My 35th completed title for the year is William Dean Howells's Indian Summer. This is yet another title brought to my attention (though I'd read his The Rise of Silas Lapham years ago) by Noel Perrin's (blessings be upon him) A Reader's Delight. I had been pleased by Lapham, but this book is better written, more artistically structured and composed. And, being set in Florence, it allows me to read no further Henry James in good conscience, at least for a while. Here's what Mark Twain had to say about this book, in a letter to Howells, as quoted in the Introduction: You are my only author; I am restricted to you; I wouldn't give a damn for the rest ... I have just read Part II of Indian Summer, & to my mind there isn't a waste line in it, or one that could be improved. I read it yesterday, ending with that opinion; & read it again to-day, ending with the same opinion emphasized ... It is a beautiful story & makes a body laugh all the time, & cry inside, & feel so old & so forlorn; & gives him gracious glimpses of his lost youth that fill him with a measureless regret, & build up in him a cloudy sense of his having been a prince, once, in some enchanted far-off land, & of being in exile now, & desolate---& lord, no chance ever to get back there again! That is the thing that hurts. Well, you have done it with marvelous facility -- & you make all the motives & feelings perfectly clear without analyzing the guts out of them, the way George Eliot does. While I'm not quite as wildly enthusiastic about the book, one can't argue too much with Twain. The book is leisurely for my tastes, and it is sometimes excruciating as it drags the main character, Colville, through the social awkwardness and emotional misbehavior of the story. But I'm not sure it wouldn't be a lesser book if it didn't let the tale play out just that way. The story, in brief, a retired American newspaperman, 40, returns to Florence, Italy, in an attempt to recapture his youth. He was jilted in Florence, years before. There he finds the girlfriend of the Jilter, now a widowed dowager with young daughter, in semi-permanent residence. She is also hosting Imogene, a debutante, who knows Colville's story, finds him charming, and the story of his lost love simply and enchantingly Romantic. So Imogene flirts with him, he with her, and they sorta become engaged. Neither of them is thinking straight. Neither of them is behaving well, and Madam is being ignored, as is the fact that she really loves Colville, herself. What makes this tale excruciating (and every detail is finely observed and told without fudging) is that when Mrs. Bowen, and Colville, and Imogene all have doubts, they try so hard to be noble and to obey the very, very, very fine points of manners and duties and etiquette, that they twist themselves all in knots and everybody betrays everybody else, in the midst of being so noble. And then, fortunately, there is a carriage accident in which Colville tries to save his young lady, and the young lady screws up. Everything sorts itself out, as best it can, after that. While this has to be read in the context of its time, the book really stands up as well as anything of James, and deserves to be better known. I'm glad I read it, even though it reminded me rather too much of situations I got myself in, years ago. Ouch. And I look forward to the other Howells titles that I have on the shelf, in Riverside Literature Series editions. One quotation from the book, illustrating Colville's humorous prattle. A repeated theme is that Americans have become very Puritanical in the last 20 years (meaning since 1860.) He and Mrs. Bowen have been discussing whether chaperoning is necessary for a proposed outing: ...She played to him on the piano some of the songs that were in fashion when they were in Florence together before. Imogene had never heard them; she had heard her mother speak of them. One or two of them were negro songs, such as very pretty young ladies used to sing without harm to themselves or offence to others; but Imogene decided that they were rather rowdy. "Dear me, Mrs. Bowen! Did you sing such songs? You wouldn't let Effie!" "No, I wouldn't let Effie. The times are changed. I wouldn't let Effie go to the theatre alone with a young gentleman." "The times are changed for the worse," Colville began. "What harm ever came to a young man from a young lady's going alone to the theatre with him?" CBsIP: The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, Ross E. Dunn Empress Orchid, Anchee Min De Re Militari, Flavius Vegetius Japanese Fortified Temples and Monasteries 710-1062, Stephen Turnbull |