Reflections Inspired by Thomas Hardy

This picture shows a house in Sturminster Newton, Dorset, where Thomas Hardy lived with his first wife Emma for two year from 1875.  They had been married just five years and were still very happy.  He wrote a poem about it called "The Two-Year Idyll".  His diary extracts from this period suggest that the maid they had at the time might have inspired his famous novel "Tess of the Durbervilles".  The maid was seduced, left their employ by climbing out of a window at night (the same window through which her seducer entered), had a baby which died, and then disappeared.

I've visited Thomas Hardy's birthplace at least three times, and the house where he died likewise.  They are both now owned and managed by the National Trust, and are filled with tasteful period artefacts (none of them original to Thomas Hardy).  This is the first time I have managed to track down Sturminster Newton and it has been on my "list" for about 10 years.

As a first wife myself, once much appreciated, but in old age resented and ignored, I had enormous sympathy for poor Emma.  Once adored, then neglected and despised, her story struck me as tragic but probably fairly typical. As Mrs Charles Dickens wrote in a letter " I was loved once."  Mrs Dickens, just a few years ahead of Emma in age and experience, was cast aside for a mistress, made to leave the family home, and forcibly separated from her children.  

Emma and Thomas had no children.  A diary entry from the Sturminster Newton interlude suggests that this was a source of sorrow to Thomas ... "Not a sign of one for us". 

A recently published book called "The Chosen", was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023. https://www.walterscottprize.co.uk/seven-strong-shortlist-announced-for-2023-walter-scott-prize/

This novel imagines the relationship between Thomas and Emma and how it deteriorated in the final years (Hardy's mistress Florence Dugdale was actually invited to the house and spent a Christmas with them).  I thought it was very well written, and well imagined except for one thing - Emma blames Thomas for the fact they never had children whereas his actual diary entry suggests otherwise.

It's well worth a read as an insight into their marriage.  I recommend it if you don't have time to read his diary, her "Recollections", their letters, and his awe-inspiring poetry.  After Emma's death he realised what he was missing and poured out a torrent of poetry re-creating their romantic meeting in Cornwall, their four-year courtship. Significantly, perhaps, he wrote nothing about their wedding, and not a word about their  honeymoon.  

I finally tracked down the house, and the porch where Emma used to wait for him in a white muslin dress at the end of a long, lonely day with no friends and virtually nothing to do. He immortalised this vision in a poem.

"..The dusky house that stood apart,  

And her white-muslined,waiting there 

In the porch with high-expectant heart..." 

 

The porch above is unlikely to be the original, as porches especially wooden ones have a short life. However, the position is the original one, and it is amazing that there are no new houses built up around this pair of semi-detached villas. Emma,dressed in white muslin, as she was not expected to do housework, was very lonely, waiting for her husband's return, and he knew this, as his poem shows.

 

 Guilty, but not enough to stop him doing so, he admitted that he dawdled on the way home, knowing that she was lonely and eager to see him.  He spent time looking at the river, and lingered on his walk over these meadows, which are virtually unchanged in 150 years.

We walked across this meadow, as he would have done.

I had thought that I would be overcome with emotion at finding myself at last treading in the footsteps of Thomas and Emma, and re-creating the feelings he wrote about.  He was actually quite good at imagining how Emma must have felt, after she was dead and it was too late.

This did not happen, however.  I was pleased to have ticked the visit off my list, took the above three photos, and then went off to find a pub for lunch.  I realised that something has changed.

 For those who wonder if I'm still here - having posted nothing for nearly a year.

Yes, I'm still here. About to celebrate my 70th birthday this month.  

The pandemic changed a lot of things in my life - some things have never recovered - my relationship with books has changed. After the compulsive reading and listening to audio books which spread over the two years 2020 to 2022, it no longer seems so vital to engage with other people's versions of the world.  My own, rapidly running towards its conclusion, seems far more important.

I no longer volunteer, since the pandemic closed all the outlets in which I did so - the museum, the local historic monument (English Heritage), plus a nearby National Trust venue.  I have not returned to volunteering, being that much older, being less mobile and active since two falls - one in 2021, one in 2022.

