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Jan. 23rd, 2017 12:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI just finished reading Sylvia Townsend Warner's Summer Will Show -- a deeply weird, depressing, idealistic, fascinating, occasionally horrible book. I think I loved it but I don't know at all whether I feel OK telling anybody else to read it, so I'm just going to talk about it and we'll see where that gets us.
Summer Will Show -- set in 1848 but written in 1936, and if you read it you will not forget it was written in 1936 -- focuses on Sophia Willoughby, a pragmatic, stoical, narrow-minded, extremely upper-class Englishwoman who has banished her philandering husband and is engaged in raising her two children on her well-ordered estate.
Sophia is very competent at fulfilling her role but feels deeply trapped and frustrated by every aspect of it, including being a mother. She hates having to worry about her sickly children and all the things that could conceivably kill them; she dreams of retreating to a cottage and doing things that it would never conceivably be allowable for her to do, like chopping her own damn wood. Obviously it is nonetheless awful when within the first forty pages or so, both of her children catch smallpox and die.
At a loss for purpose and next steps, and maybe not exactly in her clearest state of mind, Sophia decides to go to Paris and demand that her husband get her pregnant again so she can at least have something to do with the rest of her life. She happens to land right at the start of the February Revolution
While searching for her husband, Sophia accidentally wanders into the house of her husband's mistress, Minna Lemuel, who is everything that Sophia has been taught to disdain - middle-aged, plain, impractical, attention-seeking, melodramatic, Bohemian, an artist, and perhaps most significantly Jewish and not white (because it is 1848 or rather 1936 and in this book to be Jewish is very much to be not white; many, many adjectives are spent on Minna's "milk-coffee" skin and strongly Semitic features). And indeed Sophia finds Minna incredibly frustrating! She can't stop thinking about how frustrating she is! She listens to Minna tell a compelling and performative story about a pogrom of her childhood which features Symbolic River Thaws in it, and subsequently stalks angrily through the streets of Paris, thinking about how she wants to just -- grab Minna and hold her in a river until she can MAKE BETTER METAPHORS ABOUT RIVERS! Ugh!
Meanwhile, Sophia's husband Frederick is attempting reconciliation. Sophia almost allows herself to go along with this until she discovers that Minna, in the aftermath of the February revolution, is now practically penniless. Sophia subsequently finds herself storming out in order to provide Minna with a cash donation; Minna immediately dumps the cash donation into the Free Poland box instead; Sophia moves into Minna's apartment into obliquely-described-to-get-past-the-censors Bohemian lesbian revolutionary bliss!
Although, of course, despite the fact that Sophia is happier than she has ever been, of course it is not actually bliss. Minna and all her Bohemian artist friends are starving and so are all the workers they want so earnestly to help, things are not getting better, the next revolution is coming and will be bloodier, and solid English pragmatic-minded Sophie considers it obvious that they will all be dead in six months; she simply cannot see a way out of it. Although she is, technically, rich, she has no way of getting money, because Frederick is not very happy about his proper Victorian wife's surprise adoption of a life motto of "if your husband cheats on you, steal his girl", and has asserted his ability to cut her off -- and the satisfaction of punching Frederick in the face (and oh it is so VERY satisfying when Sophia just straight-up punches him in the face) does not, actually, help with their long-term survival.
Sophia is not romantic, and, despite the fact that it is a lesbian revolutionary love story, neither is the book. Despite how much she loves Minna, Sophia is very determined not to be seduced by the revolution. She notes clinically everything that is foolish and ridiculous and pointless about it; her narrative voice is ironic, often dryly funny, often prejudiced, often cruel. She is constantly infuriated by how impractical everyone is, how little hope she can see for anything to be of any use -- and at the same time she cannot help but become aware of the deep injustices of the world, how necessary it is for things to change, and drastically. It's double vision; she can't believe in the revolution, and she can't not believe in it.
