Heathcliff in Gloucester

Something strange is going on. I’ve got two books going at the moment - an audiobook and one on the page - and, though they were written a hundred years apart and by two very different authors, I am finding a strange synchronicity with them.

I am listening to the audiobook of Emily Bronte’s classic Wuthering Heights while I work or cook or knit in the evenings. I read it many years ago and back then I got all caught up in the tragic romance of Heathcliff and Catherine and didn’t pay much attention to the rest. This time around I am a little stunned to discover that their romance actually comprises very little of the book. She’s dead before the book is half over. What the book is really about is a whole bunch of broken lives stuck in the same dismal place with very little awareness of where they are headed. Heathcliff, far from being the tragic hero, is a really nasty, manipulative, devious human being set on a path of vengeance for the wrongs done him as a child and the loss of Catherine, the only person who loved him. She, however, comes a cross as a screwball torn between the lure of glitter and fun and her love for Heathcliff. This is not a romance to emulate.

The other book that I am reading is Peter Anastas’s Broken Trip which is also about a bunch of broken lives stuck in the same dismal place with very little awareness of where they are headed. It is not an easy book to read particularly because the characters that populate its pages are people I see every day and whose lives both fascinate and repel me. Broken lives - how did they get so lost? Anastas writes with authority. He was a director at Action, Gloucester’s anti-poverty program, for a lot of years. His book is painful, filled with abuse, stupidity, bad choices, tragic wrongs. His writing is terse, blunt, lacking ornamentation and yet there is an underlying compassion for these people and a sense that, if they’d only stopped and thought instead of acting out of their pain, everything could have been so different.

This morning I read a heart-breaking story titled “Joe Skag”. It touched me more because it is about men I see every day - those lined up outside the homeless shelter waiting for the doors to open, those in St. Peter’s Park trying to score or wasted or just waiting, waiting waiting. Joe Skag is a junkie who was a great fisherman. In the story his heroin addiction and HIV have worn him down to a useless man living in homeless shelters and waiting to die. He gets coerced into make one last fishing trip which brings in a fine haul and, with the profit, he intends to go to his sister in Florida for one last chance at some peace before he dies. It is a heart-breaking story.

As I thought about Joe and about Heathcliff I thought they were not so very different. Heathcliff is young and strong and has limitless potential but he is an angry man steeped in bitterness. Joe is old now but he was once young and a good fisherman. But he couldn’t hang on to anything. As the fishing industry declined through government regulation he lost his great love - fishing and the sea. The loss and the attendant idleness set him on a destructive path.

I wondered if Heathcliff had lived in Gloucester if we wouldn’t find him hanging out in St. Peter’s Park shooting up to forget the pain of losing Cathy, standing in line at the shelter waiting for a place to sleep. The difference between Heathcliff and Joe is really very little. But then the difference between Joe and all of us is surprisingly little. The moral of these stories are the same - bad things happen and we find ourselves broken. How we deal with that is up to each of us.

Thanks for reading.