Arts and Letters

This is a short tribute to a whole life dedicated and rededicated, day and night, to making good literature. For Kay Boyle it started in 1902.

Kay says, "Should we go out to lunch?"
"What about your back?"
"It's only about six blocks Grace, how's your foot?"
"Oh well, ok, ok, let's go."

Kay is about eighty. I'm about sixty-something. Walk and talk, arm in arm, my favorite way for talk, best for listening, this story and that. The first thing she wants to straighten out with me is this feminism business. Now I'm kind of adamant on this subject, kind of deep-minded but narrow. She knows that, and she tells me that in the early eighties how her grandmother took her two young children out of Topeka, Kansas, alone in a buggy, and then a train, brought her into Washington, where she became the first woman to....

I interrupt, “She was some woman. Her life supported yours.”

Kay laughs. She's able to laugh. It's been a number of years—ten, fifteen probably—since she tried to prevent a group of San Francisco State graduate students who wanted to do their studies on Tillie Olsen. They wanted to organize a women's caucus.

"Why did you do that Kay then, why did you do that?" I ask.
"But you don't know the facts, Grace. Sometime I'll tell you."
"I do know the facts."

But by this time I love her anyway. I knew that many extremely successful self-made women think, until the day they die, that they are self-made. But I'm sad, knowing her work is unknown, was unknown, for years, for important years, to that great reading public: political women. Important years to Kay Boyle and to the women. Because there she was, near, at the end of her story, over thirty-five books, columns, essays, fast book reviews, long critical reviews, novels, potboilers, short stories, a literary writer with a long enough reputation to rise and fall, rise again. A courageous model for women and men in literature and engaged in politics. A woman who had six children, paid attention to them sometimes, ignored them often, supported them frequently with nasty writing jobs, hard times. Hurt their feelings, made them desperately in love with her. Often they were full of rage and psychological hatred with which our moment in social history comforts us.

Then she told me the story of the McCarthy years, under investigation with her husband in Germany, Joseph Frankenstein, who lost his job, his career in the foreign service. The way in which The New Yorker had betrayed her, gone to press with the publication by Janet Flanner. It was hard to think of that magazine in this way as fearful, of what and of whom? She said her husband wanted nothing to do with the struggle against the accusations. But she insisted. It was essential that they fight back with others. These were events she wanted me to know about. She didn't tell me too much about her past life. She didn't speak to me about the periodicals This Quarter, Broom, and Dial, all those earlier avant-garde journals, most of them having their first lives in France. That was all in the books anyway and I could read all that.

She was a true worker, too. Apart from her incredible literary productivity, which occasionally upset her publishers unable to keep up with her at the rate she wanted (which was immediate publication on completion). She was a fine teacher. I saw her at work at Bowling Green and in Spokane at Eastern Washington University, talking in great detail with each student, listening. I was surprised, her listening in that way. Spending hours at her home which was then a motel room, smokey, cold, cold. She was at least eighty at that time, broke, earning her own living. “It's hard,” she admitted, and then she said something she probably said many, many times, "But Grace, remember this. Depression is cowardice.”

There is a way that she was mocked as a person, flying from cause to cause, and I know that mockery myself. Maybe that's why I was asked to speak for her today. Otherwise I don't know exactly. But I will say, “Kay, it was luck for me that we met that cold sleety day in front of a fancy Sixth Avenue Hotel." Very cold day, digital, side by side, and I think Muriel Rukeyser, her good friend, was with us. While inside people were talking about peace and Iran, and how long the war would go on. How important to a successful political vigil really nasty weather is.

But I looked at this woman, known by me long ago, long admired, doing work I had barely begun myself. So straight. She had that great posture from standing up, I think, to assorted villains and fools. Sometimes the collective bully of the state (ours); sometimes the single-minded nastiness of fools.

Once, a few years ago, her physical back, of muscle, bone and cartilage, disks, whatever physical backs are made of, broke. Her back broke. Her spiritual back hustled up all its intransigence and truthfulness to repair its physical self in just a couple of months. It took that much time, but it was after all not such a young back. So that was then, that was when we took a walk. Just after that healing, after her back was broken, and she worried about my foot.