The Tenant of Wildfell Hall!

Our book today is The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Bronte's taut little 1848 masterpiece, and it completes yet another organic trilogy of a type I've noticed crops up on Stevereads with fair regularity. This one was a Bronte-trilogy, centering on that weird, unprecedentedly brilliant family of siblings living out in the middle of nowhere, competently but rustically educated and yet producing a stunning complement of toweringly great works of English prose.

The Brontes have always held a fascination for me, and not only because their novels are uniformly marked with a moor-and-storm-touched bleakness I very much like in novels (the Brontes, a good Irish family, came by this good Irish trait honestly) - no, they also fascinate because the specter of 'what if' hovers around them more closely than it does almost any other figures in Western literature. And the 'what if' here is wrenchingly simple: what if they'd all lived? What if premature death hadn't killed every single one of them? What works unguessed by all of us might we now have, shattering our comforts far more effectively even than the half-dozen books that are all we'll ever have from this family?

We'll never know the answer to that, but it could be worse: the sisters could have taken to drink and drugs like their brother, in which case fragments are all we'd have. As it is, we have Villette, Wuthering Heights, Shirley, Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey, The Professor ... and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

We've already touched on the events that gave rise to this book - the five-year stint Anne did as governess for the Robinson family at Thorp Green, including the much shorter time poor tortured Branwell spent there as tutor to the Robinson boy. Anne's experiences at Thorp Green informed both her novels, although The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a more ragged, more artificially staged, and altogether more powerful work than Agnes Grey. Both are titanically scathing of polite society and the various savageries lurking beneath its veneer, but Tenant is by far the more savage work in itself. Here is the story of earnest, moralizing Helen, who is fatally infatuated with the licentious rake Mr. Huntington (and equally infatuated, one sees early on, with the possibility of reforming him), even though all their earliest meetings give the reader a decidedly ominous feeling about him. He's brutal, opportunistic, and psychologically paring even before he's physically so. In one dinner party scene, Helen is showing guests some of her drawings when Mr. Huntington gives her an unpleasant shock:

So far, so good; - but hearing him pronounce sotto voce, but with peculiar emphasis concerning one of the pieces, 'THIS is better than all!' - I looked up, curious to see which it was, and, to my horror, beheld him gazing complacently at the back of the picture - it was his own face that I had sketched there and forgotten to rub out! To make matters worse, in the agony of the moment, I attempted to snatch it from his hand; - but he prevented me, and exclaiming 'No, by George, I'll keep it!' placed it against his waistcoat, and buttoned his coat upon it with a delighted chuckle.

Helen eventually marries Huntington, and they descend by quick passages to all-out domestic warfare ... a cause into which Huntington enlists their child as soon as the boy is old enough to walk and talk on his own. It's a squalid, darkly horrible portrait of a relationship that's in every way poisonous, yet despite how awful it is to read about, the reading itself is so compelling that you can't stop. The most amazing thing about it all is that Anne never flinches, she never tenders things up or draws curtains over anything; "she must be honest," Charlotte once wrote about her, and it's nowhere more true than in this book.

But Anne was also young, and so it's no surprise that a much better love is always waiting in the wings - in the form of doe-eyed young simp Gilbert Markham, who's in love with Helen through everything. At one point late in the novel, they have a dialogue I find more mind-bendingly weird and touching than almost any I know from the literature of the period; it's about the permanence of love in the face of its greatest obstacle - eternal bliss! Here's a representative snippet:

'And must we never meet again?' I murmured in the anguish of my soul.

'We shall meet in Heaven. Let us think of that,' said she in a tone of desperate calmness; but her eyes glittered wildly, and her face was deadly pale.

'But not as we are now,' I could not help replying. 'It gives me little consolation to think I shall next behold you as a disembodied spirit, or an altered being, with a frame perfect and glorious, but not like this! - and a heart, perhaps, entirely estranged from me.'

'No, Gilbert, there is perfect love in Heaven!'

'So perfect, I suppose, that it soars above distinctions, and you will have no closer sympathy with me than with any one of the ten thousand angels and the innumerable multitude of happy spirits round us.'

'Whatever I am, you will be the same, and therefore, cannot possibly regret it; and whatever that change may be, we know it must be for the better.'

'But if I am to be so changed that I shall cease to adore you with my whole heart and soul, and love you beyond every other creature, I shall not be myself; and, though, if ever I win Heaven at all, I must, I know, be infinitely better and happier than I am now, my earthly nature cannot rejoice in the anticipation of such beatitude, from which itself and its chief joy must be excluded.'

'Is your love all earthly then?'

'No, but I am supposing we shall have no more intimate communion with each other, than with the rest.'

'If so, it will be because we love them more and not each other less. Increase of love brings increase of happiness, when it is mutual, and pure as that will be.'

'But can you, Helen, contemplate with delight that prospect of losing me in a sea of glory?'

If Western literature provides a more bitterly accurate picture of the tragic mental and emotional distortions organized religion (to say nothing of fantasies about an eternal afterlife) can produce in the human brain, I can't readily recall it. And all of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is like this: weirdly intelligent, oddly refracted, a rudely staring raw chunk of observational genius, served up by a young woman not yet thirty. What such a young woman might have written at 50, what her brother might have written, what any of them might have written - the literature's loss of that - quiets the imagination for a time.

