Tuesday, November 24, 2020

Calvinist angels

  Calvinist angels
(Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, pt. 1)
 



Correspondence with the dead resumes.*
               -
non curat cauda insignem esse illam, / Dum pinguis siet. **

 Dear Trudy,

Did I say, “Let’s go on” – meaning to Tess? And did I mean it? Are you having as hard a time getting into it as I am?

Shit! Ted

 

Dear Ted,

No, I am not. Are you going to fink out on me? I sense you are, that you are going off to look for something . . . breezier, let’s say.

     With regard to love-and-marriage, who would know better than Jesus? So, no, we don’t marry; nor are we given in marriage. As for love – or lust, its kissing cousin – we can contemplate but not fall victim to it – to either. At least, so I am told. But nothing is ever quite as it sems, even where everything is True so there should be no seeming.

Or so it seems to me, Trudy

 

Some time later, apparently

Dear Ted,

Are you going to write back? Are you going to tell me where you are in Tess – or that you have abandoned her (as men are wont to do)?

     I am pressing on. Something between love and passion, or maybe the combined force of love and passion have conduced Tess to agree to marry Angel and – so far – not to tell him about her past, that she succumbed to the wicked blandishments of her “coz,” Alec Stoke-d’Urberville and bore his child.

     What do you think of that? She is asking against her better judgment, that is clear: what is also clear: she cannot do otherwise. What did we think of that when we read the novel those many years ago? Did we blame her for being dishonest? Did we blame her for sleeping with her cousin? (You came from a much more conservative background than I did. What would you have done if I’d told you I’d gotten pregnant at 16 when we were living in Lagos – before Dad got demoted to Bamako – and had had an abortion? You’d have been disgusted, I think. That’s not too strong a word. But then you would have forgiven me and even put it out of your mind. Maybe?) (It’s not a rhetorical question. Answer.)

     Here’s another question. One of the maids quotes the old saw, “All’s fair in love and war.” Is it? There are “rules of warfare,” are there not? There Is “just-war theory,” I think it’s called. There is a “Geneva Convention,” and there are other unwritten rules. So not everything is fair in war. There’s also the idea that “love is a game” – and games must have rules, even children’s games where one calls a rule and another explains why it doesn’t apply in this case.
     I don’t know. I don’t know either – I don’t remember – how the story goes on, how the book ends. But this is Hardy, I am thinking: any secret untold will be revealed, and the reader will be convinced that it would have been better told sooner than hidden. I’m guessing, but I’m pretty sure I will be proved right.
     In any case, you will write back soon, won’t you? There are rules of correspondence, too. When I go to my mailbox, I find nothing but announcements, (gilt-edged (and guilt-edged) promulgations from the Powers on High.

So? Trudy

 

later still

Dear Trudy,

I want to write you today, but I’m not sure I can: There is too much to say about poor Tess, feckless Angel, and that ill wind that blows no one good (not even himself) Alec d’Urberville: If he never truly (completely) deceives himself (as Angel surely does – and Tess must, too), he may be the most unhappy of all. And is that maybe because he never truly, completely deceives himself? (Does happiness depend on self-deception? Are the happiest among us the least self-aware? Etc.)

     So, not only were you not a virgin when I knew and loved you, you had aborted a child. You had fooled around with some Nigerian boy, gotten in trouble and somehow gotten rid of it? Hypothetically! (So you’re saying.) What would I have thought?  – I don’t know. I did grow up in the sixties in the fifties, and my ethics (if I had such things) came to me from the Swiss and the Scots and were as much like Mr. Clare’s as anyone else’s in the novel, that is, brisk, narrow, foolishly certain and uncompromising. (And how much have I grown from then till now?) On the other hand, I may well have loved you more than God at the time though I’m not sure I could have admitted it.

     Angel can’t admit that he loves Tess more than his principles, especially those he’s inherited from his father and mother and hasn’t been able to modify – purity! Maybe he doesn’t (love her more). “What a jackass!” I say now. But what did I say then? I find these later pandemic days I become more what I was: more forgiving of myself but less of others.

     You see why I can’t write: I can’t get my thoughts, or my feelings, organized. And I don’t know that spending more time with them, pen hovering over the page, is going to help. Still, I am going to try to finish the book today though I still have most of the last two “phases” to go. Then, I’ll try to write more, whether I know more or not, or less.

Okay for now, Ted

 11.24.20

_______________
  * This correspondence with Trudy Monae began with The Return of the Native, starting here.
** “The cook doesn’t care that [the bird] had a brilliant tail, only that it was fat.” – Lucilius
Graphic:
“card catalog” - cellphone draing by m ball

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