The seizures gave my life a general air of chaos. They’d grown more rococo, harder to manage, and the medications I tried mostly made things worse. One made me unable to form coherent sentences. One made me stop eating. One sent me to sleep for twenty hours at a time. None of them worked. Fed up, I got reckless. At one party I fell and crashed through a windowpane. I lay on the floor as my friends swept up the broken glass and joked that my head had made a hole that was the exact shape of Africa. Then ‘99 Red Balloons’ came on, and I was up and dancing, until dawn. The next day I had concussion, but still, I felt glad I hadn’t let my seizures define or limit me.
I met a political researcher, tall and very erudite on the history of the pineapple. When I had a seizure on our first date, he scooped me up off the pavement, got me home, hauled me up four flights of stairs, held my wrists till the spasms stopped, then sat on the edge of my bed and stroked my hair until I fell asleep. I was smitten. And he wooed me. With champagne and chocolates and trips out of town in his battered old car, complicated jazz and simple dinners. But after all that, he said he didn’t want a big relationship. I wanted a love that would tear us apart! So I got needy, I played the damsel in distress. Like the Disney princess in Enchanted, I expected him to catch me every time I fell. It was a relief when we broke up. But as I walked home that last morning, I felt hungrier for love than I had ever been.
Next came an alcoholic – very charming and never without a bottle of whisky. I wanted to go to the dark side with him, and I wanted to save him – but he wisely and elegantly broke up with me. So, all in all, I wasn’t doing that well at tempestuous love. Then I met the oud player. And what happened next only happened because of Wuthering Heights.
It’s time to read it again. I get out my copy and before I even know it, I’ve got a bath running and a glass of wine in my hand. It’s a Pavlovian response. Am I really going to read in the bath, with a glass of wine, on a cold grey Wednesday morning? I am.
Immediately, I’m on the moors. And Heathcliff is black eyed and gazing ferociously, sneering diabolically. The trees are slanted and stunted by raging gales. Dogs snarl. A ‘bitter whirl of wind and suffocating snow’ traps the coxcomb Lockwood at his landlord’s house, and he lies, insomniac, in a wooden bed with a shelf full of books. They’re worn and scuffed, their margins dense with scrawling. (Another reason to love Cathy: she treats her books as familiarly as old friends.) The scribbles are her diary: ‘H. and I are going to rebel.’ That’s Cathy, already a vixen, up and slugging. Moments later, she’s there, an icy hand banging on the window to be let in. She’s lost her way on the moor, she’s ‘been a waif for twenty years!’ Idiot Lockwood smashes her wrist on the broken windowpane and rubs it back and forth until blood soaks the bedclothes. And Heathcliff, gruff, grim Heathcliff, opens the window and sobs out to his heart’s darling to come home.
Best start to a novel EVER.
Nine-year-old Heathcliff, found starving on the streets of Liverpool by Cathy’s father, and bold, saucy, eight-year-old hoyden Cathy, are so lovely at first. So tender. So understanding. When her father dies, they sit up in the bed they share (at eleven and twelve), consoling each other. They imagine heaven so beautifully they almost feel better. It’s adorable. It’s the sweetest glimpse of love in print. But it sours. Cathy’s jealous older brother Hindley separates them, works Heathcliff like a slave and tries to turn Cathy into a lady with fussy ringlets and clothes she can’t tramp the moors in. Cathy says Heathcliff’s been brought so low that it would degrade her to marry him, and Heathcliff hears only that bit and not that she loves him, and he runs off, in a thunderstorm, and Cathy’s all alone.
I wish Cathy were stronger. I wish she’d refuse Edgar Linton’s proposal. I wish she’d trust Heathcliff to come back for her. I wish she didn’t have so many incentives to leave her drunk, miserable brother and their disorderly house. And I wish Edgar wasn’t so good on paper – rich, adoring, and (for a romance hero this is damning with faint praise) ‘cheerful’.
All this I knew already. But for all the times I’ve read Wuthering Heights, it is very different, reading it with Emma’s words from our trip to Haworth ringing in my ears. Every other time I read it uncritically, for comfort; that was the point. Every other time, I suspended my disbelief. But this time, I want to keep waking myself up, keep thinking. This time, I’ve sworn really to think about Cathy. It takes some effort. I get out of the bath, swap my wine for coffee, and try to honestly examine my own feelings about this heroine I thought I knew so well. And what I feel is surprising. Cathy seems haughty. She seems petulant at times, solipsistic, and violent. I don’t feel like Edward from the Twilight novels who damned Wuthering Heights as a book about ‘ghastly people who ruin each other’s lives’ (which is rich coming from him), but this time I do struggle with Cathy’s decision to marry Edgar. Why does she do it? Is she just remarkably naïve? She seems to think she can have Heathcliff as a friend and Edgar as a husband – as if sexual jealousy doesn’t exist, as if she doesn’t know the two men detest each other. When Heathcliff returns, three years later, mysteriously rich, and, finding her married, asks ‘Why did you betray your own heart?’, I’m wondering the same thing.
