Year Before Last

by Kay Boyle

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

Genres: Fiction, Classics, American, Female Authors, Novels, Romance, France

Hardcover

First published December 1, 1932

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

[Dolors · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t know exactly what Boyle’s style provoked in me that it disturbed my sleep. Maybe her vast vision of a crude reality that she describes without averting her eyes, taking in all the foreboding, all the fear and all the unfairness that abounds in life and calmly waiting for the storm to break loose without missing a beat.
Maybe the poetic candor or the innocent faithfulness that pulsates underneath her carefully crafted sentences that sound like an ode to bygone times when youth and promise were still within one’s reach.
Maybe the voice at the back of my head that detected truth and personal experience behind Boyle’s fictional work and my suspicions confirmed later by Doris Grumbach’s afterword enclosed in this beautiful edition of a book that has been overlooked for too long.

A story about love, art and loss delivered in no particular order because Boyle’s point is precisely that one cannot exist without the other.
How to disentangle one’s passions from what originates them?
Hannah is a twenty-four years old American married to a Frenchman and living in the north of Paris when she crosses paths with Martin, an editor and poet from Ireland, whose adoration for words is so boundless that it makes up for his poor health and limited financial means. Defying convention and dodging all kind of practical reasons to ignore their feelings, the young couple elope together and embark on a journey in the France of the twenties that brings them to meet other expatriate artists under the close surveillance of Martin’s possessive aunt, the person who threatens to unbalance their still fragile but deeply felt commitment.

Far from the insipid cliché of mixing literary rhetoric with the predictable tale of a doomed love affair, Boyle’s novel rises above narrative conventions and it reaches an unprecedented clarity of expression that vindicates her ideals as a woman and a writer.
Her painstakingly accurate choice of words paints an all-embracing landscape that acts like a mirror for her characters’ inner struggles, although it’s Hannah’s viewpoint that acts like the leading voice in the canon of interior monologues that fuse in the vulnerability of adverse circumstances. Boyle’s perspective is absolutely feminine and for once, the male is the object of her meticulous observation.
As whimsical as Martin’s outbursts in frustration and impotence might be, it’s Hannah’s silent strength that carries the novel to a heart-stirring culmination.

Even though the world depicted in this delicate piece is often a sinister, cold and unforgiving place, Boyle’s genuine prose acts like an antidote against the cynicism and the vanity that jeopardizes the belief that true love is the natural way to protect the invisible ties that makes us human, the only authentic emotion that ignites the empathy that can transform the world for the better; and that art is the only possible channel to give form to such an unstoppable force.

[Fionnuala]

In the previous Kay Boyle novel I read there was a foreword by the author written fifty years after the book was first published, explaining how autobiographical it all was. In this one, there's an afterword, also written many years after publication, not from the author this time but with her approval. In it, Doris Grumbach reveals that the disclaimer at the beginning of this 1932 novel stating that the characters are entirely fictitious and have no reference whatsoever to real people, living or dead is itself fictitious.

Grumbach goes on to say: It turns out that almost everything and everyone in 'Year Before Last' is part and parcel of young Kay Boyle's life in France in the late Twenties.

Then she quotes something Boyle wrote in the 1980s about autobiographical fiction: The pronoun 'I' is an awkward one to deal with, and I do so with impatience; for I have come to believe that autobiography to fulfil a worthy purpose should be primarily a defence of those who have been unjustly dealt with in one's own time, and whose lives and works ask for a vindication.

I've never thought about autobiography in the light in which Kay Boyle presents it, but she does seem to have known quite a few artists whose lives and works went uncelebrated, so there is that aspect to consider. But the fact remains that it is not her own life and work she is vindicating in this autobiographical novel. The 'defence', if that's what it is, which she presents in Year Before Last is of her one time lover, the poet Ernest Walsh. He's fictionalised as Irish American Martin Sheehan who struggles to write his own poetry and publish a literary magazine exactly as Ernest Walsh did. Boyle herself is fictionalised as a young American woman called Hannah. There's a secondary 'defence' going on as well, of Italian poet Emanuel Carnavali with whom Walsh and Boyle had a deep bond. He's referred to in the novel as 'the Italian poet' and Kay Boyle dedicated the book to him.

