Kay Boyle

“I think my Crazy Hunter is the best thing I’ve ever done,” Kay Boyle wrote to her sister Joan in 1939, two weeks after she had finished writing it. Twenty years later she wrote to a friend, it “remains one of my best, I think.” This stunning short novel portrays a family––an almost grown young woman, her mother, and her drunkard father––and a magnificent blind gelding. Powerful and businesslike, the mother is determined to put the blind horse down; her daughter is determined to save him. Part of Boyle’s “British” period (based on her year’s stay in Devon), The Crazy Hunter is a charged inquiry into family relations and moral choice.

Kay Boyle’s Fifty Stories is an eloquent testament to the possibility of living and writing with passion and honor. In Paris in the twenties, in Austria before and after the Anschluss, in New York, in occupied Germany, in California, Boyle has been an inspiration both as an exquisite stylist and as a chronicler of the nuances of human experience. Now in her ninetieth year, Kay Boyle dares us, in this most comprehensive collection of her stories, to explore the themes that have preoccupied her for a lifetime: “the inviolate integrity of the human soul, the impact of external events on the most intimate of feelings, our fractured experience of love versus duty, self-respect versus hubris, social convention versus personal ethic…She is still unquestionably modern” (Ann Hornaday, The New York Times Book Review). Acclaimed novelist Louise Erdrich has provided a very personal appreciation of Boyle’s power and grace. As she comments in the Introduction: “Kay is a citizen whose life and art are intertwined, one morally dependent on the other, both inexhaustible.”

Now reissued in The Revived Modern Classics series, Kay Boyle’s Three Short Novels can once again startle the unwary reader with their brilliant combination of keen observation, skillfully crafted prose, and moral awareness. In “The Crazy Hunter” the killing of a blinded gelding is pivotal in a power struggle between a businesslike mother, a feckless father, and an almost grown daughter. In “The Bridegroom’s Body” swans become surrogates for human emotion in a story of suppressed passion and the unquestioned male subjugation of women. “Decision,” the only overtly political story in the collection, deals with the liberating power of moral choice––even if the choice means almost certain death––in Franco’s Spain. As Robert Smith wrote about Kay Boyle in the Cleveland Plain Dealer: “Few American writers have written so beautifully of the human condition with a mind that recognizes the limitations of conduct and with a heart that sees the need to test those limits always by love and courage.”

When Death of a Man was first published in 1936, the anonymous reviewer in Time described the novel as a “Nazi idyll.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Boyle, who lived in the town of Kitzbühel in the Tirolean Alps during the mid 30s, recalls that “In 1934, mothers, fathers, children––all barefoot––stood in the ankle-deep snow on the sidewalks of Vienna, their hands out-stretched for help …. Nazism as to them mutely accepted as the one hope for the economy.” The subtlety and precision honed by Boyle in her acclaimed short stories are used in Death of a Man to describe the tragedy of a society pushed to the edge by circumstance but as yet unaware of the dangers, the incipient evil, of the course it is choosing. In this setting, the passionate relationship between the appealing and vigorous but pro-Nazi Dr. Prochaska and the pampered, neurotic American young woman Pendennis, is a paradigm of the difficulty of individual love in a disordered world.

In both her art and her life, Kay Boyle has exemplified that quality she values most in other artists––the bold articulation of a passionately held belief. An American expatriate in Europe from 1923-1941, Boyle was part of that pioneering group of modernists forging the “revolution of the word.” Her stories from that period, thirteen of which are collected in Life Being the Best & Other Stories, are masterful in their complex, innovative use of language and their ironic acknowledgment of the subversive realities of life. From the quivering expectancy of the three sisters awaiting “The First Lover” to the dashed hopes of the architect’s daughter in “The Meeting of the Stones” to the desperate remedy a small boy finds for life’s dissatisfactions in the title story, Boyle provides a catalog of the ways in which love can fail. The missed (or nearly missed) chances for human connection as each individual mounts his or her solitary quest for identity provide Boyle’s characters with moments of personal intensity and her readers with an ache of recognition. Boyle strove (as she once said of Harry Crosby) to write “with an alertness sharp as a blade and as relentless.” She succeeded.

“Miss Boyle is a story teller, a superb one; by and large the best in this country and one of the best now living,” the Saturday Review wrote when Thirty Stories was first published. Selected from over one hundred stories written during twenty years, this volume includes many of her celebrated titles, masterpieces each in their separate ways, “Wedding Day,” “Black Boy,” “The White Horses of Vienna,” “Count Lothar’s Heart,” “The Loneliest Man in the U.S. Army,” for instance. Since Kay Boyle spent the years 1922 to 1941 in Europe, many of her characters and settings are European. But a deep love of nature, of mountains and water and forests make these settings universal, while the effect of nature––a flight of birds, for instance––on her characters suggests classic Japanese literature. The intensity with which she enters into these characters, their quandaries, their limitations, their resilience in the face of tragedy, makes memorable and honestly felt experience. As David Daiches has written, “We can point to a story and say, ’There! Within these bounds is contained a true vision of some aspect of the human situation.’” The San Francisco Chronicle said, in reviewing Thirty Stories, “They have none of the earmarks of feminine fiction; they never strive for the neat ending; and the emotion always has a genuine ring, although often it is an emotion that you cannot name, that you can only feel… These stories show how Kay Boyle has developed her ’art of the short story.’ She has not been afraid of the untrodden path or of unfamiliar horizons.”

Wolfgang Borchert died in 1947––the twenty-six-year-old victim of a malaria-like fever contracted during World War II. This was just one day after the premier of his play, The Man Outside, which caused an immediate furor throughout his native Germany with its youthful, indeed revolutionary, vision against war and the dehumanizing effects of the police state. In a very real sense, Borchert was both the moral and physical victim of the Third Reich and the Nazi war machine. As a Wehrmacht conscript, he twice served on the Russian front, where he was wounded, and twice was imprisoned for his outspokenness. His voice speaks plainly and powerfully from out of the war’s carnage all the more poignantly for its being cut short at so young an age. This collection of Borchert’s most important prose, translated by A. D. Porter with an Introduction by Stephen Spender, includes the complete text of the title play, as well as 39 stories and assorted pieces that comprise much of the author’s output during the two short, fever-ridden years in which he wrote, complemented by Kay Boyle’s appreciative Foreword.

“Miss Boyle is a story teller, a superb one; by and large the best in this country and one of the best now living,” the Saturday Review wrote when Thirty Stories was first published. Selected from over one hundred stories written during twenty years, this volume includes many of her celebrated titles, masterpieces each in their separate ways, “Wedding Day,” “Black Boy,” “The White Horses of Vienna,” “Count Lothar’s Heart,” “The Loneliest Man in the U.S. Army,” for instance. Since Kay Boyle spent the years 1922 to 1941 in Europe, many of her characters and settings are European. But a deep love of nature, of mountains and water and forests make these settings universal, while the effect of nature––a flight of birds, for instance––on her characters suggests classic Japanese literature. The intensity with which she enters into these characters, their quandaries, their limitations, their resilience in the face of tragedy, makes memorable and honestly felt experience. As David Daiches has written, “We can point to a story and say, ’There! Within these bounds is contained a true vision of some aspect of the human situation.’” The San Francisco Chronicle said, in reviewing Thirty Stories, “They have none of the earmarks of feminine fiction; they never strive for the neat ending; and the emotion always has a genuine ring, although often it is an emotion that you cannot name, that you can only feel… These stories show how Kay Boyle has developed her ’art of the short story.’ She has not been afraid of the untrodden path or of unfamiliar horizons.”