The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

Very often, as his hay-knife crunched down among the sweet-smelling grassy stems, he would survey mankind and say to himself: "Here and everywhere be folk dying before their time like frosted leaves, though wanted by their families, the country, and the world: while I, an outcast, an encumberer of the ground, wanted by nobody, and despised by all, live on against my will!"

Spoiler alert!

The Mayor of Casterbridge opens with a scene of remarkable cruelty: Michael Henchard, drunk on rum, sells his wife and daughter at a county fair. The book immediately fast-forwards eighteen years to the point at which Henchard, still distraught at his actions, has become a profitable businessman and mayor. When his wife and daughter return to find him, it presents him with, he hopes, an opportunity for redemption.

As it happens, at that same moment Henchard has made a purchase of bad grain (ohmygod there's so much in this book about grain) which prompts this exchange:

"But what are you going to do to repay us for the past?" inquired the man who had before spoken, and who seemed to be a baker or miller. "Will you replace the grown flour we've still got by sound grain?"

Henchard's face had become still more stern at these interruptions, and he drank from his tumbler of water as if to calm himself or gain time. Instead of vouchsafing a direct reply, he stiffly observed--

"If anybody will tell me how to turn grown wheat into wholesome wheat I'll take it back with pleasure. But it can't be done."

This is a bit on the nose for me, but it sets up the B-story, in which Henchard hires a young Scotsman named Donald Farfrae to run his grain business. Farfrae, as it happens, has invented a process that turns "grown wheat into wholesome wheat" and so offers Henchard a different kind of redemption.

But redemption is elusive. Henchard's wife soon dies, and leaves him with his daughter, who does not know she is Henchard's offspring. To make matters worse, his wife leaves him a letter that confesses she's not actually his, but that their daughter died in infancy and she named her next daughter after the first. Feeling cheated, he spurns her at the same time that his reliance on Farfrae turns to jealousy, and they become bitter rivals.

Casterbridge is a story about a man who works tirelessly to redeem himself, but cannot get out of his own way. As his place in society declines, he blames bad luck and the machinations of Farfrae, but cannot see that his pettiness, viciousness, and pride are what unravel his successes, just as they severed his marriage. After the sale he imposes a 21-year tee-totaling sentence on himself, but alcohol is not to blame for his powerful vices.

I did not find Casterbridge to be a success on the order of Far From the Madding Crowd (though the jacket erroneously calls it his "first masterpiece"). The prose is comparatively muted, and without the high-toned whimsicality of Crowd it is difficult to ignore how over-plotted it is. But it had me by the end, where Henchard, destitute, estranged from his "daughter" Elizabeth-Jane (who has married Farfrae!), has died and left this as a will:

MICHAEL HENCHARD'S WILL

"That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made to grieve on account of me.
"& that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground.
"& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.
"& that nobody is wished to see my dead body.
"& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral.
"& that no flours be planted on my grave.
"& that no man remember me.
"To this I put my name.

Jesus.

Top Ten 2011

2011 is over; 2012 is here! This year promises to be even more difficult than the last, since the Mayan spaceships are supposed to arrive in late December, meaning we'll have one fewer weak to get to 50. But don't let that stop you--we would love to add contributors to our blog! You don't have to reach 50, you just have to love books and enjoy writing about them. If you're interested, e-mail me at misterchilton at gmail.com.

Here are the top ten books I read this year. This is a fairly skewed list, since I'm not counting either re-reads (like Brideshead Revisited) or stuff like Shakespeare, which is great, but not very interesting to put on a list because everyone already knows it's awesome.


10.) Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis -- I think of this dark satire of academia every time I work on my graduate school applications. Bonus fact: It was a favorite novel of the late great Christopher Hitchens.

9.) Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence -- I liked this much more than Lady Chatterley's Lover. Both are gorgeously written, but my memory of Chatterley was that its vision of love seems remarkably shallow. Sons and Lovers, on the other hand, matches Lawrence's prose to an appropriately metaphysical vision.

8.) Moby Dick by Herman Melville -- What can be said about Moby Dick? Its size, its universality, its grandeur all serve to obviate commentary. They also obviate a lot of the good will and humor that are built up in the opening chapters, creating an object of awe, rather than an object of love.

7.) The Red and the Black by Stendhal -- "More like the red and the bleak." -- Stephen Brent Waggoner

6.) The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow -- As close as I think I've seen to "The Great American Novel," thanks to its illimitable energy, adventure, and melting-pot approach to prose. It makes me want to be a better "Columbus of the near-at-hand."

5.) The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton -- My students have been complaining that all of Shakespeare's plays end tragically. (Coincidentally, they read nothing but tragedies.) I would like to spend a semester and just teach this, Ethan Frome, and The Age of Innocence and then see how they feel.

4.) Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy -- Now that I think back on what I've read this year, I think that Far from the Madding Crowd reminds me most of Moby Dick, purely in the sense that it reading it is to be overwhelmed by the knowledge Hardy summons to his fingertips. That, along with sympathetic characters and a believable plot, were what I thought were most missing from The Mayor of Casterbridge.

