'A Village Tragedy' by Margaret L. Woods

Up until a month ago, I had never heard of Margaret L. Woods, her life or her books. It was a glancing reference linking her to something Thomas Hardy wrote that set me off in pursuit of her.

Margaret L. Woods

1855-1945

Inevitably these days, my first port of call was Wikipedia. She was the second daughter of the scholar George Granville Bradley, Dean of Westminster and the sister of another writer, Mabel Birchenough. She married Dr. Henry George Woods in 1879. He became President of Trinity College, Oxford and later Master of the Temple. She was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is interred with her husband at Holywell Cemetery, Oxford. Apart from collections of verse (published between 1889 and 1921), she wrote six novels and one children's book.

They were A Village Tragedy (1887), Esther Vanhomrigh (1891) - a romance of the loves of Jonathan Swift; Sons of the Sword (1901) - a romance of the Peninsular War; The King's Revoke (1905); The Invader (1907) - a psychological novel; Come unto these Yellow Sands (1915) - about fairies; and A Poet's Youth (1923) - about the early life of William Wordsworth. An eclectic lot! It was the first novel which was referred to and, as usual, that great bookseller, Jarndyce, came up trumps.

First Edition, 1887

I read the novel over two sessions (it is only 229 pages long) and, thank goodness, in the warm sunshine in the front garden. It is not a book for a darkened room, as it is (almost) uniformly, resolutely grim. The story is of an undernourished fifteen year-old, whose father (her only love) had died, leaving her in a fetid London lodging house with her mother Selina - a bad 'un - who is only too pleased when her late husband's brother James Pontin, takes the girl off her hands, particularly when he grudgingly hands over five pounds. Annie looked very small and childish in the second-hand frock she filled so inadequately... she turns over a small shabby heap of clothes to be placed  in a sheet of brown paper on the ground, by way of a travelling trunk and leaves with her uncle: 'Come, come, my girl...don't ye take  on so. It's all for the best.' Well - it wasn't!

Her uncle has a farm on the borders of Oxfordshire, in the village of High Cross - a low gabled building some two hundred and odd years old. A Pontin built it, and Pontins have lived in it ever since. On their arrival, the farmer's cart is taken over by Jesse, an overgrown boy, plain and dull of countenance. He is a product of the local Workhouse and is terrified of ever having to return to it. Mrs Pontin, James's second wife, is that used to trouble I don't know what I should do without it. Work, work, work, from morning till night - that's my motto. She loved the human creature in proportion as it approached the animal. Pigs, turkeys, chicken and ducklings were her devoted brood.

Annie is terrified of many of the animals and the only other being that seems to care for her is the ploughboy Jesse. He clung to Annie increasingly as one lonely human creature to another... An important, though minor, character is a 13 year-old idiot boy, Albert, whose unwieldy head rolled loosely on his shoulders, he had a blind eye - a white, viscous-looking eye - and a great shapeless mouth, that was always wet, and generally munching some unclean food. Crises come thick and fast for Annie: her aunt sees her giving a quick kiss to Jesse in the lane. 'You slut! you drab!' she shrieked...You come wi' me, I say, you nasty baggage you little sly hussy!...Them's your dratted mother's ways'... Worse was to follow. Accused of failing to shut up the turkeys, Annie is mercilessly beaten and cast out by her aunt, who says to another villager, Selina - that's Annie's mother - she always was a bad 'un, and black cats mostly has black kits.  Annie takes refuge with Jesse. She gets pregnant, thus confirming her aunt's opinion. Although the niece of the old (and useless) vicar's wife gives the couple some help (her aunt seemed to herself and him (the vicar) better fitted to deal with the coarse and commonplace needs of the villagers), the grim tale goes on. Jesse is killed crossing a railway line in the path of an express train, just as he was bringing back a wedding ring for Annie from Oxford. Annie, about to give birth, is hardly helped by her Nurse Mary's opinion that a woman's life was a poor affair for the most part, and that she did not think the little girls of the lower classes would lose much if Judgement Day came before they had taken their turn at it.

Annie tries to commit suicide on the same railway and is only saved through fainting on the embankment; she has her baby - it is a girl, the result she dreaded. Her uncle's response to this knowledge? 'As folks sow, so must they reap.' Denouement comes when she is found in the meadows: there was a look of painful effort stereotyped on the dead face; the square white teeth were clenched, the brows drawn together, and the glazed eyes very wide open, staring up into the clear morning sky. Even her wedding ring, grabbed by the idiot boy, is thrown into the nearby pond.

I tried to find the moral to the novel, and couldn't. Neither Jesse nor Annie had a chance of a happy life; but it was cruel mankind's law rather than nature's. The story is remorseless in its tragic unfolding. Moreover, Margaret Woods's general opinion of the peasantry, the rural labourer, is forthright and rather contemptuous.

The peasant is inarticulate in his loves, like the trees and plants and the many scarcely more conscious things with which he shares (and) the phlegm of the rustic does not, unfortunately, preserve him from an early acquaintance with the grosser vices. Again - the uneducated have a greater appreciation of delicate prettiness than is conventionally supposed.

