Kay Boyle: A Final Reading of the Lines

The Los Angeles Theatre Center’s 1989-90 poetry/literary series began Monday night with a reading by Kay Boyle, the American poet, novelist and short-story writer whose career parallels the path of 20th-Century letters.

Boyle, 87, is the recipient of two O. Henry short-story awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Arts Endowment Fellowship, and honorary doctorates from several American colleges. Still writing in her home in Marin County, Boyle continues the political activism that has always pockmarked and energized her career.

“I probably write to express a feeling of guilt,” she summed up in a 1949 interview. “I feel guilty for every act of oppression that has been committed in our time.”

Monday night’s crowd, all of whom seemed rather sober at the announcement that this was to be Boyle’s last public reading, clutched worn copies of her novels and poetry.

Days of Confrontation

After a brief introduction by LATC’s Alan Mandell, Sean Wong, a former student of Boyle, took the stage to introduce his teacher and reminisce about her most publicized experience of the ‘60s, when Boyle was fired from San Francisco State during one protest when she referred to the university’s acting president, S.I. Hayakawa, as “Hayakawa-Eichmann.”

Later, she was reinstated when, according to Wong, Hayakawa insisted that his firing of Boyle had been “misquoted.” (The incident was chronicled in her 1970 book, “The Long Walk at San Francisco State,” and later fictionalized in her 1975 novel, “The Underground Woman.”

Born in Minnesota in 1902, Boyle traveled extensively with her family as a child, finally settling in France in the 1920s. It was there she helped found the seminal literary journal titled transition, which was the handbook of the burgeoning surrealist movement, and met many of the people who would become compatriots and friends: William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane and her lifelong comrade, Samuel Beckett.

Returning to America in 1941, Boyle joined the war effort. Afterward, she moved to Germany and became a European correspondent for the New Yorker. Boyle’s life was torn apart when her husband, Austrian-born Joseph Franckenstein, fell under suspicion during the McCarthy Era. Having been investigated by, among others, Roy Cohn, Franckenstein was found loyal to his adoptive country, the United States, but was nonetheless dismissed from his job with the State Department. His marriage to Boyle, who had never been a communist, but whose liberal novels had angered Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s investigators, flamed the inquisitors’ fire. (Franckenstein returned to work for the State Department in 1962, but died of cancer only months later.)

Boyle began teaching writing at San Francisco State University in 1963, and owned a four-story Victorian home in the heart of the Haight-Ashbury district which she rented out to her students. During that decade, she helped organize the protest against the Vietnam War that made the campus the site of some of America’s most strident student uprisings. Boyle herself, at the age of 66, served 31 days in prison for leading a sit-in at a draft-induction center in Oakland.

Now frail but still possessing a strong voice and wry sense of humor, Boyle took the stage at the Theatre Center and immediately announced her distaste for poems about death. By way of introducing her first selection, “Poets,” she said, “I’ve been lecturing Sam Beckett for years about lightening up his poems about death--but Dylan Thomas spoils this one at the end by dying.”

But death, treated in a manner both lighthearted and grim, was the motif of many of the poems at the reading. Boyle thumbed through her books, seemingly choosing works at random, often sighing, “Another one about death?” Toward the end of the reading, she made the crowd laugh by saying softly, “Maybe I’ve learned something tonight. Maybe I should write more cheerful poems.”

Like her writing, her manner is warm and astringent. As she read, a series of soft, bucolic ruminations would be interrupted by an unsentimental line, heavy with consonants and staccato single syllables. She received the biggest laugh of the evening when she told the crowd that, as a teacher, she often forbade her students to write in the first-person singular: “They wrote much better things when they weren’t pouring out their souls.”

One of the best-received poems of the evening was written for an Iranian woman Boyle corresponded with through Amnesty International. (Still active with the Northern California branch of the human-rights organization, Boyle is feted by them annually, when Amnesty makes her birthday a fund-raiser for the group.) She spoke of her Iranian friend’s letters as “the fugitive words that slip through the bars,” and said the woman disappeared after beginning research on the lives of Iranian peasants.

Political themes--in particular, the international passion for democracy--was a favorite topic. She read verse about the Greek student uprising, comparing it to the current situation in China, and read another poem about black power.

Though she skirted reminiscences about her life and took no questions from the audience, Boyle did try to enlist help for an upcoming march in the Bay Area protesting the California death penalty. She said that she would be there herself in a wheelchair pushed by her friend Joan Baez, with whom Boyle served a month in prison for her protest against the war in Vietnam.

Vision for America

After the reading, while the audience gathered in the lobby for her to inscribe books, Boyle rested backstage and spoke of what she saw for America in the 1990s.

“Oh, I’m very optimistic,” she said. “People, young and old, are much more understanding that we can no longer have war at any cost. That’s why we have these covert wars now; we can’t afford to have an overt war.”

Since becoming professor emerita from San Francisco State in 1980, Boyle has taught writing classes in the Midwest, which she described as “quite a shock. There were no black faces in any of my classes. There were no Asians.” In disbelief, she added, “I went to the president of the school and asked where they were, and he told me they were all in computer classes.”

She grimaced at the thought, and then smiled.

“I guess I made a lot of trouble,” she said softly. “As usual.”