asked.
“What’ this in reference to?” the woman said.
A secretary.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, “but I’m trying to locate some information about Anne Ridge, formerly Anne Boyd. The widow of the novelist Jonah Boyd.”
“Jonah Boyd!”
“Do you know him?”
“I should say I know him,” the woman said. “I’m his daughter.”
Her name—Jonah Boyd’ eldest daughter’ name—is Susan. She is now forty-eight years old, and lives in Tampa, where she works as a legal secretary. Long divorced; the mother of two teenage daughters. From her, I learned much more about Jonah Boyd, and about Anne.
Biography is a funny thing. Why some people get them and others don’t is beyond me. For instance, as I write this, two academics—two!—are preparing biographies of Ernest. (Why either thinks anyone is going to shell out thirty-five bucks for the life of an obscure Freudian is beyond me.) And yet there is no biography, and never has been, and probably never will be, of Jonah Boyd. Even on the Internet, only a few mentions of him come up, mostly paraphrases from an old entry in Contemporary Authors. The abyss of obscurity into which he has fallen is so deep that even the spindly arm of biography will not reach there: evidence, perhaps, that Ben’ assessment of his work was correct.
I have managed, in the intervening years, to learn more about him. He was born in 1924 in Abilene, Texas. He was the middle of three sons. In Abilene, he married his childhood sweetheart, Mary Burrows, straight out of high school. She was pregnant, as it happens, and gave birth to Susan on her nineteenth birthday. A few years later she had Bradley, and then Karen. Mary worked in a supermarket while Jonah went to college—Texas Tech. He did not graduate. The Korean War interrupted his studies. After he got back, he started writing, and was bold in his ambitions: Like Ben, he sent his stories only to the most prestigious magazines, to The New Yorker and Esquire and The Paris Review. Unlike Ben, he received encouraging replies. His career only really got started, though, when he attended a sort of literary conference in Dallas at which he met a famous New York editor, like him a drunk. They went out drinking together, and at the end of the evening, the editor offered Boyd a contract for a novel on the basis of a single sentence. (Susan can’t remember what the sentence was, only that it never made it into the final draft.) Boyd feared that when he got back to New York, the editor would renege on his drunken promise, but he didn’t, and a contract came through. In due course the novel, Dog Bone Soup, was published. This was in 1959.
Dog Bone Soup is based on Boyd’ experiences in Korea. It is a hard, grotesque, funny book, and it gained Boyd a modicum of admiration, if little money. To earn his keep, he was teaching composition at a junior college in Dallas. Mary had gone to work for the company that published the yellow pages. Both drank. Boyd slept in the afternoons, and stayed up until dawn writing. The novel on which he was at work was the one that he would later describe to Anne as having “gone down like a lead balloon.” It was titled The World in Miniature, and it took place in England and Italy during the Great War; let me assure you that, contrary to what Boyd himself believed, it is not by any stretch of the imagination a “lead balloon.” Yes, it is long and arcane and in some parts boring (this is probably why it wasn’t very successful); yes, in its juxtaposition of bloody battle scenes and moments of romantic proto-homosexual pathos, its weird tonal hybridizing of Louis L’Amour and Somerset Maugham, it jars the ear and the mind; yet for me it succeeds—mostly, I think, because this strange admixture of Texas swagger and bookish refinement embodies perfectly the spirit of Jonah Boyd, as I briefly knew him. He was a paradox in many ways. Thus Susan remembers that even though he often drank until he vomited in the kitchen sink, and beat his wife, he was always immensely careful with his mustache, which he modeled on Proust’ own. She recalls him letting her hold his mustache brush, run the bristles through the thicket of hair.
After The World in Miniature, Boyd went through a period of severe writer’ block, one that his drinking and the four/ four teaching load