I took my dingy volume by the scroop - a Wuthering Heights anniversary - Then there was a hubbub!

"I could not bear the employment. I took my dingy volume by the scroop, and hurled it into the dog kennel, vowing I hated a good book.

Heathcliff kicked his to the same place.

Then there was a hubbub!"

Ha ha! That's the stuff!* Those are, of course, the immortal words of Catherine Linton-Heathcliff-Earnshaw, ten years old** and already out of her gourd. They were also written by Emily Brontë in Chapter 3 of Wuthering Heights, an inspirational book.

The internet is full of re-readings of Wuthering Heights - see Dorothy W. a few months ago for a high-level example, or Rohan Maitzen, who gets it all into one paragraph. "Not what I remember," that's the common refrain. It's not a romantic book, it turns out. Nor a sane one.

I see here that Anna Quindlen has a novel with a scene where a therapist prescribes Wuthering Heights to a teenager for therapeutic purposes. I had not realized that Quindlen had written a thriller about a psychiatrist who gaslights her clients - I had always thought she was so nice. I myself find Wuthering Heights therapeutic, but that's because I think maniacal laughter is healthy.

I have never seen a movie of Wuthering Heights, and I did not read it while an impressionable teen, so I will have to confess that the novel was just as I remembered it: funny, horrifying, original, clumsy in places, sublime in others.

This week I'll celebrate a slightly late first anniversary of Wuthering Expectations by wallowing around in the Wuthering half. I don't have anything in particular to say about the book, but that won't stop me from enjoying a good roll in it, like the bulldog Skulker*** when he has found a particularly fragrant and enticing dead thing on the moor.

P.S. I extend a special welcome to the omniscient Brontëblog, who will somehow make their way here by means of their mysterious internet voodoo.

* More books are abused - kicked around, thrown in fires - in Wuthering Heights than in almost any book I can think of this side of Swift's The Battle of the Books.

** More or less. I didn't keep track that carefully, although Emily Brontë did.

*** Note that it's the "normal" Lintons who have a bulldog named Skulker trained to bite little girls - "and look how Skulker has bitten her -- how her foot bleeds!" This is from Edgar and Catherine's "meet cute" scene - she's bit by a dog, he stands there and points at her.

The Bride of Lammermoor and Lucia di Lammermoor

Ford Madox Ford on "the amateur literary hack" Walter Scott: "His literary merits are almost undiscoverable," and "We are no longer inclined to sit four hours over a book before the author will deign to give us some idea of what his story is." See The March of Literature, pp. 711-13 for more. Ford explicitly compares Scott to Flaubert, which will not get us very far with very many pre-Flaubert novels - let's leave that topic for another time.

In 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, Jane Smiley singles out and recommends The Heart of Midlothian and The Bride of Lammermoor. Unfortunately, I don't remember why. The Bride of Lammermoor is a solid novel of thwarted love, with a good semi-Dickensian comic relief character who I find funny and an especially good climax. It's also short, for a Scott novel - 330 pages in the Penguin Classics edition. So far, so good. What's the problem?

The novel forms the basis for Donizetti's bel canto opera, Lucia di Lammermoor. Lucia is a silly piece of work, in general, but it has one unbelievable scene, the main reason the opera is still performed (besides the popular sextet). The heroine is married against her will and goes mad. Her mad scene, amongst the wedding guests, is one of the greatest in opera history, several arias blended into a perfect twenty or thirty minutes. Ravishing, powerful, and such words. Ahead of its time.

Here's the thing. Lucia di Lammermoor is typically long, about two and a half hours. Opera-goers are patient folk, happily waiting for the choice bits. How much of The Bride of Lammermoor does the opera include? The last thirty pages. Of 330. Less than ten percent. The first 300 pages are squashed into the minimal exposition, or ignored.

Here's something I won't say very often: the librettist was right, completely right (hats off to Salvatore Cammarano). The real story of the novel doesn't get moving until the very end. The rest is filler, sometimes engaging, sometimes not. Maybe the novel couldn't function at all if it were trimmed down. But 300 pages to get to the good part - that's a lot to ask of a reader.

This hardly means The Bride of Lammermoor is not worth reading. You might agree with Jane Smiley rather than with me, and I'm glad I read it myself. But it would take special pleading to get me to reread it.

John Clare - I am

In his 40s, Clare began to suffer from delusions. He spent the last 25 or so years of his life in an insane asylum.* During that period, he wrote about 900 poems.

'I Am'

I feel I am; - I only know I am,
And plod upon the earth, as dull and void:
Earth's prison chilled my body with its dram
Of dullness, and my soaring thoughts destroyed,
I fled to solitudes from passions dream,
But strife persued - I only know, I am,
I was a being created in the race
Of men disdaining bounds of place and time:-
A spirit that could travel o'er the space
Of earth and heaven, - like a thought sublime,
Tracing creation, like my maker, free, -
A soul unshackled - like eternity,
Spurning earth's vain and soul debasing thrall
But now I only know I am, - that's all.

There's a more famous "I Am" poem on a similar theme, available from this useful book review of a recent Clare biography. It's inevitably tempting to read these poems with pity, as a symptom of Clare's illness. But the condition described seems universal to me, and the result, the fundamental sense of identity, profound.

Clare the rustic nature poet has seemed like a minor poet to many critics, although not to me. But the "I Am" poems, and a number of others from his long life in the asylum, seem to me to obviously be the work of a major writer, ranking with Keats and Shelley.

I've been using the thick Oxford Major Works, because I own a copy, but the recent "I Am": The Selected Poetry of John Clare might be a better choice for most readers who want to spend some time with Clare.

* What is the connection between English poets of the 18th and 19th century and mental illness? The casualty list is horrifying - Cowper, Collins, Smart. Less severely, Swift, Johnson, Blake. A strange phenomenon.