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My Next Bride
"I am ready to take each act of my life as a stone in my hands, never to be denied,and my words will be like stones to myself, hard and irrevocable."
Victoria John, a young American with Puritanism in her blood, arrives in Paris in 1933 and takes a room in a Neuilly lodging-house. Here are two Russian women, starving and shivering over the remnants of their gentility who advise her to leave and tell her of Sorrel the visionary in his steel-grey tunic. Drawn into his fantastic artists' community where she sells handwoven scarves, she witnesses the dirt and conniving behind the scenes. Victoria is looking for truth but stumbles instead into drunkenness and emotional chaos when she meets the erratic artist, Anthony Lister. First published in 1934, this autobiographical novel which lays bare one woman's path to self-discovery, is a poetic and imaginative achievement.
Victoria John, a young American with Puritanism in her blood, arrives in Paris in 1933 and takes a room in a Neuilly lodging-house. Here are two Russian women, starving and shivering over the remnants of their gentility who advise her to leave and tell her of Sorrel the visionary in his steel-grey tunic. Drawn into his fantastic artists' community where she sells handwoven scarves, she witnesses the dirt and conniving behind the scenes. Victoria is looking for truth but stumbles instead into drunkenness and emotional chaos when she meets the erratic artist, Anthony Lister. First published in 1934, this autobiographical novel which lays bare one woman's path to self-discovery, is a poetic and imaginative achievement.
330 pages, Paperback
First published October 7, 1934
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About the author
Kay Boyle
98 books42 followersKay 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,
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,
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August 23, 2020When I began this third Boyle novel, the setting and story were so unusual that I thought, Here at last is some genuine creative fiction from Kay Boyle. The main character is called Victoria, and while she is yet another young American girl in France like the main characters of the other two books I'd read (who were both stand-ins for Boyle herself, and their stories autobiographical), this Victoria character seemed cut from a different cloth to the others. She had such a fresh way of thinking and looking at the world that I thought she was the most marvellous invention. As her story developed, she became involved in a back-to-nature colony run by an American artist/dancer called Sorrel. Here was another very original and intriguing character it seemed, but very soon, I realised he was typical of people who run such alternative colonies: exploitative and selfish. I liked that he was recognised as such but I found the parts of the narrative dealing with his colony slow and boring. I might have given up on the book at that point except for a new character who walked into the colony shop where Victoria worked selling home-made tunics and sandals. The new character was an American from a banking family who aspires to be a poet and artist. He was called Antony and he had very interesting ways of expressing himself. What an original creation he is, I thought—until he wore me out a bit too. Antony's wife turns up as well, and she was also interesting but at that point the story more or less petered out.
How does Boyle do it, I wondered? How does she invent such a range of potentially interesting characters? Pity she can't sustain them better.
There was an afterword which I almost didn't bother reading—but fortunately I did. It revealed that this book is just as autobiographical as the other two I'd read! After she'd left her French husband, who was the subject of Plagued by the Nightingale, and after she'd been living with poet Ernest Walsh who was the subject of Year Before Last, Kay Boyle spent time in a colony in Paris run by an American dancer called Raymond Duncan, brother of Isadora Duncan. Duncan forced the members of the colony, and their children, to wear nothing but tunics and sandals they'd made themselves, winter and summer, and to survive on goat's milk and vegetables, while he himself lead a cushier life. And like her alter ego, Victoria, while working at the colony's shop, Kay Boyle met a poet/artist. His name was Harry Crosbie and his life story fits the circumstances of the character called Antony very closely. Boyle dedicated this book to Crosbie's wife Caresse, incidentally, but according to the afterword, Antony's wife in the story was not modeled on Caresse Crosbie but on Peggy Guggenheim. Peggy Guggenheim was then married to the French poet and artist Laurence Vail, who may also be part of the inspiration for the Antony character. Vail left Guggenheim for Kay Boyle whom he married after she escaped the Duncan colony. They had several children together before they too split up. Peggy Guggenheim moved on too. She married the artist Max Ernst.
This book could as easily have been called 'My Next Groom' as 'My Next Bride'.
……….………………………………………
I don't think I'll read any more of Kay Boyle's 'fiction' but I might try the memoir she wrote with Robert McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together, 1920-1930. I kind of wish I'd started with that as what's most interesting about her life is the people she met and the zeitgeist she tapped into. The novels give only a blurry and oblique picture of all that, and although I enjoyed bits of all of them, I didn't find any of the three super memorable.
Well, perhaps Year Before Last will stay with me longest...
How does Boyle do it, I wondered? How does she invent such a range of potentially interesting characters? Pity she can't sustain them better.
