As I’ve said I like to follow a “pulp” novel, usually a thriller, with a literary one. This spring I drifted from The Hound of the Baskervilles, to Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. A jolt, to say the least. Where Doyle is spare and quick, Hardy is thick and slow. Hardy takes his time, sets up a complex web, and brings elements together in delicious clashes, like Doyle, but my god, the language. If Doyle writes in dandelions, Hardy’s words are peonies, hydrangeas, and gardenias.
Doyle and Hardy were contemporaries, which gives me a thrill. Hardy studied and worked as an architect who wrote on the side. He was 34 when this novel was published and with its success, he abandoned architecture to write full time, just as Doyle left an unpromising career as a physician to pursue writing. While The HOUND was serialized in The Strand from 1901-1902, MADDING CROWD was serialized in The Cornhill Magazine, in 1874. Interesting side note: Hardy’s editor was none other than Leslie Stephen, father of Virginia Woolf. Also fun to imagine, for me anyway: Doyle reading Hardy in Cornhill, maybe thinking, god, so wordy…
What really shocked me, because this never happens in my bookish meanderings, was the discovery that the two novels are set in neighboring counties. Most of Hardy’s work is set in fictional Wessex, a stand-in for his home in Dorset, which neighbors Devon. In today’s world, a drive from Fox Tor, the real life Great Grimpen mire, to Hardy’s Wessex would take about an hour and a half.
I love that you can have degrees in English, higher degrees, and still not know this stuff. Does it mean my degree was shit? Dunno. At this point I’m on to my own pursuits, so who cares?
The very title of Hardy’s novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, implies that the setting is significant. It’s a rural novel; his detailed accounts of farming life, both the people and the process, remind me of Tolstoy, as does his concern with class. But his love triangle has one too many characters: Bathsheba Everdene moves to the county as a farm girl; shepherd Gabriel Oak immediately falls in love with her and proposes. She refuses him and not long after, inherits land, rising in social status. Oak, through a series of strange events, becomes her farm manager. A neighboring aristocrat, Farmer Boldwood, becomes the victim of a silly, cruel joke cooked up by Bathsheba and her chamber maid. All the same, he, too, falls in love with her. But it’s Francis Troy, a dashing, morally bankrupt soldier, who steals Bathsheba’s heart. There is even a scene in which he shows her what he can do with his sword. I’m not kidding. It’s sexy. (Again, not kidding.)
But let me get to the storm. I love a good storm. I don’t know many who don’t. As such, storms come up a lot in literature. The most obvious case might be Kate Chopin’s short story simply titled, “The Storm,” in which violent weather is used as a metaphor for the release of sexual tension. Storms are not uncommon stand-ins for sex. You might see them illustrating rising political tension, family feuds, any sort of well-established conflict. In Hardy’s novel, however, the storm is in fact, a storm. It does mark a turning point; from this moment on, Bathsheba can no longer pretend she hasn’t made a gross error in marrying Troy. But there are practical concerns, too.
During harvest, Oak, the rejected-but-nonetheless devoted farm manager, sees telltale signs of coming weather. For instance, the “huge brown garden-slug[s]” invading his house are “nature’s way of hinting to him that he was to prepare for foul weather.” He notices an abundance of spiders, too, and decides to check a higher, mammalian order, his sheep. Sure enough the creatures are huddled in two huge concentric circles, their tails to the darkening sky.
Bathsheba’s husband, Troy, has said he would cover the grain in time; the farm’s entire crop of wheat and barley sits in large conical piles, called ricks. English farming practice was to use pitchforks to build a thatch roof over these giant house-like piles so they could cure. Oak seeks out Troy and the crew but finds them passed out drunk in the barn. All of them. As the storm builds, Oak climbs atop the wheat rick, pulling tarps over the grain. When he runs out of tarps, he must thatch the barley himself. Oak climbs the ladder; the storm is so close that he fashions himself a lightning rod, just in time for the first flash, “green as an emerald.”
