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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press Classics
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
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.
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Seitenzahl: 167
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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‘A small masterpiece. Simmons has found the perfect, delicate, elegiac voice’
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
‘A riveting story of youthful innocence consumed by betrayal… The book’s opening line leads like a wick into a powder keg of unexpected consequences. Simply spellbinding’
BOOKLIST
‘A perfectly-cut gem’
KIRKUS REVIEWS2
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SALT WATER
CHARLES SIMMONS
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY VESNA GOLDSWORTHY
PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS
SALT WATER
5
6
7
To Peggy and Pauline,
my twins
8
Contents
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 10elegy 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 11crafted 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 12the 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 13in 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 14business 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 15like 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 the greatest stylist. Salt Water creates its own story of American adolescence and heartbreak, in many ways darker than the Russian prototype, and, as an exercise in style, it does the Russian author ample justice.16
SALT WATER
18
“Well, that’s agreed then,” he said, settling himself into an armchair and lighting a cigar. “Each of us is to tell the story of his first love. It’s your turn first, Sergey Nikolaich.”
Ivan Turgenev, “First Love,”1860
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1
The Sandbar
IN THE SUMMER of 1963 I fell in love and my father drowned.
For one week in late June a sandbar formed half a mile out in the ocean. We couldn’t see it, but we knew it was there because waves were breaking on it. Each day at low tide we expected it to show through. A bar had never formed that far out, and we wondered if it would stick. If it did, the water near shore would be protected and calmer, and we could move our boat, the Angela, in front of the house instead of keeping it in Johns Bay, on the other side of Bone Point. The swimming of course would change, it would be like bay swimming, and the surf casting would be ruined.24
Father and I used to fish off the shore for king, weak, blues, and bass. The bass gave the best fight and were the best eating. We pulled in a lot of sand sharks too, small, useless things we threw back. Sometimes we went for real sharks, with a big hook, too heavy to cast. We’d fix on a mackerel steak, and I’d swim out with the hook and drop it to the bottom. I did this even when I was small, except then I’d float out on my inner tube, drop the hook, and Father would pull me in with a rope. Mother didn’t like this, even though we did it only when the water was calm. Once we got a hundred-pound hammerhead shark, the strangest fish I ever saw. It had a head like a sledgehammer, with eyes on the ends. People said it was a man-eater, but Father said it wasn’t.
We caught stingrays too. If Father hooked one and I was up in the house, he’d shout and I’d run down with the gaff. Stingrays are broad, flat fish. When you get them near shore, in the shallow water, they can suck onto the bottom and you can’t pull them in. You have to go out in high boots and work the gaff through them so that water gets in and breaks the suction. We caught rays five feet across. They have spiky tails that flail around and can give you a whack. Before you can push the gaff through the body you have to step on the tail and cut it off. They eat stingrays in some places, but we didn’t.25
I never went out with the gaff. Father wouldn’t let me. He went out and I held the rod. Once, after Father had cut off the tail and worked the gaff through the body, the ray took off, gaff and all, and pulled me over. The reel was locked. I held onto the rod and was carried out to where Father was. He grabbed the rod from me, and by the time we got the ray in it was mostly dead. We cut it loose, and it floated out.
“Suppose I weren’t here,” Father said, “how long would you have held on, forever?”
“Yes,” I said, and he squeezed my shoulder. I was seven that summer.
Bone Point was a special place. During World War I the government took it over for military purposes and again during World War II. After that it became a permanent federal reserve. In 1946 there were only a few houses. The agreement with the government was if you already had a house you could keep it for forty-five years, until 1991, but no new houses could be built. Mother and Father took over our house in 1948, the year I was born and the year Mother’s father died. He had built the house in the early thirties, and Mother had spent her childhood summers there too.
Like me she was an only child. She claimed the house had been too big for them, just as she thought it was too big for us. Mother was a complainer. The house wasn’t too big. I liked all that room and light. The first floor was full of 26windows and glass doors, and the porch went around the four sides. Her father had liked the light too, Mother said. She often said I reminded her of him, which pleased me because she had been so fond of him, but I felt I was more like Father. There weren’t many things Father said or thought I didn’t agree with.
