Seventeenth Summer

It's when the lilacs begin to bloom, come late spring, that I always feel the urge to re-read a rather silly, but sort of lovely, little book. Seventeenth Summer was written in 1942 by Maureen Daly. A quick internet search of Ms. Daly doesn't reveal great abundance; she wrote Summer when she was still in college, presumably in the late 1930s or early 1940s, and she went on to write other novels for 'young people'. It would be easy to assume that once she married, Daly went on to lead a rather conventional mid-twentieth century life; she was a woman, after all, and the time period would have easily placed her in apron and house-dress, a gaggle of children at her table. But Daly did otherwise. When she married the writer William P. McGivern in 1947, he didn't stow her away in the suburbs; instead, they wrote together, chronicling their travels to Africa, Spain, and Ireland. No mention of children in my research. No mention of house-wifery. Daly was a writer from a very young age, and she lived her life as such, pursuing a passion that may not have brought her incredible fame or fortune, but one that answered in her a simple and elemental need. 

I'm not really sure why I love so the life that Daly lived. I'm not really sure why I love her book Seventeenth Summer, which, by most standards, is overly simplistic and nostalgic. But I do love these things. I take great comfort in the fact of their existence. Seventeenth Summer is a simple tale; it's about a quiet girl named Angie who graduates from high school and begins a summer romance with one Jack Duluth, a popular but humble basketball star from the high school across town who now drives his father's bakery delivery truck. Angie has college designs; Jack, on the other hand, will live out the rest of his life in a small town, working for his father's business. The story is about Angie's first brush with romance and freedom, but in its own quiet way, it's also a commentary on the way small town life--and the way our families--can so easily, so stealthily, encircle us with their comforting but sometimes stifling familiarity and refuse to let us go.


There is a heaviness in Daly's writing. Angie's mother is kind and keeps a clean house, but she also sleeps a lot, pulling the blinds against the summer heat for long afternoon naps. Angie's older sister Lorraine returns home from college for the summer with fashionable clothes and a grown-up air, but she also spends a lot of time fussing in the bathroom and dating 'shady' men who have certain expectations. None of this is examined outright; Daly simply puts it on the page, surrounding these muted realities with descriptions of McKnight's drugstore on a Saturday night, and the way Angie and Jack's romance strengthens as the summer passes by.

This is a book about a girl coming to life. Sure, she falls in love with Jack, but she also falls in love with the things that surround her. Angie loves life. She loves the way her fingers feel in the garden's earth when she harvests beans for her mother. She loves the way the wild grasses by the train tracks scratch her bare legs as she walks with Jack. She notices the heavy shadows below her father's eyes when he returns home from work; she sees the red imprint of fabric pattern on her sister's cheek when she wakes from sleep.

I love Seventeenth Summer because it is simple, but also because it carries a deep awareness of the weight of life. It doesn't seek to give answers or explanations for this weight; I think Daly wrote because she was an observer. She watched people. She took notice. I know next to nothing of her; still, I like to imagine that she sought to live the way she wrote--paying attention to that which is beautiful and transformational beneath the catchings of a routine life. There is beauty in weeds by railroad tracks, if you let them brush your bare summer legs and you happen to find yourself with a boy in a clean white shirt. Somehow, as Daly seemed to recognize, seeing this kind of beauty becomes easier when the seasons turn, and we sleep with windows open to the smell of night rain and blooming lilacs.

I turn to Seventeenth Summer as a kind of physical calling; my world has just become lush, and I want a story that understands what this season prods again to life: the truth that the months of most unencumbered vitality throw into greater relief the heavy living that darker seasons nourish. That in all of its miraculous abundance, summer is the season of greatest bittersweet.



Thanks for reading.


Beth