Margaret Boylen was a writer ahead of her time. Her three novels were published in the age of Eisenhower and Father Knows Best, when men like Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs could get away with writing about outsiders and fringe lifestyles but women had to conform to stricter stereotypes. Though a few critics appreciated what she tried to do, most found her choice of characters and plots too weird for literary fiction yet not weird enough to fit with a genre label like horror or science fiction.
The opening lines of Mary McGrory’s review of Crow Field, Boylen’s first novel, in the New York Times captures what might attract some readers and repel others: “Anyone who things that a Dali canvas should be wired for sound or that the Ancient Mariner would be the perfect dinner guest should be entirely charmed with Crow Field. Readers whose simpler tastes run to a desire to know what an author is talking about will probably leave off after a few pages, pleading seasickness.” She described Boylen’s prose as “a heaving sea of words” and “an epic verbal bender.” Martha Schlegel of the Philadelphia Inquirer thought that Boylen’s conception outstretched her talent: “This novel combines a mystery story with a stream of consciousness technique to present a symbolic struggle between good and evil, the whole meanwhile being used as a vehicle for comment on the state of humanity. The result … collapses under its own weight.”
Crow Field is set in a New England country town in the middle of summer stock season and takes place over the course of twenty-four hours. Ella Kinney comes to design sets for the resident theater company but is actually intent on figuring out the reason that the theater’s previous designer, Clem, disappeared. The actors and director think he just ran off out of artistic pique. Ella, aided by premonitory dreams, is certain he was murdered.
In none of her books does Margaret Boylen follow a straight line in her narrative or sentences, but Crow Field is by far her most circuitous work. If you’re looking for a story, you’ll probably not make it past the first chapter, which is a bit of a rapturous description of the town of Crow Field and its surroundings, sort of Thomas Wolfe channeled through Thomas de Quincey after a particularly good snack of opium.
But just as some travelers prefer wandering off the beaten path, some readers will relish Boylen’s meanderings. Here, for example, on her way back to her boarding house, Ella sees some children playing:
High on a heap of ashes, flapping her arms and crowing like a rooster, stood the little girl, the King of the Hill, empress and protector of all the children. She was their ideal; hers were the treasures of romance, imagination and daring. Aristocratic, greedy and generous, she bestowed favors of withheld them as she chose, for she knew everything in the world that could be done and could tell about it afterwards, saying that which was not, unchallenged, for in her mouth lies turned into fables. She stood on the ash pile crowing, and her followers brought her empty bottles, queerly shaped pieces of broken china, and the first violets of spring. She was a tidal wave that gathered to itself the whole ocean of childhood and strode inland like a mother, full-skirted and towering, to cast her watery brood on a friendly and unpeopled shore. There was nothing to hold or to bind her, it was the time of bliss and grace, she took the world by storm.
Though Doubleday tried to entice readers by promising “the excitement of literary discovery,” Crow Field was forgotten within weeks of publication. It took nine years for Boylen to return to print, this time with a new publisher (Random House), but yet another odd young woman as her heroine.
In The Marble Orchard, Lovey Claypoole, who was blinded by an explosion in her father’s workshop as he was tinkering with one of his many impractical inventions, regains the ability to see just before her grandmother’s burial in the cemetery — the marble orchard — atop the hill overlooking her Iowa town. There are echoes of Huckleberry Finn in the hideout Lovey makes for herself in the cemetery and later shares with the town’s renegade, Robber Jim, and a climactic flood to bring the town together at the end.
Boylen was a little more successful in attracting readers this time around. The New York Times book editor, Orville Prescott, confessed that he only read the book because it was pressed on him by his daughter. “I had to find out for myself about this strange novel which some people liked so much and some people disliked so heartily.”
It didn’t grab him at first: “The opening pages are enough to set one’s teeth on edge because they are so overwritten.” How overwritten? Well, here’s an early sentence:
When the supply of tombstones ran out and new upstart families had set up a rival cemetery on the other side of town, a cemetery whose polished and tinted marbles sparkled like wedding cakes in the sunshine, the First Families of New Hoosic (for such was the town’s inaccurate name), most of them, like mine, played-out, down-at-the-heel, the heel bruised by stones not left unturned in the bumsteered search for Grace, scurried around until they found, living in a tar-paper shack near Arbor Lodge at Nebraska City, an old-timer, a stone cutter who delighted in the prospect of scaring the daylights out of quick and dead alike.
Overwritten? Meandering, certainly, but no longer wrapping itself in the cloak of Thomas Wolfe.
