The Wife of Martin Guerre Read online

  Additional Praise for Janet Lewis and The Wife of Martin Guerre

  “One of the most significant short novels in English.”

  —Atlantic Monthly

  “When the literary history of the second millennium is written at the end of the third, in the category of dazzling American short fiction [Janet Lewis’s] Wife of Martin Guerre will be regarded as the 20th century’s Billy Budd and Janet Lewis will be ranked with Herman Melville.” —New York Times

  “Flaubertian in the elegance of its form and the gravity of its style.”

  —New Yorker

  “Janet Lewis brings the haunting qualities of fable to this novella, based on a legal case that attracted wide attention in 16th-century France and has continued to fascinate down through the years.”

  —Ron Hansen, Wall Street Journal

  “I found myself weeping. The calm detail, the observation of things that continue in nature despite our own vicissitudes, the underspoken humanity of the writing: it was a combination of these, and something magically beautiful in the choice of words besides—for Janet Lewis was a fine poet as well as novelist.”

  —Vikram Seth, Sunday Telegraph (London)

  “The Wife of Martin Guerre by Janet Lewis is one of the most resonant short novels I can remember.”

  —Evan S. Connell, Jr., Bookforum

  “One of the best short novels in English.”

  —Bruce Allen, Christian Science Monitor

  “Reading the three novels in a line, from The Wife of Martin Guerre to The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron, is a powerful experience. . . . In each there is a fully and vividly realized woman who finds herself twisting helplessly in the dilemmas posed by love and duty.”

  —Larry McMurtry, New York Review of Books

  The Wife of Martin Guerre

  Swallow Press books by Janet Lewis

  The Wife of Martin Guerre

  The Trial of Sören Qvist

  The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron

  Good-Bye, Son, and Other Stories

  Poems Old and New, 1918–1978

  Selected Poems of Janet Lewis

  The Wife of

  Martin Guerre

  Janet Lewis

  Introduction by Kevin Haworth

  Afterword by Larry McMurtry

  Swallow Press — Ohio University Press

  Athens, Ohio

  Swallow Press

  An imprint of Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

  www.ohioswallow.com

  © 1941, 1967 by Janet Lewis

  Introduction © 2013 by Swallow Press / Ohio University Press

  “The Return of Janet Lewis” by Larry McMurtry, originally published in The New York Review of Books. Copyright © 1998 by Larry McMurtry, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

  All rights reserved

  To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Swallow Press / Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at (740) 593-1154 or (740) 593-4536 (fax).

  Printed in the United States of America

  Swallow Press/Ohio University Press books are

  printed on acid-free paper ƒ™

  23 22 21 20 19 18 17 13 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lewis, Janet, 1899–1998.

  The wife of Martin Guerre / Janet Lewis ; introduction by Kevin Haworth ; afterword by Larry McMurtry.

  pages ; cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-8040-1143-3 (pb : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-8040-4053-2 (electronic)

  1. Guerre, Bertrande de Rols, active 1539–1560—Fiction. 2. Guerre, Martin, active 1539–1560—Fiction. 3. Impostors and imposture—Fiction. 4. France—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3523.E866W55 2013

  813'.52—dc23

  2013016158

  Introduction

  The Wife of Martin Guerre, Janet Lewis’s most celebrated novel, emerged from the gift of a good book from husband to wife. Sometime in the 1930s the renowned poet Yvor Winters gave his wife and fellow writer Lewis an old law book, Samuel March Phillips’s Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, thinking that she might find it helpful after she mentioned that she was having trouble with one of her plots.

  From that thoughtful writerly gift grew the three novels of Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, of which The Wife of Martin Guerre is by far the most famous. Already the author of one historical novel, The Invasion, Lewis was drawn to the story of Bertrande de Rols, married at age eleven to the young son of a powerful landowner. “One morning in January, 1539,” Lewis writes, “a wedding was celebrated in the village of Artigues.” From that simple opening line Lewis spins a short novel of astonishing depth and resonance, a sharply drawn historical tale that asks contemporary questions about identity and belonging, about men and women, and about an individual’s capacity to act within an inflexible system.

  Lewis’s plot closely follows the string of events cited in Phillips’s 1874 legal history. Because of a dispute with his father, ambitious Martin Guerre leaves his wife Bertrande and their young son, intending to return when he can fully claim his inheritance. He finally returns, eight years later, to a woman who has grown in maturity and in her sense of belonging to the world around her. Or does he? The man who comes walking down the road looks like Martin Guerre, knows things that Martin Guerre would know. But there is something in the way he speaks to his wife, a note of kindness, in fact, that makes Bertrande wonder. Is it Martin Guerre after all?

