The Summer of '39

Novelist and biographer Seymour's inspiration for her fourth novel (following a biography of Robert Graves, Living on the Edge) comes from a notorious 1939 incident involving Graves and his then-companion, poet Laura Riding. As a result of the summer the two spent with Schuyler and Katharine Jackson, a young American couple, Jackson left his wife for Riding, and Katharine was institutionalized after attempting to strangle one of her daughters. Seymour's narrator is a Katharine Jackson-like character, who tells her story from the perspective of a reclusive old age. Nancy Parker grows up enduring her father's abuse and her mother's scorn; only her visits to her aunt and uncle at Point House in Falmouth, Mass., afford solace. On a trip to New York, she meets Chance Brewster, a promising young writer, literary impresario and founder of an obscure small press. After years in Greenwich Village and on New Jersey farms, always in close proximity to Bill and Annie Taylor, their closest friends, they end up at Point House, where Nancy, who has never entirely recovered from the trauma of her childhood and sensing herself out of place in the intellectual world she married into, finally feels safe. Gurdjieff and Edmund Wilson make appearances, but it is visionary poet Isabel March who has the greatest impact on the foursome. When Isabel and her lover, Charles Neville, move in with the Brewsters, Nancy allows the enigmatic woman to gradually take over her husband, poison her relationship with her children and push her over the edge into madness. Too late she learns that Isabel's mesmerizing obsession with truth in art masks her deceptive wiles. Although Isabel is not convincingly the charmer for whom men would die, the reverberations of her acts are powerful. In elegant, richly evocative prose, Seymour moves back and forth from Nancy's childhood to her old age, weaving a delicate net of narrative around an ominous core of darkness, in which personal demons are mixed up with a general dread of Hitler and the horrors to come. (Sept.)