Claire Tomalin
THOMAS HARDY
The time-torn man
512pp. Viking. £25.
0 670 91512 2
Ralph Pite
THOMAS HARDY
The guarded life
524pp. Picador. £25.
0 330 48186 X
To write the Life of Thomas Hardy is an epic undertaking. You have to disinter two complicated marriages, while wading through the interminable Dynasts and the no longer famous Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall. Epic must begin not stolidly ab ovo in the manner of traditional biography, but arrestingly in medias res. The first decision is therefore the choice of vignette for your prologue. Ralph Pite and Claire Tomalin begin as follows: “You have to leave your car in the car park and walk up the lane” and “In November of 1912 an ageing writer lost his wife”. Admirers of Tomalin’s work will have no difficulty in assigning these openings to their respective authors, not least because she is too elegant and economic a writer ever to use the word “car” twice in any sentence, let alone the all-important first one. Her best books are about marriages or quasi-marital relationships: Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, above all Dora Jordan and the future King William IV. Her prologue accordingly turns Emma, the first Mrs Hardy, into a version of the madwoman in the attic, sleeping alone on the top floor of Max Gate, reading and writing all day in a second attic room, having her breakfast and lunch brought up by her maid. The writerly decision to take the trouble to record the latter’s name (Dolly) is the authentic Tomalin touch.
Emma dies and the second paragraph begins with a bold claim: “This is the moment when Thomas Hardy became a great poet”. The remainder of the prologue is devoted to a highly sensitive account of the “Poems of 1912–13”, those extraordinary elegies of tender, guilty, evanescent remembrance in which Hardy recaptured his Cornish courtship of 1870. Tomalin is right: they are without question among the greatest poems of the twentieth century – and among the most influential, for they laid the ground for the reaction against high modernism, the achievement of Philip Larkin and the Elegies of Douglas Dunn. The trajectory from Victorian novelist to modern poet should be at the heart of a Hardy biography, so Tomalin’s desire to move between the marriages and the works is fully justified by the fact that the novel-writing took off just at the moment when Hardy met Emma, then came grinding to a halt as the marriage finally hit the rocks in the mid-1890s. Emma’s disapproval of the sexual frankness of the book that critics dubbed “Jude the Obscene” is often cited as another cause of the turn away from novels. Michael Millgate, however, who remains Hardy’s most authoritative biographer, reminds us that one reason Hardy could devote himself wholly to poetry from this time onward was that he could afford to, after the success of the first collected edition of his novels in 1895–6 and as a result of the shift to the payment of regular royalties on sales, as opposed to a lump sum on publication. Nor should we imagine that the twentieth-century Hardy lost all interest in his Victorian novels: he was an inveterate tinkerer with his work, a matter about which neither new biographer has much to say. Tomalin offers more on the formidable Max Gate dog named Wessex than the extensive revisions undertaken for the late Wessex Edition, while Pite carelessly refers to the 1895–6 Osgood, McIlvaine uniform edition as the “Wessex Edition” (its strapline was in fact “Wessex Novels” – “Wessex Edition” was the title of the Macmillan series that began to appear in 1912).
To return to the beginning, and Professor Pite parking his car at Higher Bockhampton, a National Trust property which has recently advertised for a resident curator who must be prepared to entertain visitors in the way that Hardy did at Max Gate, on an almost daily basis after the First World War. Pite starts here partly because he assumes that the majority of readers of a biography published under a trade as opposed to an academic imprint will regard Hardy as a “heritage” author, wrapped in the shroud of West Dorset tourism (“Discover the heart of Hardy’s Wessex”) and the BBC costume drama department. But Pite’s strategy is also shaped by his own disposition as a reader who is interested in place. This biography follows his admirable critical study Hardy’s Geography (2003), which sought to impart some theoretical rigour to a tradition which began with Hermann Lea’s sequence of guides, written with Hardy’s cooperation, and providing the original translation of Casterbridge back into Dorchester, Mellstock to Stinsford, Budmouth to Weymouth, Shaston to Shaftesbury, and so forth. Though Pite is not explicit about the fact, the car is also intended to suggest a suitably Hardyesque irony. As in Wordsworth’s Lake District, tourism in Hardy’s Dorset is car-dependent because of the lack of public transport. And yet the automobile is the prime marker of that very modernity against which heritage tourism is a reaction. What is more, the mass affluence and car ownership that make this kind of tourism possible have led to road-building on a scale that has radically changed both the economy and the landscape of deep England. Pite observes that there are still no motorways in Dorset, but he neglects to mention that the north Cornish coast, so crucial to Hardy’s conception of remoteness and the immemorial quality of land and seascape, has been transformed by the four-by-fours heading down to fashionable Rock and the gastronomic delights of Padstow.