Readers are treated to a series lightning flashes; in his methodical, rational way, Oak counts the strikes, each one more intense the last. They illuminate the countryside with rhythmic pulses, like stop-time photography:
A poplar in the immediate foreground was like an ink stroke on burnished tin. Then the picture vanished, leaving the darkness so intense that Gabriel worked entirely by feeling with his hands.
Bathsheba joins him, most unorthodox for a landowner, and a woman. Rather than send her away as you might expect from a typical Victorian-hero, Oak tells her that if she could hand up the reed sheaves for the roof, it would save time. All the while, pulsating in the background, is the storm:
The rick suddenly brightened with the brazen glare of shining majolica—every knot in every straw was visible. On the slope in front of him appeared two human shapes, black as jet. The rick lost its sheen and the shapes vanished. Gabriel turned his head. It had been the sixth flash which had come from the east behind him, and the two dark forms on the slope had been the shadows of himself and Bathsheba.
This appealing, unexpected snapshot of the two of them, or their shadows, seared on the ground creates intimacy. Suddenly the burning question isn’t, Will they be all right? but , What will happen between them? Will they, after all this time, make some kind of contact?
In the thunder that follows, Bathsheba grips his sleeve; he touches her arm in response. Another flash and Oak sees the poplar on the hill behind them “drawn in black on the wall of the barn.” His senses have slowed; the moment’s intensity allows only snippets of awareness, gorgeous still-lifes of the chaos around him.
The eighth blast is the largest and most profound:
The flash was almost too novel for its inexpressibly dangerous nature to be at once realized and they could only comprehend the magnificence of its beauty. It sprang from east, west, north, south, and was a perfect dance of death. The forms of skeletons appeared in the air, shaped with blue fire for bones—dancing, leaping, striding, racing around, and mingling altogether in unparalleled confusion. With these were intertwined undulating snakes of green, and behind these was a broad mass of lesser light. Simultaneously came from every part of the tumbling sky what may be called a shout; since, though no shout ever came near it, it was more of the nature of a shout than of anything earthly.
Oak is hit; he feels the energy run down the chain he’s attached to the ground and is “almost blinded.” He feels Bathsheba’s
warm arm tremble in his hand—a sensation novel and thrilling enough; but love, life, everything human seemed small and trifling in such close juxtaposition with an infuriated universe.
I love the understatement here; Hardy uses a lot of passive verbs, like “were” “was” “came.” The scene takes you by the throat without ever manhandling you, using wild imagery and color–hallucination, in short–as the source of drama. The voice feels controlled and rational even as it describes terror. A storm produces just such duplicity; we feel our smallness, and “love, life, everything human,” does indeed wither in the face of it. At the same time, we stand terrified under an electric sky and it’s hard not to believe the universe isn’t “furious;” we’re being punished, paying for some unknown awfulness.
Said another way, this passage strikes me as accurate, profound and beautiful. I didn’t mention that the final lightning strike splits the poplar tree in half, a lovely correlative for the trouble between Oak and Bathsheba. The two find safety and proceed to speak frankly about their disappointed expectations in one another. Thus Hardy uses a natural disaster to strip these two of their grudging egos and force them to work together. Even by modern standards, their relationship is complex. I had not encountered such frankness in a nineteenth century novel; so often they are filled with headstrong women being schooled in self-control. Marriage is the usual outcome, and only after the power dynamic is straightened out. Bathsheba does get schooled, but so does Oak. Troy gets what he deserves, while and Boldwood loses his mind.
I’ll stop there. Reading is, after all, personal. Bubble too effusively and the audience steels itself against the book, film, show, play, whatever. Well! one petulantly thinks. It can’t be that good.
Yet the personal nature of the experience is exactly what makes us want to talk about it. We act as if we’d just returned from an African safari, grabbing people by the sleeve: You won’t believe what happened to me! Which was, technically, that you sat in a chair or on the ground or stretched out, turning pages, maybe thumbing a screen.