Marin Women's Hall of Fame

How do you condense a person's life into a mere three thousand words?  Especially a life of such passion and intensity as Kay Boyle lived, of whom one could faithfully say she was a cat with nine lives. (And three husbands and six children.) What better than to use the writer's own words.

'If I was certain of anything in life then it was that everyone who wrote possessed a singular piece of knowledge from which I had been excluded.  I believed that everyone-and writers in particular-had been given information... which endowed them with their marvelous authority." She writes this looking back at herself at the tender age of eighteen.

Boyle's life is a veritable Who's Who of the writers and artists of her time.  But she didn't stumble upon this life quite by accident, her upbringing (and particularly her mother and grandmother) seems to have prepared her for such an avant-garde existence in the belly where swam James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, Max Ernst Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and Samuel Beckett, amongst others.

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota on February 19, 1902, she grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio.  Her mother educated her: "on books and painting, music and people." Her mother read aloud from Wind in the Willows to Kay and her sister each night, and from Lewis Carroll, and The Secret Garden. while the two daughters concurrently drew illustrations to match the text of each book. 'We felt in some way guilty if we put our pencils down for even a moment in order to stretch our fingers and relax our hands.  If we weren't drawing with care and concern, we knew we should be trying to write stories and poems of our own, or at least letters to Mother's friends who had such fascinating names. . .' Later she read them all of Jane Austen, and works by Gertrude Stein, George Bernard Shaw, and the poetry of Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman.

The family traveled a great deal and lived well (her grandfather had founded West Publishing Company and this afforded them a generous lifestyle.) At age ten her mother took Boyle to the now infamous Armory Show in New York to see the work of artist Marcel Duchamp (and his controversial painting, 'Nude Descending the Staircase") and sculptor, Constantin Brancusi (both of whom were later to become Boyle's friends.)

Her mother grew up on the Kansas prairies and had very little education because of her poor health. (She had severe curvature of the spine and was forced to wear a brace for most of her childhood.) Boyle herself hated going to school and failed miserably at it.  "As if collecting persuasive evidence why I should stay at home, I had a long siege with whooping cough when I was three, after which I had to learn to walk again; and it was a year later that I lost all my hair after typhoid fever and for a long while had to wear a tan silk cap; and then came the terrifying experience at the kindergarten across the road from us in Germantown, Pennsylvania, an experience which was the final argument in my case against my ever having to go to school." (She was locked up in the pitch black cloakroom by two little boys only to be rescued by her teacher a few minutes later.) She left school for good by the eighth grade and had no other formal education outside of two years of studying violin at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, two years of architecture classes at the Ohio Mechanics Institute, and a year at the Parsons School of Design in New York.  This nontraditional education seems to have been instrumental in allowing Boyle to blossom into the independent spirit that she was, and to enable her to find her own voice, with which she went on to produce thirty books.  Amongst those were fourteen novels, five volumes of poetry, ten short story collections, children's books, four translations of avant-garde French works, and many other nonfiction books of essays, autobiography and biography.  Alfred Steigletz was a friend of her mother's and Boyle considered him her mentor since she was eight or nine.  She and her sister participated in a show of children's art at his gallery in New York, '291."

At eighteen Boyle moved to New York City where her older sister Joan worked as a designer for Vogue magazine.  After a job she disliked as secretary to a fashion writer, she took a job typing and filing for the artsy literary magazine, 'Broom," where she began to meet the many writers who were contributors to the magazine. (She served them tea and cakes in the editor's brownstone.) William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Elinor Wylie and John Dos Passos were there, to name just a few.

In 1922 she moved to France with her first husband, Richard Brault, a French exchange student she had met in Cincinnati.  Expecting to be in France a few short months, she ended up staying for eighteen years.  She lived with Brault's family and later wrote her first book, Plagued by the Nightingale, an autobiographical novel about living with her husband's wealthy family in the north of France:

'That was a winter of tremendous and determined walking.  In the twelve hours of every weekday that I was alone, I wrote or I walked, and there was not an avenue or alley, a dock or jetty, of Le Havre that I did not know.  I collected stones and driftwood from the beach, that harsh, ungiving beach where shells could not survive an hour but were ground to sand by the beating of the surf.  I walked, and I wrote poetry, and I began my second novel, the story of the family in Brittany. . ."

