Everybody remembers Tom Thumb, Uncle Tom, Tom Sawyer. Well, I just met Tom Jones, the real Tom Jones. I read in its entirety Henry Fielding's book of the same name written sometime in the mid 1600s.
This fat book is one the many titles listed in The Lifetime Reading Plan I began several years ago. I was a bit apprehensive about reading it, not because it is 900 pages, but because I had seen a movie and part of a TV series by the same name and found these treatments off-color, bawdy, and ridiculous, like an excuse to make naughty sexy pre-Victorian era films. I came to find out that, unfortunately, bawdiness is mainly what posterity has chosen to take from this wonderful tome. Don’t get me wrong; I understand why. In the middle of the book I got a bit annoyed and discouraged. In spite of Fielding’s good treatises sprinkled throughout, I wondered how in the world the story and characters could come right. But guess what? It all came right! When I finally finished it I sighed a tender sigh, not just of relief but of gratitude and moral and intellectual satisfaction, and began to miss it as one misses a dear friend.
I loved this book. It ranged, as they say, from the ridiculous to the sublime, and isn’t that what all human lives comprise to some degree? It was a sort of lighthearted retelling of a male Moll Flanders. A young man in certain circumstances behaves quite badly, in other circumstances behaves wonderfully well, even bravely and nobly. But his intentions are never bad. His main problem is with fornication, but he is never the instigator. He is simply terribly attractive to women and terribly shallow and weak in resisting them, even when his whole heart truly belongs to another! Yes, apparently we human beings can be that way!
And here’s the fine part: this awful fault of Tom’s is never shown as right or excusable or good or mature; it is shown as the very opposite, although the author gives plenty of room for the reader to make his own judgments along the way, giving all information necessary. Flannery O’Connor wrote, “What offends my taste in fiction is when right is held up as wrong, or wrong as right.” Fielding in his brilliant and often funny asides to the reader points out that his own intentions are to show good as good and evil as evil, vice as vice (as opposed to worse: villainy) and virtue as virtue. And he does, albeit while shocking us a bit (as Flannery herself does with her characters) with, in his case, our hero’s utter youthful foolishness and lively raw “animal spirits.” Thank goodness Tom embraces his good angel to help him overcome and learn from his past follies. Thank goodness we all can! As I read I was reminded of C. S. Lewis’s famous quote about how the sins of the flesh alone are mere fleabites in comparison to the deeper, darker, dreadful sins of the heart.
My tender sigh upon finishing this book mainly arose from the great writing, and the great meaning. I think Fielding reads a little bit like a cross between Dickens and Austen (or rather they read like him, since he came 100 years before). It delivers the same real and hopeful meanings all great novels should somewhere show, that no one is all good and not many are all bad, that even the best of us have flaws and faults and foibles (some of them quite shocking), that all of us, even the most profligate sinner, should and can repent and grow and change. As Flannery put it, “It seems to me that all good stories are about conversion, about a character’s changing.” She also said, “Redemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live . . .” adding, “and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause.”
It’s true. I saw this bumper sticker the other day: “The universe rearranges itself to accommodate your picture of reality.” Say, what? Tom Jones, written over 250 hundred years ago, with its objective view of good and evil, with its corresponding personal responsibilities and consequences, with its villainy, vice, and virtue shown clearly as such, with its acceptance-of-life sense of humor, with its spiritual message of sin and redemption---in our relativistic, subjective, Godless, upside-down, egocentric, nihilistic, hopeless, hardhearted, joyless, humanist culture---reads like an all but lost world. And that's sad. People today need Tom Jones!
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