The Political Experiment of “Pot-Boylers”: Thinking, Feeling, and Romance in Kay Boyle’s Resistance Thriller Avalanche Eric Keenaghan (bio) Introduction: On Selling Out “Kay Boyle has sold the Left Bank down the river” (“Pot-Boyler” 97). So opens a brief, unattributed review in Time Magazine of Avalanche: A Novel of Love and Espionage, a thriller by the American-born modernist Kay Boyle. Serialized, initially, in The Saturday Evening Post, the novel was published in 1944 as a standalone title and became Boyle’s only bestseller. Over a decade earlier, she had been affiliated with the Left Bank avant-garde magazine transition and was a signatory of its “The Revolution of the Word” (1929)—a manifesto asserting experimentalism as an author’s right. Later, she maintained she had endorsed the document, not to support stylistic innovation for its own sake, but to insist on writers’ freedom from market pressures. “The tradition of the artist, the creator,” should “outweigh” and “prevail” over a “materialistic, bourgeois tradition,” Boyle argued (qtd. in McAlmon 269). Despite appearances, then, her commercial turn during the Second World War was not simply a matter of abandoning previously held principles, as the review implies, but was tied to Boyle’s evolution as a committed writer. When Boyle moved from bohemian Paris to politically fraught Austria in 1933, her work began to reflect her strengthening social and political conscience as she witnessed the events leading up to the Anschluss. More [End Page 339] than a marker of aesthetic individualism, her linguistic experimentation in the thirties was a facet of how her fiction thematically addressed sociopolitical issues, by dismantling the usual distinctions between internal psychological and external social realities (Spanier 92–124). Beginning with Avalanche, she extended how her fiction addressed world events by also reassessing literary markets’ usefulness for reaching broader readerships. Having written this genre novel to make Americans conscious of conditions in occupied Europe, Boyle also knowingly appealed to the sensibilities of popular magazines’ acquisitions editors and audiences. Modernist narrative techniques do not just guarantee the author’s creative freedom; they also are the means for generating American readers’ sympathy with an oppressed foreign population. In Avalanche, Boyle’s protagonist is Fenton Ravel, a young half-American, half-French woman who returns to her family’s chalet in the fictional village of Truex, a thinly veiled version of the Alpine resort town Chamonix-Mont Blanc.1 Her family had fled to the United States following the outbreak of the European war in 1939. During the Nazi Occupation, Fenton returns to France three years later as part of a relief effort in Lyon, in the Zone Libre. The novel opens with her train ride from Lyon to the Haute-Savoie region, where she hopes to search out an adolescent crush, a ski guide named Gabriel Bastineau. Fenton refuses to believe reports that he died a year earlier in an avalanche, especially since two other guides’ names, not his, are engraved on the village memorial. Eventually she happens upon Bastineau in the mountains, and learns that he is “the leader of frontier resistance,” a member of the Maquis (Avalanche 164).2 Together, they thwart the machinations of de Vaudois, a Nazi agent who arrives on the same train as Fenton and presents himself as a Swiss businessman intending to retrieve the body of a young compatriot killed in another avalanche. Vaudois’s primary mission, though, is not to retrieve the fallen youth, later revealed also to have been a foreign agent, but to ferret out information about the Maquis and its legendary leader Bastineau. A tale of espionage, adventure, and romance, Avalanche, as the Time review’s title pithily puts it, does seem a “Pot-Boyler,” a “spectacular melodrama, sometimes tautened into Hitchcocky thrills” (97). But it has another dimension. Boyle liberally intersperses free indirect discourse in the generic storyline, giving readers access to Fenton’s thoughts, feelings, and memories. Her protagonist’s impressionistic, often affective, thinking renders her more [End Page 340] than a guide through the thriller’s mystery. As the focalizing agent, she also models the development of a kind of thinking and feeling—mature and selfless—that the author hoped American readers would cultivate to...
Read full abstract
Dec 3, 2019
Tim Schanetzky 
Open Access