Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)
Page 12
(The Publisher, 19 Oct. 1836)
The last words are those of Pushkin’s paladin:
The equilibrium in Russia’s family romance has been restored (momentarily) through fiction, if not through history. In the final analysis, the forbidden knowledge about Pugachev and his uprising that Pushkin’s novel imparts to the reader is not simply that they existed (if Catherine had had her way, all evidence of this tragic episode would have been expunged from historical memory) but that their existence at some level, despite the horrific carnage, is understandable. They were the return of the repressed on a mass level, the haunting of Russian history by memories impossible to forget.
CHAPTER 12
Wuthering Heights (1847)
EMILY BRONTË
IF THERE IS A NOVEL IN Wuthering Heights, it centers upon Catherine Earnshaw, caught between the social reality of Edgar Linton and the daemonic Byronism of Heathcliff. Once Catherine Earnshaw and the Lintons are dead, the book is entirely romance. Wuthering Heights is almost uniquely the story of early marriage and early death. Catherine Earnshaw dies at eighteen, Heathcliff’s son, Linton, at seventeen, Hindley at twenty-seven, Edgar at thirty-nine, poor Isabella at thirty-one, and Heathcliff at about thirty-eight (if my arithmetic is right). Edgar Linton is twenty-one and Catherine Earnshaw seventeen when they marry. Hindley marries Frances at twenty, and the marriage made in hell between Heathcliff and Isabella starts when he is nineteen and she is eighteen. The survivors, Hareton Earnshaw and Catherine Linton, make the only happy marriage, at twenty-four and eighteen, respectively. Everyone marries very young because they intuit they will not live long. Unless Hareton and the second Catherine can defy their lineage, no protagonist in Emily Brontë’s cosmos reaches forty, unhappily prophesying that even the stalwart Charlotte did not attain thirty-nine. Emily died at thirty of the family malady, tuberculosis.
I first wrote about Wuthering Heights as a Cornell undergraduate in 1947. Whatever that was like, I cannot know, since time’s siftings have stilled it. Since then I have written three essays on Emily Brontë’s one romance, all we have of her except for her mixed yet frequently magnificent body of poems. Rereading her at eighty-eight, I find, more strongly than before, that what fascinates me most is the abyss at the center of the book. Nearly all Heathcliff is in that void and perhaps more than half of the first Catherine. I mean “abyss” in the sense of Genesis 1:2, the Hebrew tehom, for a turbulent bottomless sea. In the Gnostic heresy the Pleroma or Divine Fullness is equated with that abyss, which precedes Elohim, the normative godhead.
Though Emily Brontë’s father, an Irishman who became an Anglican priest, was devout, Christianity had little effect upon the visionary of Wuthering Heights. Her poetry celebrates the “God within my breast”:
No coward soul is mine
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere
I see Heaven’s glories shine
And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear
O God within my breast
Almighty ever-present Deity
Life, that in me hast rest,
As I Undying Life, have power in Thee
Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men’s hearts, unutterably vain,
Worthless as withered weeds
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main
To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by thy infinity,
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of Immortality.
With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears
Though earth and moon were gone
And suns and universes ceased to be
And Thou wert left alone
Every Existence would exist in thee
There is not room for Death
Nor atom that his might could render void
Since thou art Being and Breath
And what thou art may never be destroyed.
In “Self-Reliance,” the sacred Emerson gave me my guiding spur: “As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.” How far is that from Emily Brontë?
Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men’s hearts, unutterably vain,
Worthless as withered weeds
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main
Though some scholars believe that Charlotte wrote this astonishing poem, to anyone with an inner ear this must be Emily Brontë at her greatest:
Often rebuked, yet always back returning
To those first feelings that were born with me,
And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning
For idle dreams of things which cannot be:
To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region;
Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;
And visions rising, legion after legion,
Bring the unreal world too strangely near.
I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces,
And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.
I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the gray flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.
What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.
I find this difficult and revelatory. John Keats—rather than Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley—might have admired the final, contemplative stanza.
William Blake, one of the poets I loved most in my childhood, would have dismissed this as Natural Religion. I do not think that would have been accurate; this transcends nature and tosses away religion.
Moral judgments, whether of her own day or of ours, become rapidly irrelevant in the world of Emily Brontë’s one novel. Though the book portrays both social and natural energies, these are dwarfed by the preternatural energies of Heathcliff and of the antithetical side of the first Catherine. Where daemonic energy so far exceeds ours, then daemonic suffering will also be present, perhaps also in excess of our own. But such suffering is foreign to us; Emily Brontë accepts the aesthetic risk of endowing Heathcliff with very little pathos recognizable by us. We wonder at his terrible sufferings, as he slowly dies from lack of sleep and lack of food, but we do not feel his agony, because he has become even more distant from us. We are partly moved by the first Catherine’s death, since both society and nature are involved in her decline, but partly we stand away from participation, because Catherine is also very much of the realm she shares with Heathcliff. For the last half-year of his life, she is a ghostly presence, but one not much different from what she has been for him before.
