200
PARTISAN REVIEW
completeness of his mood, his identification with the purities and dooms
of twenty years ago.
When Kay Boyle became the literary publicist of the French Re–
sistance, she outdid the French themselves by finding heroes everywhere,
and not "absurd" ones either. There is no doubt about her sincerity and
nothing necessarily disreputable in her attitude toward the war, but her
literary equipment was not adequate for these larger themes and as a
consequence she has dealt herself a double blow. By retaining in her
war fiction much of her old manner and even her typical characters
she has not only written some bad stories and novels but has made one
doubt her previous work. Some artists are very unlucky: they reach the
logical end of their beginnings and thereby perform an act of adverse
criticism upon their own work. A bad book can sometimes tell you what
was wrong with a reasonably good book by the same person. In
Th irty
Stories,
a selection from two decades of her writing, those that hold up
best are least stamped with Kay Boyle's peculiar qualities. "Keep Your
Pity," along with a horror story like "Your Body Is a Jewel Box" and
the very conventional "Natives Don't Cry," seem to me successful, if not
outstanding, examples of the contemporary short story. The stories that
seem to me least successful are those in which she lays the foundation
that later collapses so unmistakably. The typical Kay Boyle characters
are heroes and heroines in a fantastic fairy tale. The hero is likely to
be a Count or a Baron or, if that isn't available, a plebeian Major.
Count Lothar has most of his important qualities. "All the manly,
bodily things came alive in his blood when he walked and rang aloud
until the echo was heard in every woman's heart that he passed." The
princes are waiting for the princess, who is a bit more American, a
hard, athletic woman with painted lips who understands the manly
creature with a sure instinct. In "Maiden, Maiden" and "Major Alshuster"
nothing is at stake except romance, a chivalrous sexual tournament, and
the stories have some emotional reality because they aren't pushed too
far or taken too seriously. However, when Kay Boyle's people become
not only fairy-tale heroes, but military and political ones as well, they are
revealed in all their foolishness and we know they were never anything
except romantic abstractions. The princess becomes ridiculous when she
puts on her Field Service uniform and one cannot quite believe in an
underground Lady Higgins. The American war stories, like "The Canals
of Mars" which tells of a typical war parting in Pennsylvania Station,
are particularly incredible because here the fairy tale, with its fabulous
honor and spartan courage, hasn't even the advantage of a foreign
setting. We have all been in Pennsylvania Station too many times.
ELIZABETH HARDWICK
