A few years back now, I bought the Franklin Edition of this novel.  Now I have just finished what was at least my fifth reading of the novel.  This edition is bound in leather, and the American drawings are almost photographic compared to the bleak wood cuts in the Folio Edition. 

After I had first read this version, I placed it at number 1 in the series of great books called A Curated Library.  It is elemental and unique, like the book that had been number 1 – Carlyle, The French Revolution.  And reading it again, I was reminded of the advice of a tutor at Cambridge.  ‘Don’t read it as history.  Treat it like opera or an epic poem.’

In the Foreword to the Folio, another Yorkshire novelist, Phyllis Bentley is recorded as saying:

On the moors one could escape from all the conventional restraint and battle fiercely with earth and sky… It is this untamed moorland and its untamed characters, who admit no restraint in their fierce passions, which give Wuthering Heights its incomparable air of dark, wild, stormy freedom.

That would accord with my sentiment that we are all like Hottentots tip toeing around the crater of a live volcano, when there is no known rule about who might fall in. 

I set out my impressions about fifteen years ago in the extract below, and I will just add a few observations about a novel about our inclination to lock out the outsider.

There is quite a bit of Antony and Cleopatra in Cathy and Heathcliff – a blazing untameable, but unworldly passion, except this time the gypsy is the male.  And there is a lot of Romeo and Juliet, except this time the lovers bring their dooms on their own heads.  And there are issues not just of class, but of caste.  There are aspects of this tragedy, for that is what it is, that call to mind Othello, theultimate outsider (depending on your view of The Merchant of Venice).

And this is a revenge story, as searing as the revenge in Titus Andronicus.  Then, in the end, two battered misfits survive the rubble to unite the two houses of the star-crossed lovers, and go out in quest of what Churchill called those broad sunlit uplands, in a way that calls to mind the magical finale of the Julie Taymor movie, or the ethereal peace found at the end of Die Walküre. 

You can, as they say, treat the novel as an opera, just as Wilhelm Furtwangler did for the symphony.  But, putting all labels to one side, this is one of the most searing and explosive moments in our literature.

Well, in addition to Shakespeare, Emily was brought up on the adamantine strictures of the Old Testament, the closet subtlety of Virgil, and the fiery imagination of Milton.  Perhaps no one else wrote like Emily because so few were brought up like that.

It is not just the location that makes this novel different – it is the times.  Class was all pervasive.  Servants were different – and less entitled to respect.  (That puts it softly.)  ‘Equality’ was a myth blown up by the French.  When Heathcliff returns, should he take food in the parlour, or stay in the kitchen with the servants?  Good grief, might they have had to set two tables?  Children were treated coldly, if not cruelly.  And sickness of any kind carried the threat of death.  Sick people had to be nursed over long periods.  Sanitation was not understood, and medicine was not far removed from the barber shop. 

The author died at the age of thirty.  When you compare her age and that of her sister, or Jane Austen, with that of Charles Dickens, you can gauge what we missed.

God only knows what may have happened if Mozart had lived as long as Shakespeare.

*

WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Emily Brontë (1847)

Franklin Library, 1971.  Fully leather bound, with gold edges and figured endpapers.  Illustrated by Alan Reingold.  Preface by Charlotte Bronte.

… and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.  It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am.  Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same….

Wuthering Heights has passages like this that some English ladies – and I do mean ladies – that you might meet at Oxford University know by heart.  It has become part of the English psyche.  It was the first and only novel of a young woman from Yorkshire who had probably scarcely been kissed by a man, and it fairly raises the question: just what did they put on the porridge of those young girls up there back then? 

Emily Brontë was brought up in Yorkshire with a Celtic ancestry of an Irish father and a Cornish mother.  Her father was an Anglican minister and the parsonage was the centre of the life of the family which included a sister, Charlotte.  The girls went to a harsh Curates’ Daughters’ School, but they had the run of their father’s library, so that their education in literature was so much better than what modern children get – the Old Testament, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, and the rest. 

The children’s mother died young, as was common in that time, and their aunt had a fiercely Calvinist view of the world.  The children began creating their own tales and legends and creating their own worlds for those legends.  They spent some time in Europe, but they were unhappy away from the parsonage.  The novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte came out two months before Wuthering Heights.  They are very, very different books.

