Wedding Day and other stories by Kay Boyle (1930)

This collection was first published in Paris in 1929, entitled simply Short Stories, in a limited edition - this is the subsequent trade publication. It was Boyle's first book, and shows her as an American under the influence of modernism in Paris in the twenties. Her strength is in spirit. It is a fighting one. These stories boil (what a superb surname for this writer) and rumble with suppressed anger and biting passions. She has a penchant also for interest in unusual circumstances; the situations here are intriguing and tasty. Some of the stories read reasonably straightforwardly and are marked in their originality and success. Her weakness shows in the others. It is in the ungrammatic and self-indulgent abrupt stops and massive disconnects - the excesses of modernism. One can almost see her, too young and flaming-eyed, at Parisian cafe tables, exclaiming in that all-too-familiar way of the indulged 'rebel'. What it does in terms of meaning is deflate; after the initial "Wow!" of many of these phrases comes the wrinkled forehead of wondering what she actually meant - the "Wow!" is revealed as a superficiality. I'm really looking forward to reading into her long career, especially watching that phenomenal fire and energy become disciplined out of these extravagances.

Commonplace Book

"...She felt herself setting out in thought, reticent and proud, and bitter in a small clean way like a cat selecting its paws. But she wanted to believe that there was something fresher and deeper that came of the mind, some force of which she would demand nothing if it would only be. She wanted to believe in a language that burned black the tongue of the one who spoke and scarred the one who listened. She would demand nothing of it, but to serve it, and be humble before it. She was ready to be humbled, but adequately humbled, not by the hate that beat all night at her pillow, nor by the love that slipped off down her cheeks at night acrid into the corners of her mouth."

from Summer, a piece in Wedding Day and other stories by Kay Boyle