by Janet Lewis
Though that statement was made forty-three years ago, I doubt she would modify it much today.
2.
That life began in Chicago, in 1899. (Janet, who is often amused, was particularly amused recently when a schoolgirl pointed out that if she makes it another couple of years she’ll have lived in three centuries.) Her father, Edwin Herbert Lewis, a teacher and writer, encouraged his children’s artistic leanings from the first. Her brother, Herbert Lewis, designed the dust jacket and endpapers for her first work of prose, The Invasion (1931). She went to the same Oak Park high school as Hemingway, at the same time, and was friends with his sister Marcelline, who was in her French club. “So I heard a lot about Ernie,” she says now. She and Hemingway each have a poem in the January 1923 issue of Poetry.
The Lewises, like the Hemingways, had a summer place up in Michigan, in the Lewises’ case way up, on an island in the St. Mary’s River, midway between Mackinac and the Sault Ste. Marie. She includes three or four up-in-Michigan stories in the collection Good-Bye, Son, stories which contrast interestingly with Hemingway’s Michigan stories. The emotional saw-teeth beneath the clear surface of Hemingway’s prose are not there in Janet Lewis, though, like as not, her stories are more overtly tragic than his. In stories such as “Proserpina,” “River,” and “Nell,” the local tragedies and misfortunes—a kindly drunk’s drowning, an appealing young woman self-thwarted—are ringed with a soft Midwestern melancholy closer in tone to Sherwood Anderson or Edgar Lee Masters than to the pre-existential edginess of Hemingway. The St. Mary’s River country she describes in The Invasion is that country unspoiled, as it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; but in his “Big Two-Hearted River” the same country is despoiled, the scarred terrain a natural metaphor for burnout. Janet Lewis had been happy in Michigan; she saw it as a fullness, whereas for Hemingway it seemed to accentuate the absences in life.
Another difference is that her interest in Michigan, once it went beyond the responses of an enraptured child on a summer outing, was historical. She made Ojibway friends, and was soon deep in the history of that much-disputed region: first Indian, then French, then British, then American, and always, after the French arrived, métis. The Invasion is an imaginative history of the founding Johnston family, a family in which Scotch-Irish and Indian blood soon mixed. It happened to be the family, too, into which the pioneering ethnographer Henry Schoolcraft married, a distant result of which was Hiawatha, Mr. Longfellow having depended more than a little on Henry Schoolcraft’s researches. Janet Lewis has always insisted that The Invasion is a “narrative,” not a novel; whatever one calls it, it is a confident, pungently written first book, with close attention paid to the densities, the shading, and the smells of the Northern forests and its peoples, at the time when the Americans first came to them.
That Janet Lewis, the woman, was less depressed than her schoolmate Ernest Hemingway is not to suggest that her work is Pollyanna-ish; the message of her major fiction is very dark indeed. She comes back again and again to the fate of honesty in a violent world. Her novels are tragedies, and this despite the fact that she was the product of a happy family, and, as a wife and mother, helped mold a happy family. The calm of her prose, and of the best of her verse, is a hard-won—indeed, a philosophic—calm. No one, saint or poet, could have lived through almost the entire twentieth century—or any century—and remained undisturbed. It is what she makes of her disturbances, as she struggles to keep her balance and do her duty, that is impressive. Not for nothing was the little magazine that she and her husband published for a single year in the late twenties called The Gyroscope: the instrument that spins and yet does not lose its balance.
