June 1959
In almost any company, when the subject arises, somebody will say that they don’t really like short stories, and as they are nearly always certain of support, the rest of the conversation has a dull, destructive ring about it and nobody is much the wiser, but whatever you usually feel about them, I beg you to try these stories and give them the chance of being your exception. The author, Jean Boley, travelled a great deal, and these fifteen stories are set in South America, Java, London, France, the U.S.A. and the Canary Islands, and while this was doubtless useful, her remarkable gifts do not seem dependent upon her changes of scene.
Whoever she writes about is immediately so real and clear that their life each side of the story is unrolled - one knows all of it from the piece that she presents. All her writing is composed of a lovely natural ability tempered by discipline and care for what she did: she writes exactly about people with an eye and ear trained by acute interest, amusement and affection for her subjects, and when you read her, it seems that there is no choice about what happens in her stories here were these people, and this is what occurred - you accept it as she offers it to you - with no desire to interfere or to judge (the main temptations provoked by less good work of this kind): but because she whets and satisfies the desire to be told something more, one reaches a point of curiosity about her. In the last piece one learns a great deal about her. This is the most interesting and impressive work of all, and only she, one feels, could have written it. It is her account of her three years’ experience of cancer, beginning with backache when she was in Java with her husband in 1954. From there the local diagnosis, flying back to America, the first operation with the ninety per cent chance of a total cure and the first year of uncertain convalescence which culminates in a recurrence of cancer and the certainty of death to be accepted (there is a wonderful account of her reaching this point and what it brought her).
In 1956 she had a third operation but when she came out of it with a strange nurse she knew that it had been useless and, when she was strong enough, flew to England to join her admirable husband. The last year of her life was spent mostly in London, furnishing the flat for her husband, feeling iller and iller and waiting to die. She says: ‘Sometimes we laughed, but death isn’t funny. When you are fatally ill the unspoken atmosphere in your house is unmanageable love. You yourself feel it for people, but also for things …’
In December her husband took her back to American for a visit to her family, but before she left England she visited a specialist who told her that she must have developed antibodies to fight her tumours. At the end of her account she says that some of the peace that came with her acceptance has gone, because there seemed to be a slight chance that she might live after all. She says: ‘You want to die well, not from the instinct for self-destruction but from the instinct for life and immortality. So you flip from a calm acceptance of death to a fight for life in an instant … in a sense they are one and the same.’
There is so much honesty and discovery in this record that there is something to be learned from it: it is unvarnished - she does not conceal or distort anything relevant to its point and she knows exactly what she wants to communicate because, among other things, she is an artist, and she gives throughout the account an impression of awareness of what was happening to her which can only be admired and loved.