Summer Will Show

Cover

Biographical Note

Title Page

Introduction

Summer Will Show

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Copyright and more information

Summer Will Show

Sylvia Townsend Warner

Introduction by

Claire Harman

One of the many remarkable things about this novel is the long period of gestation its central character survived, for her conception was casual:

Twelve years elapsed before this instantly generated character found a home. The author was visiting Paris and, outside a grocer’s shop on the rue Mouffetard, had another of her flashes of inspiration: to write a novel about the 1848 revolution in France. Sophia Willoughby and another character she had already “seen,” Minna Lemuel, “started up and rushed into it.”

Perhaps the most striking thing about this story of the novel’s inception is Sylvia Townsend Warner’s insistence that the characters of Sophia and Minna were entirely imaginative creations of long standing and not, as many readers familiar with her life might surmise, based rather closely on her own character and that of her lover, Valentine Ackland. For the Sophia Willoughby of the novel has lost the supposedly defining characteristic of prize-fighting and gained all of Valentine’s elegance, self-possession, and sangfroid, and Minna, the Jewish storyteller with the spell-binding gifts and irresistible charisma, may not have been intended as a self-portrait but certainly reads like one. The book is, after all, about two women falling in love, just as Warner and Ackland did in 1930. It is also about making common cause with the underdog during a period of violent political upheaval, just as Warner and Ackland did when they joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1935 and went to Spain in support of the Spanish government during the civil war. The parallels could be said to be flagrant, yet the author attempts to direct our attention elsewhere.

Summer Will Show,
appearing in the autumn of 1936, was the first novel Warner had published for seven years, and the first of her new life with Ackland. In the 1920s, when her best-selling feminist fantasy
Lolly Willowes
was published, followed by
Mr. Fortune’s Maggot
and
The True Heart
, Warner was living on her own in London, unprofitably in love with a married man who was old enough to be her father, and who had in fact been her father’s friend and colleague at Harrow School. She had a close circle of friends among her fellow musicologists (Warner worked for more than a decade on the committee of the Tudor Church Music project that brought a vast quantity of sixteenth-century composition into print for the first time); she was a published poet and a sometime composer; and her writer friends included David Garnett and the idiosyncratic novelist T.F. Powys. But in 1930 all the old patterns changed, and
Summer Will Show
served — among many other things — as a declaration and celebration of those changes. Like Sophia, the aristocrat who ends up on the other side of the barricades, the author could say, “I have changed my ideas. I do not think as I did.”

Sophia Willoughby, in the early part of the book, is a wife and mother and a member of the English landed gentry. Divested one by one of her functions, set free from “a world policed by oughts,” she is alarmed at how little it means to be a free woman. Freedom presents itself as a void to be filled with religion, ambition, travel, learning — she considers and rejects them all. Her gestures of defiance misfire; riding to hounds in her period of mourning she has “a growing impression that she was out on false pretences, having in reality an assignation with the fox.” It is freedom on a different plane that Sophia needs. She hankers after a “wild romantic life ... unsexed and unpersoned,” but the dream lives up badly to the brief trial it is given on a solitary journey to Cornwall, and she feels forced to turn back to an old course and to try to replace her lost children. It is while she is halfheartedly pursuing this end that she is thrown into the company of her husband’s exotic mistress, Minna Lemuel.

Minna is one of Warner’s most beguiling creations, a self-dramatist and visionary, an artist of great power, yet also a bit of a charlatan. Aging, unbeautiful, unscrupulous, “her principles were so inconsistent that to all intents and purposes she had no principles at all,” but her influence pervades the book, from the first intimation of her voice and manner, detected in the way Sophia’s husband, Frederick, has learned to say “
Ma fleur
,” to the inextinguishable sense of her vitality in the empty apartment of the final scenes. Sophia’s first impressions of this distant rival is of a vulgar Jewish strumpet, but even when Sophia begins to love her, she does so in the knowledge that “what good qualities [Minna] had must be accepted with their opposites in an inconsequential pell-mell of wheat and tares.” This is the basis of her great attraction:

The plot turns, without explanations, explicitness, or a single blush, on the development of Sophia and Minna’s unexpected and immediate sexual attraction to each other. Using sudden jumps in time, as Warner does throughout the novel, their relationship is both exposed to the reader and withheld; we see them, as does Frederick, “seated together on the pink sofa, knit into this fathomless intimacy, and turning from it to entertain him with an identical patient politeness.” Their unanimity is symbolized in the portrait that the student Dury paints of them, the title of which would serve as a description of the whole book,
A Conversation Between Two Women
.

Just as this lesbian novel refuses to unpick and categorize the characters’ sexuality, so there is no special pleading on behalf of the author’s own political ideology. Warner leaves the conditions of the laborers on Sophia’s estate in Dorset to speak for themselves (Sophia herself never really understands them) and places telling vignettes of ordinary life going on, its difficulties and injustices barely breaking on the middle-class characters’ consciousnesses. Sophia’s recollection of the 1830 uprising in England is of “a procession of men wearing their best clothes, men with washed smocks and oily church-going heads,” and the hot harvest weather seems to those of nonlaboring classes to be nothing but a boon. Idealists and exploiters of ideals are viewed in the same clear light. Sophia is approached by the Communists to run errands for them because her class might shield her from suspicion of collaborating, but she is obviously considered expendable by them on the same grounds. We are not spared her slightly acid feelings of having been snubbed by the real revolutionaries, and of not having been thanked enough — a wonderfully
social
touch.

