Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

  I had no suspicion yet that these women were not indeed the ladies they personated; and I blamed myself for my weak fears—It cannot be, thought I, that such ladies will abet treachery against a poor creature they are so fond of. They must undoubtedly be the persons they appear to be—what folly to doubt it! The air, the dress, the dignity, of women of quality—How unworthy of them, and of my charity, concluded I, is this ungenerous shadow of suspicion!

  So, recovering my stupefied spirits as well as they could be recovered (for I was heavier and heavier; and wondered to Dorcas what ailed me; rubbing my eyes, and taking some of her snuff, pinch after pinch, to very little purpose), I pursued my employment: but when that was over, all packed up that I designed to be packed up; and I had nothing to do but to think; and found them tarry so long; I thought I should have gone distracted. I shut myself into the chamber that had been mine; I kneeled, I prayed; yet knew not what I prayed for: then ran out again. It was almost dark night, I said: where, where, was Mr Lovelace?

  He came to me, taking no notice at first of my consternation and wildness (what they had given me made me incoherent and wild): All goes well, said he, my dear!—A line from Captain Tomlinson!

  All indeed did go well for the villainous project of the most cruel and most villainous of men!

  I demanded his aunt!—I demanded his cousin!—The evening, I said, was closing!—My head was very, very bad, I remember, I said—And it grew worse and worse.

  Terror, however, as yet kept up my spirits; and I insisted upon his going himself to hasten them.

  He called his servant. He raved at the sex for their delay: ’twas well that business of consequence seldom depended upon such parading, unpunctual triflers!

  His servant came.

  He ordered him to fly to his cousin Leeson’s; and to let his aunt and cousins know how uneasy we both were at their delay: adding, of his own accord, Desire them, if they don’t come instantly, to send their coach and we will go without them. Tell them I wonder they’ll serve me so!

  I thought this was considerately and fairly put. But now, indifferent as my head was, I had a little time to consider the man and his behaviour. He terrified me with his looks, and with his violent emotions as he gazed upon me. Evident joy-suppressed emotions, as I have since recollected. His sentences short, and pronounced as if his breath were touched. Never saw I his abominable eyes look, as then they looked—triumph in them!—fierce and wild; and more disagreeable than the women’s at the vile house appeared to me when I first saw them: and at times, such a leering, mischief-boding cast!—I would have given the world to have been an hundred miles from him. Yet his behaviour was decent—a decency, however, that I might have seen to be struggled for—for he snatched my hand two or three times with a vehemence in his grasp that hurt me; speaking words of tenderness through his shut teeth, as it seemed; and let it go with a beggar-voiced humble accent, like the vile woman’s just before; half-inward; yet his words and manner carrying the appearance of strong and almost convulsed passion!—Oh my dear! What mischief was he not then meditating!

  I complained once or twice of thirst. My mouth seemed parched. At the time, I supposed that it was my terror (gasping often as I did for breath) that parched up the roof of my mouth. I called for water: some table-beer was brought me. Beer, I suppose, was a better vehicle (if I were not dosed enough before) for their potions. I told the maid that she knew I seldom tasted malt-liquor: yet, suspecting nothing of this nature, being extremely thirsty I drank it, as what came next: and instantly, as it were, found myself much worse than before; as if inebriated, I should fancy: I know not how.

  His servant was gone twice as long as he needed: and, just before his return, came one of the pretended Lady Betty’s, with a letter for Mr Lovelace.

  He sent it up to me. I read it: and then it was that I thought myself a lost creature; it being to put off her going to Hampstead that night, on account of violent fits which Miss Montague was pretended to be seized with: for then immediately came into my head his vile attempt upon me in this house; the revenge that my flight might too probably inspire him with on that occasion, and because of the difficulty I made to forgive him and to be reconciled to him; his very looks wild and dreadful to me; and the women of the house such as I had more reason than ever, even from the pretended Lady Betty’s hints, to be afraid of: all these crowding together in my apprehensive mind, I fell into a kind of frenzy.

