Is there anything better than finding a new author who you want to devour (and that they do, in fact, have lots of books)? A few months ago I took a punt on a couple of dark green Virago books in a charity shop. I remembered the author’s name and at £1 a pop weren’t too big a risk. They joined the bundle of brass cake forks, the carefully wrapped glass lemonade jug, the postcards, the other book and a few edible bits and bobs from that trip and they sat on my desk until Lost Ladies of Lit gave an episode to Kay Boyle.
I won’t recap Kay’s life because they do it far better and it’s an excellent podcast all round. But I will try and give you a flavour of Kay’s loosely-linked trilogy of autobiographical novels based on her life in mid and late 1920s Paris. The “trilogy” (which in fact gives the Kay character a different name in each instalment) covers her marriage to an engineer from Normandy, her passionate love affair with the poet Ernest Walsh who died of TB a year after they started living together in Provence and only a few months before their daughter was born, and the miserable time in a commune outside Paris run by Isadora Duncan’s brothers.
First comes the short, bitter Plagued by the Nightingale with the smothering family love of Bridget’s in-laws, monstrously selfish Oncle Robert and a fatal bone disease. Next is Year Before Last, with Hannah and Martin drinking in the warm evenings, laughing on walks with their dogs and closing their eyes to the inevitable. And finally, My Next Bride with its descriptions of how a room changes while you get drunk, the hypocrisy of “a simple life” combined with the latest automobiles and fancy cake shops and the Russian emigre sisters in Victoria’s pension.
I had to say that, because one of Boyle’s talents is writing the everyday so clearly that it would be easy to include a bunch of quotes that sound almost cosy – and in no way convey the punch that her books convey. Her knack is to tell you so mildly of the everyday that before you know it, you’re in the middle of a conversation where a man is trying to tell his lover that he’s dying of TB and she tries to talk about the scenery, or the experience of being in a bar on a dark, cold, wet January night and feeling yourself get very drunk. (At the same time I have to say that I don’t think Virago did the books much favour with their very chilly 1930s covers and blurbs that try to shoehorn Boyle’s themes into the gender relations of the 1980s. Year before Last is not about neglectful men, for example, and nor is Plagued By The Nightingale a Wharton-esque study of American vs European morals.)
Enough telling rather than showing: here’s a handful of quotes for you to consider:
“You’re not allowed to cook in the room,” the servant said.
“No of course” said the girl and they could see at once how things must have been for her: a bedroom with clean sheets turned back for sleeping, and a kitchen with a stove in it where servants were. The two were never mixed up.
The ribbons came long and loose in Victoria’s fingers and lay heaped as beautiful as jewels upon the bed. The two little women behind her were almost beside her, not quite behind, silent as she lifted the long cover off, not daring to see what was inside. “Good God”, said Miss Grusha when no one else had spoken. “Good God, it’s food”, she said.
The cakes as readily green and mauve as pink stretched the whole length of the long, left wall gave him something of the vast, varied, lavish landscape of what food might be. They had faces as different as young girls’ faces – red-mouthed, milky-skinned and almond-eyed; and they were the shape of hearts, diamonds, triangles, or the ruby lips of icing saying, Oh, Mr Sorrel, oh oh Mr Sorrel, in the different cries of love, or the teeth of sugar smiling sweetly at him.
Hannah turned her head to the sweet curve of Martin sleeping beside her. Behind him in the window, the sky as clear as a well, and the milk of the clouds flowed steadily out of the strong teats of the southern wind. The room was tiled in terra cotta like the kitchen, and there was a fireplace in it as wide as the whole house, and in the window the milk of January drains down over the warm flowering trees.
At three in the morning, Hannah made a little supper of yellow cheese and bottles of stout, and they ate it on a tart on their knees, sitting up among the pillows, side by side in bed. And Martin sang with his mouth full of crackers: Tell me what thy lordly name is on the night’s Plutonian shore and in the bedroom window a warm blush of dawn had begun to spread across the trees.
She came gradually to be awake, lying soft and rested in the plumed bee, deep in the protective palm of his family. The summer afternoon has come in through the window and swooned upon the floor. A feminine world echoed in the stairway, a new world polished hard and capable even in Nicolas’ room, tied in dim bunches of lavender among the linen, I disturbed by the rose petals which had fallen and which moved sedately in the breeze across the floor. She could hear Nicolas breathing as he slept, and below them the assertion of life: Maman’s voice tiptoeing across the sound of china.
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