A few weeks ago, in my “Cornucopia of Recommendations” post,
I said you couldn’t go wrong with a Thomas Hardy novel. Much as it pains me to admit it, I have
to take back the remark. I recently
finished reading Hardy’s lesser-known novel Two on a Tower, and while there
were some features of it that were classic Hardy, it certainly didn’t live up
to the usual Hardy experience.
The premise has promise: a woman of feeling and religious
devotion falls in love with a younger man of science whose ambition is to be a
great astronomer. The woman is Lady
Constantine, a recently widowed 28 year-old; the would-be astronomer, a local
farm boy named Swithin St. Cleeve, whose father’s social standing was brought
down by his marriage to Swithin’s lower-class mother. Swithin is thus genteel enough that when Lady
Constantine first discovers him making stellar observations from a tower on her
property, she is moved to aid him in his ambitions as she can. At the time that she strikes up her
acquaintance, she doesn’t yet know her husband is dead, simply that he has been
in Africa for some years. By the time she learns he is dead, Lady
Constantine has fallen in love with Swithin, and Swithin with her.
But there are complications.
Lady Constantine, in her advanced (ahem) age, knows better than to
distract Swithin from his work with her love, so they make a pact that they
will secretly marry. That way, Swithin
can carry on with his work undisturbed, and Lady Constantine also can live on
as usual until after he has made his first breakthrough into the world of
astronomy. But then it turns out Lady
Constantine’s first husband died later than the first report said he did, so in
fact she was married at the time that she married Swithin, and their nuptials
are therefore null. Add into the mix the
Bishop of Melchester, who falls in love with Lady Constantine and proposes, and
an estranged great uncle of Swithin’s who promises a large salary to help him
in his astronomy studies provided he remain unmarried until age 25, and you
have the fixings of a rather sensational plot.
I won’t tell you how it all ends in case you don’t listen to
me and decide to read it. But I do want
to reflect on why this book falls flat because it provides a real example of
many of the axioms and warnings I’ve heard writers—and agents—give.
You may have heard people talk about novels of ideas—that
is, books that act out a philosophical idea, or books that proceed from a hypothesis
more than they do from characters. Many
great Russian novels exemplify novels of ideas, like Crime and Punishment or Fathers
and Sons. Wikipedia offers an entry on
“Philosophical Fiction” that lists some novels of ideas. Still, many times in my creative writing
education, I heard the warning not to hold your writing to a preconceived
notion, to let the characters develop, and to surprise yourself. If you’re not surprising yourself, you’re not
surprising your readers. Or, to put it
another way, in words from an essay by Alan Cheuse, “Great novels are grown,
not planned.”
Now, it’s dangerous to talk in generalizations, but by and
large, I believe such warnings should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Of course, the purpose of fiction is not to
put forth a dull agenda. Of course I
agree with that. But where would novels of
ideas be if they were not, in some way, planned? If the writer did not, in some way, say, “I
want to explore this”? In fact there are
many examples of successful novels of ideas, but Two on a Tower offers a lesson
in what happens when a novel of ideas falls flat.
Hardy himself identified his idea in the preface to Two on a
Tower: “This slightly-built romance,” he
writes, “was the outcome of a wish to set the emotional history of two
infinitesimal lives against the stupendous background of the stellar universe,
and to impart to readers the sentiment that of these contrasting magnitudes the
smaller might be the greater to them as men.”
Ah-ha, an idea. There
is yet a further idea at play: that of science versus feeling, as embodied by
Swithin and Lady Constantine. The
problem is, this idea comes through blatantly in the text and in very direct
dialogues, while the dynamic between the two characters does not come through
at all. If we are to conclude, as Hardy
suggests, that “the smaller” is “the greater,” then the reader must also be
made to realize the importance of that smaller life. In telling us the kinds of characters these
are—Lady Constantine the lonely, bored, upper-class woman, St. Cleeve the
handsome, ambitious underdog—and in having them speak directly about how little
their concerns are compared to the heavens, Hardy gets lazy in his
characterization. He provides more
characterization of Farmer Oak and Bathsheba Everdene in the first two chapters
of Far From the Madding Crowd than he does for Swithin and Lady Constantine in
the whole novel of Two on a Tower.
There’s the great scene in Madding Crowd in which Farmer Oak watches
Miss Everdene when she thinks no one is looking. What does she do? She pulls out a mirror and looks at herself
in it. What a great and characterizing
action! What volumes it speaks of Farmer
Oak in how he reacts. We get so little
of this type of characterizing action in Two on a Tower that it’s difficult to
be invested in either Lady Constantine or Swithin.
Which brings us to another oft-debated point. Readers today seem to want likable
characters. But if all characters were
likable, where would that leave Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s The Red and the
Black, or even Emma early on in Austen’s Emma, who is spoiled rotten and has
very little to trouble or vex her? There
is nothing particularly un-likable about either Swithin or Lady Constantine,
but speaking purely as a reader, I didn’t care what happened to them. The point is that characters don’t have to be
either likable or unlikeable, but they do have to have enough particularity
that the reader feels invested.
In Hardy’s defense, there are elements to Two on a Tower that
appeal to the intellect and to close-reading.
As Sally Shuttleworth points out in her introduction, Hardy embeds
elements of mythology and astronomy in the actions and trajectories of his
characters. Shuttleworth also compares
at some length Lady Constantine and Swithin to Dorothea and Mr. Causabon from Middlemarch. While I saw the similarities Shuttleworth
pointed out—the prematurely entombed woman rescued by her sunny Apollo-figure—they
only served, in my mind, to show Eliot’s fine and subtle characterization
versus the cursory effort here.
But just as the flaws of Two on a Tower illuminate Eliot’s
achievements, so too do the flaws here illuminate what is so great about Hardy
generally. He does know how to
characterize—you can’t read Tess of the D’Urbervilles and not be haunted by
that child-of-nature Tess, that man-of-double-standards Angel, and the
lecherous, evil Alec long after you’ve put the book down. Hardy is also a master at making life events
feel terrifyingly fated—many of them as small as refusing to pull one’s wagon
over for an oncoming carriage when one has the right of way (as happens in The
Woodlanders) or slipping a letter not just under a door but accidentally under
a rug so the recipient never sees it (as happens in Tess). In Two on a Tower the life events instead
feel purposefully and sensationally planted, like a convenient thunderstorm and a letter of great import delivered in the very moment Swithin is traveling to
contract his secret marriage.
And so, though I may not as freely say, “Choose any Hardy
novel and it’s bound to be great,” my admiration for Hardy is as intact as ever
from seeing his genius thrown into relief by this lesser work. Besides, it’s comforting to remember that not
even great writers can hit a homerun every time.
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