There was an afterword which I almost didn't bother reading—but fortunately I did. It revealed that this book is just as autobiographical as the other two I'd read! After she'd left her French husband, who was the subject of Plagued by the Nightingale, and after she'd been living with poet Ernest Walsh who was the subject of Year Before Last, Kay Boyle spent time in a colony in Paris run by an American dancer called Raymond Duncan, brother of Isadora Duncan. Duncan forced the members of the colony, and their children, to wear nothing but tunics and sandals they'd made themselves, winter and summer, and to survive on goat's milk and vegetables, while he himself lead a cushier life. And like her alter ego, Victoria, while working at the colony's shop, Kay Boyle met a poet/artist. His name was Harry Crosbie and his life story fits the circumstances of the character called Antony very closely. Boyle dedicated this book to Crosbie's wife Caresse, incidentally, but according to the afterword, Antony's wife in the story was not modeled on Caresse Crosbie but on Peggy Guggenheim. Peggy Guggenheim was then married to the French poet and artist Laurence Vail, who may also be part of the inspiration for the Antony character. Vail left Guggenheim for Kay Boyle whom he married after she escaped the Duncan colony. They had several children together before they too split up. Peggy Guggenheim moved on too. She married the artist Max Ernst.
This book could as easily have been called 'My Next Groom' as 'My Next Bride'.
……….………………………………………
I don't think I'll read any more of Kay Boyle's 'fiction' but I might try the memoir she wrote with Robert McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together, 1920-1930. I kind of wish I'd started with that as what's most interesting about her life is the people she met and the zeitgeist she tapped into. The novels give only a blurry and oblique picture of all that, and although I enjoyed bits of all of them, I didn't find any of the three super memorable.
Well, perhaps Year Before Last will stay with me longest...
April 9, 2021
In 1920s’ Paris, American novelist and poet Kay Boyle was part of a circle that included Djuna Barnes, Nancy Cunard, Sylvia Beach and Gertrude Stein yet Boyle remains relatively obscure, although her modernist writing has a growing cult following spurred on by an increasing body of academic explorations of her work. Perhaps part of her obscurity relates to the high price she paid for her political activism, targeted first under McCarthy and afterwards because of her involvement in protest movements. My Next Bride, like other early pieces, is semi-autobiographical drawing on Boyle’s links to a would-be utopian commune in the late 1920s. Located on the outskirts of Paris it was presided over by Raymond Duncan, a dancer and pseudo-philosopher – brother of the more famous Isadora. For a number of people Duncan was clearly a charismatic figure but Boyle was quickly disillusioned with his group’s brand of alternative lifestyle.
Published in 1934, My Next Bride’s a Künstlerroman of sorts, centred on a naïve, young American, Victoria John who gradually achieves independence and a state of self-awareness. In flight from a traumatic past, Victoria arrives in France with vague notions of becoming an artist. She washes up in a crumbling, inhospitable boarding-house where she meets two impoverished Russian sisters, still dreaming of their glamourous existence before the Russian Revolution. Through them she takes on work for self-styled, visionary Sorrel, selling his printed scarves and robes. Sorrel’s a stand-in for Duncan – although his gatherings also reminded me of a down-at-heel Gurdjieff and the community where Katherine Mansfield spent so much time. Sorrel’s acolytes adopt special diets, wear flowing robes, follow his elaborate dance routines and lap up his convoluted lectures on how best to live. And it’s through her experiences, and the people she meets, working with Sorrel that Victoria unexpectedly gains a belated education in the terrible things that can lurk behind surface appearances and how the world around her really works.
Boyle’s narrative unfolds at a leisurely pace, slightly fractured and fragmentary, it’s filled with abrupt shifts in perspective, and enigmatic asides. There are some marvellous, and moving, passages but Boyle’s style’s not entirely coherent, with a tendency to falter and meander. Her story overall’s quite uneven, I was completely caught up at some points but found it hard to concentrate at others. But I was impressed by the way Boyle’s scenarios and imagery repeatedly invoked the spectre and impact of the Great Depression; and I particularly enjoyed the subplot focused on the Russian siblings Miss Grusha and Miss Fira who are vivid, sympathetic creations.
Published in 1934, My Next Bride’s a Künstlerroman of sorts, centred on a naïve, young American, Victoria John who gradually achieves independence and a state of self-awareness. In flight from a traumatic past, Victoria arrives in France with vague notions of becoming an artist. She washes up in a crumbling, inhospitable boarding-house where she meets two impoverished Russian sisters, still dreaming of their glamourous existence before the Russian Revolution. Through them she takes on work for self-styled, visionary Sorrel, selling his printed scarves and robes. Sorrel’s a stand-in for Duncan – although his gatherings also reminded me of a down-at-heel Gurdjieff and the community where Katherine Mansfield spent so much time. Sorrel’s acolytes adopt special diets, wear flowing robes, follow his elaborate dance routines and lap up his convoluted lectures on how best to live. And it’s through her experiences, and the people she meets, working with Sorrel that Victoria unexpectedly gains a belated education in the terrible things that can lurk behind surface appearances and how the world around her really works.
