I noted last week that my reading over the year had not thus far been very serious. I felt that should be remedied, if only to a limited extent, so one of the books I selected from the Roshanara stock, taking it down to the cottage too when I was there last week, was a collection of stories by Thomas Hardy called Wessex Tales.
I had not read it previously, indeed I don’t think I have read any of his short stories, though I have of course read most of his novels, having discovered him in the mid-sixties and laid my hands on whatever I could find. Unfortunately I did not much like The Mayor of Casterbridge, which was our Ordinary Level text, and I then slowed down, though I had much loved the others I had read in swift succession, the comic Under the Greenwood Tree, the boisterous Far From the Madding Crowd turned into a glorious film, and even the gloomy Jude the Obscure.
There were others over the years but I have not read all and, having finished the stories in this volume, I think I would like to read the other novels, synopses of which sound quite fascinating. For he is a marvellous story-teller and once one starts, it is difficult to put the book down. This is especially true of the different stories in Wessex Tales though I should note that there is a certain sameness about the basic situation in more than a couple.
Several plots are about a man marrying the wrong woman, and then regretting it. But things work out in different ways, melodramatically but fascinatingly. In one the rejected woman dreams of injuring the wife, whose arm then withers, whereupon she tries a remedy akin to witchcraft to cure it, placing it on the neck of a hanged man – who turns out to be the son of the rejected woman by her husband. In another the man saves his wife who seems dead by drowning, in an accident involving the wife of a friend of his. The rescued woman leaves her husband and finally dies, but when he is free to propose to his first love, she has married the widower to whom the main protagonist had introduced her as a governess for his children.
Compared to this intensity the third story on the same theme might seem tame, for there the girl refuses the man when she finds that he had been in love with the wife of her brother. That couple come home after years away, only for the brother to die, but before he learns of this the other chap says that he will look after their child, though he is not in a position to look after her. His fiancé overhears this and, in announcing that her brother is dead, tells him to marry the widow, which he does, but gets little joy of it. When she too dies, the man tries again, but the girl now adamantly refuses him.
All sad stuff, but the implausibility is lessened by Hardy’s relentless vision of a fate that plays games with us, put most strikingly in his greatest novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. His peroration, where he declares that ‘the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess’ typifies the bleak vision which dominated his writing and in spite of so much preposterous coincidence is illustrated so movingly.
The pictures are of a television production of some of the tales.