Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  Was Hardy a good architect? The question is unfair, since he built so little and got out of the profession. He had won a prize for the design of a country mansion when he was at Blomfield’s, and he drew efficient-seeming plans for cottages and villas in his notebook, but Max Gate was his first house, designed and built in a proud and thrifty gesture after he had abandoned architecture. Few have admired it, and no one could call it beautiful. It was not a country mansion but a small house of two reception rooms, two bedrooms and a study. The outside is starkly proportioned and weighty for such a modest place; the inside is uninspired but comfortable, with a kitchen and service rooms at the back and bedrooms for servants in the attics. Hardy specified a flush lavatory, for which the water had to be pumped up daily, but there was no bathroom and no running water: maids carried jugs to the bedrooms, as was normal in the 1880s, when half the female population must have spent hours carrying water up and down stairs. Seeing Max Gate today, you have to subtract the additions made since. In the 1890s Hardy built for his brother and sisters another house at West Stafford, about two miles away, recognizable by a similarly ungainly exterior.

  No one else ever commissioned Hardy to design a country house, but he kept up his interest in architecture, mostly through William Morris’s Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, which he joined in 1881 and which tried to prevent architects from spoiling churches with the sort of work he had been employed in as a young man. He regretted what he had done and worked with the Society energetically, trying and failing to keep Puddletown Church (among others) from being ‘improved’, and speaking eloquently of how buildings hold together ‘memories, history, fellowship, fraternities’.14

  In the spring of 1884, after his three-year pause, he started on his new novel. The Mayor of Casterbridge is an extraordinary book and another new departure for him, not a love story but a tragedy built around a single man. As in The Return of the Native he created an almost closed setting, giving a dramatic intensity to the action. The scene was the town of Dorchester – renamed but recognizable – and the action was set back to the 1840s. The Mayor himself, Michael Henchard, was supposed to be about as old as the century, older than Hardy’s parents and no kin of the people of Mellstock but a stranger to the district. It is the first of his books to be named for one person, the subtitle variously ‘The Story of a Man of Character’ or ‘The Life and Death of a Man of Character’, both good.

  The book is squarely centred on this one man, strong, ignorant, energetic, driven by a sense of what he might achieve, which he fulfils once he sets his mind on doing so. Never for a moment do we doubt that becoming mayor of a small country town is a huge achievement, so well does Hardy establish the world he has chosen to write about. Henchard is undermined by guilt for his actions as a young man, and he craves affection, but has a temper that drives it away. So the basis for a classic tragedy is set up, the hero not a king or even an educated man but an unschooled, roughly spoken working man: ‘bad at science’ and ‘bad at figures – rule o’thumb sort of man’, is how he describes himself.15 Henchard comes from nowhere, first seen as an itinerant hay-trusser walking through the countryside looking for work, owning nothing but what he can carry. He was married at eighteen and regrets it at twenty-one, and the only family he ever mentions is a brother, long since dead. By moving him into the small community of Casterbridge, Hardy allows him to appear as a great figure within it, powerful, respected and also resented. He is again alluding to Shakespeare: Henchard’s behaviour in ridding himself of his family and ill-treating his mild daughter, and his strength that turns into self-destructiveness, partly mirror the behaviour of Lear. He has the ambition and the strength to be a hero, and the failings to become a tragic one. He is without subtlety, but he is built on a large scale, morally and physically – Hardy tells us he is 6′ 1½″ in his shoes – and he has an intuitive sense of what life should be. When he knows he has gone wrong, he seeks to put things right, clumsily but honourably; and when he knows he has gone irretrievably wrong, he decides that the right course is to end his life, asking that his memory should be blotted out with his life. When his daughter Elizabeth-Jane reads his instructions that he should not be commemorated, she accepts them ‘from her independent knowledge that the man who wrote them meant what he said. She knew the directions to be a piece of the same stuff that his whole life was made of, and hence were not to be tampered with to give herself a mournful pleasure.’16

  Deeply imagined and meditated work, dramatic and poetic, the narrative is shaped on a grand scale and paced with extraordinary moments. Henchard at the weir hole, intending to drown himself and seeing himself in the water, remains a terrifying incident even when you know the explanation. The words spoken over the departed Susan Henchard by Mother Cuxsom, momentarily setting aside her class belligerence in acknowledgement of the power of death, contrive to be one of the most perfect elegiac statements ever made: ‘Well, poor soul; she’s helpless to hinder… anything now… And all her shining keys will be took from her, and her cupboards opened; and things a’didn’t wish seen, anybody will see; and her little wishes and ways will all be as nothing!’

