Cases of Circumstantial Evidence. Janet Lewis

      Introduction

      The three Janet Lewis novels that together make up Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, gathered here in one edition for the first time, were originally published over the course of almost two decades. But together and separately, they explore themes consistent with their author’s long and notable career. From the French countryside of The Wife of Martin Guerre, the most famous of Lewis’s novels, to The Trial of Sören Qvist, drawn from the tragic story of a parson well known in its native Denmark, to The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron, set in Louis XIV’s Paris, the three novels range widely in their historical settings but share essential questions of devotion, curiosity, and above all, the troubled intersection of the law and human morality.

      Lewis’s Cases of Circumstantial Evidence novels build on her previous writing, particularly that of her first novel, The Invasion, set in America during the early nineteenth century and based on stories she heard in Michigan as a girl. In The Invasion, Lewis hewed closely to actual historical events and people for the skeleton on which to build her world—a pattern she would follow in all her historical writing. Her allegiance to the real-life people and events was not born of mere convenience; the reclaiming and redeeming of seemingly minor figures in history, particularly women, was a key component of Lewis’s interest in writing. Part of the pleasure in reading these books is to discover why people act as they do within the complexities of their circumstances. “You know what happens and to whom it happens,” Lewis explains in an interview with the Southern Review, speaking of the plots of her books and their basis in actual events. “But why it happens, you don’t know until you can get inside these people.”1

      The characters and the respective legal entanglements of the three novels collected here are inspired most directly by Samuel March Phillips’s 1874 legal casebook Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, given to Lewis by her husband, the poet Yvor Winters. But Lewis may also have been motivated by a case closer to home: the 1933 trial of David Lamson, a sales manager for Stanford University Press, for the murder of his wife in their home in Palo Alto. The Lamson trial galvanized the Stanford community of which Lewis and Winters were a part, with Yvor Winters taking an active role in Lamson’s defense through both public advocacy and consultations with Lamson’s lawyers. With no witness to the crime, the case hinged on numerous readings of circumstantial evidence, from blood spatter to furniture layout to rumors of an affair. (Lamson was initially convicted but was later freed after multiple trials and appeals.2) During that time the Phillips casebook made its way into the Lewis/Winters household, possibly as research for Lamson’s defense. A few years later, Lewis began work on The Wife of Martin Guerre.

      Of the three novels, Martin Guerre remains the best known, widely admired for its power and its concision. Writers such as Evan S. Connell (who called it “one of the greatest short novels”3) and Larry McMurtry (“a short novel that can run with Billy Budd, The Spoils of Poynton, Seize the Day, or any other”4) have placed the book alongside the finest examples of the form. Over the years, the other two novels have found their champions as well. Of The Trial of Sören Qvist, Lewis scholar Fred Inglis writes, “Probably it is the most perfect of Janet Lewis’ novels, and among the most perfect of any novels.”5 Another Lewis scholar, Donald Davie, claims The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron as his favorite, lauding the book for its combination of precise language and multiple layers of plot and calling it a “consummate performance.”6 The diversity of the three books emerges from these competing claims, even though the novels share a common focus and source of inspiration. Collected here in one volume for the first time, they represent a distinguished writer at the height of her imaginative powers.

      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