Sometimes I get tired of being a curmudgeon regarding various current phenomena in the continual flux that is the English language. I'm pretty sure my wife is tired of it, too--of hearing me grumble, for instance, about how annoying the word "iconic" has become in recent years. (But then I don't think she pays much attention, either.) I did a whole post on that one a couple of years ago: Worst Use of "Iconic". And complained about a couple of others in Further Linguistic Defeats. Any living language is always changing, but with English being so widely spoken, and with so wide and rapid a diffusion of these changes, the flux is extreme now.  

But I'm not always negative, and I'm here today to give my approval to the use of the verb "cringe" as an adjective. ("Cringe" is also a noun, but it seems to be rarely used. My unabridged dictionary defines it as "a cringing.") It refers to the phenomenon in which one is embarrassed on behalf of someone else: as in "He tried to sing 'Color My World' at the wedding reception, and it was so cringe." As I was writing this I came up with several more examples, but am stopping with that one, because everyone knows what I mean, and the sensation is very unpleasant. 

The essence of cringe is that the person doing the cringe thing is unaware of it; he should be embarrassed but is not. If the groom trips and falls on the way down the aisle at the wedding, it isn't cringe--he is embarrassed and we feel sorry for him. If he sings "Color My World" badly but thinks he's doing fine, it's cringe. We feel sorry for him, but mostly we feel embarrassed for him, and in our minds are begging for him to stop, because the feeling we have is normally quite painful. The spectator who enjoys the situation is cruel,  and probably hates the person doing the cringe thing. 

There are serviceable and grammatically conventional ways of making this point: "cringe-making," "cringe-inducing," and so forth, but they're a bit clumsy. "Cringey" doesn't really do the job, at least to my ear, as it seems to refer to the person who is cringing, not to behavior which causes others to cringe. "Cringe" is more effective--quick and sharp. 

If you read the posts I linked to above, you might complain about my complaining about the use of the noun "cliché" as an adjective while putting the verb "cringe" to work similarly. Well, in somewhat weak defense, I note that "cliché" has a perfectly good adjectival form of long-standing  use: "clichéd." It doesn't even require that we pronounce another syllable, which would interfere with our very busy 21st century lifestyle.

So what, you say? How does that make a usage like "that's so cringe" acceptable? It doesn't, really, by any sort of consistent rule. I confess to inconsistency. Still, as an adjective, "cringe" seems to me to add something useful and colorful to the language, whereas "cliché" as an adjective does not; it just sounds sloppy and ignorant.

I should not be reading my first Hardy novel in my 70s. It was not by oversight or accident that I have not done it earlier; it was a more or less conscious choice. Back in the early 1970s, when I was still young and more sensitive than I am now, a BBC dramatization of Jude the Obscure appeared on Masterpiece Theatre. With Alistair Cooke, no doubt--those were wonderful days, when a British import with a British-sounding host (he had long since come over here and become an American citizen) was a hugely refreshing change from American network TV. Well-acted dramatizations of serious novels were something from another world altogether. And there were no commercials! 

But if you know Jude you know that one of its most important events is a horrendous murder-suicide. It disturbed me so much that it not only killed any impulse I may have had to read the novel, but, along with an impression of Hardy's fiction as being pretty bleak in general, discouraged me from reading any of it at all. 

That was understandable to a point, I suppose, but fifty years is long enough to maintain that sort of prejudice, and to allow it to prevent me from ever reading a novelist generally acknowledged to be one of the greatest. So with my recent foray into Hardy's poetry as a catalyst, I took up the one Hardy novel on my bookshelf: Far From the Madding Crowd.

It happens to be his first big success, and I can see why. As I read more 19th century novels it becomes clearer to me that that century was the great century for the novel, much as it was the great century for the symphony. As the symphony of that time combined accessible musical appeal with technical complexity, the novel combined the sheer enjoyment of storytelling with a high level of craftsmanship and profundity of insight. 

This novel certainly belongs with those. It begins with a premise that made me think of Jane Austen: a proud and headstrong young woman must choose among several suitors, and there is more than a little doubt as to whether she will choose wisely. But the similarity to Austen doesn't go much further than that--Hardy's world is rural and his scope broader than Austen's, his people more directly involved with agriculture and the natural world in general--with the world outside the family and a fairly small and homogenous social circle. Hardy's headstrong young woman is confronted with some very elemental and practical challenges. 