Why did she write it; what was its purpose? I don't know! A contemporary newspaper review (found in the front of my purchase), argues that she should certainly be ranked among the foremost half-dozen of our living writers...it is regretted that she has not more time to devote to the literary work to which she shows such splendid talent. Both Robert Browning and Lord Rosebery wrote to the publisher, praising the novel. I am sure her other books were much more sunny and optimistic - I certainly hope so. 

'The Woodlanders' Part II

The Woodlanders was first published in Macmillan's Magazine between May 1886 and April 1887 and in Harper's Bazaar from 15th May 1886 to 9th April 1887. A three-volume edition was published by Macmillan in 1887; this was followed by a one-volume edition and a Colonial edition, both by Macmillan, in the same year.

  

The first, three-volume edition of 1887

My copy is the one-volume edition, reprinted in 1889. 

The 1889 edition

Within the first forty pages, five of the six main characters in the story have been introduced:

Marty South, whose face had the usual fulness of expression which is developed by a life of solitude...in years she was no more than nineteen or twenty, but the necessity of taking thought at too early a period of life had forced the provisional curves of her childhood's face to a premature finality. Thus she had but little pretension to beauty, save in one prominent particular - her hair.

George Melbury, was a thin, slightly stooping figure, with a small, nervous mouth who has created his own 'cross to bear' - educating his daughter for greater things than the promised betrothal to the 'woodlander' Giles can provide; later he muses to his (second) wife I know Grace will gradually sink down to our level again, and catch our manners and way of speaking, and feel a drowsy content in being Giles's wife.

Giles Winterborne a man, not particularly young for a lover, nor particularly mature for a person of affairs...there was reserve in his glance, and restraint upon his mouth...

Grace Melbury in simple corporeal presentment she was of a fair and clear complexion, rather pale than pink, slim in build and elastic in movement. Her look expressed a tendency to wait for others' thoughts before uttering her own: possibly also to wait for others' deeds before her own doing

Mrs Charmond first seen by Marty in her carriage where a pair of bright eyes looked from a ripe handsome face, and though behind those bright eyes was a mind of unfathomed mysteries, between them there beat a heart capable of quick, extempore warmth - a heart which could indeed be passionately and imprudently warm on certain occasions.

That first meeting between Marty and Felice Charmond, leads the latter's coachman to comment that as a rule she takes no interest in the village folk at all. When Giles and Grace catch up with Mrs Charmond's coach, Hardy wryly comments, thus these people with converging destinies went along the road together. 

Edred Fitzpiers is called to pronounce on Marty's ill father - Fitzpiers was, on the whole, a finely formed handsome man...his face was rather soft than stern, charming than grand, pale than flushed

Not surprisingly, with a title such as The Woodlanders, trees play an integral part in the story.

The tall elm outside his house, which Marty's father thinks will blow down and kill them - it got too big, and now 'tis my enemy, and will be the death of me - Marty tells Fitzpiers the shape of it seems to haunt him like an evil spirit. He says that it is exactly his own age, that it has got human sense, and sprouted up when he was born on purpose to rule him, and keep him as its slave. When Fitzpiers orders it to be cut down, and two woodmen do this, it finishes old South - a bluish whiteness overspread  him and he died the same evening. The outsider, Fitzpiers, had hastened his end; and, in doing so, had led to Winterborne losing his lifeholds. During the storm which leads to Winterborne's death, the trees are sinister: Dead boughs were scattered about like ichthyosauri in a museum...more trees, in jackets of lichen and stockings of moss...(other) trees close together, wrestling for existence, their branches disfigured with wounds resulting from their mutual rubbings and blows...beneath them were the rotting stumps of those of the group bthat had been vanquished long ago, rising from their mossy setting like black teeth from green gums...and under the temporary shelter of hurdles, lay Giles. The tragedy is that Giles and Marty were both skilled in woodcraft, in copse work and in planting. Marty promises, over Giles's grave, whenever I plant the young larches I'll think that none can plant as you planted...

The growth of the mutual interest that develops between Fitzpiers and Grace is compared with that of twigs budding on the trees. When Grace and her father, neither able to sleep due to Fitzpiers's gallivanting off to see Mrs Charmond, meet up, they halt beneath a half-dead oak, its roots spreading out like claws grasping the ground. So like the half-dead marriage of Grace and Fitzpiers. When Melbury, having lost faith in his own judgement and needing a genuine friend, sets out to find Winterbourne he passes through the woods which seemed to be in a cold sweat; beads of perspiration hung from every bear twig; the sky had no colour, and the trees rose before him as haggard, grey phantoms, whose days of substantiality were passed. How like the man himself. E. M. Forster wrote: English trees! How that book rustles with them.

Mrs Charmont, typically, dislikes the woods. When Grace confronts her about her dalliance with her husband, their long argument takes them into the wildest part - old trees which were once landmarks had been felled or blown down, and the bushes which had been small and scrubby were now large and overhanging. It is Grace, not the outsider Charmont, who eventually finds a way out, but not for some time. Grammer Oliver accurately sums up Felice Charmont: she's the wrong sort of woman for Hintock - hardly knowing a beech from a woak.

