Two Devon romances

Just skimming through some regional notes, I found bookmarks to two Devon-based romances - with somewhat similar themes but very different mood - by authors better known for other works and other locations, Thomas Hardy and John Galsworthy.

Bonchurch: and a singer asleep

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Continuing our exploration of Bonchurch on Monday.

After descending The Chimney, we followed The Pitts to the road called Bonchurch Shute ("Shute" is a local term for steep roads off the escarpment) and by the junction is a gate to the footpath (here) into the churchyard of the parish church of St Boniface (aka Bonchurch New Church), which is itself fitted into a niche in the hillside.

The most prominent tomb in the churchyard is this Egyptianate mausoleum - the Leeson Mausoleum - commissioned by Henry Beaumont Leeson.

Leeson, Henry Beaumont, 1803-1872, M.D., Oxon., F.R.C.P., Lond., F.R.S., M.R.Inst. Senior Physician and Lecturer in Forensic Medicine, St. Thomas’ Hospital, London. He was here in 1855, was a J.P. and land owner in Bonchurch. He held courts in the Justice Room over the Maples Stables at the corner of Madeira Road and Trinity Road. He lived and died at the Maples but owned and developed, Pulpit Rock, Rosemount, Orchardleigh, Mountfield and other properties in Bonchurch as a speculative builder. He held a Masonic Lodge in a cave in his garden (now in Pulpit Rock) He was buried in Bonchurch Churchyard under an immense obelisk tomb near the gate.
- Early Ventnor Doctors, Alan Champion, www.iwhistory.com

The novelist Henry De Vere Stacpoole, author of The Blue Lagoon, is also buried here at Bonchurch, but I didn't find the location.

(Update, 20th April 2014: I must have been in stupid mode that day. Ray Todd e-mailed me with the location: it's right next to the Swinburne plot. Thanks! - RG)

However, I found the grave I came to see, that of the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. It's an unremarkable ground-level slab, immediately visible from the main path to the church, in a railed plot with other members of the Swinburne family.

Clare's opinion on the grave is that "the best thing about it is that he's in it; he was a dirty little blighter". I guess she shares the widely-held Victorian view that Swinburne's poems were obscene - and they had a point. Many of his works are overtly sexual: erotic-religious imagery such as Nature moaning in rapture as God lifts up his rod; flora and fauna bursting and squirting and dripping liquid; and various allusions to multifarious forms of desire (see pp 69-, Chapter 4: Poetic Perversities of A.C. Swinburne, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism, Richard Dellamora, 1990).

But any perceived offensiveness may well have been compounded by his rejection of Christianity, and although he was some flavour of masochist, his works didn't necessarily reflect anything more than his mindset. Oscar Wilde said that Swinburne was "a braggart in matters of vice, who had done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestialiser".

Nevertheless, he remains a significant Victorian poet whose works contain powerful and complex imagery that's still the subject of critical study: see Algernon Charles Swinburne at VictorianWeb.  In his lifetime and shortly after, he had sometimes surprising fans. Thomas Hardy tends to be perceived as a bit of a stiff, but he admired the lyricism of Swinburne's poetry, and was highly impressed by Swinburne's rejection of Christianity and its liberating effect of putting on the table views of sexuality and morality that went counter to Victorian sensibilities. Ralph Pite's Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life has an extended account, evidenced by his notes, of the powerful revelatory effect Swinburne had on Hardy (see pp127-).

Hardy visited Swinburne's grave on 23rd March 1910, and composed this elegy (originally titled A South-Coast Nocturn:

A Singer Asleep

I

In this fair niche above the unslumbering sea,
That sentrys up and down all night, all day,
From cove to promontory, from ness to bay,
The Fates have fitly bidden that he should be
Pillowed eternally.

II

-- It was as though a garland of red roses
Had fallen about the hood of some smug nun
When irresponsibly dropped as from the sun,
In fulth of numbers freaked with musical closes,
Upon Victoria's formal middle time
His leaves of rhythm and rhyme.

