Several years ago, I watched an interview with Toni Morrison on C-SPAN.  Someone asked her what she read "just for fun."  I'm sure the questioner expected Morrison to say John Grisham or Danielle Steele.  Instead, Morrison said Faulkner or Flaubert.  That might have sounded pretentious except for what she added: "Because they never disappoint."  Since I've been doing a lot of reading in my retirement, I've tried to alternate between contemporary works and the "classics," those works I know will never let me down.  Recently, I've been reading Thomas Hardy, though actually I had read only one of his novels, The Return of the Native, and that over 40 years ago in graduate school, and knew only one of his poems, "Hap," which I often taught in a course like Intro to Lit, one of the few occasions I got to teach works that I loved that weren't American.  Here's "Hap":

If but some vengeful god would call to me

From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing,

Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,

That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"

Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,

Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;

Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I

Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

But not so.   How arrives it joy lies slain,

And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?

—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,

And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .

These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown

Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

 

It's a dark version of my own beliefs about the arbitrary nature of the world and a reminder of the

etymology of our word 'happiness,' which comes from chance, good fortune, accident, rather than from

character or choice.  It echoes Stephen Crane, though Crane is more laconic, or Robert Frost in its traditional form disguising its biting message.

 

So I decided to explore some more of Hardy's fiction, and thanks to Kindle--four novels for one dollar, all delivered within fifteen seconds--I began with Far from the Madding Crowd.  Hardy's style is in many ways conventional--an elaborate plot, an alternation of showing and telling, and an omniscient point of view that eschews the experimention with perspective that marked the beginning of Modernism.  But the novel is permeated by Hardy's dark vision, especially involving human capriciousness (seemingly small gestures that lead to dire and unforeseen consequences) and nature's flat indifference to man's concerns.  There are fires and floods that destroy even the best of man's intentions.  In one of the most harrowing scenes in the novel, the cad Frank Troy has a moment of repentance for his treatment of Fanny Robin, whose love for him he's several times encouraged and then rejected.  When she and his baby die, he buys a tombstone for her open grave and then painstakingly arranges flowers and greenery in preparation for her interment.  But before that can happen the next day, a storm arrives and washes all his work into a chaotic mess.  Indeed, the plot is set in motion in a scene of very dark "humor" when Gabriel Oak, the main male character, rising in the world through decency and hard work, is ruined by a young, untrained sheep dog which drives Oak's herd of sheep to their death over the edge of a cliff.  Far from the Madding Crowd was a long, engrossing read; it didn't disappoint.  But it was pretty much what I expected from what I remembered of Hardy.  It didn't prepare me for the novel I read next.

 

Jude the Obscure was Hardy's last novel, and it must surely be his most bitter.  The role of the natural world is greatly reduced, except for the fact that every character walks for miles and miles, often in a hard rain, to have any sort of encounter with another character.  It was exhausting just to contemplate.  The institutional world plays a much larger part as Hardy attacks the exclusivity and parochialism of British higher education, the hypocrisy of religion, and especially the constrictive nature of marriage.  Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead spend 400 pages attempting to be happy.  After disastrous and ill-conceived first marriages to others, Jude and Sue live together and have children (one critic of the time called the novel Jude the Obscene), initially without being divorced from their first spouses.  Of the two, Sue is the more interesting--a free thinker and open critic of marriage and religion, but also labile and prone to sudden and unpredictable reversals of her ideas, by the end of the novel, she has converted Jude to her point of view but abandoned it herself in a misguided attempt to do penance for her past mistakes.  She returns to her first husband who has physically repulsed her (though he is one of the decent people in the novel) and finally as an act of supposed atonement and abnegation insists that they sleep together, her mortification of her flesh.  Jude dies (walking in the rain); Sue resigns herself to her new life, but loses all her energy.  Only Jude's vulgar first wife prospers, refusing to mourn Jude and latching on to a prospering quack doctor in her search for husband number three.  The novel is, as someone wrote, "unbearingly sad."  It's unfortunately marred by one unbelievable character ("Little Father Time," who appears late in the novel, a son from Jude's first marriage, and by his sensational and melodramatic hanging of Jude and Sue's children and his own suicide).  But for unrelenting frustration of intelligent hope and hopeful intelligence, the novel must be unique.

 

Jude was published serially, and Hardy isn't the most graceful artist of temporal transitions.  My friend, colleague, and distinguished scholar Linda Hughes is an expert on all things serial.  I'm an amateur, my immersion mainly through soap operas (and Jude with its constant alternation of hope and frustration reads something like a soap).  It was a sad day for me when, after 54 years, As the World Turns was cancelled.  I remember when an unknown David Hasselhoff replaced William Gray Espy as Snapper Foster on The Young and the Restless.  I remember when an unknown Dixie Carter replaced Maeve Something-or-Other on Edge of Night.  After years of frustration, she and her lover had finally gotten married and gone on a honeymoon, only to have the bride fall overboard and seemingly drown.  When she re-appeared, the actress was suddenly Dixie Carter.  As with Hasselhoff, disappointment and suspicion were rampant.  I remember when Christopher Reeve was about to be raped in a prison shower scene on a Friday (of course) episode of Love of Life.  And then on Monday there was a new actor. Ah, the golden days of soaps!

 

(I apologize for the left margins.  Whenever I cut-and-paste something, as I did with "Hap," in this system, spacing of margins or between lines goes amok.)