We meet one of the suitors before we meet the young woman. His name is Gabriel Oak, and if you figure that with a name like that he's going to be a pretty good solid fellow, you're right. The young woman is named Bathsheba Everdene, which I thought a somewhat peculiar name to give to a daughter in Victorian England. Bathsheba was David's wife, yes, but before she was David's wife she was Uriah's, and committed adultery with David, though it isn't clear from the biblical account whether or not she was willing. Yes, she was greatly honored later, in her own time and on through Jewish and Christian history. But it still seems a bit odd as a choice of name. 

On the other hand, the name lends a suggestion of sensual allure to Miss Everdene, an allure which she certainly possesses. Her parents are dead, and she has inherited a farm, which she undertakes to run by herself, clearly something unusual in the eyes of her neighbors, but perhaps not entirely unheard of. Although she has confidence enough in her ability, it is in part the confidence of one who has not done a thing and thinks it doesn't look so very difficult. Gabriel Oak is of considerable help to her. But he himself is a man of no property at all; he doesn't start out that way, but becomes so through a misadventure involving his dog and his sheep which might be funny, in fact is almost funny, if it weren't so very disastrous. And so she regards him as beneath her, and not at all eligible as a suitor. 

The other two suitors are a handsome and charming soldier--yes, we are quite right to be wary of anyone so described--and a middle-aged bachelor farmer who had never contemplated marriage and whose life is overturned when a casual and very foolish gesture on Bathsheba's part reduces him to helpless obsessive adoration of her. 

One of the Hardy poems that I remember encountering as an undergraduate is a comic one called "The Ruined Maid," which describes satirically the not-so-tragic plight of a country girl who has become what I suppose can be loosely called a courtesan:

"O 'melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I would meet you in Town?
And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty"--
"O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she.

There is an actual ruined maid in this novel, and her story is tragic in fact, and not in the least amusing. Far From the Madding Crowd is, taken as a whole, not a gloomy novel, but there is a good deal of suffering in it.

The milieu in which this suffering occurs is rural agricultural England, which must have seemed timeless in Hardy's day. Some months ago the daily poem at Poems Ancient and Modern was "The Man With the Hoe," by Edwin Markham, which is based on the famous painting by Jean-Francois Millet. Markham denounces at length the near-bestial stupidity which he attributes not only to the man in the painting but to his whole class of poor agricultural laborers. Here's a link to the post. He's mainly concerned with denouncing the man's oppressors, which is fair enough, but I objected to his characterization of the man, who is repeatedly referred to as a "thing," as follows:

I grew up in the rural South, with segregation still de jure till I was in my teens, and de facto after that. I knew (and sometimes worked with) poor black people whose whole life involved demanding physical labor, and whose education didn't go any further than the barest levels of literacy and simple arithmetic. Poor white people, too, but the blacks were of course poorer. I can assure you that they were mentally very very much alive, even if they never so much as heard Plato's name.

Fairly early in this novel we encounter the laborers who work the fields of Bathsheba's farm and others, and the scene quickly dispels any notion we might have that they resemble Markham's caricature. It takes place in the "malthouse" of Bathsheba's farm. I naturally had to look that up. "Malt" is a word that I know only in connection with beer and whiskey, and I really had never given much thought to what it actually is. Now I know, and will leave it to you to read the Wikipedia article if you're interested. The important thing here is that the malthouse is where malting is done, and that that process makes it a pretty warm and cozy place, where the farmhands gather to rest, talk, and drink. The color and vivacity of the talk and the talkers may of course have been enhanced by the author, but as this is a pretty realistic novel I don't see any reason to doubt that it's reasonably representative of the actual. It may have been people like these who helped to furnish Tolkien's picture of hobbits: their lives and thinking are very circumscribed, but within those limits very far from stupid. Today, when even ordinary people think of themselves as sophisticated, I suppose it's easier for them--us--to mistake naivete for stupidity. But it is a naïve mistake. 

The sheer richness of Hardy's narration is maybe the chief and certainly the most immediate pleasure of reading this novel. It was a month or more ago that I finished the book. Just now I picked it up and read a few passages again, and found it hard to put down. As I'm currently reading The Pickwick Papers that's a pretty impressive competitive showing against another Victorian master.

The edition I have is a Penguin Classics one with a copyright date of 1978 and a printing date of 1985. I have no memory of when or how I acquired it. I think it's out of print, and as far as I can tell from a quick search not readily available. That I suspect may be due to the fact that it is in greater demand than one might suppose, as it has an introduction by Ronald Blythe, well-known for Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, and many other writings centered on rural England. The introduction is lengthy and marvelous, most likely far more interesting and useful than what you would to get from a contemporary academic. It would be worth your while to seek out this edition. Since this post is already rather long I'll leave it at that. 

