"This happiness could not have lasted": "Tess of the D'urbervilles" concludes

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'urbervilles: Reading Notes, Part Eight

Tess writes to Angel in Brazil in care of his parents, begging him to return to her and save her from temptation.

Hearing that her mother is very ill, Tess breaks her engagament at Flintcomb Ash and returns home. Laboring in her family's kitchen garden in the twilight, she discovers a stranger hoeing the soil next to her -- D'urberville.

The rake turned ranter turned would-be samaritan greets her breezily, not to say sacriligiously: "A jester might say this is just like paradise. You are Eve, and I am the old Other One come to tempt you in the form of an inferior animal." Tess spurns him once again.

Tess's mother rallies but her father suddenly dies -- a catastrophe for the Derbyfields as the leasehold is in his name. The disgraced Tess's return makes the family seem all the more morally problematic to the village landlord, so no pity is extended to the now headless household.

Old Lady Day. The common day on which farm laborers throughout England begin new contracts and thus are in transit from one farmstead to another. It is also the day upon which leases end, and thus on which Tess, her mother, and her six siblings find themselves dispossessed.

Alec D'urberville again comes to Tess offering to care for her and her family, saying with apparent sincerity "though I have been your enemy I am now your friend, even if you do not believe it."

With no place to live, Tess and her family camp in the graveyard that contains the decrepit ancestral tomb of the great D'urbervilles. Alec follows them and once again tempts Tess.

Angel returns a near-skeleton. He traces Tess's wanderings while he was away and finally finds her, dressed in expensive clothes, in an upscale resort lodging where Alec D'urberville has taken her.

The owner of the lodging house is said by Hardy to be in "enforced bondage to that arithmetical demon, Profit-and-Loss."

Tess, insane with sorrow that her giving-in to D'urberville has once again lost her the chance to be Angel's true wife, murders the rake in his bed. She flees the house, runs until she overtakes Angel, and confesses her deed. He vows to protect her and they go off together. Hardy reports that "their every idea was temporary and unforefending, like the plans of two chldren."

Tess and Angel finally find married bliss, first in an abandoned manor house and then, for a night, at a moonlit Stonehenge. When the police come to apprehend her, Tess is happy as all life has taught her is that "this happiness could not have lasted."


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The transfigurations of Alec D'urberville

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'urbervilles: Reading Notes, Part Seven

Alec D'urberville's conversion; like Tess, he is the same person even as he appears to be totally another.

"It was less a reform than a transfiguration. The former curves of sensuousness were now modulated to lines of devotional passion. The lip-shapes that had meant seductiveness were now made to express divine supplication; the glow on the cheek that yesterday could be translated as riotousness was evangelized today into the splendor of pious enthusiasm; animalism had become fanaticism; Paganism, Paulism; the bold rolling eye that had flashed upon her shrinking form in the old time now beamed with the rude energy of a theolatry that was almost ferocious. Those hard, black angularities which his face had used to put on when his wishes were thwarted by her modesty now did duty in picturing the incorrigible backslider who would insist upon turning again to his wallowing in the mire."

Pursued by the reformed Alec as she returns to Flintcomb Ash, Tess comes to the bleak site known as Cross-in-Hand. "Of all the spots on this bleak and desolate upland, this was the most forlorn. It was so far removed from the charm which is sought in landscape by artists and view-seekers as to reach a new kind of beauty, a negative beauty of tragical blankness."

Cross-in-Hand marked by a stone post, which Alec pronounces to Tess as the remaining upright of a holy cross -- a sacred relic. He makes her swear on it before he leaves her to return to his preaching.

Tess asks a local shepherd about the history of the cross. "Cross -- no; 'twere not a Cross! 'Tis a thing of ill omen, miss. It was put up by the relations of a malefactor who was tortured there by nailing his hand to a post, and afterwards hung. The bones lie underneath. They say he sold his soul to the devil, and that he walks at times."

Alec comes to Tess again to ask him to be his wife -- which she knows she cannot, being already married -- and then again to confess that she has tempted him away from his new vocation as a ranter.

Alec's third visit to Tess is again in the guise of the rake. He announces his fall from grace and this time demands rather than begs her company, saying he will free her from her endless toil for Farmer Groby. He caustically asks whether her husband is more than a myth and proposes that "even if you have one, I think I am nearer to you than he is. I, at any rate, try to help you out of trouble, but he does not, bless his invisible face!"

With the haughtiness of a D'urberville of the old line, Tess slaps him across the face with her farm gauntlet, drawing blood. She then demands to be punished.

On Alec's fifth visit, Tess is exhausted after a day and an evening feeding sheaves to an insatiable mechanical thresher, and she finds herself weakening in the face of his professed kindnesses.


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Obliterating her identity at every step

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'urbervilles: Reading Notes, Part Six

Deserted by Angel, Tess wanders the stony plain that stretches between "the valley of her birth and the valley of her love" in search of subsistance.

