JOIN USDappled with a gentle charm
A gentle silliness suffuses the pages of William Dean Howells’ novel Indian Summer (published in 1886). Not the broad silliness of Wodehouse with bumbling aristocrats and American conmen, but the silliness of men in middle age falling for a pretty face and deceived into believing that love can be built on fleeting pleasures.
The man whose behaviour sets off the plot is Theodore Colville who had built a career as a respectable newspaper editor in Des Vaches, Indiana, but finds himself on the wrong side of a political battle in the midwestern town and quits his job. As a young man, he’d trained as an architect and travelled through Europe and had an affinity for Florence and Italy. So it is there that he escapes post this debacle that has ended his journalism career.
Florence for Colville is also a place filled with the ghosts of youth — he’d been jilted there, but he finds the city soothing for his soul and soon enough, falls in with the Anglo-American expat crowd that has gathered there. He runs into Lina Bowen who awakens memories of his one great failed romance — she was a friend of the girl who broke his heart — and it’s with mixed emotions that he rekindles the acquaintance. In doing so, he also meets Imogene, Lina’s guest for the summer, whose beauty and youth leaves Colville smitten. And there begins a series of misadventures that a man of his age should definitely not be indulging in.
Mark Twain was a fan of Indian Summer when it was appearing in monthly instalments in Harper’s Monthly, a year before it came out in book form. He wrote to Howells explaining how he “wouldn’t give a damn for the rest” of the authors who were currently in vogue. That company included the likes of Henry James. Howells, Twain insisted, could make “all the motives and feelings perfectly clear without analysing the guts out of them, the way George Eliot does.” Twain is right when he said that Howells could spin an emotional landscape of his characters without the intensity that marked James and Eliot. Maybe that’s why he was considered a lighter writer, one without the depth of his contemporary masters of literature and why he’s not quite given the stature of a great American author.
Which is a pity — sure, there’s no great momentous world event that rocks the foundations of the lives of the characters in Indian Summer. It’s just the regular drama of the everyday we see on a small scale. People fall in what they think is love, they are surrounded by friends and well-wishers who see the truth in clearer perspective, they repeat the mistakes of the past or, if they are young, they make mistakes that they will carry into the future. Hearts break and heal and the beauty of Florence acts as a balm. Friendships are restored and new loves, forged in pain and wisdom, are born. Second chances abound and so does optimism. This is the human condition and stories like these deserve their moment in the sun, too.
The author is a Bangalore-based writer and communications professional with many published short stories and essays to her credit.
That One Book is a fortnightly column that does exactly what it says — takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great. Come, raid the bookshelves with us.