  I have not remembrance how I was for the time it lasted: but I know that in my first agitations I pulled off my head-dress, and tore my ruffles in twenty tatters; and ran to find him out.

  When a little recovered, I insisted upon the hint he had given of their coach. But the messenger, he said, had told him that it was sent to fetch a physician, lest his chariot should be put up, or not ready.

  I then insisted upon going directly to Lady Betty’s lodgings.

  Mrs Leeson’s was now a crowded house, he said: and as my earnestness could be owing to nothing but groundless apprehension (and oh what vows, what protestations of his honour did he then make!), he hoped I would not add to their present concern. Charlotte, indeed, was used to fits, he said, upon any great surprises, whether of joy or grief; and they would hold her for a week together if not got off in a few hours.

  You are an observer of eyes, my dear, said the villain; perhaps in secret insult: saw you not in Miss Montague’s now and then, at Hampstead, something wildish?—I was afraid for her then—Silence and quiet only do her good: your concern for her, and her love for you, will but augment the poor girl’s disorder, if you should go.

  All impatient with grief and apprehension, I still declared myself resolved not to stay in that house till morning. All I had in the world, my rings, my watch, my little money, for a coach! or, if one were not to be got, I would go on foot to Hampstead that night, though I walked it by myself.

  A coach was hereupon sent for, or pretended to be sent for. Any price, he said, he would give to oblige me, late as it was; and he would attend me with all his soul—But no coach was to be got.

  Let me cut short the rest. I grew worse and worse in my head; now stupid, now raving, now senseless. The vilest of vile women was brought to frighten me. Never was there so horrible a creature as she appeared to me at the time.

  I remember, I pleaded for mercy—I remember that I said I would be his—indeed I would be his—to obtain his mercy—But no mercy found I!—My strength, my intellects, failed me!—And then such scenes followed—Oh my dear, such dreadful scenes!—fits upon fits (faintly indeed, and imperfectly remembered) procuring me no compassion—but death was withheld from me. That would have been too great a mercy!

  Lovelace will come to understand that his rape of Clarissa was an apocalyptic defeat for him.

  His realization is slow: it comes when Lovelace suddenly apprehends the dialectical entrapment Clarissa has been for him:

  A horrid dear creature!—By my soul, she made me shudder! She had need, indeed, to talk of her unhappiness, in falling into the hands of the only man in the world who could have used her as I have used her! She is the only woman in the world who could have shocked and disturbed me as she has done—So we are upon a foot in that respect. And I think I have the worst of it by much. Since very little has been my joy; very much my trouble: and her punishment, as she calls it, is over: but when mine will, or what it may be, who can tell?

  Here, only recapitulating (think, then, how I must be affected at the time), I was forced to leave off, and sing a song to myself. I aimed at a lively air; but I croaked rather than sung: and fell into the old dismal thirtieth of January strain. I hemmed up for a sprightlier note; but it would not do: and at last I ended, like a malefactor, in a dead psalm melody.

  High-ho!—I gape like an unfledged kite in its nest, wanting to swallow a chicken, bobbed at its mouth by its marauding dam!—

  W
hat a devil ails me!—I can neither think nor write!—

  Lie down, pen, for a moment!—

  (Letter 226)

  The devil that ails him is the beginning of his own end, his falling outward and downward from his last shreds of a libertine ideology into the dreadful inner space of his defeat by Clarissa, his enforced realization that self-willing and self-assertion are permanently over for him. Clarissa, a great Puritan withholder of esteem, will not accept him at his own evaluation, and he begins to know that pragmatically they have destroyed one another. His actual death is a release from the death-in-life he has suffered since Clarissa’s death.

  Clarissa Harlowe is a larger form than all the heroines of the Protestant will descended from her: Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, Anne Elliot; Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne; George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke; Thomas Hardy’s Sue Bridehead; Henry James’s Isabel Archer, Milly Theale; D. H. Lawrence’s Ursula Brangwen; E. M. Forster’s Margaret Schlegel; and Virginia Woolf’s Lily Briscoe. The largeness is Samuel Richardson’s Shakespearean triumph. The fire of divine wrath is mitigated by Clarissa’s inward light. If there could be a Protestant version of Dante’s Beatrice, it would be Clarissa Harlowe.