Tomalin, meanwhile, follows in Hardy’s footsteps on the three-mile walk from Higher Bockhampton to his school in the centre of Dorchester. She claims that the route “can still be followed across a landscape that has remained relatively unchanged since the 1850s”. Well, that depends on what she means by “relatively”: the ghost of Thomas Hardy, the author of a lost treatise “On the application of coloured bricks and terra cotta to modern architecture”, would have a lot to say about the housing developments on the outskirts of Dorchester. Pite is sharper here, noting that there were three different routes available to young Tom, through slightly different landscapes. It is, incidentally, continually disconcerting to read the two biographies side by side, so frequent are their minor differences on factual matters. Thus Tomalin says “His serious schooldays began in 1850”, while Pite has him starting “at Isaac Last’s Dorchester school in 1849”. The best arbitrational rule of thumb is to trust neither but return instead to Millgate (for the record, Michaelmas 1850 is the correct answer on this occasion).
Tomalin has a passing mention of the railway reaching Dorchester in June 1847. Pite repeats a more complicated story, of which he made much in Hardy’s Geography. Before the railway came, Dorchester was an important regional centre, connected to London by more than forty coaches a week. It was also one of the stopping-points for the Western Circuit of the judiciary; the Bloody Assizes, with their public hangings, marked Hardy’s childhood. Then the railway arrived, and seven-year-old Tom took a first, never forgotten, train trip to London. He and his mother had to begin their journey on a branch line, then change trains to join Brunel’s broad-gauge Great Western line that ran from London to Bristol and on to Exeter. It was generally assumed that there would soon be a new West Coast main line along the old coaching route, cutting the journey time and linking Dorchester directly to the world of modernity. But Brunel’s rivals, the narrow-gauge companies, decided after a protracted planning dispute to build their line on a “central route” via Salisbury and Yeovil, rather than the “coastal route” that followed the old coaching road. Thus Dorchester became a dead end: “The great world left it behind and left behind the county too, which was crossed by major railway routes only at its northern edge, near Gillingham and Sherborne”. For Pite, this is the essential fact shaping Hardy’s Wessex. Thus he argues that even though the bulk of The Mayor of Casterbridge is set before the arrival of the railway, the novel is shaped by a dialectic whereby the modernizing Farfrae follows various railway routes, but
all the places Henchard goes to during the novel lie on the old coach road from London to Falmouth: the route that the layout of the railway system had eventually destroyed. This remains Henchard’s habitual trajectory – one he cannot alter or shift away from, and that inability leaves him ruined and abandoned in the end, just like the coach roads themselves.
Tomalin is more interested in bicycles. One reason why her illustrations are superior to Pite’s is that they include a splendid photograph of the aged Hardy clutching “The Rover Cob”. Emma Hardy learnt to ride a bike at the age of fifty-five and persuaded her husband to join her. Being slightly lame, she found the bicycle served her as “a substitute horse, and she even talked about going for a canter”. She had costumes made to match the colour of her bikes, first a green one (“The Grasshopper”), then a blue. For Tomalin, the fragile marriage was at its best out on the dusty lanes, “because it is difficult to keep up a quarrel or a sulk as you pedal along country roads”. Hardy had a not unjustified reputation for grumpiness and parsimony, but he spent £20 on his “Rover Cob” and never regretted it. “I have almost forgotten that there is such a pursuit as literature”, he wrote to Grant Allen, “in the arduous study of – bicycling!” For Tomalin, the biking was a shared enthusiasm kept up well into the new century. It is her device for redeeming the painful latter years of Hardy’s first marriage. Pite takes a more jaundiced view, dwelling on the tour that the Hardys undertook in the summer of 1896, which offered them respite from the black critical reception accorded to Jude the Obscure. They headed for Warwick, Kenilworth and Stratford-upon-Avon, often finding themselves the only English couple in hotels full of Americans. Emma rode the Grasshopper (presumably very slowly), while Hardy walked (we do not know how fast). “It is curious and touching”, remarks Pite, “that their posture, with Emma riding and Hardy walking, evoked their times in Cornwall together, when she rode on horseback and he walked along beside – as her courtly lover and the squire to her lady.”
