187. Kay Boyle — Fifty Stories with Anne Boyd Rioux

This transcript was generated with the use of AI and may contain errors.

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to another episode of Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew, here with my co host, Amy Helmes.

AMY: Of today's lost lady, the writer Studs Terkel once said in an interview, "Why is Kay Boyle not better known? Things are out of joint when someone like Kay Boyle is not as celebrated as she should be."

KIM: Okay, so it sounds like we are much overdue in devoting an episode to her.

AMY: Yeah, and we've been kind of talking about doing this one for a while, but I kept kicking the can down the road a little bit. I mean, the scope of her life, the scope of her writing, the circle she ran in…it's not something that you can easily distill down to a 40-minute episode. This is a woman who was hanging out with Left Bank artists and literary giants in 1920s Paris, who wrote about the buildup to and ravages of World War II a few decades later, who was blacklisted in the 1950s, and then who in the 60s and 70s was at epicenter of Haight-Ashbury protests and picket lines. And that's not to mention her personal life, which is equally storied.

KIM: Right. So it's no surprise, then, that her writing really covers the gamut too. Whether she's writing about a young girl witnessing racism in Atlantic City or from the point of view of resistance fighters in the French Alps, at the heart of Kay Boyle's prose is a yearning for human connection in the midst of darkness. Boyle wrote more than 40 books, including 14 novels, eight volumes of poetry, and 11 collections of short fiction. As you said, Amy, it's a lot to try and cover, but we're going to do our best. Luckily, we have a returning guest today who knows a lot about Kay Boyle, and she's going to help us navigate all that.

AMY: Yeah, we've got a lot to cover and a short time to do it, so let's raid the stacks and get started. 

[intro music plays]

AMY: Our guest today, Anne Boyd Rioux, is very dear to us because she is the very first guest we ever featured on this podcast. That was for episode Number 11 on Constance Fenimore Woolson. Anne, your involvement back then did so much to legitimize our podcast when we were still very fledgling. But the strength of your reputation helped us recruit other academics and authors to participate because it was like, "Oh, Anne did it. Okay, great, you know? Sure, I'll come on too." 

KIM: Yeah, I feel like you really set the tone for us, Anne. 

ANNE: I'm so glad that I was able to help you guys get started. I'm so glad you're still doing this. So thanks for having me on again.

KIM: Anne is a three time National Endowment for the Humanities award recipient. She specializes in recovering women's voices. Her published work includes Meg, Joe, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why it Still Matters (Yay!) As well as editing The Collected Stories of Constance Fenimore Woolson.

AMY: After 23 years as an English professor, Anne left academia in 2022, sold virtually all of her belongings, and bought a one way ticket to Europe, where she's been traveling and working on her own writing ever since. You can follow her work and some of her many adventures by signing up for her Substack newsletter, which we'll include in our show notes. And Patreon members, next week we're going to be devoting a whole bonus episode talking with Anne about what her life is like now as an expat abroad.

KIM: I can't wait for that episode because that's going to be really fun. To kick things off here, can you first tell us about how your own interest in Kay Boyle was sparked?

ANNE: Yes, I was teaching in Austria for a study abroad program, and I wanted to do a unit on the literary expats who were over in Europe in the, you know, 1920s, Thirties. And I had Hemingway, I had Fitzgerald, but I wanted a woman writer. This was a short story class. So I started digging around to see if I could find one. And I found Kay Boyle. And I was amazed. Absolutely gobsmacked. She was part of that literary expat scene in Paris in the Twenties, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. There was so much there. Um, and some of the writing is actually set in Austria, so it was a wonderful addition to the class.

AMY: So Boyle was born in 1902 in St. Paul, Minnesota, but as a child she lived in multiple cities, including Philadelphia, Atlantic City, and my own hometown of Cincinnati.

KIM: Shout out to Cincinnati. 

AMY: Yes! Um, there seems to have been a stark difference between her mother's outlook on life and that of her father and grandfather. What do you know about that and how it may have impacted her?

ANNE: Well, there was a stark difference. Her father and her grandfather were very business oriented, very focused on wealth. Her grandfather in particular, was very focused on accumulating wealth, um, and had very conventional ideas about what was important in life compared to her mother. Her mother had an understated but strong personality, and she managed to hold her own against these two men, the grandfather in particular. And, I think what probably had the biggest impact on Kay was that she was just enamored with artists and writers and musicians, philosophers. She loved ideas. She loved art, and she exposed her children to all of that and encouraged them to create their own. I mean, she was reading Gertrude Stein at the dining room table, to guests. Tender Buttons, I think it was. Yeah. And then, you know, in the next breath, she's reading some of Kay's work, some of her juvenilia, as if it deserved as much attention as the published writers of the day. And so it's hard to, I think, overstate her significance in Kay's life. 

