My Heart for Hostage (Book Info)

Brief Book Description: Paris, 1919. A young American officer named Edward falls in love with a French girl named Germaine and tries to convince her to marry him. Described by New York Times as a “superbly written book, written perhaps as only a poet with and expert in the discipline of verse could write,” this overlooked 1942 novel by Pulitzer-winning poet Robert Hillyer (1895-1961) is now available as an ebook. This critical edition includes a critical study by Personville editor Robert Nagle and a sampling of Robert Hillyer’s poetry.
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Title: My Heart for Hostage (New Critical Edition)
Genre: Novel
Author: Robert Hillyer (with critical essay by Robert Nagle)
Original Publication Date: October, 1942
Word Count: 80,000 (290 pages)
Publisher: Personville Press in Houston, Texas
Ebook Publication Date: October, 2022
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Copyright: 2020. Cover art by Bethany Bethurem
Book Details
Read the book online || Read a Biographical Sketch of Hillyer || Read a Sample of Hillyer’s Poetry || Hear Robert Hillyer recite poetry by himself and other people
Paris, 1919. A young American officer named Edward falls in love with a French girl named Germaine and tries to convince her to marry him. But Germaine keeps avoiding the question. Germaine is sweet and lovely, but also opinionated and immature. She’s the perfect companion for Paris night life — and a master at posing as different people and telling white lies that amuse and confuse her boyfriend. She’s a poet … or is she? Is she too whimsical and crazy for a conventional-minded man like Edward? Or is Edward too narrow-minded? Maybe they are not really in love. Or maybe Edward’s suspicions are ruining everything. This beautiful and brooding novel explores the blossoming relationship and the doubts that threaten to derail it. Can they transform the initial spark into something more lasting?
Described by New York Times as a “superbly written book, written perhaps as only a poet with and expert in the discipline of verse could write,” this overlooked 1942 novel by Pulitzer-winning poet Robert Hillyer is now available as an ebook. This edition includes lots of bonus material: a long biographical portrait of the author, an examination of the novel’s major themes, a discussion of the novel’s ambiguities and parallels between the life of the protagonist and Hillyer himself (who volunteered for the ambulance corps during WW1 and shared a Paris flat with novelist John Dos Passos). This edition also includes a sampling of poetry Hillyer wrote while living in Europe.
Brad Bigelow of Neglected Books wrote about this novel: “… is perhaps the closest thing to a neglected masterpiece I’ve come across. I cannot recommend it too highly.” It’s a love story which combines the witty social commentary of an Oscar Wilde novel with the stylistic precision of Flaubert and the psychological realism of Edith Wharton or Henry James.
Reviews and Feedback
(Mark Schorer, New York Times ). The result is a sustained performance with brilliant passages of lyric beauty such as the unforgettable scenes of Brittany. It is like a fine lyric in still another sense, and this is that when one is finished with it, one is not finished with it: it sets up reverberations as various as they are many, charming and troubling, faint and sharp. The story hangs on, and the reader is haunted by what has been said and even more by what was not….Because of its unusual combination of qualities of idyl and reality, of charm and doom, of the human desire to love and our still persisting capacity to thwart that desire in ourselves — and these are the characteristics of all the great love stories of the world — My Heart for Hostage will be read again and again. (Read more)
(N.L. Rothman, Saturday Review). My Heart for Hostage is a nostalgic memoir of Paris, 1919, done in prose with all the effects of a lyric poem, all the haunting echoes and overtones, the distilled emotions, the evocative understatement. A poem could not have told this tale, but the tale, thus heightened by a poet, tells everything it wants to, and suggests more.
(Rose Feld). My Heart for Hostage is a slight story as novels go but it is a deeply touching one. All of the characters of the book come alive in Mr. Hillyer’s finely textured prose. The two young lovers are drawn with a tender sympathy and compassion for youth; the old people with a lustier stroke, and, at times, with satiric subtlety.
(Brad Bigelow of Neglectedbooks.com) My Heart for Hostage is the story of a romance doomed from the start — but not for the reason you might think at first. Edward Reynolds, freshly discharged from the U.S. Army after time in combat on the Western Front and afterward as a courier for the U.S. delegation at the Peace Conference, meets Germaine, a beautiful 19 year-old girl from Nantes enjoying her first freedom in Paris. Strongly attracted to each other from the start, they are soon sleeping together in what both take at first as nothing but a fling. Edward, son of a fine New England family, talks of marriage but Germaine brushes him off….
My Heart for Hostage could be written off as just another American in Paris story, but everything about this book takes it to a level that puts everything else in this genre in the shade (with perhaps the exception of Henry James’ The Ambassadors, a peak I haven’t attempted myself). From his social status, upbringing, education, and experience, Hillyer was already encountering France with considerable sophistication, but what’s refreshing here is his insistence on bringing things back to an immediate and personal level …
Hillyer wrote My Heart for Hostage, the second of his two novels, at a distance of over twenty years from his time in Paris and in the midst of another World War. From its dust jacket illustration, one can imagine that My Heart for Hostage was being aimed by Random House for a sentimental, mainly female audience, but in reality, this is a book that would have appealed to G.I.s if they’d made it past the title page. Hillyer’s soldiers carry some scars with them they little understand and can’t control. They find relief in sex and drink, and feel a distance between themselves and the folks back home they can’t quite express. And they have a sense that the only true relationships have to be founded on trust — which, unfortunately, their experiences have shown to be something not given lightly. But I suspect that few G.I.s ever got their hands on My Heart for Hostage, and so it soon slipped into obscurity: too late for the veterans of WWI, too early for the veterans of WWII. I hope it will not take another war for it to be rediscovered.
I’ve covered plenty of books well-deserving of rediscovery on this site. But if it’s not going too far out onto a limb, I have to say that My Heart for Hostage is perhaps the closest thing to a neglected masterpiece I’ve come across. I cannot recommend it too highly.
About the Authors
ROBERT HILLYER (1895-1961) was a U.S. poet who published 15 books of poetry, 2 novels and 2 books of criticism. He volunteered with the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps in France during World War 1 and worked as a diplomatic courier during the 1919 Paris peace conference after the war. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1934. Born in New Jersey, he taught at Harvard University, Trinity College, Kenyon College and University of Delaware. He is known for his traditional approach to poetry, classical poetic forms, pastoral themes and a rejection of Modernist innovations like free verse. (Read a biographical sketch of Hillyer and Robert Hillyer wikipedia page.
ROBERT NAGLE wrote the critical essay about Robert Hillyer and this novel. He is a fiction writer and literary critic living in Houston, Texas. He founded Personville Press. His essay collection, NONCRAPPY THINGS FROM MY BLOG will be published in late 2025 His monthly web column, Robert’s Roundup of Indie Ebook Deals publicizes outstanding and affordable fiction being published today.
