We’re living at the speed of light, it seems, in this era of the Internet, of everything, whether there really is an app for that. A touchscreen, a tweet for customer service, a swipe for deliveries and pickups — practically no need to exchange a spoken word with another human being. Ever. What better refuge, then, than a book? Slow down and settle in with characters hiding themselves behind studied, proper manners. Characters bursting with foibles and fortitude. Characters whose actions and behaviors reflect our messy modern lives. Slow down and settle in with an emotionally resonant story that frames the universal — the search for love, for belonging, for one’s own identity — against the specific: an English country village, 1914, the summer before the Great War changes everything.
Helen Simonson’s The Summer Before the War shares the gentle wit and small-town terrain of her bestselling debut, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, which readers and booksellers alike are still talking about years after it was first published and featured in our Discover Great New Writers program.
A few weeks ago, Simonson sat down at Barnes & Noble’s Upper East Side Manhattan story to discuss her work with Elizabeth Strout, the Pulitzer Prize−winning author of Olive Kitteridge, as well as the New York Times bestsellers My Name Is Lucy Barton and The Burgess Boys, Abide with Me, a national bestseller, and Amy and Isabelle, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for first fiction. She’s been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in England. Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines, including the New Yorker and O, The Oprah Magazine.
The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. — Miwa Messer
Elizabeth Strout: Really, Helen, when I read this book, I just thought: How did she do this? How did she do this? Can you ever so briefly tell people what the book is about?
Helen Simonson. Photo credit: Nina Subin.
Helen Simonson: This is a love story of late Edwardian summer. A young schoolteacher comes to town to become the Latin mistress at the local grammar school, and this is considered quite scandalous, because Latin is a proper subject and therefore should be taught by a man. She’s taken under the wing of local matriarch Agatha Kent, who pretty much runs the town, but she runs it from inside society and from within the confines of a loving, long marriage. And Agatha has two nephews. One is a rising young surgeon, and the other dreams of becoming a poet. So the book is really about their dreams and ambitions, these young people starting their lives, but of course we the readers know that a horrific war is coming, and that pretty soon everybody is going to have to reevaluate what’s truly important in their lives.
ES: What was the impulse behind your diving into this area?
Elisabeth Strout. Photo credit: Leonardo Cendamo.
HS: I think I am very drawn to Sussex, which I spent my teenage years in. It’s sort of my emotional home. And this particular town, my hometown of Rye, is very ancient and it’s also very literary. Henry James lived there, and Radcliffe Hall and E. F. Benson, Rudyard Kipling and Virginia Woolf just down the way. So these are the writers that I grew up with. I think I always had them in my mind. I was very into Henry James. When my first book was accepted for publication, and my agent said, “You’re going to be a published writer,” I remember I was so overwhelmed I couldn’t find my way out of her office. I was sort of beating at the walls to find a door, and was sort of disgorged onto a busy Soho street, and I seemed to see the town of Rye rise up in front of me, I seemed to be standing on the Sussex hilltop with Agatha Kent, looking over this sort of toy landscape. Some of that community of “Rye-ters” just rising up to welcome me. Because in some tiny and very humble way, I, too, was going to join their ranks. That was really the very first impetus, was just to sort of go home and pay homage to all these writers.
ES: Your Acknowledgments indicate how much research you did. But I was curious how much time you spent on research, and how much writing the book.
HS: I was researching the whole time. I didn’t realize when I started out that since it was 1914 I would have to do real work, and then I realized, Oh, this will require some research. I was really researching the whole five years. I would say there was, in aggregate, about two solid years of research and maybe three years of writing. But you soon realize it’s not just military history and fashion and motorcars, but it’s everything. When a character gets up in the morning, what do they put on to go to the window? When they open the window, what kind of window catch? Everything we take for granted . . .
ES: You have it all there.
HS: I have it all there, but I also had to then take a lot out. Nothing kills a historical novel more than all those facts that the author wants you to know . . .
ES: That you’re so excited you learned.
HS: Yes, I’m so excited. So I say, “I know everything about the water and sewage system of Rye,” and I had to edit all that out so as not to bore people. Paring away what you’ve learned.
ES: You looked at magazines?
HS: Yes, that was the best. In the British Library periodicals section, they will give you original magazines, ladies’ magazines from 1914 in huge bound volumes. They give you a slanted desk by a big window, and at lunchtime they look after your laptop so you can go to the Pakistani café and have egg and chips. So I got to read the lady-gentlewoman-country life, as my matriarch Agatha Kent would have read them coming recently into her home. So my goal with the research was to make me feel that I had time-traveled there, so I could then write a contemporary novel as if I was living in 1914.
ES: Do you write from beginning to end?
HS: Yes. We should talk about that. I was looking at an interview that you did in which you said that you make all kinds of messes and scenes . . .