KIM: That's pretty amazing.

AMY: Yeah, and in terms of the writing and the artist she liked, it was very cutting edge. She likes people that were doing new and different experimental things, right?

ANNE: Oh, well, she took the girls to the 1913 Armory show, so she would have been 10, 11 years old when her mom took her to see that exhibit. And that was the one that blew everybody's minds. It was the first major exhibit of modern art in the US, and people were throwing tomatoes at the art, and people were horrified. And here her mom was elated. She loved the innovation, um, she loved the daring of it. And so those kinds of aesthetic principles imbued Kay's childhood.

KIM: Her mom sounds amazing. 

AMY: So yeah, so this is taking me back to, I mean, one of her short stories is called "Security" and it's sort of going back to her own childhood. And it's about her grandfather saying that he's going to help her fund this little amateur newspaper, and he's like, "Okay, I'll fund this, but certain political subject matters are off the table." 

KIM: Oh, I totally remember this. Yes. Yes. Yes. 

AMY: It might have even been like shares of a stock or something like that, that he was going to give her. And, um, and that ultimatum, she was like, "Nope, this is a newspaper and we're going to be writing about controversial topics and social justice," and she was basically like, "I can't be bought and you can keep your money." Um, it was a sweet little story, but…

ANNE: My understanding is that it's very autobiographical. She and her sister did have a little paper, and her grandfather did fund it. He had it printed in color, even, which you can imagine in the 1920s. Teens, I guess it would have been. Yeah, that's remarkable.

KIM: Yeah. That's pretty cool. So with her father and grandfather, when she moved to New York at the age of 20, she never, apparently, she never saw them again, which is interesting. When she was there, she was joined by her beau Richard Brault, a French exchange student she'd met in Cincinnati. I can see a French exchange student being interesting in Cincinnati. In Cincinnati. 

AMY: Yeah, yeah. He was an electrical engineer at the University of Cincinnati, I think. Of course, I wanted to find out all the Cincinnati connections. So yeah, they were dating in Cincinnati. She decides to move to New York. I think her sister was already in New York, working for a magazine. So she's like, "I'm going to go." The boyfriend tags along. So in New York, Kay right away gets a job assisting the poet Lola Ridge, who, listeners, you might remember Lola Ridge. We did a previous episode on her with Therese Svoboda. That's episode Number 108 if you want to go back and have a listen. So she joins Lola helping edit the literary magazine Broom. And I remember from our Lola Ridge episode that she was complicated. 

KIM: Yeah, to say the least. 

AMY: Yeah. But Kay Boyle really loved her. They remained close over the decades. I presume, Anne, that kind of like her mother, Lola Ridge also had a huge influence on her and the kind of writer she'd become. 

ANNE: Yes. So she was definitely a mentor to Kay, and she reminded her of her mother a lot in her frailty. Both of them were rather slight and, um, prone to illness. And so Kay had this kind of protective feeling from them both, but also admired their strengths so much. But Lola introduced her to so many writers. And at the gatherings that they would have, she's meeting William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, um, Jean Toomer, you know, lots of the writers of the day. And some of those associations, certainly with William Carlos Williams, would last for many, many years. But it was through Lola Ridge that she sort of had her entree into the world of literature, although she wasn't writing a lot yet. Um, she was, I think, a secretary for the magazine. Yeah.

KIM: So eventually Kay and Richard, the French exchange student, married, and they took a trip to France to meet his family. That was supposed to be a three month trip, but Boyle ended up remaining in France for 18 years, as one might do if they got the chance to get over to France.

AMY: Yeah, so she stuck around France, but we should note that she did not stick with her husband. Instead, she fell madly in love with magazine editor, Ernest Walsh, and she became pregnant. But by the time the child was born, Walsh sadly had died from tuberculosis. So Kay finds herself now a single mother living in France. Anne, tell us a little bit more about what you know of this time for Kate, both personally and professionally.

