The Last Summer of the World

by Emily Mitchell

HE IS JUST adding the last canvas to the pyre when Amélie arrives. She climbs stiffly from the cart she has driven in and comes to lean over the garden wall, watching him. Her dark hair has gray in it now that he had not seen before, but perhaps it is just that the bright sunlight shows it more clearly.

  “Amélie,” Edward says. He is unprepared for her visit. “I have been meaning to come down for weeks to see you.” She shrugs.

  “François said that you would be home this afternoon,” she says. “I thought I would come to you. What are you doing?”

  “I’m burning my paintings.”

  “Why?”

  “To be free of them.”

  “Well, you know best.”

  “Look, I don’t know how to say it. I miss Mildred very much; she was a dear friend, a brave spirit. I am sorry for everything that happened, and if I could do anything to change it—”

  “You can’t,” Amélie says, flatly. “It was no more your fault than mine. I should have stopped her going to America when she was ill. I’m here to bring you some belongings of yours that she was keeping; your daughter left them with us. Madame, I know, wanted to make sure that you got them.”

  “Well, let me offer you something to eat while you are here. Why don’t you go inside and make yourself at home? I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “Thank you, I will.” She starts off toward the front of the house, then calls back to him: “They are in the back of the cart.”

  “I’ll get them on my way,” Edward calls. He watches her go.

  He pushes the outlying edges of the fire together with a stick. It is getting lower now, so he leaves it to burn down. He can come back to douse it in a while. He goes around to look at what is in the back of the cart Amélie drove here; under a tarpaulin in the back he finds a single brown leather case.

  His heart jumps when he sees it. It takes a minute for him to summon the courage to pick it up because it might not be what he hopes. It’s heavy for something that size, and he catches his breath, because, yes, that is just about what it should weigh if it is full of paper and glass. He picks it up and carries it inside. Amélie is seated in a chair by the fireplace in the salon.

  “This,” he says, “is not clothing.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know yet.” He lays it out on its side on the floor and kneels in front of it. Then with his thumbs he slides both the catches out until they pop and the lid lifts slightly. Inside, he can see that there are photographs.

  He opens the lid of the case all the way. His photographs, and below them some of his negatives. These are ones that he had tried to bring with him when they left in 1914 and then, in those last minutes, had to leave behind. They are set out in the same neat rows that he had stacked them into trying to fit as many as possible into this small space.

  His whole life in discrete moments, stretching back to those first years when he’d hardly known what to do with a camera. The self-portrait he’d sent to the Philadelphia Salon, which Stieglitz had chosen to exhibit, the first time anyone had ever praised him for his efforts. Then, underneath that, the first series of photographs he’d taken of Rodin, and the first of Clara, playing the piano, her hands arched over the keys, her back to him. Then on, up through the years: Clara holding Mary when she was a baby; Marion and Clara standing at a distance from each other on the plaza outside Notre Dame; Rodin and Isadora at Meudon; harvesttime in the fields around Voulangis; all of their old friends seated around the table, eating lunch in the garden; Mary and Kate by the seashore in Brittany; an autochrome of Marion lying in a field of long grass. And then, at last, the war: refugees making their slow way along the roads away from the fighting, and the soldiers going in the opposite direction, their faces blank, or afraid or set with determination. With each new print that he turns up, the memories explode inside his head, painfully vivid but wonderful as well. He wants to spend a long time lingering over each one, letting the stories it carries with it seep into him and carry him along as far as they will take him.

  “Look,” he says to Amélie, “what my daughter has given back to me.”

  Amélie stands up and comes so she can peer over his shoulder. “Well,” she says. “Well.”

  “And look: here is one more. She must have added this to the case before she drove it to Huiry.” He holds up one of the prints. It is a picture of Kate and Clara. They are seated outside in the garden, here, at Voulangis on the lawn. It looks, from the flowers behind them, like late spring. Both of them are dressed up in their nicest clothes and they look uncomfortable. Clara’s eyes are ringed with dark circles and Kate has a lost, anxious expression in her eyes. But, still, there they are. Clara has her arm extended so her hand is cupped over her daughter’s smaller one, protecting it. She is sitting up straight, proudly. Kate has smoothed her pinafore down and tucked it under her bent knees. They are looking back into the camera, their eyes saying, We are here.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  The Last Summer of the World is a work of fiction. While many of the people and events in the novel have bases in reality, I have taken significant poetic license with the details of the characters’ lives and motivations. In the interests of creating a coherent and integrated story, I have invented incidents that probably or definitely did not take place and in some cases altered the chronology of the real occurrences described.

  Between 1906 and 1914, the photographer Edward Steichen did reside in France. He came to Paris first as a student in 1900 and then, after a stint in New York, he returned to Europe with his wife, Clara, and their young daughter, Mary, living first in Montparnasse and then moving, shortly before the birth of their second daughter, Kate, to a house in Voulangis, a village to the east of Paris.