Boyle’s narrative unfolds at a leisurely pace, slightly fractured and fragmentary, it’s filled with abrupt shifts in perspective, and enigmatic asides. There are some marvellous, and moving, passages but Boyle’s style’s not entirely coherent, with a tendency to falter and meander. Her story overall’s quite uneven, I was completely caught up at some points but found it hard to concentrate at others. But I was impressed by the way Boyle’s scenarios and imagery repeatedly invoked the spectre and impact of the Great Depression; and I particularly enjoyed the subplot focused on the Russian siblings Miss Grusha and Miss Fira who are vivid, sympathetic creations.
June 22, 2023
When I think of this book, really what I see is the image of two women lying in bed together. And yes, OK, this is an image that sometimes pops into my head of its own accord, but here it's very much tied to the novel, which, despite being mainly concerned with two men, is in the end fundamentally about the fulfilment of female relationships.
Near the start of My Next Bride, its heroine, Victoria, alone in '20s Paris in a dingy boarding-house and missing North America, finds herself remembering the nights she spent with a girlfriend years ago. ‘Don't fall for the skirts, Victoria,’ the friend had said as they embraced, ‘not till you've given the boys a trial. You'll come to it anyway in the end. The best of us do.’
Three hundred pages later, as though fulfilling a prophecy, the book comes round to another image of Victoria lying in bed with a woman: ‘she put her arm around Victoria's neck and they went to sleep abruptly and still smiling, as if some kind of peace had been suddenly and at the same instant given to their hearts.’
Women together, finding some kind of fulfilment – this is the book's abiding theme, though it takes Victoria a long time to get to this place, having first (as her long-distant friend said) ‘given the boys a trial’.
The boys in this case are an unprepossessing lot. First there is Sorrel, who runs an artists' commune in Neuilly; he wants to appear as a devotee of the simple life, but is as eager to get his hand on some money as anyone else. And then there's Antony Lister, a rich playboy with an understanding wife and a somewhat unbalanced mind.
All this is straight from Kay Boyle's life. Sorrel is a portrait of Raymond Duncan, brother of the famous dancer Isadora, at whose Neuilly commune Boyle did indeed work for several months. The Listers are even more intriguing. The Afterword to this Virago edition says they are based on Laurence Vail and Peggy Guggenheim, but I think this is misleading at best. There might be some of the Vails in there, but the main model is clearly Harry Crosby and his wife Caresse, the wealthy socialites whose Black Sun Press published Boyle's early books. Our introduction to Antony Lister is pure Crosby:
It was Caresse, not Peggy Guggenheim, who gave Boyle five thousand francs to pay for an abortion, just as ‘Fontana Lister’ does for Victoria in this novel. And it was Harry Crosby's spectacular death by suicide which precipitated the two of them into a lifelong friendship, the start of which is pointed to at the end of My Next Bride. (The book is also dedicated to Caresse.)
Having recently read Geoffrey Wolff's biography of Crosby, which left me desperately wanting more information about Caresse, the fictionalised details in here were a delight. Though Fontana comes in only at the end, her appearance is climactic; the scenes between ‘Victoria’ and ‘Fontana’ reminded me weirdly of the scenes between Dorothea and Rosamond at the end of Middlemarch – with the same sense of being given a view on conversations that male novelists just can't provide, or at least not usually so convincingly.
Whether this novel still works as well if you aren't reading it as a roman à clef, I'm not sure. Boyle writes here in a brittle, modernist style, shifting viewpoints without warning and sometimes keeping an allusive distance from the action. But there are moments of sheer beauty, too:
By the time I reached the end, I realised I was really enjoying it. You could read it as a political novel in some ways, or perhaps as a Künstlerroman exploring Victoria's artistic development. But I think of Kay Boyle and Caresse Crosby's friendship, and I just see Victoria and Fontana in that bed…‘The smell of her perfume when she stirred was like a garden suddenly flowering in the dark.’
Near the start of My Next Bride, its heroine, Victoria, alone in '20s Paris in a dingy boarding-house and missing North America, finds herself remembering the nights she spent with a girlfriend years ago. ‘Don't fall for the skirts, Victoria,’ the friend had said as they embraced, ‘not till you've given the boys a trial. You'll come to it anyway in the end. The best of us do.’
Three hundred pages later, as though fulfilling a prophecy, the book comes round to another image of Victoria lying in bed with a woman: ‘she put her arm around Victoria's neck and they went to sleep abruptly and still smiling, as if some kind of peace had been suddenly and at the same instant given to their hearts.’
Women together, finding some kind of fulfilment – this is the book's abiding theme, though it takes Victoria a long time to get to this place, having first (as her long-distant friend said) ‘given the boys a trial’.
The boys in this case are an unprepossessing lot. First there is Sorrel, who runs an artists' commune in Neuilly; he wants to appear as a devotee of the simple life, but is as eager to get his hand on some money as anyone else. And then there's Antony Lister, a rich playboy with an understanding wife and a somewhat unbalanced mind.