III

O that far morning of a summer day
When, down a terraced street whose pavements lay
Glassing the sunshine into my bent eyes,
I walked and read with a quick glad surprise
New words, in classic guise, --

IV

The passionate pages of his earlier years,
Fraught with hot sighs, sad laughters, kisses, tears;
Fresh-fluted notes, yet from a minstrel who
Blew them not naïvely, but as one who knew
Full well why thus he blew.

V

I still can hear the brabble and the roar
At those thy tunes, O still one, now passed through
That fitful fire of tongues then entered new!
Their power is spent like spindrift on this shore;
Thine swells yet more and more.

VI

-- His singing-mistress verily was no other
Than she the Lesbian, she the music-mother
Of all the tribe that feel in melodies;
Who leapt, love-anguished, from the Leucadian steep
Into the rambling world-encircling deep
Which hides her where none sees.

VII

And one can hold in thought that nightly here
His phantom may draw down to the water's brim,
And hers come up to meet it, as a dim
Lone shine upon the heaving hydrosphere,
And mariners wonder as they traverse near,
Unknowing of her and him.

VIII

One dreams him sighing to her spectral form:
'O teacher, where lies hid thy burning line;
Where are those songs, O poetess divine
Whose very arts are love incarnadine?'
And her smile back: 'Disciple true and warm,
Sufficient now are thine.'...

IX

So here, beneath the waking constellations,
Where the waves peal their everlasting strains,
And their dull subterrene reverberations
Shake him when storms make mountains of their plains --
Him once their peer in sad improvisations,
And deft as wind to cleave their frothy manes --
I leave him, while the daylight gleam declines
Upon the capes and chines.

The reference to "she the Lesbian, she the music-mother" is to Sappho and the most likely fictional story that she threw herself off a cliff due to unrequited love (see A Sapphic Leap in Dorset?).


- Ray

A Sapphic leap in Dorset?

Following on from the recent post about Swinburne and chalk cliffs - see Swinburne, Culver climber - yesterday I read Thomas Hardy's poem A Singer Asleep, his elegy to Swinburne written at Bonchurch, Isle of Wight, on the occasion of Hardy's visit to Swinburne's grave there.

The poem, which celebrates Swinburne as a kindred spirit to the Greek poet Sappho, has a particular verse that refers to Sappho's alleged suicide by jumping off a "white cape", Cape Leukas (now called Cape Lefkada) out of unrequited love for a sailor called Phaon - a yarn especially propagated by Menander's mostly-lost play Leucadia (aka The Lady from Leukas). See Sappho and the Leucadian Leap (Gary Hoffman, Opera today, 18 Sep 2005) for more on this.

His singing-mistress verily was no other
Than she the Lesbian, she the music-mother
Of all the tribe that feel in melodies;
Who leapt, love-anguished, from the Leucadian steep
Into the rambling world-encircling deep
Which hides her where none sees.

- from A Singer Asleep, Thomas Hardy

This brings me to another "white cape" at the easternmost tip of the Isle of Purbeck, Dorset; see Google Maps and this excellent aerial photo by Phil Brace. The overall formation is, as a 19th century description puts it, a broken promontory "called promiscuously Foreland, Handfast Point, and Old Harry Head". As described, with further good photos, in Dr Ian West's geological account Harry Rocks and Ballard Point, within it there are various structures including "Old Harry" and "Old Harry's Wife"; and the gap between the mainland and the first offshore rock appears on maps as "St Lucas' Leap".

"St Lucas Leap" is a name of considerable antiquity that appears on the 1580s Richards Treswell map of Studland Parish (see top right here) and, if the map is accurate, predates the collapse of the promontory into separate stacks 1. The stated origin stories reek, to me anyway, of folk etymology. The predominant one is that:

It was close by, at St. Lucas's Leap, that a pair of pedigree greyhounds belonging to a certain squire at Studland, while coursing a hare, are said to have leaped clean over the cliff and have been dashed to pieces, the name St. Lucas being afterwards given to the spot where the tragedy occurred to commemorate the name of one of the favourite hounds which perished so suddenly and tragically. It was said that the old gentleman did not long survive the disaster, as he was so greatly attached to the dog and its fortunes."
- Old Swanage or Purbeck Past and Present: A collection of articles, topographical, historical, antiquarian, biographical and anecdotal, WM Hardy, 1910

A second version, repeated in Anthony Mills' 1977 The place-names of Dorset, is that is refers to Richard Lucas, rector of Studland 1536-78.