Piers is attracted by and attracts three strongly contrasted females. A critic, Trevor Johnson, contends that Felice stands for the wild, irrational, neck-or-nothing kind, Suke for plain physical lust, and Grace for a mixture of calculation, fascination and idealisation.

Put simply, Marty and Giles stand for dignity and integrity, whilst Grace, in the end, lacks both; and Piers is just a cad.

The Woodlanders was, apparently, one of Hardy's favourite books. He is quoted: On taking up The Woodlanders and reading it after many years, I like it as a story best of all. Perhaps that is owing to the locality and scenery of the action.

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Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Only now do I turn to Claire Tomalin's superb Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (Viking, 2006), to read her comments on The Woodlanders. She write that it is like a black version of Far from the Madding Crowd. This time the good man dies needlessly, and the bad man wins his woman and keeps her in spite of his blatant infidelities. All the women are humiliated, suffer and end in sorrow.

The three novels Hardy published between 1887 and 1895 - The Woodlanders, Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure were powerful, bleak and sometimes savage in their representation of human experience. I studied Tess for 'A' Level and, in my macho teenage years, the bleakness had minimal effect! I don't want to read either of the last two books again, though. I will, however, read Under the Greenwood Tree for the umpteenth time - it is perhaps my favourite Hardy.

Kailyard - A 'New' Assessment by Ian Campbell

The Ramsay Head Press, Edinburgh

1981

I suppose Ian Campbell's Assessment can hardly be called 'new' in 2020 - his book was published in 1981, some 40 years ago. It is still a powerful, forensic critique of what is seen as the Kailyard phenomenon; and it is not just of the usual three - MacLaren, Crockett and Barrie - but a scholarly appraisal of what (and who) went before and after the 'high noon' of the last years of 19th century Scottish literature. Campbell, Professor Emeritus of Scottish and Victorian Literature at the University of Edinburgh, as he was by then, came to a John Buchan Society Seminar held in Durham in 2013 to give a talk on 'Buchan and Scott'. We were all privileged to be at his talk - packed with insights, erudite yet very understandable, he was 'drookit' in his subject matter.

His Chapter I 'Introduction to the Kailyard' is one of the best 'starters' for an exploration of the Kailyard phenomenon that I know of. After pitching George Douglas Brown's The House of the Green Shutters in at the onset - seemingly a virulent fly in the Kailyard ointment, Campbell argues that the kailyard will be seen in terms of a set of attitudes in theory and practice evolving from certain features in Scottish fiction a hundred years older than...George Douglas. He then gives six headings as guideposts:
1. Primarily we are talking of a rural form, a literature which prefers the small town or farming countryside to the burgeoning cities which were increasingly the everyday reality of Scotland in the later nineteenth century...
2. Transport is a prominent feature in our kailyard - prominent, that is, by its absence...the kailyard village lies at the end of a branch line...
3. Class distinctions are an important, if tacit, feature of kailyard...the laird is respected, the minister more so; the dominie selflessly works for the good of the local boys, and is honoured for it in the same way as is the village doctor...there is a curious and obviously satisfying air of stasis to the kailyard.
4. The kailyard, within certain rules, tolerates some change...education and self-help [could lead]  to a University chair, a pulpit...a business responsibility...to women of ability, the kailyard offered less.
5. Christian values: Churchgoing, decent rational practical Christianity, are the staples of kailyard society... the decline in churchgoing in the cities is seen in terms of contrast to the abiding certainties of the village...
6. The kailyard is in part the skill of realistic short-story telling...to reject the kailyard is to reject much that is central to any attempt to define "Scottishness".

I cannot argue with the soundness (and helpfulness) of each one of the above six guidelines.

Chapters 2 and 3 took me into an area I knew little about and skilfully explained to me the importance of such writers as Henry Mackenzie (The Man of Feeling, 1771); John Wilson, or "Christopher North" (Lights and Shadows of a Scottish Life, 1822; Trials of Margaret Lindsay, 1823); and (in Chapter 3) John Galt (The Ayrshire Legatees, 1821; Annals of the Parish, 1821; The Provost,1822; The Gathering of the West, 1823); and Elizabeth Hamilton (The Cottagers of Glenburnie, 1808). Ian Campbell also put into more understandable context, two authors I know more about - Sir Walter Scott and Susan Ferrier. Two paragraphs comparing Galt and Scott were particularly helpful to this ingenu.

Chapter 4 concentrates on George MacDonald's work, identifying the position of Dr. Anderson (in his Robert Falconer, 1868) as an example of the dichotomy within the man of parts, educated for medicine (or the Ministry) and his peasant background - this is a recurrent theme in the kailyard. Campbell argues that MacDonald - as well as Neil Gunn and Lewis Grassic Gibbon - shows greater insight into this crisis of identity. I regret I have never read any of these authors' works.