What's interesting about all of this is that even having digested Grumbach's words about the fictitious disclaimer, and Boyle's about the value of autobiography, I'm inclined to think that Kay Boyle meant what she said in 1932 in the disclaimer. I feel she succeeded in transforming the year she spent living with Ernest Walsh into a real fiction. In spite of the exact parallels with hers and Walsh's lives at every twist and turn of it, this story of Martin and Hannah, drawn to each other on first sight, holds the magical quality of a fairy tale inside it. The fairy tale element is in the way the narrative follows a little old car along the winding roads of the hills above Cannes; the way Hannah and her three dogs run wild across the countryside; the alternately good and evil god-mother figure who haunts the lovers' lives; the quaint old houses and dingy hotel rooms they hide away in; the constant swerving between feast and famine; the frequent images of blood red against deathly white; the tension between following love and following money.

When it was over, after wanting it to be over several times during the last fifty pages, I perversely wanted it not to be over.
That's the spell it cast on me.

[Tony]

There's the obligatory disclaimer on the copyright page: Author's Note: None of the characters herein depicted have any connection with actual people, dead or living.

Don't believe it.

Kay Boyle married in 1923 and expatriated to France where she left her husband and lived with Ernest Walsh, a magazine editor and poet of less than modest repute, who was afflicted with tuberculosis.

In this book, Hannah expatriates to France where she leaves her husband the very night she meets Martin, a magazine editor and a poet of less than modest repute, who is afflicted with tuberculosis.

So, except for that, no connection with actual people. Dead or living.

It serves as a template for the first novels by Boyle that I've read, this and 1939 and Gentlemen, I Address You Privately. A storyline of a woman dumping her husband for an unlikable artist and then suffering privation for his imaginary talent is not really something I need to read more than once. And, the other two novels were superior artistically.

That said, there was a scene at the midpoint which demonstrates the gift Boyle has. After getting kicked out of one hotel after another because of Martin's palpable sickness, the couple meet up with Duke and Phyllis. Duke and Martin engage in a dialogue about literature while the women, as was the fashion, half-listen and half-observe two caged marmosets.

Duke proclaims: Writing's not the place for fanatics. We haven't room. And he dismisses poetry, with contempt: But poetry!

But poetry, Martin answers. . . . Poetry is where the search for literature begins.

Duke: I don't know what you're talking about when you say you're searching for literature. . . . If a man's a good writer, then he's a good soldier, he's a good swimmer, a good dancer. . .

Martin: As for literature . . . it is not a vocabulary. Literature is a taste, and if you can give someone else a taste for it, then you are a writer.

The women shift their focus, from the boys to the marmosets. What do you feed them? asks Hannah, as she hears Duke speaking.

Duke: I wrote a little story the other day and I brought three different dialects in.

Phyllis: Bananas.

Then . . . Martin opened his mouth to speak, but a clock in some other part of the house began to strike . . . They all sat around the table in silence while the deep dooming strokes fell.

. . .

Duke: You'll change your tune when you're forty-odd!

Martin: Then I'd rather die young.

Characters sometimes get what they wish for, even if there's no connection to actual people. Dead or living.

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is really the story of a love triangle, albeit an unusual one. Hannah leaves her husband for Martin, an American poet, who lives off the wealth of his aunt, Eve. Martin has tuberculosis, Eve has an obsession with him that is both neurotic and erotic, and Hannah dotes on him in a self-sacrificial way that is almost infuriating. Sadly, the overall atmosphere reminded me of F. Scott Fitzgerald in his more prosaic efforts.

Much of the story is mundane…Eve’s tantrums, Hannah’s accepting abuse from Eve to placate Martin, Martin’s swaying between the two women like a wind-torn tree. All of them trying, and failing, to keep a brave face and ignore the inevitable.

