HOLLIS SUMMERS

by Kristina Stollger

Kentucky's claim to Hollis Summers is indisputable. He was born and largely educated in Kentucky, and did not leave the state until he attended the Bread Loaf School of English in Middleburg, Vermont, for his M.S. After earning his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, he taught at Holmes High School in Covington, Kentucky; at his alma mater Georgetown College, and at the University of Kentucky. Although he also spent time teaching at Ohio University, he continued to return to Kentucky as a frequent setting for his works. Many of his novels and short stories are set in the central Kentucky area. However, unlike ethnocentric Kentucky writers, Summers spends little time singing the glories of Kentucky's rural life. Instead, he focuses on probing the minds of his characters as he explores his themes. A major theme in his writing is the tendency of people to prefer the tangible reality of the love found in male-female relationships to the spirituality of religion.

Although he sometimes treats the issues of religion and human relationships separately, he often ties them together. For example, in the two-part poem "Accompanist," from Occupant Please Forward, he draws on his experiences as the son of a Baptist minister to show the disparity between an adolescent boy's interests and the world of the church. The image in the first part of the poem is that of a reluctant pianist playing for a mission "congregation / Who sings as well as it is able" (64). The adult narrator remembers vividly, "Your groin hurts when you hit the wrong notes / And people keep on singing right." The discord is spiritual as well as literal, and the narrator never outgrows the feeling that he must "keep on hitting the keys" in spite of his inadequacies. "After all these years I wake in a sweat still," says the narrator. "Flatting the sharps, / While the believing, / The faithful, sing" (65).

In the second part of the poem, the narrator contrasts this discord with a scene of harmony. Again returning to his adolescence, the narrator describes being allowed to drive the family's Chevrolet "all day / In front of our fifty feet of property" (65). A twelve-year-old neighbor, Martha, "whom I loved," enjoyed the same entertainment in her family car, "Glittering back and forth their three hundred feet of land." Unlike the accompanist and the congregation, the two drivers are in complete agreement. The narrator says, "we often met; / We honked and waved through a long July." In contrast to the painful images of the church meeting, "The world smelled of honeysuckle and macadam." Once again, the narrator returns to the present to draw a subtle application for his life: "But here in the center of the coldest summer I can remember / I wave to Martha."

From each experience detailed in this poem, something has endured. From the mission church, it is a permanent feeling of living out of alignment with something, but from the idyllic summer days of driving it is an enduring friendship with Martha. Like most of Summers' works, this poem is open ended, leaving the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. However, this juxtaposition of an uncomfortable church experience with the pleasant budding of a male-female relationship is significant for Summers. It is indicative of a theme he explores throughout the body of his work.

From How They Chose the Dead, the short story, "The Pentitent," also juxtaposes an uncomfortable religious setting with male-female relationships to examine these two ways that man looks for meaning in his life. When the story opens, Ralph Clark, an author, is about to begin his fall lecture tour with a week-long stay at a Catholic college and monastery outside Lexington. Before leaving New York, "he had engaged in an extravagantly varied and satisfactory lovemaking with Miss Anabel Forsythe" (39), with whom he had been infatuated for three days. The extreme contrast of his lifestyle of casual sexual encounters and the monastic life at St. Zachary's college is emphasized throughout the story. A drunken Anabel says, "I have to laugh, you in a monastery. I bet you can tell them a two or thing" (41). When Clark arrives at the monastery, he finds a sign warning that ladies are "absolutely prohibited" from entering the monastic enclosure, and he is embarrassed by it (49).

It is evident that Clark has no understanding of what it is like to be a believer in any religion when he asks a priest, "You don't mind if I read your propaganda?" and is surprised that the priest is amused (53). However, in this religious environment he allows himself to consciously think about things long pushed below the surface. In Anabel's New York apartment, he had told her, "We have made love" (40), repeating the words that his wife had said on their wedding night years before. Clark immediately tries to convince himself that his ex-wife is not an influence on him. "He had not thought of Muriel for a long time," the limited omniscient narrator says. "He did not really think of her when he said, 'We have made love'" (40). Now, in a room behind the chaste walls of the monastery, Clark again remembers his wife, this time because the room resembles one that he had shared with her. He mentions this coincidence to the priest, saying, "My wife always wanted everything to mean, even coincidences" (58). This religion, however, seems insensitive to Clark's clumsy search form meaning. "Coincidences are always happening," says the priest. "I suppose everything can't mean" (58). Throughout the night Clark is tormented by memories of Muriel, but he recovers himself before the morning.

By the week's end, Clark is keeping his mind strictly on his role as a lecturer. Summers writes, "The visit to St. Zachary's turned out splendidly . . . he left feeling a real friendship even for St. Zachary himself" (62-63). The title, "The Pentitent," suggests more repentance than Clark actually feels, but the last lines of the story are revealing: "During his entire visit at St. Zachary he had not thought of Muriel at all. He did not even think of Anabel, the slut, the whore, the bitch" (63). Clark's denial of any ties to Muriel continues, but his thoughts of Anabel reveal a more negative view of his current lifestyle. Perhaps Clark begins to admit to himself that "extravagantly varied lovemaking" in itself is less satisfying than he tries to believe. Like the characters in many of Summers' works, Clark does not experience a major epiphany or any significant growth during the story. Instead, Summers merely probes beneath the surface of the character's mind at a specific point in time.

