Wuthering Heights Again

Not quite Cathy, but I was good at pretending. 
Also, not even Yorkshire. 

 

I won't be watching the new movie. Hate to criticise work I haven't seen, but I just can't put myself through it. Let me explain. 

Wuthering Heights is my all time favourite novel, one I've loved since I first read it in my very early teens, a novel I reread roughly every year. It invariably moves me to tears. 

My mother was a Brontë fan, hence my name. Although we lived in smoky central Leeds at that time, my parents took me to Haworth when I was a small girl. We walked over the moors to Top Withens, the ruined farmhouse that is supposed to be the site of Wuthering Heights itself, albeit the house in the novel is bigger, a reasonably prosperous Yorkshire farmhouse with a blazing fire at the heart of the place. The main room Emily describes through the voice and vision of Mr Lockwood, is a typical farmhouse 'living kitchen' as we used to call our urban equivalent, when I was young. But this room, at the heart of Wuthering Heights, and at the heart of the novel, also resembles a much older 'Great Hall', a big communal living space.  

Not a single dramatised version of the novel ever gets it right. Back when I was still writing radio drama for BBC R4, I begged and pleaded to be allowed to dramatise it, and occasionally my producer would put in a proposal, but London always said no. I may not have got it right either, but I would have made a better job of it. 

The recent travesty sounds so bad that you'd wonder Emily didn't come back and haunt them. I like Margot Robbie. She's a fine actor and a beautiful woman. But she's a thirty five year old statuesque blonde, and Cathy is a young Yorkshire lass, a 'wild wick (i.e. lively) slip' of a girl with dark hair and dark eyes that mirror Heathcliff's own, because they must. It's part of the structure and meaning of the novel. Cathy is 'hardly six years old' when Mr Earnshaw brings the 'dirty, ragged, black haired child' home with him and the incomer is only a few years older. Cathy is eighteen, going on nineteen when she dies. The casting of every version invariably makes a mockery of the story. And if you think these early deaths are unusual for the time, read a little about the Brontës themselves. 

Heathcliff lives on after Cathy's death. Unwillingly. Soullessly. Hatefully. 

Wuthering Heights is a story full of sadism and cruelty. Perhaps the movie gets this right at least. I don't know. I do know that it isn't a romance, even though it has spawned a million tales of the 'bad man  redeemed by the love of a good woman' variety. Heathcliff hangs poor misguided Isabella's dog as they run away together. Even Lockwood's straitlaced narrator, prompted by the horror of nightmare, tries to rub the ghostly Cathy's wrist against the broken glass of the window pane till the blood runs down and soaks the bedclothes. 

I note that a journalist has written a clickbait article in the Independent describing the novel as 'awful'. This is nothing new. Years ago, an elderly Scottish writer, by no means as good as he thought he was, told me that the Brontës were 'daft wee lassies in love with Byron.' I disagree now as I did then. Wuthering Heights is an extraordinary novel about obsessive love and hate, about jealousy and self harm and a chaos that can only be corrected by the transition to another state of being on the one hand and by the imposition of order through a different, gentler and more human kind of affection on the other. The second half of the novel, which some critics seem to want to damn with faint praise, is essential in restoring balance on an earthly plane at least. 

Nevertheless, the fate of the two central protagonists, fey and inhuman and unfit for any Christian notion of heaven, remains uncertain. After Heathcliff's death, a little boy herding a sheep and two lambs sees 'Heathcliff and a woman yonder under 't nab' (a rocky point) - a vision he dare not pass. Neither will his sheep. We should remember that the final 'unquiet slumbers' lines come from unreliable and conventional Mr Lockwood. Like the fairies of traditional belief, Heathcliff and Cathy inhabit a middle ground, neither mortal nor divine, but I think this deliberate tension between two realities disturbs contemporary readers. 

Among so much else, Wuthering Heights is also a novel about the nature of madness. The Victorians were terrified of lunacy, seeing it as demonic, as I discovered when I was researching my own Leeds Irish family history for a book called A Proper Person to be Detained. It is no surprise that there were more Irish than English inmates of asylums in 19th century England. It's also no surprise that although Emily never specifies the origin of her dark haired and disruptive incomer, picked up on the streets of Liverpool, he is in all probability Irish, as was her own family, his 'gibberish'  the much maligned Irish language. She would have been well aware of the prejudice against these incomers, often characterised as vermin, 'but little above the savage'. Aware that Liverpool was the port of entry for so many Irish incomers. 

In Jane Eyre, Charlotte displays no sympathy at all for the first, foreign Mrs Rochester, who is reduced to little more than a beast. By contrast, Emily portrays insanity more impartially and far less judgmentally. When Heathcliff sees Cathy for the last time, the two make 'a strange and fearful picture'. Utterly unfit for heaven. Elemental and terrifying. But this is Nelly speaking, not Emily.

Years ago, my own obsession with Wuthering Heights led me to write a novel called Bird of Passage, that was a kind of  'homage' to the book. It wasn't a retelling. How would I dare? But it was an exploration of obsessive attachment, and the damage done by extreme childhood cruelty, with an occasional nod in the direction of Wuthering Heights. It was certainly inspired by my enduring love for that novel. 

