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 fear and knowledge turned about him and then leveled into an illusion. Nothing was wrong. . . .
There you have the pregnant, and, in this case, fatal, error. Jean Larcher had read the action correctly, had seen the avidity in his wife’s face and in her bite; and yet he talks himself out of it. Had he held to his true perception and thrown his adulterous wife and treacherous apprentice out at this juncture, he would have saved himself torture and death. But he suborned his own sound judgment, in this case tragically.
The human tendency to dissuade oneself from accurate insight surfaces rather more complexly in the story of Sören Qvist, a good pastor at war with himself because of his uncontrollable angers. Pastor Sören has a real enemy, one Morten Bruus, who tricks him, but it is really the force of the Pastor’s faith-driven self-accusation that causes the trick to work: he convinces himself that he has killed Morten Bruus’s brother, though the brother, in fact, is not dead.
Reading the three novels in a line, from The Wife of Martin Guerre to The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron, is a powerful experience. Though all three were based on actual cases in the law, their power is literary not legal. In each story a son leaves home because of strife with the father, and returns too late to save the family. In each the ruin of an honest person is complete, and in each there is a fully and vividly realized woman who finds herself twisting helplessly in the dilemmas posed by love and duty. To each of these women—Bertrande de Rols, Anna Sörensdaughter, and Marianne Larcher—Janet Lewis might say what she says to the mummy of the Anasazi woman in Tucson, “my sister, my friend,” for she knows these women: their feelings, their gestures, their happiness, their changeability, and their stunned helplessness as they see doom approaching.
Anna Sörensdaughter has her happiness destroyed when the young judge she loves and is engaged to marry has to pass the sentence of death on her father. Bertrande de Rols must finally accuse the nice imposter who is kind to her because she can but for so long live a lie; she chooses truth over love and then is dismissed with perfect coldness when the real Martin Guerre comes back and discovers that she has dishonored him. Marianne Larcher is the weakest of the three women, so physically in thrall to the young apprentice that she will do anything for him; but she is no less appealing for being blindly dependent, even though it results in her good husband being condemned. The last words of the Martin Guerre story might serve as ending for all these novels:
Of Martin Guerre nothing more is recorded, whether he returned to the wars or remained in Artigues, nor is there further record of Bertrande de Rols, his wife. But when hate and love have together exhausted the soul, the body seldom endures for long.
In the old law book her husband lent her, Janet Lewis discerned a great theme: the limitations of human judgment, not merely between judge and accused but between husband and wife, father and son, king and counselor (for it was a little burlesque in the manner of the late Monsieur Scarron, insulting Madame de Maintenon, that resulted in the execution of the honest bookbinder). She discerned it and, for a span of some twenty years in her long life, had the intelligence, the persistence, and the force to be equal to it.
Auden reminded us definitively that it’s language Time worships: not wisdom or innocence or physical beauty or, I would add, length of life. Janet Lewis has indeed lived a long time, but what is important is that all through that long time she has continued to tell the stories that have meant something to her in a manner all her own, and with a distinction of language that will carry them forward to startle and delight readers yet to come.
4.
Though I was at Stanford in 1960 I failed to meet Janet Lewis. Now and then I would see her husband proceeding in Johnsonian fashion through the college, often with a Boswell or two tugging at his sleeves, but, at the time, it was her work that excited me, an excitement that came back with its old force when I reread her recently.
So I ventured a letter and, to my delight, she promptly called me in Texas and invited me to dinner on Valentine’s Day of this year. She didn’t sound like the grandmother of fiction, either, when she called; she just sounded like a well-spoken woman who was curious about what a writer from Texas would make of her work.
I arrived at her home in Los Altos hand in hand with El Niño; the abundant vegetation that must once have enticed her goats dripped from every leaf and stem. I felt like the person who was going to meet the person who had once seen Shelley plain—Shelley in this case being Hart Crane, who had visited the Winterses at Christmas in 1927. Janet, still convalescent, gave him tea in her bedroom, which, at the time, she was rarely allowed to leave. “Oh yes,” she said, when I mentioned that tea. “He was very polite.” Despite the breach that occurred over her husband’s review of The Bridge, the Winterses were both deeply grieved when Hart Crane killed himself by jumping off the boat.
Janet too is very polite, but she’s neither fussy