Glory Years: Kay Boyle's Revolution
The twenty-one-year-old Kay Boyle went to France with her French husband, Richard Brault. What was to be a short stay lasted more than a decade. Here, she met the writers and publishers of the day and was featured with Joyce and Hemingway in This Quarter, the literary journal of Ernest Walsh. Acceptance in transition followed and Boyle’s literary career was launched.Her story is a roller coaster ride during which she left her husband and fended for
herself. Her encounter with Harold Loeb and introduction to Robert McAlmon sent her into a circle of literary giants such as the ailing Ernest Walsh, Emanuel Carnaveli and Eugene Jolas. When Walsh, and later Kay herself, became ill, it was McAlmon who forwarded Kay the funds needed for the best doctors. Unfortunately, Ernest Walsh died on October 16th 1926. He had been called “an intellectual whip that opened channels for expression.”. He was only 31.Kay Boyle still had strong convictions about America and American justice despite the fact that she was living in France. She was active and outspoken about America’s heavy-handedness during and after the trial of Sacco & Vanzetti. At one point she had even thought about burning an American flag at the American consulate.
She wrote such works as Plagued by the Nightingale and Gentlemen I Address You. Her association with Eugene Jolas led to exposure in transition, and her work appeared beside that of Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane and Archibald MacLeish. Through the efforts of the British poet Archibald Craig, she was contracted to ghost-write the memoirs of Dayang Muda of Sarawak (Gladys Palmer Brooke), heir to a biscuit company fortune. After this, she was able to live in comfort and style. She met most of the who’s who of the Parisian Literary society and her friendship with Harry & Caresse Crosby led to the publication of Short Stories in limited edition. Later, Black Sun Press published her translations of part of Rene Cavel’s Babylone as Mr. Knife Miss Fork and Raymond Radiguet’s The Devil in the Flesh.
After her marriage to Ernest Walsh, the birth of her first daughter, and her search for a stable life, practicality drew her into the circle of Raymond Duncan *, the brother of Isadora. He was, according to McAlmon, trying to prove he was something more than just Isadora’s brother. He had set up a commune near Neuilly, a wealthy suburb on the west side of Paris, and opened shops in Paris to sell sandals and folk art. Kay was in charge of one of the “colony’s” shops, at 218 Boul. St-Germain, and claimed she never saw the items for sale made at the commune. She guessed that they were items he and his sister had accumulated in Greece. At the commune, she had living quarters, food, and care for her daughter. When she found herself pregnant, she turned to Caresse Crosby, who helped her with finances to cover an enormous abortion bill. What followed was cerebral meningitis and six weeks in the hospital.
When the proceeds of a $25,000 sale at the shop were turned into a new American car for Duncan, she moved out of the colony, againi with the aid of the Crosbys. In 1929 she met Lawrence Vail, affectionately called “The King of Bohemia”. They were soon married and moved outside of Paris with her daughter and his son.
During her life, she maneuvered through a wide literary circle. While dismissed by Gertrude Stein, who usually favored men to women writers, she was opposed to Gertrude’s “mistrust of the intellect”. But she befriended Peggy Guggenheim, Nancy Cunard, William Carlos Williams, Janet Flaner, Nora and James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. She disapproved of Hemingway’s flagrant affair with Pauline and called him, and I quote, “a bastard.” Aside from In Our Time, she was disillusioned and did not like his writing, especially Hemingway’s treatment and ridicule of Sherwood Anderson in Torrents of Spring. He in turn did not admire Ernest Walsh, who he wrote “was a man marked for death”.
In transition, June, 1929, a manifesto entitled Revolution of the World expounded on rights of the literary creator. It was signed by such giants as Hart Crane, Eugene Jolas Laurence Vail and the Crosbys. It is interesting that Kay’s name was at the top of the list. To her, art was both politics and religion. Her religion was poetry and she referred to Whitman, Poe and William Carlos Williams as ’apostles of America.”
Kay Boyle was a missionary on a crusade for the written word. She was not like Hemingway or Stein in that she spoke for others but had little time to cultivate a following or seek literary fame.
Kay Boyle died in December, 1992
*Canadian John Glasco once described Raymond Duncan as “A walking absurdity who dressed in an ancient handwoven Greek costume and wore his hair in long braids reaching his waist.”
Other Publications:
Wedding Day and Other Stories, 1930 and 1932
Year Before Last, 1932
The Crazy Hunter, 1940
The Smoking Mountain Stories of Postwar Germany, 1952
ESSENTIAL READING:
Sandra Whipple Spanier, Kay Boyle: Artist and Activist, Paragon House Publishers. New York, 1988
Humphrey Carpenter, Geniuses Together, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston 1988
Double Deception is work of fiction recently published in serialization on the web. It is a story through the memories of Dr Robert Bartlett Haas, a close friend of Gertrude's,about the portrait of Gertrude Stein that had been done by Picasso before WWI. This portrait is now on view in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The story unfolds when Gertrude decides that she would like a copy of the painting done so she can keep a similar image in her summer home in Bilignin, near Belley not far from Aix Les Bains. She engages the copyist Morevna Vorobiev to do the job and when it is delivered even Picasso cannot tell the paintings apart since he sees them in a gas lit room.
After Gertrude dies, the painting is sent to New York where it is deemed a copy. Has the wrong painting been delivered? Through the work of two master art detectives it is determined that Miss Vorobiev, the lover of Diego Rivera, has copied the painting twice and has kept the original. The remainder of the story deals with the uncovering of the original, the solution of the mystery and the final hanging of the right painting at the Met.
It is, as Gertrude might have said, "a mystery with an ending".