Tales of Angria!

A loyal Stevereads reader (who never comments - the Silent Majority, as it were) has pointed out, in response to my recent posting on Branwell Bronte, that something very close to a 'Works' of that talented, tormented young man has indeed been brought into print in an authoritative, attractive, and affordable version - naturally, by Penguin Classics. It's called Tales of Angria, and it contains several of the longer, more polished dark social comedies set in the titular imaginary land. I found the book at my local Barnes & Noble, and as you can see, it was filed under Charlotte Bronte, even though Branwell was the presiding genius and main creative force behind the Angria tales, as all three of his sisters - even including the headstrong and slightly imperious Charlotte - were the first to admit when they were alive.

So it's a wonderful thing that Penguin Classics has produced this volume, but in subsequent reprintings, they should have the courage to ignore all the various academic quibbles - and the pecuniary allure of associative selling - and put 'Branwell Bronte' on the cover instead of 'Charlotte Bronte.'

Not many things ever brought that family much happiness, but if they could come forward in time just long enough to see such a volume, they would cast off their genetic melancholy and clap their hands for joy. The sisters would, if anything, be happier to see it than Branwell would. Let's hope Penguin makes the change; and in the meantime, go to their website and order yourself a copy of this weird, enjoyable, and slightly heartbreaking glimpse of what might have been.

Branwell!

Our book today is Branwell by Douglas Martin (the author of the weirdly original Outline of My Lover), a historical novel about Patrick Branwell Bronte, the so-called 'lost Bronte,' brother to Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. It's an quick, affecting novel, about one of literature's most poignant losers.

Young Branwell was handsome and raucously imaginative, but yeesh, talk about the deck of life's cards being stacked against you. Not only was his father a cramped, carping hypochondriac, but all three of his sisters there in the family parsonage at Haworth were prodigiously talented writers - exactly what Branwell always considered himself to be. Indelible masterpieces of English literature were germinated at that parsonage - Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, etc. - mainly because the three sisters made the crucial decision to take the incredibly elaborate day-dreaming all four of them had always indulged in and match it with work, with the actual generating of written pages. Branwell never took that step; he seemed always to want the day-dreaming to count alone.

In addition to which he's about as strong an argument as I know of for the idea that substance-addiction is a medical condition, something that strikes an individual like polio or consumption, rather than a consistently self-destructive choice. I don't cotton to that idea - what we do is always a choice - but reading the sad tale of Branwell's life is almost enough to give pause. From his early teens on, he always manages to find a congenial ale-house, and even after he can see as plainly as anybody that it's piling him under debt and ruining his life, he still doesn't stop.

Martin's book is told in a semi-dreamlike staccato present tense, and it's thickly overhung with a sense of pre-destined tragedy worth of the ancient Greeks:

His conduct, he feels, is marked by a cold debauchery, cutting its way down into his soul. There's the Lord Nelson to drink at, which stood in a square about a mile or so uphill from the station, beside the church.

He's chipping away at what he once dreamed of being.

For just these nights, they exchange their lives, from the distance over drink. He likes the places where the rough types and cultivated gentlemen meet. He's lost there everything familiar, but drink, his constant companion.

Just how far could he push this body.

In July of 1845, Branwell was abruptly dismissed from his position as tutor to young Edmund Robinson. The boy's father wrote an angry letter firing Branwell, alluding darkly to behavior "bad beyond expression." Branwell returned home and promptly lost himself in drinking, and speculation has been rife ever since as to what exactly happened. Daphne du Maurier, in her richly atmospheric, thoroughly absorbing 1960 biography of Branwell, treats the matter with her customary psychological delicacy:

If Branwell had been writing love letters to Mrs. Robinson, the husband would not have threatened him with exposure, for to expose Branwell would also expose the lady who received the letters. Did the Robinsons keep silent for the sake of Anne, and to spare Mr. Bronte, having learned something about Branwell which, in his father's near-blindness and uncertain state of health, might have proved a deathblow? It is possible that, left at Thorp Green with Edmund, and free from the constraining presence of his employer, he had attempted in some way to lead Edmund astray: no other "proceedings ... bad beyond expression" would quite seem to warrant "pain of exposure," and a charge "to break off instantly and forever all communication with every member of the family."

Martin's book came out in 2005, so its sensibilities aren't quite so doubting. Although historians of a more romantic or prudish turn of mind have always stuck to the story that reckless Branwell fell passionately in love with his employer's wife, Martin's novel has him setting his sights elsewhere, and even provides a semi-dreaming Anne as witness:

She heard something. Who was outside, there on the landing. Anne would have to go see, her heart beating in her ears.

The shadows of trees thrown over the walls painted in a picture, of limbs, and arms, around a body; a boy, in shadows, only waiting to be uncovered, gain with the wind a bit more stature, to rise up beside what appears to be another body. Two bodies were surely out there together. One of them is not quite as tall as the other.

Limbs only cradle other limbs.

We'll never know what happened that summer at Thorp Green, and Branwell himself died only a few years later, an utterly broken failure despite having been an equal partner in the unbelievably rich imaginings of his sisters while they were all growing up. Martin's very good book captures the surrealistic feel of that shared dream-world, and it leaves us wondering what we always wonder about people like Branwell Bronte: what things might he have done, if he'd had control over his own life?