Then, in Chapter 5, we are on to The Kailyards - reinforcing the points established in Chapter I, that the location of kailyard is in general rural; that it usually belongs to the past and stops within living memory; that its moral values ensure good endings to those who deserve them; and that these values are essentially conservationist with a narrow social scale. Patriarchal figures hold sway. The House with the Green Shutters, however, takes change from the background to the foreground, whilst the ideal of education for the pulpit is scorned. Campbell states that both Brown and Gibbon do not turn their backs on the kailyard, but use it as part of a strategy of involving their audience. With Neil Gunn and others, these authors create a more flexible view of the Scottish countryside than the limited kailyard can achieve. Campbell has some penetrating and shrewd comments on both Crockett and Barrie:  Margaret Ogilvy (1896) - that deplorable lapse of taste which allowed Barrie to make an enormous commercial success of his mother's last months of life. As an aside, it is interesting that it was the 7th best-selling book in the USA in 1897! The chapter concludes with a brief appraisal of Scottish verse of the period, which displays a similar narrowness and repetitiveness of theme.

Campbell's final Chapter summarises the position reached in his previous arguments: the greater Scottish writers ensured that their audience were involved in a total response, rather than a passive acceptance of preconceived roles. However, as the 19th century wore on, the contrast between some Scottish fiction and some English became more obvious: Scotland lacks the subtle exploration of local life in Silas Marner, Adam Bede, above all in Middlemarch; Scotland has no Wuthering Heights; the Scottish cities do not find an author of the stature of Dickens...Lockhart and Hogg, Galt and Carlyle spend much time in England...The future lies in London. The kailyard produced a literature which packaged environment...Its literature, in brief, is passive instead of active.

Campbell does strike a more positive note - it appears to be that the kailyard was capable of retaining small parts of Scotland's heritage, and giving pleasure in the telling of them, in competent hands.

You can tell it's a compelling book when you decide to purchase others as a result. I have my accumulative eye on Hamilton's The Cottagers of Glenburnie, Galt's Annals of the Parish and Gibbon's Sunset Song. At present, the finger still hovers over their Internet purchase.

Two more MacInnes novels - 'Horizon' and 'Friends and Lovers'

Horizon is probably Helen MacInnes's shortest and slightest book, but it bears all the (positive) hallmarks of its author. It starts in a prisoner-of-war camp high up in the Dolomites, where Peter Lennox is planning yet another escape (he had been moved there after two failed attempts). He is a resentful young man - his face grim, hard, expressionless - as the outbreak of war cut short his intended career as a painter. Moreover, his right hand was injured in the North African desert campaign - it had healed in an angry white gash across the back of his hand. And, then, his new plan - seven months of planning, of alarms and subterfuge. Seven months of tedious preparation... is disrupted; in fact, ruined. The Italian guards are already deserting, having heard that their government is on the verge of surrender. A small detachment of Germans bring a captive band of Americans and British to the camp, in transit to Germany. The PoWs join with the new arrivals to overpower and kill the Germans. So far, so good. But then, Lennox is persuaded (very unwillingly) to go with South Tyrolese partisans to prepare the ground for a future Allied advance into the area.

    

First Edition - 1945

Pan paperback - 1969

Due to its relative brevity, the characters are not as well fleshed out as her three previous books. However, MacInnes's skill in depicting the landscape (her own pre-war holidaying had taken her to Bavaria and further south) produces some powerful passages about the mountain peaks, the darker valleys and gorges, with their rushing streams, and the vineyards and wild flower meadows surrounding the tiny villages. It is also the study of how Lennox's bitterness and dejection slowly changes to a more positive outlook, as he become friends with the Tyrolese and learns to trust Johann, his young guide, in particular. His sense of failure, which exists for much of the book, is relieved by the end as he volunteers to go into North Tyrol to prepare its inhabitants for the projected Allied advance. By the end, Lennox felt he was cured. He could think of the future. A future which included returning to Hinterwald, to repaint the figures on the little church's wall and to meet up again with Katharina Kasal, a young girl who lived in the farm next to his hiding-place at the Schichtl's.

He had stopped brooding about the past: the long, bitter, wasted months and years had lost their power to nag him.

Friends and Lovers, published in 1948, but begun in January 1945 and finished in September 1946, feels like a novel that Helen MacInnes simply had to write. It is the story of an all-embracing love between two young people: David Bosworth, in his last year at Oxford University, and Penelope (Penny) Lorrimer, a would-be artist from Edinburgh. His home is in an unfashionable part of Chiswick, one of eleven boxlike houses...of red brick, now dirty and soot-lined at the seams in a run-down cul de sac, where his resentful younger sister looks after their invalid father; hers in a prosperous area of Edinburgh, with a solid and comfortable three-storied house, with a lawyer father and a mother who is a do-gooding voluntary worker (President of the Rambling for Health Club; Treasurer of the Committee to set up Clubs for Bonnier Bairns; member of a Citizens' League for the Preservation of Ruins). They first meet on the small island of Inchnamurren, where Penny's grandfather has retired to a cottage. MacInnes skilfully details the increasing attraction they have for each other, from the love-at-first sight (he was looking into a pair of very blue eyes in a very pretty face, and that was all he could seems to see...and, a little later on the sea shore...she knew that his eyes were still on her. She felt a strange mixture of excitement and tension and embarrassment, and it wasn't altogether unpleasant), through a contrived 'day-out' in Edinburgh to the growing, almost desperate, need for each other when she moves to London.

