The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy. 1886

My Posts on Thomas Hardy

I think I first found out that some few books were considered great literature from reading The Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman back around 1960.  The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy is one of nineteen English language novels on the list.  Written in a time before political  correctness and such, Fadiman acknowledges his list is swayed to English language works.  Since beginning The Reading Life five years ago I have read two Hardy novels,Jude the Obscure and The Return of the Native and several of his short stories.   I am very glad I have at long last read The Mayor of Casterbridge.  Thomas Hardy was greatly admired by Marcel Proust, who regarded him as a flawless artist.

The novel begins with a young man making a very terrible decision while drunk.  He sells his wife and baby daughter to a sailor for five crowns.  From this act, the plots line and the lives of the central characters develop.  The man tries to find them, having done it a time of emotional confusion, but he cannot.  He takes and keeps a vow not to touch liquor for twenty one years, he having already lived that long.  Twenty years go by and the man has changed, through hard work and application he has built up a good business and become mayor of his town Casterbridge.  In a cultural that celebrates drinking, he has kept his vow.  I really don't want to give away much more of the plot that Hardy worked so hard to make consistently exciting, surprising and one has to say, often depressing.  There are lots of twists and turns.

As I read on in the novel, I came to marvel over Hardy's ability to show how events can change some people or maybe better said how they can reveal them.   There is unremitting tradgedy, one bad thing after another happens.   Hardy does rely on a few devices of melodrama for his big events.  Hardy makes the English countryside and the created community of Wessex County come very vividly to life. There are lots of very interesting minor characters and the main figures are brilliantly realized.  

Some say Hardy is a "depressing writer" depicting a world of unending misery.   I think at the very end of The Mayor of Casterbridge Hardy is addressing this.

What Hardy novel should I read next year?  back to back Hardy a little too deeply sad for me now. 

Mel u

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)

Thomas Hardy is one of the highest regarded late Victorian writers.  His productive years extended well beyond the reign of Victoria.   Most of his fiction is set in an imaginary county in England he created.  I have previously posted on his The Return of the Native and some of his short stories.  

Jude the Obscure is considered by many to be Hardy's best novel.  I will say it is a very sad book which many will find depressing.   It seems to present a vision of a world not worth living in.   The novel is in many ways about aspects of the reading life.  Jude, born into a lower class family and a stone worker by trade, desperately wanted to go to college at Christchurch (said to be Cambridge).   He learns Greek and Latin and reads deeply in the classics. He educated himself to a very high level.  Part of my pondering in reading the novel was whether or not his very real depth of reading in fact only intensified his misery.  It seems to me it did.   He loved his books and sacrificed to purchase them.   We can see he was, he acknowledges this, that he lets his desire to have sex  helped to ruin him.   Neither of the two women he loved respected or understood his love of the reading life.   He read in near complete isolation and had no one to share his passion.  I can relate.  

There are lots of things in the novel about the nature of marriage and the hypocrisy of sexual and social  standards. There are numerous narrational asides of deep insight.  The characters are very subtly drawn.  Tragic events occur, deeply horrible things.  The close of the novel is shocking.  

Jude the Obscure is a canon status work, high art.  It does, to repeat my warning, have the power to depress.  Hardy saw a bleak world and he depicted it masterfully.  I will next read, once I recover from this one, his The Mayor of Casterbridge.   

Three Grim Stories by Thomas Hardy

"The Distracted Preacher" (1879, 63 pages)
"An Imaginative Woman" (1893, 28 pages)

"Barbara of the House of Grebe" (1896, 37 pages)


Prior to today I have posted on six short stories by Hardy and The Return of the Native.   I really enjoy reading his short stories a lot but I will say if you are in a downcast mood and looking for something to raise your spirits, you might look elsewhere! 




 In the  three Hardy short stories I read yesterday a beloved mother dies,  smugglers are shot, a poet kills himself, an innocent child is falsely thought to be the product of a late wife's infidelity and will have his life ruined over this, a man is in a horrible accident and is badly disfigured, a woman is driven nearly mad by the cruelty of her husband, ten out of eleven of the  children in one family die before they are twenty and those were the cheerful parts of the stories.   Most of Hardy's short stories seem to have a bitter surprise at the ending.