ES: Yes, I don’t write linearly. So I’m curious, because here I am talking to you.
HS: I do the opposite. I never know where I’m going. I start with my characters, and I literally follow them around and see where they are going to go, and whom they are going to meet, and how those people fit into the story. So there is no plan. In this case, I did know there was a war coming, because it was 1914, but I had no idea if we were going, or how we were going. But I don’t do what you do. That would totally terrify me, to write individual scenes.
ES: I read or heard that you said the whole world can be explained in a small town. I thought that was fabulous. Do you want to talk on that just a little bit?
HS: I really think that life is a comedy of manners, and somebody in describing this book had said, “Sometimes I’m in a comedy of manners, and sometimes more realistic fiction.” I don’t see a difference. Life is a comedy of manners. When it comes to wars and generals and politicians, they were just people who maybe their lunch didn’t sit well with them today. They are just people like us. My favorite example is George Washington — my real hero: he was offered the chance to be emperor of America, and he turned it down. I think this is the greatest thing that ever happened in history. But I also happen to know that he had new dentures and they hurt him, so perhaps he was like, “To hell with America; I just want to go home to Mount Vernon and take my teeth out.”
ES: At one point, Lady Agatha says, “My dear child, I fear we are all indentured servants of society.” I just thought that was so funny and perfect. Do you remember writing that line?
HS: Yes. I do remember. Because that’s the other thing in life, right? Nobody is truly free. The four-hour workweek, and maybe we’ll escape to an island. You always end up reporting to somebody. So yes, Beatrice Nash is dependent on Agatha, who in turn is dependent on her patron lady Emily, who in turn is freaked out when a real earl comes to stay — and so it goes.
ES: I read that you tried not to worry about plot. I was so interested in that, because the book is so well plotted. For example, when Beatrice falls off her bicycle . . .
HS: Yes, she does. I’m glad you remembered that.
ES: Did you know when she fell off her bicycle that Hugh would come along and pick her up?
HS: I am going to say yes, because otherwise there would be no point in her lying in the ditch, looking all fetching with a twisted ankle. I mean, yes. But I guess I only know a couple of steps ahead. I’ve been talking a lot about my writing process, which can be summed up with one word: procrastination. I write as infrequently as possible. So I think what happens a lot of times is, I go to bed thinking about the novel, I wake up thinking about it. I am working it out in my head all the time. So then, when I have two or three steps, I write it down, and then when I run out of steps, I go back to not writing for a month or two.
ES: Do you rewrite much?
HS: No, I think, as I say, a lot of it is being worked out in my head. I work very much on the individual page. I am editing as I go all the time, and then the next day, if I am writing the next day and not putting it off for a month, I am going back and rereading the day before. So I feel like I’m editing as I go. Of course, Susan Kamil, my editor — and your editor — is here, and, yes, she will tell you I probably had to rewrite a lot at the end: the second draft. This book was written cold, by myself, without writing workshops, and then just handed to Susan. It was like a big, hot mess. There was definitely some rearranging.
There were days when I had not only all the chapters laid out on the floor, but I had cut the chapters into pieces because there were sometimes different narrators. I was trying to move around thirty-five pages’ worth of material. I’d never done that before. On Major Pettigrew I wrote Chapter 1, and then Chapter 2, and then Chapter 3, all the way through to the end. So I had never done this before. It was very exciting.
ES: Good luck. It sounds to me like you’re on a slippery slope. One other point, when the refugees arrive in the village — I don’t think this gives away anything. Beatrice thinks she had not expected the silence. I thought that was an astonishing detail. I just thought, Right, I wouldn’t expect the silence. So where did that come from?
HS: I actually stole that from Henry James. He wrote an essay about standing on the ramparts of Rye and understanding on a beautiful summer afternoon that the war was coming, because he had been in the American Civil War as a young man, and so when everybody else thought it would be over by Christmas, he stood there and knew what was really coming. Then the next essay in that he talked about Belgian refugees coming to Rye, which was a story I had never heard, and I believe he talked about them coming silently. I guess because the townspeople are expecting it’s like a celebration. You’ve arrived; have a cup of tea. And these refugees have nothing to say because they’re just devastated.
ES: Can you tell us a little bit about Mr. Tillingham?
HS: I’m a huge Henry James fan, and I think I’ve been collecting materials to write a Henry James novel, and then Colm Tóibín came along and did it better. And I’ve read his letters, and I’ve read biographies. The wonderful thing about fiction, I realized, is I could use all this information about Henry James to really make Mr. Tillingham real, but then I could be totally scurrilous and also make him do and say anything I wanted, because it’s not Henry James.
ES: And you do, and that’s very funny.
HS: Well, whenever I got stuck on the novel and didn’t know where to go next, I would just pop in Mr. Tillingham, and he would say something outrageous.