In keeping with the terrain, her heart "had learnt of the dust and ashes of things, of the cruelty of lust and the fragility of love."

Angel, meanwhile, briefly dallies with one of the other milkmaids, Izz Huett, inviting her to join him on his journey to Brazil, while warning that she "is not to trust me in morals now." He rescinds the invitation when Izz reminds him of how much Tess adored him.

Wandering alone, Tess exhibits "something of the habilitude of the wild animal in the unreflecting automatism with which she rambled on -- disconnecting herself little by little from her eventful past at every step, obliterating her identity."

On the road, Tess meets the man Angel had fought on her behalf and escapes from him by running into a preserve and making a "nest."

She sleeps overnight on the bare ground, disturbed by a sound of fluttering. On awakening, she finds that she is surrounded by wounded pheasants.

"Under the trees, several pheasants lay about, their rich plumage dabbled with blood; some were dead, some feebly moving their wings, some staring up at the sky, some pulsating feebly, some contorted, some stretched out -- all of them writhing in agony, except the fortunate ones whose tortures had ended during the night by the inability of Nature to bear more.

"Tess guessed at the meaning of this. The birds had been driven down into this corner the day before by some shooting party" . . . "She had occasionally caught sight of these men in girlhood, looking over hedges or peering through bushes, and pointing their guns, strangely accoutred, a bloodthisty light in their eyes. She had been told that, rough and brutal as they seemed just then, they were not like this all the year around, but were, in fact, quite civil persons save during certain weeks of autumn and winter . . . when [they] made it their purpose to destroy life."

Hoping to avoid further run-ins with men -- and perhaps drawing a lesson from the fate of the richly-plumaged pheasants -- Tess wears her worst clothes and cuts away her lush eyebrows.

Tess finds lowly work at a dismal farm at the aptly named Flintcomb Ash. She digs the lower halves of swede (turnips) from the ground, the tops and leaves having already been chewed away by livestock. The farm turns out to be owned by the same man who chased her into the park: Farmer Groby.

Increasingly distraught, Tess determines to visit Angel's parents, but after a long cross-country trek shrinks from her goal after overhearing a conversation among his brothers that, she believes, indicates how the family thinks of her.

Heading back to the turnip farm, Tess encounters a Ranter preaching a sermon. The Ranter is the reformed rake Alec D'urberville and in his audience is the man who paints biblical slogans along the roadside.

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"You were one person; now you are another"

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'urbervilles: Reading Notes, Part Five

The scene of Tess's confession strange, with ancient portraits of past D'urbervilles to whom she has a more than passing resemblance. Angel gives her family diamonds to wear and adjusts her dress so it approximates a ball dress. He is, it is clear, more fascinated by her romantic family heritage than he admits.

Tess forgives Angel his indiscretion and begs desperately that he, in turn, forgive hers. To which the stunned Angel replies: "O Tess, forgiveness does not apply in this case! You were one person; now you are another. My God -- can forgiveness meet such a grotesque -- prestidigitation as that!"

As with the obvious fascination with the D'urbervilles despite his professed contempt for noble families, Angel's response to Tess's heartfelt plea shows he is far more conventional than he styles himself.

As Tess pleads her case, the increasingly sardonic Angel says she is thinking like "an unappreciative peasant girl who has never been initiated into the proportions of things." [So much for the simple milkmaid of his romantic dreams].

Hardy notes that Angel's sarcasm has the same impact on Tess that it would on a cat or dog -- it is the tone of anger that she hears.

Angel reverts to his radical pose in denouncing Tess for not living up to his sentimental view of nature: "Here I was thinking you a new-sprung child of Nature; there were you, the exhausted seed of an effete aristocracy."

Angel determines they must part, but comes to Tess in the night as a sleepwalker and carrys her to a stone tomb where he lays her beside him.

The next day, when they part, Hardy advises is that Angel "did not know that he loved her still."


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The marriage -- A cock crows in the afternoon

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'urbervilles: Reading Notes, Part Four

On the advice of her mother, Tess continues to conceal the truth of her past from her betrothed. Basking in the luminous glow of her love for Angel, she knew that the "gloomy specters" of "doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame" were "waiting like wolves just outside the circumscribing light."

"It was no mature woman with a long dark vista of intrigue behind her who was tormented thus by her past; but a girl of simple life, not yet one and twenty, who had been caught during her days of immaturity like a bird in a springe."

When Tess's engagement to Angel is revealed, her fellow milkmaids jealously confront her: "each girl was sitting up in her bed, awaiting Tess, the whole like a row of avenging ghosts." Yet, when she collapses in years, the milkmaids find they cannot hate Tess.

When Tess is spotted by a Tantridge man who knows her past, Angel defends her honor with his fists. With their wedding day approaching, she determines to write him a letter telling the truth and slips it under his door.

