The Solitary Summer in July

Well, it's mid-way through July already, so I thought I'd take take a quick look at the month's happenings in Elizabeth von Arnim's wonderful The Solitary Summer, which has an unexpectedly serious note. In her first entry (for the first of the month), she waxes lyrical about sweet-peas, which are her favourite flowers, after roses. She says:

A garden might be made beautiful with sweet-peas alone, and, with hardly any labour, except the sweet labour of picking to prolong the bloom, be turned into a fairy bower of delicacy and refinement.

Perhaps modern hybrids are more difficult to grow, or perhaps they've gone out of fashion, but you rarely seem to see them these days, and I've never had any luck growing them, but I love the delicate pastel blooms, and the wonderful perfume they give off. Anyway, Elizabeth is shocked to find the head inspector's wife has no sweet peas, but grows 'exceedingly vulgar' red herbaceous peonies in her garden.

Elizabeth von Arnim's comments about sweet peas,
 and a fairy bower, reminded me of Cicely Mary Barker's
painting of the Sweet Pea Fairies.

And there is domestic drama when the June baby falls into a slimy, smelly farmyard pond and is brought home looking like 'a green and speckled frog', so all the children are dosed with castor oil, as a preventative measure against typhoid, and kept in bed for three days, which seems a little extreme, but it did remind me of the various accidents and illnesses my daughters suffered when they were small, and how I over-reacted and always assumed the worst!

But they did nothing, except be uproarious, and sing at the top of their voices, and clamour for more dinner than I felt would be appropriate for babies who were going to be dangerously ill in a few hours; and so, after due waiting, they were got up and dressed and turned loose again, and from that day to this no symptoms have appeared.

On the 15^th there's a contrast in tone and subject as we get a glimpse of life in the one-roomed back-to-back cottages where the farm workers live, which are so very different to her own castle home.

The village consists of one street running parallel to the outer buildings of the farm, and the cottages are one-storied, each with rooms for four families – two in front looking on to the wall of the farmyard, which is the fashionable side, and two at ther back, looking on to nothing more exhilarating than their own pigstyes. Each family has one room and a larder sort of place, and share the kitchen with the family on the opposite side of the entrance; but the women prefer doing their cooking at the grate in their own room rather than expose the contents of their pots to the ill-natured comments of a neighbour. On the fashionable side there is a little fenced-in garden for every family, where fowls walk about pensively and meditate beneath the scarlet-runners (for all the world like me in my garden), and hollyhocks tower above the drying linen, and fuel, stolen from our woods, is stacked for winter use; but on the other side you walk straight out into manure and pigs.

Life there can't have been too dissimilar to that of the Birmingham Back-to-Backs, but although Elizabeth describes the conditions, she has no real insight into the way people must feel. She writes about their beds, 'rather narrower than a single bed', where mother, father and a baby manage to sleep 'very well' with three of four children in another such bed in the corner. She cannot understand how so many people sleep in one bed, but attributes it to 'no nerves, and a thick skin', which shows a lack of insight into their lives, for they have no choice.

We see her visiting the poor and offering advice – often on the benefits of fresh air, and seeking (and following medical) advice. She is uneasy with the role of Lady Bountiful, and whilst she can see that conditions are not right, she has little idea of how to change things, and is bewildered by the ignorance she encounters. However, just as my Socialist principles come rushing to the fore, and  I'm thinking 'just stick to the gardening Elizabeth', she endears herself to me by admitting:

But how useless to try and discover what their views really are. I can imagine what I like about them, and am fairly certain to imagine wrong. I have no real conception of their attitude towards life, and all I can do is to talk to them kindly when they are in trouble, and as often as I can give them nice things to eat.

When she does try to do something more practical, her efforts are spurned.

Shocked at the horrors that must surround these poor women at the birth of their babes, I asked the Man of Wrath to try and make some arrangements that would ensure their quiet at those times. He put aside a little cottage at the end of the street as a home for them in their confinements, and I furnished it, and made it clean and bright and pretty. A nurse was permanently engaged, and I thought with delight of the unspeakable blessing and comfort it was going to be.

But none of the women would use it, and at the end of year it was let out to a family, and the nurse dismissed. She has more success helping one of their grooms when he gets a housemaid into trouble, for the Man of Wrath agrees the young couple can live in an empty room above the stable, and he buys 'what is needful', but insists they must pay him back. In this chapter the change in outlook on relationship issues like sex before marriage, and babies born out of wedlock is very clear – when the book was written it was a sin, but but Elizabeth finds she cannot chastise this particular couple.