While still married to Brault, she began a correspondence with poet Ernest Walsh with whom she ultimately fell in love.  They worked together on the literary journal, 'This Quarter," of which he was editor.  She left her husband to live with Walsh in the South of France and bore him her first child three months after he died of tuberculosis.  In the late nineteen twenties, after Walsh's death, she moved to Paris with their young daughter, Sharon.

In Paris she became a vital part of the group of writers and artists now known as the Lost Generation.  Debunking the myth of that flourishing time, Boyle insists the real reason so many Americans moved to Paris and became expatriates was because of the incredible exchange rate.  Put quite simply, they could live cheaply enough to produce their work.  As to the idea that they all sat around in cafes drinking cafe au lait and discussing their latest creative output, she said that was nonsense.  They worked mainly in isolation, as artist always have.  She claims James Joyce discussed white wine and his wife talked primarily about clothing.  Had they brought up the subject of his work, Joyce would have stood up immediately and left.  In an essay written in 1970 she said of that time, 'Our daily revolt was against literary pretentiousness, against weary, dreary rhetoric, against worn-out literary conventions.  We called our protest, 'The Revolution of the Word'. . . There was ... before the Twenties, no lively, wholly American, grandly experimental and furiously disrespectful school of writing, so we had to invent that school."

During this period she wrote several novels.  Amongst them were Year Before Last, 1932, Gentlemen, I Address You Privately, 1933, and My Next Blj& 1934.  The last two novels were based partly on her life with Europe's artistic community.  W@L Next Bridg_ is clearly woven out of the experience Boyle had living in Raymond Duncan's 'utopian" colony in Neuilly.  She met Duncan (brother of the dancer, Isadora Duncan) at a tea in Paris in the spring of 1928.  'He was a man of fifty or so, lean and muscular, neat and scrupulously well kept, with his long hair pinned in silky gray braids in a crown around his small, eagle-like head." Boyle had been living in luxury with the Princess Dayang Muda (Gladys Palmer of Huntley-Palmer Biscuits who had married the white rajah of Sarawah) while writing the princess's biography.  She was drawn to the supposedly simple, healthy lifestyle Duncan so charismatically espoused.  In the book, as in real life, Boyle leaves after a stay of six months when Duncan buys a fancy car with the money from his American patron and takes off with his mistress for the South of France.

She also won praise for her short stories.  'The White Horses of Vienna,' a story which warned of the growth of Nazism in prewar Europe, written while she was living in Austria, won the prestigious 0. Henry Award in 1935.  "Defeat" won it in 1941.  Her most commercially successful novel was written about the French Resistance, AvalanchC, published in 1944.

In 1932 she married her second husband, Laurence Vail, a painter and would be writer, who was formerly married to American heiress, Peggy Guggenheim. (The two were also living at Duncan's colony.) She spent twelve years with Vail, gave birth to three daughters-Apple-joan, Clover and Kathe- and wrote arguably her best work.  The family lived in France, Austria and England.  In an interview given in Oregon in March of 1982, Boyle was asked how she was able to be so prolific with the different moves in her life, husbands and children.

"Because we were so often in hotels, I'd always have my typewriter with me in bed.  It was easier.  There wasn't a table.  There wasn't a chair.  We never went to any grand hotels.  But I don't think I could have done it in America, because it was possible, from the point of view of money, to have people help you in Europe.  Like washing dishes and cooking.  In the South of France, there were always little Italian girls who were there illegally, and they were just delighted to work."

"As for my second husband, Laurence Vail, he had such terrific qualities, and when I think of the horrible stories Peggy Guggenheim wrote about him, I wish I were younger and had longer to live so I could write a book about him to set the story straight."

