The Last Of Summer

Book 297: Virago Modern Classics

by Kate O'Brien

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

It is 1939, the last summer before the outbreak of war. French actress Angele Maury abandons a group of friends travelling through Ireland and takes herself to picturesque Drumaninch, birthplace of her dead father. She has come to make sense of her past. Self-conscious with her pale, exotic beauty, Angele braves the idiosyncratic world of the Kernahans: her enigmatic aunt Hannah, her ridiculous but loveable uncle Corney and her three cousins - Martin, charming, intense; Tom, devoted to his mother, and their bright sister Jo, who combines religious faith with a penchant for gambling. But is there some mystery surrounding the past? History threatens to repeat itself as Angele finds herself seduced by the beauty of Ireland, and by the love of two men...First published in 1943, The Last of the Summer is a perfectly structured psychological love story.

Release date: July 21, 2016

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 272

Sample

We have to imagine the moment. The road curves away in iron heat; the air of the little town smells of roses and porter; a river is loud and seems familiar. A young woman is resting against a wall. She is looking into her handbag mirror. Defiantly, and with a sense of incongruity, she splashes her mouth with lipstick and continues her journey. The wall she leant on is covered with moss and is low at first, and then higher until it comes to an entrance gate. And then the drive is full of crackling undergrowth and bamboo and rhododendron, all unkempt. When the curve is complete and the house appears—its name is Waterpark—it is low and cream-washed and the story is about to begin.

Moments have something in common with musical statements. They can move fast or slow down; but the speed and delay are often different versions of the same melody. The Irish countryside of these opening pages appears ordinary and quiet. But as Angèle Kernahan approaches the house at the end of the drive, she brings—with her lipsticked mouth, her questing sensibility—the fragrance and danger of another cadence. She will evoke for the people who call this their home, who don’t yet know of her existence, the headlong, brakeless speed of the European moment. This, after all, is the late summer of 1939. She will remind them, for good and ill, that the past is inescapable. She will bring into their consciousness the names of threatened cities and wasted loves. She will change everything before she leaves.

The Last of Summer is a book which mixes fictive theatre with argumentative magic. The dialogue can be cutting and funny; the description is a marvel of thrift. Again and again, on page after page, we will find ourselves in rooms which have a claustrophobic realness. Here, for example, is the north-facing dining-room in Waterpark. Surely, we say to ourselves, we recognize these crows making a racket outside the window; surely we miss the sound of the river here. Now we are in the snug in the hotel, all green baize and Victorian mahogany and caged canaries.

None of this should blind us to a central fact: in this book Kate O’Brien has designs on us. For all her economy of narrative and force of characterization she will, from time to time, invoke her privileges as an interventionist author; and, far from seeming intrusive, this will come to be one of the rewards and pleasures of the story. Now and again she will touch us on the shoulder, anxious that we should notice the fragile co-existence of these two moments. For a few days her characters will be together in this Irish country house. They will scheme and remember; they will quarrel and fall in love. Nothing else will change. The river will be as loud, the ilexes as solid. The geraniums on the front steps will be ready to take in before the first frost. The yew tree on the drive will still look blue in moonlight. Only the people, with their memories and secrets, are changed; only they play out a subtle dialogue between fatalism and free choice. “Woe to those”, writes the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, “who suddenly discover historical time unprepared, as an illiterate would discover chemistry.”

There is another moment, of course: the one outside the book—the one, that is, in which it is written and which it serves to disrupt and formalize. We need to ponder this one too if we are to understand certain things. Which is not to say that we need to understand these things in order to enjoy the novel; not at all. The current is swift and the enchantment pulls us in. But there are shadows and whispers here, echoes and pleadings. It will do no harm at all to trace them back into Kate O’Brien’s life; to come on their outline in her development as a novelist.

