[In the following essay, Selby examines screen adaptations of Far from the Madding Crowd by John Schlesinger and Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Roman Polanski, finding that the directors take liberties with Hardy's version of history and his interpretation of character.]

It was David Lodge, in an early article on The Return of the Native (1878), who first called Hardy a ‘cinematic’ novelist—by which he meant not that Hardy was influenced by film (even Hardy's last novel, Jude the Obscure (1896), was published well before film had properly evolved as a narrative medium), but rather that he emulated it. Lodge writes:

Hardy uses verbal description as a film director uses the lens of his camera—to select, highlight, distort, and enhance, creating a visualised world that is both recognisably ‘real’ and yet more vivid, intense and dramatically charged than our ordinary perception of the real world.¹

The view that Hardy's art is commonly ‘visual’ has now become generally accepted.

However, to concentrate on that art at the level of narrative would be to tell only part of the story. Despite the fact that Hardy classified both the novels I will be focusing on here—Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)—as ‘novels of character and environment’,² the manner in which these two novels present their narratives shows a difference in Hardy's conception of his fictional rural world. This difference is most noticeable in his depiction of the rustics, and illustrates a difference in Hardy's attitude towards his audience and subject-matter. While the depiction of rural characters in the early Far from the Madding Crowd has these characters as an innocent chorus to the main action, by the time of Tess of the d'Urbervilles these rural characters have taken on a credibility which places them far beyond the smock-frocked Hodges of the earlier novel. When, in Far from the Madding Crowd, Bathsheba inherits the farm, things go on in the rural world pretty much as before; but when Tess's father dies and the life-holding on the cottage is lost, the family is homeless. Tess turns to Alec, and the fatal consequences of the straightforwardly social requirement for money and shelter leads to the novel's tragic dénouement. There is thus in Tess a far greater particularity about the pressures of the social world, a particularity which reveals much about Hardy's changing attitude to his characters and to his audience. If a tendency for hokum—‘theatrical speech, action, etc., designed to make a sentimental or melodramatic appeal to an audience’³—is evident in the rural chorus of Far from the Madding Crowd, by the time of Tess of the d'Urbervilles it has all but disappeared. The question I will address in this chapter is whether that difference is reflected in the character and work of two filmmakers who adapted these novels: John Schlesinger and Roman Polanski.

Hardy is a novelist who displays not only a magnificent virtuosity in narrative and storytelling and a refined consciousness of the forces of society: he is also a writer working at a moment in the history of the English novel when the tension between the realist and self-conscious modes was, perhaps, most marked. This tension was first noted in Hardy's fiction by John Peck, who pointed out that although there is often much that is direct and evocative in Hardy's descriptions of people and of places, this visual impression is commonly followed by a paragraph of ‘polysyllabic awkwardness as Hardy attempts to analyse the character or situation he has just presented in such an uncomplicated way.’⁴ This certainly holds true for the first few paragraphs of Far from the Madding Crowd. The novel opens:

When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.⁵

This is certainly a highly visual piece of description, verging, almost, upon caricature, but the reader cannot go far wrong: the picture suggests a simple-hearted, good man, so closely in touch with nature that he is manifestly a part of it. It is also a picture which the rest of the novel goes out of its way to stress. In what is probably one of the most famous scenes in the novel, the hay-rick scene (chapter thirty-six) it is Oak who reads the signs of nature warning that a storm is brewing, and Oak who in consequence saves Bathsheba from financial ruin, while Troy and Bathsheba's drunken labourers are sleeping off their overindulgence.

If this opening paragraph is a model of visual description, the second paragraph puts the description firmly back in the hands of language:

His Christian name was Gabriel, and on working days he was a young man of sound judgement, easy motion, proper dress, and general good character. On Sundays he was a man of misty views, rather given to postponing; and hampered by his best clothes and umbrella: upon the whole, one who felt himself to occupy morally that vast middle space of Laodicean neutrality which lay between the Communion people of the parish and the drunken section—that is, he went to church, but yawned privately by the time the congregation reached the Nicene creed, and thought of what there would be for dinner when he meant to be listening to the sermon. Or, to state his character as it stood in the scale of public opinion, when his friends and critics were in tantrums, he was considered rather a bad man; when they were pleased, he was rather a good man; when they were neither, he was a man whose moral colour was a kind of pepper-and-salt mixture.⁶

There is nothing here to contradict, or even to expand on the impression the reader had already formed: we might probably have predicted that Oak would be uneasy within the formal confines of the church and would be thinking more about dinner than the vicar's sermon. But what is interesting is that, for Hardy, conceptual abstraction is at least as fascinating as physical reality. There are critics, no doubt, who will argue that this is an example of the characteristic pretensions of the self-educated man. Others may allude to Hardy's oft-quoted sentiment that art was ‘no mere copying of life’—hence his dismissal of what he called ‘photographic writing’ as an ‘inartistic species of literary produce’.⁷ The opening of this novel is not just a particular response to the world at a particular moment in social history. It is also an aesthetic response to the novel form at the tail-end of the nineteenth century. It is out of this amalgam that Hardy emerges as a ‘cinematic’ novelist: on the one hand, a novelist who gives us direct, visual access to his fictional world; and on the other, a novelist who makes us wonder at its meanings.