I cannot think of a relationship in prose romance more extreme than that of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. It is grotesque to think of Heathcliff and the first Catherine coupling. They might go up in smoke. In essence they are one.
Emily Brontë is so much an original that in a sense she had no precursors. She knew the classics, the King James Bible, all of Shakespeare, and perhaps most immediately Sir Walter Scott. And yet her language, stance, vision, even mode of romance are her own. Her descendants in her kind of Northern romance include Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, and the now neglected John Cowper Powys.
I can
locate the spirit of Emily Brontë in one living poet, the Canadian Anne Carson, particularly in her fierce and rending poem “The Glass Essay” (1994):
and I was downstairs reading the part in Wuthering Heights
where Heathcliff clings at the lattice in the storm sobbing
Come in! Come in! to the ghost of his heart’s darling,
Pitiless too are the Heights, which Emily called Wuthering
because of their “bracing ventilation”
and “a north wind over the edge.”
Whaching a north wind grind the moor
that surrounded her father’s house on every side,
formed of a kind of rock called millstone grit,
taught Emily all she knew about love and its necessities—
an angry education that shapes the way her characters
use one another. “My love for Heathcliff,” says Catherine,
“resembles the eternal rocks beneath
a source of little visible delight, but necessary.”
Necessary? I notice the sun has dimmed
and the afternoon air sharpening.
I turn and start to recross the moor towards home.
What are the imperatives
that hold people like Catherine and Heathcliff
together and apart, like pores blown into hot rock
and then stranded out of reach
of one another when it hardens? What kind of necessity is that?
“Whaching” was Emily Brontë’s spelling for “watching” and is adopted by Carson. “Necessity” must mean the ancient Greek ananke, compulsive force, Anne Carson being a scholar of the classics. “People like Catherine and Heathcliff”: I have never met any, except Anne Carson herself, whom I met only once, but with whom many years ago I carried on an extensive correspondence.
Heathcliff is both a person and a daemon. A foundling of uncertain origin, perhaps lascar or Gypsy, picked up on the streets of Liverpool by the elder Earnshaw, he is raised with Catherine Earnshaw as a quasi-brother. They become so close that they are one another, which is neither possible nor sane. But, then, the crucial element in the first Catherine is also daemonic. She and Heathcliff share a cosmos that is not ours, or indeed that of anyone else in Wuthering Heights. The most profound discussion I have found of Heathcliff is that of Henry Staten in his Spirit Becomes Matter (2014):
There is in Heathcliff no despair at the finality of the death of the body; no nostalgia for the heaven that once was; no turn to Christian morality as a replacement for Christian belief; no stance of bitter, or resigned, or heroic defiance of religious metaphysics….Like an authentic pagan, Heathcliff merely despairs in the wake of Catherine’s death, with no thought of any kind regarding transcendence.
Staten compares mourning in Emily Brontë to lamentation, not in the Biblical mode, but in Homer’s Iliad. He also strongly defends Heathcliff from accusations of sadism, noting both the endless violence of the book, and Heathcliff’s reluctance to return physical injury. The initial reaction to Emily Brontë’s startling narrative brutality was that of the poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in an 1854 letter to the Irish poet William Allingham:
I’ve been greatly interested in Wuthering Heights, the first novel I’ve read for an age, and the best (as regards power and sound style) for two ages, except Sidonia. But it is a fiend of a book—an incredible monster, combining all the stronger female tendencies from Mrs. Browning to Mrs. Brownrigg. The action is laid in hell,—only it seems places and people have English names there. Did you ever read it?
Sidonia the Sorceress by Wilhelm Meinhold (1848) was rendered into English by Lady Jane Wilde (the divine Oscar’s mother) the next year. The nastiness toward Elizabeth Barrett Browning is typical of Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Mrs. Brownrigg was hanged in 1767 for whipping her young female servants so viciously that one died of the infected wounds.
Sheila Smith, in a useful 1992 essay on Emily Brontë and traditional ballads, “ ‘At Once Strong and Eerie,’ ” illuminates aspects of the preternatural in this Northern romance:
In Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë revitalizes the literary form of the novel by use of structural devices, motifs, and subjects which properly belong to the oral tradition with which all the Brontë children were familiar, particularly through the agency of Tabitha Aykroyd, the Yorkshire woman who for thirty years was a servant in the Brontë household. Elizabeth Gaskell, in her biography of Charlotte, says of Tabby that ‘she had known the “bottom”, or valley, in those primitive days when the fairies frequented the margin of the “beck” on moonlight nights, and had known folk who had seen them.’
