Finding Lost Voices: The Poet at the Hearth Tending to the Truth, the novels of Janet Lewis
A weekly email that brings back the voices of those who have been forgotten or misremembered.
A couple of years ago my friend and mentor, the poet Dana Gioia, sent me a novel that he urged me to read. He was convinced that when I read it, I would want to write a biography about its author. The novel was The Wife of Martin Guerre and I’d never heard of it before that day I retrieved it from my mailbox. On New Year’s Eve, I sat down and started reading the novel and was so drawn in, so mesmerized by the novelist’s depiction of this story of mistaken identity, of what it was like to be a woman who had to make an impossible decision that I didn’t stop reading it until I finished it. Why hadn’t I heard of this novel before? And why hadn’t I heard about its author, Janet Lewis? A lot of the answers to these questions lie in the stories Lewis chose to tell. She never put herself at the center of a story. Instead, she tended to the hearth of the story. She researched. She examined. She questioned the past. And through this process, she breathed flames back into stories that had previously been faded to ash.
How did Gioia know about this beautiful novel? He had met Lewis when she was still living in her home in Los Altos, near the Standford campus in the Bay Area when he attended school there. Lewis had moved there with her husband, the poet Yvor Winters when he’d attended Stanford as a graduate student in 1927 and later was brought on as faculty. Their small home, crowned by orchards, became a gathering place for poets and artists and remained so even long after Winters’ death in 1968. And always at its hearth, or tending to the garden, was Janet Lewis.
Janet Lewis (1899 – 1998) was born and raised outside of Chicago, Illinois. Her father was a professor at a community college and in the summers their family would spend vacations on Neebish and St. Jospeh’s Islands, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. She attended the same high school as Ernest Hemmingway (and was in the graduating class with his sister). Then, instead of following her sisters East for college, she attended the community college where her father worked and then transferred to the University of Chicago where she became part of its famed poetry club. Lewis became enamored with Imagism and had her first poem published in Poetry Magazine. After college, she immediately moved to Paris and lived there, rooming with war widows, at the end of WWI. But, after just six months, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a sanitarium in New Mexico to recover. While she was stuck in her ward, she dreamed of her summers in the Upper Penisula, a place whose stories she now better understood having been fully immersed in the aftermath of war. It was in this state of mind, that she began to write her first novel, The Invasion: A Narrative of Events Concerning the Johnston Family of St. Mary’s (1932). In her first novel, she reexamined, the impact that the white settlers’ invasion of this community had on its indigenous people. She questioned the historical truth of the frontier stories she’d been fed in school because the definition of the frontier that she’d been taught up to this point didn’t make sense to her. After all, it didn’t contain the stories of women, or the indigenous communities it was affecting. It didn’t contain the stories she had been told those summers on Neebish Island by her friend Molly Johnston about her Ojibway grandmother Neengay and her Irish husband John Johnston (Molly Johnston was related to Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Baamewaawaagizhigokwe, who I wrote about in last week’s post). And though her subject matter would change over the years, her creative impulse to write into these questions would not change. Lewis’ work would always recenter the story around those whose voices had not been previously been heard and she would always question the idea of truth.
While in New Mexico, Lewis became reacquainted with another member of the Poetry Club from the University of Chicago, Yvor Winters and the two soon fell in love. When Winters was accepted to graduate school at Stanford, Lewis, finally well again, followed him to California.
As Tillie Olsen would later point out, Lewis’ marriage to Winters and her subsequent devotion to her life as a wife and mother was a huge loss for us as readers as it deeply depleted the time she would have to write. But, Lewis dismissed Olsen’s remark rebutting that she was content with the way her life was and enjoyed being the glue that held her family together. She did admit, however, that women who didn’t have children or husbands were able to write a lot more.