  The descriptions of Casterbridge/Dorchester combine what Auden called Hardy’s ‘hawk’s vision’ and a countryman’s wit:

  Bees and butterflies in the corn-fields at the top of the town, who desired to get to the meads at the bottom, took no circuitous course, but flew straight down the High Street without any apparent consciousness that they were traversing strange latitudes. And in autumn airy spheres of thistledown floated into the same street, lodged upon the shop fronts, blew into drains; and innumerable tawny and yellow leaves skimmed along the pavement, and stole through people’s doorways into their passages, with a hesitating scratch on the floor, like the skirts of timid visitors.

  Or

  The farmer’s boy could sit under his barley-mow and pitch a stone into the office-window of the town-clerk; reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to acquaintances standing on the pavement-corner; the red-robed judge, when he condemned the sheep-stealer, pronounced sentence to the tune of Baa, that floated in at the window from the remainder of the flock browsing hard by; and at executions the waiting crowd stood in a meadow immediately before the drop, out of which the cows had been temporarily driven to give the spectators room.17

  The Mayor of Casterbridge is a great book in detail and conception, flawed by having too much plot, too many incidents packed in too fast, so that you long for a pause in the action. At two thirds of the length it could have been still better than it is. Hardy himself complained that he had been driven by the demands of serialization to over-elaborate, and, although his inventiveness is impressive, he was right about there being too many twists and turns.18 Sometimes the chapters gallop through revelation and counter-revelation at a pace hard to keep up with or believe in. The central device – of a man who has made good out of a bad start and, just when it seems he can redeem himself, is drawn down into another spiral of mistrust, jealousy and misunderstanding – is quite enough, and the central trio, Henchard, his supposed daughter and his assistant Farfrae, strongly and subtly balanced, are always living presences. Around them the other characters gesture and play their parts picturesquely and impressively but without their depths. Henchard and Elizabeth-Jane turn through hope, conflict, hatred, forgiveness, love and despair, never quite predictably, as we watch his strength draining and hers developing. When she looks at Farfrae, she notices ‘how nicely his hair was cut, and the sort of velvet-pile or down that was on the skin at the back of his neck, and how his cheek was so truly curved as to be part of a globe, and how clearly drawn were the lids and lashes which hid his bent eyes’.19 Hardy is showing her appraising a man, finding him desirable and imagining how it would feel to touch his skin and hair – not what a nineteenth-century girl was supposed to imagine, but he was not going to deny her sexual feeling.

  When Henchard torments her halfway through the book, she is described as a ‘dumb, dee
p-feeling, great-eyed creature’, reduced by unkindness almost to a suffering animal; Hardy also knew the ways in which men are cruel to women, and women submit.20 Towards the end Henchard reflects that out of his wronging of the social law had come ‘that flower of Nature, Elizabeth. Part of his wish to wash his hands of life arose from his perceptions of its contrarious inconsistencies – of Nature’s jaunty readiness to support bad social principles.’21 He is thinking of her illegitimacy, although you might expect him to take some comfort from ‘Nature’s jaunty readiness’, this man who moves like a great tree in the wind, who gazes ‘stormfully’ (a word Hardy coined for him) and emits ‘a blaze of satisfaction’ when he carries a point; who is described as leonine and with tigerish affections. But Henchard has been defeated, and Nature has become his enemy.

  Hardy’s portrait of Henchard – depressive, black-tempered, self-destructive and also lovable, as a child is lovable – is one of his strongest achievements. He told a friend that the only tragedy that made him weep while writing it was The Mayor of Casterbridge.22 Henchard’s will forbidding mourning or memorials is a sort of soliloquy addressed to everyone who might read it, a way of cheering himself before he dies, negating the bad things he has done, choosing his own end, dramatizing himself against his environment; and ‘it is the moment at which we identify with him most completely.’23 Although Horace Moule was an entirely different case, it is still possible there were thoughts of him – drinker, charmer and suicide – coming into play in Hardy’s mind. In everyone there is some guilt, some fear that events from the past may turn out to have unforeseen consequences, and it may be that the gossip Hardy had heard of Moule’s bad behaviour to a poor Dorchester girl who went to Australia, pregnant with his child, was in his mind.

