliefs strained by economic necessity. “Year Before Last” (1932) probes the desperate, tragically short, yet joyous and deep union that linked Boyle and Ernest Walsh. The third, “Gentlemen, I Address You Privately” (1933), explores the psyche of the French (they suffer from a reverence for the substantial as opposed to the visionary and mystical) and the seething subterranean world of vagabonds. The last, “My Next Bride” (1934), prophetically connected to “Underground Woman” (1975), her most recent novel, describes the deplorable conditions in a commune, near Paris, where the author and her daughter lived in 1928, and exposes its director (based on Raymond Duncan) as a charlatan and slick advertiser. A contrasting figure in the same novel is modeled on the eccentric poet and publisher of Black Sun books, Harry Crosby, who in 1929, having called Boyle “the greatest woman writer since Jane Austen,” published her first book, a collection of stories. “Year Before Last” and “My Next Bride” have just been re-issued by Penguin in the Virago Modern Classics series.

Boyle’s short stories, the most widely read and critically acclaimed of her genres, filled three volumes in the ‘30s. After “Wedding Day” (1930) and “First Lover” (1933), came her finest collection, “The White Horses of Vienna” (1936). The title story brought the author the first of two O. Henry Memorial Awards for the best short story of the year (the second, in 1941, was for “Defeat”) and marked a dramatic shift of emphasis from her own experiences to public events. In both the story and the novel that followed, “Death of a Man” (1936), Boyle, drawing on observations she made while living in Austria from 1933 to 1936, prefigured the calamity that awaited that nation and others as they alternately succumbed to and rejected the “inexplicable fascination of Hitler.” Concurrent with her quickening political consciousness--all mankind, she believed, must oppose the forces that threaten it--was the deepening realization that love could not only give meaning to life but transform it. That message permeates “Monday Night” (1938), the novel she calls her “most satisfying book.”

In 1941, after 18 years in Europe, Boyle returned to the United States, just ahead of Joseph Franckenstein, an Austrian baron she had met in France in 1939, who, in 1943, would become her third husband. An ardent anti-Nazi, Franckenstein volunteered for military duty, trained with the Mountain Infantry in Colorado, participated in the invasion of the Aleutians, parachuted into Occupied France and was captured by the Germans. Her husband’s valorous actions and exemplary character inspired several stories and three of Boyle’s wartime novels, “Primer for Combat” (1942), “1939” (1948), and “His Human Majesty” (1949). Two others, “Avalanche” (1944), her one best seller, and “A Frenchman Must Die” (1946) extol the French Resistance fighters.

After the war, the Franckensteins traveled to Germany, Kay as correspondent for The New Yorker, Joseph as a member of the U.S. Occupation Forces. Out of the German sojourn came “The Smoking Mountain” (1951), powerful stories depicting the anguish of that defeated nation and a prefatory essay in which Boyle averred that Germany suffered from a fatal duality, the recognition of which would lead to healing the national psyche; and a novel, “Generation Without Farewell” (1960), an excoriation of militarism and a re-examination of German guilt. Out of the experience also came personal adversity. In 1952, Kay and Joseph were accused of holding communist sympathies. Although the charges, as vague as they were inaccurate, fell of their own weight, both suffered from the defamatory allegations: Kay lost her job, Joseph his position with the diplomatic service (he was reinstated in 1962, a year before his death). Back in America, embittered and blacklisted by publishers, Boyle wrote “A Declaration for 1955,” a challenge to writers not just to speak their beliefs but to defend them and to devote themselves to altering society according to the individual’s “higher standards.” That imperative underwent a severe testing in the next decade.

When students ask me what happened on college campuses in the ‘60s, I tell them to read Boyle’s “The Long Walk at San Francisco State” (1970). No more stirring account of academic opposition to the war in Vietnam exists. As one among millions, Boyle made her voice heard and paid for her out-spokenness by suspension from her teaching position. Activism also took her to Cambodia, to sit-ins at the Oakland Induction Center, and to Alcatraz Island to protest violations of Indian territory and culture. With the abolitionist John Brown, she holds that “a minority convinced of its rights, based on moral principles will, under a republican government, sooner or later become the majority.” As her fiction, essays, poetry and journalism impressively attest, Boyle has spent a lifetime speaking for the voiceless and acting for the inactive in pursuit of that goal.