So there's all this and ... honestly, I love all of this, even with the weird Jewish exoticism. It's a weird book to read and not necessarily an easy one and certainly not an optimistic one, but I love it and am glad to have read it now, in 2017, to watch Sylvia Townsend Warner, a queer woman volunteering in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, grappling with all her complicated feelings about revolutionary politics through the medium of Sophia Willoughby, a queer woman grappling with all her complicated feelings about revolutionary politics in 1848.
But, also, there is Caspar. As much as I would like to end here, I have got to talk about Caspar.
So Sophia has a young illegitimate mixed-race cousin, Caspar, whom she is responsible for arranging schooling for. Caspar turns up while Sophia's children are still alive and proceeds to be better than them at everything, earning the adoration of Sophia's son and the resentment of everybody else in the house. Sophia is charmed by him, in a deeply racist and condescending sort of way; nonetheless, she deposits him in a good British boarding school despite a vague sense that this might not turn out very well. Exit Caspar.
Two-thirds of the way through the book, Caspar turns up abruptly at Sophia and Minna's apartment seeking asylum, because, SURPRISE!, the good British boarding school was not a healthy place for a young black child. After his experiences, he is no longer a nice, charming kid; he is emotionally damaged and difficult to live with, fawns on Sophia, but is rude to Minna and all of their friends. Sophia feels guilty about her part in creating his trauma, but also does not like him, does not want him, and cannot wait to get rid of him. She gets Frederick to send him to another school. Instead, Frederick enlists him in the National Guard. This story turns out very badly for everyone.
Nobody thinks Sophia is behaving appropriately towards Caspar, even Sophia. This does not make it any more comfortable to read. Almost as awful as the racism is the way that when post-abuse Caspar appears in the back half of the book Sophia's first appalled thought is to write him off as "spoiled" -- there's nothing to be done for him anymore. Minna disagrees, I'm pretty sure the book disagrees, but ... I mean, all of this still happens, and for all of the gradual broadening of Sophia's mind, she never really does quite get around to seeing Caspar as an actual human person worthy of consideration and care; and since we spend all book in Sophia's always-quite-racist head, neither really does the book. Sylvia Townsend Warner, was this subplot really necessary? I am going to come down on this as a hard no.
Summer Will Show -- set in 1848 but written in 1936, and if you read it you will not forget it was written in 1936 -- focuses on Sophia Willoughby, a pragmatic, stoical, narrow-minded, extremely upper-class Englishwoman who has banished her philandering husband and is engaged in raising her two children on her well-ordered estate.
Sophia is very competent at fulfilling her role but feels deeply trapped and frustrated by every aspect of it, including being a mother. She hates having to worry about her sickly children and all the things that could conceivably kill them; she dreams of retreating to a cottage and doing things that it would never conceivably be allowable for her to do, like chopping her own damn wood. Obviously it is nonetheless awful when within the first forty pages or so, both of her children catch smallpox and die.
At a loss for purpose and next steps, and maybe not exactly in her clearest state of mind, Sophia decides to go to Paris and demand that her husband get her pregnant again so she can at least have something to do with the rest of her life. She happens to land right at the start of the February Revolution
While searching for her husband, Sophia accidentally wanders into the house of her husband's mistress, Minna Lemuel, who is everything that Sophia has been taught to disdain - middle-aged, plain, impractical, attention-seeking, melodramatic, Bohemian, an artist, and perhaps most significantly Jewish and not white (because it is 1848 or rather 1936 and in this book to be Jewish is very much to be not white; many, many adjectives are spent on Minna's "milk-coffee" skin and strongly Semitic features). And indeed Sophia finds Minna incredibly frustrating! She can't stop thinking about how frustrating she is! She listens to Minna tell a compelling and performative story about a pogrom of her childhood which features Symbolic River Thaws in it, and subsequently stalks angrily through the streets of Paris, thinking about how she wants to just -- grab Minna and hold her in a river until she can MAKE BETTER METAPHORS ABOUT RIVERS! Ugh!
Meanwhile, Sophia's husband Frederick is attempting reconciliation. Sophia almost allows herself to go along with this until she discovers that Minna, in the aftermath of the February revolution, is now practically penniless. Sophia subsequently finds herself storming out in order to provide Minna with a cash donation; Minna immediately dumps the cash donation into the Free Poland box instead; Sophia moves into Minna's apartment into obliquely-described-to-get-past-the-censors Bohemian lesbian revolutionary bliss!