  From this question grows that most unusual of literary forms—a short novel that does its work so efficiently that it feels as substantial as a novel many pages longer. It is no surprise, then, that The Wife of Martin Guerre has drawn comparisons with the greatest short novels in American literature. “The 20th century’s Billy Budd,” the New York Times calls it.1 Larry McMurtry, no stranger to novels both short and long, writes in the New York Review of Books that Martin Guerre is a “masterpiece. . . . a short novel that can run with Billy Budd, The Spoils of Poynton, Seize the Day, or any other.”2 Every few years another writer or critic will weigh in, urging readers to “rediscover” Lewis as she has been rediscovered so many times before.

  So what is it that gives The Wife of Martin Guerre such continuing interest? Much of it is rooted in Lewis’s portrait of Bertrande, a woman who grows steadily in confidence as the novel progresses, and who possesses a fierce moral sense that guides her actions even at great personal cost. Lewis’s portrayal of the legal system, while fascinating in its own right, also acts to amplify the moral issues at play. The law operates around questions of evidence, oftentimes incomplete or circumstantial, which nonetheless must be resolved by absolute conclusions of guilt or innocence. At the same time, the law often fails to address what is right, or what a woman like Bertrande knows in her heart to be true.

  The strength of this conundrum has given The Wife of Martin Guerre a long life, extended by two popular film adaptations. The first film, a 1982 French version titled Le Retour de Martin Guerre, recognizes Lewis’s contribution to the story by giving her author’s credit. The second, a 1993 version titled Sommersby, resets the action to the American South during the upheaval of the Reconstruction period following the Civil War. Both films devote extended screen time to their famous male leads—Gerard Depardieu in the French version, Richard Gere in the American one—thus creating a story that is as much about the husband as it is about the wife. But Lewis felt that both the specific setting of The Wife of Martin Guerre and the focus on Bertrande’s decision making are critical parts of the novel’s essence. The strict Catholic morality of sixteenth-century France serves bo
th as a guiding force for Bertrande and as a prison; once she believes she has committed adultery, as Lewis notes, “her way was laid out for her.”3 At the same time, The Wife of Martin Guerre is much more than a simple morality play. Bertrande struggles on many levels—against the limited roles afforded to her as a woman, against her husband in both subtle and forceful ways, and finally with her own knowledge of the man standing in front of her.

  This close attention to an individual’s moral choices in the face of strange circumstance links The Wife of Martin Guerre with the two novels that follow in the Cases of Circumstantial Evidence series. Though each of the novels stands on its own, they remain united by their shared origins in the history of law, discovered by Lewis in the same legal casebook where she first found the story of Bertrande de Rols and Martin Guerre. The setting shifts to seventeenth-century Denmark in The Trial of Sören Qvist, which focuses on a devoted parson, albeit one with a harsh temper, who is accused of killing one of his workers. Again the law closes in on a man who may or may not be guilty, and again the characters struggle as much with their own consciences and the changing times as they do with the ambiguous legal facts in front of them. In The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron, Lewis returns to France, this time during the reign of Louis XIV. In this longest and in some ways most complex of the three novels, a bookbinder becomes enmeshed in a political drama that spirals out of control—the king is denounced in a pamphlet, leading to criminal charges—but the real crime is domestic, an adulterous affair that contributes to the tragedy as much as the public trial that follows.

  In each case Lewis focuses her rigorous but sympathetic eye on those trapped by the circumstances, particularly the women burdened by a system that gives most of its power to men. In his retrospective on Lewis’s career that appeared in the New York Review of Books, written the year of Lewis’s death, Larry McMurtry declares, “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 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.”4

  Years after the initial publication of The Wife of Martin Guerre, Lewis continued to investigate the tragedy of Bertrande, consulting additional sources as they found their way to her. Likewise the novel itself traveled through several publishers and editions before finding a permanent home with Alan Swallow, founder of Swallow Press and longtime champion of Lewis’s husband Winters and other contemporary writers. Swallow claimed that in all his years selling The Wife of Martin Guerre and recommending it to friends, he “never found one who didn’t admire the work.”5 As for the truth behind the lives of Bertrande and Martin, Lewis herself notes simply, “In the end, many questions remain unanswered.”6 It is no wonder that novels of such enduring mystery could come from a woman with a long and fascinating life of her own.

  The Life and Legacy of Janet Lewis

  Janet Lewis was born in Chicago in 1898 and attended high school in Oak Park, where she and schoolmate Ernest Hemingway both contributed to the school literary magazine. Like Hemingway, she spent many youthful summers “up in Michigan,” a place that figures prominently in her short stories, much as it does in his. But whereas her more famous classmate is associated with hard living, literary stardom, and an early, self-inflicted death, Janet Lewis embodies a very different path.

