The Fighter_Literary Essays

by Tim Parks

  Two reflections in particular remain after reading these five books: that we would all stand to gain if, from time to time, historians could put aside their reluctance to draw on the disciplines of psychology and anthropology. So many of Bosworth’s intuitions are marvellously acute, but he does not bring them together in a coherent argument. We are overwhelmed with information that can only add up in ways the author doesn’t discuss.

  Second, that the best answer to Farrell’s enthusiasm for dictatorship is that no psychology can be guaranteed as stable over the long run. Referring to difficulties forming a coalition government in 1922, Farrell speaks of ‘Italianesque government by imbroglio’.38 Few coalitions, however, could have been as muddled, indecisive and internally divided as the mind of Mussolini in 1939.

  Fear is the Key

  * * *

  [Thomas Hardy]

  ‘WHAT HAS PROVIDENCE done to Mr Hardy’, wrote a reviewer of the Victorian writer’s novel Jude the Obscure (1895), ‘that he should rise up in the arable land of Wessex and shake his fist at his Creator?’1 The reviewer was referring to the long and painful series of misfortunes that befall Jude, culminating in the moment when his eldest child, aged twelve, is found to have hanged his younger brother and sister and then himself. So harrowing is the scene, and so apparently gratuitous, that the reviewer’s cry for some explanation from the author’s experience is understandable. The new biography of Hardy by Claire Tomalin would seem to be the place for today’s reader to get an answer, but she declines to offer one. ‘Neither Hardy nor anyone else’, she tells us, ‘has explained where his black view of life came from.’2 Most of his time, after all, was spent working at his desk. Tomalin does suggest, however, that ‘part of the answer might be that he was writing at a time when Britain seemed to be permanently and bitterly divided into a nation of the rich and a nation of the poor.’3 Elsewhere she mentions the author’s loss of Christian faith. But while it is true that Hardy’s novels contain scathing criticism of the English class system and that he himself had been on the receiving end of much snobbery and elitism, still, for many of his contemporaries, even from his own background, even agnostics, this was a period of progress and confidence.

  Another question about Hardy that remains largely unanswered is why he stopped writing novels relatively early in his long career. He was fifty-five when Jude was published. It was his fourteenth novel. He was at the height of his powers. Yet in the thirty-two years that remained to him he would never write another. Tomalin accepts Hardy’s explanation that he had always thought of himself as a poet and that having now made sufficient money he could afford to withdraw from the pressures and compromises involved in writing serialised fiction and concentrate on his verse. Yet a certain mystery remains. Was there some relation between the intensity of the negative vision in Jude and the decision to stop writing? Why was poetry more congenial to Hardy and what is the relation between the two sides to his work?

  Hardy was born more dead than alive in the small village of Bockhampton, Dorset, south-west England, on 2 June 1840, less than six months after his parents married. His father, a small-time builder, named the boy Thomas after both himself and his own father, giving no second name to distinguish the newborn. He was just another generation. His mother, Jemima, a servant and cook, had reached the relatively mature age of twenty-six without marrying, had had no desire to do so before this unwanted pregnancy, and would always warn her children against the move. Jemima’s own mother had married in the last month of a pregnancy (her second) and brought up seven children in extreme poverty. Jemima would have three more after Thomas.

  Frail, not expected to survive, Hardy was kept at home till age eight, learning to read and play the fiddle from his parents. Throughout her long life his mother would always refer to him as ‘her rather delicate “boy”’4 while in his memoirs Hardy recalls that when asked what he wished to do as a grown-up he would protest that ‘he did not want at all to be a man, or to possess things, but to remain as he was, in the same spot, and to know no more people than he already knew.’5 As late as 1917 he was describing himself at his first school as a still unfledged bird, ‘Pink, tiny, crisp-curled’.6

  The desire to be spared adult experience is repeated in Jude the Obscure: ‘If only he could prevent himself growing up!’ Jude thinks, ‘He did not want to be a man!’7 All Hardy’s major novels, in fact, present us with a child, or childish adult, who is, as it were, thrust out into the world before he or she is ready for experience. Orphans abound and even where parents are present the question of shelter and protection is always to the fore. Of Tess and her six younger brothers and sisters in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) we hear: ‘All these young souls were passengers in the Durbeyfield ship – entirely dependent on the judgement of the two Durbeyfield adults for their pleasure, their necessities, their health, even their existence.’8 In the event, Tess is sent off into service dressed (by her mother) in such a way that ‘might cause her to be estimated as a woman when she was not much more than a child’.9 The consequences are disastrous.

  But what was so hard about growing up? One of the childhood anecdotes in Hardy’s memoirs tells us how he fell in love with his first schoolteacher Mrs Martin. He recalls sitting on her lap, the rustle of her skirts, her smell. His mother, however, having decided to travel to Hertfordshire to assist her sister with the arrival of a fifth child, took Thomas away with her ‘for protection … being then an attractive and still young woman’.10 This was clearly a family obsession. What protection could a nine-year-old offer a woman in her mid-thirties? Presumably what we are really talking about is her determination to protect him. The young Thomas was upset about losing his beloved teacher and even more so when, on returning to Bockhampton, he found he was to be sent to another school further afield. Desperate to see Mrs Martin now, he escaped from home to attend a harvest supper dance at which she would be present. There was a brief emotional meeting, after which he was abandoned and, tired and afraid, had to wait outside in the dark till three in the morning to be brought home and scolded.