This detachment makes
Summer Will Show
an uncomfortably realistic political novel. Sophia is happy with Minna and her rag-tag of followers, but they are not themselves happy; the Communist Ingelbrecht is alone in his ideas, “seeming to trot on some intent personal errand, true to his own laws and oblivious of all else.” Minna is all too pleased to exercise a talent for theft, picking up old iron to fuel the Communists’ ammunitions factory, although she fears Communists and hasn’t given a thought to the further end of her action, the bullets that “billet in limb or heart or brain.” Guitermann, the impoverished Jewish musician, falls victim to a galloping consumption, but we are snatched out of graphic and terrifying description of his last moments by his landlady’s bitter reproaches: “Just our luck that he should move in and die! I told my man that he had paid the rent in advance, but he had only paid me one-half of it ... .For us there is nothing but living. We are tough, we cannot die so easily as these artists.”

Sophia’s arrival in Paris is on the eve of the first uprising in February 1848 which brought down the provisional government, and the action ends with the much bloodier second insurrection in June. It was a period during which revolutionary zeal degenerated into chaos. Universal suffrage was declared, slaves were freed in the colonies, but in the city Parisians starved; there was no work, only the mockery of the National Workshops, nominally under the control of a working-class man called Albert who had been co-opted into the government to lend the scheme some credibility. His only notable success was to employ twelve thousand men in demolishing a small hill. The provinces, impoverished and hungry after two dreadful harvests in 1846 and ’47, were in danger of using their new votes to reelect their former overlords, so their government, supposedly dedicated to serving the will of the people, responded by postponing all elections indefinitely. This atmosphere of compromised ideals and stifled rights is superbly dramatized in
Summer Will Show
; Aunt Léocadie, the Legitimist, is a glorious portrait of cautious bourgeois liberalism, attending a concert in aid of wounded revolutionaries in a carriage from which the armorial bearings have been removed, “a tactful concession to the people whose heart was in the right place though their king, as yet, was not.” “It is one’s duty to help these poor wounded creatures,” Léocadie declares. “Whatever their opinions, they bled to free us of a tyrant. And a quantity of them were wounded by accident.” Frederick Willoughby, the nonpolitical man who moves with the times, is reported toward the end of the book to have sided with the Bonapartists. Gaston, the fanatic who stage-manages an atrocity in February, has no place in the June revolution, while Caspar, Sophia’s drifting half-caste cousin, ends up in the National Guard.

The Romantic sensibility is not very flatteringly represented by the lachrymose poet Wlodomir Macgusty and the soulful doctor’s wife, Mrs. Hervey. The new brand of revolutionaries are characteristically silent and phlegmatic; the Communist Martin, his sister, and Ingelbrecht, the theorist of revolution, all have rather somber characters, testifying to the seriousness of their intent and their perception of political realities. Minna’s type of revolutionary, as Ingelbrecht points out, is already a thing of the past, and her effectiveness diminishes drastically during the course of the action. It is only Minna’s protégée Sophia for whom the new order might have some use.

Warner’s research for this book included reading as many histories and memoirs of the date as she could find (many of them in French, which she read and spoke fluently). “This was a lesson in history” she wrote later,

Haven’t we heard this somewhere before? Not quite: “I am slaving away at the Revolution of ’48. Do you know how many books I have read and annotated in the last six weeks? Twenty-seven, old fellow, and in spite of that I have managed to write ten pages.” Flaubert and his annotations for
L’Éducation sentimentale
might well have intimidated another author, but Warner boldly skirts the same ground, indeed invites the reader to bear the other novel in mind, just as at times she also evokes Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Balzac. The juxtapositions augment her own book, as she knew they would.

Summer Will Show
is a novel with a strong undertow of imagery and much of its force is poetic as much as dramatic. Minna’s narrative at the beginning of part two is a tour de force of epic power; the life of the family in the forests of Lithuania and their persecution by the Christians are told in indelible, stark strokes. It could hardly be more of a contrast with the genteel English setting of the novel’s opening scenes; the visit to the lime-kiln, conducted at walking pace, and the arrival from the West Indies of Sophia’s uncle’s half-caste by-blow, Caspar Rathbone. Images accumulate their effect throughout the book: the chestnut trees, which have lost their flowers and are “brooding, given over to the concern of ripening their burden of fruit,” are at first a symbol of maternal pride to Sophia, later an omen which she failed to recognize, and by the end of the book take on a further significance. The portrait of Sophia’s grandfather, too, offers itself up to ironically flexible interpretation: “with his gun and supple wet-nosed retriever [he seemed] to be watching through the endless bronze dusk of an autumnal evening, paused on the brink of his spinney and listening with contemplative pleasure to the footsteps of the poacher within.” The poacher about to disrupt the calm of Blandamer seems at first to be the interloper Frederick — in the long term it proves to be Sophia herself.

When Sophia arrives in Paris at the beginning of part two of the novel, bereaved, unfixed, and in a foreign land, her impressions are snatchy, photographic, and taken in almost unconsciously. She sees things just as they are, and just for the moment: