Thomas Hardy
PART TWO as continued from Part One here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/03/15/collected-short-stories-thomas-hardy/
When I read these stories, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
(My previous stories of older or classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/)
Possible spoilers —
AN IMAGINATIVE WOMAN
“Then she scanned again by the light of the candle the half-obliterated pencillings on the wallpaper beside her head. There they were — phrases, couplets, bouts-rimés, beginnings and middles of lines, ideas in the rough, like Shelley’s scraps, and the least of them so intense, so sweet, so palpitating, that it seemed as if his very breath, warm and loving, fanned her cheeks from those walls, walls that had surrounded his head times and times as they surrounded her own now.”
A declining marriage, a busy gunsmith the husband and the eponymous woman his wife, an imaginative female force that later becomes explicitly an imaginary one in a poet’s head. This is Hardy at his most powerful, transcending some farcical turns of event. An imaginative woman, yes, but one who briefly dresses in man’s clothes to ape the poet she had fallen in love with UNSEEN and in whose rooms the married couple and their children stayed for a few weeks at the seaside. Amid the poet’s books and his poetic scraps or graffiti on the wall of beginning lines some of which we later learn are explicitly “erotic and passionate”. This turn of events lead by a circuitous audit trail to the poet’s suicide (using, ironically, a gun!)
And her new born son — via whom she died during giving birth to him — the husband later deemed was a spitting image of the dead poet, although the wife (a budding writer of poetry herself) and the poet had never met in real life!
The implications of erotic role-playing via methods of transference in the ether are manifold, as on one occasion she had kissed his photo and had at least briefly tantamount to become him, I wonder? A form of ‘trans’ behaviour still uncertain to exist, even today!
I just read somewhere about a belief that Mrs Hooper, the poet’s landlady, was masquerading as the poet himself. Or vice versa!
THE SON’S VETO
“; but she still held confused ideas on the use of ‘was’ and ‘were’…”
This intentionally dreary story is bare of plot twists and turns, a Hardy-depressing, if stylistically elegant, account of a woman’s attritional life lived lamely in London, out of her social depth having married a posh churchman and had with him an even posher, certainly much stricter, son who grew up, after his father’s death, to prevent her remarriage to the man she should have married back in her yearned-for original setting of Wessex. Her complicated hairstyle restored every morning with much effort as a metaphor of pointlessness. But a hairstyle needs no upkeep in a coffin, I guess. But the reading of books, even books written about low spirits, lasts forever in some eternal ether of a higher spirit. My conviction, if not the author’s! And the reader’s final veto.
See a story I read by chance this morning where a more modern woman yearns to leave the countryside to go to the city! — https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/26/through-the-storm-rosalie-parker/#comment-21979
FOR CONSCIENCE’S SAKE
“…a house whose front, till lately of the complexion of a chimney-sweep, had been scraped to show to the surprised wayfarer the bright yellow and red brick that had lain lurking beneath the soot of fifty years.”
A man has a honourable conscience to marry the woman (who once bore his daughter) to whom he had once promised marriage many years ago but never fulfilled that promise. He seeks her out, and spies on her, till approaching this woman (masquerading as a widow) and their shared daughter. This eventually reveals features — symbolised by the above revelation of a house — into that of people’s faces below, bringing in a resemblance between them and thus a lingering scandal … and this has negative effect on his daughter’s marriage prospects. The gratuitous moral implications and repercussions are subtly tantalising. Still are, as I write this!
“The trip had not progressed far before all, except the curate, found that sailing in a breeze did not quite agree with them; but as he seemed to enjoy the experience, the other three bore their condition as well as they could without grimace or complaint, till the young man, observing their discomfort, gave immediate directions to tack about. On the way back to port they sat silent, facing each other.
Nausea in such circumstances, like midnight watching, fatigue, trouble, fright, has this marked effect upon the countenance, that it often brings out strongly the divergences of the individual from the norm of his race, accentuating superficial peculiarities to radical distinctions. Unexpected physiognomies will uncover themselves at these times in well-known faces; the aspect becomes invested with the spectral presence of entombed and forgotten ancestors; and family lineaments of special or exclusive cast, which in ordinary moments are masked by a stereotyped expression and mien, start up with crude insistence to the view.”
A TRAGEDY OF TWO AMBITIONS
“While he was patiently boring the tunnel Rosa seemed about to fly over the mountain.”
The attrition of human fate embodied in two brothers, Joshua and Cornelius, and their beautiful sister Rosa. J becomes a clergy man and C a schoolteacher, and they try to protect themselves and their sister from their drunken wastrel of a father, whom they get sent off at first to Canada with his gypsy wife, this being his first wife although it was not their mother. But he returns and, by his simple presence, threatens to blight the two brothers’ careers and also Rosa’s marriage to a Squire. But an accidental option — as abetted by their least resistance to a culvert’s weir embrace of their father — blights them instead. The duly wed Rosa is left in blissful ignorance of what they suffered.
