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My students and I just read this book in my Forgotten Books class. They weren’t thrilled by it, but I thought it was fascinating, a peek into another “lost generation” that the myth of Paris in the 20s has obscured. Their biggest complaint (and mine) is that McAlmon’s chapters are a lot of name-dropping and bar-hopping without much introspection. Boyle’s chapters, on the other hand, are a deep dive into who she was during her turbulent twenties, which also just happened to be the twenties in Paris and elsewhere in France. In 1968, Boyle grafted her chapters onto McAlmon’s (with quite a bit of editing), which had been originally published in 1938. This unusual mish-mash has caused a lot of head-scratching (and some trash talking as well along the lines of “who did she think she was”?). Here is my summation post for my online students about what I think it important to take away from this unusual and intriguing book.

This book is an experiment. And here is how it came about, from a letter Boyle wrote in 1967 while she was working on the book.

Does this quote help to explain a bit, the “Why?” that so many of you felt? So it wasn’t just getting his work republished, but also trying to restore it to its original power (which Boyle, interestingly, equates with masculinity.) So, some you ask, what’s the point? Good question—what was the point of McAlmon’s book in the first place? People often wrote their memoirs as a way to shed light on the times they had lived through and the people they had known—famous people that the reader would be interested in. In the 1930s, many of these numerous names were well known to readers. They were mostly writers and artists of some renown. And there was already an insatiable interest in the Paris expat scene of the 1920s—look at the way RMA describes it, as if it was some kind of hallowed time: “Enough of afterwar recklessness and enough of dawning hopefulness were about for dissipations to have a mass velocity. This momentum, like great periods in art or history, occurs seldom, and not even in everyone’s lifetime” (35). These are his memories of a time and place that is already becoming mythologized.

By the time Boyle took on the project in the 60s, the Lost Generation had practically become its own cottage industry, producing oodles of memoirs by people who were there as well as academic articles and biographies. Boyle resented that so much of this literature—particularly Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (1964)—left McAlmon out of the picture, when to her mind he was the lynchpin, the first publisher for many of them, and a writer who had a tremendous influence that was already forgotten. She writes in the opening, “A Note on McAlmon”: “It is my hope that the presentation will do more than provide a deeply sympathetic portrait of a writer and publisher who deserves to be remembered for his unique qualities, but that it will as well help to accord Robert McAlmon his rightful and outstanding place in the history of the literary revolution of the early nineteen-twenties. . . It was McAlmon who, in liberating himself of genteel language and though, spoke for his generation in a voice that echoes, unacknowledged, in the prose of Hemingway and that of other writers of that time” (xi).

            As I mentioned last week, Hemingway’s style loomed large—it influenced generations of writers. Yet, as Boyle says here, McAlmon deserves some credit as well. In other words, she was trying to resurrect a forgotten writer in a book that has since become forgotten itself. Memoirs of the 1920s in Paris are still popular, not least A Moveable Feast, which is more or less required reading for every American with any interest in literature who goes to Paris. Have any of you seen Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris? That film perfectly expresses the desire that so many still have to be a fly on the wall in the Paris of those days. But our perception of that time is that Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Joyce, and maybe Picasso thrown in for good measure, where the only ones there—or the only ones worth knowing about. When I visited Paris last summer and went to Shakespeare and Company (which isn’t the original one, by the way, but no one seems to care), it was packed with people milling around hoping that a little bit of the aura of that era would rub off on them. And there was a whole floor-to-ceiling bookcase with a large sign on it that read “The Lost Generation.” And whose books do you think you might find there? Only three authors: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Joyce. I was amazed—and disgusted! No Djuna Barnes, no Janet Flanner, no Kay Boyle, no Gertrude Stein even. As McAlmon’s reminiscences remind us, there were a hell of a lot more than three writers there at the time, hanging out in the cafes and hopping from bar to bar all night. In fact, according to his count, he tells us, there were 250 of writers and artists there (163).

            So why did Boyle do this strange thing of inserting her story into McAlmon’s? She wanted to get his memoir republished, but she couldn’t interest a publisher until her editor at Doubleday suggested that she write her memoirs of that time as well and publish the two together. Boyle was repeatedly asked to write her memoirs, and she detested the idea, not wanting to focus so much on herself.. She hated the self-aggrandizing of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, and the fact that that book came out only 4 years before Being Geniuses Together is surely not an accident. This book is, in some ways, a response to his, focusing as it does so much on the scene and the many interesting people who were a part of it, but for the publisher it was certainly also an attempt to capitalize on that book’s popularity. As she explains in the afterword, she could only imagine writing an autobiography if it was “primarily a defense of those unjustly dealt with in one’s own time” (332). To her, this book was a kind of memorial to McAlmon.