On their wedding morn, wondering at Angel's continued lack of concern, Tess discovers that the letter went awry -- that it slipped under the carpet. All the stress returning, she destroys the letter.

Multiple registers of ill-omens follow immediately upon Tess and Angel's wedding. Legendary: They ride off in an ancient coach resembling the infamous "coach and four" of the D'urbervilles, in which an unspeakable crime was said to have occured (and which D'urbervilles are said to see in their dreams at moments of ill-fortune). Mythic: Tess's three fellow milkmaids are aligned along a wall like the Fates; on the departure of the couple, Angel gives each a kiss at Tess's urging. Natural: an "afternoon crow" as a white cock loudly crows at the couple as they drive off.

Angel, with a truly deaf ear for the workings of fate, books their wedding night at a farmhouse that was formerly a mansion of the D'urbervilles.

He confesses, and asks Tess's forgiveness, for a sexual indiscretion earlier in his youth. And then Tess, in the light of a fire that has "a Last-Day luridness," begins to tell her story.

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Tess and Angel

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'urbervilles: Reading Notes, Part Three

At Talbothays, Tess reencounters the youngest of the journeying brothers from the May dance -- Angel Clare. Angel has abjured the ecclesiasitical path of his older brothers, choosing instead to study and gain experience in various forms of farming.

Angel's sojourn among the various farms of Wessex gives him an appreciation for the variety of rural Englishmen, usually thought of collectively, and dismissively, as "Hodge."

"The typical and unvarying 'Hodge' ceased to exist. He had disintegrated into a number of varied fellow-creatures -- some happy, many serene, a few depressed, one here and there bright even to genius, some stupid, others wanton, others austere . . . men every one of whom walked in his own individual way the dusty road to death."

Angel and Tess begin to be drawn to one another. Thinking, no doubt, of her disasterous encounter with Alec D'urberville, "Tess was trying to lead a repressed life, but she little reckoned the intensity of her own vitality."

Tess wondering whether her "noble" D'urberville heritage might earn her the honest attention of Angel Clare, inquires of the young man's opinions with the master dairyman Crick, and learns from him that such "noble blood" is common among the local poor -- several locals, including one of her fellow milkmaids, are descended from once great families. Angel, Crick expounds, "is one of the most rebellest rozums you ever knowed . . . And if there's one thing he hate more than another 'tis the notion of what's called an old family. He says that it stands to reason that old families have done their spurt of work in past days, and can't have anything left in 'em now."

Angel finds himself falling in love with Tess and they have their first kiss in a pasture. He goes to visit his family to sort through his conflicted thoughts and confesses his intent to propose.

As Angel Clare returns to the farm from the sanctimonious atmosphere of his family home it is like "throwing off splints and bandages" to him."

Angel proposes to Tess and she is alarmed due to the secret of her lost maidenhood. Telling Tess of his father, Angel mentions that the Reverend recently expostulated against a young rake-hell, whom Tess immediately recognizes as D'urberville, making her sense of doom even deeper.

Hardy describes Tess and her fellow milkmaids going out into the fields as "advancing with the bold grace of wid animals -- the reckless, unchastened motion of women accustomed to unlimited space."

Angel presses his suit: "But you will make me happy."

Tess responds: "Ah -- you think so, but you don't know!"

Tess begins to reconsider her cautious refusal of Angel's declaration of love: "In reality, she was drifting into acquiescense. Every see-saw of her breath, every wave of her blood, every pulse singing in her ears, was a voice that joined with Nature in revolt against her scrupulousness."

Together alone on an errand for the dairy, Angel points out a fragment of a manor house, formerly a seat of the extinct D'urbervilles. Arriving at the railway, Hardy speaks of Tess's unmechanized (pre-modern) nature: "The light of the engine flashed for a moment on Tess Durbeyfield's figure, motionless under the great holly tree. No object could have looked as foreign to the gleaming cranks and wheels than this unsophisticated girl . . . [with] the suspended attitude of a friendly leopard at pause."

As Tess gives in to Angel, she abandons trying to control "the 'appetite for joy' which stimulates all creation; that tremendous force which sways humanity to its purpose."

[In certain ways, Tess' animalistic, premodern nature, conflicting with Victorian social morays, actually prefigures postmodern morality].

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The birth and death of Sorrow

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'urbervilles: Reading Notes, Part Two

Tess returns to her native village, pregnant with Alec D'urberville's child. En-route, she encounters a fanatical wanderer who paints biblical imprecations on fences and farm structures. Tess refuses to believe that such curses are truly the words of God.

Nevertheless Tess is beset by moral regrets: "a cloud of moral hobgoblins by which she was terrified without reason. It was they who were out of harmony with the actual world, not she. Walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a figure of guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence . . . She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly."

Tess divided between a moral, grieving side and a natural, passionate one.

