‘It all began with the weather defying me’
The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley
We have just passed the longest day of the year. Last week saw dire warnings about UV levels, pollen and sunstroke throbbing away in the news. Now, there is a breeze and cool, delicious rain is falling. I’ve written elsewhere about how I don’t run hot, about how winter is my favourite season. No one needs to warn me about the dangers of UV rays. Even when it’s blazing hot, I am more than happy to hide away and read a book, to wait until the day has cooled before I go outside. It isn’t even that I don’t like summer. Not really. I love its late nights as the light finally fades and the cool air arrives, and its early mornings with birdsong and peace. I love the promise of a good thunderstorm, and that intoxicating smell as rain hits hot earth. It’s so rarely sultry in England that even the discomfort of heat can feel like a pleasure.
This is when reading is about cool bedsheets on a hot afternoon, or the pages ruffling in the breeze as you seek out some welcome shade in the garden. I don’t think clearly when it’s hot, so it’s rarely a time for bold new ventures in reading. Instead, I return to things I have read and reread, and I seek out books that can share the heat with me. I want their elegiac sense of summer, and especially of childhood summers that are a place none of us can go back to (and sometimes a place that didn’t even exist). I want a hint of the difficulty and temperament that heat can bring and that I recognise in myself at this time of year even more than usual.
I’m starting with Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, not least because of its title. If you already know and love the Moomins and you haven’t yet come across this, you’ll find the same sharp, funny storytelling in spades. More a set of short stories than a novel, it starts on an ‘early, very warm morning in July’ and tells tales of Sophia and her grandmother, spending summer on an island that’s little more than a rock in the Gulf of Finland. ‘It was just the same long summer, always, and everything lived and grew at its own pace.’ Except that there are interruptions – visitors who don’t behave as Sophia wants them to – and upsets – the newcomer who puts brand-new ship’s lanterns above their door (‘ “It’s always like that at the beginning,” said Grandmother. “I suppose he’ll learn.” ’). And, eventually, there is the most wonderful description of how summer begins to end, and whenever I read it I long for autumn to come:
‘Every year, the bright Scandinavian summer nights fade away without anyone’s noticing. One evening in August you have an errand outdoors, and all of a sudden it’s pitch-black. A great warm, dark silence surrounds the house. It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstill; nothing withers, and autumn is not yet ready to begin. There are no stars yet, just darkness. The can of kerosene is brought up from the cellar and left in the hall, and the lamp is hung up on its peg outside the door.’
For the best evocation of childhood in summer, and all the dislocated oddness it can bring, I think it has to be L.P Hartley’s The Go-Between . It also has one of the best first lines in literature – ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ In staid Edwardian Norfolk, Leo has gone to stay with schoolfriend Marcus at Brandham Hall. Leo’s woollen clothes, agonising in the rising heat (‘by Monday Leo will have melted into butter’), are just one of the ways he doesn’t fit in at first. But as summer blazes on, and he starts to take messages for the beautiful Marion, Leo becomes the keeper of a dangerous secret, and he feels that his new identity is linked inextricably with the rising heat:
‘Not a drop of rain had fallen since I came to Brandham Hall. I was in love with the heat, I felt for it what a convert feels for his new religion. I was in league with it, and half believed that for my sake it might perform a miracle…without my being aware of it, the climate of my emotions had undergone a change.’
The heat finally breaks as the suspense breaks too, and the awful truth of the story comes out with ‘the indescribable smell of rain filling the air’.
My summer reading isn’t all fiction. If you want to go on a summer journey, go To the River with Olivia Laing. When a relationship ends, Laing sets out to walk the river Ouse in Sussex, from its source to the sea. She chooses it because it is the river in which Virginia Woolf drowned herself (so I suppose we are back at fiction, in a way, and also at cruel, sad fact). The book is beautiful, and also unstinting in its encounters with ugly reality (interior and exterior). Near Isfield on the Sussex Downs, Laing takes a swim in the river on a hot, hot day, and then lies in the grass, drying off,
‘and as I basked there a buzzard came up from behind the trees and worked its way overhead in a series of linking circles. The clouds were tightening up into cotton wool books, the precursor to a mackerel sky. A pheasant was coughing in the hedge, and the omnipresent wood pigeon slurred sleepily from the bridge. The present, the present. It never stops, no matter how weary you get. It comes unstintingly, as a river does, and if you aren’t careful, you’ll be swept off your feet. I should have warned the wood pigeon. It skimmed down to the bank, got tangled in a nettle, and toppled comically into the water, a masterclass in how not to fly.’
