Inspired by the events that occur after poets Robert Graves and Laura Riding leave Europe to spend a summer with a young American couple, this novel is told through the memoirs of a wizened recluse whose friendship with an enigmatic poet and husband-stealer ends in a tangle of divorce and madness.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Miranda Seymour is best known as a biographer, having written lives of Henry James, Robert Graves, and Bloomsbury beanpole (and patroness) Ottoline Morrell. In The Summer of '39, however, she takes the raw material of fact and turns it into disturbing, artful fiction. Her novel recycles a literary legend--the disastrous visit of Graves and Laura Riding to a young American couple shortly before the Second World War. But instead of serving up a merely scandalous roman à clef, the author has delivered an extraordinary spin on betrayal and manipulation.
Seymour's young Americans, Nancy and Chance Brewster, do indeed have an awful time with their guests (whom the author has rechristened Charles Neville and Isabel March). But Nancy, who narrates the novel, is no less intent on recalling the years before the British invasion. First we hear about her loveless childhood, during which she is sexually abused by her father. Then Nancy recounts her marriage to hapless literary wannabe Chance. Clearly their relationship is a tenuous one: he extracts money from her, she extracts glimmers of emotional strength from him (when, that is, he's not off on one of his mysterious trips). As if that weren't enough, the couple also gets involved with a psychological-cult leader, who sets the stage perfectly for the arrival of the houseguests from hell.
Nancy recalls the whole mess as an old woman, who's retelling her past as a way to exorcise it. She's acutely sensitive to her surroundings but incapable of understanding them, not to mention herself: "I still love the peace I get from routine, the neat, repetitive creation of order and lines. Apples lying tidily shrouded, six by twelve, gave me the same satisfaction I take in drilling a straight row of seed, or folding the corners under on a clean linen sheet. I like visible results." As we discover, she's also prone to inappropriate remarks and is busily cementing her reputation as a dislikable, aging oddball. Yet Seymour develops the back-and-forth narrative with an expert hand (if, occasionally, a heavy one in the metaphor department). The actual visit, which mounts to an eerie psychological assault on the entire family, is powerful piece of storytelling. And you thought you had the summertime blues! --Teri Kieffer
From Publishers Weekly
Novelist and biographer Seymour's inspiration for her fourth novel (following a biography of Robert Graves, Living on the Edge) comes from a notorious 1939 incident involving Graves and his then-companion, poet Laura Riding. As a result of the summer the two spent with Schuyler and Katharine Jackson, a young American couple, Jackson left his wife for Riding, and Katharine was institutionalized after attempting to strangle one of her daughters. Seymour's narrator is a Katharine Jackson-like character, who tells her story from the perspective of a reclusive old age. Nancy Parker grows up enduring her father's abuse and her mother's scorn; only her visits to her aunt and uncle at Point House in Falmouth, Mass., afford solace. On a trip to New York, she meets Chance Brewster, a promising young writer, literary impresario and founder of an obscure small press. After years in Greenwich Village and on New Jersey farms, always in close proximity to Bill and Annie Taylor, their closest friends, they end up at Point House, where Nancy, who has never entirely recovered from the trauma of her childhood and sensing herself out of place in the intellectual world she married into, finally feels safe. Gurdjieff and Edmund Wilson make appearances, but it is visionary poet Isabel March who has the greatest impact on the foursome. When Isabel and her lover, Charles Neville, move in with the Brewsters, Nancy allows the enigmatic woman to gradually take over her husband, poison her relationship with her children and push her over the edge into madness. Too late she learns that Isabel's mesmerizing obsession with truth in art masks her deceptive wiles. Although Isabel is not convincingly the charmer for whom men would die, the reverberations of her acts are powerful. In elegant, richly evocative prose, Seymour moves back and forth from Nancy's childhood to her old age, weaving a delicate net of narrative around an ominous core of darkness, in which personal demons are mixed up with a general dread of Hitler and the horrors to come. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Compelling read,
This review is from: The Summer of '39 (Hardcover)
I hadn't read enough about this book before I read it to know it was based on a "true" story, but I found it to be a compelling read that told of seemingly mundane events, all the while heightening my sense of dread. Good book. It made me want to read more about Robert Graves and Laura Riding.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
WHEN EVIL PREVAILS,
By Nancy Martin (Pennsylvania (orig. NY)) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Summer of '39 (Hardcover)
I wish there were half star ratings because I would really give this book 4 1/2 stars -- I reserve 5 stars for only the best of the best -- but I would be doing this book an injustice to only give it 4 stars and thus the 5 star rating. Prior to reading this book, I knew nothing of Robert Graves and his relationship with the poet Laura Riding. I'm glad I didn't because this book was such a surprise to me. It is so well-written and you turn each page with such dread knowing that something bad is going to happen but not knowing exactly what it is. Seymour's fictionalization of Grave's and Riding's visit to America during the summer of 1939 is masterful. She's taken the liberty of including some things that add to the understanding of each character. Throughout this book, I was behind Nancy Brewster 100% hoping above hope that all would turn out well for her. The author has done such a wonderful job of turning fact into fiction that I will always believe in my heart that this is truly the way it happened. I recommend reading this book to find out for yourself how powerful evil can be and if it can be humanly overcome.
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
mystery unsolved,
By graywyvern (dallas, texas) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Summer of '39 (Hardcover)
Finely written & empathetic fictional account of a mysterious episode in the lives of poets Laura (Riding) Jackson & Robert Graves, told from the point of view of the real-life Katherine Jackson, a woman whose husband, children, house & all possessions were divested from her in a single month by the aforesaid poet-houseguests. The author, a prominent biographer of Graves, obviously detests Riding (as did quite a few of her contemporaries); yet fails to create a convincing fictional character to account for these nearly unbelievable events. The book remains a kind of literary Gothic, with its subject no less shrouded in mystery than the principals (who contradict each other completely, or have categorically refused to talk about it) left it. Katherine, however, got the last laugh: she outlived them all, & recent biographers are tending to support her side.
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