ANNE: Well, it's a very difficult time for Kay. I would hazard to say those were the darkest days of her life. She fell madly, helplessly in love with Walsh. She was enamored not just with him as a person, but with him as a poet and as an editor. He gave everything to literature.And there was a kind of religiosity to this, a sort of worship of the word. And this became her religion, I think, for the rest of her life. And I meant to say earlier that with Lola Ridge, she was introduced to writing as a form of politics, political conscience being such a big part of Lola Ridge's writing. I mean, her mom was very politically active as well. So both of those kind of influenced her, but with Ernest Walsh, she was introduced to the world of modernism and this kind of religion of the, the Revolution of the Word, and this desire to create something totally new. And so her passion, it wasn't just romantic, it wasn't just sexual, but it was literary too. And so she had this child, and she could not support herself. And she ended up in a commune, actually, that was run by Raymond Duncan, who was one of the brothers of Isadora Duncan. And this was a solution to this problem, this question of how to live as a woman writer, who's also a single mother. And so the commune was very avant garde and, you know, they walked around in togas all the time, and they're, they're making sandals , rugs and various things and selling them in the shop. And it's very back to nature. And they watched her child, and she worked in the shop and, you know, James Joyce is coming in.

She'd met Joyce and Stein and Samuel Beckett and lots of writers. Robert McAlmon was a huge influence on her. She met him through Ernest Walsh, and Robert McAlmon was a poet who was also a publisher, and he published the magazine Contacts with William Carlos Williams. He was Hemingway's first publisher. And so they became quite close and ended up, you know, there's this really interesting sort of double autobiography called Being Geniuses Together that she published after his death. It's quite fascinating, about Paris in the 20s. If you want another perspective on it, Kay Boyle's experience as an expat in the late 1920s Paris is completely different from anything you've ever read, you know, in the context of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and, you know, the grand times, the big parties that everyone was having. Um, Kay Boyle was, struggling, and what ended up happening, actually, is that they had to essentially kidnap her daughter away from the commune with the help of Lawrence Vail, who I'm sure we'll talk about it. Um, so it's a very dramatic episode of her life. 

AMY: Yeah, so it got a little bit culty there. Kim, it's reminding me a little bit of the episode we did on Hotbed and how at that time period, they were trying to figure out solutions for childcare and all these other Left Bank artists weren't having to deal with that, you know?

ANNE: Yeah. Well, they had wives to take care of the kids!

AMY: Exactly, 

KIM: Yeah, exactly. Yep. 

ANNE: Yeah.Yeah. 

AMY: Okay, so for this episode, Kim and I read Boyle's Fifty Stories, which is a 1980 collection of her short fiction starting from the late 20s through the mid 60s. So let's talk a little more about her writing style during the early time period, because she is very determined at this point to be on the cusp of something new and different. You know, she's hanging out with all these "Gertrude Stein" types. And of course, they think they're changing the face of the literary world. In fact, her name is listed first on a proclamation that was published in Transition literary magazine in 1929. It was a manifesto calling for the Revolution of the Word. So Boyle, along with 15 other expat writers, including Lawrence Vail and Hart Crane, they stated their intentions to, quote, "emancipate the creative elements from the present ideology." And here's the opening line of this proclamation that they all signed. "Tired of the spectacle of short stories, novels, poems, and plays still under the hegemony of the banal word, monotonous syntax,static psychology, descriptive naturalism, and desiring of crystallizing a viewpoint, we hereby declare that..." And then it goes on to state, I don't know, 13, 20, I can't remember how many declarations about what they intended to do as these new writers, and it ends with the declaration, "The plain reader be damned." So basically, they have no interest in boring writing. They have no interest in boring, pedestrian readers. They are wanting to break out of the box. 

KIM: I love that they had a manifesto published, like, what is bad about current writing and what they're going to do to fix it. 

 AMY: Okay, so I want to read a passage from her short story "Wedding Day." I think this story sort of, um, exemplifies her writing style in terms of trying to do this more experimental work. This story begins, it's a young girl's wedding day. She is home with her mom and brother, getting the house ready for the big event. And she and her brother are both mourning the end of their sibling relationship as they have known it.

Meanwhile, the mother is kind of oblivious to the bittersweetness of the day, and she's more worried about appearances and superficial things, you know, and she's unaware right in front of her eyes that her son and daughter are having this grieving process, basically. This is when the brother and sister just decide to go outside for the afternoon right before the wedding. [reads from “Wedding Day”]

Out they went to face the spring before the wedding, and their mother stood at the window praying that this occasion at least pass off with dignity, her heart not in her mouth, but beating away in peace in its own bosom. Here then was April holding them up, stabbing their hearts with hawthorn, scalping them with a flexible blade of wind.