Although, of course, despite the fact that Sophia is happier than she has ever been, of course it is not actually bliss. Minna and all her Bohemian artist friends are starving and so are all the workers they want so earnestly to help, things are not getting better, the next revolution is coming and will be bloodier, and solid English pragmatic-minded Sophie considers it obvious that they will all be dead in six months; she simply cannot see a way out of it. Although she is, technically, rich, she has no way of getting money, because Frederick is not very happy about his proper Victorian wife's surprise adoption of a life motto of "if your husband cheats on you, steal his girl", and has asserted his ability to cut her off -- and the satisfaction of punching Frederick in the face (and oh it is so VERY satisfying when Sophia just straight-up punches him in the face) does not, actually, help with their long-term survival.
Sophia is not romantic, and, despite the fact that it is a lesbian revolutionary love story, neither is the book. Despite how much she loves Minna, Sophia is very determined not to be seduced by the revolution. She notes clinically everything that is foolish and ridiculous and pointless about it; her narrative voice is ironic, often dryly funny, often prejudiced, often cruel. She is constantly infuriated by how impractical everyone is, how little hope she can see for anything to be of any use -- and at the same time she cannot help but become aware of the deep injustices of the world, how necessary it is for things to change, and drastically. It's double vision; she can't believe in the revolution, and she can't not believe in it.
So there's all this and ... honestly, I love all of this, even with the weird Jewish exoticism. It's a weird book to read and not necessarily an easy one and certainly not an optimistic one, but I love it and am glad to have read it now, in 2017, to watch Sylvia Townsend Warner, a queer woman volunteering in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, grappling with all her complicated feelings about revolutionary politics through the medium of Sophia Willoughby, a queer woman grappling with all her complicated feelings about revolutionary politics in 1848.
But, also, there is Caspar. As much as I would like to end here, I have got to talk about Caspar.
So Sophia has a young illegitimate mixed-race cousin, Caspar, whom she is responsible for arranging schooling for. Caspar turns up while Sophia's children are still alive and proceeds to be better than them at everything, earning the adoration of Sophia's son and the resentment of everybody else in the house. Sophia is charmed by him, in a deeply racist and condescending sort of way; nonetheless, she deposits him in a good British boarding school despite a vague sense that this might not turn out very well. Exit Caspar.
Two-thirds of the way through the book, Caspar turns up abruptly at Sophia and Minna's apartment seeking asylum, because, SURPRISE!, the good British boarding school was not a healthy place for a young black child. After his experiences, he is no longer a nice, charming kid; he is emotionally damaged and difficult to live with, fawns on Sophia, but is rude to Minna and all of their friends. Sophia feels guilty about her part in creating his trauma, but also does not like him, does not want him, and cannot wait to get rid of him. She gets Frederick to send him to another school. Instead, Frederick enlists him in the National Guard. This story turns out very badly for everyone.
Nobody thinks Sophia is behaving appropriately towards Caspar, even Sophia. This does not make it any more comfortable to read. Almost as awful as the racism is the way that when post-abuse Caspar appears in the back half of the book Sophia's first appalled thought is to write him off as "spoiled" -- there's nothing to be done for him anymore. Minna disagrees, I'm pretty sure the book disagrees, but ... I mean, all of this still happens, and for all of the gradual broadening of Sophia's mind, she never really does quite get around to seeing Caspar as an actual human person worthy of consideration and care; and since we spend all book in Sophia's always-quite-racist head, neither really does the book. Sylvia Townsend Warner, was this subplot really necessary? I am going to come down on this as a hard no.
no subject
Date: 2017-01-23 07:22 am (UTC)"Rocks fall, everybody dies" very badly or "Rocks fall, the mixed-race kid who is kind of a narrative cipher and the weirdly exoticized Jewish woman die and our English protagonist is left alone to contemplate her life" very badly or some other, more metatextual kind of very badly?