All this is straight from Kay Boyle's life. Sorrel is a portrait of Raymond Duncan, brother of the famous dancer Isadora, at whose Neuilly commune Boyle did indeed work for several months. The Listers are even more intriguing. The Afterword to this Virago edition says they are based on Laurence Vail and Peggy Guggenheim, but I think this is misleading at best. There might be some of the Vails in there, but the main model is clearly Harry Crosby and his wife Caresse, the wealthy socialites whose Black Sun Press published Boyle's early books. Our introduction to Antony Lister is pure Crosby:
“It's the first time I've walked up this side of the street. I always take the other. I believe in embassies, and always in the emissary of the soul. The patterns on these walls take the sight right out of the eye like an operation. My name's Antony,” he said, his eyes escaping. “I believe in bone.”
It was Caresse, not Peggy Guggenheim, who gave Boyle five thousand francs to pay for an abortion, just as ‘Fontana Lister’ does for Victoria in this novel. And it was Harry Crosby's spectacular death by suicide which precipitated the two of them into a lifelong friendship, the start of which is pointed to at the end of My Next Bride. (The book is also dedicated to Caresse.)
Having recently read Geoffrey Wolff's biography of Crosby, which left me desperately wanting more information about Caresse, the fictionalised details in here were a delight. Though Fontana comes in only at the end, her appearance is climactic; the scenes between ‘Victoria’ and ‘Fontana’ reminded me weirdly of the scenes between Dorothea and Rosamond at the end of Middlemarch – with the same sense of being given a view on conversations that male novelists just can't provide, or at least not usually so convincingly.
Whether this novel still works as well if you aren't reading it as a roman à clef, I'm not sure. Boyle writes here in a brittle, modernist style, shifting viewpoints without warning and sometimes keeping an allusive distance from the action. But there are moments of sheer beauty, too:
The whistles of the trains mourned slowly through the night, separately widowed over the wide plains.
By the time I reached the end, I realised I was really enjoying it. You could read it as a political novel in some ways, or perhaps as a Künstlerroman exploring Victoria's artistic development. But I think of Kay Boyle and Caresse Crosby's friendship, and I just see Victoria and Fontana in that bed…‘The smell of her perfume when she stirred was like a garden suddenly flowering in the dark.’
October 2, 2015
Clearly influenced by Evelyn Scott's Escapade (something Kay indicates herself in her letters during the period), this extraordinary Künstlerroman does, I think, surpass its predecessor. Kay's writing has a feverish, poetic, quality to it at times here, accurately reflecting the bewildering and overpowering flood of sexuality, sex, art and all the rest that has such a devastating yet transformative effect on our puritanical heroine.
The autobiographical origins of the novel come from Boyle's experiences in Raymond Duncan's Neuilly colony and, as with her previous two novels, gains much of its power from the truth of the experiences she is describing.
This is a book about material inequality, about gender dynamics and patriarchal power, about female friendships and love affairs, about sexual freedom and its consequences, about cults and lies and art and much else.
Contemporary male critics, of course, complained that it was "about nothing". Kirkus, for example, (whom I am growing to dislike with greater and greater intensity), says:
"Kay Boyle has a certain brittle originality both of conception and execution that makes one wish she could orientate herself in her material somewhat more convincingly. Here's another novel that leaves one with a sense of confusion and dissatisfaction and futility. The story of an American girl who comes to Paris to get a job, of her work in the fantastic Sorrel studio (reminiscent of Sanger's Circus and similar artistic anomalies), of her sordid lodgings from which she helps two tragic little Russian women to escape, of her love affair with a rich and undisciplined young American, of the tragic end. And so what?"
So what indeed....
And here, just because he is such a creep, is a picture of Duncan himself, dressed in full pseudo-greek regalia:
The autobiographical origins of the novel come from Boyle's experiences in Raymond Duncan's Neuilly colony and, as with her previous two novels, gains much of its power from the truth of the experiences she is describing.
This is a book about material inequality, about gender dynamics and patriarchal power, about female friendships and love affairs, about sexual freedom and its consequences, about cults and lies and art and much else.
Contemporary male critics, of course, complained that it was "about nothing". Kirkus, for example, (whom I am growing to dislike with greater and greater intensity), says:
"Kay Boyle has a certain brittle originality both of conception and execution that makes one wish she could orientate herself in her material somewhat more convincingly. Here's another novel that leaves one with a sense of confusion and dissatisfaction and futility. The story of an American girl who comes to Paris to get a job, of her work in the fantastic Sorrel studio (reminiscent of Sanger's Circus and similar artistic anomalies), of her sordid lodgings from which she helps two tragic little Russian women to escape, of her love affair with a rich and undisciplined young American, of the tragic end. And so what?"
So what indeed....
And here, just because he is such a creep, is a picture of Duncan himself, dressed in full pseudo-greek regalia:
April 12, 2025
A novel drawn from Boyle’s own time in Raymond Duncan’s (sister of tragic terpsichore Isadora) artists’ colony, this is a vivid, engrossing exploration of a bizarre personality cult told in prose that has moments of mellifluous transcendence that left me stunned. The depiction of the two Russian noblewomen mooching a life in a seedy boarding house showcases Boyle’s skill for sardonic humour, while the muddled progress of her stand-in Victoria as she struggles to evolve in a realm of vain and duplicitous egomaniacs keeps the story unpredictable and challenging. An excellent introduction (for me) to Boyle’s writing.
