A DARKER COMEDY OF MANNERS
Helen Simonson overcomes creative self-doubt in second novel
There’s a telling moment in Helen Simonson’s new novel, The Summer Before The War, when a young schoolteacher named Beatrice Nash faces a crisis. She needs a new pair of gloves — gloves of quality, not the cheap cotton ones that shop assistants might wear. And she can’t afford them.
So why is her situation so critical? Well, Beatrice has taken up a new position teaching Latin in the historic Sussex town of Rye. Her presence is being questioned by conservative factions dubious about the breach in tradition occasioned by the appointment of a young single woman to a traditionally male post, even if she does come from a privileged background. So it’s essential she keep up appearances.
The year is 1914, and Beatrice is experiencing a galling moment of truth. A pair of quality gloves will eat up a week’s careful budgeting — so in meeting the challenges of living on a fixed income, she also must face the reality of her own class snobbery.
“I like my characters to be flawed and have their own prejudices,” Simonson says in an interview. “So, while we’re sympathetic to her in her current situation, the fact remains that she has had more money in the past, taking it for granted, and has not taken the time to be sympathetic toward others in more perilous situations.”
Beatrice’s travails are one thread in a rich fictional tapestry that begins in the lingering twilight of a country at peace and then plunges into the immediate horrors of war.
Simonson is attempting something tricky here. At the beginning, her narrative successfully taps a rich vein of social comedy — offering set-piece moments that reflect this author’s admitted passion for Jane Austen. But by the end, she has managed a transition into darkness with a scene in which a 15-year-old boy, who has lied his way into the British army, faces the firing squad.
“My goal was to see whether the humble comedy of manners could encompass something as large as First World War and bring some illumination and compassion to a very tragic time,” Simonson says.
Simonson faced another tough challenge. Could she deliver a worthy successor to her much-loved debut novel, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand?
That 2010 book, set in a small English village and dealing with the relationship between a widowed English major and a shopkeeper named Mrs. Ali, had a success that astonished Simonson.
“I’d been a wife and stay-at-home mother,” she says. “That’s kind of the best and worst job in the world, and I was pretty desperate for some small escape.”
So she started attending writing classes — “and I felt I was home. This was what I wanted to do with any spare time I had.”
But she still struggled. “I wanted so much to be published — but being published seemed to be about writing very small gritty stories for respected small literary magazines. I wasn’t getting anywhere, and realized one day that my heart wasn’t really in writing about dirty truck stops and cheap motels. I was quite desperate and thinking about giving it up.”
It was then that she made a crucial decision.
“I’ll write something just for me, no matter how silly,” she told herself. And she showed up at her next writing class with the beginning of Major Pettigrew.
“There was the little lane and the little house. The door opened, and there he was.”
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand sold more than 50,000 copies in Canada alone and remains a bookclub favourite. Chatting in her Toronto publisher’s office, Simonson still marvels over its popularity. “It would be one of those small books that might spread by word of mouth” — that’s what she was told to expect. “And then it was suddenly on the New York Times best-seller list. I was 45 and I had come out of nowhere with this book.”
It was her father — “my biggest fan” — who kept her grounded at the time. “So, do you think you can do it again?” he asked her bluntly.
That question troubled her as she began work on the novel that was to become The Summer Before the War.
“As soon as I sat down at the computer to start to write, my mind went blank, and I was terrified again. But there really wasn’t any choice but to go forward and work through the creative struggle and self-doubt that I’m told all writers have.”
The British- born Simonson now lives in Brooklyn, but it was the fabled town of Rye, where she lived as a teenager, that reopened the creative gates. The Summer Before the War is very much a novel of place peopled by a richly imagined collection of characters. Among them — the inimitable Mr. Tillingham, a famous writer clearly inspired by Henry James.
James spent his last years in Rye, and his home is now open to the public. For Simonson, the old town in the summer of 1914 represents a lingering remnant of the Edwardian age, a place rich in literary connections. U.S. novelist Edith Wharton was a regular visitor. A young Virginia Woolf would come and have tea in James’s parlour.
“I was attracted to that period,” she says, “but it became apparent to me that I couldn’t write about that era without writing about the way everybody threw it away in a war.”
She also became fascinated by what was happening to women — which is why Beatrice’s aspirations become pivotal in the story.
“The war catapulted women into a new age. It literally gave them a vote, it took them out of their domestic lives,” Simonson says. “After the war, they were told to go back home — but you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”