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anthology

March 1, from 365 Days, edited by Kay Boyle, Laurence Vail, and Nina Conarain (1936)

“Doctor, connected with hospital, requires in private practice, light colored girl. Must be neat and obliging.”

“Well, Lydia,” said the woman seated at the desk, “what’s happened? Didn’t that job do?”

The young coloured girl stood before her, quietly dressed, straight and tall, her colour light as a Spanish beauty’s.

‘Yes, ma’am,” she said. “I didn’t take that job. I just didn’t take it. That’s all.”

The woman rapped the desk with the end of her pencil.

“You know you can’t pick and choose in times like these,” she slid sharply. She picked up a card from the box-index, and read it out with bitter emphasis: “Doctor, connected with hospital, requires in private practice, light coloured girl. Must be neat and obliging. Now what,” she said impatiently, “did you find to object to?”

“Nothing,” said the tall girl. “I didn’t do no objecting at all. He wanted a girl to sleep there at night. I likes to go home. That’s all.”

“Well,” snapped the woman at the desk, “if you want work, Lvdia, you’ll have to make some concessions.”

“I makes concessions every day I lives,” said Lydia, “but I do like to sleep the night alone. This doctor, he don’t want to sleep alone. That’s what the neat and obliging means.”

The woman’s face flushed dark with anger.

“You people have no sense of truth!” she said. “Don’t come here talking about an eminent man like that! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, making such an excuse!”

This sketch, from the the story-a-day anthology 365 Days that Kay Boyle edited with her then-husband Laurence Vail and her friend Nina Conarain, is one of the most powerful in the entire book. Pregnant with her third child, Boyle found herself with the burden of filling the many gaps in the collection left by contributions that were never submitted and contributions fundamentally out of keeping with the design and spirit of the anthology, which aimed to portray the year 1934 imaginatively through 300-word stories inspired by a particular news story headline from each day. And so, perhaps in desperation as pieces failed to arrive in response to requests, she began reaching out to everyone she knew — friends, acquaintances, neighbors, and in this case, her mother, Katherine.

It makes me long for the book Katherine Boyle never wrote. “I makes concessions every day I lives” is such a stunning statement. Matter-of-fact, resigned to the situation yet never failing to bear witness to its fundamental injustice. It’s a perfect example of the kind of breathtaking writing that jumps out of the pages of this remarkable collection.

365 Days, edited by Kay Boyle, Laurence Vail, and Nina Conarain
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936

January 6, from 365 Days, edited by Kay Boyle, Laurence Vail, and Nina Conarain (1936)

Unemployed Crowd Benches of New York Parks as New Year Begins

Charlie huddled in the doorway, protected somewhat from the tugging wind; but when he saw the old lady approaching with her dog, he squared his shoulders and walked towards her with something of his old carelessness. He whispered: “It’ll be easier, the first time, to ask an old dame. It won’t be so shameful.” The old woman stopped and peered over her nose glasses at Charlie, surveying his wrecked shoes, his dirty reddened hands, his unshaven face. The terrier bitch stepped forward, dancing in the cold, and sniffed his trousers, making a whining sound.

All at once Charlie’s jauntiness vanished. The set speech which he had rehearsed in the doorway went out of his mind. He spoke rapidly in his terror: This was the first time he had ever begged. She must believe that, for God’s sake. He wasn’t a bum. He’d had a good job until just a few months ago. This was the first time, and he hadn’t eaten for almost two days. He was a man with self-respect and she must believe that. It was important. She must believe that, for God’s sake.

The old woman opened her bag. She dropped a dime into his palm.

Charlie sat on a bench in Washington Square, clutching the coin tightly, crushing with his heels clods of soiled and brittle snow. In a little while he would get up and buy something hot for his gnawing belly; but first he must sit here a little longer and adjust himself to shame. He rested his face against the iciness of the iron bench, hoping that nobody could guess his degradation by looking at him. He thought: “I sold out pretty cheap, didn’t I?”

William March only contributed two sketches to the story-a-day anthology 365 Days that Kay Boyle edited with her then-husband Laurence Vail and her friend Nina Conarain, but they are among the very best in the book. This one in particular is like a haiku of the Great Depression: brief, deft, perfect. It’s exactly reflective of the design and spirit of the anthology, which aimed to portray the year 1934 imaginatively through 300-word stories inspired by a particular news story headline from each day.