Hart Crane was awed by Yvor Winters’s learning—why, he could even read Portuguese!—and so impressed by his sensitivity to poetry that he allowed him to midwife The Bridge, rather as Pound had midwifed The Waste Land; and, though there was an ugly quarrel once Winters’s harsh, disappointed review of the finished poem came out, Crane had not been entirely wrong to trust Winters’s ear and his sensitivity. Yvor Winters from the first put the act of evaluation at the center of his critical practice. In The Armed Vision Stanley Edgar Hyman poked fun at some of Winters’s wilder overestimations—Elizabeth Baryush, Jones Very, Sturge Moore—but he still respected Winters’s force as a critic. This essay is about Janet Lewis, not Yvor Winters, but it is, I think, of interest that all Janet Lewis’s major fiction hinges on the difficulty of just and accurate evaluation, not merely in the law but in the mundane circumstances of everyday life, where the consequences of misevaluation are apt to be more destructive than they usually are in literary criticism. Something of the evaluative habits of the poet-critic husband soaked deep into the creative practices of the poet-novelist wife.
The Winterses were not wealthy; professors were not then superstars. Janet Lewis wanted to write fiction for magazines that paid money, so as to add her tiny bit to the family coffers. But she was not by nature a good plotter, and was only now and then able to sell something to the slicks. Sometime in the Thirties Yvor Winters was lent an old law book, a nineteenth-century compilation of famous cases of circumstantial evidence. At some point Winters handed the book to his wife, thinking there might be something in it that would help her with her plots.
Did it ever! Though not quickly. At first she merely took notes and reflected, but the notes sprouted and in time she produced the three novels of her maturity: The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941), The Trial of Sören Qvist (1947), and The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron (1959). Though it is not likely that the family finances were much affected, Janet Lewis did learn to plot. She tells three stories in which the fate of honest people depends on their ability or inability to correctly evaluate the confusing body of evidence that life presents us as we go rushing through it. In all three cases it is the human, not the judicial, misevaluation that makes the books so powerful.
3.
Whoa, though. Despite the steady and loyal readership these three novels have won her, Janet Lewis thinks of herself mostly as a poet. Poetry is what she began with and what she still has now. She started with Imagism, the vogue of her youth, but she soon developed a less impersonal, more individual, and more complex poetic style. One would be foolish to try to guess where she’ll finish up, since so far she’s shown no inclination to finish at all. She has always looked closely, and with delight, at the natural world and has rendered it vividly both in verse and prose. Some of her poems have come from contemplation of her garden, or her goats, or just the morning light:
The path
The spider makes through the air,
Invisible,
Until the light touches it.
The path
The light takes through the air,
Invisible,
Until it finds the spider’s web.
I won’t attempt to follow Janet Lewis through the many decades of adding and subtracting, winnowing and honing, that have boiled down to the poems in her most recent selection, but I would like to link in a brief way one set or sequence of poems to the prime concerns of her fiction, specifically her powerful desire for balance; she doesn’t want to be swept away, or altered in her nature, however violent or whatever the character of the storms that strike her. This need for balance doesn’t deny sentiment—she has plenty of that—but attempts to secure for sentiment its due dignity.2
In the interview mentioned earlier, she makes clear that the death of Yvor Winters was a devastating blow; for a time after it she wrote nothing. But she did go back to the desert, to the places of the pueblo peoples, the Hopi and Navajo, peoples who appear to live in harmony with the eternal simplicities: sun, stone, sky. She ponders a fossil:
In quiet dark transformed to stone,
Cell after cell to crystal grown,
The pattern stays, the substance gone. . . .
And, in a museum in Tucson, contemplates—at first with envy—the mummy of a small Anasazi woman:
How, unconfused, she me
t the morning sun,
And the pure sky of night,
Knowing no land beyond the great horizons . . .
But later she learns of the massacre at Awatobi (1700), where defenders of the old gods wiped out a village that had accepted the new gods of the Spaniards; she realizes that the little woman may not have been spared confusion and terror after all:
Men of Awátobi,
Killed by men of the Three Mesas,
By arrow, by fire,
Betrayed, trapped in their own kivas.
. . .
The men of the Three Mesas,
In terror for the peace of the great kachinas
Who hold the world together,
Who hold creation in balance,
Took council, acted. . . .