MacInnes is equally good at describing the 'landscapes' of the island, the middle-class home in Edinburgh, the dinginess of David's home, the London streets and varied life of 1932-1933, and the Oxford colleges and high-tables of that period. All the characters, even those occupying a brief time in the book are 'alive' and individual - such as Mrs Fane whose white mask which cracked round the lips as they went through the motions of smiling and her offspring Robert a lofty prefect with his new motor-cycle, Billy a rather grubby specimen of an over-bullied fag. Carol had been a placid blonde sausage...and Lilian Marston, who looked like Garbo and just wanted fun with men.

First Edition - 1948

Pan paperback - 1972

There are several 'dated' references (both David and Penny smoke, as do most of the other characters) and (authorial) opinions, which would not sound well at a women's-lib gathering: ...in a way put all the responsibility of future developments completely on his shoulders. But in a way, too, that was how he as a man wanted it to be. The delicate balance of human relationships, of a woman and a man with two separate and well-defined personalities learning to adjust them to each other, would have been overweighted if she had been more confident, more dominant than he was. And again, Penny's thoughts that the main trouble is that we try to be independent creatures, and we are not. We are dependent on others. And mostly, if we would only be honest enough to admit it, we are dependent on men. They give us the balance we need. She smiled as she imagined the professional feminist's retort to such an admission. It is also pretty clear that David's sister's friend, tall, large-boned, tweed-suited Florence Rawson is a prototype lesbian, although the word is never said; that Penny's employer, Bunny, whose hair waves and his voice curls, is not interested in women; and the throwaway comment about The Times reporting of the carefully worded trial, which deceives nobody, of the two Guardsmen in Hyde Park.

It would not be a MacInnes book without strongly-held view on Communism and Fascism. Not particularly necessary for the novel, but nor totally 'bolted on'. Her Chapter Twenty-one, 'Post-mortem on Friendship', is a strong attack by David on the communist Marain, thin and dark, with a gentle voice and savage phrases. David rejects the latter's views: I believe that there is to be a change they (the majority) have to earn it for themselves. Not by violence, but by thinking things out. Get an intelligent electorate, and then an intelligent election, and soon there will be plenty of house-cleaning. David a little later comments adversely on another man, Breen (worryingly a friend of his sister's): If it becomes fashionable among the so-called intelligentsia to wear black shirts, Breen will be out there in front of them mimicking Mussolini...he has a mountainous inferiority complex. He has to justify himself by extremes. He thinks strong methods prove strength. This is pure MacInnes territory!

It feels very much like a 'first book', which are nearly always autobiographical. The dialogue rings so true, the descriptions so apt, the constant worry of young minds about the other's true feelings so accurate, the mini misunderstandings and quarrels, the tensions in both families. On too many occasions, the commentary seems so heartfelt, so personal: Perhaps it is completely natural that women in love forget everything else. It is not selfishness, for their thoughts are not on themselves, but on those they love. It is an absorption, all the more complete as love increases, that shuts them away from any other emotional interests. It all ends well: David gets an excellent First, a job travelling in the United States and with Penny. Her parents have finally agreed with her grandfather and the two get married with a luncheon at the Savoy. And the honeymoon? - a week on the island of Inchnamurren, of course!

Born in Scotland in 1907, MacInnes was only four years older than David and Penny in 1932. She studied for a Librarianship Diploma at University College, London (Penny's Slade was in a section of the complex) and may well have lodged in Gower Street, if not at Penny's forbidding Baker House. She married Gilbert Highet in September 1932 (a month David and Penny had planned for!)

It is a book best read by those on the same emotional journey - in their late teens or early twenties - OR for the elderly looking back (as did Penny's grandfather), fondly reminiscing over faded photographs and smiling at the memories. I know, because I do.

Thomas Hardy's 'The Woodlanders' Part I

Having just finished a re-reading of Hardy's The Woodlanders, I decided to re-watch the Channel 4 film I had on a DVD. This blog will admit to two heresies. Firstly, unusually, I want to discuss the film before the book.

