Thirty Stories

by Kay Boyle

“Miss Boyle is a story teller, a superb one; by and large the best in this country and one of the best now living,” the Saturday Review wrote when Thirty Stories was first published. Selected from over one hundred stories written during twenty years, this volume includes many of her celebrated titles, masterpieces each in their separate ways, “Wedding Day,” “Black Boy,” “The White Horses of Vienna,” “Count Lothar’s Heart,” “The Loneliest Man in the U.S. Army,” for instance. Since Kay Boyle spent the years 1922 to 1941 in Europe, many of her characters and settings are European. But a deep love of nature, of mountains and water and forests make these settings universal, while the effect of nature––a flight of birds, for instance––on her characters suggests classic Japanese literature. The intensity with which she enters into these characters, their quandaries, their limitations, their resilience in the face of tragedy, makes memorable and honestly felt experience. As David Daiches has written, “We can point to a story and say, ’There! Within these bounds is contained a true vision of some aspect of the human situation.’” The San Francisco Chronicle said, in reviewing Thirty Stories, “They have none of the earmarks of feminine fiction; they never strive for the neat ending; and the emotion always has a genuine ring, although often it is an emotion that you cannot name, that you can only feel… These stories show how Kay Boyle has developed her ’art of the short story.’ She has not been afraid of the untrodden path or of unfamiliar horizons.”

362 pages, paperback

First published January 1, 1957

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

[lavendread · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of short stories Boyle wrote during different periods of her life. They’re listed chronologically so you can see her skillset as a writer and her ideas expand over time. Many ideas here can be revisited in her full novels; all of them have an intensity in the emotionality of the characters and or their ideologies or wants are in conflict with real world issues. War is a huge theme in her work and how people are altered by it for better or worse, and the ways in which environments transform themselves under political pressure. Great collection from an underrated writer.

[Jeff Hobbs]

Read so far:

from The Wedding Day and Other Stories (1930):
Episode in the life of an ancestor --
*Wedding day --

from The First Lover and Other Stories (1933):
Rest cure --2
Kroy Wen --
Black boy --2
Friend of the family --2
***
The first lover --2

from The White Horses of Vienna (1935):
White as snow --
Keep your pity --
Natives don't cry --2
Maiden, maiden --
The white horses of Vienna --2
Count Lothar's heart --1
Major Alshuster --
Your body is a jewel box --2
***
Astronomer's wife --3
*Convalescence --

Uncollected until Thirty Stories (1946):
How Bridie's girl was won--
The herring piece --
Major engagement in Paris --
Effigy of war --3
Diplomat's wife --
*Men --
They weren't going to die--2
Defeat --2
Let there be honour --
This they took with them --
Their name is Macaroni --2
Hilaire and the maréchal pétard --
The canals of Mars --2
The loneliest man in the U.S. Army --
Winter night--3

***
Anschluss --
Frenchman's ship --3
The lost --4
Nothing ever breaks except the heart --
Poor Monsieur Panalitus --
St. Stephen's Green --
Seven say you can hear corn grow --1
Summer evening --2
The wild horses --