Far from the Madding Crowd was the first novel in which Hardy used the setting of ‘Wessex’, a setting which rapidly asserted itself as a quasi-real place with its own history, places and personages.⁸ It is obvious that such a ‘reality’ would rapidly attract the attention of the filmmaker.⁹ For one thing, the fiction world of the novel is a simple one, telling a simple story of simple lives in rural England, with plenty of opportunities for period costume, Barsetshire accents and ritualised ale-swilling. However, the fact that Hardy himself did not conceive of the novel as hokum is evidenced in the title itself—an ironic invocation of Gray's ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (xix), 1750:

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife
Their sober wishes never learned to stray;
Along the cool sequestred vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

Certainly, this novel is no rural idyll. With its bunch of rustic simpletons and simple rituals, customs and habits, it may be set far from the madding crowd, but it tells a dark and dangerous tale, with characters at the mercy of almost uncontrollable passions and forces, both in themselves and in nature. This is a story in which an innocent and pregnant woman is left by her seducer to die in the workhouse, a story in which one man is financially ruined, another is murdered, and another confined for life as a madman. Paradoxically, there is a very real sense in which Hardy captures something of Gray's philosophical predicament: simple renunciation of the great, wide world is not enough, because ‘from the tomb the voice of nature cries’ (‘Elegy’, xxiii). This sentiment is echoed in the novel by Troy, to Bathsheba, standing beside Fanny's open coffin: ‘This woman is more to me, dead as she is, than ever you were, or are, or can be … You are nothing to me—nothing … A ceremony before a priest doesn't make a marriage. I am not morally yours.’¹⁰

The question for the filmmaker—whose language and grammar is of the descriptive and the visual—is whether he or she can hold together the presentation of visual content and complexity of artistic form. This was precisely the task undertaken by John Schlesinger in his version of the novel for MGM (UK) in 1967. The cast included Julie Christie as Bathsheba Everdene, Terence Stamp as Sergeant Troy, Alan Bates as Gabriel Oak, with a script by Frederic Raphael and cinematography by Nicolas Roeg.¹¹ The location, taken exclusively in Dorset and Wiltshire, has much to do with the magnificence of many of the landscapes, even when page-by-page scripting seems to slow the film almost to a stop. In fact, everything in the film, as in Hardy, is driven by landscape, so that what we see is beautiful even when the characters or situations are not. There is, indeed, plenty of room for hokum: ‘In this rather plodding film the insufficiency of the foreground is partly offset by the winsomeness of the backgrounds. The very sheep are so engaging as to entice our gaze into some extremely amiable woolgathering’, writes John Simon.¹² But something has happened in the thirty years since the film was released. Alan Bates and Julie Christie remind us of 1960s hippies taking in the sunshine on the south coast. They look as if they have arrived on the set after a shopping-spree in Carnaby Street or the Portobello Road—Christie in an Indian print cotton off-the-shoulder number (but no cow-bell), while Bates, as a struggling sheep-farmer, appears to be sporting a kaftan. What we are seeing, of course, is not a nineteenth-century novel, but a 1960s adaptation of a nineteenth-century novel. There is nothing unusual about this, since as audiences and readers we are almost always aware of our own historical position relative to the text.

But it must be said that Schlesinger made little attempt to do anything very exciting with the novel. There is a good deal about the film that is highly reminiscent of those worthy Sunday tea-time dramatisations which rattled off the Barry Letts assembly-line at the BBC during the late 1960s and into the 1970s: something good, clean and morally uplifting before going to bed (if the audience happened to be young) or before settling down to enjoy the evening (if the audience happened to be adults). This is not surprising: as a student at Oxford University from 1945 to 1950, and later as a producer-director at the BBC from 1956 to 1961, Schlesinger was well-steeped in the notion of the English literary classic and English public service broadcasting. Victorian fiction had always been a rich source for material of this nature, but it had been Dickens, rather than Hardy, who had attracted the programme-makers' eyes. There was a very good reason for this. Dickens's genius in large part lay in being able to mix sentiment and melodrama so brilliantly—the former indulgent but seldom in bad taste, the latter stirring and exciting without toppling into Gothic excess unsuitable for a middle-class Sunday afternoon.¹³ Hardy, however, with his tendency for gloomy pessimism and the occasional flighty woman who ends no better than she should have been, was a different matter. If there was bravery in Schlesinger's dramatisation of the novel, it was, perhaps, in the fact that he took it on at all.

In fact, Schlesinger develops Hardy's story with rigorous evenhandedness. The opening displays a sensitivity to Hardy's visual dramatisation of his landscape which is quite stunning. It is worth analysing the first few minutes of the film in some detail:

• 1 The film opens with titles over the sea and sky, with solo flute playing in the background. Tilt and pan-shot to a steep cliff-edge. Low tilt, revealing sheep-tracks on wild landscape, but no signs of any human habitation.

• 2 Slow pan and tilt, almost as if the camera is looking for something, the landscape changing now to rolling valleys, the music becoming more formal and orchestral. There are the first signs of human habitation, a ploughed field and a small farm building. Diegetic sound: sheep and a dog barking, the dog in the distance running wild, chasing the sheep, ignoring the man's shouted commands.

