Saturday, 19 July 2014

Early Autumn

Louis Bromfield (born on 27 December 1896) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1927 for Early Autumn.


The novel documents a period in American society where tradition and change collide. The setting is the seaside Massachusetts home of the Pentlands, a family with a proud early New England ancestry and an extensive display of portraits to prove it. The middle-aged Anson Pentland is obsessed with the family tradition and spends much of his time researching a book on the family’s genealogy. Everything that is not of the New England tradition is viewed with suspicion or contempt: the Polish immigrant workers, the Portuguese woman who married into the family, the Irish (several of whom are employed by the family) and those family members that have been living in France. These people are the agents of change. They transform their own situations, particularly Michael O'Hara who has risen from a working-class background to being a major landowner and an aspiring politician. They encourage others to behave differently, such as when Higgins eggs on Anson’s unhappy wife, Olivia, in considering an affair with O'Hara: “Well, you can't do better, Ma'am. I hope it brings you happiness. You ought to have a man like that.” The family members who have lived in France, including débutante Sybil who has returned home from her schooling in France, have little sympathy for the conservative attitude of Anson and the older generation at Pentlands and show little desire to remain there.

Bromfield served in the First World War with the American Field Service and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. He was enamoured with France during his service there and returned there in 1925 (the intention was a family vacation but they remained there for years). The writing of Early Autumn was begun in America and completed in France. The relationship between Sybil and a young Franco-American, Jean, had begun “when all Paris was celebrating the anniversary of the Armistice, and in the morning Sybil had gone with Thérése and Sabine [her cousin and her aunt] to lay a wreath beside the flame at the Arc de Triomphe (for the war was one of the unaccountable things about which Sabine chose to make a display of sentiment).”
Sybil is enraptured: “something in the sight of the uniform, or perhaps in the feel of the air, the sound of the military music, the echoes of the Marseillaise and the Sambre et Meuse, the sight of the soldiers in the street and the great Arc with the flame burning there... something in the feel of Paris, something which she loved passionately, had taken possession of her. It was something, which, gathering in that moment, had settled upon the strange young man who regarded her with such admiring eyes.” Jean, French by upbringing, though of New England ancestry, views America as a pioneer might. He contemplates “the plans he had for adjusting himself in this vigorous country. To discover it now, at the age of 25, was an exciting experience. He was beginning to understand those young Americans he had encountered occasionally in Europe (like his cousin Fergus Tolliver, who died in the war), who seemed so alive, so filled with a reckless sense of adventure... young men irresistible in such an old, tired world, because Nature itself was on their side.”


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