When you think of Wuthering Heights, think not of a novel.  Think of Shakespeare – the passionate young Hamlet jumping into the grave in defiance of convention to embrace the dead body of a woman who went mad and then killed herself when Hamlet so coldly and cruelly rejected her; think of King Lear, plunged into madness by his sustained rage at being rejected by the one woman he loved; think of Othello, tipped over the brink of madness by the thought that the young, white woman he loved was not true to him; think of Macbeth, who allows the woman he loves to push him so that his ambition sends him and her to their respective hells; think of Malvolio, who is cruelly tricked into believing that his lady loves him and then is even more cruelly accused of being mad; and think of Prospero, who uses his powers of magic to bring together those who had wronged him and then brings them undone – and then buries his magic. 

Think of opera.  Think of The Flying Dutchman, and the thumping romantic drive of the music of the sea by Wagner, and the story of a rejected loner doomed to roam alone until he finds redemption.  Think of painting.  Think above all of La Tempesta by Giorgione.  Against a nocturnal European landscape, with sawn-off pillars and odd buildings, and lightning in the sky, a young man in contemporary costume stands calmly watching over a nude woman suckling a child.  Have you ever seen anything so enigmatic?  What on earth can it mean?  Or are we simply impertinent to seek to put into words what this great artist put on canvas?  Well, then, why not just enjoy it? 

Wuthering Heights is the story of a man despised and rejected of men, who is then rejected by the woman he loves, and who sets out to and does get revenge upon the whole pack of them, but who then, in the emptiness of his achievement, is reconciled to the memory of the woman he loved. 

The scenes between Cathy and Heathcliff on his return are the most blazing.  ‘I meditated this plan just to have one glimpse of your face – and a stare of surprise, perhaps, and pretended pleasure; afterwards settle my score with Hindley; and then prevent the law by doing execution on myself.’

The score settling would have to be terminal.  This is as elemental as Greek tragedy.

In their final argument Heathcliff looks to Nelly like a mad dog foaming at the mouth.  There is a level of sustained hysteria rarely seen outside of Dostoyevsky.  Heathcliff and Cathy flay and lacerate each other like mad monks.  It is like crossing Medea and Now, Voyager.

Has any other English writer unleashed emotional power – passion – like this?  The fury that Heathcliff unloads on those who should have been close to him – for example his wife and his son – must unsettle any reader.  Heathcliff twice refers to Cathy as a ‘slut’.  Nelly got it right when she said they were ‘living among clowns and misanthropes’.  But the more revenge and power that Heathcliff gets, the emptier becomes the shell of his life, and then we see that the second Cathy is looking to change things by being civilized.

For Heathcliff, God and Satan are one, and equally irrelevant, but somehow, he manages to induce his own death, so that he can be at one in the ground with his Cathy. 

The novel ends in this way: ‘I sought, and soon discovered, that the three headstones on the slope next the moor …I lingered around them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and the harebells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth’.  It is so English, and yet so wild.  And the ending is as rich as that of The Dead by Joyce.

This novel comes up at us out of the earth like a novel of Christina Stead –a rough uncut diamond.  It is all rawness, and it is found in Yorkshire, of all places.  Antony and Cleopatra, Abelard and Heloise, Tristan and Isolde, and Romeo and Juliet come at us from the mists of the past and foreign places.  (Charlotte found her male lead in Rochester in Jane Eyre – those Brontë girls sure liked their men strong and tough.)  

Our novel is altogether more modern.  Heathcliff is the original angry young man who comes undone because his girl is not ready for him – Cathy prefers the discreet charms of the bourgeoisie, with a little bit of bovver on the side. 

Well, who could blame her?  Heathcliff was a gypsy, and he had all the makings of a real bastard.  And yet we know that neither was ever going to find peace above the ground.  How come, then, that Geoffrey Boycott was so boring? 

*

And if I can bring this note to an end by swapping from cricket to footy, when you get into this book, you are playing with the big boys.  What a shame for us that we never got a reading of this book with Heathcliff read by Richard Burton.