A word in her defence. Heathcliff didn’t leave a forwarding address. We never do find out where he spent those three years. Nelly thinks he has been in the army because his posture is better, which is just the kind of boring thing Nelly would think. But he could as easily be dead. So Cathy’s options are to marry Edgar, to marry someone else (though there doesn’t seem to be anyone else), or to stay in her brother’s house. Marrying Edgar is really her only viable choice.
But, still, Cathy, why do you betray your own heart?
Later, Cathy falls into ‘brain fever’, which is one of those amorphous diseases fictional Victorians get all the time, and not one my neurologists recognise. I have asked them. This is when Cathy sees how lost she is. She pulls the feathers out of a pillow she’s ripped up with her teeth, and arranges them on the bed sheet, naming the birds they come from – turkey, wild duck, pigeon, moor-cock, lapwing. ‘I wish I were out of doors,’ she cries. ‘I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free . . . I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills.’ This line breaks my heart. Because after betraying her heart, she’s never herself again. She never can be.
But could she have redeemed Heathcliff, if they’d married? I’m not sure. Particularly as I am forcing myself, though it pains me, to admit that Heathcliff is a bad man. He raises a hand to strike a woman (his daughter in law) on page 28. It’s deeply disquieting. I never thought of Heathcliff beating up women, but he does. Repeatedly. Never exactly a jolly, even-keel character, he gets so twisted up by bitterness and hate that he becomes more villain than hero. I hate the way he wreaks revenge on Hindley and his innocent son Hareton, and the way he gloats over his enemies’ misfortunes. I hate him beating Isabella, calling her a ‘slut’, hanging her dog, goading her to hate him, sneering that the more brutal he is to her, the more she loves him. It’s hard to root for a man who rages about saying things like ‘I have no pity! I have no pity! The more the worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails.’ It’s savage stuff, but it’s also just so . . . can I say it? . . . melodramatic.
But here’s the thing: Wuthering Heights isn’t really about Heathcliff as a hero, or Cathy as a heroine. Heathcliff himself cautions against ‘picturing in me a hero’. It’s about love. Transcendent love, operatic love, excessive, abandoned love. It’s unreasonable, this love. It is angsty and probably immature. But tornado love is more appealing than postmodern love, the mealy-mouthed love Umberto Eco wrote about when he defined postmodernism as the attitude ‘of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her “I love you madly”, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you
madly”. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say.’ All those caveats and equivocations make me want to scream. That isn’t love, it’s nit-picking.
Wuthering Heights is a novel that comes out strongly against small-mindedness. Cathy and Heathcliff may be monstrous but at least they aren’t like Edgar, who disowns his sister like a fat-headed patriarchal buffoon. They’re not like Joseph who wants to impose his boring, narrow view of God on everyone else. Or like pernickety, patronising Nelly. Or loser Lockwood idiotically going out in a snowstorm and thinking all the women fancy him (we do not). Cathy and Heathcliff are not sensible in their love. But the novel holds out the hope that their love could have survived if the world weren’t so petty and stupid.
I was brought up on high drama. An Iraqi Jewish endearment, fudwa, means ‘I would die for you’. In a five-minute phone call about yoghurt my grandma can offer to die for me ten or fifteen times. So the Sturm und Drang of Heathcliff and Cathy’s love made sense to me. I wanted a love so intense it could send me into a brain fever or cause the man who loved me to gnash his teeth and dash his head against a tree till he bled. To dig up my grave and be so blinded by love that he’d swear that even after seven years in the ground my face was still my face, uncorrupted.
I met the oud player at a Kurdish community centre where I was researching my first radio play, about a Kurdish teenager who avoids being married off to a Nice Kurdish Boy by joining the freedom fighters in the mountains of Kurdistan. I was still writing the story about a girl who doesn’t want to marry the man her family chooses for her – but I was trying to find different endings for my heroines, new things for them to do.
Over glasses of tea, under maps of Kurdistan (maps that are acts of faith, wishes that one day the Kurds will get their country and the sketched-out borders will be real), the oud player told me the story of his life. He was born on a boat, at sea, in a storm, where his father delivered him in the raging waves. His name means ‘liberty’ in Kurdish. The rest was no less romantic. He’d been with the freedom fighters, he’d been a refugee on the run. He’d arrived in England with only his oud, cigarettes and a copy of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. I’m not even making this up. ‘Do you know the saddest thing that’s happened to the Kurdish people?’ he asked. I shrugged; chemical bombings? Having their language banned and being denied a country? No. ‘We’ve lost all our love songs,’ he said. ‘When we got political, we changed all the songs. Instead of “I love you”, “I want you”, we sing “I love you Kurdistan”, “I want you Kurdistan”. It’s impossible,’ he said, gazing at me, ‘for a man to say to a woman “I love you”.’ I thought he was doing fine.