Is just "Sayers" enough, or should I have said "Dorothy L. Sayers"? She was particular about the "L," which stands for "Leigh, her maiden name. Her last name is perhaps right at the threshold of fame where it needs no additional specification. It's enough for me--I don't know another literary Sayers--but perhaps not for the world at large.

After finishing Longfellow's Dante translation, I wanted to read something lighter, and this looked like a good possibility. I had read most or perhaps all of Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels back in the '70s--she was very popular then, due in part I think to the feminist movement--and enjoyed them. But as far as I recall I hadn't read them since. 

Strong Poison introduces Harriet Vane, the somewhat Sayers-like character who becomes a romantic foil to Wimsey and eventually marries him. I assumed that that placed the novel among her earlier work, but I was mistaken: Sayers was already a very successful mystery writer when she added Harriet, and the resultant romance, to her stories. The romance begins most improbably: Harriet is on trial for murder, and Peter, attending the trial, falls in love with her at first sight, which of course establishes her indisputable innocence in his mind. This, obviously, means that he must prove that she did not poison the ex-lover with whom she had cohabited for a while.

The case against her is extremely strong, seemingly air-tight. And casting at least reasonable doubt on that case in turn involves figuring out who else might have done it, and how--especially the "how," as this novel involves the sort of very complex scheme that seems to have been favored by the mystery writers of the time. Very complex, and to me somewhat implausible--but then if I were ever driven to murder someone it would probably be a pretty crude business, perhaps ending with "Yes, I killed him, and I'm glad I did, because he deserved it," and holding out my hands for the cuffs. 

I really had forgotten how much fun Sayers's work can be. Strong Poison opens with the judge's charge to the jury at the end of Harriet's trial, and it's an excellent bit of writing, capturing equally the old judge's dry plodding recitation of the facts, glimpses of his distinctive and perhaps not always so dry personality--he seems to have a special interest in the food which plays a part in the crime--and the reaction of certain spectators, including Wimsey. It goes on for some twenty pages, and the fact that it is not dull is a tribute to the author. At the end of it we know all the details of time and place and possibility, regarding the crime, and Harriet's means, motive, and opportunity are firmly established. It could have been a tedious exposition, but it isn't.

I had forgotten that Wimsey can be pretty amusing. I had forgotten about Wimsey's manservant Bunter, and that the two of them often make one think of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, except that Wimsey only appears to be goofy. The resemblance had already occurred to me when I read this exchange:

"I endeavor to give satisfaction, sir." 

"Well then, don't talk like Jeeves. It irritates me."

And I had forgotten about the Dowager Duchess of Denver, Peter's mother, who combines the chatter of an aristocratic flibbertigibbet with shrewd perception. I would like to see more of her, which is perhaps to be found in some of the other books.

Implausibilities pile up as the narrative continues. Bunter is if anything more omnicompetent than Jeeves himself, with his knowledge of experimental techniques in chemistry providing a crucial item in Harriet's defense. We are expected to believe that Wimsey supports an office staffed by mature ladies who are as skilled at detective work as secretarial and research, and who can be called upon if a mature lady is needed, for instance, to infiltrate a household, also implausibly. A little less implausibly,  though for me still a little hard to believe, we have at least two instances of a person tagging "what what" to the end of a sentence, which is always funny in books and movies though it would probably be pretty annoying in real life. 

But plausibility doesn't matter much--the novel is a skillfully executed and engaging construction, enlivened by wit, with an undertone or implication of seriousness about the situation of the young woman, disgraced by a love affair which has far less significance for the man's reputation. I have several more of these little Avon paperbacks which were the readily available editions of Sayers's work in the early '70s, and expect to read at least one more this year. 

The murder of which Harriet is accused is loosely based, or perhaps just suggested by, the case of Florence Maybrick, an American woman who married a rich Englishman who treated her rather badly and whom she was accused of poisoning. Personally I don't think she did it, though he may have deserved it.

I ran across a very interesting Substack post on Harriet and Lord Peter by Laura Thompson, who has written biographies of Agatha Christie and several other notable women. If you are at all interested in the subject, I think you'll find it worth reading. You'll see why I associate the '70s vogue for Sayers with feminism. It discusses one of the last novels in the series, Gaudy Night, which I recall being of particular interest to young feminist-inclined women at the time (especially one who was of particular interest to me). Among other things, it's all about Harriet.

I read Sayers's translation of Dante's Inferno back in the '80s, and as I recall I thought the translation, in Dante's verse form, had problems but that her notes made it worthwhile. I think I'd like to look at it again.