David Matthews

Wuthering Heights is one sublimely strange novel. Harold Bloom goes so far as to claim it “as unique and idiosyncratic a narrative as Moby-Dick, and like Melville’s masterwork breaks all the confines of genre.” (“Introduction,” The Brontës, Chelsea House Publishers, 1987, p. 7)

 I came to the book with a vague notion that it has to do with doomed romantic love but was in no way prepared for the twisted tale of tormented passion and ruthless vengeance found there. Wuthering Heights is demanding and not always a source of immediate pleasure, but our engagement does not end, we do not close the book on it, when we come to the last page. In that respect Emily’s novel is comparable to works of Samuel Beckett and Thomas Pynchon. The pleasure we take in it comes as much from pondering it afterward as from the reading itself.

We can understand why Heathcliff is as he is, implacable, uncompromising, misanthropic — brought home by Mr. Earnshaw, master of Thrushcross Grange, father of Hindley and Catherine, “a dirty, ragged, black-haired child; big enough to both walk and talk — found starving, and houseless, and as good as dumb in the streets of Liverpool” (p. 31). He is abused by the older Hindley, who becomes master of the house on the death of his father, and alternately befriended, tormented, and perhaps after some fashion loved by the willful and capricious Catherine. At the same time we sense that Emily does not see Heathcliff as a being reduced to nothing more than the product of his miserable environment. Under other circumstances he might not have been as implacable, uncompromising, and misanthropic, though this is a matter of degree, not kind.

Although Heathcliff’s tenant Lockwood is technically the narrator, most of the story he passes on to the reader comes to him through second- and third-hand accounts. He describes his landlord, Heathcliff, after their first meeting as “the solitary neighbor that I shall be troubled with,” an observation that proves prescient. Then he notes, setting the stage for the claustrophobic tale that follows:

This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist’s Heaven — and Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us. (p. 1)

…

The apartment and furniture would have been nothing extraordinary as belonging to a homely, northern farmer, with a stubborn countenance, and stalwart limbs set out to advantage in knee-breeches and gaiters. Such an individual, seated in his armchair, his mug of ale frothing on the round table before him, is to be seen in any circuit of five or six miles among these hills, if you go at the right time, after dinner. But Mr. Heathcliff forms a singular contrast to his abode and style of living. He is a dark-skinned gypsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman — that is, as much a gentleman as many a country squire: rather slovenly, perhaps, yet not looking amiss with his negligence, because he has an erect and handsome figure — and rather morose — possibly some people might suspect him of a degree of under-bred pride — I have a sympathetic chord within that tells me it is nothing of the sort; I know, by instinct, his reserve springs from an aversion to showy displays of feeling — to manifestations of mutual kindliness. He’ll love and hate, equally under cover, and esteem it a species of impertinence to be loved or hated again — No, I’m running on too fast — I bestow my own attributes over-liberally on him. (p. 3)

Lockwood’s backtracking at the end notwithstanding, the description is apt.

Characters and reader alike are trapped within narrow physical and psychological bounds in a tale set almost entirely in two houses, Thrushcross Grange where Lockwood resides as tenant, and the more isolated and rougher dwelling at Wuthering Heights, and the land between the two. Heathcliff is a demonic force, relentless in his machinations to avenge himself on Edgar Linton and his family for having taken Catherine from him. Only Edgar’s sister Isabella, after Heathcliff seduces and marries her with bad intent, escapes the confines of the Wuthering Heights-Thrushcross Grange orbit, however briefly before her death.