Like all of the stories by Hardy I have read, they are set in rural England.   Even as Hardy was writing about the people from this area, their way of life was rapidly disappearing.   


"The Distracted Preacher" somehow reminded me a lot of Daphne de Muarier's novel about smugglers, Jamaica Inn.   Of the two, "The Distracted Preacher" is the most exciting and suspenceful.   As the story opens a new to the town minister (one of the true stock characters of Victorian fiction) is renting a room in the house of an attractive widow about his age.    The man falls in love with her but she seems to have mysterious nocturnal activities that he at first does not understand.    He also is confused when he sees her leave the house wearing the clothes of her late husband.  I do not want to tell more of the plot of this wonderful story. It really is exciting and kept my interest high right until the end.   It also helped me understand the importance of smuggling to coastal people in rural England.   


"An Imaginative Woman" is about two poets (Hardy saw himself primarily as a poet who wrote fiction for a living.)    As the story opens a family, husband, wife and children are renting a place for a holiday stay.   The wife agrees to accept the place on the condition the current tenant move out for the short time they are there as they need the whole space.   The woman has always fancied herself a poet and has published a few items.   It turns out the man who they displaced is a  male poet she has always very much admired.   I do not want to at all spoil the plot of this very sad but beautifully done story.


"Barbara of the House of Grebe" is a very sad story.   It is a small master work.   The characterizations are simply brilliant.

Hardy's short stories are kind of like "mini novels".   Each one of these stories could be further developed into a captivating novel.   


If you have read a short story this week, please post about it on  Breadcrumb Reads by Risa in support of her Short Stories on Wednesday event.


I plan to read Hardy's collection of related short stories, Wessex Tales soon.


All of these short stories can be found online.  


Mel u

Thomas Hardy: Three Short Stories

"The Three Strangers" (1883, 25 pages)
"The Grave by the Handpost" (1897, 13 pages)

"The Fiddler of the Reels"  (1893, 19 pages)


Since I began my blog in July 2009 I have read and posted on three short stories by Thomas Hardy and his very highly regarded novel, The Return of the Native.   I really liked the short stories a lot so yesterday when I was looking around for something on my shelves to read I was happy to find Thomas Hardy:  Selected Stories selected and edited by John Wain.


All of the stories I read recently by Hardy are set among country people in rural England.   The stories are about the lives of these people and they do involve some rural dialect that requires one slow down a bit but I think Hardy is best read slow anyway.


In my brief sample,  Hardy short stories center on death, betrayal and isolation and read like they were very  old stories told for years.  


I  will try to post just enough on each story to convey the flavor of the work but not to spoil the plot.   All of the stories are told in a very traditional fashion and none are hard to follow.   I would say don't read these stories when you are looking for a light pick me up kind of read.    


"Three Strangers" is set during an annual party at the house of a farmer and his wife.   There is a bounty of the honey based drink mead being served.   I think we have to see the idea of three strangers calling at the farm house as an echo of the three wise men.   The strangers arrive one at a time and it is the custom of the region to offer them hospitality even though the wife is not keen on having strangers drink the mead.   Strangers are also a bit sinister seeming in the countryside where most rural people never go twenty miles from where they were born.    The question everyone wants to ask is who is the stranger.   There is a deep connection between the strangers.   "Three Strangers" also lets us see how people felt about some of the terribly harsh laws of the time such as hanging a man for stealing a sheep.    


"The Grave by the Handpost" is a very grim story of a dual suicide  by a father and then his son.   It also shows how England's  wars affected the people of the countryside that provided the soldiers for these wars.    Anyone can write an anti-war story but only a master like Hardy can make us see the real human cost of war on the rural people of England.   I really do not want to relay any of the plot of this very deep perfectly plotted story.


"The Fiddler of the Reels" is another very powerful story.   It is about a very good man, the woman who rejected his marriage proposal four years ago, the handsome fiddler she preferred over him and her three year old illegitimate daughter by the fiddler.    This is a very sad story with a hauntingly sad ending.