I was interested, however, in the earliest appearance of the name in Google Books, which is Thomas Hardy's relatively early comic novel The Hand of Ethelberta.  Set partly on the Isle of Purbeck, it features several vivid descriptions of sailing past the promontory: Hardy calls the whole formation "Saint Lucas Leap" in the original 1876 Cornhill Magazine publication and the first book imprint (see the Internet Archive handofethelberta02hard). In later editions, for some reason, he revises it to the real name, "Old Harry Point".  

I think Hardy's original name gives a glimpse into his creative processes, because the novel concerns a widowed poet called Ethelberta Petherwin who is fending off several suitors.  She is a poet and writer that Hardy twice identifies with Sappho:

He lived by teaching music, and, in comparison with starving, thrived; though the wealthy might possibly have said that in comparison with thriving he starved.  During this night he hummed airs in bed, thought he would do for the ballad of the fair poetess what other musicians had done for the ballads of other fair poetesses, and dreamed that she smiled on him as her prototype Sappho smiled on Phaon.
...
‘Well, it is an old and worn argument—that about the inexpedience of tragedy—and much may be said on both sides.  It is not to be denied that the anonymous Sappho’s verses—for it seems that she is really a woman—are clever.’

This makes me strongly suspect that Hardy must have had Sappho's "Leukas leap" in mind when he upgraded "St Lucas Leap" to a full promontory.

1. It's not clear when the collapse of the Old Harry promontory happened. HB Woodward, in 1890, contains the anecdote that

"about one hundred and twenty years ago a man could creep along a narrow path from the mainland to Old Harry"- (page 78, in Swanage (Isle of  Purbeck) Its History, Resources as an Invigorating Health Resort, Botany, and Geology, John Braye, 1890).

But this is unreliable, as it appears to be recycling an 1837 anecdote that refers to an entirely different rock a little westward along the coast, The Pinnacle:

"In one place, nearly half way between Ballard Point and Old Harry, is a rock about 100 ft. high, with mould and grass on the top. It is at the bottom a square of, say, 11 yards; and there are 49 tiers of horizontal flint. I was informed that some very old men recollect that, about seventy years ago, they could creep along a narrow path out to this rock; but, about fifty years ago, it was disjoined, but scarcely any other change has taken place." - On the Strata near Swanwich, in the Isle of Purbeck, James Mitchell, page 591, Magazine of Natural History, Volume 1, 1837.

- Ray

Tamara Drewe review

I've mentioned previously Stephen Frears' film adaptation, with screenplay by Moira Buffini, of Posy Simmonds Tamara Drewe. We saw it today and highly recommend it; it was every bit up to expectations.

As is generally known, it takes its scenario loosely from Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd: the beautiful Tamara (played by Gemma Arterton) comes to the Dorset village of her childhood to initiate renovation and sale of her late mother's house. There she becomes the focus of attraction for three men: the reliable handyman and past lover Andy Cobb (Luke Evans), the adulterous author Nicholas Hardiment (Roger Allam), and the charismatic indy band drummer Ben Sergeant (Dominic Cooper) who she is interviewing.

Over the course of a year, their shifting relationships are watched by Hardiment's long-suffering wife Beth (Tamsin Greig), the weary academic Glen McCreavy (Bill Camp) and the other residents of the writers' retreat run by the Hardiments, and by two bored and mischievous village teenagers, Jody and Casey (Jessica Barden and Charlotte Christie). Eventually, the already tense situation is raised to boiling point by Jody - who is smitten with Ben - sending a provocative forged e-mail to all of Tamara's suitors.

The film could be described a tragicomic farce, deliciously wry rather than laugh-out-loud. The casting, locations and characterisation can't be faulted; it handles its different threads deftly; and it's tightly storyboarded from the graphic novel, except for a very effective and sympathetic change to part of the resolution. The main story is rich in Thomas Hardy book and movie allusions without being heavy-handed, from the lovely set pieces such as Ben impressing Tamara with his skill with drumsticks (just as Captain Troy impresses Bathsheba with his swordsmanship) down to the minor characters called Tess, Eustacia and Diggory.