  For those years, Steichen and Clara divided their time between their country house and two daughters, and their many friends, a group that included Henri and Amélie Matisse, Leo and Gertrude Stein, the journalist Mildred Aldrich, the painters Arthur Carles and Marion Beckett, and Edward’s great mentor and friend, Auguste Rodin. But beneath an idyllic surface, there were tensions stirring between these two headstrong and artistically inclined people. As her later writings indicate, Clara was coming to feel increasingly discontented in her marriage, even as she longed to fulfill the idealized role of self-sacrificing wife and helpmeet. This situation was not helped by Edward’s rumored infidelities with, among others, the British sculptor Kathleen Bruce and the dancer Isadora Duncan.

  Then, in the summer of 1914, larger events overtook them. The Steichens and their friends watched as Europe descended with disorienting speed into war, and, simultaneously, the stresses inside Edward and Clara’s relationship erupted into a bitter fight that tore the family in half. Clara accused Edward of being unfaithful with their mutual friend Marion Beckett, who was staying with them for the summer. Edward denied the affair, and only the urgency of evacuating their children from the path of the war made them temporarily put aside their quarrel. In the end, they left their home and returned to America, taking with them only what they could carry, just three days ahead of advancing German troops.

  Once they were all established in the States, relations between Edward and Clara deteriorated still further, and finally in the summer of 1915, Clara took her younger daughter, Kate, and crossed the Atlantic once more. She lived for the next two years in their old house in the Marne, enduring the hardships and privations of wartime.

  When America entered the war in April of 1917, Edward Steichen joined the new Photography Division of the Army Signal Corps and was assigned to help develop aerial reconnaissance photography for the American Expeditionary Force in France. He was responsible for organizing reconnaissance ahead of the critical Second Battle of the Marne; for most of the war his role was administrative, although he did take aerial photographs of the front, which he later exhibited. He returned to his house during this period for the first time since abandoning it in 1914 and found that his photographs and negatives had been severely damaged during the
intervening years. According to Steichen’s biographer Penelope Niven, he and Marion Beckett did encounter each other at one point during the war. Steichen’s sister, Lilian, told her daughter Helga Sandburg that her uncle was having a love affair with a beautiful American woman while he was serving in France, though she did not, apparently, give any further details of the woman’s identity. In 1919, Clara Steichen sued Marion Beckett in New York, charging that she had destroyed her marriage by conducting a protracted affair with her husband. Clara was unable to prove her claims and lost the suit.

  Of the photographs described in the novel, some but not all of them are genuine Steichen photographs from the early decades of the twentieth century. Notably, Self-Portrait, 1898, was the entry that Steichen sent to the Second Philadelphia Salon, and which first brought him to the attention of Alfred Stieglitz. Also, the photograph Wheelbarrow with Flowerpots, 1920, was part of a series of experiments Steichen made in photographic abstraction during the years immediately following the war.

  In 1923, Steichen, then living in his old house in the Marne, burned his paintings, because he wanted to devote himself henceforth to photography; only those paintings that had already been sold survived. He remained in Europe for several years after the war before returning to America. In the 1920s and ’30s he worked for Vanity Fair, and took some of the most well-recognized portraits of that era, including pictures of Winston Churchill, Greta Garbo, Paul Robeson and Charlie Chaplin. He was reunited with his children, and eventually married his second wife, the actress and writer Dana Desboro Glover. In World War Two, despite being fifty-six years old at the war’s inception, Steichen again volunteered and was sent to the Pacific to document in photographs life on board an aircraft carrier. In 1946 he became the director of the Photography Department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and orchestrated “The Family of Man” exhibition in 1955, his attempt to show, through photography, the common humanity of all races and cultures in the face of the rising tensions of the Cold War.

  After her divorce, Clara Steichen lived in the Azores and later in Vermont. She wrote an autobiographical work entitled An Ozark Childhood, which was never published. She did not remarry. Mary Steichen became a physician, and Kate Steichen became an opera and choral singer. Marion Beckett returned to the United States, and in the 1920s adopted two children. She lived and worked in Washington, D.C., sharing an apartment with the painter Katharine Rhoades. In 1925 her paintings were shown at the Montross Gallery in New York.

  In 1960, after Dana’s death, Steichen married Joanna Taub. He died in 1973.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MY GRATITUDE AND admiration go to my editor, Jill Bialosky, whose acumen improved this book immensely, and also to my agent, Gail Hochman, whose guidance and support were invaluable. Thanks also to Evan Carver and Adele McCarthy-Beauvais.

  I was lucky to have many insightful readers for this manuscript during the process of its creation, including my sister Joanna Mitchell, J. M. Tyree, Michael Cunningham, Ernesto Mestre, Jenny Offill, Lewis Braham, Cari Luna, Halimah Abdullah, and Philip Kadish. Irini Spanidou, Lauren Acampora, James Helgeson, Joseph Pearson, Stacie Cassarino, Monica King, David Bain, Kate Davis and Christina Wulf all gave much-appreciated encouragement. My parents, Lois and Christopher Mitchell, were amazing in their love, support and provision of air-conditioning at crucial moments. Wendy Brandchaft and Charlie Plotkin gave me my very first writer’s grant and believed in me all along. My grandparents Elaine and Bernard Brandchaft gave their whole family a love of reading and thinking.