One interesting thing in the stories of Hardy is the things that happen in the background.   The several references to people basically disappearing forever through immigration to America were very powerful.   To those left behind, it was almost like a form of death.   

Please share with us your experience with Hardy.   I have three  stories in the collection still to read and post on and I also have on hand The Mayor of Casterbridge.   I will read and post on three more short stories very soon and the novel, hopefully, by the end of 2012.


Please share with us your experience with Hardy


Mel u

The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy  (1878, 401 pages)

A Great Northern Peat Fire Novel?

Last year I read and really admired three of Thomas Hardy's short stories.   One of my 2011 reading goals was to read at least one of his novels.   I recently found an 80 percent off sale on Barnes and Noble Classic Editions (a series with good production values).   One of the books I acquired was Hardy's (1840 to 1928-UK-there is some back ground information on Hardy in my prior posts) very famous, widely read The Return of the Native.


In pondering what to post on this very powerful novel I have decided to dispense with much plot summation.  (If you want one you can find a decent one HERE.)
Basically it is a tragic story of star crossed love and deception.

The descriptions of the natural beauty of the English country side are very beautiful and serve to set the mood for the story.    Sometimes it seems Hardy loved writing parts of these book more than anything else.  

I thought Hardy's treatment of the relationship of the central male character and his mother was totally brilliant.    Their relationship reminded me somehow of a peat fire (the novel is set in English peat country in Hardy's imagined community of Egdon Heath).    In fact the whole novel is almost like a peat fire!

Peat has a high carbon content and can burn under low moisture conditions. Once ignited by the presence of a heat source (e.g. a wildfire penetrating the subsurface), it smolders. These smoldering fires can burn undetected for very long periods of time (months, years and even centuries) propagating in a creeping fashion through the underground peat layer.   (from Wikipedia).

The scene where the lead character tells his mother he is marrying a woman she knows is very wrong for him was very moving to me.   You could feel the mutual heartbreak and feel the very powerful emotions at play just below the surface.   I know not everyone will agree, but I found this the best realized relationship in the novel.    The moral confusion of the lead character, Cylm Yeobright is conveyed in a very subtle fashion.   I wonder if this name is meant to suggest he is a yeoman (meaning a dependable worker or more narrowly and old fashioned and minor worker in a royal household) of intelligence.

As I was reading The Return of the Native  I  was struck numerous times by some of the amazingly insightful observations of Hardy.   As I was reading I said to myself numerous times that Hardy knows some important truth the  learning of which are alone enough to mandate the reading of his work.

At times I did not quite see the extreme attraction of the female lead character.  (The cynical side of me thought that perhaps there is not an over abundance of beautiful women in the English peat countryside!)    Maybe this is meant to signal the limits in the intelligence of the lead character (though she has other admirers also).   I also think the sexual fixation on one woman is a part of the puritanical background of the ethos of the world of the novel.    I wondered if Hardy is of this ethos or if he is looking down on it from a higher perspective.  This is a very guilt driven novel.  

The ending of the novel in which Clym finds his true vocation was very intriguing.   It felt a bit forced to me.  

The Return of the Native is a very good novel.   D. H. Lawrence in a blurb at the end of the book says the real tragic power of the novel is from the setting.    I think he is right.

I am starting to think more and more about how climate effects literary productions.  I think this is a cold weather harsh environment book about a place where you have to work to see beauty.  

With the understanding that the novel is one that many will find depressing, I recommend it to those who like Victorian era novels.    It is not a happy days feel good book.    It is a deeply insightful work of the northern zones mentality (OK new term I made up today!) with wonderful nature scenes.   The depiction of the relationship of Clym and his mother is pure brilliance.  I have never seen the relationship of an adult man and his mother in conflict done in a better fashion.  

I have in my possession two other Hardy novels,  Tess of the D'Ubervilles and The Mayor of Casterbridge.   I hope to read them within the next year.    If you are new to Hardy or not sure you would like him, I suggest you start out with the short stories I have posted on.   (There are links to the stories in my posts.)