April 6, 2020
I wanted to like it more, I just couldn't understand Victoria's choices most of the time. But maybe that was the point? I had this persistent feeling that so much more could have been done with this material, based as it was on Boyle's life, and especially considering the soaring, consciousness-exploring prose of the second chapter. There were wonderful moments throughout when characters continued to speak inside Victoria's head after they had finished speaking aloud, and other moments when characters not present would join the conversation. These techniques really engaged me, and yet, all the way through, I couldn't shake the feeling that something was missing here. Dunno, I think I still need to read more Boyle.
June 8, 2023
Thanks to to its fragmentary, poetic style this is not the easiest read. But it is an important one given that it provides an early (1934), detailed account of an abortion in its final section, based on the personal experience of the author. Unlike earlier depictions of abortion, Boyle's narrative ends with women relying on women, the development of a strong friendship between two female characters: Fontana, the wife of Anthony, and Victoria, the woman needing an abortion who has previously been Anthony's lover (though the pregnancy may be a result of other encounters). Contrast this with TS Eliot's treachorous female 'friendship' in The Waste Land (1922), where he recounts the story of the aborting, working-class woman, Lil. Boyle's book is also interesting for its fictional depiction of Raymond Duncan, brother of Isadora Duncan, and their alternative but fraudulent commune in Neuilly, France.
September 5, 2025
Miss Fira said there was this difference, she said Sorrel was an artist. She said he was a dancer, a painter, a light shining in a window on the other side of the trees. She said Sorrels door is never locked and anyone can go in and sit down at the table. The hungry, the ill, the unhappy, even the poor, poor things. He says that in children there is the endless recreation of the world.
They had gone back, seeking a river's source and from them he had learned the weave of their cloth, and the language, and the rain and the crop dances, and the festivals of fire at night. Knowing that people of identical will take of themselves identical direction, he had no word to mar them, not colony or group or tribe, speaking of their ways until they were opened into the deep throated thunder of woods and wind in the autumn, the copper and yellow seen, and the crab apples, and the winds blaring out a silence as rich as late October clouds.
They've come her looking for God! That's what they come to me for! My dear dear children, I say to them, I don't know anything about the poor old fellow. God, I say to them, why, there's more God in a dish of stewed prunes than in any book that's ever been written about him. But people, you see, my dear girl, they don't want stewed prunes instead of God. They've had stewed prunes ever since they were born, so when they grow up they want something new.
And up from the earth beneath them came the wonderful movement of what was stirring and groaning in it's sleep, of trees toughening from saplings overnight, of waters breaking and rivers rising, of some momentous arousing as if a man who slept curved under the mountains and the plains and the waters were awakening and breaking and brushing the pine-forests and the world's endless spiderwebs from his eyes and preparing to stretch yawning from one continent to another.
There are two kinds of people in the world, there are the rich and the poor, and if you're the poor, you're finished from the first, even though you don't see it right away. You can make a little struggle, very brief, and after awhile you begin to see. You see they've got you down and certainly aren't going to let you up again. It wouldn't be clever at all. Once you got up and were still young enough, you might tell what you had seen down there.
But Antony was saying that the rich and the poor were not the issue; it had to be something better than that or else he might as well be dead. If you had no money at all, you were finished, but also if you had money it was also possible you were finished too. Rich or poor, everyone was stabbing everyone else with hate, stabbing in envy and in terror. It isn't a great deal to ask, that everyone put down their weapons.
3.5 stars. There were some beautiful prose throughout the book, but not quite enough storyline to keep my attention, especially in the last half.
u
They had gone back, seeking a river's source and from them he had learned the weave of their cloth, and the language, and the rain and the crop dances, and the festivals of fire at night. Knowing that people of identical will take of themselves identical direction, he had no word to mar them, not colony or group or tribe, speaking of their ways until they were opened into the deep throated thunder of woods and wind in the autumn, the copper and yellow seen, and the crab apples, and the winds blaring out a silence as rich as late October clouds.
They've come her looking for God! That's what they come to me for! My dear dear children, I say to them, I don't know anything about the poor old fellow. God, I say to them, why, there's more God in a dish of stewed prunes than in any book that's ever been written about him. But people, you see, my dear girl, they don't want stewed prunes instead of God. They've had stewed prunes ever since they were born, so when they grow up they want something new.
And up from the earth beneath them came the wonderful movement of what was stirring and groaning in it's sleep, of trees toughening from saplings overnight, of waters breaking and rivers rising, of some momentous arousing as if a man who slept curved under the mountains and the plains and the waters were awakening and breaking and brushing the pine-forests and the world's endless spiderwebs from his eyes and preparing to stretch yawning from one continent to another.
There are two kinds of people in the world, there are the rich and the poor, and if you're the poor, you're finished from the first, even though you don't see it right away. You can make a little struggle, very brief, and after awhile you begin to see. You see they've got you down and certainly aren't going to let you up again. It wouldn't be clever at all. Once you got up and were still young enough, you might tell what you had seen down there.