Here went their yellow manes up in the air. Turning them shaggy as lions. The Sen had turned around in the wind, and in tufts and scallops was leaping directly away from St. Cloud. The clouds were cracking and splitting up like a glacier. Down the sky they were shifting and sliding, and the two, with their heads bare, were walking straight into the heart of the flow.

It isn't too late, he said. I mean, It isn't too late. The sun was an imposition, an imposition, for they were another race stamping an easy trail through the wilderness of Paris, possessed of the same people, but of themselves like another race. No one else could, by lifting of the head, only be starting life over again.

And it was a wonder the whole city of Paris did not hold its breath for them. For if anyone could have begun a new race, it was these two. Therefore, in their young days, they should have been saddled and strapped with necessity so that they could not have escaped. Paris was their responsibility. No one else had the same delight.

No one else put a foot to pavement in such a way. With their yellow heads back, they were stamping a new trail, but in such ignorance, for they had no idea of it.

KIM: Wow, I'm so glad you read that. 

AMY: She's describing this as almost like a tragic natural disaster, you know? The glacier is splitting in two. 

KIM: And it feels Greek. 

AMY: Yeah! 

KIM: Almost a little maybe incestuous, too, with the idea of them starting the new race and kind of escaping together. There's so many things going on that you can even just see in that passage.

AMY: Yeah, and I think the very opening sentence of this story, I have to paraphrase because I don't have it right in front of me, but they're throwing down the red carpet runner that the bride is going to walk down. And it said that the red carpet unfurled like a spurt of blood or something like that, you know? So… 

KIM: Yeah. It's very violent. 

AMY: Yeah. And I do think not so much anymore but back then, weddings were like a death in a certain way. It's an ending of childhood, and I think also the very ending of the passage I read, "They were stamping a new trail," you know, "Paris was their responsibility." That to me goes back to Kay Boyle trying to chart this new literary course, you know, putting her own stamp on a new type of writing.

KIM: I didn't even think about Amy. I love that.

ANNE: Yes, I think her early writing really shows her ambitions too, right? To create something new, with language. That is what she got from that circle, right? From Ernest Walsh, from Robert McAlmon. And of course she was already hearing that from her mother, that that's what a writer does. A writer reinvents language. And so you see this kind of really intense description and imagery in a lot of her early works that, like you said, that could be violent, right? Describing something as simple as a rug can take on these sort of intense emotional qualities. She's really digging deep in a lot of these early stories and you sense how passionate she was as a person, I think, through these stories too. That's a lot of her personality coming through as well.

AMY: And the poet. The poet within her. We haven't mentioned that she also wrote poetry. Yeah.

ANNE: Yeah. Yeah. A lot of poetry. 

KIM: Yeah. I feel like it's Fifty Stories… This is like, I think the second story, but it's unforgettable. Like, it doesn't get lost in the fact that you've read a whole book. 

ANNE: It is an incredible collection of stories and…

KIM: It is. 

ANNE: …if people ask me, What should I read by Kay Boyle? I say, get the collection, Fifty Stories, and just start dipping in because you'll be amazed. Certainly this collection shows the breadth and depth of her achievements, particularly as a short story writer. She also wrote novels. She also wrote poetry. I think that she particularly excelled as a short story writer and, you know, a number of these stories were published in The New Yorker and Harper's and other magazines. I really feel like she should be credited with helping create the modern short story in America. but she, you know, for various reasons, hasn't been. And one of them, I think, is because she lived overseas for so long. You said 18 years. And sometimes in her stories, there aren't even American expat characters as you will typically see in writers from that period. She's just writing about French people, you know, dealing with the war. She's writing about the Austrians and, and the rise of the Nazis of Germany. And it's like, wow, it's not what we expect from an American writer. But I think the stories speak for themselves. They're so high quality.

KIM: Yeah, definitely. So, uh, let's circle back to her personal life a little bit. Next, she's taking up with an artist and intellectual you had mentioned before Lawrence Vail. He was also called the King of Bohemia. He'd been married to Peggy Guggenheim. Boyle and Vail were together for 13 years and they had three children together. So she's writing so much, it seems like, but yet she has a lot going on in her personal life as well, which is interesting. 