Both biographers return to that first meeting several times, before bringing the wheel full circle with the elegiac “Poems of 1912–13”. In March 1870, Hardy, approaching his thirtieth birthday, was an aspiring author in private but an ecclesiastical architect by profession. He was commissioned to survey the decaying parish church of the tiny village of St Juliot on the north coast of Cornwall, not far from Boscastle. Church “restoration”, which sometimes meant desecration in the name of Victorian architectural fashion, was all the rage. Hardy arrived at the rectory on a Monday evening. The Rector was in bed with gout, which Tomalin describes as “the classic complaint” of such a residence, so the door was opened by his sister-in-law, a young woman dressed in brown. Her name was Emma Gifford. She and Hardy became constant companions during his three-day stay. She stood in the pulpit while he surveyed the church. They ran to the edge of towering Beeny Cliff. In the evenings she played the piano. He left at dawn on the Friday morning. She got up early to see him off, and they may have kissed. Hardy soon wrote a poem linking Emma to the place where he had met her: “the spot / That no spot on earth excels, / – Where she dwells”.
Four and a half years later, they married. Hardy may have been a reluctant groom. The rest of the story provides Tomalin with the main thread of her narrative. Always childless, they gradually drifted apart. After twenty unsatisfactory years came the final straw: Hardy published the immoral and irreligious Jude the Obscure, deeply offending the sensibility of the pious Emma. They spent more and more time apart; he became interested in other women and she retreated to that attic. Immediately on her death, filled with remorse, he began writing the “Poems of 1912–13”, included as a discrete section within Satires of Circumstance, the volume of verse he published in 1914. The second half of the sequence was written during a return visit to Cornwall, made in March 1913, around the forty-third anniversary of the first meeting. The combination of the return to the beloved place and the memory of his courtship led him to write such masterly miniatures of apparent simplicity but actual profundity as “After a Journey” (“Yes: I have re-entered your olden haunts at last; / Through the years, through the dead scenes I have tracked you”), “Beeny Cliff” (subtitled with the dates “March 1870–March 1913”), and “Places” (“One there is to whom these things, / That nobody else’s mind calls back, / Have a savour that scenes in being lack, / And a presence more than the actual brings”).
The essence of these elegies is the thought that for us humans the significance of a place comes not from geographical particulars but from personal associations and memories. “Why go to St Juliot?”, Hardy asks in the poem written just before he set off on the journey of return. Before getting on the train, he already knows that there is a deep sense in which the meaning of the place has been extinguished together with the life of the person who embodied it: “Does there even a place like Saint-Juliot exist? / Or a Vallency Valley / With stream and leafed alley, / Or Beeny, or Bos with its flounce flinging mist?”. For the remaining fifteen years of Hardy’s long life, he kept his desk calendar permanently set on March 7, the day he knocked at the rectory door.
