Simmons Salt Water

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80533-277-0
Verlag: Pushkin Press Classics
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

It's 1963, and fifteen-year-old Michael is spending the summer in the usual place: his family's New England beach house. This isn't a summer like the others, though. This is the summer he falls in love with the girl next door, twenty-year-old Zina. This is the summer he begins to understand the difference between what adults say and what they really mean. This is the summer he finds himself betrayed and learns in his turn to betray. This is the summer his life falls apart.This devastating coming-of-age story, inspired by Ivan Turgenev's classic novel First Love, is a witty, elegiac masterpiece, which captures all the booze-soaked, salt-brined atmosphere of America's last summer of innocence.

Charles Simmons (1924-2017) was for decades the editor of The New York Times Book Review. Born in Manhattan, he was educated at Columbia University and served in the Army in the Second World War. As well as Salt Water, he published several comic novels.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Simmons, Charles

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

TURGENEV BY THE ATLANTIC

Vesna Goldsworthy

Before I knew anything about Salt Water, the magic of its opening pages seduced me. There was the lyrical promise of that simple, evocative title, followed by the unlikely combination of a quote from Ivan Turgenev’s First Love and a map of an unnamed coast with an ocean stretching to the east, like a sketch for a treasure hunt. Then the story began with an unforgettable sentence: “In the summer of 1963, I fell in love and my father drowned.” How could you resist such a daring amalgam of light and darkness?

I am glad I did not. From that perfect opening through to the maelstrom of a finale, I discovered a carefully orchestrated elegy of a book, in turns enchanting and disturbing. While the broad outline of Salt Water will be familiar to those who know Turgenev’s famous coming-of-age novella – on a long summer holiday an adolescent boy falls in love with an older girl only to discover that she is his father’s mistress – Simmons’ story adds up to something much more original than is implied in the notion of reworking a classic.

It would be dishonest not to admit that, once I grasped the Russian connection, I had mixed feelings about transporting Turgenev to America. I had done something similarly daring – or foolhardy – in the opposite direction, when I used Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby as a premise for my novel Gorsky, a story of a Russian oligarch in noughties London. It was not so much the idea of reworking a classic bothering me, then, as an unexpected possessiveness about the original, the very response I had feared from Fitzgerald’s fans. Caring about Turgenev, I worried about whether his masterpiece would thrive, transplanted in different soil.

Re-reading a Russian classic remains for me the best way to restore faith in writing after a disappointment with any overhyped recent novel. And Turgenev was my first literary love. His name alone evokes seaside holidays and phoneless adolescent immersion in reading. My teenage body may have been shaded by Adriatic pines, but my mind travelled to a dacha somewhere outside Moscow, absorbed in emotional upheavals crafted by Turgenev. Among his works, First Love was the one I devoured both most eagerly, and too early to notice the full extent of its underlying darkness.

I was younger than its sixteen-year-old narrator, Vladimir, and, like him, I was “all longing and anticipation.” Despite my gender, I found it easier to identify with the restless adolescent boy who reads romantic poetry, skips schoolwork, and argues with his mother about what to wear, than with the female object of his desire. Even decades later, I vividly remembered the scene in which Vladimir first catches sight of – and is bewitched by – twenty-one-year-old Zinaida, as she stands in the garden of her rented summer residence surrounded by suitors. A tall slender blonde in a striped pink dress, she seemed an unlikely femme fatale, slapping adult men on the forehead with a flower shaped like a small bag which burst open with a pop. The suitors’ willing submission to indignity seemed as puzzling as Zinaida’s own, when, towards the end of the story, Vladimir observes his father reaching for a whip and she kisses the red trail of blood it leaves on her arm.

Although I went on to read and admire Turgenev’s other works – books such as Sportsman’s Sketches, On the Eve, Fathers and Sons, or Virgin Soil – it took many years to return to First Love, perhaps precisely because I remembered it with such intensity. When I finally did, I understood much better the ways in which Turgenev links eroticism with pain, and I found the narrative even more engrossing. The thirty-odd thousand words seemed to contain a much longer novel.