AMY: So during this time of her life, Boyle won her first of two O. Henry Awards for a short story called “The White Horses of Vienna.” And side note, this summer, I'm going to be going to Vienna, so I hope to maybe get a glimpse of these white horses that are still there , at the Imperial Spanish Riding School. It's very symbolic of Vienna, those white horses. So in this story, Boyle talks about one of these horses being crippled. It's a symbol of Austria's grandeur being struck down by the Nazis. And it's such an interesting story because it includes a somewhat sympathetic portrait of Nazi sympathizers. It's almost as if somebody had written a story that is sympathetic to a MAGA person, you know what I mean? And then for that to win an O' Henry award seemed like, surprising to me. 

ANNE: Let me give this some context here, okay?

AMY: Okay.

ANNE: So that story, which is one of her best stories, but it's very difficult for modern readers to understand because of subsequent history, it was written in 1934-35. So before the Anschluss. Before, I mean, Hitler had only been in power since 1933. And so the sort of crippled horse that represents Austria is actually the crippling came from the First World War. Um, Hitler hadn't had anything to do with them yet. Okay. So, so that. She also wrote some really interesting stories about the effects of World War I on Austria. It was an incredibly impoverished country. They had left Vienna, in fact, the family, uh, She, Vail and the kids had been living in Vienna and the poverty was so bleak. And so they went to the Alps and lived in this little town called Kitzbuhel, and it's beautiful there. Oh my God, it's so gorgeous. But, they're noticing this political unrest happening and they're seeing swastikas burning and fire swastikas burning on the mountain sides at night. Nazis were outlawed in Germany at that time. And there were Nazi agitators coming in over the border and this area of Tirol, where she was living, which was close to Bavaria. And so there were, there were Nazis coming over and stirring up, you know, the locals who were going on these sort of terror campaigns and blowing up train tracks and different things. So this is the context in which she's writing the story. She's trying to understand why so many of the locals are sympathetic to the Nazis. The hotel they were staying in in this little town, it was the only anti Nazi or non Nazi hotel in town. They discovered that actually the governess, the girl who was taking care of their children, was a Nazi and was helping her boyfriend light those fires on the mountain sides.

And so this was like incredible material, right? She wants to understand what is it about Hitler that, that seems to magnetize them? So that's what she's writing about. She's trying to understand it, long before people knew how totally dangerous he was. She wrote a novel about that period as well, that expands on all of this, you know, why are the locals so enamored with Hitler? And in this story and in that novel, she hints at the devastation that's going to come. 

 She sensed how fanatical he was and how dangerous he was. And that comes through a bit, but it's not as overt. So we look back at it now and think, Oh my God, she was a Nazi sympathizer. But she wasn't. 

AMY: I knew in reading it that she wasn't a Nazi sympathizer, but it was just her ability to kind of showcase both, like, like you said, exactly what's going on here, and…

ANNE: Right, well I, I felt the need to say this because there are still people writing today who describe her as a Nazi sympathizer because of that story. 

AMY: What?! That is crazy.

ANNE: There is a book about American writers in Austria somebody showed to me not too long ago and I thought, “Oh my gosh, this person doesn't understand the context”. Because she's not overt enough. She's writing from the perspective of these characters. She's so immersed in the characters’ point of view.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: She's pointing out the anti-Semitism 

ANNE: Exactly, exactly. That character of the doctor who comes to stay. He's a very sympathetic character, the Jewish doctor from Vienna who comes to help out. And then the Nazi characters, who I think are less sympathetic. Um, but you know, at the same time, the doctor even understands why they're doing this. Because of what they endured in the First World War and with all of the economic deprivation that they've suffered since. I mean, people were basically starving. I'm sorry. That was a very long winded explanation of the story. 

KIM: No, I think it was good to bring that up. Yeah, we don't need anything to further inhibit her, um,

ANNE: Her recovery. Yeah. 

KIM: Exactly. 

AMY: But no, there's so many wartime stories in Fifty Stories. I mean, whether during the war, the prelude to the war, or post war, for like the decade or two post, and it was so enlightening, I think. As an American, we have an idea of what World War II was, and it just really gives you an entirely immersive, um, different view of what it was like to be there. What it was like to be French in Vichy France, what it was like trying to rebuild after. How messy it really, really was, even after we won. 

