Noted as a stylist and awarded distinguished recognition for her short fiction, Kay Boyle, in her prodigious writing during the 1930s, earned for her fiction and poetry an enthusiastic and discriminating following. Her later reputation, born perhaps from her reporting of post-World War II Europe and nurtured in the caldron of McCarthy's 1950s, encompasses another element of Boyle's concept of what a writer should be, for Kay Boyle is now additionally recognized as an articulate spokesperson for a variety of political and social issues, a voice of society's conscience, and—not coincidentally—a crafter of the essay as well. Rather than being a separate manifestation of Boyle's writing, the political activism of her recent career is a direct development of the concerns she expressed in her earlier poetry and fiction. Her essays, spanning almost sixty years of this century, reveal the connections that unite her work and chronicle the growth of her artistic vision.

Boyle's essays about literature or writing or writers themselves, those written in Europe before World War II as well as those written after her return to the United States in the 1940s, demonstrate convincingly the growth of Boyle's commitment to and development of the full scope of literature as a profound form of communication between writer and audience and culture. She began with the aesthetic conviction that the writer must draw from deep engagement with his or her themes, but as she saw and experienced the turmoil of the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the metaphorical McCarthy-era war, she became convinced that writers must become committed crusaders, speaking for those who have no voice and addressing the injustices of contemporary life. While she earlier called for writers to be deeply concerned, she now wants both deep concern and the courage to articulate for a less sensitive world the truth that must be said.

During the late 1920s as neophyte writer in the ferment of Europe's artistic community, Boyle wrote two significant reviews for transition, one discussing favorably William Carlos Williams' In the American Grain (1925) and the other dealing negatively with Hart Crane's early poetry. The underlying concern she expressed in these essays revolves around the writer's responsibility for accuracy, both that of image or archetype—as she articulated in both essays—and that of language—as she argued more specifically in the Crane essay.

The earlier essay, "In the American Grain" (1927), focuses on Williams' attempt in his book of the same name to redefine the American literary heritage. He returned, Boyle tells us, to the documents, court letters, diaries of the past to recapture an unbiased version of life as it was, without the overlay of "borrowed interpretations" based on a perhaps more attractive false image too often attached to any systematic account of the past available in our century. In the process, Williams discovered an authenticity—"sound and color and smell"—that Boyle finds invigorating. Just as Boyle, Eugene Jolas, and their contemporaries in Paris were decrying the limp and inarticulate poetic diction of the late Victorian and Edwardian ages and calling for a Revolution of the Word to inject vitality and meaning into twentieth-century literary language, so Boyle here rejects with Williams the pallid and lifeless portrayal of the American heritage that was contained within "the national American mind."

Her 1928 review, "Mr. Crane and His Grandmother," provides a conjunction of the issues concerning image and language, for Boyle faults Crane on both counts in his poetry. In an extension of her theme from the Williams essay, Boyle's most telling difficulty with Crane comes from the cavalier portrait he painted of his grandmother in "My Grandmother's Love Letters" (White Buildings, 1926). She resents the "gently pitying laughter" he granted to his grandmother as he led her through "much of what she would not understand," for Boyle finds the woman "a better bet than he." Boyle abhors Crane's patronizingly chauvinistic portrayal, for it denies real acquaintance with the woman herself and illustrates a profound lack of understanding on Crane's part of the reality of her life—by extension that of all women within the American experience. For Boyle, whose own fiction demonstrates a strong autobiographical thread and an unswerving drive toward recreating in fictional context the real and true, Crane's lack of insight indicates a serious flaw in his poetic vision. In contrast, Boyle's earlier review of William Carlos Williams' In the American Grain commends his nod of recognition to the "Pocahuntus tradition" which speaks authentically of the female American experience as the alternate tradition to the "Pilgrim or the Indian polished to bronze."

Yet for Boyle, Crane's writing is ultimately unsuccessful because it lacks vitality and humor; in fact she finds that he uses words to observe truth, finding them useful in "hiding a human fear." She contrasts his poetry with a graphic and visually explicit passage about wild boar hunting from Robert McAlmon and, instead of McAlmon's crisp and clear language, shows Crane's poem to be clouded in essentially incomprehensible images. His meaning is not communicated to his audience because it is not unwrapped in the vital, vigorous language the twentieth century demands.

In attacking Crane's use of highly abstract images, Boyle by definition clarifies her own stance in the matter. In many ways her attack on his imprecise poetic imagery extends the concern she expresses in her review of Williams' work. She craves accuracy of language in much the same sense and with very much the same fervor with which she rejoices in Williams' call for precision in historical image; for her the two demands are, in fact, tightly interwoven. In a later decade, the 1960s, Boyle refers to herself and her earlier compatriots in Europe as resistance fighters in a particular context: "The resistance was against the established English language, and the fight was for the recognition of a New American tongue." In the 1928 Crane essay, she was actively engaged in the validation of this new tongue, particularly in poetic language, and she found Hart Crane's latest book of poetry to be a throwback to a tradition better left behind.

