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. . . .
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