Do you have a favorite Hardy novel or short story?   Is it accurate to call his work "depressing"?  

Mel u

"The Melancholy Hussar of The German Legion" by Thomas Hardy

"The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion" by Thomas Hardy (1889, 10 pages)

"There soon the sage admiring mark´d the dawn 
Of solemn musing in your pensive thought; 
For when a smiling babe, you loved to lie 
Oft deeply listening to the rapid roar 
Of wood-hung Menai, stream of druids old."-Thomas Warton

Not to long ago I read and posted on one of Thomas Hardy's short stories, "The Withered Arm".      Of course it is a masterwork of the story teller's art.    I recently finished  reading my way through The March of Literature by Ford Madox Ford,  almost an encyclopedia of literature that only an awesome force of intellect like Ford could produce.    In The March of Literature Ford describes the work of Hardy (1840 to 1928-UK) as being like the root of a 400 year old tree.     

I would say do not read "The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion"   on a day which finds you in a sad or depressive mood.     I think I am beginning to understand what Ford may have meant when he compared Hardy's work to the trunk of a 400 year old tree.      If the Old Testament had been written in the 19th century in England to be read for the next 4000 years "The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion" would be a fitting parable.    

As the story opens we meet Phyllis and her father.   Her father, once a fairly successful country doctor has become since his wife died totally withdrawn.    He  retreats into his reading, caring for the needs of himself and his daughter with a bit of rental income.   I really hate to tell any of the plot of this very economical tale as I want others to be have the pleasure of discovering it for themselves.   

In some ways the story can be seen as an stunning critique of British social and military policy of the 19th century.   It is almost like a miniature novel.    The ending of the story is pure sadness.   

Hardy is not a self consciously innovative writer.    When you know as much about the human condition as he does you do not have to be.    

This story and a lot more of Thomas Hardy's work (including many short stories) can be read at the web page of the University of Adelaide Library.

Mel u

"Squire Patrick's Lady" by Thomas Hardy and "The Novels of Thomas Hardy" by Virginia Woolf

"Squire Patrick's Lady" by Thomas Hardy (1890, 8 pages)

"The Novels of  Thomas Hardy" by Virginia Woolf  (10 pages   1928-essay)

Not to long ago I read and posted on one of Thomas Hardy's short stories, "The Withered Arm".      Of course it is a masterwork of the story teller's art.    I am currently reading my way through The March of Literature by Ford Madox Ford,  almost an encyclopedia of literature that only an awesome force of intellect like Ford could produce.    In The March of Literature Ford describes the work of Hardy (1840 to 1928-UK) as being like the root of a 400 year old tree.     Most days I am in the habit of checking to see what the short story of the day is on East of the Web: Short Stories.    A few days ago the story of the day (normally a story of a canon or near canon status writer) was "Squire Patrick's Lady" by Thomas Hardy.    

As you might expect from an author described as "like the root of a 400 year old tree" Hardy looks back to the Old Testament and the Greeks rather than forward to the moderns writers.   There is a lesson to be learned in this story about the consequences of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.    As the story opens the wife of Squire Patrick is dying.    She calls her husband to her side and says she has a lie in her heart that she must reveal to her husband before she passes.     There so much in this short story but I do not want to give away any of the plot line.   The language does somehow feel ancient even though Hardy was a contemporary of Joyce, Mansfield and Woolf.    It is a searing account of the corrosive effects of the class system, among other things.    I find it hard to imagine someone reading this story and not being glad they have done so.

Shortly after Hardy died Virginia Woolf wrote an essay about his work "The Novels of Thomas Hardy", which was  republished in The Common Reader, Series Two.    I have not found myself comfortable paraphrasing the essays of Woolf.   I have noticed most who have blogged on her essays pretty much just quote them.     Of course Woolf speaks in glowing terms of the work of Hardy.   I found her dividing up of literary artists into conscious and non conscious writers very interesting.     Hardy is among the non conscious creators who simply write what is in their heart without self-conscious artifice.  