ANNE: Yes. Yes. She had this remarkable ability to get inside of the experiences of French people, of German people, of Austrian people, not just Americans always looking on from the outside. And that's something she worked really hard at. And she does have a lot of works that do include an American character, but two of her best stories from the war "Defeat" and "Men" are written totally about the men who experienced the war. On the one hand, in "Defeat," she's portraying two French soldiers who are coming back after the fall of France to Germany. And in the other story, "Men," she's describing refugees of the Nazis who were rounded up in France as soon as the war started. In September, 1939, France rounded up people who had passports from Austria, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, what was then considered greater Germany. Most of these people had fled the Nazis, but nonetheless, they were classified as enemy aliens and they were rounded up and put in concentration camps. And the story of "Men" depicts some of those men, and it's really beautiful. And it is actually based on someone she knew, which I think we're going to get to.

AMY: Yeah, for sure, and I can't wait to talk about him. But while we're talking about the wartime literature, it felt like she really felt an obligation to tell these stories and to write about the world that she was living in and speak for the people that didn't necessarily have the voice or the megaphone. So I got curious and read one of her more commercial novels, which sort of ties into this idea of... 

KIM: Extra credit! 

AMY: Yeah, some extra credit points for Amy. But, um, so this book is called Avalanche, and it's set in a village in the French Alps. It's much more, uh, you know, "plain readers be damned," when she said that earlier, this book is more for the plain reader, I think. It's a more commercial novel. It's a thriller. It's about a young girl who's on a mission to find her lover who's working in the French resistance. I loved it. I read it in like two days. It was a page turner. It kind of reminded me of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, and I'm sure she would hate that comparison because I don't think she loved Hemingway that much.

ANNE: So much more readable though. Her book is.

AMY: Oh, oh, 100%. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, 

ANNE: than his. Yes. Yes.

AMY: But my point being, this book was a critical flop, which surprised me. It's beautifully written. 

ANNE: But it's a romance, and it's political, you know, so that's why she was criticized. Not because it wasn't good. It was because she was writing a different kind of novel than what she'd written before. She was writing less as an artist. I mean, there's still art in it, but she knew, she knew, she was writing a different novel for a commercial, wider audience because she had something important to say about France. Because when she came back to the US in 1941, she was horrified at how Americans talked about the French. "Oh, they just laid down for the Germans," you know, "they deserve it. " And so she wanted to show that, no, look, there's a resistance happening. And a friend of hers, Mary Reynolds, who was Marcel Duchamp's partner, actually, when Marcel Duchamp left France, Mary Reynolds wouldn't leave. And she and Kay were friends. And she worked for the resistance, and she had to escape over the Pyrenees, ultimately, because she'd been found out. She had a really rough escape.  But anyway, Avalanche is dedicated to Marcel and Mary, because Mary's stories helped inform that book. So it isn't fantasy. It isn't made up. It's very real in a lot of ways. And it's a fascinating book. I think it might be the first fictional attempt at describing the French Resistance. It was written during the war still, um, when the French Resistance was still getting going. So it's a fascinating book.

AMY: Yeah, and it has that sort of ticking clock. It's set over just a couple of days, like, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and there's this urgency of, the Resistance has this, um, tactical, you know, thing that they need to carry out. So, that's where I saw the similarities. But she was like, Not only am I going to write this for everyone, I can't do the experimental stuff here, because I have a message and I want this message to get out. So I think that's interesting that she kind of backtracked a little bit from that manifesto. 

ANNE: It was wartime, you know? Manifestos didn't count. They didn't matter when people's lives were at stake. And she felt so guilty for having left France. Um, you know, she was able to get out, but a lot of people she knew didn't. And some of them didn't survive. So Avalanche features a strapping, Adonis-like mountain man who is the love interest. He is an incredible skier, he is noble in every way, like, 

KIM: [laughing] He's an incredible skier!

AMY: Um, he's like an action hero, you know, who you'd cast with some Hollywood hunk. We encounter a lot of these heroic mountain men in the short stories that are Tyrolean, right, including, um, the short story, "Maiden, Maiden" and "Diplomat's Wife."

KIM: Can I say I loved "Maiden Maiden," by the way? I just have to like give a shout out to that story. That one's one that really stayed with me. It's all so beautiful and tragic. 

ANNE: It was made into a movie starring Sean Connery, actually.

KIM: Wait, 

AMY: my gosh! 

KIM: It played like a movie in my head. I had no idea. Sean Connery. Oh Yes. We'll have to see if I can get my hands on it somehow. If it's streaming or 

AMY: So Anne, tell us about this fascination with the mountain man, that archetypal character. 