In book reviews produced during the 1930s and very early 1940s, Boyle returns to these two themes, faulting for example Katherine Mansfield for belonging to an older world and Elizabeth Bowen for lacking connection to the real world. Yet she blends her concerns for the writer's precision with a growing demand for passionate commitment to one's themes in the literature one produces. In Mansfield's case, Boyle finds a "lovely, proud, appealing woman" whose best stories and tragic life had kept her immune from a true evaluation of her work. Many of the stories she produced, with only a handful of sparkling exceptions, are shallow and lifeless, "not enough, for what the intent must have been, not love and comprehension for the persecuted young or old, or satire bitter enough for those she would condemn." The passion is lacking, and more sadly, Boyle believed Mansfield knew it. Instead of the issues of life and death, she is confined, according to Boyle, to a world of "irritable and irritating themes." Bowen, too, suffers from a lack of deep commitment, creating a "singularly immature and ungrateful theme." In her earlier books, Bowen's collective protagonist—regardless of name or occupation—seems to Boyle to be too much a victim, too little aware or assertive to engage in meaningful action, too pallid to contain significant insight. Boyle's review contains hope for Bowen's latest effort, Bowen's Court, for in her opinion it represents "a truly heroic effort to connect with reality at last," perhaps indicating the birth of a deeper commitment or perception on Bowen's part.

One writer of this period, the years immediately before World War II, whom Boyle finds to be noteworthy is William Faulkner. Her 1938 review of The Unvanquished. "Tattered Banners," praises his "hot devotion to man's courage" and his passion and "fury to reproduce exactly not the recognizable picture but the unmistakable experience." She finds Faulkner's commitment to his themes to be not just the province of The Unvanquished or any given of his novels, but of his work in its entirety. He is a risk-taker who explores his themes with insight and conviction, making him "the most absorbing writer of our time." In fact, Faulkner matches Boyle's description of the ideal writer, for he combines precision of image and language with that deep commitment to his themes she believes to be so necessary.

These early essays follow standard formats, concentrating on an individual writer and perhaps specific works of that writer. The prose is clear, the point of view definite, and the persona reasoned. As models of their kind, stylistically and philosophically well-honed, these early essays allow Boyle to deal with writers within the context of their own canons. She looks for internal significance and themes, demanding of the writers a dedication to their individual visions and themes. The revolution she supports during this time is an aesthetic and conceptual one: re-visioning language, reconceptualizing reality, making poetry and literature vital in this twentieth-century world. While her own fiction of this period deals with more political subjects, she does not demand that kind of commitment to social change of her contemporaries.

By the mid-1940s, however, Boyle's world had dramatically changed. From her special vantage point as a newly returned exile of sorts, she observed statewide reactions to the cataclysm in Europe. Her 1944 essay, "The Battle of the Sequins," conveys with almost Swiftian satire the outrage she felt at the societal nonchalance she saw: In the midst of a world gone mad in war, with death and dying everywhere one looked, the scuffle of well-dressed customers for a department store's sale-priced pieces of spangle takes on for some more meaning than the real life-and-death battle going on throughout Europe. The essay's persona magnifies the irony involved by reporting in matter-of-fact tones the grabbing and shoving of the women at the sales counter, while recognizing that moving among them are the ghostly faces of dying soldiers and victims of the war, complete with battlefield and jungle landscapes. The women in the store are cautioned not to look too closely—a needless warning—for "you will see something you do not wish to see." The unexpected juxtaposition of such a trivial setting as a department store with the profoundly moving issues in this essay heightens its ironic effect and demonstrates a new willingness of Boyle's part to experiment with essay form for the sake of communicating a vivid message. Furthermore, although the essay does not deal directly with either literature or writers, it signals a new element in Boyle's philosophy that she would soon attach to her literary essays. After all, Boyle and her generation had witnessed a world-wide loss of innocence: in the post-Holocaust age Boyle knows that no one, especially not the writers, can afford to be as complacent as they had been in the age that existed before.

Boyle's subsequent essay, "Farewell to New York" (1947), marks a turning point in her literary commentary. Although the focus of this essay—spoken in the voice of "the Spaniard"—is predominantly socio/political, Boyle uses it to introduce the writer's role in world events. The Spaniard tells her that when a political man is exiled from his country, "he is maimed and mute," but a writer in exile can retreat into "a spiritual terrain of silence which is native to him, and which he can turn to in any country where he is." Because the writer can create this native soil, the writer by nature is not compelled to be silent. Boyle closes the essay by addressing her friend personally, from the perspective of a later, wiser time, to tell him that she feels guilt because so many who had been given the opportunity to speak out "a long time ago" had remained silent or noncommittal or deliberately isolationist. She calls these writers by name—Pound (in 1937 before his involvement in World War II Italy), Waugh, Eliot—and allows their own comments to speak volumes for them.