            The problem for many readers (you all included) is that the book reads like two books, which is not surprising, since two very different people and writers wrote it. While Boyle admired McAlmon, she did not share his deep cynicism. See his description of himself, in response to William Carlos Williams’s idea that he had “a genius for life”: “If absolute despair, a capacity for reckless abandon and drink, long and heavy spells of ennui which require bottles of strong drink to cure, and a gregarious but not altogether loving nature is ‘a genius for life’, then I have it” (169). I think it’s clear from his chapters that he didn’t really love anyone or anything and did not have the capacity to truly enjoy life. But Kay Boyle, who did have the capacity to love, clearly loved him (her letters to him that I have read clearly indicate as much). And while this book is her tribute to him, it is also her attempt to explain herself—to him. He seemed to demand of everyone to know who and what they were. She couldn’t answer him at the time, but in this book she tries to explain who and what she was (as unformed—and young—as she was-she was born in 1902) and who and what she became.  (And since some of you wondered why she felt she the one to do this, the two were very close for the rest of his life, although it was a friendship carried on through letters. It’s such a lovely image at the end of the book where he gives her his typewriter, on which she wrote him letters for the next 25+ years.)

            Hers is a remarkable story, and I have to admit I found it infinitely more interesting than his, in part because she is writing to understand and explain herself (a more contemporary idea of the purpose of memoir) rather than to tell anecdotes of others (an older idea of the purpose of memoirs). The jumping back and forth between their perspectives didn’t much trouble me. I was often anxious to get back to her voice, but there were passages of his that captured my attention, particularly his discussion of Hemingway and bullfighting (160-163). If you missed that, go back and read it. It’s very perceptive on Hemingway but also himself and what it meant to be a man then. His discussion of the hand he had in Ulysses is hilarious (117-119). There he also sums up this generation: “The moral and righteous will accuse us of lacking standards and intelligence, but it was neither intelligence nor standards which any of us lacked. It was belief” (119). That’s as succinct and perceptive a definition of the Lost Generation as you will find. They weren’t lost in the way people tended to think they were—in terms of morality, living debauched and loose lives (which, of course, they did). What they had lost was their belief—in what? In everything, McAlmon would say—in God, in the decency of human nature, in their elders, in America, etc. But the one thing that many of them still believed in (although McAlmon may have not) was literature and art, which became a kind of religion for the writers of this era. They certainly were for Boyle. It was literature and art that made life worth living and could redeem humanity. Witness the following passage from Boyle: “I did believe with him [Eugene Jolas] in Freud’s concept of continuous creativity as a tradition that runs always parallel to the materialistic, bourgeois tradition; and I knew then, as I know now, that if Western civilization is not finally to crumble into corporeal dust, it must be the tradition of the artist, the creator, that outweighs the other and prevails” (269). Wow—that is some faith in art. (If you are interested in a more recent take on the importance of creativity in our lives, you must read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, a powerful book that I’m quite sure Boyle would have enjoyed.)

            But Back to Boyle’s life story. As one of you points out, through Boyle and Bryher (McAlmon’s wife) we can see how precarious women’s lives were, even as—or especially as—they left home and hit the road. First of all, they needed a man to do so. That’s why Bryher married McAlmon, and, one could intuit, part of the reason Boyle married Richard Brault. (Katherine Anne Porter also married to escape Texas.) If a woman wanted to leave home, the easiest way to do so was on the arm of her husband. That none of these three marriages lasted is telling. It is also quite interesting to compare the expat experiences of Boyle and McAlmon. While he seems to be infinitely free to traipse around Europe (thanks to his wife’s money, by the way), Boyle is not. Her poverty is a constant factor in her life. So is her gender.

            Boyle gives us a dramatically different view of the expat’s life, particularly when it is a woman’s life. Her life is complicated by having married a Frenchman, having to live with his family, then having to live with him in poverty, unable to earn her own money. Then falling in love with the consummate (and consumptive) poet Ernest Walsh, and getting pregnant with his child. And then becoming a single mother struggling to support herself and her child. Her account of her life in Paris, joining Raymond Duncan’s commune (as a way to get support for herself and child) and drinking and sleeping her way through Paris (in despair over her lost love, Ernest Walsh, and her daughter being carted off with the rest of the colony into the countryside) is just astonishing to me. She describes the shame she felt and how “from now on I could look with passionate compassion on any fallen sisters.” However much the American expats had declared themselves free from the old moralities, the “puritanical conscience” was difficult to free oneself of, especially when one was a woman. The inevitable result was pregnancy, which Boyle tells us about, including the illegal and very dangerous abortion she chose.

This is nothing like the “Midnight in Paris,” “Irish-twilighty” romance of Americans in Paris in the 1920s. To me, this book does much to dispel those myths—through both McAlmon’s blunt accounts and Boyle’s honest (and really quite vulnerable) retelling of her life.

Notice that in the Afterword she explains that shortly after the book ends she married again. It wasn’t for love. It was for security. She married an artist, Laurence Vail, the so-called “King of Bohemia,” who just so happened to have a trust fund. In that way, she was able to stay in Europe (and live in the South of France, Austria, the French Alps, and the southern coast of England) for many years to come. While most of the rest of the Lost Generation went home around the time of the Crash, Boyle and Vail stayed, right up until June 1941 and the war chased them away. Too bad Boyle didn’t keep writing her memoirs. (I guess that’s were I come in . . .)