In bereavement Janet Lewis sought, even as she had in the happy Gyroscope years, the secret of things that move but are not changed:
The sunlight pours unshaken through the wind . . .
And she takes a poet’s delight in the fact that the Navajo, who simplify many things, cannot reduce water to one name:
Tsaile, Chinle,
Water flowing in, flowing out.
Still water caught in a pool,
Caught in a gourd;
Water upon the lips, in the throat,
Falling upon long hair
Loosened in ceremony;
Fringes of rain sweeping darkly
From the dark side of a cloud,
Riding the air in sunlight,
Issuing cold from a rock,
Transparent as air, or darkened
With earth, bloodstained, grief-heavy;
In a country of no dew, snow
Softly piled, or stinging
In a bitter wind.
The earth and sun were constant,
But water,
How could they name it with one word?
In poetry Janet Lewis developed a singularity of voice over time, but in prose she was from the first strikingly confident. Here is the opening paragraph of The Invasion; we are on the Plains of Abraham in 1759:
That September day the English appeared so suddenly that they seemed to have dropped from the sky; appeared, and fired. A warm rain fell now and again upon the troops, and the smoke from the rifles lay in long white streamers, dissipating slowly. The noise of the rifles, reflected from the running water and from the cliffs, was something like thunder, but the rain was too quiet. And running, for the French, had become almost more important than fighting. The head of Montcalm lay upon the breast of Ma-mongazid, the young Ojibway, the dark sorrowful face, with its war paint of vermilion and white, intent above the French face graying rapidly. Presently they took the Marquis to the hospital in St. Charles, where he died. Ma-mongazid with his warriors in thirty bark canoes returned to La Pointe Chegoimegon through the yellowing woods and the increasing storms of autumn. The rule of the French was over, the Province of Michilimackinac had become the Northwest Territory. The Ojibways called the English Saugaunosh, the Dropped-from-the-Clouds, and regretted the French.
With similar confidence she brings us to Jutland in the early seventeenth century, as she opens the story of the parson of Vejlby, Sören Qvist:
The inn lay in a hollow, the low hill, wooded with leafless beech trees, rising behind it in a gentle round just high enough to break the good draft from the inn chimneys, so that on this chill day the smoke rose a little and then fell downward. The air was clouded with dampness. It was late November, late in the afternoon, but no sunlight came from the west, and to the east the sky was walled with cloud where the cold fog thickened above the shores of Jutland. There was the smell of sea in the air even these few miles inland, but the foot traveler who had come upon sight of the inn had been so close to the sea for so many days now that he was unaware of the salty fragrance. . . .
and to Gascony almost a century earlier, as she begins Martin Guerre:
One morning in January, 1539, a wedding was celebrated in the village of Artigues. That night the two children who had been espoused to one another lay in bed in the house of the groom’s father. They were Bertrande de Rols, aged eleven years, and Martin Guerre, who was no older, both offspring of rich peasant families as ancient, as feudal and as proud as any of the great seignorial houses of Gascony. The room was cold. Outside the snow lay thinly over the stony ground, or, gathered into long shallow drifts at the corners of houses, left the earth bare. But higher, it extended upward in great sheets and dunes, mantling the ridges and choking the wooded valleys, toward the peak of La Bacanère and the long ridge of Le Burat, and to the south, beyond the long valley of Luchon, the granite Maladetta stood sheathed in ice and snow. . . .
The movement backward, into earlier centuries, which might inhibit many writers, seems to excite Janet Lewis and also to increase her assurance. When she comes into her own time, as she does in her one conventional novel of manners, Against a Darkening Sky (1943), set in Santa Clara County during the Depression, she is noticeably less confident. The heroine of that book is introduced to us as Mary Perrault, but is often thereafter called Mrs. Perrault, as if the author is not sure just how much intimacy she should assume with her main character.