• 3 Man, sheep and dogs in mid-shot; one dog out of control, chasing and biting sheep viciously and at random.

• 4 Cut to horse in distance being ridden by a female. Solo flute, the sea in the background. The woman is riding along the cliff-edge, her hair blown by the wind, then off track on to rough grass.

• 5 Cut to medium close-up of the woman waving to Oak in the distance, who waves back. Cut again to see her in long-shot. She rides out of the rough and back on to a small sheep-track.

• 6 Cut to Oak carrying a lamb, walking across neat green fields. Cut to Bathsheba looking out of a window. Oak is accompanied by a dog. Bathsheba hides at the back of the house, while Mrs Hurst invites Oak indoors, where he sits awkwardly in the parlour, Mrs Hurst opposite him and the lamb upon his lap. Oak explains that he was intending to ask Bathsheba to marry him, but Mrs Hurst, who is evidently unimpressed, tells him that Bathsheba has many other suitors. He leaves.

• 7 Cut to Bathsheba chasing after him. He stops and offers her his hand which she, significantly, refuses, explaining, as she does so, that she does not in fact actually have dozens of suitors. He appears to accept this, and appears to assume also, therefore, that they will be married. Then follows a series of shots inside a barn and gradually moving out during which Oak is telling Bathsheba of the various luxuries she can expect as his wife: a small piano; a £10 gig for market; a frame for cucumbers; to have the marriage announced in the papers, likewise the births of the babies. The final suggestion does not appear to please Bathsheba, who looks coy.

• 8 Tracking-shot to Oak and Bathsheba outside the barn. Bathsheba explains that she cannot marry him because she doesn't love him. There is the sound of wind rising in the background throughout this interview between the two characters.

• 9 Cut to aerial long-shot of the dogs, rounding up the sheep, driving them towards a man, presumably Oak. The camera pulls back further, further and further, the details of the scene becoming almost unidentifiable.

I think it is fair to say that this is brilliantly executed, and conveys precisely the overall thematic concerns both of its specific novel and of Hardy as a writer in general. At the broadest critical sweep of Hardy's novels, it can be said that the fundamental pattern of Hardy's novels is that they will contain one or more characters who are in conflict with the world in which they find themselves—characters like Bathsheba, Eustacia and Clym in The Return of the Native, Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess, Jude and Sue. These characters can generally see the value of conformity, but something in their personality makes it impossible for them to conform. Their instinctive, natural and human response to others and to situations is at odds with the orderliness of society. This is paralleled by nature itself—the landscape, the weather—which appears often indifferent to the plight in which human beings find themselves; sometimes wilfully destructive of all of humanity's attempts to create meaning and pattern in the physical world. This fundamental conflict—between society and order on the one hand, and the instinctive unruliness of human behaviour on the other—is evident through the novel, and brilliantly evoked by the opening few minutes of Schlesinger's film, which serves not only almost as a self-contained piece of drama, but also almost as an opening of a symphony, rehearsing all the tensions, motifs, tropes and structures which are to be found in the novel as a whole.

The sea and sky in the opening shot establish the overriding impression and role of nature in the novel: it is huge, pure existence, simply, apparently, looking on. The movement of the camera in these opening sequences reinforces this sense of distance: many of the shots, for example, are in long-shot, with people being either absent from the land entirely, or barely distinguishable upon it. This is a technique we recognise from many of Hardy's novels, one of the most memorable being, perhaps, that marvellous description of Tess, insignificant against the temporal and spatial scale of the earth and the universe at large, ‘like a fly upon a billiard table’.¹⁴ Both in Hardy's novels, and in this opening sequence, everywhere we look, we find this fundamental conflict. As we see the ploughed field, the first sign of human habitation, so the solo flute (the instrument played by Oak in the novel), gives way to formal orchestral music. The dog, out of Oak's control, is obeying its own, instinctive and unruly desires to attack the sheep, despite Oak's attempts to train it. The horse—long a symbol of this same conflict between the passions and the need to control them—is being ridden by Bathsheba close to the cliff-edge, and she is obviously and significantly well off the beaten track. Oak, carrying a lamb, offers it to Bathsheba for a pet—yet another reference to the conflict between the natural and the social. This opening perfectly summarises the novel's thematic concerns and interests. It grasps the novel as a whole and translates it into a visual representation of its patterns, concerns and interests. This world of both novel and film is fundamentally a thematic one in which characters play out their lives against a much broader backdrop.