But Antony was saying that the rich and the poor were not the issue; it had to be something better than that or else he might as well be dead. If you had no money at all, you were finished, but also if you had money it was also possible you were finished too. Rich or poor, everyone was stabbing everyone else with hate, stabbing in envy and in terror. It isn't a great deal to ask, that everyone put down their weapons.
3.5 stars. There were some beautiful prose throughout the book, but not quite enough storyline to keep my attention, especially in the last half.
u
March 27, 2024
This was interesting, and I’m glad I read it. It was written in 1934, and definitely reflects the times, mainly dealing with the tension between idealism and practical reality.
It’s not always easy to read because it’s written in a very elliptical, poetic style. The protagonist, Victoria, remains enigmatic through most of the novel, as we follow her actions, and occasionally her words, but very rarely her thoughts or emotions. She exists in the moment, like an empty space that’s defined by what’s around it, and that’s how the reader knows her.
She is a young North American woman who has come to Paris, and is looking for work, but it’s not easy to find. She moves into a rundown rooming house, presided over by a stern servant and a blind but very fierce mistress, across the hall from two elderly aristocrats who’ve escaped Russia with only their pride.
These two, Fira and Grusha, introduce her to Sorrel, an American ex-pat who has a little colony of back-to-nature spiritual seekers. Sorrel welcomes everyone, leading them in dances, giving lectures on philosophy, and selling hand-made scarves and tunics in a little shop. But it soon becomes apparent that Sorrel’s colony is no utopia.
There’s some beautiful writing in this novel, some lavish, sensually rich descriptions. There are metaphoric passages that work perfectly. There are some sensitive, mostly spare portraits of characters. There are also places where it’s hard to figure out what Kay Boyle is trying to say.
Boyle writes evocatively about poverty, hunger, and lack. The children of the colony come through very clearly. They’re mostly ignored by the adults, and they feel themselves outcasts, but don’t know how to adapt to the greater society. They play at religion – reading Catholic literature, acting out the Jesus story - in contrast to the self-consciously pagan adults around them.
Antony, the rich, feckless American who crushes out on Victoria, doesn’t come through as well. He speaks volubly, but rarely makes much sense. Is he really this clueless? He seems like the true innocent, an echo of Sorrel, but at the same time, he also does a lot of inadvertent damage while trying to do good. His wife, Fontana, on the other hand, feels very real, even though she is only alluded to for most of the novel. She appears at the end, embodying the sympathy and tenderness that the men here imitate but don’t possess.
Some quotes:
< So the gong struck in keeping with Sorrel’s voice, and he danced with a faint, thin smile on his face, an exaltation which gave him the look of a divine. He might have been a preacher exhorting his people, calling in this way on them because the ways of speech had failed; and so might this place have been the temple to which he drew them, willfully blind to their shortcomings, willfully deaf to what they spoke in sin. There was no impatience in his eye, for he did not seem to see them. >
< “You know, it’s very nice of you to come,” he said. His green and miraculously lashed eyes were level with her her own, looking in some kind of tenderness and helplessness upon her, but remotely, impersonally looking, as if into the memory of what had once happened somewhere else or beyond it into the vision of what might be. >
< There was a young man playing a violin in the street, standing to one side and turning on his feet as he played to keep the blood moving in him and to catch sight of any one who might drop money in the violin-case that stood open by the kerb. His chin with the stubble on it lay close on the deep curved shoulder of varnished wood, and the cries of the strings were thin as lost cats asking, their spines drawn out in grief in their tails with asking, their claws and their fish-bone teeth gone wild with asking that death from starvation and death from weather be given mice or birds, be tacked upon the barn-door in warning, but that they be spared it. This was the thin, the ailing, the ignoble complaint the violin was making in this public place. >
< “It may not be good money,” said Miss Fira, her lips sucked in, her eyes buttoning and unbuttoning in their lids. >
It’s not always easy to read because it’s written in a very elliptical, poetic style. The protagonist, Victoria, remains enigmatic through most of the novel, as we follow her actions, and occasionally her words, but very rarely her thoughts or emotions. She exists in the moment, like an empty space that’s defined by what’s around it, and that’s how the reader knows her.
She is a young North American woman who has come to Paris, and is looking for work, but it’s not easy to find. She moves into a rundown rooming house, presided over by a stern servant and a blind but very fierce mistress, across the hall from two elderly aristocrats who’ve escaped Russia with only their pride.
These two, Fira and Grusha, introduce her to Sorrel, an American ex-pat who has a little colony of back-to-nature spiritual seekers. Sorrel welcomes everyone, leading them in dances, giving lectures on philosophy, and selling hand-made scarves and tunics in a little shop. But it soon becomes apparent that Sorrel’s colony is no utopia.
There’s some beautiful writing in this novel, some lavish, sensually rich descriptions. There are metaphoric passages that work perfectly. There are some sensitive, mostly spare portraits of characters. There are also places where it’s hard to figure out what Kay Boyle is trying to say.
