I feel a little trepidation in writing about My Heart for Hostage. It may be the closest thing to a perfect book that I’ve come across in nearly 13 years of working on this site. It’s so good that early in reading it, I felt a frisson of fear that Robert Hillyer would not be able to sustain its quality, that the style, the story, or the narrative voice would give way and leave me frustrated and disappointed. Instead, I feel it’s I who will end up letting this book down.
My Heart for Hostage is the story of a romance doomed from the start — but not for the reason you might think at first. Edward Reynolds, freshly discharged from the U.S. Army after time in combat on the Western Front and afterward as a courier for the U.S. delegation at the Peace Conference, meets Germaine, a beautiful 19 year-old girl from Nantes enjoying her first freedom in Paris. Strongly attracted to each other from the start, they are soon sleeping together in what both take at first as nothing but a fling. Edward, son of a fine New England family, talks of marriage but Germaine brushes him off.
They encounter a variety of early American expats, including a dowager still carrying a torch for Edward’s father and a flamboyant painter proud of his notoriety as a décadent. They escape to Brittany, where they spent an idyllic few late summer weeks swimming and sailing off a small fishing village, and Germaine finally admits she could marry Edward. When the first storm of autumn arrives, they return to Paris to plan for their marriage and the trip back to Edward’s home in the U.S..
In Paris, however, single incident sparks Edward’s simmering sense of jealousy, and it all blows up. Edward is hospitalized, and when he recovers, he travels to Nantes to locate Germaine. He finds her about to wed an older man to whom she had been promised by her parents years before, and he quickly flees, taking the first passage to the U.S. he can book. There, on board, he meets a fellow ex-officer who reveals a few facts that transform his entire understanding of Germaine — indeed, that reveal to Edward how little he understands people at all.
My Heart for Hostage could be written off as just another American in Paris story, but everything about this book takes it to a level that puts everything else in this genre in the shade (with perhaps the exception of Henry James’ The Ambassadors, a peak I haven’t attempted myself). From his social status, upbringing, education, and experience, Hillyer was already encountering France with considerable sophistication, but what’s refreshing here is his insistence on bringing things back to an immediate and personal level:
The trouble was, he said, that people in America who pose generally had some goal in view; they wanted to impress some advantageous person to get on in the world. Whereas in France, people just posed for the fun of it.
No, she decided, people in France who posed also had some goal in view; but the goal was just to show off. You see, the French wanted to puff themselves up in their own eyes by making other people notice them, even if they had to behave very queerly like the silly artists on the Boulevard St. Michel. Americans wanted to overreach other people. If a Frenchman were posing, he’d look seriously in a mirror to see if he were acting the part properly; an American would wink at his reflection to show he was not fooling himself at any rate. Sometimes Americans seemed to her much more mature than the French. But in love they are very banal. “Take, for example, yourself, Edouard. You never believe at the right time and you always doubt at the wrong time. Isn’t that true?”
Edward had been thinking that she knew altogether too much about Americans in love. “I don’t know,” he said, and suddenly buried his face in his hands.
“But you do know,” she persisted, “because you never really trust me. You will never believe if we live together in joy until our death. That doubt will poison whatever you think of me — oh, even at our best times together — and it will bite, drop by drop, like acid into you, into your deep nature, until all you will have to say to me will be Bonjour, cherie, and Cherie, dors bien.”
Hillyer wrote My Heart for Hostage, the second of his two novels, at a distance of over twenty years from his time in Paris and in the midst of another World War. From its dust jacket illustration, one can imagine that My Heart for Hostage was being aimed by Random House for a sentimental, mainly female audience, but in reality, this is a book that would have appealed to G.I.s if they’d made it past the title page. Hillyer’s soldiers carry some scars with them they little understand and can’t control. They find relief in sex and drink, and feel a distance between themselves and the folks back home they can’t quite express. And they have a sense that the only true relationships have to be founded on trust — which, unfortunately, their experiences have shown to be something not given lightly. But I suspect that few G.I.s ever got their hands on My Heart for Hostage, and so it soon slipped into obscurity: too late for the veterans of WWI, too early for the veterans of WWII. I hope it will not take another war for it to be rediscovered.
I’ve covered plenty of books well-deserving of rediscovery on this site. But if it’s not going too far out onto a limb, I have to say that My Heart for Hostage is perhaps the closest thing to a neglected masterpiece I’ve come across. I cannot recommend it too highly. There are less than a dozen copies available for sale at the moment: Grab a copy now!
Thanks for the feedback, Tim. Always good to get some … well, calibration.
I bought a copy when I first read your review, and read it in one sitting today. It’s every bit as good as you said!
Thanks, Robert — this is exciting news.