  She attended the University of Chicago, where she majored in French, and after her graduation left for Paris (“without waiting to pick up her diploma,” one biographer notes), residing there for six months, not quite long enough to become enmeshed in the expatriate literary scene with which the city is so strongly associated.7 Shortly after returning home she contracted tuberculosis, the disease that felled so many artists and nearly killed her as well. (Many years later, she told an interviewer, “There was a moment, be cheerful or die. You take your choice.”)8

  Despite the life-threatening illness in her youth, she went on to live an impressive ninety-nine years, most of those years in the same house in the hills of Northern California where she and her husband, the poet Yvor Winters, raised their two children. Her ability to balance her domestic life—by all accounts, she enjoyed a remarkably happy marriage—with decades of literary output gives her an image that is simultaneously traditional and feminist. In her book Silences, Tillie Olsen cites Lewis as a clear example of a talented woman writer whose literary production was inhibited by her obligations to family and to a more famous husband. Lewis acknowledged the challenges of balancing her familial responsibilities with her writing. “I do think those women who have turned out an enormous amount of work were generally not women who had children,” she allowed in an early interview.9 But at the same time she publicly and explicitly rejected Olsen’s characterization of her, perhaps unwilling to see her family and her writing in conflict. “Being a writer has meant nearly everything to me beyond my marriage and children,” she told an interviewer in 1983.10 The remark is Lewis distilled. She foregrounds her marriage and her family. Beyond that, everything is about her writing.

  As a poet, she met early success, publishing a four-poem sequence called “Cold Hills” in Poetry in 1920, before she had even finished college. A couple of years later, she moved into prose as well, publishing her first story in another influential magazine, The Bookman. Her first book of poems, The Indian in the Woods, was published in 1922 by the short-lived imprint Manikin, whose entire publishing history consists of three books: one by Lewis, one by William Carlos Williams, and one by Marianne Moore. It was just the beginning of a lifetime of close association with literary greatness, both personally and professionally.

  A decade after her first book of poems, a period during which she got married and she and Winters both recovered from tuberculosis, she published her first novel, The Invasion, her first foray into historical fiction. Subtitled A Narrative of Events Concerning the Johnston Family of St. Mary’s, it is set in the Great Lakes region and tells the story of an Irish immigrant who marries an Ojibway woman.

  Almost ten years after that, she published her acknowledged masterpiece, The Wife of Martin Guerre, marrying her eye for history with the peculiarities of the legal system that would give her the platform from which to explore powerful questions of morality and personal responsibility that fuel the three Cases of Circumstantial Evidence.

  To European critics, Lewis seems quintessentially American. To American critics, her fondness for European settings leads to comparisons as expected as Flaubert and as unusual as the Provençal writer Jean Giono. The New York Times compared her to Melville and to Stendhal. Another critic sees her, based on The Invasion and some of her short stories, as a definitive voice in Western regional writing. In some ways, Lewis’s writing remains elastic, allowing other writers to see in her a powerful reflection of their own interests. Novelists claim her novels as her best work. Poets are drawn again and again to her diverse body of poetry, which attracts new requests for reprinting in anthologies every year. In short, as with all the best writers, her work and her decades-long career defy simple categorization or comparisons.

  Despite Lewis’s resistance to easy definitions, her many literary admirers, including Theodore Roethke, Wallace Stegner, and so many more, agree on two things: that her writing, particularly the poems and the historical novels, is first-class; and that she deserves a much wider readership. It is for exactly this reason that Swallow Press has created the present edition.

  But if Lewis herself felt neglected as an author, there is no evidence of it. In person and in published comments, she championed graciousness. She sent thank-you notes to our publishing offices here in Ohio upon receiving her yearly royalty check. Late into her nineties, she charmed literary pilgrims who found their way to her house in Los Altos, serving them tea and apologizing for the self-described “laziness” that led her to sle
ep until the late hour of 8:30 in the morning, and for the periods of quiet introspection that meant she would sometimes go for many years without publishing new work, only to pick up again in startling new directions, be it in writing opera libretti (she wrote six, including adaptations of her own Wife of Martin Guerre and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans), or in poems quite different from the Imagist work with which she began her career.

  Her disarming modesty, about her own character as well as her writing, is the most constant theme in interviews and profiles. This exchange, in the Southern Review, is characteristic:

  Interviewers: Many writers and critics—Evan Connell and Donald Davie, to name a couple—admire your work greatly. Yet, you are not widely known. What is your reaction to this?

  Lewis: I think I’ve had as much recognition as I need and probably as much as I deserve.11

  She stated that her goal in writing her Cases of Circumstantial Evidence was equally modest: to stay as close to the history as possible and to let the characters and the facts speak for themselves. She demonstrated a similar sense of duty to her husband, the man who gave her the book that made these novels possible. For the thirty years that she outlived him, she kept their home in Los Altos much the way that it had been when he was alive, with his name on the mailbox and his writing shed maintained as if he might return, any moment, to use it.

  It would have been impossible to predict the success of this modest professor’s daughter, born at the very end of the nineteenth century. But her first poem in Poetry, which appeared at the height of modernism and when she was only twenty years old, seems to anticipate both her long life and the way her work stands on its own, just outside the literary canon. She writes,

  I have lived so long

  On the cold hills alone . . .

  I loved the rock