But the historical reality of ‘Wessex’ at that time was wildly at odds with the kind of picture presented by both Schlesinger and Hardy. Throughout the last half of the nineteenth century, and even into the first decade of the twentieth, Dorset was experiencing that social phenomenon now euphemistically referred to as the ‘depopulation of the English village’. During the fifty years of the period 1860-1910, about 350,000 agricultural workers simply disappeared from the land. The historical, social, and economic reasons for this depopulation have been well documented:¹⁵ the development of the American wheat prairies hit cereal-farming severely, just as the importation of cheap wool from Australia and of refrigerated meat from the Argentine undercut the wool and meat markets. The consequence of this was one of the greatest agricultural depressions ever known. Only a hundred years previously, at the end of the eighteenth century, many of the small villages about which Hardy writes were thriving, agricultural communities. Winfrith Newburgh, about eight miles east of Dorchester and about two miles from Wellbridge Manor (the Woolbridge manor in which Tess and Angel spend the first night of their ill-fated honeymoon), is just one such parish. John Hutchins records in his monumental History of Dorset (1774), that Winfrith Newburgh then contained: ‘about 100 houses, three hundred and fifty inhabitants, ten teams, seven freeholders, and twelve copyholders’.¹⁶ And farming, too, was good: ‘there is fertile corn land, and good sheep downs, about 2000 sheep being kept in the parish’. Not that these material benefits necessarily filtered through to the agricultural workers; labourers' wages were then ‘about 1/- a day, mechanics' 1/6d; and provisions in general very dear; the price of butchers' meat 4d a pound’.¹⁷ Even so, Winfrith thrived economically in the first half of the nineteenth century, reaching its peak about 1850, when—as the 1851 Census records—over 1,100 people were living in the parish. A century later, in 1951, this number had fallen to 587.

The ending of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 had brought with it an immediate recession in agriculture, and a consequent increase in the price of basic foodstuffs. Further, the agricultural labourer, largely denied his rights over common lands by the active enclosures of the period, found it impossible to subsidise his family's food supply as he had in the past. A piece of folk-rhyme of the period accurately details the effects of enclosure, and the local hatred of the landed classes that was to follow:

The law arrests the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But leaves the greater rascal loose,
Who steals the common from the goose.

It was this widespread enclosure of common land, low wages and poor living conditions which gave rise to several decades of agricultural unrest in Dorset, the most famous being the notorious ‘Captain Swing’ riots—taking their name from the mythical signatory of the threatening letters sent to landowners, and commonly tied to a stone thrown through their windows. The widespread rioting, machine-breaking, and rick-burning of the Captain Swing period—which led in large part to the eventual and over-zealous transportation of the Tolpuddle Martyrs—was recorded by Mary Frampton, sister to one of the most active and unpopular magistrates of the time, James Frampton of Moreton:

November 28th [1830]—Notice was received of an intended rising of the people in the adjacent villages of Winfrith, Wool, and Lulworth … [the rising at Winfrith] … took place on the 30th. My brother, Mr. Frampton, was joined very early that morning by a large body of farmers … all special constables, amounting to upwards of 150, armed only with a short staff … The mob … would not listen to the request that they should disperse. The Riot Act was read. They still surged forward and came quite close to Mr. Frampton's horse; he collared one man, but in giving him charge, he slipped from his captors by leaving his smock-frock in their hands.¹⁸

The degradation and misery that lies behind these stories are hidden by the images Hardy was himself feeding to his London-based publishers and reading public: images of the pastoral and the smock-frocked Hodge. At the time he was writing Far from the Madding Crowd, one of the most vociferous commentators of the period, the aristocratic rector of Durweston from 1848 to 1875, Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne, was trying to raise public awareness of the destitution and grinding poverty found amongst the Dorset poor.¹⁹ Osborne, or ‘S.G.O’, as he signed himself in his numerous letters to The Times, soon became involved in bitter personal controversy with George Bankes, Conservative MP for Dorset (1841-56). Bankes upheld the Corn Laws, whilst Osborne argued that Peel was right to repeal them. Osborne, along with other commentators, such as Joseph Arch, accused Bankes of painting a misleading rosy picture of labourers' conditions to Parliament, whilst Bankes scoffed at what he called ‘the popularity-hunting parson’ for grossly exaggerating the hardships of the poor.²⁰ Admirers interpreted the initials S.G.O as ‘sincere, good, and outspoken’, and outspoken he certainly was. He spoke of Yetminster, a typical Dorset village of the time, as:

the cesspool of everything in which anything human can be recognised … whole families wallowing together at night on filthy rags, in rooms in which they are so packed, and yet so little sheltered, that one's wonder is that physical existence can survive as it does the necessary speedy destruction of all existing moral principle.²¹

That other great agitator of the period, Joseph Arch, commented, when he was attempting to organise the General National Consolidated Trades Union movement in Dorset in 1872, that ‘the condition of the labourer in that County was as bad as it very well could be … and worse than that commonly found in the negro plantations of the American south’.²² Little indeed was being actively done to improve things. Given, for example, that in Hutchins's day Winfrith Newburgh had consisted of ‘about 100 houses’ with a population of 350-400, by the time of the 1851 Census, and with the population in Winfrith having virtually trebled—to over 1,100—the number of households had risen to only 161. The Parliamentary Report on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture comments, in 1843, that ‘such villages as Bere Regis, Fordington, and Winfrith … (in which there is an average of seven persons to a house) … are a disgrace to the owners of the land and contain many cottages unfit for human habitation’. There is in this that always rather shady distinction between the ‘house’ and the ‘household’: the Reverend Eldon S. Bankes, rector of Corfe Castle, records in 1867 (only seven years before the publication of Hardy's novel) that in one cottage on Corfe Heath, divided into three ‘households’, there were thirty-three people living. And in Winfrith, in common with many other Dorset villages, landlords—willing rather to pull down cottages than to build and maintain new ones—found it more economically practical to have single ‘houses’ partitioned into several ‘households’. Living conditions for that de-smocked Hodge at the hands of Mr James Frampton must have been as cramped, squalid and unhealthy as they possibly could be.