My junior year in college we read The Brothers Karamazov in a class that took up European intellectual history from 1789 to 1914. This was the first of several rereadings of Dostoevsky’s novel over the course of decades, after I discovered it on the recommendation of Dr. Mulvaney, who taught an introductory philosophy course I took spring semester of my freshman year. Dr. Mulvaney, a wonderful teacher who embodied what is best in the ideal of liberal scholarship and education, provided a lengthy reading list from which students could choose several books to read for the class. Among them was The Plague by Albert Camus. I did not read The Plague that spring but picked it up the following fall and found it captivating. There was no particular reason to pick it up when I did; the book just happened to catch my eye on the shelf when I was looking for something to read. One day Dr. Mulvaney and I happened to cross paths on campus, and I mentioned that I read The Plague and enjoyed it. He suggested that if I liked The Plague I should read The Brothers Karamazov. This turned out to be not only a pleasure in itself but also a gateway to Dostoevsky’s other novels, and Dostoevsky and Camus together a gateway to existentialism, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre. Once again I am struck by the role chance occurrence and happenstance of this kind play in our lives and how we come to be who we are.

During class discussion about The Brothers Karamazov, Mr. Mandell another wonderful teacher I was fortunate to know, blurted out, “How realistic is this? These people scream at each other.” Indeed, they do. As do Emily’s people. They are not on the whole people with whom we would wish to spend time. Yet they intrigue us.

“Emily Brontë’s religion is essentially erotic, and her vision of triumphant sexuality is so mingled with death that we can imagine no consummation for the love of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw except death.” (Bloom, pp. 8, 9). I am not sure what Bloom means with the assertion that Emily’s religion is essentially erotic or by triumphant sexuality. Like Bloom I can imagine no consummation for the relationship of Heathcliff and Catherine except death, but I am less ready than he to characterize that relationship as love, or if it be love, it is, in the words of Charlotte, “a sentiment fierce and inhuman.” There may be something of love between them, but that is only an aspect of it. Again Charlotte’s critique strikes me as perceptive:

Heathcliff betrays one solitary human feeling, and that is not his love for Catherine; which is a sentiment fierce and inhuman: a passion such as might boil and glow in the bad essence of some evil genius; a fire that might form the tormented centre — the ever-suffering soul of a magnate of the infernal world: and by its quenchless and ceaseless ravage effect the execution of the decree which dooms him to carry Hell with him wherever he wanders. No; the single link that connects Heathcliff with humanity is his rudely confessed regard for Hareton Earnshaw — the young man whom he has ruined; and then his half-implied esteem for Nelly Dean [the housekeeper who relates the back story to Lockwood]. These solitary traits omitted, we should say he was child neither of Lascar nor gipsy, but a man’s shape animated by demon life — a Ghoul — an Afreet. (writing as Currer Bell in an editor’s preface to Wuthering Heights)

As for Catherine, the two-sidedness and ambivalence of her feelings for both Heathcliff and Edgar Linton brings to mind Dostoevsky’s great female heroes Nastasya Filippovna in The Idiot and Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov. The story could be seen as effectively ending with Catherine’s death, followed by a lengthy epilogue where Heathcliff’s single-minded passion for revenge plays out with the unanticipated consequence that it brings together Cathy Linton and Hareton Earnshaw, a beauty and the beast motif that in lesser hands might be hackneyed, but I think Emily pulls it off as under Cathy’s influence the abrupt, uncouth, wholly unsophisticated, and unlettered Hareton’s better qualities are brought out and flourish.

I anticipate that a second reading of Wuthering Heights will reward with glimmers of understanding missed the first go around. That will come another day. For now, it is on to the finish of Jane Eyre and the conclusion of this series of essays. I regret that I have given the third sister, Anne, short shrift here, and fully intend to sample one of her novels down the road.

Those who wish to read more about the remarkable Brontës might find BrontëBlog of interest.

As for your oft humbled scribe, I am off on a new adventure even as I set about wrapping up the Brontë project: the one-volume condensation, weighing in at just under a thousand pages, of Joseph Frank’s monumental five-volume biography of Dostoevsky. Frank’s premise is that

a conventional biographical point of view could not do justice of the complexities of his [Dostoevsky's] creations. To be sure, while Dostoevsky’s characters struggle with the psychological and sentimental problems that provide the substance of all his novels, more important, his books are also inspired by the ideological doctrines of the time…. The personal entanglements of the figures in the novels, though depicted with often melodramatic intensity, cannot really be understood unless we grasp how their actions are intertwined with ideological motivations.