Boyle has many assets. She has an almost mesmerizing style when she is describing places and surroundings, and a high sense of imagery. When she describes the heat or the cold, I could feel it; when Hannah interacts with the dogs, they are present as full-blown characters.

Had it been the heat of summer on them, or a trip to be made through an evil city, the despair in their thoughts might have set their sorrow afire. But it was a long shadowy road they had to follow across a flight of mountains in the early day. They drove up from the palms and yucca of the coast, up through a mock-sunlight of mimosa, steadily soaring into the black firs, the pines, and the strong separate nameless trees growing up the mountain side. The rocks were dark and bare like savages; they were wigged with long green dripping mosses and had set their bony faces against the wastrel south.

There are graphic passages in which Hannah has to administer medications to Martin as he bleeds from his mouth. These passages are both horrifying and compelling, and yet they seem to be happening to someone we do not know versus someone with whom we have spent 270 pages.
The biggest drawback, for me, in this novel is that I feel no connection to any of the characters. They are not sympathetic in nature, the endless games they play become tiresome, and I failed to understand most of what drives them. Hannah might have become a focus point, she does seem to feel real love for Martin and a willingness to take a lot of horrible experiences just to be in his presence, except that she is so hard and unfeeling toward the husband that she leaves, who oddly enough, dotes on her in the same fashion she dotes on Martin, that I could not connect to her emotionally.

Stylistically, one objection: There is no use of quotation marks when someone is speaking, and this makes it difficult to keep a flow in a book where so much of what happens is verbal. I realize this became popular at some point, but I was surprised to find it in use in a book published in 1932.
I somehow had huge expectations of this book. I am not sure why. I cannot remember who suggested it to me or if it came to me from reading someone else’s review or paper. It is always bad to go into a new author with too much eagerness or presumption. I know this, and yet I do it. I fear it makes the disappointment more acute and the read less fulfilling than it might have been otherwise. At any rate, this novel was a 3.5 star read for me, just because of the quality of the writing, but cannot merit 4-stars.

Strangely enough, since this is an early work, I might actually try Boyle again someday.

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love, hear thou how desolate the heart is.

I knew I needed to read this book after I read Being Geniuses Together, 1920 1930, the memoir Kay Boyle coauthored with Robert McAlmon, which detailed the lives of American literati living in Europe during the twenties. That era packages literature, music, writing, poetry, good conversation and fine drinks in a way that makes it an enticing world to disappear.

Of course, there is love. This year I started with love as a reading theme and I plan on being steadfast.

What can do you with love? she said. On which side does it lie? If love is an element, like weather or wind, then it must go unchallenged.

This novel is an autobiographical account of Kay Boyle's relationship with the poet, Ernest Walsh. You sense this. She articulates love from the innermost parts of her characters so adeptly that a reader is able to examine their flaws and strengths in the most objective way. I relished the tenderness of the prose, the languor of plot, the poetry in the texture and style. There's also something small and special that makes me fall in love with certain books: when characters in the book give the art of writing and close reading prominence. Yes, I love when characters admire books in the same way I do.

A spot of drink would give me courage,but instead of it if you could give me a small sentence spoken out clearly, a word or two or three words even to bind on my forehead like a miner's lantern. Without you, he said softly. He sat looking down into his open hands and she could do nothing in her love but sit down again beside him. Without you for half a day even, he said, I might go astray.

Hannah, a married woman, leaves her ambitious, distant husband after she falls in love with a poor writer, Martin. Once Martin's aunt, also his benefactor, learns of their relationship, they're faced with financial troubles. They travel together, skipping from one hotel or inn to the next either because they can't pay the bills or because the hotels don't want Martin, who has an affliction of the lungs, staying there. For someone struggling with a terminal illness, Martin lives his life freely and uninhibitedly.

Martin's interaction with Hannah made me think of this excerpt from one of my favorite poetry collections, Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems. This one is from the poem "Unnatural State of the Unicorn":

I'm standing here in unpolished
shoes & faded jeans, sweating
my manly sweat. Inside my skin,
loving you, I am this space
my body believes in.

