The Political Experiment of “Pot-Boylers”: Thinking, Feeling, and Romance in Kay Boyle’s Resistance Thriller Avalanche

Abstract

“Kay Boyle has sold the Left Bank down the river” (“Pot-Boyler” 97). So opens a brief, unattributed review in Time Magazine of Avalanche: A Novel of Love and Espionage, a thriller by the American-born modernist Kay Boyle. Serialized, initially, in The Saturday Evening Post, the novel was published in 1944 as a standalone title and became Boyle’s only bestseller. Over a decade earlier, she had been affiliated with the Left Bank avant-garde magazine transition and was a signatory of its “The Revolution of the Word” (1929)—a manifesto asserting experimentalism as an author’s right. Later, she maintained she had endorsed the document, not to support stylistic innovation for its own sake, but to insist on writers’ freedom from market pressures. “The tradition of the artist, the creator,” should “outweigh” and “prevail” over a “materialistic, bourgeois tradition,” Boyle argued (qtd. in McAlmon 269). Despite appearances, then, her commercial turn during the Second World War was not simply a matter of abandoning previously held principles, as the review implies, but was tied to Boyle’s evolution as a committed writer. When Boyle moved from bohemian Paris to politically fraught Austria in 1933, her work began to reflect her strengthening social and political conscience as she witnessed the events leading up to the Anschluss. More