African savanna Book

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.