The whole story is given greater depth by Simmonds' sharp observations of the difficult social trends of villages taken over by Yuppie culture, and of the foibles and pretensions of the writing circuit; a recurring theme, right through to the end credits (don't miss the song) is how writers recycle their experience into their works. I particularly liked the way it manages to bring a sympathetic edge to Tamara, the Bathsheba character (she could be unsufferable and too perfect, but her burden is that she is an unwitting femme fatale who evidently hasn't come to terms with her new-found attractiveness after rhinoplasty) and the way the film made Jody and Casey even more central to the story. They act both as a Hardyesque rustic Greek chorus, and as classic trickster figures - superficially disruptive, but the eventual catalysts for change and resolution.

It's hard to single any actor out as especially good, but Dominic Cooper was outstanding as the scary and charismatic Ben Sergeant, as was Jessica Barden as Jody (she did well not to get entrenched in a Coronation Street bit part). However, all concerned - author, adapters and cast - should be immensely proud of this film. Go and see it.

PS:  There's an excellent article - minor spoilers - about the genesis and making of the film in the Sony press kit.

- Ray

Tamara Drewe movie

A brief update: I'm please to see the Exeter Picturehouse schedule for forthcoming films includes Tamara Drewe, Stephen Frears' adaptation (screenplay by Moira Buffini) of Posy Simmonds' graphic novel of the same name - a satirical comedy of English Yuppie country life. From the trailer, it looks as if it has been storyboarded very faithfully to its source. The UK premiere is on September 6th, and it'll be on general release from around the 10th.

There are plenty of preambles in various media sections - for instance, Peter Bradshaw's Guardian Film piece ("Stephen Frears's adaptation of the Posy Simmonds comic strip is like the filthiest possible episode of The Archers") - and comingsoon.net has an exclusive preview of the poster. But most of them miss the crucial detail that the graphic novel is, in turn, a loose adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd. It was filmed, appropriately, in Dorset (Salwayash and Yetminster) and it may be a casting in-joke or sheer coincidence that the lead actress is Gemma Arterton, who starred in the rather good 2008 BBC adaptation Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

See Tamara Drewe for further background.  See the Guardian for the full archive; on Saturday 28th August the paper also had a good interview with Posy Simmonds.

- Ray

Hardy's poetry: downbeat but great

Thomas Hardy's novels have such high profile via the many film and TV adaptations that it's easy to forget that Hardy was a prolific poet. He's buried 1 in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey; he called poetry his "first love", and he especially focused on it in later life, after the negative reviews of Jude the Obscure soured the experience of novel-writing, and after the death of his first wife in 1912. Not only was he prolific; nowadays he is critically viewed as a great, and groundbreaking, poet. The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English says of him:

He ... anticipated Modernism in breaking with the conventions of literary usage which usage which increasingly constrained Victorian poetry ... His poetry's fidelity to ordinary patterns of speech is matched by the realism and accessibility with which he treats a remarkable range of subjects; he may be approached as a nature poet, a topographical poet, a poet of London, of rural custom, of love, and of grief. His achievement as a poet was not fully recognized until after his death

I probably made a mistake some years back in first trying to read his Napoleonic War epic The Dynasts (Gutenberg EText-No. 4043), which although in verse is more of a "closet drama" - something like a movie screenplay - and considerably experimental. However, his works in conventional poetry - Wessex Poems and Other Verses onward - are far more accessible, and I think he's extremely good, as long as you don't mind him being extremely downbeat.

Many of the themes in his poetry are recognisable as those of the novels. Rural scenery, especially Dorset, features often, as do wry situations and black humour. I'll single out Satires of Circumstance as a current favourite for its dark and unsettling vignettes about human character. In "In Church", a Bible class student idolises the vicar for his emotional sermons, until she peeks into the vestry and sees him rehearsing the choreography. In "In the Cemetery", the sexton watches mothers squabbling over their children's graves, he knowing that he has moved all them all to a common grave to make room for a drain. In "Outside the Window", an accidentally eavesdropping young man catches a glimpse of his girlfriend's foul temper, and decides it's better to walk away. In "At the Draper's", a man discovers his wife shopping for a widow's dress. "On the Death-Bed" concerns a man's confession of using wartime as an opportunity to murder a rival.