Thus, Frank’s treatment is as much history of ideas, intellectual history, as biography. It promises to be fascinating.

David :: Mar.29.2010 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: 1 Comment »

Conversations with Joseph Brodsky
Solomon Volkov
The Free Press, 1998, 306 pp.

I am presently enjoying a collection of conversations between the poet Joseph Brodsky and Solomon Volkov, a Russian musician, cultural critic, and author who emigrated to the U.S. in 1976, four years after Brodsky came here in exile. Brodsky as he is portrayed in the film Room and a Half is a considerably more appealing character than the Brodsky of these tape-recorded interviews that took place between 1978 and 1993. Plenty of interesting people can be pompous, arrogant, and full of themselves. Some I find simpatico. Brodsky, not so much.

Even so these wide-ranging interviews with the Nobel Prize-winning poet who lived almost half of his life in involuntary exile are a joy to read, unconvinced though I am by many of his assertions and ideas. My experience here bears out my conviction that we can respect and appreciate people with whom we differ on substantive matters and find ourselves to some degree unsympathetic.

Brodsky was not inclined to false modesty, I give him that, and the rather silly observations he was prone to spout are at times amusing, as with these remarks about Stalin and Western intellectuals:

…[D]o you know who Stalin made a very strong impression on? Homosexuals! This is terribly interesting. There was something southern, something Mediterranean in that mustache. A real-live mustachioed daddy! I think that a significant percentage of the support for Stalin among the intelligentsia in the West had to do with their latent homosexuality. I would guess that many people in the West turned to the Communist faith precisely for this reason. That is, they simply worshiped Stalin! (pp. 30-31)

Anti-intellectualism is a hallowed American tradition, as is homophobia for that matter. Perhaps Brodsky the emigré is just trying to fit in as he exhibits a variant strain not uncommon in intellectuals of the self-educated variety, which manifests itself in a tendency to hurl slurs at intellectuals, the intelligentsia, in general. This is altogether distinct from the legitimate leveling of concrete criticism against individual intellectuals, debatable points that will stand or fall on their merits.

There is an interesting exchange about European and American attitudes about money in an interview from the second half of the 1980s.

Brodsky: By the way, not just in Russia, but in Europe, too, talking about money is just not done. There are so many political parties, platforms, philosophies, and everything else there, all of which can be discussed with impunity, but no one would ever breathe a word about money. Whereas here, in the States, everyone talks about it. Well, maybe not everyone, but in general, people talk about money quite a lot. The majority of Americans, in comparison with Europeans, are extremely well off. Nonetheless, a rich American can start making faces because a sandwich seems too expensive to him. Or make a terrible scene about it in a restaurant.

Volkov: I’ve run into that more than once. Americans are nonchalant about going to a restaurant only when their company is footing the bill. (pp. 163-164)

A little further on Volkov inquires if Brodsky cooks for himself or goes out to eat.

Brodsky: There’s this illusion that it’s cheaper to cook for yourself, which is true to a certain extent, but in the final analysis, it’s not. There are so many psychological costs involved. First, there’s all that chaos. Then endless dilemmas arise: wash the dishes or not? And if so, then now or later? And so on. Therefore, as a rule, I go out in the evening. (p. 164)

The psychological costs involved in cooking for oneself! Now there’s an intellectual observation! These considerations have been on my mind of late even before I came to this passage. I enjoy dinner out, wine, conversation when with a companion. Dining out is something of an occasion, more than just getting something to eat. For that reason and so that I do not have to concern myself too much about expense when I do eat out, I cook at home most nights. I am no great shakes as a cook, but I do well enough for myself. Brodsky nails it with the psychological cost. That’s the kicker, the time it takes for preparation before and cleaning up after, with the disruption and chaos that entails. When you factor this in with time wasted at the wage-work, granted a necessary evil but nonetheless an evil, a substantial chunk is taken out of the day that would be better spent on other pursuits. There is no solution to this dilemma. We must live with it. Or as I advised my niece, an art major, when she asked if I have any advice about how to survive as an artist: Marry a doctor. It may be too late for me, but she still has a shot.

