Quote of the Day (Kay Boyle, on a Child Viewing New York on a Cold January Night)

“There is a time of apprehension which begins with the beginning of darkness, and to which only the speech of love can lend security…. It may begin around five o'clock on a winter afternoon when the light outside is dying in the windows. At that hour the New York apartment in which Felicia lived was filled with shadows, and the little girl would wait alone in the living room, looking out at the winter-stripped trees that stood black in the park against the isolated ovals of unclean snow. Now it was January, and the day had been a cold one; the water of the artificial lake was frozen fast, but because of the cold and the coming darkness, the skaters had ceased to move across its surface. The street that lay between the park and the apartment house was wide, and the two- way streams of cars and busses, some with their headlamps already shining, advanced and halted, halted and poured swiftly on to the tempo of the traffic signals' altering lights. The time of apprehension had set in.”—American novelist, short-story writer, poet, educator, and political activist Kay Boyle (1902-1992), “Winter Night,” originally printed in The New Yorker, Jan. 11, 1946, reprinted in Thirty Stories (1957)

I chose this quote for today not only because it relates to this point in the year but also because it combines vivid description of a time and place with compassion for the dilemma facing “little girl”: another night without her divorced mother, who is working constantly to make ends meet.

Within 10 pages, “Winter Night” opens up, as good stories do, to something much larger: a world far beyond that of Manhattanites readjusting to life after WWII.

Kay Boyle had seen much of the worst of the war before America’s entry, as a foreign correspondent for The New Yorker. In this story, she introduced readers—many of whom still knew little about those caught up in the European maelstrom—to the refugees who found themselves on America’s shores.

It’s an imaginative leap into the life of a migrant—a fictional instruction that Americans can use as readily in our time as in Boyle’s.

Chances are, if you’re like me, you may have heard, glancingly, about Boyle without having read any of her nearly fifty books (novels, collections of short fiction, poetry, and non-fiction). 

That enormous output resembles more that of European authors (like Georgy Girl author Margaret Forster, whom I profiled earlier this month in this post) than American ones who labored on only a few books spread out over years or who flamed out after a short but exciting creative spurt.

The “time of apprehension” in the opening paragraph refers to the hour that seven-year-old Felicia waits for her mother in their apartment, fearful of being left alone.

But the “sitting woman” who comes to mind her, it becomes clear, has experienced her own “time of apprehension.” In telling Felicia about another little girl who loved the ballet, the sitter exposes the horror of the Final Solution: fathers gone off to “another place,” remaining family members separated in weekly deportation roundups, constant hunger and lack of necessities, and mothers’ desperate covert messages passed along on trains begging surviving women to look after their children.

Nowhere are the phrases “concentration camp” or “death camp” used, but Boyle’s postwar readers could have easily inferred that was being discussed in the babysitter’s quiet narration.

At the end of the story, Felicia’s mother finds her daughter and the babysitter asleep in each other’s arms. Boyle hints that this is only a temporary remedy for lonely Felicia, who’s enduring a parade of sitters who are “no more than lonely aunts of an evening or two who sometimes returned and sometimes did not,” and for this one, forever traumatized by the horrors she’s witnessed in the war.

Surprisingly, considering Boyle’s considerable body of work, it’s not easy to find any of her books in many libraries. (My local system, covering 77 libraries, contains single copies of only three of her books.) I was only able to find this title in a 1977 Reader’s Digest anthology, Great American Short Stories.

As more writers compete for slots on college curricula, it’s likely to be even harder to locate examples of Boyle’s work—unless feminist scholars succeed in placing her in more American literature courses.  Judging by the skill she displayed in this story, she deserves to be far better known.