This general fatalism pervades Hardy's poems, and a great many combine nostalgia with regret over lost loved ones and lost opportunities. It's hard not to relate this to Hardy's life and his childless and unhappy marriage to Emma Gifford, when there had been other women in his life who made an impression, notably Tryphena Sparks, memorialised in "Thoughts of Phena at the News of Her Death", and Florence Henniker, the probable model for the free-spirited Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure. And yet the second half of Satires of Circumstance is a series of love poems to his long-estranged wife; as discussed in A Pessimist in Flower, The love songs of Thomas Hardy (Meghan O'Rourke, Slate, Jan. 18, 2007), his motivation is complex, if not unfathomable.

There's a selection of Hardy's poetry in convenient format at Thomas Hardy and his Wessex. Elsewhere, the majority of his works are online at Project Gutenberg: Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898), Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Time's Laughingstocks, and Other Verses (1909), Satires of Circumstance (1914), Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917) and Late Lyrics and Earlier, With Many Other Verses (1922). Although I'm pretty sure they're out of copyright - 70 years after Hardy's death has elapsed - I can't find online his last two collections, Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles (1925) and Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928).

A look at the reviews and separate poems online suggest the last two are more of the same; Rosemarie Morgan's Student Companion to Thomas Hardy says of Human Shows:

Human Shows is filled with loneliness, what one American contemporary, Isabelle Wentworth Lawrence, described as the "essential but terrible loneliness of the individual human soul" (Boston Evening Transcript, January 1926). The loneliness lingers at familiar thresholds, spiritually silenced: "And mute by the gate I stand again alone, /And nobody pulls up there" ("Nobody Comes")

Winter Words, summarised as a "superb volume" in Harold Bloom's A Map of Misreading (see page 23 and thereabouts) is more or less Hardy's elegy to himself. It contains his chosen final poem "He Resolves To Say No More" and what Bloom describes as it as what "may be the bleakest sonnet in the language", "We are Getting to the End":

We are getting to the end of visioning
The impossible within this universe,
Such as that better whiles may follow worse,
Or that our race may mend by reasoning.

We know that even as larks in cages sing
Unthoughtful of deliverance from the curse
That holds them lifelong in a latticed hearse,
We ply spasmodically our pleasuring.

And that when nations set them to lay waste
Their neighbours' heritage by foot and horse,
And hack their pleasant plains in festering seams,
They may again,—not warely, or from taste,
But tickled mad by some demonic force.—
Yes. We are getting to the end of dreams!

The dates of the poetry are a little surprising; Hardy (again perhaps because of the high profile of the novels) has the feel of a Victorian author, but most of his poetic work was early 20th century, notably the 1912 The Convergence of the Twain subtitled (Lines on the loss of the "Titanic") 2. It was controversial - see Human Fallibility in Thomas Hardy's "Convergence of the Twain" (April, 1912) at The Victorian Web - for its general lack of focus on the human tragedy; it strongly implies the Titanic 'had it coming' as an embodiment of human vanity, and that the final meeting of ship and iceberg was a mutual destiny:

...
IX
Alien they seemed to be;
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,

X
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,

XI
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

I find that last line quite chilling; a couple of decades later, that could easily have been an allusion to the detonation of the "Fat Man" nuclear bomb, whose core consisted of two plutonium hemispheres brought together to create a critical mass.

Before I depress readers to the point where they need to listen to some Leonard Cohen to cheer them up, I'll finish with Hardy's The Ruined Maid. and Great Things. While undoubtedly the first impinges on major social issues - see The Victorian Web again - and the second has a certain wistfulness, they shows Hardy was capable of lightening up on occasion.

The Ruined Maid

"O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?
And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?"
"O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she.

"You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,
Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;
And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!"
"Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined," said she.

-"At home in the barton you said 'thee' and 'thou,'
And 'thik oon,' and 'theäs oon,' and 't'other'; but now
Your talking quite fits 'ee for high compa-ny!"
"Some polish is gained with one's ruin," said she.

"Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak
But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek,
And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!"
"We never do work when we're ruined," said she.

"You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream,
And you'd sigh, and you'd sock; but at present you seem
To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!"
"True. One's pretty lively when ruined," said she.

"I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,
And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!"
"My dear a raw country girl, such as you be,
Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined," said she.


Great Things

Sweet cyder is a great thing,
A great thing to me,
Spinning down to Weymouth town
By Ridgway thirstily,
And maid and mistress summoning
Who tend the hostelry:
O cyder is a great thing,
A great thing to me!

The dance it is a great thing,
A great thing to me,
With candles lit and partners fit
For night-long revelry.
And going home when day-dawning
Peeps pale upon the lea:
O dancing is a great thing,
A great thing to me!

Love is, yea, a great thing,
A great thing to me,
When, having drawn across the lawn
In darkness silently,
A figure flits like one a-wing
Out from the nearest tree:
O love is, yes, a great thing,
Aye, greatest thing to me!

Will these be always great things
Greatest things to me? . . .
Let it befall that one will call
"Soul, I have need of thee":
What then? Joy-jaunts, impassioned flings,
Love, and its ecstasy
Will always have been great things,
Greatest things to me!

- Ray

1. Most of him, anyway. His heart is buried in his wife's grave in Stinsford, Dorset; though there's also a literary legend that when the heart was excised, it was left on the kitchen table and carried off by the surgeon's cat.
2. The one on which the Simon Armitage 9/11 poem of the same name was based.

Madding adaptations

Having just finished the Tamara Drewe book (see the earlier post, Tamara Drewe - it was in the library, and I was too impatient to wait for Christmas) seems a good excuse to look at another book / film / film trio, Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd (Gutenberg EText 27) and two adaptations, John Schlesinger's 1967 version (probably the one most familiar) and Nicholas Renton's 1998 TV version.

In this case, they both have major merits. The Schlesinger pulls out all the stops visually and atmospherically, through the many recognisable Dorset locations - see the IMDb list - and its wistful soundtrack integrating thematically pertinent English folk, (such as The Bold Grenadier) and minor-key English pastoral score by Richard Rodney Bennett (also see YouTube - ignore the idiosyncratic animation). On the downside, I think Julie Christie as Bathsheba Everdene was miscast and the role misinterpreted, making her a smug tease rather than inexperienced; and the plot, though excellently adapted by Frederic Raphael to maintain the flavour of the novel and include some of the more distinctive dialogue, excised a deal of storyline in favour of clear-cut interpretation. For instance, the film shows Gabriel Oak wading in on minimal acquaintance to ask Bathesheba to marry him, making her refusal unsurprising; but in the book they actually have much more of a history (Bathsheba saved his life from smoke suffocation after he fell asleep in a badly-ventilated hut). Another omission was the fate of Boldwood, whose death sentence is commuted on grounds of insanity, following a petition, after the extent of his obsession is revealed. The 1998 version (if you don't mind Japanese subtitles, there are clips on YouTube - search for "FFTMC") is an altogether more low-key treatment, but incorporates much more of the text and considerably more subtle characterisation. For example, it follows the book in showing Bathsheba maintaining her composure after Troy is shot

"Gabriel." she said, automatically, when he entered, turning up a face of which only the well known lines remained to tell him it was hers, all else in the picture having faded quite. "Ride to Casterbridge instantly for a surgeon. It is, I believe, useless, but go. Mr.Boldwood has shot my husband."
- Far from the Madding Crowd, Gutenberg EText-No. 27

as opposed to her instant hysteria in the Schlesinger, notable for its 30+ consecutive utterances of "Frank" (this must be a record). I think the Renton wins on intelligence and authenticity to text; Schlesinger on emotional punch in conveying the "partly real, partly dream-country" nature of Hardy's Wessex.

That said, it's open to discussion whether authenticity to text is an automatic merit; an adaptation is a derivative work, and can do as the adapter likes, which may be an improvement. (In modern context, I can think of the Inspector Morse TV series, whose depressed intellectual hero is far more iconic than the rather seedy Morse of at least the early Colin Dexter novels; and the culturally-allusive and Oscar-winning Shrek animations compared to William Steig's naive and cumbersome picturebook).

