The Voyage Home

urn:iso:std:iso:639:ed-3:eng

169–70

text excerpt

We reached the extreme western tip of Lake Constance one evening when darkness was settling prematurely and threateningly over the countryside as an alpine thunderstorm gathered … Under a cannonade of thunder we fled for shelter to a small inn near by.  It was a peasants’ haunt, but clean and welcoming.

Nor were we the only refugees from the storm, which raged all that evening and through the night.  A band of Hungarian gypsies came in.  They were on their way to north Germany, to play for the summer season in a sophisticated restaurant in one of the great towns.  But here they were au naturel, and they played for their supper and night’s lodging.  Cembalo, fiddles and deeper strings, the music challenged the storm, wrestled with it into the early hours, extemporizing on themes some of which I recognized as folk tunes rescued and civilized by Korbáy, Bartók and Kodály, under the impulse of Franz Liszt.

We lay in the room above, the bed and the crude furniture vibrating in the conflict.  Sleep was impossible, though we were physically exhausted after walking all day, bowed under rucksacks.  We cursed the storm and the musicians, but listened nevertheless, spellbound by the wildness of sound and setting, under the threat of the brimming lake.

That night evoked the emotional impulse which led me to plan a second novel, whose purpose would be to bring this elemental contest between man and nature down into focus, within the character of a young woman seeking to escape from the ready-made shelter of parental home and then of marriage, so that she could begin her own homemaking.  The theme hovered over me like an eagle for the rest of the tour, as we walked on day after day round the Lake to Lindau.  I began to write the book, called High Summer, soon after we got home.  

excerpt from 'The Voyage Home' pp. 169–70 (318 words)

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1447599293191