Dedicated to Valentine Ackland, Summer Will Show was the first novel Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote after the two women had met and fallen in love. It is a sort-of historical novel, although – as in the two other historical novels of hers I have read, After the Death of Don Juan and The Corner That Held Them – it is unusual for a historical novel. It is written in four ‘movements’ and in a decidedly modernist manner – the action is entirely from the perspective of one character, Sophia Willoughby; the characters are fluid and mysterious; there is little historical detail, just enough to locate the novel in 1848, a vinaigrette hurled here, a fashionable bonnet pawned there. In fact, I had to look up the 1848 revolution in France because there is absolutely no info-dumping in this novel.
(Barricades rue Saint-Maur, Paris, June 1848; found here)
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At the beginning of the novel Sophia Willoughby, young and beautiful, is the mother to two young children and heiress to the estate of Blandamer. Unfortunately, her husband Frederick has taken up with Minna Lemuel:
A byword, half actress, half strumpet; a Jewess; a nonsensical creature bedizened with airs of prophecy, who trailed across Europe with a tag-rag of poets, revolutionaries, musicians and circus-riders snuffing at her heels [...]
and lives with Minna in Paris on an income Sophia provides for him. Sophia’s children are delicate and she takes them to be swung over the lime kiln, a treatment she believes has been responsible for her own good health but which causes their deaths. Until now, Sophia’s life has had purpose, to manage Blandamer, breed and pass on the estate, she has been a link in a chain. Now her life is without purpose. Clearly the solution is to breed more heirs, so Sophia sets off for Paris and Frederick, whom she expects to do his duty. However, she arrives in time for the overthrowing of the French king Louis Philippe in February 1848 and, searching for Frederick, finds herself in Minna’s apartment during a party at which Minna is telling a story:
At that moment the slowly flickering glance touched her, and rested. It showed no curiosity, only a kind of pondering attention. Then, as though in compliance, Minna’s large supple hands gently caressed themselves together in the very gesture of her thought. Sophia started slightly. The glance, mournfully numbering, moved on. But answering Sophia’s infinitesimal start of surprise there had been a smile – small, meek, and satisfied, the smile of a dutiful child.
In my post on Voices from Fairyland we saw that STW’s poems found a way of speaking about a love which could not be spoken about, lesbian love. And so in this novel STW is actually quite circumspect. It is both abundantly clear that Sophia and Minna fall in love and yet at the same time if you were wilful you could read it as concerning a close friendship. Sophia feels, her emotions fluctuate, through her we experience them too; but she is not given to romanticism and her expressions of love tend to take a practical turn such as managing finances, shopping or comforting.
The story which Minna is telling when Sophia first meets her is a story of her childhood, in Lithuania, and it is a story of poverty and violence, a pogrom of the Jews. Later she tells Sophia a little more about her youth, again a tale of cruelty and penury. Her background is as different from Sophia’s as it could be; and so are her philosophies of life. She is an artist, without youth or beauty; she is an excellent thief, ‘magnanimous and unscrupulous, fickle, ardent, and interfering’. She is Jewish, a complete outsider. Most of all, she is a liar but one whose lies and stories contain a greater truth than any fidelity to facts could provide. Her improvidence and generosity counter Sophia’s hereditary avarice and soon Sophia finds a sort of exhilaration in having to scrabble for money and sing for her supper (she sings hymns in the street, pretending to be an escaped Protestant nun).
Sophia is drawn into the shabby, artistic world of the revolutionaries by her love for Minna; it is only gradually that she rejects the exploitative system from which she had until that moment profited. The exploitation is of peasants, workers and former slaves. Blandamer, so bucolic and ordered, prettifies this repression, in contrast to the dirty, populated city of ideas that is Paris. The political philosophy of the novel is supplied by the Communist Ingelbracht. Ingelbracht distinguishes between ‘true’ revolutionaries and revolutionaries like Minna, romantic, undisciplined and doomed to one grand gesture only. Sophia he characterises as a bourgeois hanger-on and a danger to the movement. But at the end of the novel, Sophia sits alone reading Ingelbracht’s tract, penniless, surely herself now a true revolutionary.
(Chettle House, Dorset, from here; perhaps Blandamer looked a bit like this)
Politics is central to the novel, as it is in After the Death of Don Juan, but this is a wonderful book because of the way that it is written, the light touch of Sophia’s particular gaze and responses, the dispassionate air, the patter of conversation, the comedy and affection beside the pain. It has great charm and the characters, even Frederick and wicked old Léocadie, have great charm too. Trying to discuss it makes me realise how leaden my writing is and how much better it is to lay a quote at your feet to sample – this is a conversation between Sophia and Minna, when Sophia has returned to Minna to find her in deep poverty:
‘You would never believe, Sophia, how filthily that Natalia kept everything. My beautiful dish-cloths all rolled up in dirty balls, my china broken, verdigris on the coffee pot ... she would have poisoned me if I had kept her a day longer.’
‘Was that the servant who ate pickles because she had known so many sorrows?’
‘Ate pickles? She engulfed them. She drank the brandy, she stole the linen, she was in league with the concierge, she lowered down bottles of wine to him from the balcony, she had the soul of a snake, the greed of a wolf, the shamelessness of a lawyer. [...] And after she had goneI found a monkey’s tail in the rubbish-bin.’
‘A monkey’s tail?’
‘A monkey’s tail. Judge for yourself if she was depraved or no.’ [...]
‘I suppose,’ [Sophia] said, thoughtlessly voicing her thought, ‘it’s because you’re so patently a liar.’
‘A liar? I a liar, my lovely one? Alas, I am incapable of lies. I am a poor recounter of stories only, I cannot make them up.’
And she flipped the dusters out of the window [...]
‘Was it from this balcony,’ enquired Sophia, ‘that the wine was lowered?’
Minna feigned inattention to this lure.
‘I would lay down my life for the truth,’ she added serenely.
As ever, the last STW I read is always my favourite STW, until the next one...