Which text anyway? Far from the Madding Crowd first appeared in 1874 as a anonymous Cornhhill Magazine serial illustrated by Helen Paterson Allingham (see the Thomas Hardy Association site, or The Victorian Web for a detailed commentary); Hardy made major revisions for the 1895 book edition, and more in 1901. The term "Wessex", for instance, made its first brief appearance in the 1874, but Hardy later expanded references as it grew as a brand - see Hardy perennials).

While skimming, I noticed one such Wessex reference that I haven't previously seen explainaed, at the opening to Chapter 50:

THE SHEEP FAIR -- TROY TOUCHES HIS WIFE'S HAND

GREENHILL was the Nijni Novgorod of South Wessex; and the busiest, merriest, noisiest day of the whole statute number was the day of the sheep fair.

This refers to Nizhny Novgorod, trade centre of the Russian Empire, which similarly had the annual Makaryev Fair. As the paper Hardy's "Pedantry" mentions (CH Salter, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Sep., 1973), pp. 145-164) the use of such erudite allusions got Hardy a deal of stick from critics. William Sharp (Thomas Hardy and his novels, 1892) called him "in point of diction the most Latinical writer we have had since Dryden and Milton". Argument about Latinisms is nothing new, then.

I'd quite forgotten I have a copy of Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage (RG Cox, Routledge, 1970) which collects contemporary reviews of Hardy's works. Much of the 1995 edition is viewable at Google Books, and the Far from the Madding Crowd reviews make interesting reading. Although the novel more or less cemented Hardy's reputation, the general tone of reviewers was to praise the originality of setting and scenario, but criticise the style. The unsigned Athenaeum review noted the "penny-a-liner" phraseology and Hardy's habit of putting astonishingly erudite language into the mouths of supposedly illiterate countrypersons

"Yes." continued William," they pranced down the street playing "The Girl I Left Behind Me." so 'tis said, in glorious notes of triumph. Every looker-on's inside shook with the blows of the great drum to his deepest vitals, and there was not a dry eye throughout the town among the public-house people and the nameless women!"

RH Hutton, in The Spectator, echoed this view that Hardy's rural characters are uniformly too erudite for belief:

The whole class of hoers, sowers, ploughmen, reapers &c., are – if Mr Hardy’s pictures are to be trusted – the most incredibly amusing and humorous persons you ever came across, full of the quaintest irony and the most comical speculative intelligence.

Andrew Lang, in Academy, spotted this too, further noting that the country folk in the story had "not heard of strikes, or of Mr. Arch". This comment deserves more analysis, in that "Weatherbury" is based on the real-world Puddletown, only a couple of miles from Tolpuddle, home of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Despite the authenticity of detail in many respects, the Far from the Madding Crowd novel doesn't appear to be socially and politically savvy. While Hardy's Wessex is anything but idyllic - personal tragedies abound - it does embody a very recognisable stereotype of the timeless countryside to which Hardy adaptations, particularly the 1967 film, do tend to play. As I've said before - see Views of the countryside - it's a very English yearning, and I think Hardy played a strong role in fostering it. Wessex as "partly real, partly dream-country" goes deep.

- Ray

Tamara Drewe

From the Guardian books section, an interesting video, Posy Simmonds speaks about her comic Tamara Drewe. I briefly mentioned Gemma Bovary a while back. Tamara Drewe, originally serialised as a Guardian comic strip, is likewise loosely based on a classic, in this case (as the TLS review says - Tamara Drewe's Wessex) on Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd.

In a series of allusive namings, Harding's setting of Weatherbury becomes Ewedown. Tamara (in the Bible, Tamar is a daughter of David) is the analogue of Bathsheba Everdene, and three also very recognisable men are attracted to her: the working-class handyman Andy Cobb, the Indie band drummer Ben Sergeant, and the established novelist neighbour Nicholas Hardiman. As with Bathsheba's unwise joke of sending a Valentine to Farmer Boldwood, tragedy ensues when a prankster sends out an e-mail - "I want to give you the biggest shagging of your life" - from Tamara's laptop.