Nevertheless, The Marble Orchard soon won Prescott’s heart. The book was, he cheered, “so original in matter and manner, so startling in its verbal acrobatics and so witty in a raffish and bizarre fashion unlike anything ever printed on paper before that it ought to make Mrs. Boylen famous.” On the other hand, he acknowledged, it might not: “Queerly brilliant books are all too often ignored.” Amen, brother!
The Times’s assigned reviewer, Victor Hass, saw the book as a quirky, corny country comedy: “Mrs. Boylen has recreated a time and a place and a people with wit, strength and an admirable economy of words [did he read the same book as Prescott?].” He then condemned the book to a New York reviewer’s Purgatory: “The result is an excellent regional novel.” These were the days when Willa Cather was still referred to as “a fine regional novelist.”
The best thing about The Marble Orchard is Lovey Claypoole’s voice, as distinctive in its perspective and diction as Mattie Ross’s in Charles Portis’s classic, True Grit. When Robber Jim — who is, in reality still a teenager himself and just a few years older than Lovey — tells her he plans to escape if sent to reformatory school, she despairs:
Misery. The good old-fashioned Number One Dilemma. Even setting aside the peculiar impossibility of it — or being but children, sexy, but children — the horned dilemma lowered at us. It often happens that two people who cannot be with each other cannot be without each other. But they have to, anyway, one thing or the other. And not pine away and die of it, either, nor lace it up in a suicide pact. Why not? Because it’s out of fashion, that’s why, and when a thing is out of fashion and has no style, you’ve lost the hang of it and don’t know how to do it anymore. But these are deep waters and God knows Lovey [Lovey often refers to herself in the third person] and her persnickety Robber were not in them. Just water-bugging over the surface, for the nonce.
The Marble Orchard sold slightly less poorly than Crow Field, but it did at least earn Boylen a Guggenheim Fellowship. Even with that, though, she struggled to progress on her third book. “I’m off to a party at the drop of a hat,” she told one interviewer. Still, she managed to return to print after five years — and with the same publisher — with A Moveable Feast. Although A Moveable Feast was a fresh title at the time, its use three years later for Ernest Hemingway’s bestselling posthumous memoir of Paris in the 1920s helped guarantee its disappearance.
A Moveable Feast (1961) is an Edward Gorey-esque take on Margaret Sidney’s Five Little Peppers books. In the opening chapter, we are introduced to the five Mortrude children, who attain a gruesome bit of early fame when their parents are both killed in a tractor accident that has to be read to be believed. Orphaned and penniless, they are rescued and raised through the collective generosity of their hometown of Clorinda. Or at least, that’s what their guardian and the book’s narrator, Will Calhoun, would have everyone believe.
Uncle Will has hopes for the five Mortrudes as he attempts to raise them (Chapter Two, “How They Grew”) and then, years later, when four of them (Little Od having died trying to fly from the roof of their house) return to Clorinda (Chapter Three, “Why They Grew”). Located just down the road from the Claypoole’s New Hoosic, Clorinda aspires to be a version of Lake Wobegon, a town where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.
Instead, as the four big Mortrudes demonstrate, reality comes closer to William Carlos Williams’ vision than Garrison Keillor’s. These pure products of Clorinda go crazy, each in his or her own way. Like a remarkable number of Midwestern boys, Farnham heads straight for the coast and becomes a hard-drinking, far-traveling, tattooed sailor. Gidley rises high in academia but proves obsessed with minutiae. Jessica becomes a great beauty of Broadway who needs a third of a fifth to get through an evening.
And Eleanor becomes, perhaps, a proxy for Boylen herself. “Eleanor has still to learn that the shortest distance between a subject and a predicate is the simple declarative sentence,” Calhoun observes after reading an “unfairy tale” she sends him. In fact, as the Mortrude’s return to Clorinda approaches, he begins to see that his reality and theirs have been on separate planes for a long time: “Buffaloed. They had me buffaloed; from the very start, and my fear of the Reunion comes on apace.”
Several reviewers described A Moveable Feast as a Grand Guignol comedy set in a cornfield, but I think they missed what’s really going on in the book. It’s true that Boylen fills her pages with extravagant declarations and exuberant eccentrics. Like The Marble Orchard, it’s a book that would appeal to fans of Gorey, Charles Addams, and Lemony Snicket. But Boylen’s Midwest gothic has just as much in common with Flannery O’Connor’s Southern gothic: beneath its surface of the odd and the extreme runs a bedrock of moral granite. For Boylen, the real freaks are the ones struggling the most to maintain a facade of normality.
Margaret Boylen was just a year or two too early for the wave of black humor that became one of the high points in 1960s American fiction. And her chances of establishing a place alongside Bruce Jay Friedman, J. P. Donleavy, and Joseph Heller may also have been undermined by health problems. She died of a heart attack in 1967 at the age of 46. Her work has never been reissued.