In 1941 Kate O’Brien was forty-four. The thirties had been a good decade for her, settled and successful. Not so the twenties. They were as stressful and turbulent as the ten years after them were composed. In 1924, for a brief time, she was a wife. She married Gustav Renier—later well known for his polemical book The English, Are They Human?—in Hampstead Town Hall. For exactly eleven months she lived with him in two rooms in Belsize Avenue, Hampstead. Then the marriage broke apart. Contemporaries differ in their accounts. There are suggestions that she married Renier, who was then a thirty-year-old freelance journalist, after a good deal of importuning on his part. More likely, the villains of the piece are neither husband nor wife but those conventions of an age which a gifted, free-spirited woman must have found constraining.

Angèle Kernahan, the heroine of The Last of Summer, is twenty-five when she walks up the drive of Waterpark house; a year or so younger than her author when she took those vows in Hampstead Town Hall. There may well be shadows here; we may well be catching a glimpse of that early fracture between imaginative vocation and the shape of conformity. Certainly, The Last of Summer is more a tragedy of conscience than a comedy of manners. In the fifth chapter Angèle stands at the edge of the Moher cliffs with Martin, her cousin. Beneath them are rock and water and one black canoe; beside them the perilous survival of windflowers and orchids. Suddenly their oblique, parrying conversation takes a serious turn as Martin challenges her:

“Angèle, are you going to play old hell with me?”

“Oh no. I like you terribly, Martin. There’s no ‘old hell’—we’re relations, after all. First cousins.”

“I don’t think we need pay much attention to that. If they wanted the forbidden degrees observed they should have announced them in time! Not that this is a proposal of marriage, by God!”

“I don’t want a proposal of marriage. I’d loathe to be married.”

“But you like family life.”

“Yes. I think it’s a perfect thing. But it’s not for me. I’m quite unsuitable.”

This is one echo; and there are others. When we read about Angèle Kernahan arriving at Waterpark, bringing the surprise and danger of the unknown, I think we are entitled to see another inference there. This time the year is 1915 and the place is University College Dublin, where Kate O’Brien is a student. Like other first-year arts students, she attends Roger Chauvire’s lectures on French literature. In 1962, in an essay called “UCD as I Forget It”, she recalled that experience: “He took literature into cold daylight; he cut it out clearly as an exact and exacting skill. Listening to Chauvire upon French writing in the 17th and 18th century, I grew up.” The exact daylight, the cold skill, continued to excite Kate O’Brien. But so also did human passion, inside and outside literature. The dichotomy between them is a constant motif in her work. The Last of Summer elaborates it.

The world Angèle Kernahan represents is a far cry from the settled customs of Waterpark. Her father may have belonged there but her mother, now dead, was an actress with the Comédie Française. On the distaff side, therefore, Angèle is heir to a complex of disciplined self-expression and deep vocation. These are possessions her creator values highly, and their cost and survival are powerful themes in this book.

Love and exile; choice and vocation. They are constant themes, consistent oppositions. By the time this book is finished Kate O’Brien has come a far way down the road of her own calling. This, after all, is her sixth novel. She has left behind the rooms in Belsize Avenue and the flat in Bloomsbury where she wrote her first novel, Without My Cloak. She no longer makes such frequent visits to Ireland and the big house in Strandhill, the property of her brother-in-law, where she wrote The Ante-Room. She has transmuted her experiences as a governess in Bilbao, where she minded her two charges, José and Hélène, into Mary Lavelle. She has purged her disappointment with de Valera’s Ireland in Pray For the Wanderer. Her fifth novel, The Land of Spices, has been banned in her own country. Now, in a new flat in London, in 33 James Street, she takes on small wartime assignments for the Ministry of Information. And here, in The Last of Summer, she attempts once again to heal the past by examining flawed human love in a rigorous light.

The rigours are not in the plot. The sequence of narrative is simple and rapid, with an almost classical unity. Angèle Kernahan comes to Waterpark. She is unannounced and, in some quarters, unwelcome. More than a quarter century ago her father had left this house, gone to France and married a French actress. Now Angèle enters the house of her aunt-by-marriage, Hannah Kernahan, a resourceful widow who rules Waterpark with the help of her eldest son, Tom. This is the world Angèle Kernahan finds; this is the one she disrupts.