David :: Mar.13.2010 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: 2 Comments »

I seem to recall an interview with Gregory Corso where he remarked that if he found the poet’s life interesting he would the find the poetry interesting. I believe he was speaking of Shelley, but I could be mistaken, as I cannot lay my hands on the interview to confirm that recollection, and the gears of memory grind erratically these days.

Be that as it may, I located the Unmuzzled Ox interview where Corso responded to Michael Andre’s mention of a Richard Howard essay about his  poetry:

…I met him maybe two or three times, so he gets his shot from what I write. Anybody is going to take me for what I write, then I have the trump card. After all, I know what I am putting down there and why I am putting it down. The poet and his poetry are inseparable [italics mine]. (Writings from Unmuzzled Ox Magazine, 1973, 1975, 1981, p. 140)

Yes, well, maybe. Does the writer really hold a trump card that overrides all else? Must we know what a writer thinks she or he is putting down and why to make a legitimate critical assessment, much less understand it, in whatever sense we may think of understanding these things? Must we read the biography, journals, letters, and so on before taking up the body of a writer’s work?

We bring whatever we may know of an author’s life, background, influences, interests, and passions to bear on what we read, and we hope we mange this with discrimination and acumen, wary of reading into the writing what is not there, but this knowledge is not sine qua non. We appreciate writers about whom we know next to nothing of their lives and thinking, however curious we may be and frustrated when we cannot satisfy that curiosity. Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, J.D. Salinger, and Thomas Pynchon come readily to mind, our appreciation scarcely diminished by how little we know about them. Do we read Nietzsche differently knowing that he composed books during long walks of several hours morning and afternoon? Does this help us understand what he was up to? Or thought he was up to? Does knowing so little about Shakespeare diminish our reading of Hamlet, King Lear, and the rest?

This brings us back to the Brontë project, which I am thoroughly enjoying. Those girls are fascinating, three sisters, daughters of a provincial clergyman, who grew to be young women of formidable intellect and significant literary accomplishment in their all too brief lives. Whether the context provided by a glimpse into those lives aids interpretation of the writing may be almost beside the point. Perhaps what we learn about them by way of biographical and personal details offers a different pleasure, distinct though not altogether separate from the pleasure their novels and poems give us.

More is known of Charlotte than her sisters thanks to her prolific, lifelong correspondence, notably to her childhood school friend Ellen Nussey, her publishers, and more occasionally literary contemporaries such as Robert Southey, Hartley Coleridge (son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge), Thomas de Quincey, and Elizabeth Gaskell. The letters make clear that while Charlotte and her sisters lived almost their entire lives in provincial isolation, they were anything but ignorant of the wider world, especially the world of arts and letters.

Charlotte (1816–1854) and Emily (1818–1848) were the third and fifth of six children born in a span of seven years, from 1813 to 1820, to Patrick and Maria Brontë in Haworth, Yorkshire. Maria died in 1821, leaving Patrick to rear the brood with the aid of his sister-in-law, who moved in with the family in 1823. More tragedy followed in 1825 when Marie and Elizabeth, the oldest of the siblings, died of tuberculosis contracted at Cowan Bridge School, a clergymen’s daughters boarding school that was by general account a gruesome place. Charlotte and Emily attended the school briefly in 1824 before being brought home by their father after their sisters’ deaths. The school register offers these notes:

[Emily] Reads very prettily & Works a little

[Charlotte] Reads tolerably — Writes indifferently — Ciphers a little and works neatly — Knows nothing of Grammar, Geography, History or Accomplishments — Altogether clever of her age but knows nothing systematically.

Six years later Charlotte attended Roe’s Head School, where she later taught. Emily followed her sister to Roe’s Head in 1835, but formal schooling did not agree with her. She lasted three months and grew miserable, pale, and thin before returning home. The girls were otherwise schooled at home by their father, with Charlotte also teaching her younger sisters.

