Rebel with a Pen

...In 1929 she "joined a group of avant garde expatriates who signed a 13-point manifesto," Spanier tells us in her long and invaluable Introduction...

...Even near the end of her life she unsettled the other residents of her retirement home when she "integrated" the dining room by inviting guests of color to lunch...

...she earnestly followed...

...We belonged to the generation of young women who paid for our independence by spending hours solemnly listening to pompous speeches while taking dictation from men seeking to impress inexperienced girls on whom they had designs...

...I was born a year after her...

...Boyle's modernist training began in Greenwich Village, where she devotedly assisted Lola Ridge, the American editor of Broom, Harold Loeb's Paris magazine...

...An impressed Katherine Anne Porter called Boyle's early writing "portentous...

...Boyle's confidence that her work would interest a publisher may not have been merely a daydream...

...The scene stirred emotional memories of my own, for Boyle and I were almost exact contemporaries...

...She did write the book, an autobiographical novel entitled Process...

...The connection was a strong influence both before and during her 18year stay in France...

...Just a few expository lines at the outset would have made so much of Process more intelligible...

...She did all that while raising a sizable family...

...The hills lean away from the smoke, lean away from the river that cleaves them...

...She published at least one book in each decade of her life after the '20s...

...come out...

...The manifesto, published in the magazine transition, called for "The Revolution of the Word...

...Yet there is music in it too...

...fired by her university during the San Francisco Free Speech uprising (a dismissal rescinded while she was still incarcerated...

...Numerous passages require study and speculation, which for a conscientious reader makes mastering them oddly ponderous, despite what she is describing...

...An unpaid switchboard operator in her family's failing business, she forces herself to be callous and prepares to escape by studying in business school at night...

...Certainly she could not have imagined the washday morning when a chauffeur would arrive with baskets of beneficence from her in-laws' orchard, promptly fall under the chandelier that was supporting lines of wet clothes, and engulf both of them in sodden sheets and shirts as prize pears and apples rolled around the sopping wet floor...

...But somehow it disappeared, and stayed lost until Sandra Spanier, an authority on Kay Boyle who was starting to collect her letters, discovered a worn carbon copy mysteriously tucked away in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library...

...But that does not seem to be Boyle's intent...

...Sensitive, antenna-like the first trees advanced into the spume of wheat...

...Following the chauffeur's hasty departure, she rushed out to the well to draw water and heat it on the smoky stove, then did the wash all over again...

...She responds, "When we can all come to that, things will happen...

...Not before...

...When in 1941 she was forced by the rise of fascism to retreat to America, she came home, Spanier reports, "in the company of her second husband, Lawrence Vail, his ex-wife, Peggy Guggenheim, and their combined family of six children.' It's hard to make out exactly what Boyle's politics were at the beginning...

...In the novel she tries mostly to express feelings, impressions, her sense of the world around her...

...Here is Kerith walking with Brodsky, the intellectual of the two men with whom she has intense but contrasting friendships: "The forest fell like a shadow discoloring the hill...

...Boyle repeats words and phrases endlessly...

...come out, sleepers, breathe new odors with us...' " Even at first glance, could any of those readers of nearly 100 years ago have doubted that they were meeting a new...

...Kerith stretched her arms to the dark mean houses...

...How would they have responded, for instance, to this scene, where Kerith has led the two men out into a rainy night...

...His hypocritically cruel response to the death of a young worker in his factory so disgusts her that she abruptly quits...

...Her poetry and short stories appeared in the little magazines alongside the work of Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, whose urgent command, "Make it new...

...in jail with her mother and Joan Baez during the Vietnam War...

...The feet of the two walking scarred moss that glided from them smoothly into the stark bone agony of brush...

...The woman ruminates rather incoherently, "'If I'd always had someone to be a part—going on easily and stopping simply when one felt like stopping...

...Come out,' she chanted, dancing before them, 'come out, sleepers, and dance with us...

...James Joyce was basking in the reception given Ulysses, and Gertrude Stein was startling everyone...

...Kerith felt her analyzing the voids of an abstract woman...

...Bending forward from the back seat is someone referred to only as "the woman," whose tender caresses seem erotic as Kerith stops impulsively and parks to enjoy the river view...