Poetry colors the world, adds a musical note, gives it a different beat. Martin is a poet and a magazine editor who basks in the words of other poets and wants the world to hear the music of poetry. He is gregarious and lighthearted. Hannah is self-effacing and tender. They both detest convention so their life in motion suits them and suits their three dogs. The style of this novel parallels poetry so it is lyrical and lucid. Most of the novel exists in the characters' sensibilities so it may not be the reading choice for everyone, but it certainly was for me.

[Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I do not understand why this ultimate 5 star book is not more frequently talked about and reviewed.

Boyle speaks quietly while stringing together her small gemmed pearls leading to moments of stinging drama. They push the narrative forward while developing breathing, sweat-driven characters. These are people I could not live without as they were caught within their own webs of conflict, solidity, passion, and in the moment of art.

My words fall short of what this work is. So be it, I won’t say anymore.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful. Devastating. Builds to a powerful gut-punch of sorrow and loss, made more profound by the fundamentally autobiographical nature of the text and those elements from Kay's own experience which are passed over in silence (her pregnancy in particular). This is her second novel and I felt as though I could actually feel her growing in confidence as it progressed.

Noting some critiques of this as being too middlebrow, too heteronormative, too middle-class, I think it is easy to fail to recognise the disruptive nature of such works at the time they were written, and the vehemence with which they were rejected and buried by the male gatekeepers. The subject matter and the "female" perspective were genuinely avant-garde, as were many of the works written by other buried women modernists of the period. What may seem mundane to us now, was certainly not at the time. It is also stylistically and structurally inventive. though not in the kind of "flashy" ways we may expect from "experimental" texts. Put simply, I would just want to say that the bravery in writing such a book as this, at the time it was written, should not be ignored.

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

You likely know how boring it is to be in the claustrophobic world of a young couple in love who are everything to each other. That’s how it felt for me for the majority of the book. Scenes with their three dogs and the other characters who enter the couple’s life, however briefly, and however odious these characters (not the dogs) might be, were always very welcome.

I didn’t believe in Martin’s genius until somewhere past the middle when it clicked for me. I found the ending superior, though the writing is beautiful throughout. Boyle is some talent.

As for the title, the only meaning I can ascribe to it is that this is the main female character’s looking back at that particular time. (8/13/20, Note to self: See the comments below Fionnuala's review for the explanation.)

[Diane Barnes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a great novel, but a pretty good introduction to Kay Boyle, especially since other reviewers like some of her later books much more. The afterward by Doris Grumbach in my Virago edition explains that, contrary to Boyle's claim that the characters are all fictional, it was pretty much an autobiographical account of her affair with and love of the poet Ernest Walsh during the last year of his life. I'm too old and jaded to find a young girl's sacrifices for a narcisstic, selfish, sensitive artist romantic, but I was impressed enough with her writing to read more by her.

[Luke · Rating 2 out of 5]

[Dickens] had something to say once about Edgar Allan Poe, said Martin. He spoke of him as a miserable creature, a disappointed man in great poverty, to whom I have ever been most kind and considerate....And suddenly Martin's warm laughter ran out. The chill of that kindness and consideration! said Martin, buttoning his coat over. Don't you feel the shiver of it on your spine?

Back when I was able to physically participate in book sales (I'm trying not to think of how long I'll have to go without those), I remember bypassing a sizable number of tattered, underread looking first editions that hailed from the 40s and earlier and thinking, when I had read a great deal more and started settling down, I'd happily gather all those works under my wing and start disinterring in earnest. The risk of doing so can be seen here, as it's not as if Boyle doesn't have consistently beautiful prose, or regular bursts of insight, or combinations of the two so intense that I have to memorialize such, leastwise in the digital sense of the matter. My eyes just have a habit of glazing over when the domestic heterosexuality bursts through and too many of the characters are too careless with money and it is so obvious how different the scenario would be if the genders of the poor and the rich were switched that it makes me sick with boredom. Also, there was probably no small amount of jealousy on my part over the fact that someone coughing blood was gallivanting all over the European landscape in a manner that I imagine was in some ways quite similar to those who first spread the pandemic that the rest of my world is now dealing with the fallout of. The fact that this is a light fictionalizing of someone's actual life doesn't make me more sympathetic, as why not just commit to the nonfictional stance and save me the trouble of expecting something more fictionally significant? Boyle's evocations of nature were beautiful enough that I could have read a full 320+ pages of her and her dogs and her cooking and gardening, but alas. Virago Modern Classic or no, drama is what sells, and my picking a work solely because of its publication year did not go so well this time around.

