The Woodlanders was Hardy’s favourite child and it’s not difficult to see why.
I first came across it when I taught the novel as part of an undergraduate module on the Pastoral. When the module was scrapped as a consequence of the move from terms to semesters I’d become so fond of the text that I incorporated it into an Access to HE 19th Century Literature module. It suited the interdisciplinary nature of our Access course well. Through Grace Melbury Hardy dramatises the way so many of us today are torn between the familiar and the rooted, embodied in Giles Winterborne and the village of Little Hintock, and the pull of the new and provisional, given flesh in Fitzpiers. Prior to the 19th century the dilemma wouldn’t have existed for the overwhelming majority of people: you were stuck with your roots whether you wanted them or not. Although Hardy paints Giles as a far better man than Fitzpiers, and his heart is with the world of Little Hintock, he knows that what it represents has had its day. The future is Fitzpiers.
A couple of years ago I’d quite enjoyed reading Giro di vento a novel by the contemporary Italian author, Andrea De Carlo. Partly prompted by the falling off of Camilleri’s powers, I decided recently that I ought to get to grips with some serious contemporary fiction. So I sent off for a couple more books by De Carlo. I’ve just finished the first: Due di due. Unlike Giro di vento it didn’t immediately grab me: I found the first 100 pages tedious. And the title puzzled me: what did Due di due signify? I looked on Amazon to see what title an English translation might have, if one existed. It did: Two Out of Two, which didn’t help at all. Fortunately the answer to my question appeared on page 216. ‘Pensavo a quanto le nostre vite erano state diverse in questi anni, e anche simili in fondo, due di due [my italics] possibili percorsi iniziati dallo stesso bivio’ - I thought about how greatly our lives had diverged over the years and how at the same time they were fundamentally the same: although we’d each followed a different route, both of them were one of the two possible directions which began at the same crossroads.
As grammar school pupils growing up in Milan both Mario, the narrator, and his best friend Guido had been disenchanted by the values which the City embodied and its unhealthy physical environment: Milan’s smog is notorious. It is Eliot’s ‘Unreal city’. Guido’s solution is to pursue the infinite possibilities which the world offers, hating to be tied to one place because that necessarily excludes all the others. He has a similar attitude to women. As Martina, the monogamous narrator’s partner puts it:
‘… ogni donna era per Guido una chiave che gli permetteva di entrare in un’altra vita, sperimentarla nel suoi risvolti più intimi invece di immaginiarsela dal di fuori. … le donne gli piacevano come persone, e lui evidentemente piaceva a loro, ma doveva essere l’ossessione per le infinite possibilità parallele a rendere senza fine la sua ricerca’ - for Guido every woman was a key which allowed him to enter into another life, to try it out in its most intimate aspects rather than just imagining it from outside. … he liked women as individuals, and they obviously liked him, but he had to follow his obsession with the infinite parallel possibilities, which made his research endless..
In other words he kept moving from woman to woman!
Mario’s solution is to go for self-sufficiency in a remote spot of the Umbrian countryside, teaching himself - from books he buys in Perugia - how to start an organic smallholding . He and Martina, an assistant in the Perugian bookshop when he met her, have children together and slowly make a success of their business,
Like The Woodlanders, Due di due ends movingly. As a symbolic gesture, Mario commemorates his friend’s death by literally torching the adjacent house Guido should have occupied, but never did. Guido’s choosing a different but complementary path had illuminated the narrator’s life.
Unlike Hardy, De Carlo ultimately comes down on the side of ‘returning to the land’ as the way forward. A nice idea, but - despite its popularity with some idealists here - until we’re forced into it by the collapse of western civilisation it’s pretty unlikely to have many takers I’d say!