I have a copy of Summer Will Show; I never got around to reading it before it got packed up with the rest of my books, and due to the vagary of the packing system came out of a box about a week ago. Hestia has been persistently knocking it off its place on the shelf, so it has been on my mind. I am almost certainly still interested in reading it; I'm just curious what I need to brace against, if that makes sense.
no subject
Date: 2017-01-23 01:35 pm (UTC)Barricades fall, Caspar is directly and knowingly responsible for Minna being maybe dead (but possibly she survived and Sophia will find her again! unclear!), Sophia is subsequently directly and knowingly responsible for Caspar being maybe dead (and maybe he also survived but probably not and either way Sophia will most likely never see him again! unclear!), and Sophia is indeed pretty much the only person who is for-sure not dead, although Caspar stuff aside this doesn't actually bug me given that the book is quite conscious about the fact that it has done this; the only reason Sophia survives is that she has somehow managed to hang onto her nice bonnet throughout the whole thing, and the National Guard chivalrously refuses to firing-squad a nice upper-class white lady, and she is SO PUT OUT ABOUT IT.
"I cannot consent to the death of a woman."
"Death of a woman!" she cried out furiously. "Death of a woman! And how many women are dead already, and how many more will be, with your consent and complaisance? Dead in besieged towns, and towns taken by storm. Dead in insurrections and massacres. Dead of starvation, dead of the cholera that follows starvation, dead in childbed, dead in the workhouse and the hospital for venereal diseases. You are not the man to boggle at the death of a woman."
It seemed to her, and she was glad, that she had screamed this out like a virago of the streets.
But with a bow he reasserted,
"I cannot consent to the death of a lady."
Bitterly humiliated, she found herself taken out of the rank of the doomed.
no subject
Date: 2017-01-23 08:09 pm (UTC)Okay, that sounds great in a bitterly ironic well-documented double-standard kind of way.
no subject
Date: 2017-01-24 04:48 am (UTC)"I cannot consent to the death of a lady."
Bitterly humiliated, she found herself taken out of the rank of the doomed.
Oh, ouch. So much ouch.
I suspect this one isn't going on my TBR, but I loved reading your review.
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Date: 2017-01-23 10:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-01-23 01:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-01-23 03:00 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2017-01-24 01:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-01-25 02:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-01-23 09:09 pm (UTC)"But you will stay?"
"I will stay if you wish it."
It seemed to her that the words fell cold and glum as ice-pellets. Only beneath the crust of thought did her being assent as by right to that flush of pleasure, that triumphant cry.
"But of course," said Minna a few hours later, thoughtfully licking the last oyster shell, "we must be practical."
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Date: 2017-01-24 01:27 am (UTC)Thank you! That is definitely nearer to a sex scene than I thought might happen. :D
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Date: 2017-01-23 05:25 pm (UTC)On a scale of 1 to 24601, how much is this going to be like if Mary Renault wrote Les Mis fanfic with an f/f Enjolras/Grantaire?
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Date: 2017-01-24 12:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-01-23 09:16 pm (UTC)This was maybe my problem with the book. I wanted more feeling! Like, if you're going to abandon your previous life for a lesbian love story in revolutionary Paris, there's got to be something that draws you to do that, you know? Also, I am all for nuanced and critical views of revolutions, but somehow the book did not grip me as much as The Dispossessed does in that regard. Maybe it's just that Sophia's personality does not click with mine.
no subject
Date: 2017-01-24 12:57 am (UTC)But I also didn't have a problem with her distancing, I generally felt like Sophia was a pretty unreliable and self-contradictory narrator as regards what she was feeling at any given time, which is one of the things that made her interesting to me.
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Date: 2017-01-24 10:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-01-25 02:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-01-23 11:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-01-24 12:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-01-24 02:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-01-24 02:59 am (UTC)Also, Revolutionary Girl Utena!
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Date: 2017-01-24 03:01 am (UTC)One of these days I will watch Utena, I swear.
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Date: 2017-01-24 04:50 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2017-01-25 02:01 pm (UTC)