ANNE: Everybody assumed it was the man that she ended up marrying her third husband, uh, Joseph von Franckenstein was his name. 

KIM: What a literary name! 

ANNE: I know. Yes. It seems that Mary Shelley got her name actually from this family. She'd seen the castle that belonged to the family in Germany. So he has this interesting name, but Joseph was not the model for some of the early characters, the ski instructors, the guides. There was another Austrian man. So she was living with Lawrence and the children in Negev France, and there were these Austrian refugees living around there. And one of them was a ski instructor named Kurt Vick, and he was a ladies man. Flirted with all the women who came to visit, young or old, and taught them how to ski. And yeah, Kay kind of fell for him and they had a fling. So Kurt and Joseph knew each other. So Kurt went off to Africa, and in the meantime, Joseph comes back to Negev, and he meets Kay. And they truly fell in love. Okay, the thing with Kurt was a fling and she in a letter describes why this happened with Kurt and what had happened. She tells Joseph the whole story, and those letters between Kay and Joseph are the most amazing documents. There are hundreds of them, and they were embargoed until I believe 20 years after her death. So they've only been available to researchers for a decade or so. I've read a very large portion of them. And I know that in the letter where she tells him about Kurt, and this is something that does not show up in the biography of her, people didn't understand why she'd had this relationship. Uh, Lawrence Vail was violent and he was, um, an alcoholic and he beat her and he called her a whore in front of their friends. He was jealous all the time. He was suspicious and she was desperate, desperate to get out of it, out of this marriage in some way. And so what do you do when you're desperate to get out of a marriage? You flee into the arms of another man. Kurt wasn't the right one. Joseph turned out to be the right one. She helped save him. So the Nazis were closing in, and in the summer of 1941, she got him out of France, out of the only port that was still open in Marseilles. Her efforts were heroic. I mean, she probably saved his life. But he saved hers too, I'm quite certain of that. And he was a remarkable, remarkable person. A biography needs to be written about the two of them. I really hoped to do it, and I've done a ton of research on it. I hope still to do it someday. I'm not in a position to at the moment. But while their story is incredible, because he came back to the U S and they got married, um, he joined the Army, became a U S citizen and ended up getting recruited into the OSS, which became the CIA. And he was a spy for the U S, and he was parachuted into Europe and made his way to Innsbruck, Austria, his hometown, and helped liberate it from the Nazis.It's an incredible story. Yeah, 

KIM: Wow.

AMY: This is what I'm talking about when I was like, I'm just so overwhelmed by her story because there's so many components to it. It goes on and on and it's all so fascinating. 

KIM: Yeah. 

ANNE: This is why I knew I couldn't write a biography of her entire life. That just wasn't going to happen. But basically from when she wrote that. story about the Nazis and their influence in Austria, then in the mid 1930s, from that up through the war, and we can talk about after the war too, her life and the stories that she wrote during that period are just monumental, um, and so, so important. And I hope to still do that work someday, and I encourage other people to do it too.

KIM: Yeah. And speaking of like, there's so many things. She was pretty, it seems, unequivocal about good versus evil during the war years, but then she was later accused of being a Communist. And there was a McCarthy style loyalty panel. She and her husband were eventually cleared, but she lost her accreditation with The New Yorker, and she was, basically blacklisted by the literary community, 