“I put aside a few hours a day. Probably the best hours. My working time has always been when everyone went to school.” In one instance she typed the manuscript for a novel with her small daughter sitting on her lap. “She was very small, so I could reach around to the typewriter. I was working on The Invasion then, and I was under contract to finish it at a certain time. I worked very regularly, getting up very early in the morning before anybody else, except the baby, who had to be taken care of. She was quiet for awhile, she had her naps, and I knew what I was doing because I had been working on the book for a long time. I knew where I was going and didn’t have to pace up and down the floor and say, ‘what do I do next?'”
—Janet Lewis on how she found time to write.
But, lucky for us, Lewis did find the time to write several more novels including the one that kept me riveted on New Year’s Eve. Around the time that Lewis was trying to write her second novel (the haunting, Against a Darkening Sky), a murder happened within the Stanford community. Lewis’ husband Winters became obsessed with helping the husband in the case with his defense. The man, David Lamson, who was Winters’ colleague in the Stanford English department, had been accused solely based on circumstantial evidence. It’s this interest that led Winters to the book, Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence: With an Introduction on the Theory of Presumptive Proof, by the legal historian Samuel March Phillips and once he’d read it he gave the book to Lewis. What struck Lewis when she read the cases contained in the book was the horrible circumstances in which the women in these cases were placed. She identified with the life-changing moral decisions each had to face. The book would not inspire her to finish the novel she was working on, instead, it would send her in a whole, new direction and inspire three novels by Lewis, called The Circumstantial Evidence Novels.
The Wife of Martin Guerre is the first of these three books. Set in 16th-century France and told from the point of view of Bertrande, the wife of Martin Guerre. Her book takes us back to the beginning of the story: how the young couple were married in an arranged marriage at the age of eleven. How they grow up together, facing difficulties. How they have a child while still living with her in-laws. How Martin rebels against his father’s agricultural ideas, ends up stealing from his father, and knowing he’ll be caught, flees, leaving Bertrande her her child alone with his family. Martin promises his wife he will come back. But he does not for eight long years. During this absence, we watch Bertrande grow and become more sure of herself. She evolves and acquires some agency. She is no longer the woman he left behind.
After eight years, he finally returns. So much time has passed Bertrande doesn’t know if the person who has returned is actually her husband and she finds herself in a terrible predicament. Once again, in The Wife of Martin Guerre Lewis examines the idea of truth. The man who returns to Bertrande looks the same physically, but the way he treats her, and the way he acts in the world are completely different. The new Martin is kind and loving. He’s a better lover, a better father. He respects her for who she is. This makes the moral decision she has to make: whether or not to point out that her husband may be an imposter, nearly impossible.
This story has been told many times (it’s even been made into two films), but Lewis is the only person to have approached this story from the point of view of the wife, Bertrande. And her approach is nothing less than brilliant. You’ll have to read the book to find out what she decides to do. (And I’ll warn you that once you pick up this book you won’t want to put it down).
So, thank you Dana Gioia for sending me this novel, and for sending me down the rabbit hole of researching Janet Lewis’ life.
Speaking of biographies, I will be giving my first talk on my next subject, Sanora Babb, and my biography about her Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb next Friday night. For details, see my upcoming readings below!
Upcoming Readings
3/1 6 PM PST Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb Presented by Iris Jamahl Dunkle Gallery Reception – Making Change and Ruffling Feathers in partnership with the Sonoma Woman’s Club & the Sonoma Valley Historical Society 276 E Napa St, Sonoma, CA 95476-6721, United States
3/22 7 PM EST A Reading with Tyler Mills, Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Lindsey Bernal, and Leah Souffrant, Unnameable Books 615 Vanderbilt Ave. Brooklyn, NY.
3/19 4 PM PST Access Inspiration Bookclub on Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer
3/23 9 AM - 3:30 PM PST Workshop: The art of mini-biography and autobiography, or how to find the story of a life taught by Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Dominican University, Edgehill Mansion 75 Magnolia Avenue San Rafael, CA 94901