For a strange superstition has survived among most that editors or publishers are discriminating readers. Which is absurd. They carry their wares about in a suitcase, like salesmen for horse-medicine or cough-drops or something worse. Not good tough roistering salesmen with their own lingo, but an affected figure aped out of some London drawing-room.

It's really a shame. If the book had gotten past its own conceit of tagging along with some dude's philandering flights of fancies, it could have been quite something. Or, there could have been more commentary that wasn't nearly so self-effacing and resigned to what is probably allosexuality at its most incomprehensible, leastwise to one such as myself. Like I said, the visual descriptions are on average noticeably superb, and Boyle's descriptions of dogs have probably done more than anything else in getting me to actually like the creatures. Every so often it seemed the main character was going to follow through on one tangent or another and give me something to really sink my teeth into, but it was never more than a page or so before a new chapter started and the errant elopers were on the run again. I'm as sentimental as the next person when it comes to certain aspects of humanity, but this particular breed of overly dramatic romanticism grew exhausting after the fifteenth forced displacement. True love and the beauty of poetry and the cruelties of poverty and illness and all that, but I feel nothing more than too old for the first two as a consequence of having dealt with the latter while too young for too long, so most of it was boring at best and pathetic at worst. Boyle's other works have cropped in various places of repute, but as I've said in many other a review of mine, I haven't done the "oh no that was the wrong work to start with this is where you should have gone" macarena in a long time, and I'm not about to start now. So, when I get the chance, off this goes to someone who also likes the sort of ideal that VMC abides by but isn't in a position to buy the works new. I can imagine this book really doing something for someone who needs it, but that person truly is not me.

A combination of circumstances means that this wasn't the best book for me at this time, but honestly, my priorities are so incompatible with the work's main themes that is probably best that I ripped the band aid off now. Considering how much I avoid soap operas in my visual entertainment, I would rather not run into it under a more varnished coating. There's certainly merit to the work beyond this this SparkNotes level dismissal, but my sensibilities are not the kind to naturally resonate with such to the point of ignoring everything else. If Boyle has anything else out there that focuses more on her strengths and less on the comprehensive man/woman relation details that served as the base of this narrative, I'd be open to getting to it eventually. I hear she has short stories, so those might be worth checking out, especially the more bucolically inclined. For now, though, I'd rather focus on authors for whom I don't need to call upon my academic paper writing skills in order to give them a fair chance in my thoughts.

Do you know he can give you a taste for living that is sharper than all the beauties in the world, and whoever can give you this is the strong light of the day coming to shine on your youth. If you sit with this man thinking that his clothes are different and his words different in a queer way, then maybe you want nothing else of living except the seeking and the finding of your own kind so that you need never know that your humour is a sick thing and your art a hollow thing and all your words fall as heavy as stone into the heart of the man who listens to you.

[Doug H · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Layer by layer as they climbed the land changed for them and the clear air poured in upon their faces. Behind them hung the dogs’ warm muzzles, their noses dewed and eager and wavering with spring. The trails of wild things escaping or scents they crossed, sent the dogs whistling with grief and impatience against the windows of the car."

Descriptions of the protagonist’s three dogs run throughout this, Kay Boyle’s second novel. I loved them. I also lived for the moments at the end with Aunt Eve spinning drunk and in insane denial:

"Eve came in dancing, came in skipping, she came in jigging with a Pernod in her hand. Have a drink, Hannah, a little drink, Hannah. It’ll give ye a taste for the supper we’re going to have. She would stay the night but she would stay no longer. My dark Rosaleen, she hummed high in her throat, my dark Rosaleen.”

