It wasn’t ‘Jude
the Obscure’ that made me shed tears. It
was his predecessor, ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’. There they were, as the clock struck eight, compelled
to turn at the top of West Hill and look back down on the Wessex city; and there we were, in a French
campsite by the river; it was just after
siesta and little Bertie had woken up and her daddy very kindly stopped her crawling
all over me so I could sob in my own fashion. So when asked which books have
made me cry, yes, ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’, ‘The Secret Diary of Laura
Palmer’ (sweet sixteen) and Roy’s ‘The God of Small Things’. The first two, at the end. The last, a bit all the way through…
At secondary
school we hung, drew and quartered ‘The Return of the Native’. On skipping through pre-emptively I thought
all that landscape would have me bedding down for a kip. A portion of rolling Wessex under the curve
of my hip, the distant town making a pattern of the horizon, sleepily turning
into a dream…But I never bedded down; there was always someone coming back
across the heath, or a figure to be seen on the ridges. Magnets on the earth, Hardy’s characters each
played their own game with Fate. But,
like Tess later on, they were mostly stoic when the full stop approached. But there were those more stubborn. I have
taken Vye as my pen name. This villain
girl had me rooting for her until the end.
Like I’ll root for myself. Like we all do. Did this woman, who could be
coaxed to a Sphinx-like stillness with the brushing of her mane, leap into the
roaring Shadwater Weir? Or, like
‘thistledown in the wind’[1], was
a tumble and a fall her true Destiny in the end? Anyway, they all left me wishing they’d come
back, and they do from time to time.
Like briefly meeting up again to write this essay…
I was now on
the Hardy track. I was beginning to find my way around. So, after the first ‘so long’ to the
Reddleman, Thomasin, Wildeve and Eustacia, I sought out ‘Jude’. ‘Jude the
Obscure’. I had heard of him. What a title!
How not be drawn to a book which gives one character all that importance and
then erases it. Hardy has an accomplice,
because doesn’t she…? Doesn’t Sue steal
the principle role right from our first sight of her photo on Miss Fawley’s
mantelpiece, filling Jude’s head and hopes? We do not know what part she is to
play, this cousin, but we wait for her like Jude. First we get photographs, and
then comradeship, until soon they were inseparable; ‘fools-like two children’, happily
relettering the Ten Commandments in some out-of-the way chapel, no sign of a
ring but the beginning of a rounded belly.
This is a sweet episode, with Jude reverting to being a craftsman to
earn their keep, his theological studies on the backburner and Sue less
outraged by ‘ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods’, the very
spectres that would eventually lay her low.
Years after our
private first meeting, I tackled ‘Jude’ with a seminar group of strangers. Or maybe I only went to the lecture. I
forget. Either way, I haven’t kept the notes.
I imagine class oppression was discussed. Perhaps even Hardy’s solitary revolution of
Victorian Literature juxtaposing pagan joy against pale Christianity…? I felt far removed from all discourse and
found it hard to open my mouth, sitting there in my corner, but I’ll essay it
now: I was on the road with Jude. I was
the collision with Sue when he finally made it to Christminster. I was hoping.
I was dread. Because there are
some things we can’t forget. I was a
crash through a training school’s window, and a contented huddle by the fire,
with a spoonful of brandy gently administered.
Face to face with Jude again, I hadn’t wanted to pin him down in a two
thousand word tract, although I probably did come up with the requirements. I
probably praised Hardy on his prowess through his life-size pretend world, and
got marked accordingly…
And just recently he came off the shelf into my hands like an Egyptian
cat. What magic made me turn to him
again all these years after? Bertie ten
years old and me and her daddy separated these last six.
*
Diary entry,
September; Spain
We have been rosé-d. He lies on the other bed in this bright
little hotel room, sticky with the last drops of wine. The others had gone to bed earlier. The room is dark. I am writing into the long dawn. As I am wont to do, persevering, after wine,
whilst the others sleep…
Before the tilt of wine sends me scribbling
back-bowed over my notebook on the floor, I sat on the tiny balcony, my arms
gathering up my folded legs. The
staleness of wine breath had me gulping in the night air. Glimpsed through the half light of the
retired village square, the church rose out of the trees whose shadows were performing
to the delight of the moon.
I used to stalk churches;
I’d dare to go inside and then talk to myself, head bowed, hoping. On the other side of the world I’d wait to be
invited into places of worship, I learnt beautiful prayers to cope with all my
desires and volatile reasoning that, now, I can only just conjure past my lips.
The church bells have begun! They are filling up the half-light and their echoes
are finding me on the balcony. They are
sweeping me clean, my ‘kindling glance’ is shut, nun-like now…
The churn of sweet wine turned sour in my
belly, I go to ground. The church bells
have beaten out a ghost. Where had she
been hiding, that this sound could unearth her?
