2023-12-22 05:00:52
The critic Edmund Wilson said of her that she had the style of Hemingway feminized, and surely that was where the literary influence that most marked Kay Boyle (1902-1992). Although it is also true that Boyle made the style his own with clean and distinct writing, like drops of water that fall separately, not exercising mannerism. Messy and obstinate, she also wrote many short stories, without having the gift for satire or comedy. Eudora Welty y Flannery O’Connor, two great American masters of short stories. She died at age 91, and during that long life she published 45 books, almost all fiction, stories and novels. She had three husbands, numerous lovers and six children, three of them born out of wedlock. Among other places, she lived in St. Paul, Cincinnati; In New York; Le Havre, Grasse and Paris; England, Austria, Germany and Switzerland; Connecticut and California. With her third husband, Joseph von Franckenstein, an Austrian baron and Nazi opponent who worked in the United States Foreign Service, became involved in a long and complicated struggle during the McCarthy era, when Von Franckenstein was considered a security risk. She was accused of belonging to the Communist Party. In the late 1960s, while teaching at San Francisco State College, she actively participated in a high-profile strike against the institution. Her activism never stopped her from writing. But it is possible that the fact that she preferred to live her life rather than analyze its consequences eventually reduced her artistic potential, and it is proven that she diminished it as her mother. She never regretted her decisions, except when she intervened in defense of Huey Newton and the Black Panthers. The writer Grace Paleywho treated her somewhat late, went so far as to say that people with a full sexual life do not regret it.
Kay Boyle’s name was long associated with modernism, with living in France in the 1920s and with the short story, the format that she most liked to cultivate. Her literary reputation waxed and waned in the active half-century she lived: she peaked around 1942 and later went into decline. Not because she did not enjoy sufficient self-esteem, she had it to such an extent that it was difficult for others to celebrate her considering that she seemed to monopolize the reverence towards herself. She used to comment that the Jews had produced three original geniuses: Christ, Spinoza and Boyle. He also adored Gertrude Steinof whom he said that if it did not exist it would not have succeeded either Sherwood Anderson and without an eloquent and indubitable Sherwood Anderson, we would have had a less literary disciplined Hemingway. He wrote that no one since Shakespeare had done nothing to revolutionize the English language except Gertrude Stein.
Idealist and visionary, Boyle, an American expatriate in Europe between 1923 and 1941, was part of that pioneering group of modernists who undertook and forged a revolution of the word. Her stories from that period, thirteen of which are collected in “Life Being the Best & Other Stories” (1988), are masterful in their complex and innovative use of language and their ironic recognition of certain subversive realities of life. Some of them, along with others from a previous anthology, “Fifty Stories”, appear in the selection now published by the publishing house Muñeca Infinita with the title “Living is the best.” Amid the whirlwind of global war in which they were conceived, Boyle offers a catalog of the many ways in which love can fail: the missed, or nearly missed, opportunities for human connection as each individual undertakes their lonely search for identity provides its characters intense moments and to readers an accurate replica of pain. Anthological descriptions also abound, such as that of the flock of sheep in “Maiden, Maiden”, one of the selected stories: “There was a scattered flock of strong mountain sheep, as big as calves; their faces turned smooth ebony if they saw a being. human, and the wool on their backs was matted and dark like the thick fur of a buffalo. Some white ones walked among the rest; they had shadows of disenchantment under the eyes and long powdered cheeks of the old, the wicked and the dissipated. By Kay Boyle, the same publisher previously published “The Blind Horse”, a remarkable short novel.
culture
Living is the bestr
Kay Boyle
Translation of Magdalena Palmer
Infinite Doll, 272 pages, 21 euros
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