ES: Again, without wanting to give too much away, I wondered how the story of Celeste and Daniel came to you. Daniel I understand. He’s been a major character all along. But their particular story is very poignant.
HS: Everybody in this book is an outsider to a certain degree. Right? Beatrice Nash is an outsider. Celeste is a refugee. She’s an outsider. She’s also blonde and incredibly beautiful, and so just the sort of person that people would latch onto who want to take care of refugees but not face the really bad things that are going on. And Daniel is a poet, and of course World War One is all about all the poets who went to the trenches and died, so he’s an iconic character to me. But Daniel is a bit of an outsider because he is a little flamboyant, and so as the novel progresses he becomes more dangerously an outsider, and then bad things have happened to Celeste, and she becomes dangerously an outsider. But again, I work step by step. So I knew Daniel was important, but the way they manage to somewhat help each other kind of came to me one day, and it’s like, Oh, I’ll never get away with that.
ES: I thought you did get away with it. I thought it was just lovely.
HS: Thank you.
ES: Do you have a favorite character?
HS: Well, for laughs it will probably have to be Mr. Tillingham. As I say, he was my refuge. I feel closest in age and temperament to Agatha Kent. She is a little bit my Mrs. Dalloway, and on a good day I sometimes feel like the better part of Mrs. Dalloway. So it was much harder to get inside the head of Beatrice Nash, who is twenty-three. I had to really dig deep to remember being twenty-three. I finally did it, because I finally realized, you know, Beatrice has no money, and I remember being a young woman with no money, and that sent memories flooding back and enabled me to sort of live as a young woman again.
But as for Agatha Kent, working her way through the ladies’ committees and trying to run everything . . . you know, she manages a lot more good putdowns than I ever managed. Somebody who had read the book said to me, “Oh my God, it hit me like a blow — the arrogance and condescension of all your characters.” I suddenly realized he was talking about Agatha as well as the funnier characters, and I suddenly realized that I was so close to Agatha that I hadn’t even realized all her failings and foibles, because they are probably mostly my own. So that was really, really interesting, to realize that you were too close to a character, so you weren’t actually seeing some of the things she did as being a little condescending.
ES: Were there characters that were harder to visualize, harder to conjure up?
HS: Yes. My problem is, I always have a big cast of characters. I wish I could write like Caroline Parkhurst, who wrote the book about the wife who committed suicide and the husband is trying to get the dog to tell him what happened — The Dogs of Babel. She writes their whole life story, including their marriage, and there’s no one in the book except the husband, the wife, and the dog. I can’t do that. If my characters go to a wedding, I have to tell you about everybody.
ES: You do it very well.
HS: But it gets more difficult as you get into the second and third layer of characters. OK, now, I’ve got to go commune with Mr. Poot, to find some reason that he thinks he’s redeemable. I call them all “Smith” to begin with, and I had to come up with names, which I hate. Do you hate coming up with names?
ES: No, I love coming up with names.
HS: Would you come up with names for me, and I could do something else for you?
ES: This is maybe not a very fair question but I’ll ask anyway. As you were going about this and working on it, did you feel a pressure from the success of Major Pettigrew?
HS: Well, I told everybody no. I told everybody, “No-no-no, no pressure, because I’m a mature woman and I have my family and friends and the validation of publication means the second book can hold no terrors for me.” Of course, that was completely untrue.
ES: Whom did you tell this to?
HS: Oh, I was on some panel. There was an audience of the industry. And I later realized I did feel that pressure. I was determined not to tank. So the only way I knew not to tank was to set myself bigger challenges than Pettigrew. So this is three voices instead of one; it’s war, which raises the stakes; and throw in the historical research, which means I have to prove that I can do that — or not. I’m sure I’ll be getting emails that I did everything wrong.
ES: It’s interesting how people are so willing to tell you what lies ahead.
HS: I’ve had people tell me, “You’ll be good for three books and then you’ll be toast.”. So I have one more book. And then people tell me, “Well, lightning has struck twice; you can’t expect it a third time.” So I feel no pressure about the third book.
ES: I think people are so interesting.
HS: Life is a comedy of manners, right?
ES: As a fiction writer, with two fantastic books under your belt now, what do you want people to feel when they’re done reading your books?
HS: Well, with this book I want to break their hearts. I want them to sob, and I want them to write and tell me they’re still weeping. But actually, what’s been the most special to me (and I’ve been out on the road for two weeks now) is that everywhere I go, the Pettigrew army shows up, and these are fans of Major Pettigrew — he meant so much to so many people, and there are people have read it multiple times, and they feel like they’ve added him to their family. I wasn’t expecting that, because I think of him as sort of a petty little man. I adore him, too; he’s been very good to me.
ES: That’s a nice thing.
HS: So I would like to continue to do that.