Kay Boyle Quotes

Your body is a jewel box.....the jewel is your soul

Genius' was a word loosely used by expatriot Americans in Paris and Rome, between the Versailles Peace treaty and the Depression, to cover all varieties of artistic, literary and musical experimentalism. A useful and readable history of the literary Thirties is Geniuses Together by Kay Boyle-Joyce, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Pound, Eliot and the rest. They all became famous figures but too many of them developed defects of character-ambition, meanness, boastfulness, cowardice or inhumanity-that defrauded their early genius. Experimentalism is a quality alien to genius. It implies doubt, hope, uncertainty, the need for group reassurance; whereas genius works alone, in confidence of a foreknown result. Experiments are useful as a demonstration of how not to write, paint or compose if one's interest lies in durable rather than fashionable results; but since far more self-styled artists are interested in frissons á la mode rather than in truth, it is foolish to protest. Experimentalism means variation on the theme of other people's uncertainties.

Writing of a chance early meeting with Dylan Thomas in a London bar, Kay Boyle writes (1955, in the era of McCarthyism, 1947-1956): Perhaps because he [Dylan Thomas was so often out of place among men, we take him now as symbol. Perhaps because we who write in America are in great difficulties now, we cherish Dylan Thomas as if he were our own ego, our own wild soul freed of the flesh. An American critic, writing of the American literary scene, points out that thinking Americans, in this period of our nation's development, are deeply troubled because "the demands for national security and for individual freedom" are in conflict.

There is no way for even the most honest among us to look into memory's dreamy, evasive eyes and know she can be persuaded not to lie, not to betray.

It takes courage to say things differently: Caution and cowardice dictate the use of the cliché.

Words are shallow troughs for the deep water of the mind and it is only the fierce, the living, the simple, the clear, the angry mind which can overflow the troughs and go out over the mud, and over the grass, bearing the light of the sun on it like an angry shield.

The puritanical conscience is the coldest and cruelest of all the self-flagellating consciences to bear, for it stamps the sweet abandon out of life entirely. .... The puritanical conscience, with its little grey bonnet tied under its chin....

I heard the military bands playing with false and terrible cheer in the streets as the recruits went off to war [WW1]. I had beat the bed with my fists then, and cried tears of rage that young men must march off to this artful ad calculated accompaniment to places where wagon roads would be laid across their bones.

Collecting statistics at camp Zachary Taylor after the armistice [WW1 1918], I found that out of two hundred and fifty men from Kentucky and Tennessee, ninety were completely illiterate, several were actual imbeciles, two had syphilitic rheumatism; and any number had married at childhood ages, from twelve - the youngest - to seventeen. They had married girls from nine - the youngest - to fourteen. So I am ready to believe that the Faulkner and Caldwell depictions of ingrown sections of the country are based upon actual conditions....

That threshold lying at the entrance to each man's and woman's life, I knew without equivocation now, must be recognized and genuflected before.

... our landlord and landlady. Their house, just outside the town, was quite a little chateau, and the evil that dwelt within its highly polished salons, that reclined on its lace-covered beds, and was coiled deep in the stuffing of its exquisitely upholstered chairs and sofas, was enough to make the blood turn icy in the veins.

America, the only America that would endure, I believed now with a conviction as sharp as a knife turning in my breast, did not belong to Judge Thayer, or to Governor Fuller of Massachusetts, or to the President of the United States, who had refused a shoemaker and a fish peddler his word of clemency. The American that lent me its direction forever now was Lola's, and it was Bill Williams, and Mother's and Michael's, and mine; and I knew, with a terrible humility in the presence of their innocence, that it was Saco's and Vanzetti's as well.

Kay Boyle said once that a good story is both an allegory and a slice of life. Most writers are good at one, not the other. But you are doing both so beautifully here.

(I am waiting for news from Ezra Pound and from Kay Boyle, to whom I sent carbons. They may make valuable suggestions.)