'When he and Peggy Guggenheim divorced, she allowed him to keep a magnificent gift, an Hispano-Suiza car which his mother-in-law had made especially for him, and he sold it for 100,000 francs, which was a terrific amount in those days.  So we started off on that, and eventually went to the South of France to live, then to Austria, then to the French Alps.  I had given up my job in Paris as a secretary to an American fashion writer and was able to sell some stories every now and then to 'The New Yorker" and Laurence and I did a number of translations together.' (In 1931 she published her first story for 'The New Yorker.")

In the thirties Boyle was living in Austria when Hitler and the Nazi regime came into power.  Because of the escalating war, in June of 1941, she and her family traveled by train to Lisbon (accompanied by Vail, Peggy Guggenheim and Guggenheim's husband-to-be, the surrealist painter, Max Ernst) and after a wait of some weeks booked passage on the Pan Am Clipper back to the United States.  She met Austrian Joseph Franckenstein (Baron von Franckenstein) when he was hired as a tutor for her children.  She divorced Vail in 1943 and married Franckenstein that same year.  They had one child, a son.

'That was not a hard time economically.  I was making a good deal of money then, selling serials to the Saturday Evening Post.  It was the only time I ever made money from my writing.  Before, in all those years in Austria and France, we just sort of lived hand to mouth.  I had never heard of a savings account.  I never even had a checking account before 1941."

From 1946 to 1953 Boyle returned to Europe as a foreign correspondent for 'The New Yorker" magazine.  She was assigned to write on the conditions in wartorn Europe until she and her husband were blacklisted. (An interesting note, after the war, Franckenstein proved to be a pivotal witness for the prosecution in the Nuremberg Trials.)

"In the fifties my short stories were not saleable because Joseph and I were black-listed.  During all that time, he couldn't get a decent job anywhere.  He had been a foreign service officer, stationed in Germany, and the tragic thing was that he had a government hearing and was completely cleared by the counselor panel in Germany; but four days later Kohn and Schine, two of McCarthy's henchmen, came over to Germany to go through the files of the people... and they fired everyone who had a loyalty-security hearing even though they'd been exonerated, completely exonerated.  And we were told to leave at once." "The New Yorker" withdrew Boyle's accreditation and for the next ten years she was completely boycotted.  With the exception of 'The Nation," the journals that had previously scrambled to get her work, now avoided her completely.

'How many people suffered!  Arthur Miller.  Pete Seeger.  Langston Hughes.  Lillian Hellman... But neither Joseph nor I had ever been a member of any party whatsoever, and we didn't have many Communist friends.  The charges were just something that had been completely invented."

They spent the next nine years fighting those charges. (During this time the family resided in Connecticut.) In 1962, Franckenstein was reinstated by the government and given a position as cultural attach6 to the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran, where the family moved.  But already ailing from lung cancer, barely a year later he passed away.

In 1963, finding herself virtually on her own with several children to support, she moved to the West Coast to take a job teaching at San Francisco State University where she taught writing for the next eighteen years.  Always fervent in her beliefs, Boyle became active in the movement against the war in Vietnam and worked along with Joan Baez and others in protesting that war, and was sent to jail twice in 1967 for her activism (the second time for a stay of thirty-one days for leading sit-ins that blocked the entrance to the Oakland Induction Center.) In her essay entitled, "From the Lock-up" in Words That Must Be Somehow Said. she writes:

'It may be that none of us can ever get out of the solitary confinement we've condemned ourselves to (out of fear, out of pride, out of loneliness) until we find ourselves in actual prisons of iron and stone... The walls of Troy and Limerick were built to keep the invader out, but we have built walls to keep the lost and bewildered among us out of our line of vision, walls to seal our fellow citizens it away. 