Smith continues her discussion with a passage from Wuthering Heights:
The country folks, if you asked them, would swear on their Bible that he walks. There are those who speak to having met him near the church, and on the moor, and even within this house—Idle tales, you’ll say, and so say I. Yet that old man by the kitchen fire affirms he has seen two on ’em, looking out of his chamber window, on every rainy night, since his death. I was going to the Grange one evening—a dark evening threatening thunder—and, just at the turn of the Heights, I encountered a little boy with a sheep and two lambs before him, he was crying terribly, and I supposed the lambs were skittish, and would not be guided.
‘What is the matter, my little man?’ I asked.
‘They’s Heathcliff and a woman, yonder, under t’ Nab,’ he blubbered, ’un’ Aw darnut pass ’em.’
Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw are revenants, quite visible ghosts returned from the apparently dead. But were they not in some sense always revenants from the very beginning? Emily Brontë sometimes seems to me a kind of revenant herself, a being totally uncanny.
CHAPTER 13
Vanity Fair (1848)
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
I FIRST READ Vanity Fair in 1947, just before going up to my freshman year at Cornell. With each successive reading I am more and more delighted by Becky Sharp and even more puzzled by William Makepeace Thackeray. The voice speaking the book is frequently intolerable to me. Charlotte Brontë, who venerated Thackeray, drives me away by her brutality toward her male readers. I do not like to be thumped over the head as I read. Poor Rochester, a surrogate for George Gordon Lord Byron, is progressively mutilated by Charlotte Brontë and her surrogate Jane Eyre. Approaching eighty-eight, I do not want either to be cudgeled or sneered at by a novelist. Back in the days when I spent some time in the company of Philip Roth, he would cheer me by saying: “Harold, we are here to be insulted.” Perhaps.
I have read most of Thackeray’s fiction and admire, in addition to Vanity Fair, The History of Henry Esmond (1852). For reading about Thackeray, I recommend Juliet McMaster and John Sutherland. There are also Gordon Ray’s admirable biographical studies of Thackeray. But the more I read about Thackeray as a person, the sillier he becomes. Vanity Fair for me is Becky Sharp, a superb anti-heroine who does what she has to do in a society that gives her lack of an income no options whatsoever.
In a rather dreadful introduction to the Penguin Classics Vanity Fair, the egregious John Carey asserts that Vanity Fair has strong claims to be the greatest novel in the English language and is superior to Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Poor Thackeray; he does not deserve that. But, then, Thackeray could not stop moralizing:
It is only when their naughty names are called out that your modesty has any occasion to show alarm or sense of outrage, and it has been the wish of the present writer, all through this story, deferentially to submit to the fashion at present prevailing, and only to hint at the existence of wickedness in a light, easy, and agreeable manner, so that nobody’s fine feelings may be offended. I defy any one to say that our Becky, who has certainly some vices, has not been presented to
the public in a perfectly genteel and inoffensive manner. In describing this siren, singing and smiling, coaxing and cajoling, the author, with modest pride, asks his readers all round, has he once forgotten the laws of politeness, and showed the monster’s hideous tail above water? No! Those who like may peep down under waves that are pretty transparent, and see it writhing and twirling, diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping amongst bones, or curling round corpses; but above the water-line, I ask, has not everything been proper, agreeable, and decorous, and has any the most squeamish immoralist in Vanity Fair a right to cry fie? When, however, the siren disappears and dives below, down among the dead men, the water of course grows turbid over her, and it is labour lost to look into it ever so curiously. They look pretty enough when they sit upon a rock, twangling their harps and combing their hair, and sing, and beckon to you to come and hold the looking-glass; but when they sink into their native element, depend on it those mermaids are about no good, and we had best not examine the fiendish marine cannibals, revelling and feasting on their wretched pickled victims. And so, when Becky is out of the way, be sure that she is not particularly well employed, and that the less that is said about her doings is in fact the better.
There is a disturbing flavor to that paragraph. Thackeray was unfortunate in his own erotic life. As a young man in London, he frequently visited bordellos and made an unfortunate marriage when he was twenty-five to a nineteen-year-old Irish girl of no particular abilities. Three daughters were born to them, but the third brought on a postnatal melancholia that became incurable. Thackeray put his wife away into private care and centered his life upon his daughters. Yet, in 1842, he fell in love with a woman married to a college friend. Although the passion was useless and agonizing, it continued for several years, during which he composed Vanity Fair. The novel was enormously successful and established Thackeray as a supposed rival to Dickens, not at all an agon that Thackeray could win.