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