The character of Hannah Kernahan is one of the strengths of the book—indeed, one of the strongest portraits in all of Kate O’Brien’s work. This is a characterization made up of insight and irony. Hannah is possessive and adroit. Much of the glitter of the novel comes from changing perspectives on her, as she is seen through the eyes of different characters. To her son Tom she is almost a saint; to her friend Dotey, a martyr. When Dr. O’Byrne comes to see her, to ask her help in arranging the union of his daughter and her son, his private musings during their conversation throw a harsh and important light on Hannah’s manoeuvrings:

Dr. O’Byrne almost nodded his head as he listened to this delicate little speech—so exactly did it tell him what he had already told himself very often about this woman. She’s certainly a great fly in the ointment, he reflected now with anxiety. I could hardly choose a worse mother-in-law for my girl. And she’s only about fifty, so far as I recall, and she hasn’t a thing wrong with her. Superb organic health. Nothing to stop her hanging on in vigour into the nineties. Upon my word, I think Norrie will need the heart of a lion to face it . . . But it’s no joke—setting herself up for life against as selfish a case of mother-love as has ever come to my knowledge, so help me!

The true rigour of this book, and the unswerving moral intelligence of its writer, can best be seen in this characterization of Hannah, and in the clash between her and Angèle. The first is scrupulous and surprised by need; the second is a veteran of pride and its corruptions. Hannah knows how to hold and keep; she knows how to fend off and crush. In her dramatization of this contest between two women and two kinds of passion, Kate O’Brien shows her gift for the cold daylight and exact skill she had admired years before in Chauvire’s lectures. Now she deploys those skills to achieve what the book sets out to be: an anatomy of love.

A novel is closed between covers; a painting is confined within its frame. They are both, in one sense, artificial borders. All artists are at work on a continuous statement; the poem, the painting, the novel constitute just a fragment of it. In order to judge the statement we must look at the part. In order to understand the part we have to consider the whole statement.

Kate O’Brien is that kind of artist. There is a consistent—even a visionary—quality about her most assured work. It would be misleading to call The Last of Summer her best book, but it comes in the best phase of her work. It is marked by the same themes, the same struggles to heal and resolve, which are so luminous in The Ante-Room, The Land of Spices and Mary Lavelle. In its preoccupation with the fractures between sense and spirit The Last of Summer has more in common with these—her finest novels—than with the plangent and polemical Pray for the Wanderer or the Galsworthyian Without My Cloak.

In this book she returns to the class which fascinated her. The Kernahans are Catholic Irish and there is more than an echo, in her descriptions of the dash and risk and obstinacy of Ned Kernahan, of her own past. Her grandfather—also called Tom—had brought his family and the debris of an eviction into Limerick on an ass cart. He bought a horse, sold it at a profit, bought another. Soon Tom O’Brien was an acknowledged authority on horseflesh and in Ireland at that time it was an excellent thing to be. Horses were everything. The whole of a gentry class rode to hounds, harnessed their thoroughbreds and paid handsomely to have a good piece of horseflesh which would make them the envy of their neighbours. By the time Tom O’Brien died he was building a villa to go with his stud farm.

Kate O’Brien’s father took on the business. By her own account he was an expensive and cheerful man: “He dressed well in tweed cutaways,” she tells us in the autobiographical fragment Presentation Parlour, “his hands were freckled, expensive and well cared for; everything about him was of good taste and quality from cigar to boot to handkerchief.”

But there are shadows here. This was a class which made a world at a price: a world of increasing wealth and uneasy conscience, where the women wore stays and rouged their cheeks, had their clothes made by Dublin dressmakers and tried to forget the hauntings of the past. This was Catholic Ireland; it was never nationalist Ireland. Steadily, obstinately, it had shut out the cacophony of the times: the Land War, the evictions, the disgrace of Parnell. As the nineteenth century wore on and the twentieth began, this prosperous class loaded its tables with food, its sideboards with silver, and stopped its ears to rumours of rebellion and self-determination. We get a glimpse of their insularity in the way Roseholm—the house of the Mulqueens in The Ante-Room—strikes the new visitor, Nurse Canning:

This big and quiet house, so excellently run, this spacious dining-room, full of mahogany, its roaring fire, its two long windows facing a smooth green garden, its heavy silver tea-service and silver dishes filled with food which no one ate, all this was of fascinating interest . . .