Boyle writes evocatively about poverty, hunger, and lack. The children of the colony come through very clearly. They’re mostly ignored by the adults, and they feel themselves outcasts, but don’t know how to adapt to the greater society. They play at religion – reading Catholic literature, acting out the Jesus story - in contrast to the self-consciously pagan adults around them.
Antony, the rich, feckless American who crushes out on Victoria, doesn’t come through as well. He speaks volubly, but rarely makes much sense. Is he really this clueless? He seems like the true innocent, an echo of Sorrel, but at the same time, he also does a lot of inadvertent damage while trying to do good. His wife, Fontana, on the other hand, feels very real, even though she is only alluded to for most of the novel. She appears at the end, embodying the sympathy and tenderness that the men here imitate but don’t possess.
Some quotes:
< So the gong struck in keeping with Sorrel’s voice, and he danced with a faint, thin smile on his face, an exaltation which gave him the look of a divine. He might have been a preacher exhorting his people, calling in this way on them because the ways of speech had failed; and so might this place have been the temple to which he drew them, willfully blind to their shortcomings, willfully deaf to what they spoke in sin. There was no impatience in his eye, for he did not seem to see them. >
< “You know, it’s very nice of you to come,” he said. His green and miraculously lashed eyes were level with her her own, looking in some kind of tenderness and helplessness upon her, but remotely, impersonally looking, as if into the memory of what had once happened somewhere else or beyond it into the vision of what might be. >
< There was a young man playing a violin in the street, standing to one side and turning on his feet as he played to keep the blood moving in him and to catch sight of any one who might drop money in the violin-case that stood open by the kerb. His chin with the stubble on it lay close on the deep curved shoulder of varnished wood, and the cries of the strings were thin as lost cats asking, their spines drawn out in grief in their tails with asking, their claws and their fish-bone teeth gone wild with asking that death from starvation and death from weather be given mice or birds, be tacked upon the barn-door in warning, but that they be spared it. This was the thin, the ailing, the ignoble complaint the violin was making in this public place. >
< “It may not be good money,” said Miss Fira, her lips sucked in, her eyes buttoning and unbuttoning in their lids. >
December 10, 2024
My thoughts on this perfectly summed up in the afterword of the Virago edition:
My Next Bride is not an eventful novel. Instead of plot, almost to the last page, it substitutes a poetic and impressionistic style, which blurs the edges of character and event and gives us instead a Manet-like portrait of a young American's life in Paris in the early Thirties. Its descriptions are often veiled and hazy, like much of Antony's conversation, determinedly allusive and clouded. At times the novel seems to be awash in a sea of suggestion rather than contained in concrete detail.
Knowing about Boyle's life going into this I was hungry for the details and drama that were withheld and clouded over... I think I would appreciate her short fiction more. There's a really good podcast about Boyle on Lost Ladies of Lit- one of their best episodes imo.
My Next Bride is not an eventful novel. Instead of plot, almost to the last page, it substitutes a poetic and impressionistic style, which blurs the edges of character and event and gives us instead a Manet-like portrait of a young American's life in Paris in the early Thirties. Its descriptions are often veiled and hazy, like much of Antony's conversation, determinedly allusive and clouded. At times the novel seems to be awash in a sea of suggestion rather than contained in concrete detail.
Knowing about Boyle's life going into this I was hungry for the details and drama that were withheld and clouded over... I think I would appreciate her short fiction more. There's a really good podcast about Boyle on Lost Ladies of Lit- one of their best episodes imo.
April 15, 2019
I was keen to read Kay Boyle's "My Next Bride" because of its autobiographical content. Two principal characters, Antony and Fontana, were fashioned after Harry and Caresse Crosby, two American ex-pats members of the "Lost Generation in 1920s Paris. Reading their diaries and autobiography ignited an interest in how their contemporaries viewed them.
Although the characterizations were interesting, I found the plot disjointed resulting in a loss of coherence and momentum. There are bright spots of writing, especially when describing Victoria's insights into the motivations of other characters. These passages made me wonder if later books by the author would be more promising.
Although the characterizations were interesting, I found the plot disjointed resulting in a loss of coherence and momentum. There are bright spots of writing, especially when describing Victoria's insights into the motivations of other characters. These passages made me wonder if later books by the author would be more promising.
abandoned
September 12, 2020After reading about 80 pages, I'm giving up on this. The style is not working for me--it's just scene after scene of people being eccentric with little actual explanation of who they are and what their relationships are. You have to read between the lines to glean any actual information and follow the story. That's a clear stylistic choice, but it's not one I generally enjoy, and it's definitely not one I have the mental wherewithal to deal with right now.
