The black and white above was taken at the end of the summer of love. The color photo is a selfie taken this past Sunday, half a century later.
For the longest time I had a tee shirt that read, "A Summer in Life--1967." I was not in California wearing a flower in my hair in July and August of '67, but it was nevertheless a wonderfully romantic summer.
In the summer of love The Grass Roots encouraged us to live for today. The Doors urged all to light our fires. Johnny Rivers sang "All summer long we were dancing in the sand. And the band kept on playing, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."
I can remember, almost vividly, a July day fifty years ago, sitting shotgun in a car with three others humming "Live For Today". I was leaning out the passenger window, adjusting the side view mirror thinking that the future and present seemed so bright.
Did the summer of love leave a lasting imprint?
How did that "live for today" philosophy work out for us?
Did our fires remain lit?
Bliss, Remembered by Frank Deford is a novel about a summer of love. But the summer was 1936. And, in addition to the questions above, a question that the book wants the reader to address is this: "How much would you do for love?"
In a nutshell, in the summer of 2004 an 80 something year old woman asks her son to come visit. The father has already passed. Now his wife, the mother, is dying. She tells the son that when he visits she has "something of a surprise" she must relay.
When the son visits, the mother--still lucid and feisty despite the sad medical prognosis--tells her son about her experience in Germany in 1936 when she was on the women's Olympic swimming team. The son knew that his mother was on the team. What he did not know was the essence of the surprise. He did not know that within days of arriving in Berlin his mother met and fell immediately in love with a young German. The German's father was a diplomat and consequently, the courtship with the German allowed her not only to meet Hitler, but to attend a gala Nazi party hosted by none other than Goebbels.
To the son, the mother's relaying of this "remembered bliss" is a bit disconcerting. Nazis aside, he has a fond recollection of his father and, apparently, this German/Horst character swept his mother off her feet before Dad had come into the picture. The book continues with the reader learning about what happened to the lovers after the summer of 1936 and into the first years of the war.
To relay more of the plot is to spoil the story for interested readers.
Is it worth reading? The novel is engaging even if the ending is more than a little implausible. Not the love parts. Those are very plausible. But the resolution, could not have happened. Even three quarters of a century ago.
Also, the way the story is told can be a bit off putting. While the narrator is the son, most of the book is told in the first person by the mother. The son has a tape recorder and the mother speaks into it, with a few interjections from the son. About eighty other pages are from a manuscript the mother has written that describes the sequence of events. So again the manuscript is in the first person from the perspective of the mother, with the son occasionally making first person comments like, "I didn't really think mom would do that."
For the mother in this novel, the summer of love was 1936, even though that summer was a summer of hate. Her German sweetheart does not have Nazi sentiments, but his brother-in-law, sister, and father have consumed the Kool-Aid. When the Olympian visits the German's parents she is asked repeatedly about her last name to sleuth out if she is Jewish. She is not, but she knows there is something wrong about attending a party hosted by the slimy Goebbels, yet is so taken by her lover that the shine of love trumps logic.
For her, the summer of love--1936--the Bliss, is remembered and it leaves a multigenerational imprint. It was interesting to me how much the mother followed, naturally and beautifully, the advice of the Grass Roots and followed her heart so that her fires might be lit.
This book is not as good as Deford's, An American Summer, which I reviewed in this blog several weeks ago. But readers will enjoy turning the pages of Bliss, Remembered and, at the end, when you say--"That could not have happened"--you might also find yourself saying, "so what."
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