3.) A Passage to India by E. M. Forster -- Don't be fooled--this isn't really a novel about Anglo-Indian relations in the early 20th century. What it is, however, I find much more difficult to say.

2.) Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte -- I only pretended to read this in high school, and now I regret it. Very few characters are as intense as Heathcliff, and very few books are as intense as Wuthering Heights, which at times wavers between a Gus Van Sant movie and a snuff film.

1.) Parade's End (1 2 3 4) by Ford Madox Ford -- Maybe it's cheating to include the whole tetralogy here, but I wanted to save room for a few other books on my list. Parade's End is the best example I have ever seen of what Ford called literary impressionism, the reproduction of life as it is lived--in A Man Could Stand Up--, he spends twenty pages describing a spot on a wall!--and ever since then even great works of literature that attempt similar things have seemed to me disingenuous. I am skeptical, but optimistic, that the upcoming HBO adaptation will be successful. BUT in case you're wondering, Some Do Not... (1) > A Man Could Stand Up-- (3) > No More Parades (2) > The Last Post (4).


Happy New Year!

Christopher's Books 2011

50. The Big Book of Irony
by Jon Winokur
49. Elizabeth I
by Anne Somerset
48. Antony and Cleopatra
by William Shakespeare
47. The Importance of Being Earnest
by Oscar Wilde
46. A Passage to India
by E. M. Forster
45. Orlando
by Virginia Woolf
44. Cleopatra
by Stacy Schiff
43. Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England
by Timothy Rosendale
42. Alterations of State
by Richard McCoy
41. Moby Dick
by Herman Melville
40. Nine Stories
by J. D. Salinger
39. Pincher Martin
by William Golding
38. Doctor Fischer of Geneva, or the Bomb Party
by Graham Greene
37. Will in the World
by Stephen Greenblatt
36. Henry V
by William Shakespeare
35. Wuthering Heights
by Emily Bronte
34. Lucky Jim
by Kingsley Amis
33. The Watch
by Rick Bass
32. Romeo and Juliet
by William Shakespeare
31. The Last Post
by Ford Madox Ford
30. What Ever Happened to Modernism?
by Gabriel Josipovici
29. The Taming of the Shrew
by William Shakespeare
28. Sons and Lovers
by D. H. Lawrence
27. A Man Could Stand Up--
by Ford Madox Ford
26. Sense and Sensibility
by Jane Austen
25. Othello
by William Shakespeare
24. The Mayor of Casterbridge
by Thomas Hardy
23. Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
22. Julius Caesar
by William Shakespeare
21. Dr. Zhivago
by Boris Pasternak
20. No More Parades
by Ford Madox Ford
19. Slaughterhouse-Five
by Kurt Vonnegut
18. Howards End
by EM Forster
17. Much Ado About Nothing
by William Shakespeare
16. Lord of the Flies
by William Golding
15. Some Do Not...
by Ford Madox Ford
14. The Hunger Games
by Suzanne Collins
13. The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
12. Henry IV, Part One
by William Shakespeare
11. Travels with My Aunt
by Graham Greene
10. The Hothouse by the East River
by Muriel Spark
9. How to Read a Sentence
by Stanley Fish
8. The Adventures of Augie March
by Saul Bellow
7. The Broken Estate
by James Wood
6. Cymbeline
by William Shakespeare
5. The Return
by Roberto Bolano
4. Far from the Madding Crowd
by Thomas Hardy
3. Death Comes for the Archbishop
by Willa Cather
2. The Red and the Black
by Stendhal
1. The Things That Matter
by Edward Mendelson

The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

Moreover to light a fire is the instinctive and resistant act of man when, at the winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout Nature.  It indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness against this fiat that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery and death.  Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.

I have found diminishing returns with Hardy's novels, I think.  I really loved Far from the Madding Crowd, but The Mayor of Casterbridge exposed a lot of the artificiality and overwroughtness of Hardy's writing that I hadn't noticed in Crowd.  Jude the Obscure was very good, and as heart-rendingly bleak as its reputation, but suffered from the same flaws.  I didn't really enjoy The Return of the Native much at all, because Hardy's bloviating and melodrama seem discordant with such a cramped and narrow story.

Of course, cramped and narrow is half the point.  Eustacia Vye, the beautiful and tempestuous heroine, wants badly to leave Egdon Heath, the blandest and most barren stretch of the Wessex countryside and live life on a larger scale.  She thinks that she has found her ticket out in the figure of Clym Yeobright, the native of the title who has returned from studying in Paris.  They fall in love--there is a nice scene where Eustacia takes place in a Christmas masque, trying to spy on this intriguing newcomer without herself being scene, though Yeobright sees through her costume with the benefit of some sort of kismet--but after they marry, she becomes disillusioned.  Yeobright, for his part, only wants to found a provincial school in his homeland, not sweep his bride away to the Continent:

But do I desire unreasonably much in wanting what is called life--music, poetry, passion, war, and all the beating and pulsing that are going on in the great arteries of the world?  That was the shape of my youthful dream; but I did not get it.  Yet I thought I saw the way to it in my Clym.

