Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  CLAIRE TOMALIN

  Thomas Hardy

  The Time-Torn Man

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  MAP showing the area around Higher Bockhampton and Max Gate

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE: 1840–1867

  1 Mother

  2 Child

  3 The Bookish Boy

  4 Friends and Brothers

  5 The Londoner

  PART TWO: 1867–1874

  6 The Clever Lad’s Dream

  7 Lyonnesse

  8 The True Vocation

  9 Easy to Die

  10 A Short Visit to the Continent

  PART THREE: 1875–1905

  11 Dreaming the Heath

  12 Hardy Joins a Club

  13 The Tower

  14 The Conformers

  15 The Blighted Star

  16 Tom and Em

  17 The Terra-cotta Dress

  18 A Witch and a Wife

  19 Cat, Bird, Eagle, Sphinx

  PART FOUR: 1905–1928

  20 Convergence

  21 Satires of Circumstance

  22 A Friend from Cambridge

  23 The Wizard

  24 Winter Words

  EPILOGUE

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  NOTES

  LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

  TEXT AND ILLUSTRATION PERMISSIONS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THOMAS HARDY

  ‘Painfully gripping… acute and original. A great biographer’ Carole Angier, Literary Review

  ‘Perceptive and intelligent. Tomalin brings time and place and people tenaciously alive’ Alan Taylor, Sunday Herald

  ‘Scrupulous and luminous biography’ Chicago Tribune

  ‘Excellent… high- and fair-minded, authoritative’ Caroline Moore, Sunday Telegraph

  ‘A splendid picture of Hardy’ Raymond Carr, Spectator

  ‘A fascinating insight into the great Victorian novelist and poet’s life’ Harper’s Bazaar

  ‘Sparky, compelling, immediately gripping’ Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times

  ‘Tomalin’s biography… allows the reader to muse on the relationship between life and fiction, between poetry and the novel. One returns to Thomas Hardy with renewed pleasure and surprise’ Tim Parks, New York Review of Books

  ‘Fresh eyes and vivacious prose’ John Sutherland, Evening Standard

  ‘Exemplary… written with clarity and understanding. It is, in short, a triumph’ Tatler

  ‘Tomalin’s special gift as a biographer is her engaged concern for the people she writes about’ John Carey, Sunday Times

  ‘Sure-footed and compassionate’ Dinah Birch, Independent

  ‘One of the country’s finest biographers’ Book

  ‘Tomalin’s insights are always rewarding’ John Burnside, The Times

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Claire Tomalin worked in publishing and journalism for many years. She was literary editor first of the New Statesman and then the Sunday Times , before devoting herself to writing full time. She is the author of eight highly acclaimed biographies: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft , which won the Whitbread First Book Award; Shelley and His World; Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life ; The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens , which won the Hawthornden Prize, the NCR Book Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography; Mrs Jordan’s Profession; Jane Austen: A Life ; Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self , which was the 2002 Whitbread Book of the Year; Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man; and, most recently, Charles Dickens: A Life.

  She lives in London with her husband, the novelist and playwright Michael Frayn.

  By the same author

  The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

  Shelley and His World

  Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life

  The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan

  and Charles Dickens

  The Winter Wife

  Mrs Jordan’s Profession

  Jane Austen: A Life

  Several Strangers: Writing from Three Decades

  Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

  Illustrations

  FIRST INSET

  1. The view of Dorchester that Hardy knew from his earliest years

  2. Hardy’s drawing of his birthplace at Higher Bockhampton, which shows it as it was in the 1890s

  3. and 4. Hardy’s parents in old age

  5. Melbury House, the seat of the Earls of Ilchester

  6. Stinsford House, near Bockhampton

  7. Hardy’s first school at Lower Bockhampton

  8. The Revd Moule and his family on the lawn in front of his Fordington vicarage

  9. Horace Moule, Hardy’s great friend and mentor

  10. Hardy at nineteen, when he was an architectural pupil in Dorchester

  11. The garden terrace of the rectory at St Juliot, showing the Revd Cadell Holder, his wife, Helen, and her sister, Emma Gifford

  12. Emma Gifford

  13. Hardy at thirty

  14. Hardy’s sketch of Emma on her knees searching in the river

  15. Emma’s sketch of Hardy holding a flag

  16. Emma’s drawing of the summerhouse in the garden of the St Juliot rectory, where she and Hardy often sat together

  17. Emma’s drawings of the Boscastle Valley and ‘The Watercourse’ of the Valency River

  18. A page of Emma’s honeymoon diary

  19. Riverside Villas, near Sturminster Newton, where Hardy and Emma enjoyed two happy years from 1876

  20. The view of the Blackmore Vale from Hardy’s upstairs study window at Riverside Villas, where he wrote The Return of the Native

