Kay Boyle has now published three novels and two volumes of short stories and, with this much evidence on hand, the character and development of her work is becoming clear. She is one of the most eloquent and one of the most prolific writers among the expatriates; her work is always finished in the sense that her phrases are nicely cadenced and her imagery often striking and apt; her characters are almost always highly sensitized individuals who are marooned or in flight in some foreign country, banding together in small groups in which the antagonisms often seem intense beyond their recognizable causes. These small groups of exiles from their closed circles, the members of which exist on the verge of tears or nervous breakdown, and are often physically ill as well. The drama comes out of their meetings—it is noteworthy how much Kay Boyle gets out of the casual coming together of her people, what untold dangers and mysterious excitement she finds in their first impressions of each other—out of the tormented relationships and the eventual flight.

Gentlemen, I Address You Privately fits into this pattern. Here, too, the characters are on the run, not indeed from a recognizable compulsion, but as though a headlong flight were the natural course of life and any pause a mere interruption. The hero, Munday, is an American, a former priest, living in exile in Brittany after having abruptly severed his connection with the Church. It is characteristic of the writing of the exiles, from Henry James on, that they only begin their stories when the major decisions and the major conflicts are behind their characters, and devote themselves exclusively to detailing the experiences which follow. Obviously a career so sensational as Munday's would have led to its crises and exhaustions, would leave its scars, but as the story opens Munday is merely contemplating the pleasures that lie in wait for him, and, if he is tormented by his memories, if his torments in turn infect his new relationships, Kay Boyle does not show him in those moments. A sailor named Ayton, whose past is also mysterious and jumpy and who seems equally unscarred by his experiences, suddenly appears and moves in with Munday. After an elementary resistance on Munday's part, Ayton seduces him, and the remainder of the book deals with the gradual revelation to Munday of the depths of malice and irresponsibility in his lover. In the end Ayton simply disappears, along with three Lesbians whose intrigues and disorders typify the emotional confusion into which Munday's new relationship has led him; they disappear as if by magic and Munday is left with fresh evidence—which he receives good-naturedly—of his betrayal.

It is not enough to point out some of the superficial improbabilities in this story, such as the easy changes of sex which the characters make without suffering any drastic psychological punishment. These violations of actuality would be unimportant if they served to heighten some more basic conflict, as comparable inventions are used in Melville and Dostoevsky and Gide. The important point is that, in the world Kay Boyle describes, human beings possess no consistency and no body; they are capable of doing anything, of reversing themselves and shattering the impressions of their own personalities that have been built up out of the complex of their actions and responses; they give expression to extreme moods of affection or despair or distrust, unchecked by apprehension as to the effect of these expressions, never learning the limits within which the others move, never gauging the boundaries of their friends' imaginations or sensing the possibilities that lie before them. Their closest companions grow increasingly mysterious as they absorb more and more information about them; they look upon one another as they might upon some strange wild birds that may be temporarily harbored but can never be understood and are certain in the end to take flight.

This is not a feature peculiar to the works of Kay Boyle; it is a distinctive characteristic of the writings of the American expatriates, from James on to Ernest Hemingway. Those characters in James who makes such baffled attempts to figure out what is going on in the minds of the people about them, and who in the end are only more mystified than when they began, are similar in this respect to the characters in Hemingway who fly to the extremes of antagonism and affection in a moment, confide in strangers and misrepresent their motives and desires to their friends—they are alike in the sense that they are presented as if their actions were unchecked by any barriers save those set up by their fluctuating moods, or as if their actions were somehow inconsequential, incapable of influencing the actions of others. All of these writers—and Kay Boyle more than the rest—present a world made up of insulated groups having only the thinnest contacts with the social life of their environment, being forced to depend on fragmentary acquaintance with servants and bullfighters and hotelkeeper for any knowledge of the life beyond their circle.

Jack Conroy's The Disinherited is illuminating by contrast: it is a study of the society from which the exiles have fled, a picture of the life from which they are insulated. Yet Conroy's book is also, in a sense, the story of men in exile. It is the chronicle of a young worker's search for a live-lihood, a part of that continual movement Tolstoy described as the wanderings of the workingman over the face of the earth, with its only development the hero's gradual enlightment as to the character of the society through which he has been moving. As the son a miner, Larry Donovan has known the meaning of strikes from his boyhood, and after his father is killed in the mine and he has gone to work himself, he learns more of them in terms of his own experience. Half-conscious of his social role, dissatisfied, always reminded of the hardships which his mother and all his people endure, vaguely interested in poetry, he moves from one job to another, from railroad yards to a steel mill, from a rubber-heel plant to an automobile factory, in contact with an ever-widening circle of workers, continually driven by his dissatisfaction to learn from the people around him. He drifts to Detroit, pulled by the magnetic attraction of good jobs, and learns what the speeding-up of labor means; when the depression begins he and the members of his class have known it as a reality before its first consequences have been marked on the stock exchange or in the speeches of government officials. Then he and a friend begin a long trip back home in a wheezy automobile, a trip which seems almost as difficult as the migrations of the pioneers across the plains; the car continually breaks down; they are forced to hunt for work to get enough gas to move a few miles, and to live in a Hooverville while they gather together resources for moving on. There are no swift and mysterious flights in a world so concrete, there is no place for violent fluctuations of mood or long sustained distrust of man for man.

Both of these books are interesting, and both, in their different ways, are well written. The parts of The Disinherited which deal with the Monkey Nest Mine, with the death of Larry's father and with the boy's emotion as he watches his mother at work, belong with the best of this literature of first-hand observation. In general Conroy's talent resembles Dreiser's; he reveals a similar unwillingness to doll up an event or an emotion in prose. The Disinherited is a first novel, one obviously written over a long period of time, so that the parts often fit together awkwardly; the conclusion, dealing with the stopping of a foreclosure by a group of farmers, when the poor are at last stirred to positive action, seems far less convincing than the earlier parts of the story. And the hero's relations with women belong in another book, in an immature volume in the Moon-Calf tradition. Yet it is impossible not to contrast the movement and variety of Conroy's story, the drive and indignation behind it, with the finished care, the sense of fatigue and of labored and artificial eloquence, of Kay Boyle's writing. Unexpectedly, The Disinherited suggests one reason for the importance the writing of the exiles has had for us: it suggests that the position of the intellectual in contemporary American society, at least in relation to the kind of life Conroy pictures, is not unlike that of a foreigner in a community he does not understand and with which he has only a fragmentary contact. If Kay Boyle and the other exiles have told us the meaning of isolation, Jack Conroy and a few similar talents are giving us a sense of the richness and strength from which we are isolated.