In technique this essay experiments with time, point of view, persona. Unlike Boyle's earlier literary commentary, it ignores aesthetic concerns directed toward a particular writer's work; unlike later essays it accuses without providing a model of appropriate behavior. Yet the essay establishes Boyle's guiding principle: it no longer will suffice for her to write—even as passionately as she has always done—of deep commitment and precision of language, the aesthetic concerns of a less traumatized world, without adding to those issues a call for involvement on the part of those—the writers—who have access to the pages of world thought. Boyle's philosophy does not so much change its course as that it adds societal cogency and purpose to the elements of commitment, passion, and precision that she has always valued.

In "Farewell to Europe" (1953) Boyle explains the personal necessity she felt of returning to America to speak out against McCarthyism. One of her earliest concerns, as explored rather impersonally in her 1927 essay about Williams, is the nature of one's American identity. In 1953, she felt this concern to be even more immediate and its impact far more personal. Her own background, as she tells us, contains many strong voices raised in defense of individual freedom and its corollary, individual responsibility. Yet in the essay she must also chronicle a growing disbelief in American democracy on the part of many Europeans of her acquaintance, for they had heard too loudly and too long the strident voice of "McCartair," the McCarthy who would change the lives and fortunes of many Americans before his day in the sun ended. Boyle tells of her friends who advise her to stay in Europe where she will be freer to speak out than in the suddenly repressed and oppressive America. It is Boyle's recognition of the irony of this situation and her commitment to the values of the democratic country of her heritage that compel her to return to America, against the wishes and better judgment of her friends, to "speak out with those of the other America clearly and loudly enough so that even Europe will hear." Her emphatic defense of American individual freedom coupled with her realization that such defense was not immediately forthcoming leads her to establish a central metaphor that recurs in her essays for the next several decades: the writer's "voice" and the related need for "speaking out."

In "A Declaration for 1955" (1955), she turns her passion for commitment into a clarion call for all writers in America, for democracy demands "that one take part in it." Wiser and more determined in 1955 than she had been earlier, Boyle recognizes the enormity of McCarthyism's threat, whether in the voice of McCarthy himself or in the apathy of those afraid to speak, and she calls for the Artist to live up to his or her moral responsibility for changing the world. Recalling that Thomas Mann—who would appear in several of her post-World War II essays—placed the moral and ethical responsibility for any given age on its writers, she urges the Artist to become crusader: "The transforming of the contemporary scene is what I now ask of all American writers."

By 1964, McCarthy had long been discredited, but the silence he engendered was still deafening. For Boyle it was no longer sufficient for just the Artist to speak out, but the young must be given the courage and the insight to do so as well. Boyle writes to teachers of writing in the NEA Journal (1964) that learning "how to release reluctant students to speech" must be a major consideration for them. In a later essay, "The Long Walk at San Francisco State" (1970), Boyle identifies a writer/teacher/Artist who has done just that—Sonia Sanchez, who urged the students in her creative writing class to use their own language to describe their own worlds, to write "poetry that would have meaning to others in their community, and that is probably one of the things that good writing does." Inherent in the essays of this period is a growing awareness on Boyle's part that those who have traditionally remained silent or been rendered voiceless must be empowered to speak for themselves and for their counterparts. The writers of this period whom she praises are those who have with courage and clarity addressed the issues of contemporary life: James Baldwin, Edward Dahlberg, Dylan Thomas, Emanuel Carnevali, and others.

In many ways these essays, particularly the later ones with their heavy emphasis on socio/political action and concern for justice, complete a circle, uniting the Boyle of the activist late twentieth century with the young Boyle of the 1920s. She herself makes this connection in "The Triumph of Principles" (1972) in which she reminds us, "I remember the days in Paris when we who were writers or painters or composers wrote pamphlets and distributed them in the streets and cafés. I remember when we signed manifestos and read them aloud on street corners, following without any humility whatsoever in the traditions of Pascal, Voltaire, Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, Zola, so that the world would know exactly where we stood, for we considered ourselves a portion of the contemporary conscience, and we had no pity on the compromiser or the poor in spirit of our time."

The young Boyle wanted writers to express with accuracy and passion the truth that is around them. The mature Boyle can no longer satisfy herself with accurate portrayals of the past or with language to capture the present. She wants nothing less than to spark the voices that will shape the future, and those with the courage to do so must write, must produce a language and a forum for those who find themselves without political power or presence. For herself and with great faith in the integrity of the Artist, Boyle can say with conviction, "It is a good day when the writers speak out loudly and clearly."