 1997 Film on DVD

For once, unlike so many modern travesties, the film stuck quite closely to the book. No actor is exactly like the character you have conjured up in your mind's-eye during your reading, but I thought those in the film were not far off my imagination. Rufus Sewell fitted Giles Winterborne (more restrained than his earthy performance in that classic Cold Comfort Farm!); he was suitably supported by Walter Sparrow as Old Creedle; Anthony Haygarth made a pretty good fist of Mr. Melbury;  Sheila Burrell may have reminded me too much of Ada Doom and the something nasty in the woodshed, but was still apt casting as Grammer Oliver; Polly Walker exuded both the sensuality and vulnerability needed for Mrs Charmond; Amanda Ryan fleshed out the small part of Suke Damson (the name suggests ripeness); whilst Jodhi May clearly got across Marty South's intense but unrequited love for Giles. Cal Macaninch as Dr. Fitzpiers and Emily Woof as Grace Melbury did not let the side down: the coldness, self-centredness, arrogance of the first were all amply expressed; whilst the strange mixture of innocence mixed with ambition, of purity combined with sexual awareness were intrinsic to Woof's portrayal.

Rufus Sewell as Giles : Emily Woof as Grace

When one adds the breath-taking scenery of the brooding woodlands, the claustrophobic hamlet, the open-vistas of the downs, the changing seasons and weather (particularly the rain-swept tragic final hours of Giles); with a music score which never felt intrusive - then, I think, a contemporary Film Review got it about right: Breathtaking cinematography...a great cast...a triumph of full-blooded story-telling.

Little Hintock

Now, for the second heresy.

The film ends with Fitzpiers slowly walking up a slope to Grace; both are dressed in black and the figures show up starkly against the skyline. She does not attempt to come close to him. He says: "I have done you so much wrong..."; then, a few words later, "What do you feel for me?" A brief silence. As she turns away from him, she replies, "Nothing". The credits roll.  After being pretty faithful to the story-line of the book (admittedly a few key episodes were, had to be, left out), this ending has no place in Hardy's novel. Given it was released in 1997 - 110 ten years after the novel was first published - it reflected the social mores of the changed (dare one say, progressed) times. I still feel Hardy would have given the reader a more truthful, morally acceptable, ending if he had  followed a similar course.

If only the book had finished before the last three chapters, with a tying up, similar to the film's conclusion. Grace's father's counsel should have sealed it: ...my opinion is that if you don't live with him, you had better live without him, and not go shilly-shallying and playing bo-peep. You sent him away; and now he's gone. Very well; trouble him no more.  However, Chapter XLVI commences with a 'warning' of what was to come: The woods were uninteresting, and Grace stayed indoors a great deal. She does venture out to tend Winterborne's grave with the devoted Marty. Then her husband arrives there unexpectedly. He realises Grace is not yet to be treated presumingly; and he was correspondingly careful to tranquillise her. What a calculated and sinister meaning there is in the word 'tranquillise'. Grace seemingly holds out: I go with Marty to Giles's grave. We swore we would show him that devotion. And I mean to keep it up. Chapter XLVII, to me, is the most artificial of the whole book. Two pages are devoted to a mini-essay on man traps. Admittedly, there is a touch of humour in the description of the various types: from the toothless variety used by the softer-hearted landlords - quite contemptible in their clemency. The jaws of these resembled the jaws of an old woman to whom time has left nothing but gums.; to the bruisers, which did not lacerate the flesh, but only crushed the bone. The irony (pardon the pun) of this trap, laid by Suke's husband Tim Tangs to wound the doctor,  whom he knows had frolicked with Suke, is that it not only nearly caught Grace, but that it led inexorably to the reunion of the two Fitzpiers. This time, Hardy's description of the surroundings borders on the 'twee': Grace noticed they were in an encircled glade in the densest part of the wood....it was an exceptionally soft, balmy evening for the time of year, which was just that transient period in the May month when beech trees have suddenly unfolded large limp young leaves of the softness of butterflies' wings. Ugh!

Grace is, in fact, diminished in most readers' eyes. To worry about the lack of a brush or comb when walzing off to Sherton Abbas, rather than the effect of her volte face on her father and others. Well, really! Father Melbury hits the nail softly on its head when he says to himself: Well - he's her husband,...but it's a forlorn hope for her; and God knows how it will end!  Creedle uses the hammer more firmly: "Ah, young women do wax wanton in these days! Why couldn't she ha' bode with her father, and been faithful". Poor Creedle was thinking of his old employer (Winterborne). As was faithful Marty South. She bookends the three years of the book's time-line. She lost her hair for Mrs Charmond at the beginning and now mourns her lost love at the end. The withered flowers that she and Grace had left on Giles's grave a week earlier are cleared away, and she puts fresh ones in their place: "Now, my own, own love, " she whispered, "you are mine, and on'y mine; for she has forgot 'ee at last, although for her you died...If ever I forget your name, let me forget home and heaven!. . . . But, no, no, my love, I never can forget 'ee; for you was a good man, and did good things!" One is left with a compelling feeling that Marty deserved happiness, whilst Grace did not.

Giles Winterborne a good man...

Unlike Marty, or Grace in the film, Hardy's Fitzpiers are off to the Midlands. One wonders if one of his well-off landed patients will be a Chatterley. Perhaps, Grace might meet Mellors' father on one of her lonely wanderings through those woods.

I will do another blog on the rest of the novel next.

'Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil' by John Berendt

John Berendt (1939-    )

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

What a thoroughly enjoyable read of a character-driven book. On my Vintage paperback edition (signed by Berendt – Yes!) – there is a short quotation presumably from a longer review by Edmund White: The best non-fiction novel since In Cold Blood and a lot more entertaining. I absolutely concur with the last part of his sentence. Whereas I became increasingly uncomfortable with Capote’s book (and Capote himself), I was immensely entertained and relaxed when I read Berendt’s.

Berendt seems such a humane author, more interested in the people he was writing about than himself. Although the first person pronoun is used throughout the book, it does not drive or dominate it (he claims he is ‘shy’ at one point). He is more of a detached observer than Steinbeck (whose account I also admired, but whose aim was polemical) or Capote (who may just have called himself ‘the reporter’, but whose personal hang-ups defined his work). No; we are drawn, through Berendt’s voice and eyes into a kaleidoscope of fantastic, but eminently real people. It really didn’t bother me this time, if he embroidered or used, as he says in his Author’s Note, certain storytelling liberties. It made for a flowing narrative.

I recall vividly, from my youth in the West Indies, looking out of my bedroom window onto a brilliant Flamboyant Tree – Berendt’s array of characters are so alive, flamboyantly so!  What a start (describing Jim Williams) with eyes so black they were like the tinted windows of a sleek limousine – he could see out, but you couldn’t see in. There’s the eventual victim, Danny, with sapphire-blue eyes blazing and with tattooed arms - a Confederate flag on one arm, a marijuana plant on the other; Mandy Nichols – crowned Miss BBW (Big Beautiful Woman) in Las Vegas and watching television whilst driving; Joe Odom – what a life force! [Whilst I was reading about Joe, I also broke off to read The Times of Thursday, February 2. One story headline sprang out at me: “Poet’s bohemian guests are causing a scandal in Belgravia”.  Neighbours of Linda Marinelli Landor, 81, complain that her flamboyant guests come and go noisily at odd hours and hold soirées including a flamenco dancing evening that set their chandeliers swinging. You couldn’t make it up! I wonder she was a cousin thrice-removed of Joe’s?! I hope it wasn’t The Caledonian Club who complained].  Then there’s Luther Diggers, ordering eggs, bacon, a Bayer aspirin, and a glass of spirits of ammonia and Coca-Cola each morning at Clary’s drugstore; Serena Vaughn Dawes, once an icon of upper-crust glamour; Emma Kelly, colliding with her tenth deer as she sped along the highway; and, in some ways above all, Chablis: I dance, I do lip sync, and I emcee…. Her name before that? Frank.

My signed Vintage paperback copy of 1995

The mini stories – of Conrad Aitkin and Johnny Mercer; of ‘Jack the One-eyed Jill’ and his boss; William Simon Glover and his ‘Come on Patrick’, to the long-dead dog following him; Sonny Seiler and his big white bulldogs – a line of Ugas; all add to the rich tapestry of Berendt’s narrative. One chapter deserves the accolade of ‘Masterpiece’: Black Minuet – the tale of the black debutante ball. Here a sense of place and of period march together with the characters. Chablis delivers her best performance, with her increasingly embarrassed white chauffeur (Berendt) desperate to escape!

Berendt does not just excel at character drawing and building; he portrays an acute sense of place. Whether it is his descriptions of the various Squares in Savannah; the court room scenes; or accompanying Minerva (another great character) past the ghostly drapery of Spanish moss to the eerie Bonaventure Cemetery.

Whereas Capote was disliked in Kansas, Berendt is seemingly fêted in Savannah. As Joe Odom rather succinctly, and these days politically incorrectly, put it: So now we have a murder in a big mansion…we’ve got a weirdo bug specialist slinking around town with a bottle of deadly poison, We’ve got a nigger drag queen, an old man who walks an imaginary dog, and now a faggot murder case. My friend, you are getting me and Mandy into one hell of a movie. AND a great book. Perhaps it was because the Clutters were ‘of their own’, cf. Williams who, whilst belonging to clubs etc., was still really an ‘outsider’ (Nazi paraphernalia etc.), as was Danny. The Savannah folk took to Berendt.

“I was beguiled by Savannah”, Berendt wrote. By the end of his book, so was I.

Truman Capote's 'In Cold Blood'

In Cold Blood

The cold-blooded murder of four members of the Clutter family by Richard Hicocks and Perry Smith

 The First Edition (1965)

I found this a deeply ‘uncomfortable-to-read’ book; not just because it was a detailed report of four particularly gruesome murders, but because of a growing unease about Capote’s motives and veracity -  apparently, he claimed his memory retention for verbatim conversations was "over 90%". I am afraid, like many others at the time and since, I don’t believe him. I found myself underlining examples where I thought romance had taken wings over factual reporting. Certainly, folk interviewed by Capote (e.g. Mrs Meier, the sheriff’s wife) went on record later as saying they, too often, had a different version of events. He is not popular in Kansas.