This pattern is true also in the stream-of-consciousness novel, The Day After Sunday, in which Summers constantly changes the point of view to delve into the psyche of each character. Once again, the search for meaning in sexual relationships is intertwined with religion throughout the book. The story traces the lives of a semi-aristocratic Lexington family from the time that the spinster church secretary, who lives in their house, sleeps with the seventeen year old boy until she moves with her "adopted" baby to a rural home with relatives.

The book opens on Beulah Thomas' thoughts as Joe Bill leaves her bed. "She could remember Beulah Thomas, the real Beulah, the only Beulah Thomas, dear God. Dear God in heaven" (3), she prays. As Summers reveals her thoughts throughout the novel, he portrays a religious woman attempting to deal with an unthinkable transgression. As she struggles to cast her actions in a light that she can live with, Biblical phrases recur in her thoughts. "He is a child who does not know what he has done. Forgive him, for he knows not . . ." (8), Beaulah prays, echoing Christ's words on the cross.

Beaulah already knows where she can turn for meaning and guidance. Praying in the washroom of her church office, she decides to bear any consequences alone, in her own strength. Summers writes, "She would not burdenGod with her burden any more. She had been given The Way; alone, she understood the way alone" (83). In her determination to atone for her sin, she harshly repulses Joe Bill's awkward approaches, and when she learns that she is pregnant she arranges a thin plot to make it appear that she is adopting a baby.

Although she clings to her religion, the reader's final view into her mind finds her thinking, "Joe Bill, Joe Bill, sweet. Joe Bill" (258). She never lets go of the belief that she felt true love for the boy. She knows that he was drunk when he came into her room, and she realizes "A boy did not love a woman old enough to be his mother" (7), yet she is unable to accept what happened as anything other than love. Even after her prayerful rededication, she believes "She had loved the way Joe Bill Watts moved and had his being . . . And now she bore that sin and love, knowing the way" (85). This supports Summers' idea that human relationships are more real and enduring than divine ones.

Even his most devout characters fail to find complete fulfillment in their religion, and Joe Bill is not by any means a religious boy. But as he moves from his first drunken encounter with the woman he continues to think of as "Miss Thomas" to dating his peer and friend Alice, who says firmly, "I believe in being a virgin, Joe Bill" (125), he is a useful tool for Summers' exploration of male-female relationships. The day after sleeping with Miss Thomas, Joe Bill immediately brags to his friend, Don, about it. He invents a mysterious stranger so that no one will guess the truth, but as he describes what happened he makes his language "as dirty as her could" (61). Before his son is born, he has fallen in love with Alice Ewing, whose figure had been the subject of many conversations with Don, and he has broken off his friendship with the other boy. But although his values seem to have changed, Joe Bill never does more than deny to himself that the baby could be his. When his father reveals his suspicions that something occurred between the boy and the older woman, Joe Bill says, "Not but once. Maybe not once. I . . . I think I dreamed . . ." (273) If the boy has found salvation in his loving, healthy relationship with Alice, it does not change him enough to make him want to know whether the child is his son. Thinking about his newfound love for Alice, however, does bring a Biblical phrase to mind: "God is love" (267). Beulah Thomas had remembered the same phrase in her bed more than nine months before (7). Both characters are led to thoughts of God by their human love affairs, but neither finds fulfillment there.

Love is the glue that bonds the themes of religion and male-female relationships in Summers' works. He portrays people searching for meaning and coming up empty--or, if not, with only a glimmer that love is what they need. If they find true love, with a sexual lover or with a friend, as in the poem "Accompanist," they must cling to it. Often the characters find, like Ralph Clark, that pure young love is easily lost. Summers does not try to lead his characters to a conclusion or even to follow their journey to an important turning point, but rather to reveal in them a common human condition. Is God the answer? Can people achieve a perfect state of love? Summers has revealed that such questions lie beneath the surface of life, but he has left them open.

Summers, Hollis. The Day After Sunday. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.

---. Occupant Please Forward. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1976.

---. "The Pentitent." How They Chose the Dead. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973.

by Kristina Stollger

Poetry:

Summers, Hollis. Occupant Please Forward. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1976.

Summers, Hollis. The Peddler and Other Domestic Matters. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1967.

Summers, Hollis. Seven Occasions. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1964.

Summers, Hollis. Sit Opposite Eachother. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1970.

Summers, Hollis. Someone Else : Sixteen Poems about Other Children. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1962.

Summers, Hollis. Start from Home. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1972.

Summers, Hollis. The Walks Near Athens. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959.

Novels:

Summers, Hollis. Brighten the Corner. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1952.

Summers, Hollis. City Limit. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948.

Summers, Hollis. The Day After Sunday. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.

Summers, Hollis. The Garden. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

Summers, Hollis. The Weather of February. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957.

Short Story Collections:

Summers, Hollis. How They Chose the Dead. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973.

Summers, Hollis. Standing Room. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984.

About Hollis Summers: These books include sections about Hollis Summers' life and works:

Browning, Sister Mary Carmel, O.S.U. Kentucky Authors : A History of Kentucky Literature. Evansville, In. : Keller-Crescent, 1968.

Ward, William S. A Literary History of Kentucky. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988.