She gives birth to a sickly infant whom she names Sorrow. On the child's death, she buries it in the corner of the village graveyard reserved for those souls that will never see heaven.

On Sorrow's death, Tess begins to wonder if it would be impossible for her to reclaim her maidenhood. An opportunity arises for her to leave her parents' home to work at a large dairy farm, Talbothays, in another valley.

Leaving her home "some spirit within her rose automatically as the sap in the twigs. It was unexpended youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing with it hope, and the invincible instinct towards self-delight."


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"Fine skellingtons": "Tess of the D'urbervilles" begins

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'urbervilles: Reading Notes, Part One

The fateful meeting of Durbeyfield with the Antiquarian parson Tringham, who informs him of his heritage as descended from the once powerful, now "extinct" D'Urbervilles.

The D'Urberville legacy consists of things that are dead and buried -- like the "fine skellingtons" and lead coffins of which the drunken Durbeyfield brags.

Similarly, traditions in Wessex have decayed -- the wan May celebration at which Tess dances; the dogeared copy of the "Complete Fortune-Teller" that her mother won't allow in the house overnight -- without modernity having taken grip. In Wessex, "the Elizabethan and Victorian ages stood juxtaposed."

The Durbeyfield brood of six. Hardy punctures the Victorian equivalent of family values rhetoric, in which the family is said to represent "Nature's holy plan": "All these young souls were passengers in the Durbeyfield ship -- entirely dependent on the judgment of the two Durbeyfield adults . . . If the heads of the Durbeyfield household chose to sail into difficulty, disaster, starvation, disease, degradation, death, thither were these half-dozen little captives under hatches compelled to sail with them."

In the darkness, Tess and her young brother Abraham take the bee hives to market in place of the drunken Durbeyfield ("Sir John"). Abraham "with upturned face made observations on the stars, whose cold pulses were beating amid the black hollows above, in serene disassociation from those two wisps of human life."

This description of the remoteness of the heavens counters the reading ("A Counterblast at Agnosticism") of the oldest of the wandering brothers at the dance.

Tess, from the national
curriculum and her "Sixth Standard" education is aware there are other planets and worlds and imagines them to be better ones. Pondering alternate suns in the stars above, she tells Abraham that they live on a "blighted" star, not a sound one.

Tess' education also results in her having "quite a Malthusian towards her mother for thoughtlessly giving her so many little sisters and brothers."

Tess sent by her parents as emissary to their rich relations -- the Stoke-D'urbervilles -- who in reality are not relations at all. A newly rich tradesman, Simon Stoke, had picked the disused D'urberville name out of old heraldry books at the British Museum.

She meets the young heir Alec D'urberville whom Hardy foreshadows as "potentially the 'tragic mischief' of her drama -- one who stood fair to be the blood-red ray in the spectrum of her young life."

Tess pricked by a thorn from one of the roses Alec D'urberville had placed in her bosom, which she sees as an ill portent. Hardy notes drily that it is the first bad omen she had noted that day.

After the bourgeous Stoke-D'urbervilles erected their new home, they converted the previous house to the poultry shed over which Tess presides: "the rooms in which dozens of infants had wailed at their nursing now resounded with the tapping of nascent chicks. Distracted hens in coops occupied spots where formerly stood chairs supporting sedate agriculturists. The chimney corner and once blazing hearth was now filled with inverted beehives, in which the hens laid their eggs; while oui-of-doors the plots that each succeeding householder had carefully shaped with his spade were torn by cocks in wildest fashion."

The blind Mrs. D'urberville holds tender feelings for her fowl and the bullfinches that fly free in her bedroom, but less for her son whom she neverthelss loves "scornfully."

Alec rescues Tess from the revels, turned ugly, of her fellow farm maids. But as he rides off with her, the peasant women laugh, knowing she faces a greater danger under his care than from their fists.

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Reading notes on "In the Lake of the Woods"

Reading Notes: Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods
April 11, 2009

"In the Lake of the Woods" is a mystery novel of sorts, but one in which the mystery gets deeper as secrets are revealed.

As a boy, the rising politician John Wade takes refuge in magic tricks, practicing illusions before a mirror in the basement of his house. As he grows up, he internalizes the mirror and lives by illusion.

In Vietnam, where he is part of the company led by Lieutenant Calley that massacred civilians at My Lai (a secret he tries to hide from the public as well as himself) he is known as "Sorcerer."

Structure of the book is multifold: 1) chapters that describe "What" happened after Kathy's disappearance; 2) retrospective chapters on the "Nature" of John Wade's experiences as son, lover, soldier, politician, and suspect; 3) chapters that assemble "Evidence" in the form of passages from histories, public documents, quotes from characters in the novel, professional texts, literary works, lists of the contents of "John Wade's Box of Tricks"; and 4) "Hypothesis" chapters on what might have happened to Kathy.

