It’s doom alone that counts - Thomas Hardy's 'Wessex Tales'

In his song Shelter from the Storm Bob Dylan sings: “nothing really matters much; it’s doom alone that counts…” While it’s probably a fool’s errand to try to interpret any of Dylan’s lyrics I’ve always taken this line to mean that it doesn’t really make much difference what hopes we have or what actions or choices we make as everything is determined by fate or destiny. Like Dylan – and Jacques in Diderot’s novel – you could say I’m a fatalist. Not so much a case of “I’m all right, Jack” as “I’m all fatalistic, Jacques.” In literature, the master of fatalism is Thomas Hardy. Hardy’s characters, try as they might, cannot beat fate. This might seem a depressing scenario, but there’s something deeply satisfying – even reassuring – about the way the dominant force in any Hardy story is fate itself.

Over the last few months I’ve been reading Hardy’s first collection of short stories, Wessex Tales. To the modern-day fan of short stories it’s a curious collection for several reasons. These are tales rather than short stories in the contemporary sense. Hardy doesn’t deal in ‘slices of life’ like so many of today’s short story writers. Wessex Tales contains no open-ended glimpses of characters' lives, no apparently arbitrary moments. Instead, Hardy always tells a good yarn – something happens in the story that makes it worth the telling. The events may be “strange, lively or commonplace”, (as Hardy put it in the collection’s subtitle.) Thus, he mixes the domestic with the supernatural and humour with tragedy. Hardy himself sometimes referred to his tales as “minor novels” and some of them cover several years of their characters’ lives and could easily have been developed into full-length novels. (Likewise, some of his novels had few characters and simple plots and could therefore have been compressed into short-story length.) In Hardy’s day there was a thriving market for self-contained short stories (periodicals like The Cornhill Magazine and Blackwood’s Magazine) and, at the same time, novels tended to be first published in serialised form, so there was perhaps more fluidity between short- and long-form fiction.   

The stories in Wessex Tales contain many passages of fine, descriptive writing that speak volumes about the psychology of the characters and their social situation, as in this extract from The Melancholy Hussar:

Before that day scarcely a soul had been seen near her father's house for weeks. When a noise like the brushing skirt of a visitor was heard on the doorstep, it proved to be a scudding leaf; when a carriage seemed to be nearing the door, it was her father grinding his sickle on the stone in the garden for his favourite relaxation of trimming the box-tree borders to the plots. A sound like luggage thrown down from the coach was a gun far away at sea; and what looked like a tall man by the gate at dusk was a yew bush cut into a quaint and attenuated shape. There is no such solitude in country places now as there was in those old days.   

The yearning for a visitor (and perhaps a certain visitor in particular) is captured by the multi-sensory hyper-vigilance of mistaking the meaning of various sights and sounds while the last sentence – “there is no such solitude in country places now” – underlines part of Hardy’s mission, in writing these stories, to preserve “a fairly true record of a vanishing life.”

Small domestic details (of the ‘commonplace’) are often used by Hardy in acutely observed and telling descriptions to symbolise psychological and social rupture. In the story Fellow-Townsmen we have this evocation of the family home of Downe, whose wife has recently died by drowning:

The old neatness had gone from the house; articles lay in places which could show no reason for their presence, as if momentarily deposited there some months ago, and forgotten ever since; there were no flowers; things were jumbled together on the furniture which should have been in cupboards; and the place in general had that stagnant, unrenovated air which usually pervades the maimed home of the widower.

The use of “maimed” to describe the house is unexpected but perfect, suggesting the family home itself has suffered a violent and life-threatening trauma.

There is so much to enjoy and admire in Hardy’s short stories and reading Wessex Tales has whetted my appetite to revisit the novels, and also to read Claire Tomalin’s acclaimed biography of this great writer. 

And, by the way, just to return to Shelter from the Storm for a moment, is that a futile horn or a flugelhorn that the one-eyed undertaker blows?