by Janet Lewis
Anna Sörensdaughter has her happiness destroyed when the young judge she loves and is engaged to marry has to pass the sentence of death on her father. Bertrande de Rols must finally accuse the nice imposter who is kind to her because she can but for so long live a lie; she chooses truth over love and then is dismissed with perfect coldness when the real Martin Guerre comes back and discovers that she has dishonored him. Marianne Larcher is the weakest of the three women, so physically in thrall to the young apprentice that she will do anything for him; but she is no less appealing for being blindly dependent, even though it results in her good husband being condemned. The last words of the Martin Guerre story might serve as ending for all these novels:
Of Martin Guerre nothing more is recorded, whether he returned to the wars or remained in Artigues, nor is there further record of Bertrande de Rols, his wife. But when hate and love have together exhausted the soul, the body seldom endures for long.
In the old law book her husband lent her, Janet Lewis discerned a great theme: the limitations of human judgment, not merely between judge and accused but between husband and wife, father and son, king and counselor (for it was a little burlesque in the manner of the late Monsieur Scarron, insulting Madame de Maintenon, that resulted in the execution of the honest bookbinder). She discerned it and, for a span of some twenty years in her long life, had the intelligence, the persistence, and the force to be equal to it.
Auden reminded us definitively that it’s language Time worships: not wisdom or innocence or physical beauty or, I would add, length of life. Janet Lewis has indeed lived a long time, but what is important is that all through that long time she has continued to tell the stories that have meant something to her in a manner all her own, and with a distinction of language that will carry them forward to startle and delight readers yet to come.
4.
Though I was at Stanford in 1960 I failed to meet Janet Lewis. Now and then I would see her husband proceeding in Johnsonian fashion through the college, often with a Boswell or two tugging at his sleeves, but, at the time, it was her work that excited me, an excitement that came back with its old force when I reread her recently.
So I ventured a letter and, to my delight, she promptly called me in Texas and invited me to dinner on Valentine’s Day of this year. She didn’t sound like the grandmother of fiction, either, when she called; she just sounded like a well-spoken woman who was curious about what a writer from Texas would make of her work.
I arrived at her home in Los Altos hand in hand with El Niño; the abundant vegetation that must once have enticed her goats dripped from every leaf and stem. I felt like the person who was going to meet the person who had once seen Shelley plain—Shelley in this case being Hart Crane, who had visited the Winterses at Christmas in 1927. Janet, still convalescent, gave him tea in her bedroom, which, at the time, she was rarely allowed to leave. “Oh yes,” she said, when I mentioned that tea. “He was very polite.” Despite the breach that occurred over her husband’s review of The Bridge, the Winterses were both deeply grieved when Hart Crane killed himself by jumping off the boat.
Janet too is very polite, but she’s neither fussy nor chilly. She’s lived in that smallish but cheerful house for sixty-four years and is thoroughly the mistress of it; there she raised her family, there she watched war come and war be over, there she entertained generations of poets, artists, musicians, and even the occasional lepidopterist such as Vladimir Nabokov, who showed up at her door with his butterfly net one day in 1941. The Nabokovs and the Winterses hit it off; the exiles came often for meals. I had heard that Nabokov enjoyed himself so much in her kitchen that he sometimes helped her wash up; when I asked her about this she chuckled and said, “Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had.”
I had hardly said hello when we were off through the streaming backyard to the small, detached study where she and Yvor Winters did their writing; an old Royal typewriter sits as a reminder of those days. On the walls, casually tacked up, were photographs of a number of noble Airedales and several slightly less noble poets, one or two of them so obscure that neither of us could quite puzzle out who they might be. A sketch of Pound was by one window; a lovely photograph of Janet as a young woman hung from a nail. Janet remarked that the goats came into her life at a time when she was too weak to write but liked to sketch; Yvor Winters went down the road and bought a couple of goats, so his wife could have something to sketch besides Airedales.
Later, two gifted men friends turned up and cooked a delicious meal, which we ate at the small table in her kitchen. Once, on the audiotape, when a young interviewer was asking her how she got the details right in her historical fiction, Janet talked for a bit about looking at Breughel and reading lots of histories, but then she dropped from the highfalutin’ and merely said, “I’ve always liked kitchens”; it is as if she is saying that from her own bright kitchen, where Vladimir Nabokov once wielded a dish towel, she can imagine all kitchens, as her fiction—filled with kitchens—demonstrates.
In the company of most people who are brushing a century, ignoring their age requires conscious effort; but when Janet Lewis is discussing a book or remembering a visit or a trip, or describing northern Michigan as it was in her girlhood, remembering that she’s elderly is what takes the conscious effort. Perhaps the fact that her sickness was so nearly mortal, that she lived for five years of her young womanhood with death as a near-neighbor, has left her unimpressed that it’s in the neighborhood still. Though she is reasonably cautious, and is attended by squadrons of friends, who do their attending for the rich reward of her company, there is also a slightly mischievous, slightly devil-may-care, I’ll-go-when-I’m-good-and-ready air about her. It’s as if that terribly early struggle has bought her a little exemption, and she knows it, and she means to enjoy her privileges to the full.
The four of us finished the meal very companionably, had dessert, had more tea. Janet probed around in a bookcase and found an essay on her poetry that she thought I might like to read. I took it and wandered back to my motel on the Camino, thrilled. A great lady of American letters had—for the space of an evening—been my valentine.
1 Robert McG. Thomas Jr, “Janet Lewis, 99, Poet of Spirit and Keeper of the Hearth, Dies,” New York Times, December 5, 1998, 16.
2 Larry McMurtry, “The Return of Janet Lewis,” New York Review of Books 45, no. 10 (1998): 24.
3 Roger Hofheins and Dan Tooker, “A Conversation with Janet Lewis,” Southern Review 10, no. 4 (1974): 336.
4 McMurtry, 24.
5 Alan Swallow, An Editor’s Essays of Two Decades (Seattle: Experiment Press, 1962), 334.
6 Janet Lewis, “Sources of The Wife of Martin Guerre,” TriQuarterly 55 (Fall 1982): 105.
7 Charles L. Crow, Janet Lewis (Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1980), 9.
8 Mitzi Berger Hamovitch, “My Life I Will Not Let Thee Go Except Thou Bless Me: An Interview with Janet Lewis,” Southern Review 18, no. 4 (1982): 307.
9 Crow, 11.
10 Marilyn Yalom, Women Writers of the West Coast: Speaking of Their Lives and Careers (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1983), 21.
11 Hofheins and Tooker, 341.