  CHAPTER 3

  Tom Jones (1749)

  HENRY FIELDING

  WILLIAM EMPSON increasingly seems to me the most useful literary critic of the twentieth century. I owe a lot more to the great Canadian magus Northrop Frye, whose writings formed me for twenty years, from 1947 to 1967, when I reacted against them after a night of bad dreams concerning the figure that Ezekiel and William Blake called the Covering Cherub:

  Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee so: thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire.

  Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee.

  By the multitude of thy merchandise they have filled the midst of thee with violence, and thou hast sinned: therefore I will cast thee as profane out of the mountain of God: and I will destroy thee, O covering cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire.

  (Ezekiel 28:14–16, KJV)

  My distinguished former student Leopold Damrosch, Jr., in his book God’s Plot and Man’s Stories (1985), begins with the judgment that the most eminent literary work of the eighteenth century is Fielding’s Tom Jones. I am more attached to Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa than to Tom Jones, and wonder why Damrosch prefers Fielding to Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, and William Blake. Still, Damrosch argues a considerable case. For him Tom Jones, though a farewell to providential fiction, nevertheless affirms the presence of a benign God:

  The marvel of Tom Jones is that it balances so perfectly between determinism of plot and freedom of character. Within the large patterns of causality that God ordains, human beings remain free to improvise and change. Like Bunyan and Richardson, Fielding is a Christian, and like them he therefore asserts a providential universe, but fallen life looks altogether different to him, and his mode of fiction stands in permanent opposition to theirs.

  I am not sure what Empson would make of that. He did not much care for the neo-Christianity of T. S. Eliot and his critical disciples. Fallen life to Fielding, indeed, is very different from the visions of Bunyan and Richardson. Pragmatically, it seems at its best Edenic. The marriage of Sophia Western and Tom Jones at the close of the book is that of an unfallen Eve and a regenerate Adam.

  My late friend and colleague Martin Price observed, “Fielding can reward his heroes because they do not seek a reward.” Another friend and former teacher, the late Frederick W. Hilles, enjoyed comparing Tom Jones to Joyce’s Ulysses, though he acknowledged that Fielding as narrator was neither indifferent nor invisible. Tom Jones is a comic Odyssey, and so the ancestor of both Charles Dickens and James Joyce.

  I have idolized Dr. Samuel Johnson all my life but am somewhat baffled that he strongly disliked all of Fielding’s work. I myself share Johnson’s preference for Samuel Richardson over Fielding, though I love Tom Jones, but, then, Clarissa always seems to me much the strongest novel in the English language, surpassing even the works of Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and all their descendants. There is the alternative tradition that includes Dickens and Joyce, and it finds its great precursor in Tom Jones, and yet certainly they surpass Fielding even at his best.

  For Johnson, Fielding was simplistic, but the greatest of our critics misread how shrewd a moralist the comic Fielding could be. I recall venturing that Fielding and Richardson in effect split up Shakespeare between them. Shakespeare’s unique gift for representing inwardness was partly absorbed by Richardson, whereas Fielding chose to emphasize the Shakespearean power that could depict the world of romance so deftly that it seemed to become more real than reality.

  Readers of Tom Jones sometimes identify with the rambunctious hero, whose exuberance renders him always ready for rapid activity, whether it be fighting, whoring, hunting, or exercising his good-heartedness at every moment that comes along. He falls truly and permanently in love with Sophia Western, yet follows a labyrinthine path until, at last, they are united, at the very close of the book.