Literary endeavor was nothing out of the ordinary in the Brontë household. Patrick published two volumes of poems, two prose tales, two pamphlets, and three sermons, beside which several articles and poems appeared in local newspapers. By general account none of it was of any distinction. Maria penned an essay entitled “On the Advantages of Poverty in Religious Concerns,” described as “[p]ious and sincere, entirely correct in the style of the time…[but containing] nothing original or striking and did not achieve, perhaps did not seriously attempt, publication” (Phyllis Bentley, The Brontës, Thames and Hudson, 1969, p. 12). For the sisters “the highest stimulus, as well as the liveliest pleasure [they] had known from childhood upwards, lay in attempts at literary composition.” (Charlotte, quoted in Bentley, p. 13)

One day in 1826 Patrick brought home a box of wooden soldiers for Branwell and other gifts, including a model village, for the girls. The children immediately gave names to the soldiers and made up stories about them, which grew into extensive written accounts of the fanciful kingdoms of Angria (the creation of Charlotte and Branwell) and the darker Gondal (from the imaginations of Emily and Anne).

The family’s high hopes for Branwell, “his Father’s and his sisters’ pride and hope in boyhood” (Charlotte, letter to W.S. Williams, 2 October 1848), did not pan out. Sent to London to study art, he fell in with a bad crowd and returned home after only a week. Thereafter he found gainful employment only sporadically.

[He] drank, got into debt, took opium, wrote wild letters, illustrated by wild sketches…dozed about the Parsonage in a drunken stupor by day, raged and ranted by night, and in general behaved with such feverish irresponsibility as to bring continual disquiet and distress to the Parsonage. (Bentley, p. 84)

At her brother’s death Charlotte wrote,

I do not weep from a sense of bereavement — there is no prop withdrawn, no consolation torn away no dear companion lost — but for the wreck of talent, the ruin of promise, the untimely dreary extinction of what might have been a burning and a shining light. My brother was a year my junior; I had aspirations and ambitions for him once — long ago — they have perished mournfully — nothing remains of him but a memory of errors and sufferings — There is such a bitterness of pity for his life and death — such a yearning for the emptiness of his whole existence as I cannot describe — I trust time will allay these feelings. (Letter to Williams, 2 October 1848).

There would have been no such expectations for the sisters, career opportunities being not exactly abundant for women in a provincial village in the first half of the nineteenth-century. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne determined that their best shot lay in teaching or being governesses, to which they were not particularly well suited, despite their considerable intelligence and learning. Charlotte put it frankly in a letter to Ellen Nussey:

…no one but myself can tell how hard a Governesse’s work is to me — for no one but myself is aware how utterly averse my whole mind and nature are from the employment —  Do not think that I fail to blame myself for this or that I leave any means unemployed to conquer this feeling. Some of my greatest difficulties lie in things that would appear to you comparatively trivial. I find it so hard to repel the rude familiarity of the children —  I find it so difficult to ask either servants or mistress for anything I want, however much I want it. It is less pain to me to endure the greatest inconvenience than to go into the kitchen to request its removal. I am a fool — Heaven knows I cannot help it. (3 March 1841)

How could I not feel kinship with this woman? As for Emily, Charlotte says she “is not very fond of teaching but she would nevertheless take care of the housekeeping, and though she is rather withdrawn she has too kind a heart not to do her utmost for the well-being of the children — she is also a very generous soul…” (letter to Constantin Heger, 24 July 1844, where Charlotte tells of a plan to open a small boarding school at the parsonage).

Their aunt derived some financial resources from her father, who was a prosperous merchant. In 1842 Charlotte and Emily convinced her to send them to school in Brussels where they might improve their French and German and even gain a little Italian and thereby improve their prospects for employment as teachers. At the Pensionnat Heger they studied French, German, music, singing, writing, arithmetic, and drawing. Charlotte wrote of Emily that she “works like a horse” (letter to EN May 1842) and “is making rapid progress in French, German, Music and Drawing —  Monsieur & Madame Heger [who ran the school] begin to recognize the valuable points of her character under her singularities.” (letter to EN July 1842).