For me, other than the dogs, it was all about Eve. And, yes, Bette Davis would have been the perfect choice for a film version - even though it was actually Martin who kept shouting, “What a dump!”.

I had some quips with the rest of the “it’s you and me against the world babe” love story, but Boyle’s prose is admirable throughout. I admire her highly visual style and I could almost see it growing in front of me while I read.

Overall, I enjoyed it (especially that ending), but I didn’t find it rising to the same level as The Crazy Hunter or The Bridegroom's Body from her later Three Short Novels. If you haven’t yet read anything by Boyle, I’d recommend you start there. Or, if you'd just like to try a taste, there's Your Body is a Jewel Box: a five-star gem from Fifty Stories. It's available as a standalone for .99 on Amazon and it definitely stands alone.

3.5 stars

[lyndel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really enjoyable read and if you are interested in the women writers from the 20s and 30s then this is one I would recommend . The story is an auto biographical account of the love affair that the writer kay boyle has with the carismatic irish poet she meets while she is married to another man. I love the descscriptions of their travels through France of the late 1920s as they fight with "poverty" (money mysteriously arrives in envelopes from some where!) and the fact that he has actually fallen victim to tuberculousis. It sounds sad but really its about courage and the will to live despite everything . I loved the
whole expat scene that she illustrates full of people living in hotels in french villages , drinking copious cocktails and writing avant garde magazines !

[Bill FromPA · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a moving story of a love affair told with cool, modernist detachment. The author manages to persuade the reader to love Martin as well, and to understand and ultimately excuse his faults. She also presents a complex character, simultaneously admirable, hateful, and comic, in his Aunt Eve, the jealous and possessive patroness who controls the financing for the literary magazine that is Martin's main reason for living. Hannah, the point of view character and, according to the afterword by Doris Grumbach, barely fictionalized stand-in for the author, is almost an embodiment of moral conflict: whether to stick with Martin and live out their love, knowing this deprives him of essential economic support, or to cede him to his aunt, breaking two hearts in the process, but granting him a longer, if less happy life.
I never quite got an understanding of Hannah. There seemed too much not told about her: her American past, her relationship with the French husband she quickly abandoned at what might have been (but wasn't) a whim of Martin, or exactly why she felt it necessary to except her three dogs, only one of which seems to have a name, in entirely abandoning everything else about her past life in order to live with Martin.

[Juliet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting, and with some memorable passages but not as good stylistically or in readability as her previous novel, plagued by the nightingale. Very evocative though, especially regarding the chaotic nature of the life of Hannah and Martin. I also really liked the portrayal of Hannah's loping dogs.

[Theresa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Guess I’m in the minority on this one. The writing was excellent, but I just couldn’t muster any liking for the characters, and was glad to be finished with it.

[Yesenia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kay Boyle writes so beautifully, so beautifully... I do not understand why she is not more widely read, more widely translated. I wanted my book club to read this or another novel (in Spanish, I live in Spain), and I have only found two novellas...

It is hard to describe why her writing is... what she does... it's almost magical. It is as if she has a magical relationship with words and language and images and characters and thoughts. And life. You know how Virginia Woolf does something amazing, something that only she does and that is impossible to describe to somebody if they have never read her...? It's the same with Kay Boyle. Not the same "thing"--they write very, very differently--but the same thing: the taste of water cannot be described, this book cannot be described, Kay Boyle's style defies description, it is itself and must be read.

The book itself is... is... the story, I mean, which is based on her and the poet she fell in love with and the patron/aunt who suspended her support of his literary magazine and their time in southern Europe going from one villa and village to another as he... as they... The name. That should tell you something. The title of the novel is like her writing. It is, in its absolute simplicity, absolutely pregnant with meaning, with implications, with suggestions, with evocations... And every sentence is like this, there's no respite from the sentences that are always beautiful, all of them placed intentionally, lovingly, every description a poem.

Every single one.