  The scene reads very much like something in a Hardy novel: it is a mindset where desire and fear battle for the upper hand in the absence of any moral content. Throughout his life, perhaps influenced by his parents’ shotgun wedding, Hardy would be awed by the consequences of romantic and above all sexual experience. As a boy he hated to be touched. Years later he would visit the widowed Mrs Martin at her London home and even in his memoirs he would be reflecting that their love might have been ‘in the order of things’11 if only he had got back to her earlier. In line with his general anxiety about exposing himself to criticism and derision, Hardy removed these lines from the manuscript to be sent to the publishers.

  What was ‘in the order of things’ for the boy now was a three-mile walk to school in Dorchester, the nearest town. Thomas didn’t like going so far from home. He complained of being sent when he was ill. All the same, ‘born bookworm’12 as he was, he became a prize pupil. Deeming their son too delicate for building work, his parents seized on this intellectual success and had him articled to an architect, again in Dorchester. He was sixteen (‘still a child’ he later remarked). Upwardly mobile, he rose in his parents’13 esteem and, of course, architects and builders might one day hope to work together. At the same time he became different from the rest of the family and there were the embarrassments of moving in a class which might despise his manners and accent. Apparently it was impossible to have a positive thing without a negative.

  Aged twenty, Hardy received his first salary and was able to rent a room in town, returning home at the weekends. It was the beginning of a long habit of oscillation between separate worlds, between bold independence and the safe protection of home, that would remain with Hardy all his life. In Dorchester he met the influential and intellectual Moule family who directed his reading and gave him encouragement with his first attempts at writing. Back home he went with his father to play the fiddle at village festivals,
not so much the carouser as the one who provides the music, in the reassuring company of a parent. What romantic crushes there were at this stage were unconsummated; often Thomas flirted with his many female cousins, as if it might somehow be safer to keep love in the family. Then in 1862 this cautious young man suddenly decided to be brave, quit his job and set off to London.

  One of Hardy’s finest novels is entitled The Return of the Native (1878), and the expression might aptly be applied to many moments in the writer’s own life. For after five years in London, years in which he fell on his feet, found a job with an architects’ firm, won two Architectural Association prizes, immersed himself in the life of the capital, made friends and courted girls, in 1867, again rather suddenly, Hardy ‘fell ill’,14 ‘felt weak’ and, nothing diagnosed, abandoned all he had achieved to return home. In The Return of the Native, nothing is less convincing than the motives given by the handsome young Clym for his return to his tiny village after five successful years in the jewellery business in Paris. He claims to have grown tired of worldly ways, says he wishes to offer instruction to local village children. But clearly the most important person in Clym’s life is his beloved mother; the passionate young Eustacia, who destroys his relationship with Mother, is portrayed in a most ambiguous if not negative light.

  Aside from his ‘health’, Hardy’s ostensible reason for abandoning London was that his lowly origins made it difficult for him to start an architect’s practice of his own, or at least would involve ‘pushing his way into influential sets’.15 Whether this was really such an obstacle is hard to say. In any event, what saved the retreat to Dorset from feeling like complete failure was that Hardy brought back with him more than 400 pages of a novel-in-progress. Hence while resuming part-time architect’s work in Dorchester he was able to get on with the book at home. Mother’s protection in Bockhampton was thus combined with aspirations that would be fulfilled in the big city.

  It is usually said of The Poor Man and the Lady that it was rejected for publication and much is made of Hardy’s sufferings as an aspiring man from a poor background seeking space for himself in the literary world. The circumstances are complicated. Since the manuscript was destroyed we have little idea what was in the novel, but he himself described it as a ‘dramatic satire of the squirearchy and nobility, London society, the vulgarity of the middle class, modern Christianity, church restoration and political and domestic morals in general … the tendency of the writing being socialistic, not to say revolutionary.’16

  No doubt this was hard for London publishers to swallow, especially if the writer was still unaccomplished. But one publisher, Chapman, said it would do the novel if Hardy were willing to make corrections and pay £20 against losses. Chapman’s reader, however, George Meredith, himself a novelist from a humble background, warned Hardy that publication of such inflammatory material might compromise his future. It would be better to write something else. Later, yet another publisher, Tinsley Brothers, offered publication if Hardy would guarantee the company against losses, not an unusual arrangement. He declined, complaining he couldn’t afford it, though only a year later he would make a contract with Tinsley for his second attempt, Desperate Remedies, which involved handing over to them the very large sum of £75 against possible losses.