This puts the chorus of rustics in Far from the Madding Crowd in a rather different light. For them, the news that Dicky Hill's wooden cider-house has been pulled down, and that Tompkin's old cider-apple tree has died and been rooted up is proof enough of the ‘stirring times’ in which they lived. The luxury of smoky evenings spent in the cosiness of Warren's malthouse belonged to an earlier age altogether—if they ever existed at all. To complain about this would be rather like complaining that Austen did not mention the slave trade or the Napoleonic Wars, or that Dickens was not a feminist. But it does mean that when we watch Schlesinger's adaptation of the novel, it's not him we have to accuse of hokum.

By the time of Tess of the d'Urbervilles Hardy's history had changed considerably. Unlike the earlier novel, which was begun and finished in a relatively short time and which—notwithstanding a certain cautiousness over the Fanny Robin story—had a relatively easy relationship with its editor, Tess was much longer in the writing, and had a much more troubled passage into print. It was written, Hardy claimed, to shield ‘those who have yet to be born’ from misfortunes like those of Tess, and plans for the novel were begun as early as the autumn of 1888.²³ Just over half the novel was accepted by the newspaper syndicate of Tillotson & Son for publication under the title of ‘Too Late Beloved’ (or ‘Too Late, Beloved’), but when the first sixteen chapters reached proof stage in September 1889, serious objections were raised by the editors and the agreement was finally cancelled at Hardy's request.²⁴ The story was then declined by the editors of Murray's Magazine and also by Macmillan's Magazine.²⁵ By about the end of 1890, the novel was ready for serial publication in The Graphic and Harper's Bazaar, but it was not until March the following year that Hardy finished the novel. Of the various changes Hardy made to make the novel suitable for serial publication (this included the loss of the baptism scene)²⁶ the most notorious is probably that involving Angel's use of a wheelbarrow to carry the three dairymaids in turn over the flooded road—close physical proximity obviously proving too much for the editors of the day.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles tells an age-old story: that of a woman's sufferings in a society whose attitudes towards sex and women have condemned her. Again, what is at the heart of the novel is a conflict between instinctive behaviour and the social dictates which restrict behaviour. What is interesting, however, is the extent to which this novel, written almost twenty years after Far from the Madding Crowd, places the depopulation of the Dorset villages at centre-stage—‘the process, humorously designated by statisticians as “the tendency of the rural population towards the large towns”, being really the tendency of water to flow uphill when forced by machinery’.²⁷ Indeed, in Tess, the consequences of depopulation take a front seat: John Durbeyfield is a poor, struggling farmer, a man dispossessed of his once-great family, and of almost any means of sustenance: when the horse, Prince, is killed, the single remaining means of maintaining his family dies with it, and it is this ‘spilling of blood’, which leads Tess to agree to go to the d'Urberville house, which in turn leads to the loss of her virginity, social condemnation and the final, symbolic spilling of Alec's blood when he is stabbed by Tess: ‘The oblong white ceiling, with this scarlet blot in the midst, had the appearance of a gigantic ace of hearts.’²⁸ Quite unlike the situation in Far from the Madding Crowd, it is the reality of that great agricultural depression which acts like the spring on the trap which is finally to net Tess. When Angel's mother advises him not to be ‘so anxious about a mere child of the soil’,²⁹ the same tension is implicit in Tess's character as we find throughout, not least in her use of language: Tess, ‘who might have been a teacher, but the fates had decided otherwise’, had passed the Sixth Standard at the National School, where she had learned to speak ‘correct’ English. On the one hand, ‘she spoke dialect at home’; on the other, ‘ordinary English abroad and to persons of quality’. Tess thus quite literally ‘spoke two languages’,³⁰ and this is symbolic of how awkwardly she is poised between the worlds of the old, rural, agricultural community, and the new, social world, which is draining the life out of the old:

Between the mother, with her fast-perishing lumber of superstitions … and the daughter, with her trained National Teachings … there was a gap of two hundred years as ordinarily understood. When they were together, the Jacobean and the Victorian ages were juxtaposed.³¹

When Tess is herself sent off to make her fortune in this new Victorian age with the family of incomers, the Stokes, who have bought the family name of d'Urberville, the tragedy of the past confronting the present must inevitably follow.

Clearly, a story of this kind demands a very different kind of filmmaking to Far from the Madding Crowd. On the face of it, Roman Polanski would seem to fit the bill. If Schlesinger's background in Oxford and the BBC equipped him to provide us with a classic adaptation for an audience weaned on public service broadcasting, Polanski's background qualified him to understand the darker values of the later novel. His own life seems to mirror many of its most tragic events. Born in Paris in 1933, Polanski's life includes his internment as a child in a German concentration camp, the early death of his mother at Auschwitz and the horrifying murder of the actress Sharon Tate, his second wife, to whom the film Tess (Columbia, 1979) is dedicated. Polanski was charged with the seduction of a fourteen-year-old girl in 1977 and fled America to avoid the remainder of a gaol sentence. There he had made some of his greatest films—Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, with its flawless handling of plot and characterisation—bringing to Hollywood the technical innovation he had learnt in film school in Poland. At the moment of writing, Polanski is still attempting to arrange an out-of-court settlement with his alleged victim, which would enable him to return to America, and to mainstream filmmaking once again. Tess was in some ways a return to his much earlier work, most notably Noz w Wodzie (Knife in the Water, 1962), which was cowritten with Jerzy Skolimowski and the last he made in Poland.