Cross-referenced with O. Henry today here: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/839-2/#comment-804
To be continued soon…
ON THE WESTERN CIRCUIT
“Then the pleasure-machine started again, and, to the light-hearted girl, the figure of the handsome young man, the market-square with its lights and crowd, the houses beyond, and the world at large, began moving round as before, countermoving in the revolving mirrors on her right hand, she being as it were the fixed point in an undulating, dazzling, lurid universe, in which loomed forward most prominently of all the form of her late interlocutor. Each time that she approached the half of her orbit that lay nearest him they gazed at each other with smiles, and with that unmistakable expression which means so little at the moment, yet so often leads up to passion, heart-ache, union, disunion, devotion, overpopulation, drudgery, content, resignation, despair.”
A most amazing story with a boring title, so nobody might have read it because they thought it something else? — unless it makes circuit with the O. Henry story (‘Each According To His Ability’) about a man called Vuyning as both parasite and host, that I just this minute coincidentally read HERE?
The story of illiterate young woman Anna who attracts a highly literate older man by his sight of her at the wondrously described carousel-circuits of the steam-circus! But he accidentally touches the hand of Anna’s older, more literate and, as it happens, married mentor called Edith, older than the man who fancies Anna.
Edith, whose marriage is fragile, later writes vicarious love letters galore to him at the request of Anna who cannot write them herself, letters that take on their own momentum, eventually without Anna’s knowledge, but letters still in Anna’s name. And so the man falls in love with Anna while, unbeknownst, actually. falling in love with Edith. The outcome is poignant and everlasting. Paradox of parasite and host making this an unknown classic perhaps written by someone else about someone else to someone else. Yet, which one is the shadowy third?
“…elbow other juniors habited like himself…”
TO PLEASE HIS WIFE
“‘The little one is Emily Hanning; the tall one Joanna Phippard.’
‘Ah! I recollect ’em now, to be sure.’
He advanced to their elbow, and genially stole a gaze at them.”
This is a story master-class in the Hardyesque by Hardy, as triggered by this elbow gaze, with a growing sense of tragic depression with disarmingly deadpan fast-moving decades (from youth to old age) passing through such depression to its ultimate inescapability. A sailor come home safe the from sea choosing a spot in the church to pray thanks for his deliverance.
Then with various misunderstandings involving the two women, and who loves whom most? — some of the three variably with good intentions, some otherwise fallible or misunderstood or even bad-intentioned, until that spot in church becomes a stain of focus for the potential widow whose husband and two sons are missing at sea, sons who did not say farewell to their mother face to face but by the transience of chalk marks.
The status of a grocery shop (“Did a customer inquire if the grocer could really recommend the wondrous substitute for eggs which a persevering bagman had forced into his stock, he would answer that ‘when you did not put eggs into a pudding it was difficult to taste them there’;”) versus a stationery shop, opposite each other in the same street, and the letters on stationery that sometimes are sent and some destroyed before they’re sent. We’re all “twopenny customers” in this world of commerce, personal, spiritual or financial commerce that ‘eats itself hollow’. And the metaphorical sea of fate washing through our “land-rust.” A love letter inside a book like this one earlier today, or chalk marks that run.
“…and she was to think of the letter as never having been written.”
THE FIDDLER OF THE REELS
This has turned out to be a truly GREAT short story, in fact unexpectedly so, as I had never heard of it before! It may even become a favourite of mine to be listed in any of my fiction legacy awards before I depart this earth! There is too much brilliant prose to quote, and thus I shall quote none! — except for the dancing witchery of “acoustic magnetism” to match the confidence-tricksy magnetism in the story by O. Henry that by chance I reviewed HERE just before reading this Hardy story, the latter conjuring up the 1851 Exhibition in London as well as the Dantean Egdon Heath where our flawed heroine Carline lived and was wooed by young Ned, but she is bewitched into dancing a different tune by a man called Mop with his devilish Paganini fiddle. So, Ned goes to London, trudging there I think, or at least he catches one of those early steam trains in those days whereby passengers suffered the elements in open carriages! Later, Carline realises Mop’s intentions were elsewhere and she travels in such open carriages to join Ned with her three year old daughter whose real father is Mop. This is more than just a sad story and I will leave the rest of this plot to you to read except for me to mention the stilts that the small girl was forced to dance on when working the streets with her real Dad in the bewitching dance of life, as they lifted, I infer, the spirits of others by such cruelly induced entertainment — also lifting, like this story itself does, our intergenerational spirits, lifting them at least temporarily within the spinning reels of fate’s own confidence trick.
And on that high note I shall leave it.
end