The death of their aunt later that year brought the sisters home, where Emily remained when Charlotte returned to the school as a teacher in January 1843. Charlotte did not care for the Belgian girls she taught or the other teachers, and she fell for Monsieur Heger, an unfortunate situation made worse when Madame Heger picked up on it.  A miserable year ended with Charlotte’s departure from Brussels for good in December. Her letters to M. Heger over the next two years convey both her feelings for him and the one-sided aspect of the affair.

The sisters also engaged in some modest investments, which Emily managed “in a most handsome and able manner” (letter to Margaret Wooler, 30 January 1846) for Charlotte while she was in Brussels, evidently with some persnicketiness, to judge by Charlotte’s letter, where she writes of the Railway Panic and their investment in the York and North Midland line. Charlotte assured Wooler, whom the sisters had previously solicited for investment advice, that their capital was as yet undiminished, but she would have preferred moving it to a more secure investment. She was not, however, able to persuade her sisters and would rather run the risk of loss than hurt Emily’s feelings, saying,

…therefore I will let her manage still and take the consequences. Disinterested and energetic she certainly is and if she be not quite so tractable or open to conviction as I could wish I must remember perfection is not the lot of humanity and as long as we can regard those we love and to whom we are closely allied, with profound and never-shaken esteem, it is a small thing that they should vex us occasionally by, what appear to us, unreasonable and headstrong notions. (ibid.)

As I write this, I have read Wuthering Heights, about half of Jane Eyre, biographical and critical writings about the sisters from several sources, and a fair number of Charlotte’s letters. Charlotte is interesting on many levels, intelligent, perceptive, witty. To Anne I have given only passing attention thus far. It is Emily, mysterious, reclusive, fiercely intelligent, fiercely independent, who grips my imagination with each reference to her singularities and unreasonable and headstrong notions.

A good deal of what we know about Emily comes from Charlotte; much of the rest is surmise and speculation that draws on Wuthering Heights, the astounding poems, and characters in her sisters’ novels that might be modeled at least in part on her. I quote here at length from Charlotte’s prefatory note to “Selections from Poems by Ellis Bell [Emily Brontë]” for its glimpse into Emily’s persona and for the vivid description of the place the sisters called home.

At that period [when Emily was sixteen] she was sent to school. Her previous life, with the exception of a single half-year, had been passed in the absolute retirement of a village parsonage, amongst the hills bordering Yorkshire and Lancashire. The scenery of these hills is not grand — it is not romantic; it is scarcely striking. Long low moors, dark with heath, shut in little valleys, where a stream waters, here and there, a fringe of stunted copse. Mills and scattered cottages chase romance from these valleys; it is only higher up, deep in amongst the ridges of the moors, that Imagination can find rest for the sole of her foot: and even if she finds it there, she must be a solitude-loving raven — no gentle dove. If she demand beauty to inspire her, she must bring it inborn: these moors are too stern to yield any product so delicate. The eye of the gazer must itself brim with a ‘purple light,’ intense enough to perpetuate the brief flower-flush of August on the heather, or the rare sunset-smile of June; out of his heart must well the freshness, that in latter spring and early summer brightens the bracken, nurtures the moss, and cherishes the starry flowers that spangle for a few weeks the pasture of the moor-sheep. Unless that light and freshness are innate and self-sustained, the drear prospect of a Yorkshire moor will be found as barren of poetic as of agricultural interest: where the love of wild nature is strong, the locality will perhaps be clung to with the more passionate constancy, because from the hill-lover’s self comes half its charm.

My sister Emily loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen hollow in a livid hill-side her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best loved was — liberty.

