First Musing:  On A Classic Work of Literature

Written a few years back, I admit. I had just reading "Wuthering Heights". I ought to explain, it was April when I wrote it.

I am giving advance warning, and an advance apology, for what I am about to say, because I know it's going to be unpopular in many quarters, and I know that some of those same quarters may be my dearest friends. All I can plead in mitigation is that we are all grown up people here, and I believe that we are not afraid of voicing opinions with which others may disagree, and we all believe that others have the right to voice different ones. And so on.

I have to say to my shame, that this is the first time I have read it all the way through, having made an abortive beginning at the age of eight when it was my mother's night school English text, and getting the Cathys and Lintons totally mixed up. So, when a copy came into my hands for 50p, I thought, "Now, Mim, this is your chance, are you going to let one of the acknowledged diamonds of English literature pass you by?" and I thought, "Of course not!" The lady in Poor Richard's Books, our local second-hand book emporium, told me it was her favourite book. I knew that the late Heath Ledger was apparently named for the chief character. The paperback fitted neatly into my work handbag for reading on the train. All the omens were, therefore, good.

Now I have given up negativity for Lent, as some of you know, and am therefore embracing positivity, and therefore, the use of some words or phrases must not pass either my tongue or my keyboard during this holy season.

Words, for example, like "Horseshit".

Which is probably just as well.

In its defence, it is a great page-turner, and once you have started, you feel you have to see the thing through to the end. The descriptions of the countryside and the Yorkshire moors are absolutely mouthwatering. But the characters! Oh my sacred aunt. There isn't one of them that you wouldn't happily employ as a moving target in the World All-Comers Backside-Kicking Championships. Catherine Earnshaw has to be one of the most irritating little divas in literature, surely, a young woman who basically dies to spite everybody.  Her deathbed scene, by the way, is hilarious - she staggers around sinking into things and raising herself weakly up, and pulling Heathcliff's hair and telling him he has murdered her, and generally behaving swooningly, and then almost as an afterthought, giving birth to the second Catherine.  (That's Catherine Linton, afterwards Catherine Heathcliff, afterwards Catherine Earnshaw, not to be confused with her mother, the said diva, Catherine Earnshaw, afterwards Catherine Linton, and at no point Catherine Heathcliff.  Keep up at the back, there.) I will also say, however, for Emily Bronte's characterisation that she is really good on teenagers and very honest about what little s-h-one-ts they can be. When you remember for example that the "elder" Catherine is nineteen when she dies, a lot of her behaviour, unfortunately, makes sense. And yes, I do remember myself at that age. That's what I mean.

But the worst disappointment must surely be the portrayal of Heathcliff himself.  I believe there are otherwise sensible women who would happily throw their underwear at him were he to appear before them. I think the lady in Poor Richard's Books may have been one of them. If this is so, it is really worrying, because he is portrayed as unremittingly bad almost from the first, when the nice but hopelessly naive Mr Earnshaw discovers him as a child in a Liverpool slum. Abuse at the hands of Mr Earnshaw's son obviously doesn't help, as he then spends the rest of his life exacting diabolical revenge on everybody for everything. Except, actually, that he doesn't murder Number One Catherine  - she is exaggerating, as usual.  It's about the one crime he doesn't commit. (He does just about everything else, including a spot of quite lovingly described necrophilia.  He probably would have ridden a bike without lights if bikes had been invented at that point.) In short, he is a man who should just have gone around with "I am the Devil Incarnate" tattooed on his forehead, thus sparing everyone the bother. Completely charmless and actually, two-dimensional. You feel that a puff of green smoke should appear every time he has a scene. A pantomime villain, but without the laughs.

Oh, and there is a religious maniac who wouldn't be too out of place in "Cold Comfort Farm" - parts of which, I guess, are "Wuthering Heights" played for laughs - and which is definitely up there among my favourite books. A young woman's book, too, like "Wuthering Heights". Maybe that says more about me than about either book.

I dunno, I just dunno.  A rough diamond of a book, I think. A stained brocade. A flawed masterpiece. Who knows, if Emily had lived, what else, etc, etc.

Or, possibly, horseshit.

Can't get that ruddy Kate Bush song out of my head, though.

Mim