John's repressed rage: "All that rage. Like an infection it seemed -- some terrible virus that kept multiplying within him." The night of Kathy's disappearance, his poltical career in tatters, he mutters again and again "Kill Jesus," pours boiling-hot water on houseplants (an act of deforestation?).

John lives by magic; Kathy by order and logic: "And then, for fifteen minutes over a second cup of coffee, she sat at the kitchen table with her book of crossword puzzles. She liked to start each day with a sense of accomplishment, solving what could be solved."

John, when his external success, his guise in the world has been demolished: "The mental scaffolding was gone, all the dreams for himself, all the fine illusions and ambitions."

John's coping mechanism: "Long ago, as a kid, he'd learned the secret of making his mind into a blackboard. Erase the bad stuff. Draw in pretty new pictures."

John deploys "tricks," mental and social, to repress the atrocities in which he was involved in Vietnam and the trauma of his father's suicide.

From his early youth, John perfects the skill of hiding behind the "mirrors" in his head -- illusions of normality. He is aware of the fakery, saying to himself that "his whole life had been managed with mirrors."

John's heroism and battle wounds, his political career, his marriage all a form of "apology" of atonement, for what he did in Vietnam.

John's ideal of love is a kind of disappearance. He speaks of wanting to disappear within Kathy and, observing in Vietnam two snakes eating each others' tails, he imagines the ultimate magic of 1 + 1 equalling zero. Later, after Kathy's disappearance -- and contemplating a suicide like his father's -- he sees nature as a place where that same math could prevail.

John irked by Kathy's gambling in Vegas; as a magician, John has no tolerance of chance.

Novel of secrets: the ones that you don't tell others (the abortion) and, more dire, the ones you repress -- the ones you don't tell to yourself (My Lai).

Dostoyevsky's "Notes from the Underground" quoted as "Evidence": "Every man has some reminiscenses which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away . . . Man is bound to lie about himself."

In the "Evidence" sections, O'Brien connects politics to war, Vietnam to eradication of Native American populations, magic to denial, repression of memory to performance.

Notable (too easy?) that the Native American in Calley's company, Thinbill, is the only character who doesn't participate in the massacre.

In reference to John Wade's "Sorcerer" identity, Justin Kaplan quoted as "Evidence": "By taking a new name . . . an unfinished person may hope to enter into more dynamic -- but not necessarily more intimate -- transactions, both with the world outside and with his or her 'true soul,' the naked self." [An intersting thought in our age of avatars].

Assigned to administrative duty toward the end of his tour, "Sorcerer" makes his involvement in My Lai disappear by altering company records.

The failure of John's political "trick" of trying to make his past vanish: "He'd tried to pull off a trick that couldn't be done, which was to remake himself, to vanish what was past and replace it with things good and new. He should've known better. Should've lifted it out of the act. Never given the fucking show in the first place."

Intentionally or not, living or dead, Kathy has pulled a vanishing act -- her own feat of magic.

The final "Nature" chapter has Kathy dead (accident? murder? there are "Hypotheses" to cover both) at the bottom of "Lake of the Woods." So Kathy, and her death are now part of John's past along with the other incidents in the "Nature" chapters.

Yet the last "Hypothesis" chapter provides, perversely, a happy ending."

The narrator reflects: "Our own children, our fathers' our wives and husbands: Do we truly know them? How much is camoflage? How much is guessed at? How many lies get told and when, and about what? . . . How often do we lie awake speculating -- seeking some hidden truth? Oh yes, it gnaws at me. I have my own secrets, my own trapdoors. I know something about deceit. Far too much. How it coreodes and corrupts"

As for John Wade: "Can we believe he was not a monster but a man? That he was innocent of everything except his life? Could the truth be so simple? So terrible?"

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From coddled prodigy to beast of burden

William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner: Reading Notes, Part 4

Pampered in his role as the pet of the Turner plantation, Nat tells how it was the pious Miss Nell who innocently reads to him the bloodthirsty Old Testament passages that will inspire his future plans for revolt.

[The whites in "The Confessions of Nat Turner" read the bible and quote from it, but seem to have no sense at all of what it is saying].

Nat describes his early sexual fantasies, which are of a faceless white girl with curly blond hair.

He has a more worshipful regard for the youngest daughter of the Turner family, Emmeline. But then, one night, he spies her and a cousin fornicating. In the midst of their coupling, Emmeline blasphemes fervently. Nat's sense of Emmeline's purity, her untouchability is permanently destroyed and soon her image replaces the faceless blond as the subject of Nat's solitary, guilt- ridden pleasures.

On a trip into town, Marse Joseph tells Nat of his plans to emancipate him upon his reaching his majority. But the spell of that eventual gift is clouded when they pass a gang of slaves in chains, enroute to a plantation in Georgia to which they have been sold.

