More News of the Dark Foundling

By -- Paul Gray

WUTHERING HEIGHTS by Emily Bronte; 388 pages

RETURN TO WUTHERING HEIGHTS by Anna L 'Estrange; 365 pages

Pinnacle Books; $1.95 each (paperbacks)

HEATHCLIFF by Jeffrey Caine; Knopf; 246 pages; $7.95

Nightmares and dreams, through which devils dance and wolves howl, make bad novels." So wrote an American critic upon reading Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights soon after it was first published in December 1847. As so often happens, the reviewer was wrong. Emily's tumultuous tale of Catherine Earnshaw and the dark foundling Heathcliff, of the passion that raged between them across the Yorkshire moors, easily endured critical barbs and long ago became an English classic. If anything, the novel's popularity has grown steadily in the past 130 years. It has been filmed several times, most memorably in 1939 with Laurence Olivier in the role of Heathcliff. U.S. readers can now choose among more than 20 different editions of the book.

To which Los Angeles-based Pinnacle Books has added yet another. Why? Because the firm has also published Return to Wuthering Heights and hopes that the Bronte novel will serve as a teaser for its sequel. Fair enough. The more copies of Wuthering Heights available the better, for it is unquestionably the best of the hundreds of derivative gothic paperbacks published each year. Both Emily Bronte and her sister Charlotte (Jane Eyre) helped raise gothic fiction to the level of art. Before them, emotion-churning novels had been ludicrous affairs, monsters produced by the sleep of 18th century reason. The sisters' works domesticated gothic terror and made it seem, because it arose in a homely and familiar setting, more terrible still. The Brontes knew better than to assert the supernatural; much more chilling to insinuate it while denying its existence.

Emily's leap of genius was to have the story of Heathcliff and Catherine's blighted love told by Lockwood, a prissy outsider, and by Nelly Dean, the prim housekeeper who had witnessed most of the novel's events. Such narrow-minded story tellers were ill-equipped to understand a raging natural force like Heathcliff, much less to sympathize with his condition. The greater their shock at Heathcliff s behavior, the more they condemned him, the clearer it became that Heathcliff existed on a plane beyond the grasp of normal comprehension. Emily also wisely kept the man offstage much of the time. Rumors of monsters are usually more impressive than the creatures themselves.

This hint of ineffability has contributed much to the allure of Wuthering Heights. It has also, coincidentally, prompted two writers to fill in some of the things Emily did not say. With few exceptions (notably T.H. White's revisitation of Gulliver's Travels and Nicholas Meyer's further adventures of Sherlock Holmes), sequels of books, written by someone other than the original author, have been shameless ripoffs. Oddly enough, Wuthering Heights is still sufficiently vital to sustain its parasites.

In Return to Wuthering Heights, Anna L'Estrange (pen name of Author Rosemary Ellerbeck) sticks closely to the original Bronte formula. Lockwood's son Tom inherits his father's manuscript and becomes intrigued by the story of Heathcliff and Catherine. He returns to the vicinity of Wuthering Heights to learn what happened to the survivors after Heathcliff's death 38 years earlier. He meets Nelly Dean's great-niece Agnes, who has served virtually all the Earnshaw and Heathcliff descendants since. She has plenty to tell.

Catherine's daughter, also named Catherine, and Hareton Earnshaw were to marry at the end of Wuthering Heights. Well, they did, and things went swimmingly until Heathcliff's natural son showed up and wooed Catherine away to Wuthering Heights. The child produced of this union is thus another illegitimate little Heathcliff who robs the nest of the next generation of Earnshaw men. "History," Agnes remarks blandly, "was repeating itself."

All this intermarriage and intermingling produce some tangled relationships and considerable confusion. When Agnes talks to Hareton about his father, she has to tell him and the reader exactly whom she means: "Your father Mr. Hindley, Mrs. Linton's brother." Later, things reach a prettier pass. Agnes is appalled to think that "not only was the Colonel Margaret's husband and the father of her unborn child, and the enemy of her father but he was also the lover of her mother and the father of Anthony and all this unbeknownst to the children. No wonder the knowledge of it made Mr. Earnshaw ill." When such awkwardnesses of her own creation threaten to overwhelm the story, L'Estrange keeps things moving by simply brazening through. She produces a page-turner rather than art, but she does not drag Wuthering Heights into blithering depths.

Rather than picking up after Bronte's novel, Heathcliff begins and ends during it. Novelist Jeffrey Caine attempts to show where Heathcliff was during the roughly three years he was absent from Wuthering Heights. L'Estrange suggests in passing that he was in Liverpool, working on the docks. Caine insists that he went to London and made a fortune in the underworld.

Ordinarily, such speculation is about as profitable as wondering what Hamlet studied at Wittenberg. But given its woolgathering premise, Heathcliff is a remarkably accomplished and engrossing novel. It is also a first-rate act of literary impersonation. Caine introduces convincing versions of Lockwood and Nelly Dean and, at some risk, a long autobiographical letter written by Heathcliff himself. Bereft because he knows Catherine will never marry him, the ferocious young man flees the Heights with a vague plan to wreak vengeance on the world. No sooner does he reach London than he joins a mob wrecking a house in Bloomsbury Square. The work invigorates him: "I longed to cross the square and start on Bedford House, then begin elsewhere, until I had demolished every great house in London; after which I'd unleash myself on the provinces and not quit till I had the razing of all such dwellings from Land's End to Carlisle. And maybe Scot land, too."

That sounds a lot like the Heathcliff that generations of readers have loved. Even those unfamiliar with Wuthering Heights can enjoy Heathcliff's crackling prose and rapid pacing. Inevitably, though, the information that Caine contrives detracts something from the legend that Bronte invented. Heathcliff was not meant to dally, however rudely, with Lon don ladies. Heathcliff also suggests that its hero is more pussycat than tiger. For all his violent talk ("I kicked him in the mouth, rattling his teeth nicely, like dice in a cup"), Heathcliff kills no one. His one violent act, cutting off the hand of an enemy who had tried to kill him, goads him into a shamefaced apology to Catherine. The real Heathcliff would never explain or apologize.

Except, of course, that there never was a real Heathcliff. The power of great fic tion makes such facts unimportant, and both L'Estrange and Caine have paid trib ute to that power. The trouble is that both writers hint of further tributes to come. Pinnacle does more than hint; it promises "additional volumes chronicling the lives and loves of the descendants of Heathcliff and Catherine." The prospect of some nine generations of Heathcliffs yet to come is horrifying, and not in a way Emily Bronte would admire. A Heathcliff in the factory, another in the trenches, yet another on the dole and, finally, a Heathcliff as the lead singer in a group of punk rockers: it will be too much. Heathcliff should remain in the state Bronte left him, buried under the moor while his spirit roamed, exactly where it belonged, around Wuthering Heights.

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