  SECOND INSET

  21. Hardy at thirty-four, looking the part of the successful Victorian literary man

  22. Leslie Stephen, the editor of the Cornhill, who commissioned Far from the Madding Crowd

  23. The house in Tooting taken by the Hardys in 1878

  24. Max Gate, the house designed by Hardy and built by his brother. Hardy and Emma moved there in June 1885

  25. The hall at Max Gate

  26. Hardy dressed for the road, with his bicycle

  27. Mrs Florence Henniker, with whom Hardy fell in love in 1893

  28. Emma Hardy in her later years, dressed for one of her garden parties

  29. Drawing of Florence Dugdale by William Strang

  30. Florence Dugdale and Hardy on the beach at Aldeburgh in 1909

  31. Florence, Hardy and their dog Wessex

  32. Luncheon visit to the Hardys by the Prince of Wales in 1923

  33. Hardy in 1924: ‘a human being, not “the great man”’

  34. Augustus John’s 1923 portrait of Hardy

  Prologue

  In November of 1912 an ageing writer lost his wife. He was not expecting her to die, but then he had not been taking much notice of her for some time. They had run out of conversation, he was in love with another woman, and for some years now she had withdrawn from him, choosing to sleep alone in a small room in the attic. She spent much of the day up there too, having her breakfast and lunch brought up, and reading and writing in a second attic room. She had just reached her seventy-second birthday. There had been no celebrations. She had seemed unwell, the doctor had seen her, but she had refused to allow him to examine her, and he had given no warning that there might be anything seriously wrong. At about eight in the morning on 27 November her young maid Dolly went to her as usual and found her alarmingly changed since bedtime the night before, when the girl had attended her. Now she was ‘moaning and terribly ill’. She did not complain or ask for the doctor to be sent for, but she did ask Dolly to fetch
her husband. Dolly ran down to the master in his study, where he was making an early start on his day’s work. He told her to straighten her collar – she wore a blue dress with a white collar when she was working – then he climbed the narrow stairs to his wife’s room and went up to the bed. He spoke her name: ‘Em, Em – don’t you know me?’ But she was already unconscious, and within minutes she had stopped breathing. Emma Hardy was dead.1

  This is the moment when Thomas Hardy became a great poet. He was a long-established, admired and popular writer, acknowledged as a great novelist and, more recently, as a poet. His historical epic-drama had been greeted with interest and respect, and he had written many fine poems and a few outstanding ones. But it was the death of Emma that proved to be his best inspiration. Filled with sorrow and remorse for their estrangement, he had her body brought down and placed in the coffin at the foot of his bed, where it remained for three days and nights until the funeral.2 The gesture would have been remarkable in a lover who could not bear to be parted from the body of his mistress, but for an elderly husband who had for years been on bad terms with his wife it seems almost monstrously unconventional, until you realize that he was thinking of his situation quite differently. He had become a lover in mourning.

  He began at once to revisit their early love in his mind with an intensity that expressed itself in a series of poems. ‘One forgets all the recent years and differences,’he wrote to a friend, ‘and the mind goes back to the early times when each was much to the other – in her case and mine intensely much.’3 The dry old man was ‘in flower’as a poet – these were his own words – although the flower was sad-coloured; and he wrote more poems than he had ever done before in the same space of time.4

  They are among the most original elegies ever written, in feeling and in the handling of language and verse forms. They are both conversational and lyrical. They do not spare the truth about the unhappiness suffered by wife and husband, but they move into the past with an expansiveness and panache he had never found before. In them he speaks to her, he gives her a voice, he conjures her up: sometimes she appears as a ghost, sometimes as the elderly woman who liked parties and hats; more often as the girl of long ago, wearing an ‘air-blue gown’, or with her ‘bright hair flapping free’. And he recalls how she seemed to him once a sublime, almost Homeric woman, ‘Fair-eyed and white shouldered, broad-browed and brown-tressed’.

  He talks to her about her past self, ‘With your nut-coloured hair, / And gray eyes, and rose-flush coming and going’. He remembers how the light of the sunset over the sea, with its ‘dipping blaze / Dyed her face fire-red’. He relives a moment when he walked with her on a rainy road, and they exchanged the words that changed their lives, calling up her image and then letting it go:

  I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,

  I look back at it amid the rain

  For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,

  And I shall traverse old love’s domain

  Never again.5

  At the same time he knows that she is ‘past love, praise, indifference, blame’. She is shut in her grave, ‘the clodded shell / Of her tiny cell’. She is wrapped in her shroud, with the rain that she hates – or hated – beating down on her.6 She is not there where he expects to see her working in the garden in the evening, and when he returns from his walk the house where she should be is empty of her. He needs to speak to her and see her, although he knows he cannot. The poetry allows him to. It keeps him balanced between the possible and the impossible, as the bereaved need to be, so that he can sorrow, and then rejoice, and then admit that the rejoicing cannot change how things are now.