Liberty was the breath of Emily’s nostrils; without it, she perished. The change from her own home to a school, and from her very noiseless, very secluded, but unrestricted and inartificial mode of life, to one of disciplined routine (though under the kindliest auspices), was what she failed in enduring. Her nature proved here too strong for her fortitude. Every morning when she woke, the vision of home and the moors rushed on her, and darkened and saddened the day that lay before her. Nobody knew what ailed her but me — I knew only too well. In this struggle her health was quickly broken: her white face, attenuated form, and failing strength threatened rapid decline. I felt in my heart she would die if she did not go home, and with this conviction obtained her recall. She had only been three months at school; and it was some years before the experiment of sending her from home was again ventured on. After the age of twenty, having meantime studied alone with diligence and perseverance, she went with me to an establishment on the Continent: the same suffering and conflict ensued, heightened by the strong recoil of her upright, heretic and English spirit from the gentle Jesuitry of the foreign and Romish system. Once more she seemed sinking, but this time she rallied through the mere force of resolution: with inward remorse and shame she looked back on her former failure, and resolved to conquer in this second ordeal. She did conquer: but the victory cost her dear. She was never happy till she carried her hard-won knowledge back to the remote English village, the old parsonage-house, and desolate Yorkshire hills. —

In 1845 Charlotte accidentally happened on a notebook in which Emily had copied her poems and found them “wild, melancholy and elevating.” Emily was at first furious at this invasion of her privacy. Eventually Charlotte convinced her that the poems merited publication. A volume containing poems by all three sisters was brought out at their expense in 1846 as Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, published pseudonymously to avoid the bias of the critics against women writers and to keep the publication secret to their father, brother, and neighbors. The publication was conspicuous for its lack of success, as Charlotte documented in a note to de Quincey signed by Currer Bell:

My Relatives, Ellis and Acton Bell and myself, heedless of the repeated warnings of various respectable publishers, have committed the rash act of printing a volume of poems.

The consequences predicted have, of course, overtaken us; our book is found to be a drug; no man needs it or heeds it; in the space of a year our publisher has disposed but of two copies, and by what painful efforts he succeeded in getting rid of those two, himself only knows.

Before transferring the edition to the trunk-makers, we have decided on distributing as presents a few copies of what we cannot sell — we beg to offer you one in acknowledgment of the pleasure and profit we have often and long derived from your works — (16 June 1847)

A bit more than a year later, in September 1848, after publication of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Anne’s Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Charlotte told Williams that she had no pride in her poems from that first book at the same time she attested to Emily’s strength and originality.

…much of it was written in early youth — I feel it now to be crude and rhapsodical. Ellis Bell’s [Emily's] is of a different stamp — of its sterling excellence I am deeply convinced, and have been from the first moment the M.S. fell by chance into my hands. The pieces are short, but they are very genuine: they stirred my heart like the sound of a trumpet when I read them alone and in secret. The deep excitement I felt forced from me the confession of the discovery I had made — I was sternly rated at first for having taken an unwarrantable liberty — this I expected — for Ellis Bell is of no flexible or ordinary materials — but by dint of entreaty and reason — I at last wrung out a reluctant consent to have the “rhymes” (as they were contemptuously termed) published — The author never alludes to them — or when she does — it is with scorn — but I know — no woman that ever lived — ever wrote such poetry before — condensed energy, clearness, finish — strange, strong pathos are their characteristics — utterly different from the weak diffusiveness — the laboured yet feeble wordiness which dilute the writings of even popular poetesses.

That the mysterious Emily should so captivate me is no mystery. The iconic Romantic figure of the solitary poet, the solitude-loving raven, walking where her own nature would be leading, vexed to choose another guide, shunning convention, strong-natured and stubborn in Imagination’s embrace of a bleak beauty, is at the heart of what has drawn me to poetry from its first stirrings in me. This is enough to make Emily intriguing even if the writing did not hold up. Because the writing does hold up, her persona adds to the texture and richness of our reading. Because the writing holds up, Emily is not just intriguing, she is important.

David :: Mar.07.2010 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: No Comments »