Nat develops a friendship with another slave boy, Willis, and begins to school him in letters and numbers. One day when the two are fishing, and after Willis casually takes the Lord's name in vain (see Emmeline above) for which Nat slaps him, the two boys fall into a carnal embrace -- which Willis enjoys (Man, I sho liked dat. Want to do it agin?) and which Nat justifies to himself via the biblical story of David and Jonathan. Gulity nevertheless, Nat takes it upon himself to baptize Willis and then himself in the stream. Willis becomes his first disciple as a self-proclaimed "minister."

As the economic status of the Turner plantation erodes through the environmental degredation wracking the Tidewater, Marse Joseph secretly sells four slave boys for ready cash. Willis is one of them, which angers Nat, though the master explains that soon all the slaves -- the only true capital available to him -- will need to be sold to pay debts.

Nat is loaned out by Marse Turner to a minister, the Reverend Epps, who tries to molest him and, failing, makes the boy the servant of the entire congregation. The previously pampered Nat discovers for the first time what it is to be a Negro: "It seemed to me that I had been plunged into a hallucination in which I had parted from all familiar existence and was suddenly transformed into a different living creature alltogether -- half man, half mule, exhausted and without speech, given over to dumb and reasonless toil from the hours before dawn until the dead of night." Nat endures it thinking of the freedom he has been promised when he turns 21.

Marse Turner apparently having forgotten, or repudiated, his promise to free Nat, he is sold by the Reverend Epps at a slave auction, the former favorite locked "in a crowded, noisy pen with fifty strange negroes" experiencing "a kind of disbelief which verged close upon madness, then a sense of betrayal, then fury such as I had never known before, then finally, to my dismay, hatred so bitter that I grew dizzy and thought I might get sick on the floor."

Nat's new master, an illiterate, is stunned that his new possession can read. Brooding, the owner Thomas Moore tells his equally uneducated cousin Wallace about a "free nigger" he'd heard about in Smithfield who could read: "when he died they cut open his head and looked at his brain and it had wrinkles just like a white man's. And you know, they was a story 'bout how some of the niggers got holt of a part of the brain and actual et some of it, hopin' they'd git smart too."

Fearing the new slave will inevitably get "uppity," Moore is not pleased at having bought a "nigger" who can read. When Nat asks for food, he is whipped -- physically punished for the first time. It is then, as he feels the wet blood on his neck, Nat first hears God's voice booming through the trees, saying the words: "I abide."

In the future when God speaks to Nat, urging him to "bloodshed of baptism or preaching or charity" it will always be with those same two words: "I abide."

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Nat's education: a half-loaf of learning

William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner: Reading Notes, Part 3

While awaiting execution, Nat recalls his earliest days. He is a "house nigger," brought up hearing (and imitating) the voices of the white owner. His best friend Wash, was "moulded by different sounds . . . nigger voices striving clumsily to grapple with a language never taught, never really learned, still alien and unknown.

In the library of the boy Nat's master, Samuel Turner, the books "had been locked up behind wire, row after row of lustrous leather-swaddled volumes imprisoned in a cage."
Nat steels himself to take one of two tracts by John Bunyan he sees left out on the library table: "The Life and Death of Mr. Badman" (the other is "Grace Abounding").

Nat witnesses the rape of his mother, the cook Lou-Ann by the Irish overseer McBride ("There, God damn, you'll have a taste of me big greasy"); rape turning to seduction as he sees them couple in a rhythym he thought, from earlier spyings, amid the slave cabins, was peculiar to negroes and as the overseer exclaims to Lou-Ann that she shall have earrings from him.

Discovered in his theft of the book, Nat's desire to learn how to read fascinates his master. Musing over this event in his cell, Nat reflects that "the most futile thing a man can do is to ponder the alternatives, to stew and fret over the life that might have been lived if circumstances had not pointed his future in a certain direction." He nevertheless wonders what would have been his fate had he not become "the beneficiary (or perhaps the victim) of my owner's zeal to tamper with a nigger's destiny."

From the day his desire to learn is discovered, Nat's education becomes a family project. Nat reflects that his master, Marse Turner, "could not have realized, in his innocence and decency, in his awesome goodness and softness of heart, what sorrow he was guilty of creating in feeding me that half-loaf of learning."

Wonderful passage where Nat imagines, from youth to dotage, what would have been his life had he not learned to read -- happier, he suspects, for being ignorant.

The boy Nat a kind of agricultural experiment. He overhears Marse Samuel exclaim on the evils of slavery, opining that education is needed before slaves can be freed to live on their own.

Samuel Turner's brother Benjamin disagrees, finding his brother "sentimental as an old hound" in believing "you can take a bunch of darkies and turn them into shopowners and sea captains and opera impressarios and generals." Benjamin sees negroes as "animals with the brains of a human child." His desire is to replace Negro slaves with machines both for fieldwork and then, sardonically, in the form of "another grand machine to come chugging through the house, lighting the lamps and setting the rooms in order." He drunkenly expands upon the conceit to say that such a machine would not steal or be given to laziness and that, upon such a wondrous machine being invented "I will say a happy adieu to slavery."

