Word: heathcliff
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...HEATHCLIFF by Jeffrey Caine; Knopf; 246 pages...
...wolves howl, make bad novels." So wrote an American critic upon reading Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights soon after it was first published in December 1847. As so often happens, the reviewer was wrong. Emily's tumultuous tale of Catherine Earnshaw and the dark foundling Heathcliff, of the passion that raged between them across the Yorkshire moors, easily endured critical barbs and long ago became an English classic. If anything, the novel's popularity has grown steadily in the past 130 years. It has been filmed several times, most memorably in 1939 with Laurence Olivier...
Emily's leap of genius was to have the story of Heathcliff and Catherine's blighted love told by Lockwood, a prissy outsider, and by Nelly Dean, the prim housekeeper who had witnessed most of the novel's events. Such narrow-minded story tellers were ill-equipped to understand a raging natural force like Heathcliff, much less to sympathize with his condition. The greater their shock at Heathcliff s behavior, the more they condemned him, the clearer it became that Heathcliff existed on a plane beyond the grasp of normal comprehension. Emily also wisely kept...
Imagine a 1970s Heathcliff sitting in the study of Wuthering Heights, dressed in a country gentleman's tweeds. He has spent the morning keeping tab on his prosperous estate. Now, while his beautiful young wife and chil dren await him for 5 o'clock tea, he neatly taps on an electric typewriter his dark history of humiliation, vengeance and- since he is a Catholic convert-reform...
Read's Heathcliff is not a stableboy but a contemporary Yorkshire parson's son who sulks because God did not make him an aristocrat. At times, an American reader is hard put to take Hil ary Fletcher's miseries as solemnly as he does himself- even if one grants that a second-rate British public school is "worse than prison" and that hell knows no torment like an Englishman at the hunt ball whose jacket fails to fit. Alas, The Upstart stipulates that exactly this sort of class embarrassment can still drive a dated Angry Young...