It is easy to see why Polanski should find the novel so perfectly suited to his own interests and concerns, preoccupied as they often are with alienation, individual isolation and the understanding of evil. It is the fate of an individual in an alienating society which fascinates Polanski, and he uses Hardy's novel as a framework within which to couch this idea. Throughout the film, we are struck by the result of Tess's non-conformity in a conformist society. Tess craves the security which conformity would give her, and yet there is something both in her character, and in her past—both ancestral and individual—which makes that conformity and security unattainable.

But where the novel takes in the broad span of a disappearing rural community, Polanski's adaptation focuses much more locally on the simple domestic reality of Tess and her relationship with Angel and Alec. The film opens with music strongly reminiscent of Percy Grainger, part of the English country-garden movement with which we associate cosy Edwardian high-teas on tidy Edwardian lawns, ladies in long cotton dresses and the sound of tennis. There are even strains of Greensleeves in the opening music, which serve only further to reinforce our sense of a secure, reliable and pretty past. And pretty Tess certainly is. The opening few shots of the film fill the screen with gorgeous distant landscape bathed in a golden light, but then, as the camera pulls back, more of this landscape is revealed. There is a scrubby track in the bottom left corner of the screen, which seems only accidentally to be a part of what we see. This is one of the characteristics of this opening: we are constantly given the impression that all this is happening quite coincidentally, that the camera may just as easily be filming another story elsewhere, and that it is simply recording whatever is happening. Coincidence is important in Hardy's novels, and in Tess particularly; if Angel had found the letter Tess had pushed under his door, perhaps he would have been able to see her past in a different light. Coincidence is also central to the camera work in the opening to Polanski's film. It is consistently unobtrusive, so that we receive paradoxically a strong sense both of verisimilitude and of the fact that the film is artlessly conceived and executed. Of course, quite the reverse is the case, with the film hiding its own processes of structuration so carefully that we are almost totally unaware of how our responses are being managed and manipulated. While the camera appears merely to sit, unobtrusively watching, we see, along this revealed track, in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, a group of people dancing or walking along towards us to the tune of a highly stylised folksy tune. Everything is slow-moving at this point of the film and occurs in real-time, in stark contrast to the careful pacing and editing towards the end of the film, when Tess and Angel are attempting to escape the police after the murder of Alec.

Throughout this opening, the impression is that things cannot be hurried: actions, events, simply happen, and the camera is simply watching. This not only serves to increase that strong sense of verisimilitude, but also ties in precisely with the effect of fate upon an individual's existence, a theme common to Polanski, and to Hardy: ‘As Tess's own people down in those retreats are never tired of saying among each other in their fatalistic way: “It was to be”. There lay the pity of it.’³² There is clearly much in the overall impression of the opening to the film which we find in Hardy also. But it is in how this overall impression is developed through the details of the piece that we find the most noticeable differences.

In the opening to the film, the procession of young girls, all dressed in white, all heavily decorated and garlanded in the floral mode, and all gaily waving switches presumably pulled from the local hedgerows, are preceded by four musicians—elderly men making music of a delivery and scale which seems quite beyond both them, and beyond their simple instruments. This is the first of many visual contrasts in this opening between youth and old age, between the past and the present. Characters seem to be drawn almost coincidentally to this spot somewhere in an ill-defined rural setting, and somewhere in an ill-defined rural past. As the procession passes, the camera merely follows abstractedly, refusing to focus on any particular person or thing. The procession of young girls crosses another track, and, as they move out of shot, so we see another character, a straggling old man coming towards us. This is John Durbeyfield, the haggler, and is the first precise shot of many in the film where we see characters moving first towards us and then away from us, along their own roads. Characters in this film are fundamentally alone, each following his or her own track. Camera movement reinforces this point immediately. First, the camera follows Durbeyfield, then tracks to give us his point-of-view of the procession now moving away from him. These are people whose paths quite literally cross, but who are fundamentally and symbolically following their own, isolated little tracks. Further, the past and the present (represented by the young girls, the four elderly musicians who precede them and John Durbeyfield, respectively) see each other differently, and from different perspectives. The focus at this opening of the film is very much upon such issues, and serves to foreshadow the idea of individual isolation and alienation from others and from society.