Vladimir, absorbed in his feelings after an evening of entertainment at Zinaida’s, simply steps over the body of his servant – more than a servant, a dyadka, a male nanny who would have cared for him since he started walking – who had fallen asleep on the floor while waiting to undress his charge. In my early reading I too ignored such details. I now noticed layers which held little interest to me as a teenager, depictions of class and snobbery, and whole constellations of Russian society. First Love ends with the death of a homeless woman in a scene which prompts Vladimir to examine the meaning of sin and forgiveness. Love may be the primary theme, and oedipal rivalry with the father the central conflict of the story, but they are set within the richly complex framework of mid-nineteenth century Russia.

First Love is sometimes mentioned as Turgenev’s only wholly autobiographical work, inspired by his adolescent infatuation with Princess Catherine Shakhovskoy, which ended when he discovered her liaison with his father. Charles Simmons suggested that his plan with Salt Water was initially the opposite, to move away from his own life. His four previous novels were all autobiographical, and he had tired of himself as a subject. “I meant Salt Water to be an homage as well as an exercise,” he said in an interview. “The surprise to me was that in complicated ways Salt Water turned out to be autobiographical too.”

For those readers who love Turgenev (and Simmons was a fellow fan), one joy of reading Salt Water is its finely-judged balance of faithfulness to the original alongside the creation of an ultimately very different world and set of characters. There is the pleasure of spotting echoes of Turgenev with American twists: the narrator, Michael (Misha) is fifteen, claiming to be sixteen, the son of an insurance broker; Zina Mertz is a young photographer of partly Russian ancestry, twenty but claiming to be twenty-one. Her mother, Mrs Mertz, is a flirtatious divorcee, with touches of Mrs Robinson.

In his poem “Annus mirabilis” Philip Larkin famously wrote that “sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three”: in Salt Water, sex is already there even for the fifteen-year-olds, and it gives the story and the father-son relationship a very different undercurrent. Reading Simmons is like reading Turgenev and J. D. Salinger at once.

The American East Coast in 1963 is, of course, nothing like tsarist Russia a century earlier, or even like Larkin’s austere post-war Britain. It is the world we are familiar with from iconic period films such as The Apartment or The Graduate, and have viewed through the nostalgia-tinted lens of TV series such as Mad Men. Women and children spend long hot days in summer houses on the beach while men go into town for business and adulterous trysts. Although the teenagers are much more knowing than they are supposed to be, there is nonetheless a prelapsarian feel to that long summer before Kennedy’s assassination – America’s sense of innocence is in jeopardy, but still, just, intact.

Simmons’ memories of his own childhood summers spent sailing, fishing, and hunting for seashells provide the unexpected autobiographical dimension in his homage to First Love. He creates a world as American as Turgenev’s dachas outside Moscow are Russian. Images of his paradise lost are hauntingly beautiful. The changing seascape is evoked in precise, translucent prose and so vividly that the ocean becomes one of the most unforgettable characters in the novel.

Salt water keeps recurring as a leitmotif, initially in images of luminous, innocent pleasure while Michael is swimming or sailing under the changing sky, then in the aftermath of his shameful act when he thinks it could wash away his sin, and finally in the scene of his father’s drowning, when “tears and salt water taste the same.” The father’s death is announced in the first sentence, so it is no spoiler to mention it, but it is impossible to do the fine detail justice without ruining the buildup of tension that awaits the reader.

Simultaneously plain and evocative, the world of Salt Water can also be reminiscent of Hemingway’s stories of the sea: both writers wrote from experience. Their oceans move and breathe like living things. “I always checked the ocean in the evening,” Simmons writes, “Tonight, it was unusually still. Small waves broke quietly on the shore. On windless evenings in summer I thought the ocean was false. How could something so big and heavy in the body be so dainty in the fingertips?”

Associations with Hemingway may not be accidental: there is a Turgenevian dimension to both writers’ work. Hemingway compared writing fiction to “boxing with Turgenev.” It may seem unlikely that an understated stylist like him, someone who declared that “adverbs are the enemy of the verb,” could call Turgenev – who had no qualms about using adverbs – the greatest writer there ever was. Turgenev’s sentences may be more ornate than Hemingway’s but they are crystalline in their elegance.

In the West, Turgenev had, for many decades, been considered the greatest among the Russian writers. Although he has now perhaps been overtaken by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, he is still considered...