He played me Kurdish songs, translating the lyrics. As in the Arabic songs I grew up with, the songs are narrated by lovesick swains tormented by unattainable ice queens. One man waits for years in the garden of a woman’s house and, just once, smells her perfume in the evening air. By the time I found out the oud player had a girlfriend, it was too late. I was already in the garden.
We tried to be friends. And when, a year or so later, they broke up, and we ended up in his bed, I half knew they’d get back together. I was behaving badly. But in Wuthering Heights, everything is justified by love. And that first night, I had my recurring dream again, again I was being chased through the desert by mustachioed men, but this time the oud player turned up in a getaway car and saved me. It felt like a sign. But things got a lot more tangled and confused before, many months later, he was single and I was single and we tried again. And then it was sometimes beautiful.
We watched black and white films, we brewed thick, sweet coffee, we went for long walks late at night in London, just us and the foxes. There was a frisson of star-crossedness – my family would not have been happy to know I was dating a Muslim. Which was ironic, because it was the first time I’d gone out with someone who spoke the language of my childhood and it was unbelievably intimate. I felt as if my previous relationships had been lost in translation. He felt like home. And just as I’d always tried with my family, I wanted to make up for all the bad things that had happened to him. But you can’t rescue people; you can only help them rescue themselves. And he didn’t love me the way Heathcliff loves Cathy. He didn’t love me enough to commit to me. I wasn’t Cathy, adored by Heathcliff. I wasn’t even Heathcliff, adoring Cathy as she married another man. I was Isabella, fawning on Heathcliff. And no one wants to be Isabella.
As I’m writing this book, I’m also writing a play, about a woman who goes out with all the wrong men because her paradigm for a romantic hero is Heathcliff. When I show it to my writers’ group – all men, all better feminists than me – over chips and wine at our usual Tuesday night in a skanky pub in Soho, they tell me ‘you can’t really still want Heathcliff!’ My heroine doesn’t work in the first draft, or the second, and I’m wondering if she ever will. And then I think, I must be writing her because I need her, and if I need her, someone else will too. She ends up summoning Heathcliff’s ghost to meet her on the moors so she can persuade herself that he really, finally, definitely isn’t The One. Maybe reading and reconsidering Wuthering Heights is my attempt at a similar exorcism. And I feel weepy. Not pleasurable-weepy but very sad. Because Heathcliff and Cathy feel remote, and I feel as if I’m saying goodbye to a book that meant so much to me.
I wonder if Jane Eyre will pick me up. I wonder if Emma is right.
My copy of Jane Eyre is pristine, not battered, not defaced, not trashed by the fury of my affection. But I’m surprised on the very first page. Jane is so present. While Cathy was muffled, dead for most of the novel, glimpsed through her names scratched into paint, her scribbles in old books and a series of nested narrators, Jane addresses us boldly, vividly from the start. This culminates, of course, in her famous ‘Reader, I married him’. In her very first words she questions authority and in her opening scene she speaks her mind, and gets a book thrown at her head for it. Some men (like her horrid cousin) can’t take a woman being cleverer than them; that would have been a useful thing to know. As a teenager I found her impassive, dejected. When she ruefully imagines that her aunt would like her if she was ‘sanguine, brilliant, careless, exacting, handsome, romping’, I thought those were all things I wanted to be myself. (Yes, romping.) Instead she’s plain and awkward. I was too, but I didn’t want to be. Back then, I wanted my heroines to show me new ways to be, like heedless, selfish Cathy. I didn’t want heroines who mirrored my own anxieties too accurately. But maybe I’ve changed. Or at least: maybe I am changing.
Jane could have taught me that you don’t have to be beautiful to value yourself. She could have taught me to find my own faith – at school, she rejects the founder’s false pieties and her friend Helen’s angelic renunciation, but she hangs on to her own ideas about religion. She could have shown me how to seek out female mentors, like Miss Temple, the headmistress, who clears Jane of the false accusations against her, comforts her with seed cake, and helps her become a teacher.
I’ve always resented what I saw as Jane’s placid preternatural calm but now it seems like enviable self-possession. And she does get angry sometimes. In one amazing passage she seethes, ‘Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded . . . to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.’ Is there a better articulation of discontented Victorian womanhood? Oh Jane, I’ve misjudged you.
When Rochester, her foxy, brooding employer, needs her to deal with crises (a stranger with blood pouring out of his arm, his bedroom going up in smoke), she’s calm, unhysterical, brave; I wish I could be as cool under pressure. She’s not coquettish like h
er pupil Adèle or haughty like Rochester’s admirer Blanche (supposedly elegant, yet always played by an actress in sausage curls). When Rochester asks Jane if she finds him handsome, she bluntly says no. She’s more interested in his ‘original . . . vigorous . . . expanded mind’. (Later she decides he’s not bad looking after all.) She stands up for herself and when she thinks he’s going to marry Blanche, she hands in her notice.
How can anyone not love a Jane who demands,
‘Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton? – a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! – I have as much soul as you, – and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh; – it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal, – as we are!’
How To Be A Heroine Page 17