She marched with California farm workers, celebrated Christmas on Alcatraz during the Native American occupation of 1970, founded the San Francisco chapter of Amnesty International in 1973, forever spoke out on behalf of others less fortunate than herself.  Quoting Eugene Debs in one of her essays she reveals the deep source of her dedication to political activism.  'While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

Living so often in the thick of things, clearly her mc-tier was observation of the Real, and she did not separate life from art.  In her essay, 'Triumph of Principles,' she quotes Leopold Bruckberger, 'By tradition the European intellectual has a special characters vocation beyond the limits of his own profession of writing or science or teaching.  He believes himself called to a more universal responsibility than are other men, and that is to keep watch on the world, and to call the plays as he sees them, at whatever risk to himself."

On the subject of her lifelong profession she said this at the age of eighty-one:

'Writing... is an extremely lonely and discouraging thing.  I refer all my students to Albert Camus who in his life and in his work never ceased seeking to define with clarity and modesty the writer's predicament in our particular time... Camus believed he had not the right, either as man or writer, to sever himself from the plight of other men.  He believed that the miner who was exploited, the slaves of the concentration camps, whether they were in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union or other totalitarian states-in other words, the persecuted legions throughout the world-required the testimony of those who could speak.  The writer must give voice to the silence of the silenced, Camus said.  'That is all that is perhaps asked of each of us writers, not to separate ourselves from our time. . .' "

William Carlos Williams wrote this of her first book, a short story collection.  'Her short stories assault our sleep.  They are of a high degree of excellence; for that reason they will not succeed in America, they are lost, damned." While not receiving the widespread critical acclaim as did many of her illustrious contemporaries, still she made her mark.  She was a fellow at Weslayan University in 1963 and at Radcliffe in 1965, and was awarded several honorary doctorate degrees, from Colombia University in 1971, Skidmore College in 1977, and Southern Illinois College in 1982.

In 1979, at the age of seventy-seven, she retired from her teaching position at San Francisco State University.  But it is doubtful that she stood still for very long.  In the ninety eighties she was visiting professor at Northwestern University and then at Bowling Green.  In 1989, pushed along in a wheelchair by her son, Ian, she protested capital punishment at San Quentin.  She was awarded two Guggenheim fellowships, and was one of the first women to be inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters, American Academy.  A life well spent, she died in Mill Valley in 1993, at the age of ninety.

Still, when putting together the pieces of a puzzle that is someone's life, the whole is never quite the sum of its parts.  Major events, accomplishments, people, dates and places intact, it is something we can never know-only guess at. le ne sais quoi.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BEING GENIUSES TOGETHER1920-1930, Robert McAlmon, revised with supplementary chapters by Kay Boyle, San Francisco, North Point Press, 1984

 LIFE BEING THE BEST AND OTHER STORIES, Kay Boyle, Ed. with Intro. by Sandra Whipple Spanier, New Directions, 1988

 MY NEXT BRIDE, Kay Boyle, Afterword by Doris Grumbach, New York, Penguin Books, Virago Press, 1986, original copyright 1934

 PLAGUED BY THE NIGHTINGALE, Kay Boyle, 1931rpt., Carbondale and Edwardsville, Southern Illinois University Press, 1966

WOMEN WRITERS OF THE WEST COAST, Speaking of their lives and careers, Ed. by Marilyn Yalom, Santa Barbara, Capra Press, 1983, Interview by Margo Davis

 WORDS THAT MUST SOMEHOW BE SAID, selected essays of Kay Boyle, Ed. and Intro. by Elizabeth Bell, San Francisco, North Point Press, 1985

 Articles:

 A GENIUS ALONE, by Nancy Ramsey, Vogue, December 1986

 KAY BOYLE, A LONG AND ELEGANT LIFE, by Beth Ashley, Marin Independent journal

 KAY BOYLE, by Chris Andre httl2: wwwanb.org / articles / 16 /16-03084.htrnl; American National Biography Online Feb. 2000, Copyright 2000 American Council of Learned Societies.  Published by Oxford University Press.