It is at this point that we return, as it were, to Hardy's novel: Durbeyfield is greeted by Parson Tringham, riding on a horse, who relays to him the story of the past grandeur of the d'Urberville family and recognises in him the final relict in the male line: ‘Yes—that's the d'Urberville nose and chin—a little debased.’³³ Parson Tringham is the first representative of the Established Church; here, he is sitting on a horse, talking down to Durbeyfield, in much the same way that the Established Church later, both in Angel Clare's family, and in Tess's attempts to have her baby baptised, talks down to her also. Tess is at a transitional point in history, the past has decayed, and the established present which is replacing it is a world in which people like Tess and her kind have no place. We then cut to Parson Tringham riding away from us, again from Durbeyfield's point-of-view, another shot of people retreating along their own track. There is then a cut to the club-dancing scene and the girls dancing merrily together, followed by another cut to three young men approaching along the road towards us, dressed in Sunday-best. One of the young men, who turns out later to be Angel Clare, intends to join in, but the other two (his brothers, both in training for the Church), decide against the idea, concerned that somebody may see them mixing with common country-folk, again foreshadowing the idea of correct social behaviour. Angel grabs the nearest pretty young girl (we do not know at this stage of the film whether this is Tess), and dances. Again, the role of the camera here is simply to watch, simply to see, and we are not aware how carefully our responses are being managed. We note in this scene, for example (and again, this is done almost in passing), one of the local lads trying to take the hand of Tess in dancing. We do not know at this stage in the film that this young girl is Tess. But we do see her rebuff the local youth's attempt to make her join in with the dancing. This is clearly significant, and illustrates a good deal of Polanski's intention and attitude to Tess here: the fact that we don't yet know this is Tess, and the fact that we see her decline the youth's offer to dance, tells us that, at least so far as Polanski is concerned, this young woman believes she is rather better than the rural community. This may or may not be Hardy's attitude to Tess in the novel; certainly, we are told that Tess ‘had hoped to be a teacher, but the fates had seemed to decide otherwise’.³⁴ But in the film the simple fact that Polanski has his Tess behave in a way which tells so much of her character without revealing her identity reveals in its turn a great deal about Polanski's interpretation and presentation of that character.

This, then, is Tess; but it is Polanski's Tess, not Hardy's. In the novel, there is a diffidence in her character which does not square with the defiance we see in her character at this point in the film, a point which is underscored by the cinematic use of sound and image: as Clare leaves the club-dancing, so the music and the sunlight fade also, and we cut to Angel walking past the defiant Tess. Throughout the novel, Angel's social prejudices are stronger than his natural feelings. Here, and later, he has to leave Tess behind, simply because she threatens his deeply-rooted sense of correct moral behaviour. As he moves away from her, into a retreating distant point, so the darkness of the scene is rapidly increasing, and with it goes the whole sense of security and stability of the club-dancing scene. Things take on an almost absurdist sense of threatening inconsistency. Out of the increasing darkness lurches Durbeyfield, drunk, and in the back of an open cart; silhouetted against a darkening and brooding red sunset; we cut to the girls dancing, but the camera-angle is now low, the girls now looming above us, weird shapes in the darkening light. Polanski pushes imagery as far as he can take it without destroying the mastery with which he has constructed the whole illusion of verisimilitude in these opening scenes. The next cut is to Tess approaching her parents' cottage, and the lighting is actually brighter although it is supposedly contiguous in time. Polanski is quite willing to sacrifice a mere detail of continuity editing in order to reinforce or to establish a meaning—here, the threatening and brooding potentiality of the scene that he wants to capture, the sense of potential alienation and loneliness. But these meanings are Polanski's, not Hardy's. If Schlesinger is true to Hardy's hokum rather than Dorset's history, Polanski is true to his own history rather than Hardy's, so that in the end he, too, is guilty of a kind of hokum.

And this is the difference. An excellent film though it undoubtedly is, the sensation when watching Tess is akin to what we feel when we read a travel book by a writer who has passed through a place in which we live. The places sound the same in the telling: but they don't feel it. In his Notes from a Small Island (1995), Bill Bryson gives us his impression, as an American living in England, of drinking beer in an English pub:

So I sat and drank beer, and watched, as I often do in these circumstances, the interesting process by which customers, upon finishing a pint, would present the barman with a glass of clinging suds and golden dribble, and that this would be carefully filled to slightly overflowing, so that the excess froth, charged with an invisible load of bacteria, spittle and micro-fragments of loosened food, would run down the side of the glass and into a slop tray, where it would be carefully—I might almost say scientifically—conveyed by means of a clear plastic tube back to a barrel in the cellar. There these tiny impurities would drift and float and mingle, like flaky pooh in a goldfish bowl, awaiting summons back to someone else's glass. If I am to drink dilute dribble and mouth rinsings, then I do rather wish I could do it in a situation of comfort and cheer, seated in a Windsor chair by a blazing fire, but this appears to be an increasingly elusive dream.³⁵

All very interesting stuff: knowledgeable, detailed, and delivered with considerable panache. Total nonsense, of course, but stylish nonsense. We know the place, we may even share Bryson's particular hokum for the Windsor chair, the real ale, the blazing fire, the bygone and more secure age—but it's not quite right, this picture of the English pub as a place where the English go merely to exchange saliva.