365 Days, edited by Kay Boyle, Laurence Vail, and Nina Conarain
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936

April 23, from 365 Days (1936)

“Fatal Motor Accident in Bois de Boulogne”

Damocles is drunk. He has imbibed a stock of whisky, a warehouse of gin and a dockyard of champagne. Before slumping over the steering-wheel, he declares that the negro hostess of the joint he is leaving is his true and only mother; the other one, the blood relative, no longer counts at all.

Damocles drives on, now jerking upright, now falling asleep. The car lurches perilously: decidedly, it would be wiser to stop. Damocles abandons his car in the heart of the Bois and sets off on foot. He talks. His voice and his words are suspended in his delirium. He walks. He talks. The trees, the planets, the earth, the sky, all seem simple to him. He fears nothing, neither the bludgeon of the police nor the assassin’s knife.

Damocles returns to the civilized parts of town. His former wrath revives. He would like to knock down a house with his fist. “All — all are heartless. They sleep. They make babies. They do not know the horror of it all.” Further on, before a butcher shop, he emits atrocious yells. In a public park, he sees a drunk asleep on a bench. Damocles thinks himself an angel or in a dream.

At dawn, Damocles rings the bell of the apartment house where he lives with his mother. In a corner of the vestibule, weeping, his mother stands in her nightgown. The concierge, attired in her petticoat, is repeating: “Your son was killed tonight in a motor accident. They have just telephoned.”

Damocles feels himself all over and discovers that he has lost his arms and legs. Now he understands why it seemed to him that night for the first time, that he had come face to face with himself.

— Michel Leiris

365 Days is an anthology of flash fiction published decades before the form had a name. American novelist Kay Boyle and her then-husband Laurence Vail were in Austria at the start of 1934 — a year, as they wrote in the preface, “that was to be characterized by almost universal unrest, by civil war, revolution, by strikes and unemployment figures reaching monstrous proportions.” They decided to “compile a record in fiction form not only of that year’s nationally or internationally important events but as well of the ordinary individual’s life.”

They collected American, English, French, German, Austrian, and Italian newspapers, along with some from as far away as Australia and Singapore. From these they selected stories they thought representative of the year’s events, movements, and attitudes. With the help of their friend Nina Conarain, an Englishwoman who later published dozens of Mills & Boon romances as Elizabeth Hoy, they wrote or contacted fellow writers and asked they to write 300-word pieces, usually imaginative, based on these stories.

Some ignored these requests. Some just wrote one or two. William Saroyan sent in an entire year’s worth of material. Boyle, Vail, and Conarain knew they would have to fill in any gaps with their own pieces, but by the time submissions stopped flowing in, it was obvious that there were well over 100 days’ worth of material still to be written. Vail contributed some, including some of the most imaginative ones, but he began to lose interest in the project as his interest in his new lover, the heiress and art collector Peggy Guggenheim, began to heat up. In the end, it was Boyle, pregnant with her third child, who wrote over a quarter of the book’s contents, demonstrating exceptional versatility in her choice of subjects and styles.

Halfway through the year, much of the edited material for the book was destroyed when a pro-Nazi group set fire to the offices of an Austrian anti-Nazi newspaper, Tyrolia, and a burning package was tossed into the beer garden of Boyle and Vail’s hotel room and exploded. Less than two weeks later, Boyle gave birth to their daughter Katherine.

When the book was finally published in 1936, reviewers seemed to delight in dismissing the project as a novelty and to note how few of the stories met their critical standards. Now, however, it is a fascinating document featuring an impressive range of contributors. Raymond Queneau’s two days are his first work to be translated into English. James T. Farrell and Henry Miller provided pieces, as did now less well-known writers as Bessie Breuer, Grace Flandrau, Arthur Calder-Marshall, William March, Evelyn Scott, and Malachi Whitaker. The overall tone is empathetic, anti-fascist, activist, and angry, yet it rarely descends into propaganda. Indeed, one wishes that a collection of contemporary writers would take on a similar project for one of our own tumultuous years.

I have been reading my way through 365 Days a day at a time and will be posting other pieces from it through the rest of this year.

365 Years, edited by Kay Boyle, Laurence Vail, and Nina Conarain
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936
London: Jonathan Cape, 1936