Inevitably, only one ‘side’ in the immediate drama could be interviewed: The Clutters were dead. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the Clutters were caricatured - a few writers, with socio-political axes to grind have portrayed the family as the symbol of a class manipulating and perverting other human lives; but Capote is, surely, on the side of the romantic, the quixotic, the hard-done-by, as opposed to the money-minded business class – Perry Smith versus the Clutters. The have-nots juxtaposed with the haves? The poetry loving, abused Smith versus well-off, cushioned Herb Clutter? Capote quoted from Perry Smith’s prison Diary, I heard man say (on the radio) the county attorney will seek Death Penalty. ‘The rich never hang. Only the poor and friendless.’ 

Penguin Edition, 1966 (28th printing)

Why do I think this?  Let me return to my underlinings. (I read the Penguin edition above) and they usually refer to Perry Smith:

(p.255) * Smith is in the sheriff’s cell. The topmost branches of a snow-laden elm brushed against the windows of the ladies’ cell. Squirrels lived in the tree, and after weeks of tempting them with leftover breakfast scraps, Perry lured one off a branch on to the window sill and through the bars. He named it Red, and Red soon settled down, apparently content to share his friend’s captivity…he sketched portraits of Red, drew flowers, and the face of Jesus…  (p.260) still in the cell. Except for the squirrel, except for the Meiers and an occasional consultation with his lawyer, Mr Fleming, Perry was very much alone”  (p.273) at the trial. Wearing an open-necked shirt (borrowed from Mr Meier) and blue jeans rolled up at the cuffs, he (Perry) looked as lonely and inappropriate as a seagull in a wheatfield.   

(p. 340) Smith’s sensitive eyes gazed gravely at the surrounding faces, swerved up to the shadowy hangman (the latter also described as anonymous leathery who impatiently lifted his cowboy hat and settled it again, a gesture somehow reminiscent of a turkey buzzard huffing…) Who’s the ‘baddie’ here?

Compare these extracts, with the seven-word skewering of one of the legal prosecutors (p. 292): A citric smile bent Green’s tiny lips.

Truman Capote

All my examples come from the final section of the book – The Corner – because it was by this section (pp. 252-343) that I felt Capote had lost whatever objectivity he had had originally. He was empathising far more with the perpetrators (especially Smith) than he was with the victims.

On page 300, Capote quotes from a psychiatric journal of the time about Smith-like criminals: All of them, too, had been concerned throughout their early years about being considered ‘sissies’, physically undersized or sickly…  Here was empathy writ large – a mirror portrait of the author himself (he was actually shorter than Smith!).

Fine; but don’t maintain you are writing a purely factual account.

Pluses? The alternating storylines in the early part of the book do heighten tension, even though the reader knows what’s coming. Drawn out descriptions of (even bit-part) people and surroundings delay the tragic central event to dramatic effect. Good novelist’s touches – but for a novel, not a true reconstruction of an horrific event. Throughout the book, Capote’s use of adjectives is skilfully employed to draw the reader to one point of view. Capote is a compelling writer, but he is writing a dramatic piece with moments of persuasive embellishment.

Footnote.

In April 2005, Nancy Clutter’s boyfriend, Bob Rupp (then in his 60s), remembered Capote pestering him with questions. He had still not read ‘In Cold Blood’ and never intended to. Four years later - on the 50^th anniversary of the murders - a first cousin of Nancy’s, Diana Selso Edwards, wrote a newspaper article recalling the first time she had read Capote's book. I was angry and disappointed. The Clutters became cardboard figures, hardly more than a backdrop for Capote's sympathetic depiction of the killers. I felt powerless to correct his version of the truth.

On 28^th November 1966, Capote had hosted his famous Black & White Ball at Manhattan′s Plaza Hotel (a book written a decade ago about it called it ‘The Party of the Century’). It was launched on the back of the phenomenal success of ‘In Cold Blood’ – it was to be the self–promoting, social–climbing apex for Capote, in all its preening glory. The ‘male nymphet’ (as he had been described next to his photo on his first book dust wrapper) had earned millions - around $6 million in 1960s money - from the story of the Kansas murders; one feels he equally earned the rapid decline that set in soon after the party. He expired, aged 59 (11 more years than Herb Clutter had enjoyed) in 1984, after decades of drug abuse and alcoholism. His identification with ‘disenfranchised loners’ was complete. 

Later Postscript!

I wrote the above immediately after finishing the book – on 26^th December.

I have subsequently watched two films: Capote (2005) and In Cold Blood (1967). Philip Seymour Hoffman, a compelling actor (who, ironically, also died of a drug-induced background - aged 46), was the Capote I imagined. My wife said at the end of the DVD, “what an obnoxious man”! The latter film was shot very effectively in black and white and conveyed the dark, brooding, ‘cold’ reality of the unnerving events in grim detail. It helped that most of the scenes were shot on the actual locations, including the Clutter residence and where Smith and Hickock were executed (moreover, seven original members of 12 jurors and the real hangman replayed their parts on the screen). The film could not have been made without Capote’s novel, but, to me at least, it was strangely more effective/compelling because it did not ape his ‘poetry’ (poetic licence? partiality?).  

Columbia Pictures, 1967