My mother-in-law died (unrelated to Covid). The last member of the older generation, and leaving a big gap in many people's lives. The world seems a little emptier, and it has definitely affected husband's outlook on life, not for the better.

I'm still reconfiguring, and trying to come to terms with the finite nature of existence, which didn't seem so finite whilst mother-in-law was still going strong at 97.

I still keep a record of every book I read, and every audio-book I listen to, but it doesn't seem to be so important to share.  Planting trees seems much more important.

Best wishes to those who have enquired, why not let me know how your views on life have changed, or not changed, since the events of the last few years.

To Paradise, by Hanya Yanagihara

 

I've now read this book, by an author  referred to in the previous post, in which I reported on an interview  found in "The New Yorker."

It's extremely rare that I turn back to the beginning to read again any book I have just completed.  The last time it happened was with Hilary Mantel's personal memoir, "Giving Up The Ghost".

"To Paradise" is long, and divided into three sections - 1892, 1992, and 2092.  The sections are connected by what appear to be members of two or three families, the Binghams, the Griffiths, and the Bishops.  Characters from the first section turn out to be the grandparents and great-grandparents, and later the great-great grandparents of those who appear in the later sections.

Another common theme is that all the main characters are gay men, and in fact, the writer depicts these sometimes successful, sometimes failed relationships with such skill, delicacy and empathy that I had to look the author up again to make sure that it is not a man.  I'm not sure why this is such an important theme, as the successes and (more often) failures are similar to those of any relationship.  There is also the common theme of discrimination, which runs throughout the novel.The main characters in each section are discriminated against, usually on grounds of their sexuality, but also on racial grounds and even on the grounds of their political and social position.

The theme of the total destruction of the world as we know it is what hits hardest. As our homes sizzled in hitherto unheard of 40 degree temperatures, I was reading of environments devoid of trees - they had wilted to death in constant and relentless heat. As we were warned of hosepipe bans, I read of water shortages such that showering took place in communal "air showers" and even these were strictly rationed.  News footage of wildfires accompanied me as I read of the exhaustion of the emergency services  dealing with fires following hard on the heels of devastating floods.

The recent pandemic of Co-vid 19 (which is not over yet) runs through the book - a relentless series of pandemic waves pouring over the world in all too realistic detail.  The great skill of a good dystopian novel is to select actual, factual elements from the world around us, then weave them into a narrative of imagined characters set against recognizable backdrops. The backdrops are altered just enough to make the settings scary and the events are exaggerated just enough to convince the reader that this could be us, if things should, (as the narrative insists that they will ) get  worse.  

It's possible to trace the apocalyptic climaxes in the third section back to events and human activities from the first and second parts.  The middle section is particularly vivid in its depiction of the island of Hawaii, notable for desecration by human activity.  The words of a Joni Mitchell song rang in my ears throughout - "They paved paradise, and put up a car park."

The first time I read the book, I concluded that the "Paradise" of the title was death.  Some of the main characters actively wish for death, others can only achieve peace via death. And the mess humans have made of the planet seems a fitting reason why death is the only solution for human beings.  

Near the end, we are given an ancient fable about a lizard which ate and ate and ate every leaf, blade of grass, fruit, fish,  anything it could, because it had to eat to stay alive.  Its whole purpose was simply to eat and stay alive.  Naturally it ended up destroying its habitat until there was nothing left to eat.  Ah, we think, a perfect image for the human race, destroying its environment - then humans will die out completely and that will be the end of it.  But the lizard doesn't die, it returns, as a creature walking upright, and the environment gradually regenerates.  The narrator in this section reflects that some will die, but others will "keep doing what we always have ... doing what our nature compels us to ..."

The second reading made me think the complete opposite.   Life is an ongoing gift, which we should never reject by pessimism and defeatism. The majority of us will not in any case choose to reject, but are driven on by the impulse to survive.

Life is the paradise, the world is the paradise.  It's up to us to make the best of it.  

