KAY BOYLE
19 February 1902 – 27 December 1992
PORTRAIT
Richard is a gold beach.
Feet of waves run printless across him.
His eyelids are smooth shells
Curved beneath his forehead.
His eyes,
The sharp elbows of his mind
Through his threadbare face.
Rain swirls about legs,
An unruly skirt.
He walks with the rain on his shoulders
Like a loose mantle.
February 1927
As a poet and novelist, Kay Boyle was at the heart of North American letters for more than sixty years, initially finding work as an editor in New York City before moving to France in 1923 with her first husband. It was in France that she wrote her first novel Process, a book that remained unpublished until 2011, and joined the staff of the influential 'new' literary magazine transition (deliberately printed in lower case in the best Modernist tradition). She also found time to marry her second husband, the editor John Walsh, and become a mother five months after his death from tuberculosis in March 1927.
Boyle was an integral part of the expatriate scene in Paris, socializing with Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce and befriending Harry and Caresse Crosby, owners of the Black Sun Press who would go on to publish her first collection of short fiction in 1929. Three years later she married her third husband Laurence Vail with whom she had three more daughters. The 1930s saw the couple move from France to Austria to England while Boyle wrote and published her first two collections of poetry, four collections of short fiction and seven novels, including a 1936 attack on Nazism titled Death of a Man.
In 1943 Boyle divorced Vail and married her fourth husband, the German-born Joseph von Franckenstein, with whom she already had a daughter who had been born the previous year. A son followed soon afterward and at the end of World War Two the family briefly re-located to Germany before moving again, this time to the United States.
Boyle and Franckenstein were early victims of the 1950s anti-Communist witch hunts overseen by Senator Joseph McCarthy, with Boyle being fired from her job as foreign correspondent for The New Yorker and blacklisted by every other major North American magazine while Franckenstein was fired from his job at the US State Department. Although they were eventually exonerated by Franckenstein's former employers, who re-hired him in 1963 shortly before his death, Boyle did not return to the world of freelance journalism, instead accepting a teaching position at San Francisco State College where she remained from 1963 until her retirement in 1979.
Boyle's writing became increasingly political following her persecution by the McCarthyites and would remain so throughout the 1960s as she protested the Vietnam War and visited Cambodia in 1966 as a member of an 'Americans Want To Know' fact-finding group. In her later years she also became a vocal supporter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the human rights organization Amnesty International. In 1980 Boyle received the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in recognition of her achievements as a writer and poet with more than forty publications to her name which by then included eight volumes of poetry, fourteen novels, three collections of short fiction, three children's books and a large number of essays and translations. She died in 1992, at the age of ninety, in a retirement community in the northern Californian city of Mill Valley.
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