SUMMER—a high, candid, definite time. It may slither out of the ambiguity, hesitance, or too early ripeness of spring and edge toward the soothing peculiarities of autumn, but summer is downright, a true companion of winter. It is an extreme, a returning, a vivid comparative. It does not signify that some are cool and some are dry and sweltering; summer is a kind of entity, poetic, but not a poetic mystery. The sun is at its zenith in the Tropic of Cancer, a culmination.
Think of the yellow afternoons of the last century, such as we see in the paintings of our text, the illustrations.* Then, we believe, it was another world—quiet, perhaps not so much reflective as drowsy and wondering. A luxurious pause, an inattention except for the concentration on pleasure. A caesura to honor the sun, the warm waters, the breezes of the mountains, and the hope of some dreamlike diversion of destiny in the pause.
Here, in the paintings—all from the new Terra Museum of American Art in Chicago—is a languorous game of croquet. It appears that this game may be one too many, too much like yesterday, a routine, and nothing to surprise. And Charles Curran’s bursting, voluptuous water lilies. The sun has ravished the flowers, full force, and how ferocious they are amid the passive, sheltered glances of the young women in the boat.
What a lot of clothes the women are dragging about in these rich-toned landscapes. Hats, sleeves, petticoats, ties at the neck, parasols—a shroud of protection, giving a somewhat fatigued femininity to these lost summer days. Sargent’s summer painter must be putting the bush and the field and the reflection of the stream on canvas. He looks much as a man would today: white suit, coquettish red belt, and what appears to be a handkerchief on his head.
But she, the companion, is reading in a hat like a haystack, a dark skirt, and holding the inevitable lacy umbrella, a thing of no apparent utility unless it be a weapon against a change of his mood there in the erotic sleepiness of a full summer afternoon, and the ground dry and not even a dog in sight.
I like to remember the summer season coming to those who just stay at home the year round, that is, most of the world. The plain patterns of simple domestic life meet each year with a routine. Nothing is unexpected. An almanac of memories disputes claims of the hottest day in decades or the level of the rainfall.
The furnace is shut down and the fireplace, if there should be one, is emptied and the tiles relieved of grit and polished to an oily sienna sheen. Windows washed, everything aired; moths seeking the bedroom light bulb; grass and weeds pushing up out of the hard winter soil; leaves on the maples and elms—nothing special; doors latched back and covered by a flapping screen—with a hole in it and rusty hinges; voices calling out of the windows; perennials determined to exhibit their workhorse nature, if most a little disgruntled and with more stem than flower; insects strong as poison; the smell of chlorine in a child’s hair—from the community pool across town.
The congratulation of summer is that it can make the homely and the humble if not exactly beautiful, beautifully acceptable. Such brightness at midday and then the benign pastels, blues and pinks and lavenders of the summer sky. Much may wither and exhaust, but so great is the glow and greater the freedom of the season that every extreme will be accommodated. There are great gardens filled with jewels as precious as those dug out of the earth and then the hand that planted the sparse petunias and impatiens in the window box—there’s that, too.
I remember days from the summers in the upper South and sights from certain towns in the Middle West, in Ohio and Indiana, places just passed through long ago. There’s something touching about the summer streets of middle-size towns: everything is a bit worn down in July, all slow and somnolent except for the supersonic hummingbird in the browning hydrangea bush at the edge of the porch. The disaster of the repetitive but solid architecture of the 1920s—once perceived as quite an accomplishment of ownership, and suitable—comfortable according to what was possible.
The front porches. That unalterable, dominating, front-face mistake left over from the time before the absolute, unconditional surrender to the automobile and to traffic. There was a time when not everyone had a car, and to children then the traffic was interesting. The brand names, the out-of-state license plates—a primitive pleasure to take note of them, like stamping your palm at the sight of a white horse. And the family on the front porch, watching the life of the street.
This porch in front and so unsightly and useless and awful in the winter with the gray of the splintered planks and the soggy sag of the furniture often left out to hibernate in public view. The old eyesores, defining the houses, many of them spacious, with gables, and bits of colored glass from a catalogue over the door, in a fan shape. If nothing else, summer redeems the dismal overhang of the porch, for a few months, and even the darkened halls and parlors within might be glad of an escape from the heat.
Somewhere there is water. Not too far away there will be an abandoned quarry, difficult to climb into and cold as a lake in Nova Scotia. There will be a stream or a river, not very deep and muddy at the banks—Middle Western water.
If there are no neighbors to be seen on the streets, they can be seen and heard at the back, there on the patio where tubs standing on tripods and filled with charcoal lumps are ready to receive marinated bits of flesh. There is pleasure in all this, in the smoke, in the luscious brown of the chicken leg—on your own little plot where you fed the chickadee last winter.
These scenes, local as the unearned wildflower, the goldenrod with its harsh cinnamon scent, are not splendid. Little of the charm of the ocean view and the table set with blue linen, and the delectable salmon, so well designed for painterly display, laid out on a platter among scattered stems of watercress. Still the American town streets—those angling off the main drag seen on the way to the airport—are a landscape of the American summer. And why should we groan with pain at the sight of the plastic flamingo on the lawn or the dead whiteness of the large inflated duck coming into its decorative own nowadays? There’s not much else to buy downtown, for one thing.