There are similarities between Roseholm and Waterpark. Both are actual places with a symbolic inference. The novelist Benedict Kiely has aptly said of the first:

The Ante-Room of the title is not a place where the bourgeoisie suffer before they become poets, but the dread hall of silence and pain where body and soul kiss for the last time before the final parting in death: and death and departure, suffering and sin, exile, love satisfied and yet never satisfied, have been predominant themes in Kate O’Brien’s novels.

‘We can scarcely hate anyone we know,’ says Hazlitt. And Kate O’Brien is determined we shall know these people. To do so we have to follow her as she exposes their self-deceits, their dreams, the corruption of their loves. The Last of Summer opens quietly. The hot road, the long drive; a diffident girl and an unknowing family. This could be a conventional story: a novel of passion and surprise such as the post-Victorian era is all too rich in. But after a while we see the glint of the scalpel. There is a rottenness at the centre of this quiet possession. Hannah Kernahan is emblematic of it, and her relation to her son Tom is all wrong. We know that. But we should also know that the emblem suggests something more. In her selfish desire to hold on she suggests the wider, historical class from which she comes: those who shut out the shadows and treasures of history; clutched at strength and despised weakness; harmed what they owned and were destroyed by what they shunned.

Yet Kate O’Brien—with the exception, perhaps, of Without My Cloak—has no real interest in being a social or historical novelist. She has a feel for action and event as background, but her foreground is an imaginative and mysterious place where events can quickly become shadows. Certainly, history is a presence in The Last of Summer. These people come from countries under threat. Angèle knows that people she loves are at risk in France. Martin realizes that he can have no part in Ireland’s neutrality in the coming war; he will join a French regiment. Jo, his sister and Hannah’s only daughter, is aware that the coming struggle casts a shadow on the contemplative life.

But the issue in this book is not history. It is the confrontation—played out in a private theatre of obsession and love—between doom and choice. One passage, towards the middle of the novel, canvasses the whole undersong. Angèle is sitting on the top step of a jetty. She has found her way there by following the path south through the trees, past the burnt-out house and up a lane leading from it. This has brought her to Brady’s pier. And here she contemplates the difficult issues of love and self-love:

But now she was committed. She had pledged her love and faith and if she was surprised by the peace that brimmed from a surrender so vast for her and so absurd, the surprise was only instinctive, for she was without experience. I love him enough. She did not know that this was almost never true, and that it was not became manifest to many lovers even within the very pleasure of their first embrace. Love can survive, a little or a long time, this lesson of its insufficiency—because it must, because self-love and self-respect insist; because pleasure is strong, and compromise is an understood necessity, and because lovers learn to understand love cynically and yet value it. Love is too frequent an event to be frequently complete; whether or not by direct experience it is probable that every living heart knows this and is resigned to it.

Kate O’Brien believed in love. Her novels, from Without My Cloak to The Last of Summer, are witnesses to that faith. But she also believed in what she called, in her study of Teresa of Avila, “this science of the spirit”. In the best of her work there is a clear, painful sense of the conflict between love and this “science”. In Angèle the unstated conflict is there from the start. Angèle, after all, is an actress. She feels within herself the power of a vocation; a calling to be solitary, single-minded, ruthless in the pursuit of a gift. Yet such gifts, in Kate O’Brien’s work, are always mysterious and ambiguous. They imply necessity and they promise pain. They provide hints of the fracture between sense and spirit, ritual and rite, sexuality and intellect, which shadow and enrich her work.

I met Kate O’Brien only once. She came to our house for dinner. I was newly married at the time and anxious to serve her the food she liked. It so happened that I knew what food she did not like. In a delightful, quirky travel essay called My Ireland she had written:

I may be afraid of bossy waitresses but I am not at their mercy . . . I have asked, for instance, if I could have a minute steak, a plain green salad and a glass of wine. Always no . . . I have been so driven to experiment that I have asked for a linen napkin, instead of a paper one. (But that last may have been a bit unreasonable.)