  Perhaps, then, rather than this being a case of outright rejection, Hardy, cautious as he was, had taken Meredith’s advice. He would also describe The Poor Man and the Lady as telling ‘the life of an isolated student cast upon the billows of London with no protection but his brains’.17 Isolation, lack of protection, are so often the key with Hardy. This was how he thought of himself. A book that set the world against him was not what he had in mind. In any event, this first venture into publishing suggests how ambiguous, in his mature novels, is the relationship between social criticism and the misfortunes and defeats of his characters: snobbery, injustice, discrimination there may be, but these horrors can also offer the insecure child-adult an excuse to give up and return home, or they may confirm a preconception that life away from the parental hearth is unspeakably dangerous.

  Despite his lowly origins, Hardy eventually published his first (now determinedly innocuous) novel at thirty-one and his second at thirty-two, at which point, with a contract signed to write a third, this time serialised, novel, he was already able to dedicate himself entirely to writing. Even today such an achievement would be remarkable. The London literary world was not after all so hostile to a country boy.

  Meantime his last years in an architect’s office were to bring Hardy to an even more momentous initiation than that of big-city life or publication. Having always specialised in church restoration, he was sent to Cornwall to assess the condition of a church in the tiny hamlet of St Juliot where he fell in love with Emma Gifford, sister-in-law of the incumbent clergyman. She was interested in literature and a bold horsewoman, something that a man with his history of frailty was bound to admire. In this poem, dated 1870, St Juliot is renamed Lyonnesse, a mythical land in Cornish legend:

  When I set out for Lyonnesse,

  A hundred miles away,

  The rime was on the spray,

  And starlight lit my lonesomeness

  When I set out for Lyonnesse

  A hundred miles away.

  What would bechance at Lyonnesse

  While I should sojourn there

  No prophet durst declare,

  Nor did the wisest wizard guess

  What would bechance at Lyonnesse

  While I should sojourn there.

  When I came back from Lyonnesse

  With magic in my eyes,

  All marked with mute surmise

  My radiance rare and fathomless,

  When I came back from Lyonnesse

  With magic in my eyes!18

  Typical of Hardy is the presentation of a before and after, with, elided in the middle, an experience that transforms someone absolutely, but cannot be spoken. In this case the transformation is positive; more often, and particularly where sexual, rather than romantic, experience is involved, it will be negative. After the beautiful young Tess has been deflowered by the rake into whose service she was so carelessly dispatched, we hear: ‘An immeasurable chasm was to divide our heroine’s personality thereafter from that previous self of hers who stepped from her mother’s door to try her fortune at Trantridge poultry farm.’19

  In love, Hardy did not hurry to marriage. His mother was against it. Emma was a middle-class woman, and hence marriage to her would complete Hardy’s move away from his kinfolk. She was also penniless. It was the worst of both worlds. Emma’s father too was against her marrying into a lower class. In short, there was good reason for hesitating and enjoying an exciting romantic correspondence which Hardy later compared to that between Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, though they of course had thrown caution to the winds and eloped. Again and again in Hardy’s novels, which are above all stories of attempted and usually failed partnerships, one partner will prefer ‘perpetual betrothal’20 to consummation. Sexual experience, when it comes, will be all-determining, fatal even. Or will it? It is on this question, the fatal quality, or otherwise, of experience, that all Hardy’s fiction turns.

  In Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), Hardy’s fourth novel and first major success, comedy prevails. Written while Emma was still at a safe distance in Cornwall, the novel reads like an extended betrothal. Independent shepherd Gabriel Oak proposes to orphan girl Bathsheba. Bold and beautiful, she rejects him, but not outright. He loses his flock in an accident. She inherits a farm from an uncle where he finds salaried work. Socially above him now, she unwisely attracts the attention of proud local landowner Boldwood who bullies her toward marriage. Courageous in running her farm, Bathsheba is a child when it comes to romance. Before she can succumb to Boldwood, the disreputable Sergeant Troy seduces her with a dazzling display of swordsmanship that involves having his blade flash all around her body as she stands frightened and adoring. Desire and fear are fused. La
ter we discover that she married Troy because she was afraid that he had found someone else, afraid that her reputation was already compromised.

  But in this early work the mistake is not allowed to be fatal. Exposed as a rake, Troy is murdered by Boldwood. With both pretenders out of the way, humble, hard-working Gabriel who has done everything to protect Bathsheba and her farm from ruin finally claims his prize. His loyal friendship has been more worthy than their passions, another constant theme in Hardy.

  Following the author’s marriage, however, there would be no more happy endings. Having tied the knot in 1874 Hardy began to move his wife back and forth from the suburbs of London, a short distance from where his career was developing, to the country round Dorchester, a short distance from his family. Seven moves in eight years. The family the couple wanted for themselves did not arrive. Allowed to help with his writing during betrothal, the childless Emma was now slowly frozen out. She did not mix well in London, where she preferred to live, or at all in Dorchester, which he preferred.

  In 1880 Hardy managed to revamp the relationship by falling ill, confining himself to his bed for many months and allowing Emma to run his life. The recurring mystery illness, vaguely described years later as a bladder inflammation, did not prevent the writer from meeting the demanding deadlines of serialised novel publishing. On his recovery, Emma was sufficiently reassured about her role in the partnership to agree to the building of a permanent home not far from Dorchester.