  There were times when he thought of the poems as a way of making amends to Emma, ‘the only amends I can make’, he wrote to another woman he had loved.7 He was seeing her again in the place where he first knew her, and with which he always identified her, the remote coast of north Cornwall, where the untamed landscape and the young woman on horseback with her hair blowing behind her had seemed almost exotic to him in 1870. Away from Cornwall her exoticism faded, and after they were married they never returned there, for which Hardy blamed himself. More than anything, though, he was re-creating his great romance, writing for the first time openly and boldly of ‘The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me’, restoring her to the Cornish cliffs where she had seemed to him to embody the spirit of landscape:

  I found her out there

  On a slope few see,

  That falls westwardly

  To the salt-edged air,

  Where the ocean breaks

  On the purple strand,

  And the hurricane shakes

  The solid land.

  The sequence, which he called ‘Poems of 1912–13’, adding the words Veteris vestigia flammae(‘traces of old flames’), makes up one of the finest and strangest celebrations of the dead in English poetry.8 It is cast in a different mould from Lycidas, Adonais or In Memoriam, fragmented, less marmoreal, but it still stands beside them. The metrical patterns and shapes of each poem are ambitious, complicated, surprising. The more risks he takes the less he falters, and what he gets away with is astonishing. No two use the same structure. There is a bow to Shakespeare when he reminds Emma’s ghost that night is ending, and ‘Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me, / For the stars close their shutters’.9 But the voice is purely his own.

  ‘The Voice’was written within weeks of Emma’s death, in December 1912. Its first words go straight to the point: ‘Woman much missed’. You might think he had written down what was in his heart immediately, but the manuscript shows that his first draft suggested something more complicated and even sinister: ‘O woman weird’. We can look over his shoulder and see how second thoughts brought simplicity:

  Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

  Saying that now you are not as you were

  When you had changed from the one who was all to me,

  But as at first, when our day was fair.

  The ‘call to me, call to me’is made into a wail of grief by the ‘Woman much missed’before it. The woman is trying to reach him and explain something complicated: that her death means she is no longer as she was in the later years of their marriage, ‘when you had changed’, but as she had been ‘at first, when our day was fair’. Hardy is looking at three different bits of time: the long-ago past, when he and Emma had been true lovers, the recent past, when they were estranged, and ‘now’, when he imagines her to be again as she was in the distant past. (This explains the force of the ‘woman weird’ he began with – she can time-travel inside her grave.)

  He goes on to picture her as she used to be, waiting for him to arrive at Launceston Railway Station. Again, he made a change to the second stanza, from a dull ‘Even to the original hat and gown’ to the marvellous ‘original air-blue gown’that lifts and lights the whole poem. It tells us it was summer, and how she stood out luminously in the drab railway station.

  Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,

  Standing as when I drew near to the town

  Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,

  Even to the original air-blue gown!

  Then, to close the poem, he changes the shape and rhythm, reducing the lines as he finds himself reduced, unable to keep his imagination working, brought to his lowest ebb: ‘Thus I’. No air-blue to lift him now; he is merely an old man who can hardly move forward among a few skeletal autumn trees, and faltering. In this bleakness the woman’s voice is still heard but with no possibility of an answer or an exchange.

  Thus I; faltering forward,

  Leaves around me falling,

  Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,

  And the woman calling.

  ‘The Phantom Horsewoman’is as odd and bold as any of his poems, rising from one of Hardy’s awkward starts to a conclusion that feels triumphant instead of sorrowful, as though this time the poetry has actually worked magic.
It starts with an unnamed ‘I’ who seems to be observing another anonymous person, ‘a man I know’, this one old, half mad and obsessed with something only he can see as he gazes out over the ocean:

  Queer are the ways of a man I know:

  He comes and stands

  In a careworn craze,

  And looks at the sands

  And the seaward haze

  With moveless hands

  And face and gaze,

  Then turns to go…

  And what does he see when he gazes so?

  Two anonymous men make an impersonal start to the poem, even if both are aspects of Hardy himself. What one is looking at, and seeing continually in his mind, is explained in the last part of the poem, when it changes from the impersonal to the intensely personal. He is seeing

  A ghost-girl-rider. And though, toil-tried,

  He withers daily,

  Time touches her not,

  But still she rides gaily

  In his rapt thought

  On that shagged and shaly

  Atlantic spot,

  And as when first eyed

  Draws rein and sings to the swing of the tide.

  The ‘ghost-girl-rider’and ‘toil-tried’give a spring to the rhythm, so that the short lines canter away after them like the girl on her horse – and like time that has run away with their happiness, and with her life. Only the poem allows her to pause. This is Hardy’s magic. He makes her draw rein, she sings, she is there again, and now that he has written the poem, she will always be there.

  Hardy was a writer who made many of his best effects out of incidents and stories he had collected and put aside, sights stored up, feelings he had kept to himself, anger he had not shown to the world. In these poems about Emma he is rediscovering repressed sorrow and forgotten love. He is like an archaeologist uncovering objects that have not been seen for many decades, bringing them out into the light, examining them, some small pieces, some curious bones and broken bits, and some shining treasures. There is a rising excitement in the writing as of someone making discoveries. He has found the most perfect subject he has ever had, and he has the skills to work on it. ‘There is the harvest of having written twenty novels first,’wrote Ezra Pound in praise of Hardy’s poetry.10