In a way the three historical novels, all based on actual cases in the law, are legal briefs brought to life, the novelist being a prosecutor whose sympathies are nonetheless with the accused; and the accused, in all cases, become the condemned. There is nothing quite like these three books in our fiction; such echoes as there are are French, particularly Stendhal. All the central characters, whether Bertrande de Rols, or Pastor Sören, or the honest bookbinder Jean Larcher, are threatened by judicial confusion over circumstantial evidence, but the brilliance of the pattern is the way in which Janet Lewis shows that none of the three would ever have been in court in the first place had they themselves not made similar misjudgments when confronted with the rushing mass of circumstantial evidence in everyday life.
Perhaps the best example of such normal error occurs in The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron. Paul Damas, the apprentice bookbinder who has seduced his master’s wife, Marianne, loses a button from his shirt:
One day in midsummer, Paul and Marianne being alone in the bindery, Paul remarked that he had lost a button from his shirt, and Marianne offered to sew it on for him.
It seemed an innocent activity, especially in view of their relationship. She performed the task deftly and quickly, then looked about for her scissors to snip the thread. Not finding them, “Lend me your knife,” she said to Paul. “No, never mind,” and, bending toward him, she bit the thread. The action brought her head against his breast. Perhaps she held it there the fraction of a moment longer than was necessary. It seemed to Paul that she delayed the moment, for, looking over her head, he met the surprised gaze of his master. Jean had returned, with no undue quietness of step, with no intention of taking anyone unawares, but absorbed in themselves, neither Paul nor Marianne had heard the opening of the door or the advancing step. A rigidity in Paul warned Marianne of something amiss. She lifted her head, looked first at Paul, then followed his glance toward her husband.
Midday, midsummer, the air was warm and moist after a morning shower. Marianne had discarded her cap and her fichu. Her arms were bare almost to the shoulder, as she had pushed back her sleeves. The air, the informality of the moment, the two figures standing like one in a rectangle of sunlight, all combined to give Jean an impression of what was in fact the truth. But the moment itself was innocent.
A sense of revelation rushed upon him, bringing to mind a hundred hitherto unquestioned gestures, poses, inflections. They were lovers, these two. He had taken his wife in adultery. . . . He stopped dead where he stood. Then the moment resolved itself naturally, without drama. Marianne came toward him, holding on the middle finger of the hand poised above her, her silver thimble. . . .
“I mislaid my scissors,” she said. “I had to use my teeth.” . . .
Jean’s fear and knowledge turned about him and then lev
eled into an illusion. Nothing was wrong. . . .
There you have the pregnant, and, in this case, fatal, error. Jean Larcher had read the action correctly, had seen the avidity in his wife’s face and in her bite; and yet he talks himself out of it. Had he held to his true perception and thrown his adulterous wife and treacherous apprentice out at this juncture, he would have saved himself torture and death. But he suborned his own sound judgment, in this case tragically.
The human tendency to dissuade oneself from accurate insight surfaces rather more complexly in the story of Sören Qvist, a good pastor at war with himself because of his uncontrollable angers. Pastor Sören has a real enemy, one Morten Bruus, who tricks him, but it is really the force of the Pastor’s faith-driven self-accusation that causes the trick to work: he convinces himself that he has killed Morten Bruus’s brother, though the brother, in fact, is not dead.
Reading the three novels in a line, from The Wife of Martin Guerre to The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron, is a powerful experience. Though all three were based on actual cases in the law, their power is literary not legal. In each story a son leaves home because of strife with the father, and returns too late to save the family. In each the ruin of an honest person is complete, and in each there is a fully and vividly realized woman who finds herself twisting helplessly in the dilemmas posed by love and duty. To each of these women—Bertrande de Rols, Anna Sörensdaughter, and Marianne Larcher—Janet Lewis might say what she says to the mummy of the Anasazi woman in Tucson, “my sister, my friend,” for she knows these women: their feelings, their gestures, their happiness, their changeability, and their stunned helplessness as they see doom approaching.