The furniture was all from Grandfather’s time, and everything was large. For instance, there was a wicker couch in the living room that Father could lie on one end of, reading, with me at the other end, and we’d only overlap from the knees down. My bedroom was big enough for my double-size bed with plenty of space left over. Blackheart, my dog, always slept with me, and we never got in one another’s way. Every September we’d have to adjust when we moved back to town, where my bed was ordinary size.
Although after a week we couldn’t actually see the bar, its presence got plainer every day. Complete waves were breaking on it.
“Want to swim out?” Father said.
It was as if he had read my mind.
“The tide is out,” he said. “We can rest on the bar when we get there. On the way back the tide will be coming in and carry us along. What do you say?”
We were both good swimmers. Father used the crawl for general purposes. I did the backstroke, which is slower but 27not so tiring, and I liked looking up at the sky when I swam. Is there anything better than your body in the water and your mind in the sky? Whenever we swam together, because he was faster, Father would pull ahead, flip over, dive, stay down, come up, and fool around till I caught up. He was a regular porpoise.
I didn’t think he should be doing it this time. We were heading half a mile straight out to sea, and he was using up his energy. Then two hundred yards out I knew we had miscalculated. We were moving too fast. It wasn’t ebb tide, as Father had thought. The tide was still going out and speeding us to the bar. Every day the tide is an hour later. Today we had started out at noon, and I remembered that the previous day low tide had been at noon. Now low tide wouldn’t be for an hour. I told Father.
“It’s okay. We can wait on the bar before we swim back.”
He didn’t seem worried, but he didn’t fool around anymore either.
When we reached the bar we found the water was deeper than we had expected. Father could stand with his mouth above water, but I couldn’t. He tried holding my hand so the tide wouldn’t take me farther out, but this pulled him off his feet. I had to swim just to hold my place.
“We can’t rest,” he said. “We’ll have to go back. You mustn’t panic. Do you understand?”28
“I won’t.”
“Do you want me to help you?”
“I’ll panic if you have to help me.”
It was hard getting in. What kept us going was knowing that the tide against us was weakening. The question was, would the tide wear out before we did?
On the beach, figures stood watching us. As we got closer to shore and I knew we would make it I flipped over on my stomach and waved to Mother. I got a mouthful of water. Blackheart was there, along with the two people who were renting the guesthouse and their dog. It took us twenty-five minutes to get in, where it had only taken ten to get out.
Father and I lay exhausted on the beach for a long time. The two dogs sniffed us to see if we were alive. Mother held my hand. She was furious with Father. The two renters, who had just moved into the guesthouse, stayed with us. Mrs. Mertz was Mother’s age. Her daughter, Zina, even upside down, was beautiful. Her eyes and hair were brown, her skin was a lighter brown, and her lips were purple. They seemed to be carved. She kept hugging and stroking her dog, as if it had been in danger instead of us. Then she touched my cheek, out of curiosity, I thought. I fell in love with Zina upside down.
After dinner that evening, Father motioned me to follow 29him outside. We walked to the water’s edge, not saying much. He wanted to look at the water, I thought, or get away from Mother, who wasn’t speaking to him. The day had been bright and clear. Now the air was thick and damp, and a chill wind came off the ocean, turning it choppy.
“I thought for a moment out there you were going to leave me,” I said.
“I wouldn’t do that. Why did you think that?”
“It was just a thought.”
“Would you have left me?” Father said.
“No, sir.”
“Well, that’s good,” he said and put his arm around my shoulder. Whenever he did that I felt he loved me.
We walked back to the house. Mother was building a fire.
“Return to the scene of the crime?” she said. She was getting over it. We played Monopoly before going to bed. The wind shifted, and a nor’easter came up during the night. It lasted three days, and afterward the sandbar was gone.30
