A tingle of nervous excitement shot through my body as I opened the novel. What would I find inside here after over sixty years? A treasure trove or a recycled dump of disappointments? It felt like a reunion with an old school friend, someone whose dynamic adventurous company I had once enjoyed and then lost all contact with. How well would this once loved friend have aged? How weathered and wrinkled and robust would he look? I skipped the laborious authorial introduction, having no memory at all of such an encumbrance. I wanted the meat of the yarn, the characters, the emotional hurdy gurdy, the craic – and I’d be damned if I was kept waiting a second longer! The shock to my system turned out to be very severe indeed. How could I have forgotten so much?

Before I arrived at the end of the first chapter or so, two things had struck me. Firstly, this Bronte woman could write brilliantly – but her punctuation was just awful. Semi-colons, parentheses, dashes all inappropriately sprouted in her paragraphs like ugly weeds in what could otherwise have been a tidy and fertile lawn. Secondly, what a master stroke to have this supercilious, hail fellow well met, egotistical foppish twat called Lockwood to narrate the first part of the story.

Off Lockwood goes on a stroll across the moors to find solace in the company of his new landlord, too up himself to realise a blizzard was about to blow in or to have any notion of the total madhouse that awaited him up there. Once inside Wuthering Heights the dozy tosser is assaulted by a degree of inhospitality and parsimony that includes snarling untamed human beings and their canine half-starved equivalents. The owner is a forty year old man of swarthy features called Heathcliff who has mastered the dark arts of surliness, tyranny and avarice. The elderly chief servant, Joseph, is a curmudgeonly Yorkshireman whose dialect is as unfathomable as his fire-breathing judgmentalism. This is to say nothing of the laconic waifish, Mrs Heathcliff, and the morose lumpen dullard, Hareton. Lockwood gets marooned by the snow storm and savaged by a dog in quick succession. He is awoken in the night by a terrible dream then witnesses Heathcliff screaming hysterically like a maniac through the bedroom window for his long dead heart’s darling, Cathy, to please come back in from the wilderness.

As I said, to have an entitled genteel narcissistic tosser set the scene is sheer literary genius. It seriously grabs your attention. Especially since stolen and thwarted entitlement will be at the heart of the story to follow. I don’t think I appreciated such cleverness when I was young – even though I did understand what a madhouse was, simply because I lived in one myself. Tyranny and vindictiveness were normative to me as a child but entitled tosserdom as yet remained an obscure concept. At an early point Lockwood hands the narrative over to Nelly and so the backstory of Heathcliff is told by virtue of her vivid memory, letters she has received, reports received and much else. Nelly is an impeccable and reliable witness. She is decent and loving and the reader can trust her implicitly. However horrific, cruel and improbable the events, we can fully believe them because Nelly is the salt of the earth. Okay, her perceptiveness and use of language belongs to Bronte not to the character, who as an uneducated servant is unlikely, in my opinion, to be quite so gifted. But that didn’t bother me.

What did bother me, however, as I advanced deeper into the novel was the growing realisation why as a teenager I could not stop reading it. The bloke who I learnt to call my dad was a brooding vindictive black haired secretive atheistic monomaniac much like Heathcliff. He was my primary male role model. A low self-esteem cynical bully who would resort to violence if ever you dared to contradict or disobey him. It was through skirting around his misanthropy and probably unconsciously mimicking him that I learnt how to become a man, albeit a very warped one. This novel therefore provided me as a kid with an opportunity to begin to understand how deep rooted psychotic disturbances and a thwarted sense of identity can manifest in a family, and how that cancer of lunacy can infect one generation after another. My father had been badly emotionally damaged as a child of impoverished immigrants and he lived mostly to redress the balance by treating others with the same ferocious contempt life had treated him. My brother got beaten up and abused by him much more than I did. My brother was our Hareton Earnshaw and my mother a kind hearted domestic slave like Nelly. Psychologists call this process projection, don’t they? Unless we learn to expiate our hurts and neuroses healthily, we continually project our hatreds and rage and sense of injustice onto others – and those most conveniently available are our children. Then the children project on to their children. A cycle of lunacy is established. This can and does work within tribes and nation states equally as it does within families. Bronte was a very young woman when she wrote this. Her insights, her portrayal of these hidden psychological processes, is astonishingly mature and detailed. See chapter 32 page 351.

