Collected Short Stories – Thomas Hardy
When I read these stories, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
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5 thoughts on “Collected Short Stories – Thomas Hardy”
FELLOW-TOWNSMEN
“‘It is a very common folly of human nature, you know, to think the course you did not adopt must have been the best,’…”
It is a shame that this story has such a boringly inappropriate title, because it is such a great story. It is the story of George Barnet in a fully thought-out genius loci of a community, featuring the audit trail of his life, its unrequited love, abrupt deaths of others, an inappropriate marriage, stoical decisions that are counter-productive but seemingly correct, unexpected but finally appropriate turnings, and an ending that is perfect and intensely appropriate, but not necessarily a happy ending. And should I take you through the audit trail of George Barnet in detail it would completely spoil it for you. Suffice for me to mention things (in random order) that caught my fancy, some appropriate, some not — shepherds calling from hill to hill, flanking this genius loci; the house George built called ‘Chateau Ringdale’; the wallpaper he tore up before it could be used to decorate the Chateau’s walls; Charlson the medic (“he was needy; he was not a coddle; he gossiped with men instead of with women;”); the crocus in Raffaelesque Lucy’s garden; the bulging green hills and the quiet harbour; the unopened umbrella of forgetting; the caged canary; the extraordinarily delayed death by drowning; the faded complexions within Joshua Reynolds frames; the lack of health and safety of children encouraged to play in empty, half-built houses; the pregnant emptiness between two separate letters just received together; and finally that stoicism again and a righteous perversity.
Pages 231 – 246
“‘Is this your love?’ said Betty reproachfully. ‘O, if you was sickening for the plague itself, and going to be as ugly as the Ooser in the church vestry, I wouldn’t—‘“
This is so great a story, especially as I could not scry, in the real-time of reading it, its potential turnings. Can you? All endings are happy, simply if it be a tractable portrait of natural life and death, and its mixed motives, its sadnesses and satisfactions. I am astonished that gout is such a dangerous illness, but he did not rest and laboured under stress and the combination can kill. And the eventual reactions of the two younger men in love with Betty proved that one did and one didn’t. Like truth kissing a Covid patient today with no mask upon its sincere face. And the ‘dying fall’ of the fate of this story (and the next one below) is so charming, I could imagine it being read aloud amid “deformed butterflies, fossil ox-horns, prehistoric dung-mixens” and “the dead eyes of the stuffed birds —“
DAME THE FOURTH, LADY MOTTISFONT
By the Sentimental Member
By the Sentimental Member
“It need hardly be said that our innocent young lady, loving him so deeply and joyfully as she did, replied that she would do all she could for the nameless child; and, shortly afterwards, the pair were married in the same cathedral that had echoed the whispers of his declaration, the officiating minister being the Bishop himself; a venerable and experienced man, so well accomplished in uniting people who had a mind for that sort of experiment, that the couple, with some sense of surprise, found themselves one while they were still vaguely gazing at each other as two independent beings.”
After meeting in such a solemn place as this cathedral, the description of which, as environmental assets bodily and psychological, this ironically UNsentimental story makes much play of, the eponymous lady marries the prestigious man she met there, but the ceremony as described in the above quote seems to be a premonition of how this story pans out and ends, with glib and fickle parental feelings for a foundling girl called Dorothy and a Countess (far more beautiful than our Dame), a Countess who is Dorothy’s suspected real mother as earlier born illegitimately to her and to our Dame’s husband, but the affections of all three slide all over Dorothy and don’t stick, as even our Dame’s once steadfast affections for this waif-like foundling failed to stick. And with this story’s bathetic ending I now look forward more to the next Dame’s story due to be told by a churchwarden “with a sly chink to one eyelid—“
CONTINUED HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/03/15/collected-short-stories-thomas-hardy/
“THERE IS NO FUN
.UNTILL i CUM”
A dark rainy atmospheric Higher Crowstairs house where a shepherd lives, high and low lands thereabouts having different microclimates, and tonight there’s a Christening party with 19 guests, a dancing party vying with a ‘sit-still party’. The respective interactivity of three male strangers (one dressed in cinder-gray) who arrive separately out of the dark rainy blue, as it were, is a hoot and a half, involving a hanging for sheep stealing or writing prose that trips you up at every turn. In a good way. But what is a “hedge-carpenter”? And there are also today’s “‘wuzzes and flames’ (hoarses and phlegms)” and ‘grogblossoms’ up the nose.
“…an invasion of England through a Channel tunnel…”
Or through the mucus ducts of the body? I’ll leave you to decide which of these it is? If either! A tale – 1804 may not have been the exact year – Boney plans to land his troops but where? A retrospective narrative by a boy when older, a boy taken a fancy to by his Uncle Job who accompanies him on the shepherding and climming near the coast … they see Boney himself on English land. To plan the way for the troops’ flat-bottomed boats to land. Boney once crowned himself and named himself after some brandy, too. But that’s not really in this story. But I imagined it was! Patience is needed sometimes by you when I freewheel a review!
“, the walls in this district being built of rubble, without mortar, so that there were plenty of crevices for small toes.”
Why King George in those days had German soldiers on our south coast as part of his troops is beyond my knowledge! Anyway, this is the story of Phyllis, starved of “pretty mirrors”, romantically ping-ponging, under the stare of her father, between some gormless chap called Gould and a German hussar who is, against her father’s wishes, her true love across the borders of walls that dare not be breached by love. Misunderstandings and mis-trysts, desertions by sea, and due deserts by firing squad. Why have I read this melodrama? I have no idea – but the semi-coloned and tentacular clauses are in themselves satisfying to read.
“The wall is white, and somebody in the field may see your shape against it!”
“A white bonnet and a silver-coloured gownd. It whewed and whistled so loud when it rubbed against the pews…”
You must already know this Egdon Heath and Casterbridge story. So, no need to re-rehearse the plot for you. And I have simply read it again and laid myself open to its meaning as evolved subconsciously in my mind throughout the last 12 years of self-training in the art and freewheeling rigour of gestalt real-time reviewing. A story of milking and milkmaids, and of two women, both betrayed by the same man, and of the boy-child that he gave one of them. There emerge “freaks of coincidence”, and a mutually synergistic curse as balanced by alternating dream-streams between the two women, a curse inadvertently aimed by each of them at the other — one woman as an “incubus” upon the other’s body, the latter who then stigmatises or squeezes the former’s arm with a recognisable four-fingered grip… and an identity later revealed by a singularly conjured floating egg-yolk face just as, at the end, we see that boy-child now grown into a man subjected to an undeserved hanging, duly stigmatised or squeezed, this time by a rope — and, eventually, I feel, there evolves a new mutual synergy of the other egg-yolk face precariously balanced or suspended “to the rhythm of alternating milk-streams.”