...delightful talent...

...In Cincinnati Kay's mother read aloud from Stein's Tender Buttons at a dinner party, causing one man to laugh so hard that he became ill...

...It proclaimed, among other things, that "The writer expresses, he does not communicate," and "The plain reader be damned...

...She was always "there" as Studs Terkel put it— fighting for civil rights...

...The opening of her first novel signals the protagonist's rebellion: Kerith is driving along in a Ford at a time when few women drove, and we learn that she is normally a demon behind the wheel...

...Boyle was to change her mind and her style as her writing progressed...

...They always had designs...

...Her resolute attempt to give every nuance of sensation results in a piling up of descriptive words, some of them strange or strangely used...

...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "Great Day Coming: A Memoir of the 1930s" When Kay Boyle, at age 21, sailed with her French husband to meet his family in Brittany, she was quite sure of what lay ahead: "I would begin my novel, and after the first few chapters were done, a New York publisher would pay me an advance so that I might finish it, and this would take care of our return fare...

...As she recalls in her aforementioned chapter in Being Geniuses Together...

...In an early scene of Process the heroine, Kerith, is told by her French beau Soupault, himself a veteran, about French soldiers who turned back andjoined the Germans marching on Paris...

...Perhaps Boyle's eagerness to go to France grew from the moment (reproduced in the novel) her first husband expressed his shock that most American workers were unsympathetic to radicals...

...our steps striking new paths while the pavements drip away to the gutters...

...It was homage, service to the spirit, perhaps, that I wanted to give, but what good was it if I could not find for it a concrete gesture and a name...

...Aside from the historical value of Process as a pure, untouched example of early high modernism, it has genuine literary value of its own...

...She also ignores the rules of grammar and syntax in following her own fancies, such as turning the verb "isolate" into an adjective...

...blacklisted in the McCarthy years...

...I never really wanted anything more...

...The 18year-old compares their messages and is dissatisfied with both...

...Spanier says, rather tritely, that the novel "pushes the envelope of genre distinctions, blurring the boundary between fiction and poetry...

...Boyle told the story, still not quite as farce, in one of the alternating chapters she wrote for Robert McAlmon's memoir, Being Geniuses Together (1968...

...This day, though, she seems in a thoughtful mood as she negotiates Cincinnati streets that "curl into the hills, and wired inclines above them stand like long-legged birds in fume...

...Successful, she becomes the secretary of a pretentious Rotarian...

...Given Boyle's high expectations, she could not have foreseen the squalid basement in Le Havre where she would work on her novel...

...This was 1923...

...In Paris that year I wanted so much to know what was taking place inside me ('to know,' which D. H. Lawrence saw as a total evil) so that I could put what I was to some kind of use...

...One wishes people of the 1920s could have read the book at the time Boyle wrote it...

...As for "the woman," we have to wait four pages until Kerith addresses her once as Mother...

...But in her initial Paris years Boyle shared the aims of the rebel expatriates around her...

...Such scenes, presented straightforwardly by Boyle, are so evocative that I could forgive her for the effort her style requires of a reader in other parts of the novel...

...It is a joyous introduction to that tumultuous time in the 1920s when writers who rejected Main Street materialism and complacency flocked to Paris and made history...

...Her 1941 Avalanche, an exciting love story about daring members of the Resistance during the shameful days under Marshal Pétain, was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post and became a best seller...

...From then on we gradually realize that she will be known only as Nora...

...Kerith is more than dissatisfied with her personal life...

...see the walls dripping away to the gutters and the gutters running away to gold...

...In her lifetime (1902 - 92) Kay took part in virtually every radical movement of the century...

...The cry of an axe singing down through timber cleared space in which a cabin staggered against trees...

...Uncle Peter liked stopping this way over the river.' " But Uncle Peter, whoever he is, disillusioned her, and in any case he is never mentioned again...

...Boyle set many scenes of Process in the Cincinnati Labor Temple, where one evening Kerith hears speeches by both Lincoln Steffens and William Z. Foster, leader of the Communist Party...

...Both mother and daughter were thoroughgoing rebels...