But the other reason re-visiting this book shocked me was to do with grief and the way we can become haunted by our dead loved ones. Haunting is not a literary conceit. It may not even be a temporary derangement of the mental faculties. Lots of people attest to being haunted. It happened to me at the age of 23. I find Heathcliff’s bitterness and resentment of the living absolutely plausible. I spent several years hating my best friends just for being alive. Those final pages when the ghost of Cathy moves right up close to him and he finally dies in an exalted state of bliss is for me one of the most moving passages of writing in the whole of literature. Do I like Heathcliff? Absolutely no! Do I understand him? Absolutely yes! He is an archetype of masculinity in all its tragic grace and complex impoverishment. For my part I cannot engage with Heathcliff without thinking of my father. In addition to being a misanthropic bastard, dad had some significant qualities. So does Bronte’s hero in the final analysis. He has an aesthetic sensibility, an ability to stare into the recesses of his demonic soul, a stoical sense of loyalty and integrity. So I somewhat modify my previous damning judgement..

How could such a young woman get this complex ambivalence of character so right? We should be staggered at her genius. Never mind her insights about the psychology of human behaviour and the brilliant way she counterpoints them against the external phenomena of Nature, there is the sure handed arrangement of her wealth of material to consider. By situating all these traumatic events within a purely ordinary domestic setting – “the domiciling of the monstrous in the ordinary rhythms of work and life” – she somehow makes it simultaneously less monstrous and therefore more disturbing. Today we do not suffer the same precarity of life as people did in 1800 but in every other sense we have not really changed. We assume we are rational but really we are mostly slaves to our passions. Wuthering Heights is a soap opera of sorts, a microcosm of the global geopolitical chaos in which we struggle to survive and coexist. Every tyrant should study Heathcliff and ask himself why he exercises power in the way he does, what lies at the roots of his psychopathology. Or is that for you, dear reader, too grandiose a proposition?

One of the questions asked of the Cathy Heathcliff relationship is whether it was sexual or platonic. We’re given no clue. Sex was off limits as a subject for the 19th century novelist – well most of them. (I suspect Bronte was a virgin anyway. When babies are born in this book they almost appear out of thin air.) It may be a limitation of the book that we are not told. On the other hand we can decide for ourselves. My view is they were physical lovers. When I was young reading it I was much more anguished about Cathy’s reason for marrying Edgar. She rationalises it is to help Heathcliff. It felt like class betrayal to me. There is certainly an element of the fairy tale about the couple’s bonding and separation. When I visited the Thrushcross Grange type houses of my grammar school middle class friends I invariably found them seductive and envied the affluence on which they were situated. Simone De Beauvoir, who regarded Bronte on the basis of just this story as one of the greatest novelists ever, notes that Cathy shacks up with the rich wimp and dumps the macho foundling because she has no agency as a woman in a ferociously patriarchal society and has to deny what she really wants just to materially survive.

Critical theorists of feminist, Marxist or psychoanalytical persuasion all interpret WH in different ways. For my money, whether you read the novel as a love story or a fairy tale or a ghost story or a revenge tragedy or political allegory, you have to admit it has extraordinary narrative and descriptive properties. As a flawed anti-hero Heathcliff is on a par with Hamlet, King Lear, Oedipus and the creations of Dostoevsky. I keep trying to quell the inner Heathcliff in me and one of the most painful realisations while re-reading the novel is knowing how badly I have failed. Give me the child until he is seven and I shall give you the man – alas! So thank you, Jim, for enabling me to have such intense purgatorial pleasure and several broken night’s sleep. If you weren’t fathered by a Heathcliff or have never been haunted by your dead lover I can hardly blame you for wondering what all the literary fuss is about. I just envy you your serenity. May the ghouls and spectres of your unrequited passions never be with you!

5 STARS *****