  Certain books were extremely useful in the research for this novel, most especially Penelope Niven’s outstanding biography of Edward Steichen, published by Clarkson Potter. I also referred extensively to John Keegan’s The First World War, John Ellis’s Eye-Deep in Hell, and many other works from and about the period in which the novel is set.

  Thanks to the Julia and David White Artists’ Colony in Costa Rica, where I finished an initial draft of the book.

  A finalist for the New York Public Library’s

  Young Lions Fiction Award

  Named a Best Book of 2007 by

  Providence Journal

  Austin American-Statesman

  Madison Capital Times

  MORE PRAISE FOR EMILY MITCHELL AND

  The Last Summer of the World

  “Soldiers, of course, live and die in the trenches, in the air, behind the cameras, and Mitchell engages our sympathy for them and the ravaged land by emphasizing the fragility of both. … Her writing is spare yet never mannered; she holds back only to draw you in, whether she is describing a spectacular aerial dogfight or a marital spat.”

  —Boston Globe

  “An absorbing debut novel … told with the elegance of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, this book captures the life and heart of a great photographer and of a world beset by war.”

  —Book Passage

  “Finely wrought … rich in detail … Mitchell has a lyrical sensibility and a glorious ability to write about art.”

  —Madison Capital Times

  “Mitchell’s prose is engaging and spirited. … A striking novel highlighting the rich experience of artists in Europe in the early 1900s and the inner life of a conflicted individual.”

  —Library Journal

  “Mitchell vividly imagines the terror of these historic dogfights. … Enriching her intensely psychological tale with cameos of Auguste Rodin and others, Mitchell evokes the spell of creativity and the pain of rupture when following one’s vision severely complicates relationships.” —Booklist, starred review

  “Mitchell has chosen an innovative and unusual narrative structure of chronological fragmentation. … Mitchell establishes a context for individual photographs and deftly handles moments of personal crisis in Steichen’s life and career. … A novel in which the chaos and fragmentation of war mirror the chaos and fragmentation of personal relationships.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  THE LAST SUMMER OF THE WORLD

  Emily Mitchell

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  EMILY MITCHELL ON HER NOVEL THE LAST SUMMER OF THE WORLD

  What first got me interested in writing about Edward Steichen was his photographs, in particular his beautiful early work, his impressionistic pictorialist pictures from the first decades of the twentieth century. At the time, I’d lived in New York for several years, and many of Steichen’s best-known pictures from this time are archetypal scenes of that city: the Flatiron building at night, the Brooklyn Bridge flying out across the East River. These images reminded me how photography can focus our attention on what is familiar and show it to us in a new light—it can offer us a second look at things we thought we knew about. I wondered how this potential for letting us see anew might work in the plot of a novel.

  So I started reading about Steichen’s life, and I came across his and others’ accounts of his service in the First World War. I asked myself what it would have been like to work in reconnaissance when both flying and photography were so relatively new. It seemed to me that the work of war and the work of art are so opposed to each other—destruction and creation—that I began to imagine what it would have been like for an artist, especially one with refined, romantic sensibilities like Steichen, to go to war, to use his skills for that purpose.

  I also became fascinated by the story of Steichen’s tumultuous relationship with his first wife. To me Clara Steichen seemed more comprehensible to our time than she perhaps was to her own. She now appears to have been a woman frustrated by the limitations of her life as a wife and mother, by the fact that she was forced to abandon her independence in marriage while her husband was not. She may also have suffered from an undiagnosed mood disorder that made her prone to wild swings of emotion. For a while I considered making Clara my protagonist and trying to write the story of her wartime return to France after she left Edward. But I had trouble focusing the book this way because Clara’s story is thwarted; it’s a silence, an absence of re
alization, and for this reason very sad and difficult to write. In the end I discovered that I wanted to tell both sides of the Steichens’ impossible marriage, not only Clara’s.

  In the Steichens’ private conflict, I found some reflections of what was happening in the great public catastrophe of the war. Both were waged by people who believed they were doing the right thing the entire time; both seemed to come out of nowhere, to surprise and horrify their participants with how destructive they became. Without implying an equivalence, I wanted to use these conflicts to explore how people find themselves driven to extreme places in human experience, how they cope once they are there, and how they attempt to recover in the wake of disaster.

  EMILY MITCHELL’S RECOMMENDED READING LIST

  Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins

  In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje

  Sent For You Yesterday by John Edgar Wideman

  Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer by Christine Schutt (stories)

  The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz

  DISCUSSION QU ESTIONS

  1. The Last Summer of the World has a unique chronological structure. Chapters alternate between Steichen’s experiences during the war years and the events in his life leading up to the war. What is the effect of this structure? Why do you think Mitchell chose to construct the novel in this way?

  2. How does Steichen win Rodin’s admiration during their first meeting in 1901? What does this visit tell us about Steichen’s character? What does Rodin say about photography during their visit, and how does it affect Steichen’s later work?

  3. What is it about Clara that first attracts Steichen to her? When do we first begin to realize that their relationship has changed?

  4. What sort of army officer does Steichen make? Does he win the affection of the men around him?