A Garden by Moonlight

Right, here is this month's instalment from Elizabeth von Arnim's The Solitary Summer, which I was going to post tomorrow, since one of the 'entries' is for June 16. However, tomorrow is my Saturday Snapshots day, so today we will enjoy Elizabeth's garden, and her reflections on life, the universe and everything – all of which makes her something of an icon as far as I'm concerned. And not only that, but she writes beautifully.

Her first 'entry' for the month is June 3, when she tells us:

The verandah at two o'clock on a summer's afternoon is a place in which to be happy and not decide anything, as my friend Thoreau told me of some other tranquil spot this morning. The chairs are comfortable, there is a table to write on, and the shadows of young leaves flicker across the paper. On one side a Crimson Rambler is thrusting inquisitive shoots through the wooden bars, being able this year for the first time since it was planted to see what I am doing up here, and next to it a Jackmanni clematis clings with soft young fingers to anything it thinks likely to hep it up to the goal of its ambition, the roof. I wonder which of the two will get there first.”

One of my roses - I think it's beautiful, though it's obviously
not in the same league as the roses in Elizabeth's garden.

It sounds so comfortable and pretty I considered sitting in my own small garden to write this while observing the roses (unnamed I afraid) which are trying to cover the fence. There's a honeysuckle there as well, and some jasmine, both of which I grew from cuttings. Sadly, it is too cold and windy to sit outside, and although it is not raining today the garden chairs are so waterlogged they feel as if they will never dry out.

Anyway, Elizabeth's thoughts stray to her children, for through the open window she can hear the two eldest 'babies' at their lessons (the village schoolmaster gives them lessons for a couple of hours every afternoon), and she writes:

I hope he will be more successful than I was in teaching them Bible stories. I never got farther than Noah, at which stage their questions became so searching as to completely confound me; and as no one likes being confounded, and it is especially regrettable when a parent is placed in such a position, I brought the course to an abrupt end by assuming that owl-like air of wisdom peculiar to infallibility in a corner, and telling them they were too young to understand these things for the present; and they, having a touching faith in every word I say, gave three contented little purrs of assent, and proposed that we should play instead at rolling down the grass bank under the south windows...

On June 16 she describes how on the previous day (June 15 – so there is a link to today) she stole through the house at three in the morning, and let herself out into into a wonderful, unknown world. It's one of the most magical passages in the book.

I stood for a few minutes motionless on the steps, almost frightened by the awful purity of nature, when all the sin and ugliness is shut up and asleep, and there is nothing but the beauty left. It was quite light, yet a bright moon hung in the cloudless grey-blue sky; the flowers were all awake, saturating the air with scent; and a nightingale sat on a hornbeam quite close to me, in loud raptures at the coming of the sun. There in front of me was the sun-dial, there were the rose bushes, there was the bunch of pansies I had dropped the night before still lying on the path, but how strange and unfamiliar it all looked, and how holy – as though God must be walking there in the cool of the day.

But after breakfast she cannot believe it is the same garden, because the wind blows, and there are angry showers. It is so gloomy that in the evening, despite her wish for solitude, she welcomes a visit from the 'least objectional' of the candidates seeking a position as parson on the estate. She despises herself for feeling pleased to see a visitor but, with a fine sense of irony, decides that such is the weakness of the female mind, coupled with the effect of a two-day gale after two months alone.

After meeting the impoverished parson, and listening to him talk about his family, and his struggles to make ends meet, Elizabeth reflects on the daily task of distributing sausages (which she hates) to the servants, and the problems of being both poor and genteel, in which case she would sit with a piece of bread, a pot geranium, and a book. Then she would buy a radish, and eat it wit the bread, sitting under a tree, and feed crumbs to a robin, and no creature would be happier.

It sounds an unlikely scenario for someone in her position, but she does seem to have had the gift of taking pleasure from the simple things in life.

Ellizabeth von Arnim

Elizabeth von Arnim, born Mary Annette Beauchamp, was the daughter of a wealthy shipping magnate. She met Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin (her first husband) in Italy in 1889, when she was 23 and he was a 38-year-old widower. They lived in Berlin for five years, then moved to his family's vast estate at Nassenheide, in Pomerania, which was then part of Prussia.

There, she obviously led a cushioned existence, but in her writing she is quite satirical about the Germans' social conventions and way of life. She didn't enjoy entertaining visitors and playing lady bountiful to poor tenants and servants, and would rather spend her her time reading and thinking as she wandered about the garden and the fields, forests and farms. It is obvious from 'The Solitary Summer' that she was a great reader, who loved her favourite authors, for she talks about them as if they are having conversations with her, whether they are alive or dead.

She loved living on the estate, but in 1908 it was sold to pay off the count's debts, and Elizabeth – who became known by her pen name – moved to England. Her husband died two years later. 


My original post is at http://chriscross-thebooktrunk.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/what-blessing-it-is-to-love-books-and.html