We could, of course, take it on at the physical, practical level: turn to the Licensed Victuallers' Association to check out the accuracy of Bryson's observations. Or we may consider instead how it is that we do actually know the hokum of which Bryson is talking, since we share his notion of an England and of a time that never was. And similarly, of course, we must also remember that Hardy often simply wrote to his own audience's hokish expectations, temporarily and variously having them seated, as it were, in Warren's malthouse, or The Pure Drop, or Rollivers, the inevitable chorus of rollicking rustics rattling and burbling around them. For in a sense it really is this simple, even if difficult to quantify absolutely; like a shadow passing briefly across a window, this hokum is something we glimpse, a palimpsest of a recreated past that never could and never has existed.

Or could it? On 11 September 1997, the Poole and Dorset Advertiser carried the following note:

Local people of all ages have the rare chance to appear in the latest TV production of a Thomas Hardy classic about to begin filming. London Weekend Television is appealing for those who would like to appear in its new £1m-plus version of Tess of the D'Urbervilles to attend a casting session for extras.

It takes place at the arts centre in School Lane near the Grove in Dorchester—where Hardy's statue stands—tomorrow, Friday, September 12, between 9am and 5pm.

Everyone is welcome but anyone interested should make sure they bring a recent photograph with them. The producers say they are particularly looking for character.

Seven weeks of filming for Tess takes place in Devon and Dorset between September 26 and November 3.

The three-hour TV film is due to be shown on the ITV network in February.

Locations include Swanage Pier as well as Cerne Abbas, Minterne Magna, Turnerspuddle and Burton Bradstock.

History will be well catered for in this new offering: Swanage Pier doubling as Hardy's Bournemouth (Sandbourne); Cerne Abbas (with symbolic glimpses of the well-endowed Giant) as Tess's Marlott. And we may be assured that there will be room, too, for something in the way of hokum: ‘The producers’—prospective applicants, be warned—‘are particularly looking for character’.

Notes

1. David Lodge, ‘Thomas Hardy and Cinematographic Form’, Novel, 7 (1974), pp. 254-64.

2. See, Thomas Hardy, ‘General Preface to the Novels and Poems’, 1912 edition of his works.

3. This is the definition of hokum offered by the OED.

4. John Peck, ‘Hardy and Joyce: A Basis for Comparison’, Ariel, 12: 2, pp. 71-86 (p. 83).

5. Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (London, Macmillan, 1965 [first published 1874]), p. 1. Subsequent references are to this edition.

6. Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, p. 1.

7. Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy 1840-1928 (London, Macmillan, 1962), p. 351.

8. See, F. B. Pinion, A Hardy Companion: A Guide to the Works of Thomas Hardy and their Background (London, Macmillan, 1968), p. 28.

9. The filmography of Far from the Madding Crowd and of Tess of the d'Urbervilles is remarkably similar. Far from the Madding Crowd was first dramatised for film in 1915, directed by Larry Trimble, who also wrote the screenplay. It was not then remade until 1967, when it was directed by John Schlesinger (see note 11, below). Tess of the d'Urbervilles was first filmed in 1924, directed by Marshall Neilan, screenplay by Dorothy Farnum and cinematography by Dave Kesson. It was then not remade as a film until Roman Polanski's Tess, 1979.

10. Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, pp. 352-3.

11. Far from the Madding Crowd, 1967, MGM, 165 minutes, colour.

12. John Walker (ed.), Halliwell's Film Guide (London, HarperCollins, 1993).

13. Robert Giddings, ‘Hooked on Classics’, New Socialist, December 1985, pp. 40-1.

14. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman (London, Macmillan, 1974 [first published 1891]), p. 159. Subsequent references are to this edition.

15. See Merryn Williams, Thomas Hardy and Rural England (London, Macmillan, 1972), p. 111: ‘In the eighteen-seventies, after the Agricultural Workers’ Union had given a further strong impetus to migration, Dorset was one of only nine counties in England which recorded an absolute population decline. The so-called golden age of agriculture had brought real benefits only to the farmers and landowners.’

16. John Hutchins, The History and Antiquities of Dorset, 1774 (1st edn); 4 vols, 1973, vol. 4, p. 279.

17. Hutchins, History and Antiquities, p. 282.

18. The Journal of Mary Frampton of Wool, 1885.

19. See Cecil N. Cullingford, A History of Dorset (London, Phillimore, 1980), pp. 109-12.

20. Cullingford, History of Dorset, p. 110.

21. Cullingford, History of Dorset, p. 111.

22. Williams, Thomas Hardy, p. 194.

23. Pinion, A Hardy Companion, pp. 46-7.

24. R. L. Purdy, Thomas Hardy, A Bibliographical Study (London, Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 71-2.

25. This time, Hardy knew the ‘fearful price’ he had to pay ‘for the privilege of writing in the English language’. See ‘Candour in English Fiction’, in Harold Orel, Thomas Hardy's Personal Writings (London, University of Kansas Press, 1966; Macmillan, 1967), pp. 150-1.

26. This was published in The Fortnightly Review in May 1891 as ‘The Midnight Baptism: A Study in Christianity’.

27. Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, p. 436.

28. Hardy, Tess, p. 471.

29. Hardy, Tess, p. 455.

30. Hardy, Tess, p. 58.

31. Hardy, Tess, p. 61.

32. Hardy, Tess, p. 108.

33. Hardy, Tess, p. 35.

34. Hardy, Tess, p. 88.

35. Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island (London, Corgi, 1995), p. 252.