May 19, 2011
Recommended by Alison O. (who gave me my first Persephone book). From Doris Grumbach’s afterword: “My Next Bride is not an eventful novel. Instead of plot ... it substitutes a poetic and impressionistic style, which blurs the edges of character and event and gives us instead a Manet-like portrait of a young American’s life in Paris in the early Thirties.” In fact, I was thinking of Picasso as I read it—the prose certainly has a poetic but almost fractured quality, as if various bits of writing had been spliced together, more like a collage or cubist work. And in fact, the author drops the names Brancusi, Duchamp, and Gertrude Stein near the beginning of the second chapter, perhaps signaling the formal, abstract, nonliteral quality of this work.
The story begins thus:
“Victoria was in Neuilly ... watching for trees in the bare gardens. When she saw the biggest ones, and the sign at the gate, and the old house standing back on the drive, she put the bags down and pulled the bell at will. The two Russian women heard it ring in the house and they laid down their sewing. The air out of the city was clean and sharp and they could see her very well through the machine-fashioned mesh of the curtains at the window.
... the girl’s face was hanging sideways from the weight of the two bags in her hands. They would remember this, and for a long time after they would not take the mud from their shoes at the door outside but bring it in with them. The girl was passing close to the window: they could see her head riding past the glass.”
The characters often speak in a very stylized, associative way—Antony Lister most particularly. A random example:
“ ‘I knew gypsies once,’ said Antony. ‘They have a good name for us, but it rankles day and night in me. They call us “trees” because we stand still, we can’t move, we’re caught rooted. Rooted in what? In rugs, books, walls, floors, possessions that cannot follow after. God, how I hated trees this afternoon,’ he said. ‘I drove faster to get away from them than I ever went towards them. They gave nothing, they made no promises, they kept their peace mean and hard inside them like all the people that drive me to despair. What I wanted for you I had to get out of a hot-house where the sun had been courted week after week by glass and the soil had been wooed by cowflops and blossomed. That’s how jonquils grow this time of year, not for love,’ he said, ‘but for money. It is not bitterness but hope that has taught me spring can be had at any time of year. I have been too many times betrayed by the virtues I have strained my eyes blind for in reality and not yet perceived.’ ” (p. 136-137)
I had to read it slowly, like poetry.
I loved the impoverished elderly Russian sisters, Miss Fira and Miss Grusha, who
room in the same house with Victoria John, the main character, and was glad they get away to a better life in Monte Carlo in the end. Here they are in an early scene:
“At the turn in the stairs [the servant] came in sight, and when she saw them she cried down: ‘Miss Fira, Miss Grusha, what are you doing?’
The heads of the Russian women reared up like puppets pulled; their hands fell into their skirts at their sides, and their rings clicked aloud as they struck one against the other in the cold.
‘Go back into your room,’ said the servant. ... The two Russian women turned and went, side by side and their skirts following behind, their heads borne high, identically unfaltering into the vast desolation of their room and closed the door against the dark.” (p. 18)
The story begins thus:
“Victoria was in Neuilly ... watching for trees in the bare gardens. When she saw the biggest ones, and the sign at the gate, and the old house standing back on the drive, she put the bags down and pulled the bell at will. The two Russian women heard it ring in the house and they laid down their sewing. The air out of the city was clean and sharp and they could see her very well through the machine-fashioned mesh of the curtains at the window.
... the girl’s face was hanging sideways from the weight of the two bags in her hands. They would remember this, and for a long time after they would not take the mud from their shoes at the door outside but bring it in with them. The girl was passing close to the window: they could see her head riding past the glass.”
The characters often speak in a very stylized, associative way—Antony Lister most particularly. A random example:
“ ‘I knew gypsies once,’ said Antony. ‘They have a good name for us, but it rankles day and night in me. They call us “trees” because we stand still, we can’t move, we’re caught rooted. Rooted in what? In rugs, books, walls, floors, possessions that cannot follow after. God, how I hated trees this afternoon,’ he said. ‘I drove faster to get away from them than I ever went towards them. They gave nothing, they made no promises, they kept their peace mean and hard inside them like all the people that drive me to despair. What I wanted for you I had to get out of a hot-house where the sun had been courted week after week by glass and the soil had been wooed by cowflops and blossomed. That’s how jonquils grow this time of year, not for love,’ he said, ‘but for money. It is not bitterness but hope that has taught me spring can be had at any time of year. I have been too many times betrayed by the virtues I have strained my eyes blind for in reality and not yet perceived.’ ” (p. 136-137)
I had to read it slowly, like poetry.
I loved the impoverished elderly Russian sisters, Miss Fira and Miss Grusha, who
room in the same house with Victoria John, the main character, and was glad they get away to a better life in Monte Carlo in the end. Here they are in an early scene:
“At the turn in the stairs [the servant] came in sight, and when she saw them she cried down: ‘Miss Fira, Miss Grusha, what are you doing?’
The heads of the Russian women reared up like puppets pulled; their hands fell into their skirts at their sides, and their rings clicked aloud as they struck one against the other in the cold.
‘Go back into your room,’ said the servant. ... The two Russian women turned and went, side by side and their skirts following behind, their heads borne high, identically unfaltering into the vast desolation of their room and closed the door against the dark.” (p. 18)
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