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 met 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. . .
