Monday Night

by Kay Boyle

Unfathomable horror broods over this story in which two Americans become involved in the search for one man: a toxicologist who has been connected with certain notorious poisonings which had occurred in France. Boyle's main character, the investigator Wiltshire Tobin, is based on Left Bank legend Harold Edmund Stearns.

The dust-jacket features a printed letter from Dylan Thomas to Boyle.

274 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1938

About the author

Kay Boyle was a writer of the Lost Generation.

Early years
The granddaughter of a publisher, Kay Boyle was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and grew up in several cities but principally in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her father, Howard Peterson Boyle, was a lawyer, but her greatest influence came from her mother, Katherine Evans, a literary and social activist who believed that the wealthy had an obligation to help the less well off. In later years Kay Boyle championed integration and civil rights. She also advocated banning nuclear weapons, and American withdrawal from the Vietnam War.

Boyle was educated at the exclusive Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, then studied architecture at the Ohio Mechanics Institute in Cincinnati. Interested in the arts, she studied violin at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music before settling in New York City in 1922 where she found work as a writer/editor with a small magazine.

Marriages and family life

That same year, she met and married a French exchange student, Richard Brault, and they moved to France in 1923. This resulted in her staying in Europe for the better part of the next twenty years. Separated from her husband, she formed a relationship with magazine editor Ernest Walsh, with whom she had a daughter (born after Walsh had died of tuberculosis).

In 1928 she met Laurence Vail, who was then married to Peggy Guggenheim. Boyle and Vail lived together between 1929 until 1932 when, following their divorces, they married. With Vail, she had three more children.

During her years in France, Boyle was associated with several innovative literary magazines and made friends with many of the writers and artists living in Paris around Montparnasse. Among her friends were Harry and Caresse Crosby who owned the Black Sun Press and published her first work of fiction, a collection titled Short Stories. They became such good friends that in 1928 Harry Crosby cashed in some stock dividends to help Boyle pay for an abortion. Other friends included Eugene and Maria Jolas. Kay Boyle also wrote for transition, one of the preeminent literary publications of the day. A poet as well as a novelist, her early writings often reflected her lifelong search for true love as well as her interest in the power relationships between men and women. Kay Boyle's short stories won two O. Henry Awards.

In 1936, she wrote a novel titled Death of a Man, an attack on the growing threat of Nazism, but at that time, no one in America was listening. In 1943, following her divorce from Laurence Vail, she married Baron Joseph von Franckenstein with whom she had two children. After having lived in France, Austria, England, and in Germany after World War II, Boyle returned to the United States.

McCarthyism, later life
In the States, Boyle and her husband were victims of early 1950s McCarthyism. Her husband was dismissed by Roy Cohn from his post in the Public Affairs Division of the U.S. State Department, and Boyle lost her position as foreign correspondent for The New Yorker, a post she had held for six years. She was blacklisted by most of the major magazines. During this period, her life and writing became increasingly political.

In the early 1960s, Boyle and her husband lived in Rowayton, Connecticut, where he taught at a private girls' school. He was then rehired by the State Department and posted to Iran, but died shortly thereafter in 1963.

Boyle was a writer in residence at the New York City Writer's Conference at Wagner College in 1962. In 1963, she accepted a creative writing position on the faculty of San Francisco State College, where she remained until 1979. During this period she became heavily involved in political activism. She traveled to Cambodia in 1966 as part of the "Americans Want to Know" fact-seeking mission. She participated in numerous protests, and in 1967 was arrested twice and imprisoned. In 1968, she signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge,

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some great writing here, and an interesting experiment from Kay - you can hear the Faulkner influence, and I also felt echoes of The Lime Twig (though this would only be written 30 years later). I ideally would like someone else to read it and tell me if it was actually any good...

[Molly · Rating 3 out of 5]

A work of modern fiction I saw recommended by Doris Grumbach in her Fifty Days of Solitude. Takes place in France (various cities) on a Monday night into an early Tuesday morning. I lost count of the number of drinks had by the long-winded alcoholic protagonist (?), Wilf, as he dragged around Bernie (who, thanks to Wilf, has had no sleep and no food for too long -- "lost between a whine and a yawn," as the New York Times review of the book aptly puts it), a young American who's recently graduated medical school and who has come to France looking for Sylvestre, his toxicology idol, a man who is connected through his damning evidence at trial with the conviction of several notorious poisoners. The writing is dense but not beautiful, the plot grimy and full of diversions, and would-be-writer Wilf's verbosity and intense focus on a mission -- perhaps on behalf of Bernie at first, to locate his idol, and then on behalf of others as time unfolds, or perhaps simply for his own benefit, as he envisions the book that will come of his suspicions, and even if no book comes, for the moment his vision of it is enough --  is frustrating to witness, particularly the way he goes about it, steamrolling all and sundry with his baseless speculations, his "subterranean fantasy." The contemporary NYT review of the book captures well the feeling of the reader: "The abnormal is not only obvious, as Gertrude Stein remarked; it's also darned fatiguing. It's true, of course, that Miss Boyle does not always concern herself with the abnormal as such; but when your people are never anything but sufferers, when they are always trapped between a blow and a scream, it's difficult not to want a little more light and air." The Kirkus review of the book in 1938 includes this line: "Her concentration on the gutter side of life is unpleasant." If I'd been expecting a sort of horror story, I might have rated it higher.

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