  You do not go to Fielding to trace the progress of the soul. His mode excludes inwardness, and his skepticism even toward his own created self, the “Fielding” who as narrator is always with us, absolves him from the burden of self-consciousness. Johnson, pushing away Boswell’s protests, insisted, “There is more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson’s, than in all ‘Tom Jones.’ ” This excessive judgment depends upon Johnson’s conviction that Richardson gave us “characters of nature” whereas Fielding could only give us “characters of manners.” Richardson, an extraordinary psychologist, insisted that he would not read Tom Jones. I suspect that he did read it, since he comments that Fielding neglected Probability. Tom Jones was published only some weeks after the yearlong appearance of the seven volumes of Clarissa. Both evidently sold quite well, and Fielding, a much more genial person than the dour Richardson, consumed all of Clarissa and then wrote a generous letter of praise to Richardson. The two novelists were as antithetical as Henry James and James Joyce, or as Flaubert and Victor Hugo.

  For me, and I would believe for most readers, the glory of Tom Jones has to be the quite Shakespearean Squire Western, Sophia’s improbable father, magnificently played by Hugh Griffith in the 1963 film version directed by Tony Richardson from the screenplay of John Osborne. Charming as Albert Finney was as the bastard Tom Jones, Griffith steals the movie with his absolutely mindless energy, violence, and daemonic force. He seems to be the Freudian bodily ego run rampant. Squire Western is hardly Shakespeare’s Falstaff or Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. They have dangerous wit and indisputably heroic vitalism. They give us life. Western parodies vitalism, and yet he touches the limits of representation and can live outside the novel in that world beyond mimesis that only Shakespeare, Cervantes, Chaucer, and Dante can give us. Here is an instance of the Squire run wild:

  Western had been long impatient for the event of this conference, and was just now arrived at the door to listen; when, having heard the last sentiments of his daughter’s heart, he lost all temper, and, bursting open the door in a rage, cried out—‘It is a lie! It is a d—n’d lie! It is all owing to that d—n’d rascal Jones; and if she could get at un, she’d ha’ un any hour of the day.’ Here Allworthy interposed, and addressing himself to the squire with some anger in his look, he said, ‘Mr Western, you have not kept your word with me. You promised to abstain from all violence.’—‘Why, so I did,’ cries Western, ‘as long as it was possible; but to hear a wench telling such confounded lies—Zounds! doth she think, if she can make vools of other volk, she can make one of me?—No, no, I know her better than thee dost.’—‘I am sorry to tell you, sir,’ answered Allworthy, ‘it doth not appear, by your behaviour to this
young lady, that you know her at all. I ask pardon for what I say; but I think our intimacy, your own desires, and the occasion justify me. She is your daughter, Mr Western, and I think she doth honour to your name. If I was capable of envy, I should sooner envy you on this account than any other man whatever.’—‘Odrabbit it!’ cries the squire, ‘I wish she was thine, with all my heart—wouldst soon be glad to be rid of the trouble o’ her.’—‘Indeed, my good friend,’ answered Allworthy, ‘you yourself are the cause of all the trouble you complain of. Place that confidence in the young lady which she so well deserves, and I am certain you will be the happiest father on earth.’—‘I confidence in her?’ cries the squire. ‘ ’Sblood! what confidence can I place in her, when she won’t do as I would ha’ her? Let her gi’ but her consent to marry as I would ha’ her, and I’ll place as much confidence in her as wouldst ha’ me.’—‘You have no right, neighbour,’ answered Allworthy, ‘to insist on any such consent. A negative voice your daughter allows you, and God and nature have thought proper to allow you no more.’—‘A negative voice!’ cries the squire—‘Ay! ay! I’ll show you what a negative voice I ha.—Go along, go into your chamber, go, you stubborn—.’ ‘Indeed, Mr Western,’ said Allworthy, ‘indeed you use her cruelly—I cannot bear to see this—you shall, you must behave to her in a kinder manner. She deserves the best of treatment.’—‘Yes, yes,’ said the squire, ‘I know what she deserves: now she’s gone, I’ll show you what she deserves. See here, sir, here is a letter from my cousin, my Lady Bellaston, in which she is so kind to gi’ me to understand that the fellow is got out of prison again; and here she advises me to take all the care I can o’ the wench. Odzookers! neighbour Allworthy, you don’t know what it is to govern a daughter.’