Singling out Nat's accomplishments in reading, numbers, and Bible-study, Benjamin opines that whatever learning can be achieved by a darky, he will still be "an animal with the brain of a human child" incapable of wisdom, honesty, or an understanding of human ethics and thus needful of the "benevolent subjection" that enlightened slave owners can provide. A darky, he concludes, "is basically as unteachable as a chicken."


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"The plain ordinary evil of your dad-burned Bible"

William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner: Reading Notes, Part 2

Nat's second dream comes while he is chained to the bench in court. He dreams of black chldren being sucked down into a fetid swamp. But he has misplaced his Bible and can do nothing to save them.

In court, he tries to pray, but feels his prayers falling to the ground rather than rising up to heaven. He feels he has been abandoned by God and that makes him fear death for the first time.

Listening to the prosecutor, Nat feels the denunciations of the closing arguments flow directly, naturally from his own confessions. He accepts the savagery of his actions.

Nat notes ruefully that Gray has a different speaking manner in front of whites in court: "I had grown only mildly surprised by his voice, filled as it was with eloquence and authority, free of the sloppy patronizing half-literate white-man-to-a-nigger tones he had used in jail.

In Gray's summation, another version of the "cloak" Nat cites as necessary to cloak a Negro's true thoughts. Gray sees it as cloaking baseness, deviance, speaking of: "the evasiveness the Negro uses to cloak and disguise the base quality of his nature."

Nat also winces as Gray speaks with reverance of the slaves who stayed loyal to their masters and defended them from the insurrectionists.

Gray's argument becomes a eugenic pereoration as he explains that what separates Napoleon from Nat is the inadequate cranial capacity of the Negro race.

Nat refers to his first recruits to his conspiracy (Hark, Henry, Nelson, Sam) as "men of God, and messengers of His vengence."

Nat hopes to exclude from his cadre the ungovernable Will who has "the frenzied, mindless quality of a wild boar cornered hopelessly in a thicket, snarling and snapping its brutish and unavailing wrath."

The issue for Nat with Will if clearly that he is unrepressed; he speaks of Will the same way whites speak of "niggers" as a whole. But Will shares, in uncontrolled form, all Nat's mingled hatreds and passions; Nat represses his desire for the white girl Catherine Whitehead (and hates her for her easy intimacy and trust) while Will mutters obsessively under his breath "get me some of that white stuff" and more derisively "old white cunt." Nat excludes Will from his recruitment because it is well known that he "broods upon rape," which Nat has forbidden to his followers.

Nat sentenced to death by Judge Cobb, who summarizes the enormity of his crimes while nevertheless referring to his sympathy for the criminal.

Later, back in jail, Hark relates to Nat from the next cell the vigilante riots that followed the capture of the insurrectionists and the many innocent blacks who were murdered by whites seeking retribution.

Gray comes to Nat's cell to tell him he's been denied access to a Bible.

He then lectures Nat that "Christianity is finished" chiding Nat that "the message contained in Holy Scripture was the cause, the prime mover of the entire miserable catastrophe" -- causing the deaths of Nat's followers, of their 55 white victims, and of the innocent blacks killed in the ensuing mob violence.

"Don't you see,". Gray asks, "the plain ordinary evil of your dad-burned Bible?"

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"Most blessed or cursed of God's creatures": "The Confessions of Nat Turner" begins

William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner: Reading Notes, Part 1

Styron's "The Confessions of Nat Turner" a double confession. The slave revolt leader Nat Turner, chained and in prison awaiting trial and execution, tells his story to the lawyer Gray but it is a surface account -- one that doesn't reveal his motives. But the reader hears Nat's inner thoughts, his private confession.

Nat's dream of an ocean voyage (he has never seen the ocean) at the end of which lies a doorless marble structure on a bluff. A tomb?

Through chained and hungry, the one thing Nat cannot bear is that the Christian God who spoke to him, who daily inspired him to slaughter the enslaving white race has withdrawn from him, no longer speaks in his thoughts.

In prison, Nat meditates on whether the fly that buzzes around his head is the most blessed or cursed of creatures: "In many ways, I thought, a fly must be one of the most fortunate of God's creatures. Brainless born, brainlessly seeking its sustenance from anything wet and warm, it found its brainless mate, reproduced, and died brainless, unacquainted with misery or grief. But then I asked myself: how could I be sure? Who could say that flies were not instead God's supreme outcasts, buzzing eternally between heaven and oblivion in a pure agony of mindless twitching, forced by instinct to dine off sweat and slime and offal, their very brainlessness an everlasting torment?"

A g(Nat) = a fly? Nat clearly placed between fellow slaves Hark (who hears) and Will (who acts).