These things remind me of those elders who used to go abroad every summer to the same pension, to dusty interiors and dining rooms where the wine bottle with your name on it returned every night to the table until it was empty. Perhaps in Florence or outside Siena or in the north, to the band concert in the park by a German lake.
In Russian fiction people go off to the Crimea and sigh, how dull it is here. But since there is to be a plot, the scene is not to be so dull after all. In the salon, with the violin whining and the fish overcooked, the same faces take up their posts for the same complaints and posturings. Then someone new appears to the defensive snubs of the old-timers or to the guarded curiosity of the bored. It might be a sulky young girl with a chaperone or her mother; or a woman, not a girl, to be seated on the same side of the room as the tall man from Moscow, away from his family for two weeks and subject to dreaming. And it begins to begin . . .
Summer romance—when the two words are brought together, each takes on a swift linguistic undercurrent. As a phrase, it is something akin to “summer soldier”—the romance carries away and the summer soldier runs away from duty or from the reality of things. Heaven is something with a girl in summer: a line of Robert Lowell’s. The summer romance will have the sharpness and sweetness and the indescribable wonder of the native strawberry, raspberry, blueberry, and toward the end the somewhat gritty cling of the late blackberry.
The sun-filled romance is the dramatic background of much fiction. There is the accident of the meeting and the unreasonable heightening of the season. And classically there is often an imbalance in the lovers, an imbalance of class or situation, hard, chilly truths swept away by the soft clouds, the fields, and the urgency of the burst-open water lilies.
Edith Wharton wrote a short novel called Summer. In it you will find a love affair between a pretty and poor young girl from the New England hills and a clever young man from the city who likes to study the old houses of the region. As always, he is alone, happily solitary, idling about in the sunshine, and she is there, as she has always been. In the way of these sudden romances everything before and ahead seems to fade. Of course, it is not to last, at least not to last for the young man who, as it turns out, is engaged to someone of his own sort . . . and so on.
Tess of the D’Urbervilles: “Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and stretched them in long stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams, opened petals, and sucked out scents in invisible jets and breathings.” This is the summer landscape that engulfs Tess and Angel Clare and finally leads to a despair of such magnitude only the genius of Thomas Hardy could imagine it and embody it in the changing seasons and the changing structure of the English countryside.
In Chekhov’s story “The Lady with the Dog,” the lady and the man are both married. They meet in Yalta in the summer and the romance flows along on a pitiless tide, without any possible ending except misery. When they believe the love will at last end or the devastation will have a solution, the final line says no, “it was only just beginning.”
So in spite of the meadows and the picnic under the shade of the copper beech tree, the days will grow longer and there will again be buying and selling and coming and going elsewhere. The romantic ritual of the season fades, even if it will be staged again next summer with other lovers in other places. The freedom of the summer remains in the memory.
In the mountains, there you feel free . . . Yes. Under Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire—a storm of stars in the heavens, a pattern of gorgeous gleaming dots on the dark blue silk of the sky, all spreading down like a huge soft cloak to the edge of the field.
The mountains are perhaps not quite in such demand as they once were in summer. Too lonely and overwhelming, the pleasures offered no longer quite suitable to the extraordinary energies of those who rush to the long, long expressways on a Friday afternoon—flat roads ahead, and yet they mean getting there. The weekend, commuting distance, breads and cheeses and bottles of wine, Vivaldi on the cassette, and a lot of work to be done and gladly.
Impatience with the division of city and country, or what is more or less “country,” has changed the heart of the seasons. Many face a February weekend as if it were July. There is a need for an eternal summer, some mutant need created by the demand for nature, for weekend nature, even as nature disappears along the route.
Eternal summer, kind only as a metaphor. Night is the winter of the tropics, as the saying has it. On the equator the days are twelve hours long. Withering rivers and unrelenting lassitude in the never-ending summertime. In Bombay in January, blissful for the citizens, but to those accustomed to the temperate sections of the United States, the heat of January in India spreads around like an infamous August swelter.
The gardens, the terraces, the flowers in vases. The first peas, the lettuce out of the ground, the always too greatly abundant zucchini—and at last a genuine tomato. No doubt the taste for these has grown sharper from the fact that we have them all year round in an inauthentic condition of preservation. Where the memory is never allowed to subside, according to each thing in its time, the true taste is more astonishing. One of summer’s intensifications. Very much like actually swimming or sailing after the presence of the sea or lake known only as a view.
Summer, the season of crops. The concreteness of it. Not as perfumed and delicate and sudden as spring and not as triste as autumn. Yet for the enjoyment of summer’s pleasures, for the beach, the crowded airplane to Venice, most of us consent to work all year long.
1987
* “The Heart of the Seasons” was accompanied by American Impressionist paintings from the Terra Museum collection, including Winslow Homer’s The Croquet Match (1872), William J. McCloskey’s Strawberries (1889), John Singer Sargent’s Dennis Miller Bunker Painting at Calcot (1888), Frederick Carl Frieseke’s Lilies (1912) and Lady in a Garden (1912), Charles Courtney Curran’s Lotus Lilies (1888), Mary Cassatt’s Summertime: Woman and Child in a Rowboat (1894), and James McNeill Whistler’s Note in Red: The Siesta (1882–1883). [Editor’s note.]