Complicating this story is Eustacia's former lover Damien Wildeve, who has recently married Yeobright's cousin Thomasin.  (I didn't know this was the female version of Thomas, but I like it.)  Typically, Wildeve's former passion for Eustacia is rekindled when she becomes attached to Yeobright, which causes all sorts of problems and misunderstandings.

The plot is confined mostly to this love-square, with Yeobright's disapproving mother added, and Diggory Venn the "reddleman," who has long been in love with Thomasin.  A reddleman travels around selling the pigment that is used for marking sheep, and consequently is often covered in red himself, and has a strange mystical presence because of it.  Venn himself is sort of otherworldly.  His love for Thomasin drives him, not to undermine her marriage to Wildeve, but to endeavor tirelessly to reconcile their relationship that she might be happy and not dishonored.  His inherent goodness is a contrast to the underhandedness of Wildeve, the self-absorption of Eustacia, and even to the well-intentioned foolishness of Yeobright.  He's the best part of the book, and an powerful reproach to the idea that "good" characters are boring and "evil" characters the most interesting or complex.  The Return of the Native could have used more of him.

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

"...You are Joseph the dreamer of dreams, dear Jude.  And a tragic Don Quixote.  And sometimes you are St. Stephen, who, while they were stoning him, could see Heaven opened.  Oh, my poor friend and comrade, you'll suffer yet!" -- Sue Bridehead

When Jude Fawley is a little boy, his schoolmaster advises him, "Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read all you can."  It seems like a particularly banal and childish piece of counsel, but it turns out to be the most humane moral code Jude will ever encounter in a universe where kindness seems to have no moral value whatsoever.

Jude's dream is to elevate himself, despite his poverty, to the ranks of the learned, and as a boy he studies his Latin and Greek assiduously.  As is commonly the case, his ambitions are derailed by sex.  He falls for a girl named Arabella Donn, who, not wishing to let Jude go, seduces him and tricks him into marriage with a made-up pregnancy.  Hardy describes their marriage this way:

And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe, fell, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks.  What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore.

Jude's foil in this is his cousin, Sue Bridehead, whom he meets long after his marriage has crumbled and Arabella has run off to Australia.  He falls for Sue, who falls for him, but not before she has married the same old schoolmaster, Phillotson, to assure her position as a teacher.  Phillotson, true to his advice to the young Jude, releases Sue from her bonds, but this remarkable act of kindness fails to change the material reality of Jude and Sue's existence, which is defined by the marriage bonds which they have made but cannot shake.

As Sue tells Jude, "There is something external to us which says, 'You shan't!'  First it said, 'You shan't learn!'  Then it said, 'You shan't labour!'  Now it says, 'You shan't love!'"  The external thing which says You shan't is the moral code which values the bond of marriage over human kindness.  For most of the book neither Jude's nor Sue's spouses assert any claim to them, but the pair are roundly denigrated for their scandalous relationship, chased out of work and home.

 Jude the Obscure caused quite a controversy in its day, one which may seem quaint compared to modern attitudes of marriage, but I think Hardy's contemporaries were right to see that the book savages much more than marriage itself: It criticizes the value of the Christian moral framework, which Hardy sees as elevating doctrine over simple kindness and love.  Not too subtly, he emphasizes this by having Jude and Sue chased off a job restoring a monument of the Ten Commandments.

But the highest tragedy of Jude is that Jude, though he ultimately abandons his religion, cannot escape his own moral snare.  At one point he stands before a gathered crowd and offers himself as "a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story":

"However it was my poverty and not my will that consented to be beaten.  It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one; and my impulses--affections--vices perhaps they should be called--were too strong not to hamper a man without advantages; who should really be as cold-blooded as a fish and as selfish as a pig to have a really good chance of being one of his country's worthies."

See how entangled, in Jude's mind, are poverty and rectitude: a good man knows his place, in wedlock and in penury.  Jude has forgotten his schoolmaster's advice, but we have not, and are forced to ask ourselves, which is the better path--to "be kind to animals and birds," or to "be as cold-blooded as a fish and as selfish as a pig?"

It is easy to see why Hardy found the response to Jude so personally draining, and never wrote another novel.  Giving his readers the choice between human decency and old-time religion, many of them said we'll take the old-time religion, thank you.  Doubtless Hardy must have felt much like Jude.  And yet, I would argue that Jude might have been more nuanced.  A happy marriage is simply a concept that does not exist in this novel; though we laugh at the innkeeper who is suspicious of Jude and Arabella's relationship until he recognizes her "flinging a shoe at his head" to be "the note of genuine wedlock," it isn't clear to me that Hardy's opinion is very different.

Jude presents us with a handful of really gut-wrenching set-pieces where Hardy provides enough pathos to make nuance unnecessary.  In between them, I admit I found parts of it tedious and artificial.  Hardy's natural long-windedness is effective when accompanying real agonies, but does little for Sue's long campaign of mind-changing and sexual frigidity.  Did Far from the Madding Crowd suffer from the same flaws, which show as well in The Mayor of Casterbridge?  Probably so, but I'll take it over those two anyway.