She comes at me with an enquiry of relentless love. She wants to know what happened to me after I
had left her on the other side of the world.
She knows all the mantras by heart, she smells of fresh night, and she has
what I had been looking for: a beautiful recompense for all my confessed
remorse.
My back is to you, who lie
on the other bed. The love that I had
been saving found you. And I seem to
have shrunk to a girl, angry and impetuous, a quiver full of broken arrows. By
then, you took too much science on trust; like God not existing! You sleep
through the bells ringing ...What am I to do? Wait, there is another sound now
swirling in from the night sky. It is
enrobing the noise of the bells, letting them fade away, warm. But the sound stays. The Spanish square is breathing aloud inside
the room, as big as Spain beyond. I
strain my ears to hear, frightened that my visitor didn’t leave with the last
echo of the bells. But it is not her. All I hear is you, on the other bed. Sound asleep.
Breathing. Church bells.
She must have lain awake
from him some nights and thought, O! Jude, you are church bells! It is I who
make the difference…
*
Some years after
this, we found ourselves in a French campsite by the river and you stopped our
little girl climbing all over me so I could cry in peace.
You did always
understand my need to cry.
I know you
thought of me as symbolic of something larger, like Jude saw Sue in the engravings
from paintings of the Spanish school, and, like him, you warmed to know how
near I was. And there we were in Spain, starting out. And then there was that night when Sue made a
dash from the College, as I was always absconding and rushing to you; she settled
by the fire in his suit, as he rushed down into the street for brandy to warm
her chilled limbs, her rushing heart. He
came back to her clumsy excuses for her under garments, drying there before the
fire. I spent years clumsily excusing
away any feeling I had for you that did not pertain to the pure. How could I have curled up with you after it
was you administering the remedy? How to
give myself to you, even falteringly, when after I fell asleep you stood
regarding me and saw in me something much more than I was. Hence, my ode to a
sexless love affair, my appreciation of all that you taught me, asleep on the
other bed, and then at the side of other littler beds, because for a time we ‘kept house and managed
everything’, and came up with two delightful souls. Our Aldbrickham days! Our
cheery walks across fields and our cold dinners because of them. I offer you all this and my reading of Jude
the Obscure for the third time…will you accept it, friend and comrade?
You are church bells
In a sleeping Spanish square
My stony mantra
Unmouthed these past six
years
*
I would wait tremblingly for Hardy’s full
stop. Trudging around the rooms for let
with Sue and Jude, starting on Mildew Lane, and being refused further down the
tiny streets until a misunderstanding allows Sue and the kids to rest for one
night. Just one night. After this, I was
less naïve as I followed Angel and Tess creeping across the countryside waiting
for Fate to catch up with them. Less
naïve and less hopeful. Yet, he had
turned and waited for her, this figure in the distance, and as she came closer he
could do nothing but feel tenderness for her. Their last days together in the
forest were solemn and still and peaceful, and in the mansion draughty and
candleless; shuttered, sweet and lovely.
If only it didn’t have to come to an end But my breath baited, my heart, like Tess’,
being roused and spent, when they came we were ready; they let the sun on our
eyelids wake us up …
Funny how we
don’t always remember the endings even of the novels that we love the best. Not
exactly. Certainly not word for
word. The only one I have managed off
pat is ‘The Fox Cub Bold’. It didn’t
come to mind earlier but it is another real tear jerker… ‘Bold looked towards
the watchful figure in the oak tree and prepared, at last, to leave the Real World’[2]
had my mother busy coaxing me back to reason many a night during my childhood.
I don’t remember anything about Laura Palmer except that she stayed on my bookcase
for years and I was too overcome ever to read her again. I could describe to you the smell of Ayemenem
in ‘The God of Small Things’, and if they ever made the, thankfully, forbidden film
it would be me playing Ammu disappearing. Years between readings, I completely
forgot that Eustacia Vye hadn’t made it.
That the Shadwater Weir took her down.
I had her on the boat, brave sailing…
Yet I had
remembered that Sue and Jude parted. I knew that she went back to
Mr.Phillotson. I knew that it was tormenting and sad. But I hadn’t remembered exactly, and how
much. Even this time there were no tears.
As we all know, there are many different ways to cry. I could even count
the ways…
I just put it
down on my knees, along with the saints and along with God, looked up high, thought
of you, and sucked down an awful lot of air…
[1] All
quotes are from Thomas Hardy, ‘The Return of the Native’, 1878, ‘Jude the
Obscure’, 1896, and ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’, 1891.
[2] Colin Dann, ‘The Fox Cub Bold’ 1983
‘The
Secret Diary of Laura Palmer’ (1990) was written by Jennifer Lynch and the ‘The
God of Small Things’ (1997) by Arundhati Roy.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire