Kay Boyle

From Philosopedia

Boyle testifying before the Senate Constitutional Rights Subcommittee, 1955

Boyle, Kay (19 February 1902 - 27 December 1992)

A novelist and teacher at San Francisco State College in California, Boyle wrote impressionistic stories such as Wedding Day (1930) and The Smoking Mountain (1951). In a novel, Plagued by the Nightingale (1931), an American girl and her French husband, who has a hereditary disease, must decide whether to have a child in order to receive his legacy. Death of a Man (1936) told of an American girl’s renunciation of her love for a Nazi physician. A Glad Day (1938) and American Citizen (1944) are collections of poems.

Once an expatriate living in Paris, Boyle was long a member of the Institute of Arts and Letters of the American Academy. Asked about humanism in 1989, she responded:

[I am] a mixture of two humanisms: Naturalistic Humanism and Ancient Humanism. Sorry not to be more explicit at the present time. [Dictated during her illness by her secretary, A. Doherty].

A year later, however, as a resident in a retirement community, she was converted to Catholicism, the religion of her husband, Baron Joseph Franckenstein. Her son, Ian, in a letter to Warren Allen Smith explained that his father

came from a long-tradition Austrian Catholic family, and Kay had a deep love and respect for his mother, who was a devout Catholic. My sister Faith and I were raised Catholic by my father. Kay always assumed a rather neutral position, allowing us to be brought up thus and never, to my knowledge, did she ever interfere or for that matter attend a Mass throughout those years we were growing up in Connecticut. She was truly, at the time, a non-believer, a naturalist, a humanist. . . . Mother once said to me: “Catholics look after and take care of each other.” I knew what she really meant was the fraternity that existed that appealed to her, not the sacraments or the ‘ritual’ of being Catholic, or even the belief in a Supreme Being. Kay felt that becoming a Catholic would bring her peace of mind. So in December 1991 she was baptized by Father Gerry O’Rourke. I feel it was an act that was more a “placebo” effect rather than a conscious dedication to and acceptance of a God, the Blessed Trinity, etc. She never read or studied any formal catechism or literature on Catholicism, before or after her conversion. . . . I believe that despite these developments late in her life, Kay died a naturalist who loved all people, and whose works reflected that throughout her long literary career. Kay always listened to her inner voice and acted upon that. She never lacked the courage to do so.