While Tamara Drew follows the skeleton of Far from the Madding Crowd, Simmonds , has sufficiently altered it that the ending is not a foregone conclusion: for instance, the adulterous Hardiman is the caddish character rather than Sergeant, and there are a number of new characters who provide new viewpoints. The focus is also not merely on Tamara's relationships with the three men, but also on the various angsts of writers and the satirising the tensions between locals and incomers in English rural settings. Apart from her general excellence as an observational cartoonist, the latter is an area where Simmonds is particularly sharp; for instance, her earlier creation of "Tresoddit" - see Rock of Ages - is a pleasantly barbed take on the Yuppification of Rock in Cornwall).

I haven't read the expanded and embellished book version of Tamara Drewe, but it's on my wish-list for Christmas. Clive James enthuses about Posy Simmonds here, with a few Tamara Drewe samples (Cover, Drinks at Stonefield, Dr Glen Larson, Jody and Casey), and in general about Bande dessinée (up-market Francophone comic art, to which genre Posy Simmonds' work is closely equivalent) - though I'm not sure I agree with his view that the ponderous satire Flook was so wonderful, nor that there was nothing between it and Posy Simmonds (since he misses out SF comics - both writer and artist of Watchmen are English, as is Brian Bolland). There is also the problem of comparing essentially realistic social satire (as in Tamara Drewe) with the non-realistic "morality play" approach of superhero comics (which may nevertheless present a sophisticated take on moral and philosophical topics - see, again, the journal ImageTexT).

Anyhow, publication details: Tamara Drewe, Posy Simmonds, Jonathan Cape Ltd, Nov 2007, ISBN 022407816X).

Update, August 2010: See Tamara Drewe movie.

- Ray

Tryphena Sparks' grave

I just added a minor addendum to the Hardy perennials post: a photo of the grave of Tryphena Gale (born Tryphena Sparks), Thomas Hardy's cousin and possible lover in his younger days. A friend kindly helped us through a gap in the hedge to show us the location.
-Ray

Hardy perennials

Although it has become something of a stereotype of the modern fantasy novel to include a map at the front of the book, the idea is far older, a classic example being the Wessex map featured in the Macmillan editions of Thomas Hardy novels. This semi-fictionalised southern England - the landscapes stay the same, but Bournemouth becomes Sandbourne, Dorchester Casterbridge, and so on - has become iconic of Hardy's vision, and there are lots of very nice books exploring the relationship between the fictional and real locations. Just skimming the shelves here, I find Desmond Hawkins' Hardy's Wessex; Kenneth Phelps' The Wormwood Cup: Thomas Hardy In Cornwall; and the Penguin reprint of Hermann Lea's two-volume The Hardy Guides, a 1913 travel guide prepared in collaboration with Hardy.
      It's tempting to think of Wessex as a fully-fledged mental landscape within which Hardy wrote. Yet this is far from the truth : Birgit Plietzsch's research project Thomas Hardy's Wessex traces through successive drafts and correspondence how the unifying 'Wessex' and its frontispiece maps grew as a marketing concept that Hardy himself initially resisted. More maps, and on Hardy in general, at the Thomas Hardy Association website.
      Topsham in Devon, incidentally, has a minor Hardy connection: Hardy's cousin Tryphena Sparks (with whom he may have had a romance in his younger days) married a publican here, and is buried in Topsham cemetery.

- Ray

Addendum: I just ran into another related book, Hardy's Wessex Today (Mellstock Press, 1990). This is a nice little paperback, the first volume - I don't think there have been any more - in Vera Jesty's project to collate the 240 Hermann Lea photos of Hardy locations with her own 1985-1990 ones.

Addendum 2: today (March 21st, 2008) a friend kindly showed us where to find Tryphena Sparks' grave in Topsham Cemetery. It's in the far north corner, directly adjacent to Topsham water tower. The inscription reads "Mors janua vitae" ("Death is the gate of life" - commonly translated as "Death is the gate to eternal life") and "Tryphena / Wife of / Charles F. Gale / Died 17th March 1890 / Aged 39".