The chained Nat bargains with the garrolous lawyer Gray: "There is no doubt about it. White people often undo themselves by such running off at the mouth, and only God knows how many nigger triumphs have been won in total silence."

In drawing out Nat's confession, Gray complains that the prisoner is not forthcoming about why the insurrectionists killed the kindly (including his "humane" master Joseph Travis) as well as the brutal and were unsparing of innocent children. He also is incredulous that Nat himself slew so few; that he attributes much of the carnage to the slave Will. In these external confessions, dictated to Gray, Nat refuses to address either of these questions of motivation or reluctance.

Gray's legal disquisition on the different kinds of chattel: animate (like Nat) and inanimate (the example he gives is that of a wagon). The court has condemned to death only the intelligent slaves -- a minority of the insurrectionists -- returning the "inanimate" ones to their masters. Gray gives this as evidence of Virginia's superior sense of justice and mercy.

Internally narrating the story of his youth, Nat recalls how his fellow slave Hark (now in an adjacent cell) "always declared he could distinguish between good white people and bad white people -- and even white people who lay between good and bad -- by their smell alone."

We already know that Nat's bloody, biblical vengeance, in accordance with the strictures expressed by the prophet Ezekiel, will make no distinction between good and bad oppressors.

Hark also theorizes the condition of being "black-assed" -- "the numbness and dread which dwells in every Negro's heart" and that comes from contact with every white, whether evil or kind, that inevitably reminds the slave of his blackness. Hark expects a similar result to come from meeting God in heaven.

Hark has gained the enmity of the master's stepson Putnam (who is actually Nat's owner, though as a minor not yet his "master") from having, while out hunting hickory nuts, "innocently but clumsily ambushed Putnam and Joel Westbrook in some tangled carnal union by the swimming pond, both of the boys as naked as catfish on the muddy bank, writhing about and skylarking with each other in the most oblivious way." Putnam's consequent anger at Hark's "spying" is to Nate an "uncorrectable situation: white people really see nothing of a Negro in his private activity, while a Negro . . . must walk miles out of his path to avoid seeing everything white people do."

Styron's evocative description of Nat's pastoral existence (the warm shed he shares with Hark, his daily trapping of rabbits in the surrounding woods) under the kind master Joseph Travis is remarkably intersperced with brief, matter-of-fact, dispassionate references by Nat to the carnage he is planning.

Nat recalls first meeting Judge Cobb, the magistrate who will shortly be presiding over his trial. The judge, visiting the wheelwright shop of Nat's master, identifies Nat as the intelligent, bible-reading slave he has heard rumor of and taunts him with all the contradictory verses which demand of slaves either bloodthirsty revolt or meek obedience.

The drunken Judge Cobb taunts Nat to spell the word cat -- to show his learning -- and Nat rages internally that he will have to murder the man, and thus lose the opportunity for the revolt he is meditating, if he is forced to reveal the secret of his intelligence.

Nat, as Cobb attempts to taunt him into revealing his intelligence: "A Negro's most cherished possession is the drab, neutral cloak of anonymity he can manage to gather around himself, allowing him to merge faceless and nameless with the common swarm: impudence and misbehavior are, for obvious reasons, unwise, but equally so is the display of an uncommon distinction, for if the former attributes can get you starved, whipped, chained, the latter may subject you to such curiosity and hostile suspicion as to ruinously impair the minute amount of freedom you possess."

Cobb repeatedly quotes an aphorism that Nat cannot place in the Bible: "As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly."

Nat, in more learned fashion, reiterates Hark's notion of black-assed-ness: "even when they care, even when they are somehow on your side, they cannot help but taunt and torment you."

Cobb's drunken rant on the degeneration of Virginia from "plump and virginal principality," fecund with a variety of crops, to "withering, defeated hag," despoiled to provide tobacco for English pipes, and now breeding ground for slaves ("little black infants by the score, the hundreds, the thousands, the tens of thousands") required by the cotton states: "a nursery for Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas . . . A monstrous breeding farm to supply the sinew to gratify the maw of Eli Whitney's infernal machine."

The drunken and grotesque Judge Cobb wails: "Oh Virginia, woe
betide thee! Woe thrice woe, and ever damned be the day when poor black men in chains first trod upon thy sacred strand."

Nat, who has been plotting his bloody insurrection, feels a momentary "thrill of hope" in hearing Cobb's crazed pronouncements, but it quickly gives way to a sense of danger, suspicion and mistrust.

Cobb further laments loudly when Nat tells him of how the "kind" master Joseph Travis, who doesn't allow beating of his slaves, nevertheless had no choice but to sell Hark's wife and young son to work in the Mississippi cotton fields.

In accordance with the passage from Exekiel that guides Nat's plan and that calls for the protection of those who sigh for justice even as the innocent children are to be slain, he determines that Cobb will be "spared the sword."

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