It's on sale for 99p, for a few days from 13th February, the film's release date. But in all honesty, I'd recommend that you go back to Wuthering Heights itself. Read it with an open mind. Forget every terrible TV and film version you've ever seen or heard about. Remember when it was written and by whom. Then note its emotional power, its complicated structure, its vivid language, and the way in which it challenges so many of the cultural and societal norms of the time. Perhaps especially when written by a woman. You don't have to like it. It is a deeply shocking book. But its author was a genius. 

Top Withens in the 1950s

PS I've just watched the trailer. Aaaargh. Margot Robbie in scarlet with, as my mum would have said, her dumplings boiling over. It looks more like an old Hammer horror movie than anything else. Was that intentional? 

Another Outing for my Radio Dramatisation of Ben Hur

Back in the dear dead days when I was writing lots of radio drama, I dramatised Ben Hur in four episodes, for BBC R4. Now, you can hear it again on R4 Extra, and you can also catch up with it online, here. 

I've been listening to it again myself, because my only copies of it seem to be on cassette (although I still have the scripts filed away somewhere, I think.) To my surprise, it has stood the test of time. Not everything does, but I've occasionally listened again to my dramatisations of Kidnapped, Catriona and Treasure Island, and found that I've enjoyed them. A lot of it is down to the original material, the skills of the producer/director (with Kidnapped and Catriona it was my friend, the late Marilyn Imrie) the music, the editing and perhaps most of all to a brilliant cast. Radio, like all drama, is collaborative.

Ben Hur was directed by the late, much missed and exceptionally fine radio producer Glyn Dearman, with a cast to die for, including Jamie Glover as Ben Hur, Samuel West as a suitably villainous Messala, and Michael Gambon, no less, reading the relevant bible passages. The sound - the amazing sound and music - was by Wilfredo Acosta. 

The original novel, should you want to give it a try, is still available. I found it quite hard going. And when I was dramatising it, I found one or two significant plot holes that I had to fill in,  in the course of the drama. But it is undoubtedly a very good story indeed - as anyone who has watched the film will already know.

The most fun bit to write and record was definitely the chariot race. If you want to hear how it was done, though, you'll have listen yourself! 

Playing Fast and Loose with the Classics

Kidnapped, with swords!

Christmas TV here has been a bit dodgy. Plenty of movies to enjoy, but very little good original TV drama, and most of what was touted as 'original' - wasn't.

This is, as ever, a personal opinion. And I'm coming at this from the point of view of somebody with my fair share of dramatisations under my belt, albeit for BBC Radio 4. These included Kidnapped, Catriona, The Bride of Lammermoor and even Ben Hur, chariot race and all, among many others. Some of them are repeated from time to time on R4 Extra, where you can catch them all over again, although I always forget to look, so the small cheque for residual payments comes as a pleasant surprise.

Dramatisation is fun, especially when you love the book you're working on, but it's also a challenge. Not something for beginners. You are not there to impose your own creative quirks on somebody else's creation.

One of the first things you have to decide is how you are going to set about translating that original into what is a completely different medium - and to do it without upsetting too many people. Scenes will have to be left out. Characters too.  But alongside the notion that you are creating a faithful realisation in a different medium is the notion that you should strive not to do too much violence to that original.

I could cite a dozen examples of excellent film and TV dramatisations, faithful to the original, but also wonderful dramas in their own right. Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility comes to mind but there are plenty more. I'd place the recent Poldark series in that category as well. I didn't watch it the first time round, and I know there are people who prefer the previous dramatisation, but I've read some of the books, and the newer dramas seem very faithful to the world Graham created.

The other form of drama that works well is where a writer takes a much loved original and uses it as inspiration for a wholly new piece of work, without ever pretending that they are doing anything different. The brilliant Bridget Jones falls into this category, as do clever, quirky, funny films such as Clueless. I've done it myself to some extent, with a novel called Bird of Passage that is a re-imagining of Wuthering Heights in the present day, while remaining a loving homage to the original.

But during winter 2019, here in the UK at least, we were treated to various dramatisations that took a much loved book and then skewed it till it was virtually unrecognisable, in some cases imposing a world view on it that would have been wholly alien to the original.

I hated all of them without exception.

Christmas Carol - why tamper with perfection? Dickens knew how to tell a damn good story if anyone did. Dracula? Why call it that? But it began much earlier with theWar of the Worlds that started off well but very quickly descended into such a tissue of incomprehensible nonsense that many of us were left feeling indignant and cheated. Sanditon was another one in which a writer indulged himself at the expense of a dead novelist. (Is this a thing over-confident middle aged male writers do? It might be so.)

I'm left wondering, don't these dramatists have an original idea in their heads? Or is it just possibly the notoriously conservative TV executives, paying the piper and calling the tune. Are they so scared of originality that they can only permit dramatists to piggyback on the classics?

After the brickbats, the bouquet.

Far and away the best TV drama of 2019 - probably of the decade - was Craig Mazin's Chernobyl. I still think about it with a combination of awe and admiration of every single thing about it: writing, production, acting. If you haven't yet watched it, seek it out. I have seen nothing like it produced here in the UK for many a long year. Maybe our systems no longer allow for such talent. But try not to binge watch it, or if you do, perhaps you should allow yourself some recovery time!