I read her remarks with attention and anxiety. That October night she got a linen napkin, a minute steak and whatever green salad an Irish autumn could provide. She was elderly and frail, with an easy grace in conversation and recall. I could see her eyes glitter now and again with a joke, like Yeats’s musicians on their steep hill of lapis. What stays with me, however, is nothing to do with food or a preference for linen. It is a remark she made which illuminated her poise of spirit and imagination. I was pressing the claims of some person, on the grounds—infirm, I am sure—that they had a great sense of humour. I can still see her features: aquiline survivors of a classical beauty. She regarded me thoughtfully. When she replied, her tone was a deft blend of mirth and menace. “I am entirely against”, she said, “the promotion of a sense of humour as a philosophy of life.”

I include that small, personal snapshot because even at the time it revealed and confirmed something which still, at this distance, seems important. Above all, Kate O’Brien was an artist of balance and proportion; a seeker after poise; a healer of divisions. What grace human life could afford happened, she proposed, at rare moments of truce: when the spirit and the senses put aside their quarrel. But in her search for equilibrium—and her novels, including this one, are a commentary on that search—she allowed herself no diminution of costly and subversive questioning. She tolerated neither evasion nor simplification. In her best fiction there are no palliatives: neither false comfort nor easy laughter.

The Last of Summer offers neither. It is a story of love and choice; of subtle and exacting surrenders to design. In Angèle and Tom we see star-crossed love. In Hannah we see the arts of peace twisted into the vindictive strength of a latter-day war goddess. For the rest of them—Martin, Jo, Corney—we may reserve the roles of victim or witness; it hardly matters. The great strength of the book is to make us see how these elements can be choreographed into an ironic and heartbreaking pattern. The past repeats itself; but in such a way that we understand it freshly. The future is in doubt, and present certainties prove illusory. As we read on, the enchantment grows: we know these are dangerous matters; we know we are in safe hands.

Eavan Boland, Dublin, 1989

WATERPARK HOUSE

THE porter said he’d mind her bag.

“To be sure, Miss. Look, I’ll put it inside here, the way the sun won’t boil it on you.”

“Is it far from here to Waterpark House?”

The old man looked at her with interest.

“Mrs. Kernahan’s place you’re wanting, Miss?”

Angèle nodded.

“Is it far?”

“Yerrah, no. Half a mile, maybe, and a bit. No walk at all, if it wasn’t for the heat that’s in it this evening, glory be to God! But sure, isn’t it a wonder Mr. Tom and Mr. Martin wouldn’t be here for you, or Miss Josie herself, in the Ford?”

Tom. Martin. Miss Josie.

“They aren’t expecting me,” Angèle said. “They don’t know I’m in Ireland.”

“Ah well, if that’s the way! Will I give them a ring-up on the telephone, Miss, and maybe the Missus could send down for you?”

“No, thank you. I’d rather walk. I don’t mind its being hot.”

“Well, you’re young and light, God bless you.” They stood outside the station, under a lime tree. A cart loaded with corn brushed against them, leaving wisps on Angèle’s hair.

“Move on there, Jimmy, like a good boy,” the porter said to the child on top of the corn. When the cart had passed he pointed down the road.

“Turn to your right below McMahon’s, Miss, and straight on down with you through the town until you come to where you’ll turn sharp right again at the extremity of the street. Follow on then by the side of the water till you see a big ivy wall and a gate in it. And that’ll be Mrs. Kernahan’s place for you.”

“Thank you very much,” Angèle said.

“Not at all, Miss; you’re welcome.”

She turned right at McMahon’s. “The Town” lay before her—a wide, down-sloping street of white, pink, grey, and yellow houses. There was a church, there were some little shops; children in doorways, a pony trap outside a public house. The village of her father’s childhood.

The sky seemed very high, a space of pure blue; trees threw banners of shadow across the brilliant little houses; the air smelt of roses and of porter. There was hardly a sound in the street.

Angèle had always purpose. . .