One other thing. If anyone wants to receive a notification when the (free) ebook of this novel becomes available, feel free to drop me a line: idiotprogrammer AT fastmailbox.net
Ok, update, I’ve been communicating with some other people at Project Gutenberg, and we’re going to try to get it over there.
Hathitrust has a full version available — though it’s somewhat inaccessible. However, I now have a PDF version with the text from a scan. So it should be pretty easy to make a book with a small file size — for epub and mobi. If PG can’t do it in a timely fashion, I should be able to make it available at no charge by the end of the year.
Finally I took the liberty of doing a screenshot of the NYT 1942 review: Enjoy! https://www.personvillepress.com/balengo/heart-for-hostage-nyt-review1942.png
First paragraph:
Robert Hillyer’s second novel, “My Heart for Hostage” is a superbly written book, written perhaps as only a poet familiar with an expert in the disciplines of verse could write it. It is like his own lyrics in its restraint, its high finish, its delicacy; which is not at all to say that it is written in a purplish “poetic” vein (that is rather the province of undisciplined writers, like Wolfe and Faulkner), but in a prose simple, lucid and flexible, perfectly adjusted to its subject. The result is a sustained performance with brilliant passages of lyric beauty such as the unforgettable scenes of Brittany. It is like a fine lyric in still another sense, and this is that when one is finished with one is yet not finished with it; it sets up reverberations as various as they are many, charming and troubling, faint and sharp. The story hangs on, and the reader is haunted by what has been said and even more by what has not. (Reviewer Mark Schorer).
Robert — Thanks so much for your comments. Funny, I did exactly the same thing: went back to check if I’d missed the extent to which Edward Reynolds’ hubris and assumptions undermined his own expectations. I definitely think Hillyer approached the story as a life lesson and not a tragedy. Reynolds will walk off the ship in New York, get a job, marry and raise a family, and look back occasionally on his experiences in France. He’s not taking a leap over the railings into the icy waters.
It’s good to have a confirmation about the book being in the public domain. Now to get it reissued!
I finally got around to reading this work, and truthfully I was prepared to be disappointed.
I only had one complaint with the plot complication (NO SPOILERS) about the painting. It seems too sudden, maybe even contrived.
But oh, boy, that novel was beautifully written. Every single sentence had wonderful details while never being overwritten or over the top. Even the denouement was plausible and just and profound. I just loved every single character, and there are certain universal sentiments magnificently stated.
After finishing, I wondered if the “tragic flaw” of the protagonist was just tacked on or whether it was apparent from the start. I re-read the first 3 chapters and see now that a lot of it was there from the beginning. — but I had just missed it.
I love transcontinental love stories (indeed, I am writing one myself), but this one was such a fresh take, and the details of the time period were so accurate that I can’t help regarding this as a kind of exemplar. I was also struck by how flawed almost all the characters were in some way, and how often dialogues and suppositions were not what they appear.
One can say a lot of things about this book. Let me leave with a question. Is this story a tragedy? Or an instructive tale about learning from one’s mistakes?
Finally I mentioned before that it appears to me to be in the public domain and I even posted it on a list for Project Gutenberg in the hope that someone might digitalize it. I shall continue such efforts, but I only wish I had the time to digitalize it on my own. (I run an ebook press).
BTW, I mentioned your rave on one of my book columns: http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogrammer/2019/07/roberts-rants-reviews-3-books-ebooks/
Sorry to hear you were disappointed, but thanks for persisting and posting your assessment.
I read the book — the whole thing.
But, as I was reading, my ongoing thought was “I do owe it to the Neglected Books Editor and the Librarians at Inter-Library Lending to finish.”
Yes it was a little bit of an effort… And enjoyable effort but had I not made a promise to myself I probably would not have finished it… I kept coming back to “… closest thing to a neglected masterpiece I’ve come across. I cannot recommend it too highly” and felt a bit guilty wondering what I was missing.
In general, it’s fascinating to read about an era 100 years ago and written 80 years ago, so it gives me insights into what the world was like … a world in which I was almost but not quite alive…and a world in which I am happy to have avoided.
On the one hand, I didn’t find any of the characters or the events very engaging, (except for the couple’s several-week vacation on the Atlantic coast and the coolness of the locals — those were great descriptions.)
Thanks for sharing this. Perhaps that will provide some publisher a little more motivation to bring it back in print.
After doing a little research, I’ve come to the conclusion that this work is in the public domain.
Its copyright was never renewed at the US Copyright Office.
I just asked for it via inter-library loan and will get it… Sometime… I have no idea how long that process takes.
No higher compliment. Thanks.
Please let us know what you think of it — good or bad. I thought it was wonderful, but as they say here on the Internet, YMMV.
Inspiring review.
Thx.
This book is going on my list to get through interlibrary loan. World Cat shows several copies in the south. Thanks for such a great write up! Too bad its not online at Gutenberg or a similar site.