Mel u

"The Withered Arm" by Thomas Hardy

  "The Withered Arm" by Thomas Hardy (1888-20 pages)

Thomas Hardy (1940 to 1928)  is one of the giants of Victorian literature.     He wrote numerous novels now considered an important part of the canon such as Return of the Native,   The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Far From the Madding Crowd as well as some very wonderful poems.    It has been a long time since I have read any of his books so as soon as I got the suggestion to read this from  Mrs B of The Literary Stew I decided this would be a good opportunity to renew my acquaintance with Hardy and I am very glad I did.

The story is set in rural England in the 1880s on a milk farm.    As the story opens we meet a strange solitary milkmaid who works for the farm owner, Mr Lodge.   She has a 12 year old or so son and we quickly gather there was once a relationship between her and Mr. Lodge and we think Mr Lodge is probably the  father of her son.   A rumor spreads around the farm that Mr Lodge is to marry.   Everyone begins to at once wonder what  the soon to be Mrs Lodge is like.

Hav' anybody seen her?' said another.

There was a negative response from the first. 'Though they say she's a rosy-cheeked, tisty-tosty little body enough,' she added; and as the milkmaid spoke she turned her face so that she could glance past her cow's tall to the other side of the barton, where a thin, fading woman of thirty milked somewhat apart from the rest.

'Well, she's growed up, and her ways be quite a woman's.'

'Of course. What colour is her hair and face?'

'Her hair is lightish, and her face as comely as a live doll's.'

'Her eyes, then, are not dark like mine?'

'No - of a bluish turn, and her mouth is very nice and red; and when she smiles, her teeth show white.'

Clearly there is a good bit of under the surface hostility toward the as yet unseen Mrs Lodge.

Rhonda has a dream in which the new Mrs Lodge, Gertrude, visits  and her  basically shoves her wedding ring into the face of the Rhonda.   In the dream Gertrude has an injured nearly withered arm after Rhonda grabs the arm with the ring hand.   Soon she has such an affliction in reality.    We can see Hardy's style is this account of Gertrude showing her injured arm to Rhonda (who sees her as her replacement):

'How did it happen?' she said mechanically.

'I cannot tell,' replied Mrs Lodge, shaking her head. 'One night when I was sound asleep, dreaming I was away in some strange place, a pain suddenly shot into my arm there, and was so keen as to awaken me. I must have struck it in the daytime, I suppose, though I don't remember doing so.' She added, laughing, 'I tell my dear husband that it looks just as if he had flown into a rage and struck me there. O, I daresay it will soon disappear.'

'Ha, ha! Yes. . . . On what night did it come?'

Mrs Lodge considered, and said it would.

Sadly and not to his credit as Gertrude is a very good person and wife, her increasingly withering arm causes her husband to lose his feelings of love and passion for her.   Gertrude wants more than anything to find a cure for her arm.   Several years go by and Gertrude begins to try  folk ways of curing her arm.   She has never been able to conceive a child and Mr Lodge is a harsh man who begins to feel it was a mistake to marry her and does little to hide his feelings.    Over time Rhonda begins to develop almost an affection for Gertrude as she knows it is not the fault of Gertrude that Mr Lodge abandoned Rhonda and his probable son.   Finally one day Rhonda suggests Mrs Lodge go see a conjurer,  a practitioner of folk medicine.    I will relay no more of the plot so as not to spoil it for others.  

"The Withered Arm" is a wonderful tale in the Gothic manner.   It does have a surprise ending as short stories often do but it is more powerful than the standard cute ending in the O Henry/Saki style.  In this case the ending is very moving and made me rethink the whole story.     This story was first published in a magazine and the public seemed to want surprise endings.   The language of the story is beautiful and with just a few phrases Hardy is able to built a complete world.   The mood of the story is dark and it shows us something about what guilt can do to us.   There are numerous places you can read this story online.

If anyone has a suggestion as to other short stories please leave them in a comment

Be sure and look at Mrs B's very preceptive post on this story

Thanks

Mel u