[Jim Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kay Boyle wrote beautiful poetic novels and short stories about vulnerable and naïve women who, even when being influenced by outside forces, were somehow able to maintain a strong sense of self and purpose. In Year Before Last she fictionalizes a relationship with a dying tubercular poet whom she left her first husband for. While the reader is frustrated by her choices and sometimes by the selfishness of her dying lover, we are always on her side and hoping somehow she pulls through this situation without the worst happening to her. The book is about the tension between the poet’s wealthy, domineering aunt and his lover, the sweet, nurturing, and penniless Hannah for control of the poet whom everyone knows is living his last months. The fact that Boyle can throw you into the middle of all of this with no exposition and have you along for the ride from the get go is a testimony to this writer who deserves so much more attention that she gets. Thank goodness for the Virago reprints of her amazing work.

[Jennie Rogers · Rating 3 out of 5]

a deep cut

[Eudora · Rating 5 out of 5]

Boyle is one of my dissertation subjects, I really like her. This novel as a supplementary work.

[Pat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Originally published in 1932, Year After Last by Kaye Boyle is a fine example of modernist writing with its first person nuanced expression of the thoughts and feelings of Hannah, a twenty three-year old American woman who leaves her caring but dull academic husband Dilly to live with Martin Sheehan, a literary magazine editor and poet. She walks out of her comfortable home in Paris with her three dogs and only enough money for her train fare and travels to Nice in the south of France to be with Martin.
Hannah quickly finds that she is part of a triangular relationship. His aunt Eve, who actually introduced the couple, is wildly jealous of Hannah and refers to her as a harlot and a whore. Although Eve has been a suffragette and an activist on various issues she has never had a relationship with a man because she is convinced they are after her money. Martin, her nephew, is `safe’ and she maintains her hold on him by providing the money to fund his highly intellectual literary journal.
Martin is very self-involved and is better at taking love than giving it. His only source of income is a disability pension he receives from the government for being gassed in WWI. His refusal to come to terms with reality is evidenced by the way in which he squanders that pension putting himself at the mercy of Eve’s wishes. One monthly check is used to buy lobster and champagne and a dozen pairs of silk stockings for Hannah. He hints at having only a short time to live but Hannah never really comes to grips with his tuberculosis until his condition worsens and becomes very apparent. The couple set off to live at various places near Nice staying mostly just ahead of bill collectors and then later driven from pillar to post as his TB becomes obvious to inn keepers and landlords who are very aware of the infectious nature of the disease.
It is a very unequal relationship. Martin stays connected to Eve but is enraged to find that Hannah still feels she must help her Dilly deal with their separation. He describes Hannah as just existing “on the brink of what I am.” What Boyle paints is an intense picture of why such a relationship happens, the intensity of Hannah’s physical passion for Martin which ignites from just looking at him, “his hair as tender as a child”, is just one of the references Hannah makes to his physical beauty. From time to time, when he is sick or out of money, Martin suggests she should leave him and go back to her husband so that Eve will take him back, but then he accuses her of being “as hard as flint” for being willing to let him go back to Eve.
Boyle’s prose is exquisite, particularly her descriptions of nature. Hannah’s moments of freedom and self-realization really only occur when she walks into the country with her dogs.
“The soil was burdened and rich with the rains and the warmth of the summer that was dying; the cattails weighted the tubes of the grasses, the lavender was at its ripest, and the patches under the fir trees were richest loam”.
Boyle lived in the South of France herself and mixed with the literary leaders of the modernist movement of the 20s, the likes of Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes and James Joyce. This makes the section of the book where they dine with a prolific best-selling writer particularly interesting. Duke, who has made a small fortune tailoring his writing to the popular book-buying market, pours scorn on poets such as Martin who, Duke feels, won’t acknowledge that the only reason to write is money, “there is not any idea going that will put four walls around you”. Martin counters that “poetry is where the search for literature begins.
The book is pretty autobiographical according to Doris Grumbach whose excellent afterward was written for my Virago edition published in 1985. You don’t need to know that to enjoy the book, but Grumbach does provide some excellent background to the time and environment that was the genesis of the book.

[Troy Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wonder why Kay Boyle is not more well known. This is a great book.