I think the summer author who takes the prize for me must be Henry James. It’s not so much that he writes well about summer, and weather (though he does do that). It’s more that he isn’t bedtime reading. You need to keep your wits about you with James, but to appreciate his sentences, you also need to slow your heart and your mind down, and wait, as you read, for his ways to creep up on you. The sentences are long. They are hard. You will lose your way, and, from time to time, almost your mind (a friend of mine joked that when he first started reading The Wings of the Dove, he thought he was having a stroke). James demands time, and the languid time of summer is somehow best.
In The Bostonians, sexual politics and social expectations are flooded by desire and confusion. Towards the end of the story, Basil Ransom, the handsome, ambitious, old-fashioned Southerner, travels to the coast in the summer when ‘the ripeness of summer lay upon the land’, when there is ‘a sweetness begotten of low horizons, of mild air, with a possibility of summer haze, of unregarded inlets where on August mornings the water must be brightly blue’. He is there to find Verena Tarrant, with whom he is in love. But Verena, an inspirational speaker about the rights of women, is loved, too, by Olive Chancellor. Ransom and Chancellor tussle for her, and the culmination of the tussle happens at the Cape, where the women are resting from their progressive labours: ‘He knew that the Bostonians had been drawn thither, for the hot weeks, by its sedative influence, by the conviction that its toneless air would minister to perfect rest… They wanted to live idly, to unbend and lie in hammocks.’
On ‘a day she was destined never to forget’, Olive walks on the shore, watching the boats ‘shifting in the breeze and the light’, and as the day turns to night, she knows that she has lost Verena to Ransom. The day fades, ‘bringing with it the slight chill, which, at the summer’s end, begins to mark the shortening days’, and ‘Olive’s imagination, hurried, with a bound, to the worst.’ Although the worst is not true and Verena has not drowned, the truth is even worse for Olive than the worst and she feels ‘only a wild personal passion, a desire to take her friend in her arms again on any terms, even the most cruel to herself’.
In The Portrait of a Lady, James takes what could be an ordinary literary heroine and does extraordinary things with her. Our view of her story starts on a summer afternoon, at tea in the garden of an English country house. Summer heat is benign here, even beneficent, but by the time Isabel Archer reaches Italy, heat begins to feel wrong, a reflection of the horrors in which she is about to become entangled. Agreeing to marry the curious, intriguing, monstrous Gilbert Osmond, Isabel goes one afternoon to meet his daughter, and sees, without knowing it, the web of rules and misery she is about to step into. ‘Papa left directions for everything,’ Pansy tells her. ‘I go to bed very early. When the sun goes off that side I go into the garden. Papa left strict orders that I was not to get scorched.’ When Isabel walks into the courtyard, Pansy says ‘I may go no further… I have promised papa not to go out of this door,’ and we know that the beauty of summer in Florence is no liberation for Isabel. I think one of the reasons I like it so much is that James seems suspicious of the easy virtue that heat and summer offer. No coincidence, I feel, that James gives Isabel her true freedom (‘As you love me, as you pity me, leave me alone!’) in an English summer again, but now in its cooler part, after a ‘cold, faint dawn’, ‘as she strolled again under the great oaks whose shadows were long upon the acres of turf’.
No one does regret like Henry James. He leaves us in every doubt about what the ‘right’ outcome should be, tugging us one way and then the other, to like and to despise, and to sympathise, all at the same time. His books are slow, and they are always, always worth it. They take root in you and, like a long summer, they have the power to change you forever.