First Two Books of 2022 finished 2nd January 2022

So, not quite one a day, but two in two days isn't bad! This is the first:

I have in the past found Nabakov difficult.

 At college in 1976, I had the misfortune to be rooming in a shared house with a colossal bore who wanted to go on and on endlessly about "Lolita" and the brilliance of the character "Humbert Humbert". I dismissed all ideas of reading that book, because even 45 years ago it was clear to me that it concerned criminal child pornography.

Later on in life, I thought I'd give the memoir "Speak Memory" a go, hoping to learn more about what it was like to live through the Russian Revolution. Somehow, this failed to hit the spot. The only detail I retain is the train journey, attempted escape. The wealthy Nabokov family, cosseted in first class warmth and padded carriages, were astounded when thuggish revolutionaries urinated down the chimneys into the elite compartments from the roof.

Recently I took to reading the "New Yorker" online, which contains a short story in every weekly publication. One of the best of all the stories I have read in the last year was an excerpt from "Pnin" (it's actually chapter 6). This enchanted me, and I recognized at last the brilliance of the writing, so I decided to read the whole book.

You do need a dictionary. Why use the word "calvity" when the perfectly good word "baldness" exists, and baldly states the condition without nuance or subtext.

You do need patience. It's not a rollicking page turner.

However, I did laugh out loud on at least three occasions (almost unheard of for a 68 year old with jaded palate for humour).

There is subtlety and there is irony, and there is a very straightforward critique of the more ridiculous aspects of American college education (some of which we now see here in the UK). There is pathos, and the backstory of poor Pnin (far more evocative of the emigre experience than "Speak Memory") is filtered with delicacy during the course of the book through the lens of his current experiences.

Timofey Pnin is a truly unique creation, a bumbling yet endearing intellectual. Rejected by his cruel wife Liza, dismissed as unimportant by the more ambitious academics who seek to oust him from his untenured position, he evokes a long lost past. Through his experiences the author depicts an America which welcomed all its sad waifs and refugees (unlike the America of today). This aspect of the book (unimagined when it was written) has a pathos all of its own.

I give it four stars because there is something unsatisfying about the shadowy "narrator" who first poses as a friend of Pnin's, but is later exposed as someone Pnin cannot stand to be with or near, but this is never explained. Even this is revolutionary, however - the so-called "unreliable narrator" has become an extremely fashionable trope in contemporary English-language fiction in the last five or so years.

Finally, it is a short book, only 168 pages in the Penguin Classics paperback edition, so easily despatched.

The second book I finished today is even shorter, and much easier to read.

I've read books in which the pandemic appears right at the end, ("The Black Dress" by Deborah Moggach) or during the latter part of the book ("Summer" by Ali Smith), and this is the first I've read set entirely right in the thick of it. It is set in the Peak District during the second lockdown of 2020, foreshadowing the locked down Christmas of 2020, and referencing back to the first lockdown.

It's eery to see set down on the page the restrictions, the laws and fines, the confinement to home, the washing of shopping and hands, the loneliness and isolation. I now look back from the perspective of the post vaccination year of 2021 (the first vaccinations were in January 2021, after the book ends). It's so easy to forget what it was actually like, after getting used to the relative freedoms conferred by the summer of 2021 and the booster jabs which have encouraged many to get out more. It seems incredible what we actually put up with. This novel will become important social history. I would expect it to appear on school reading lists in the future.

The author has uncannily inserted herself into the minds of three key characters, representing three demographics - the well-off aged who can afford their comfort but are vulnerable, the frustrated and poor middle aged who lose their salary and their freedom (which matters more), and the young, who are doubtful, confused, fearful, angry but ultimately need the guidance of their elders.

The plot, which concerns a quarantine breaker out walking on the fell, is a neat analogy for those who court the virus by mixing with others, cost the state a lot of money, have to be cared for and are cared for.

Humanity and the mixed perils of being human. A very swift read, and a very worthwhile one.
Why only four stars? I feel the definitive pandemic novel has yet to be written and will be much longer and more philosophical than this one.