Although it was a few years ago, it feels like yesterday when I ran into Kay Boyle’s former secretary, David Ryan, while working at a bookstore on the edge of the Tenderloin in San Francisco.  It was a happy reunion.  He channeled her in a spot on impersonation that got me laughing and thinking back.

As a student at San Francisco State University, I was lucky enough to spend time with some amazing writing teachers.  Kay was the most memorable of them.  She was — for me, at least — larger than life, even though she was quite thin and in her early seventies when I met her.  Having lived as an expatriate in Europe in the 1920s and 30s with the likes of James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, she had stories to tell.  When I expressed my admiration for the poet Hart Crane, she said, “Oh, yes, Hart,” and told me a story about one of his little-known escapades.

I remember a class I attended at her Victorian house on Frederick Street in the Haight Ashbury District.  On the hall table was a surreal looking “tree of hands” that Jean Cocteau had bought for her at the Paris flea market.  “It’s for holding calling cards,” she explained.  But for me it was pure magic, evoking daydreams of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.  I got a sense of her mindset early on, though, when she responded to a student who complained that he didn’t have enough time to work on a story.  “Andre Malraux found time to write, even when he was working with the French Resistance and helping Jewish children escape from the Nazis,” she said crisply.  “If you’re serious about writing, you’ll find time.”     

Boyle’s growth from an idealistic young writer to a savvy witness of political realities can be seen in her early novel, “Death of a Man,” which exposed the threat of fascism to a largely unsuspecting world.  It can also be seen in her long story “The White Horses of Vienna” (winner of the O. Henry Award), which depicts the need for artists to engage in the political and social conditions around them.  It’s a theme that shaped much of her poetry over the years, too.  Her poem, “A Testament to My Students,” supports student demands for a Black Studies program and other reforms in the 1960s; “Dedicated to Terre Des Hommes” laments thwarted efforts to transport wounded Vietnamese children to European hospitals ” (Doubleday & Company, 1970).

A critic once faulted Boyle for a tendency toward romanticism, to which she responded with atypical indifference, “This may very well be true.”  At its core, though, her work reminds us that people need to speak out, to stand against injustice in every era.  The message couldn’t be timelier.  The opening lines from “A Poem for the Teesto Dine’ of Arizona,” below, suggest that the source of Boyle’s commitment wasn’t simply anger, although that was part of it, but respect for others and a deep reverence for life.  The complete poem can be found in “This is Not a Letter and Other Poems” (Sun & Moon Press, Los Angeles, 1985).  

“The Mountain is old.  They say she is a female mountain.

The women who know her are not young, yet they call her

The Mother.  She stands tall against the sky, fragrant with herbs,

embellished by shrubs…”

“…She is The Mother who stands in silence

when the land is fettered and barbed with wire, when it is parched

to dust by the drought of uniformed men…”

– Kay Boyle

Two of my favorite books are Boyle’s memoir, “Being Geniuses Together, 1920 – 1930,” written with alternating chapters by Robert McAlmon, and her collection of short stories, “Nothing Ever Breaks Except the Heart.”  Both evoke the world of pre- and post-war Europe through the voice of an insightful narrator who was ahead of her time.