“Every woman who makes a permanent impression on a man is usually recalled to his mind’s eye as she appeared in one particular scene, which seems ordained to be her special form of manifestation throughout the pages of his memory.” So wrote Hardy, and he described a woman sitting by candlelight at the piano, her hands in place on the keys, her lips parted as she sings a setting of a sad love poem by Shelley. This must be his memory of one of those first evenings with Emma. It comes, however, from a work of fiction rather than a memoir. It occurs early in his third published novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, which appeared in monthly instalments in 1872–3. The commission for serial publication (in Tinsleys’ Magazine) was his breakthrough as a novelist. The story begins with the arrival of a young architect at a remote rectory on the Cornish coast. He has been commissioned to survey the parish church with a view to restoration. The Rector is in bed with gout, so the visitor is met by a young woman. She stands in the pulpit while he works in the church; they wander together on the cliffs; in the evenings she plays the piano and sings; they fall in love. “Has the reader ever seen a winsome girl in a pulpit?”, asks the narrator; “Perhaps not. Nor has the writer; but he knows somebody who has and who can never forget that sight.” Ah yes, that old trick: what would you say to a friend of mine who’s got this little problem . . . . The direct authorial voice is clumsy there, the pretence that the experience was not his own hardly credible. Hardy must have blushed to read this passage when he revised the text of A Pair of Blue Eyes for the 1895 collected edition of his novels. In an act of good judgement, he cut it. In the biography of Hardy written by his second wife – in reality a ghosted autobiography – the connection between the opening sequence of A Pair of Blue Eyes and the author’s first sight of Emma at St Juliot was acknowledged: “the character and appearance of Elfride have points in common with those of Mrs Hardy in quite young womanhood”. But the autobiography also claims that the plot of the novel had been conceived and written down long before the author met his Emma. What Hardy had in mind when making that claim was his draft of a first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, written over two years before he went to Cornwall and destroyed after it was rejected by four publishers. Tomalin provides a picaresque account of the misadventures of this manuscript on its road to oblivion; Pite is excellent on its content. A politically radical young architect of peasant background falls in love with the daughter of the squire on whose estate his parents work, to the horror of her parents: Pite traces this plot back to a romantic liaison that fascinated Hardy, the marriage of the Irish actor William O’Brien to Lady Susan Fox-Strangways, whose bodies lay together beneath Stinsford Church in a vault which happens to have been constructed by Hardy’s grandfather (though that last connection is made by Tomalin, not Pite).
The autobiography also denied that the character of the young architect in A Pair of Blue Eyes, Stephen Smith, was a picture of the author’s own personality. Hardy maintained that he himself had a greater resemblance to the other member of the novel’s love triangle, Henry Knight, a London man of letters who is Smith’s intellectual mentor before becoming his rival for the affections of the heroine, Elfride Swancourt. This is a most intriguing suggestion, because it is generally recognized that the person whom the character of Knight truly resembles is Hardy’s own intellectual mentor, the Oxbridge man of letters Horace Moule. Knight is the metropolitan sophisticate Hardy would have liked to have been, Smith the honest but naive countryman he really was. Hardy and Moule were not rivals for the affections of Emma Gifford – Moule is considered by many to have had strong homosexual inclinations. Pite leans to the view that he did, while Tomalin does not. Both are rightly sceptical of the recent tendency to view Hardy himself as a repressed homosexual; even as an old man he was always falling in love with attractive young girls. But it does seem plausible that in fantasizing in fiction about a man like himself and a man like Moule being rivals for a woman like Emma, he was working through his own conflicting desires, for close male intellectual companionship on the one hand, and a wife on the other. By a grimly Hardyesque irony of circumstance, Moule slit his throat in his college rooms in Cambridge just two months after A Pair of Blue Eyes was published in book form – and a year after that, Hardy married Emma. Simply to narrate all this illustrates something of the knotted relationships between Hardy’s life and his works. Tomalin seems reluctant to take on the tricky task of mediating between invention and memory, dramatization and self-projection, in the novels. She is more comfortable with the poetry, where the “I” who speaks the verse is more patently and potently autobiographical.
Her book has great charm and is effortlessly readable. Its most valuable contribution is to open up the poems for the benefit of the many readers who know only the novels. It does, however, lack the intellectual meat required by those with an appetite for a full understanding of Hardy’s achievement. In particular, there is a failure to grasp the extent to which, in the course of preparing The Return of the Native, Hardy undertook a programme of reading in philosophy and aesthetics, traceable in his Literary Notebooks, with which he sought to reach beyond the label of “rural novelist” (the biographer who remains most acute on developments of this kind is Robert Gittings). Pite’s book is spikier and less assured in tone, more nuanced as criticism than biography. It struggles to make Hardy nicer than he was, but offers rich insights into the relationship between the novels and the process of social change in late nineteenthcentury rural England, while probing restlessly at the inner life. It is particularly sympathetic in its account of Hardy’s admiration and affection for the Dorset schoolmaster and dialect poet William Barnes. Had Tomalin’s book been constructed as a biography of Hardy’s two marriages, it would have been a triumph. Had Pite chosen Barnes as the subject for his first biography, he would truly have made his mark.
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Jonathan Bate is the author of John Clare: A biography, 2004. He is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick and the General Editor of the New Oxford English Literary History.