ANNE: Yes So after the war Joseph worked for the State Department and was stationed in Occupied Germany. And she's going back and forth from France to Germany to see him. The New Yorker ended up getting her a foreign correspondence pass to be in Germany, and she had it for many years, from, I want to say 46 or 47 up through 50 or 51 when she had to come back after they were accused of being Communists and The New Yorker did not renew her accreditation. People haven't really questioned it very much, but when they have been questioned, they said that, Well, we didn't revoke it, our permission. We just didn't renew it. But she was writing. They sent her to write about Occupied Germany, but they wanted fiction from her. They had journalists over there, but they wanted fiction about what life was really like, telling the stories that journalists couldn't tell, they didn't have access to. And so she's writing all these incredible stories about what life is like in those very first years after the war. And some of these stories are still so powerful. "Adam's Death" is an incredible story about a Jewish man, a dentist, who comes to this small town, very prejudicial town in Germany, who had been in one of the camps. And came there after the war and is just trying to start over.  Think about what it was like for a Jewish person to come out of the camps and try to start their life over in Germany. That's a story we don't know. And there's another fascinating story called "The Lost" that is about the orphans who were picked up by the American GIs as they swept through Europe. There were all these young boys, and they would take them in and they were called mascots. She's writing the story about what it was like for them after the war. You know, they speak English now. They have Brooklyn accents, you know, or Southern accents, and they're trying to get to the U S, to be with these GIs that they've become very close to, and they're being told that they can't, they have to stay. And she sent this story to The New Yorker, and they turned it down because they said it wasn't believable. She fired off this livid response to them that said Every word of this is true. I have pictures of the boys who are in the story. I spoke to the woman at the detention camp who had to tell that boy that he couldn't go to America because the soldier that he had become very close to, who was like a surrogate father to him, was Black. And this little boy, I think he was from Czechoslovakia, so he was white. And she was trying to explain to this little boy, the woman who works at the detention center, that you can't live with this man who's become your father because he's Black and you're white. There's this thing in America called the race question. And so a week later, the boy comes back to her and says, Hey, have they solved that race question yet? And she's No, I'm sorry. They haven't. And The New Yorker said this didn't happen. It's not real. They didn't publish it. She said it was absolutely real, every single word of it. And she did end up publishing it later. So she's writing stories that are pointing out how hypocritical America was, you know, coming over there and saving Europe when they're still so hateful and racist and segregated at home, right? She was in Germany, where there was a lot of fear that there were Communists, um, infiltrating, like the Iron Curtain was very close. And so I think a lot of it had to do with her criticism of America. And she wanted to bring Richard Wright, of all people, to come and speak in Occupied Germany and they refused to allow him to come.

AMY: Yeah, this whole time period, like, post war Germany, rebuilding, I had never before read any, anything about this time period. 

ANNE: Yeah, me neither.

AMY: Like fiction or nonfiction. It was all new to me. So my favorite stories were the alpine stories, but these were a close second because I had no idea how it all worked, you know, with the Americans being stationed there. And there's just so much I learned about that, what the world was like. 

ANNE: Me too! Yes. 

AMY: Like the, uh, during the war, like the, the situation in France and, anyway, I, I don't want to get into it all, cause we're, we could just go on and on… 

ANNE: Sorry. I've already spoken way too long. Yes.

KIM: No, not at all. This has been really good.

AMY: So Kay Boyle died in California in 1992. Um, up until that point, she was busy both as a writer, a teacher, and an activist. She lived in the Haight Ashbury heart of San Francisco in the 1960s protesting the Vietnam War. She was twice arrested, briefly imprisoned for this activism. She worked in support of Amnesty International and the NAACP. Um, I love that literally from her childhood and from that little newspaper story through the later years of her life, she was always speaking out against injustice. It's just such a clear throughline for her entire life.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. And as we've said we are only scratching the surface. Anne, thank you so much for joining us today to discuss Boyle's incredible life and writing. This has been really wonderful. Um, I'm excited that we got to have a reunion episode with you. 

ANNE: Thank you so much for having me. This was a blast. Thanks.

AMY: And as we mentioned, Anne has something in common with Kay Boyle in that she's currently living the expat life in Europe. Before we sign off here, I wanted to just switch gears a little bit and find out, Anne, what are you working on?

ANNE: Well, as you mentioned at the outset, I have left academia. And although I was writing this book about Kay Boyle, I've set that aside for the moment, because of this huge transition in my life. I'm writing full time now. Um, I'm working on a memoir about my year of travel after my daughter went off to college. So I sold my house and I left my career, ended my marriage and started traveling when my daughter went off to college. And it's been an incredible journey. It's been kind of a second coming of age for me. So I've been writing about that. I'm also planning, I'm not working on it yet, but I'm planning to write a novel in the future. So these are some of the things that I've been kinda dabbling in. But, a lot of my energies right now are going into my Substack. As you mentioned, it's called Audacious Women, Creative Lives. And I profile a lot of women writers who are quite bold and audacious and do inspiring things, and talk about why so many of them have been forgotten. So very much in line with the themes of your podcast, which I just love.

KIM: Yeah. your Substack is a must read for sure. 

AMY: I'm going to be talking to Anne a little bit more about her whole experience abroad next week in our bonus episode exclusively available for all our Patreon members. I know you've learned a lot about yourself over these past couple of years, so I can't wait to hear more about that.

KIM: For everyone else, we'll meet you back in two weeks to discuss another lost lady of lit. And in the meantime, consider giving us a rating and review wherever you listen to this podcast to help spread the word.

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.