  Another tenuous link with local life is in the naming of Abel Whittle. The manuscript shows him fiddling with Henchard’s name, trying out Giles and James before he settled on Michael, and with Farfrae’s, but he had most trouble with the name of the foolish workman humiliated by Henchard for being late, who appears variously as Smallbone, Small, Wringbone and John Wringbone in the manuscript before he is finally named Abel Whittle. When Whittle first appears he is shown as a near-pauper and a near-idiot, but at the end he becomes a saintly fool who goes to help the dying Henchard. The fact is there was a real Abel Whittle who had been a prosperous farmer at Maiden Newton where Jemima Hardy worked at the vicarage as a girl. His name appears in the census for 1851 and for 1861, when he was sixty-four, a farmer with 1,000 acres, living in Church Street close to the vicarage, with wife, three adult children and several servants; before that he was at nearby Up Cerne. Jemima would have known about him from her friends and could well have known him herself. She may have given Hardy the name, and she may have had reasons of her own for suggesting it to Hardy, or he may simply have found it himself and liked the sound of it. Even the faintest hint that he talked about his work with his mother is intriguing, since he is silent on the subject.24

  If Hardy himself experienced rage like Henchard’s, he turned it inwards. He said he suffered from depression, telling a friend in a letter of 1887, ‘As to despondency I have known the very depths of it – you would be quite shocked if I were to tell you how many weeks and months in byegone years I have gone to bed wishing never to see daylight again.’25 He went on to say that ‘this blackest state of mind’ was something he suffered from rarely now, but that there were times when it returned. In November 1885, between finishing The Mayor of Casterbridge and seeing it published, he noted that he was ‘in a fit of depression, as if enveloped in a leaden cloud’. Then he wrote, ‘a tragedy exhibits a state of things in the life of an individual which unavoidably causes some natural aim or desire of his to end in catastrophe when carried out.’ This was putting prosily what his book had demonstrated dramatically. Was he now thinking of Henchard or of himself? A few weeks later, ‘This evening, the end of the old year 1885 finds me sadder than many previous New Year’s Eves have done.’26 This was just before the book began to be serialized in January 1886, and four months before it was published. A reader at Smith, Elder complained that the ‘lack of gentry among the characters made it uninteresting’. They printed only 750 copies and remaindered the book in under a year.

  He must have planned the book in his head before he put pen to paper, writing it at a gallop in not much more than a year, and that a year full of interruptions as he supervised the building and furnishing of Max Gate and took up his position as a JP in the spring, sitting on the bench for the first time in the autumn. He was also away in London for part of June and July. In 1883 he and Emma made their first venture into taking part in the London Season, and from this point on it became an annual habit. It is one of the unforeseen and even shocking oddities of Hardy’s life that for the next twenty-five years, almost without a break, as the weather grew warm each spring, he chose to make the long train journey to Waterloo – still nearly four hours – and to exchange the beauty of the countryside, the birdsong and sweet air he celebrated in his writing, for a sooty atmosphere and unpredictable quarters in town in order to join in the upper-class rituals of the Season.

  In the early years they stayed in modest hotels or lodgings in Bloomsbury, partly to be close to the British Museum, where Hardy used the reading room. As time went by they tried a great many lodgings, rented flats and occasionally houses, rarely returning to the previous year’s perch but experimenting boldly, sampling life in various parts of town: Bayswater, South Kensington, Holland Park, St John’s Wood, Marylebone, Manchester Square, Maida Vale and Victoria. As Hardy prospered, there were summers when they took their own servants with them, just as Hardy’s mother’s employers had taken her with them to London for the Season. Jemima herself may well, directly or indirectly, have put the idea that one should go up for the Season into her son’s head. It was what you did when you were rich, as she knew, and she must have been impressed and pleased to see her Tom marked out as one of the rich. It was not something Emma’s family had ever been in a position to contemplate doing, but she was pleased too, happy to sample the pleasures and amusements of the great world with him. The bonus for her was that she got him away from his mother’s influence at the same time. It was still a surprising way to choose to spend the best months of the year. They made occasional visits to town in winter and spring also, but the Season dominated their year. He considered himself ‘half a Londoner’.27

  Hardy did some reading, and even a little writing, during his London Seasons. He went to the Savile, which moved to new premises on Piccadilly in 1882. He saw the summer show at the Royal Academy, and took in theatres and concerts. He attended ‘At Homes’, ‘crushes’, luncheons and dinners, even balls. In London he met the Dorset landowners who had not noticed his existence in Dorchester and found that in London he was a well-known figure. He kept an eye on politics. In 1886 he took himself into the House of Commons, admired the benevolence on Gladstone’s face and saw ‘the dandy party enter in evening-dress, eye-glasses, diamond rings etc. They were a great contrast to Joseph Arch and the Irish members in their plain, simple, ill-fitting clothes. The House is a motley assembly nowadays.’28 As his own fame grew, the society hostesses who took him up as a celebrity introduced him to politicians, Liberal and Conservative – Lord Salisbury, Balfour, Joseph Chamberlain, Asquith among them. When tea on the terrace of the House of Commons became fashionable, he was there taking his tea.

  It was understandable that he should be pleased to lunch with a man of letters such as Lord Houghton, friend of Swinburne and editor of Keats, but he also ate and drank with men and women he could not have found congenial. Sometimes he wrote sardonic notes about them, how men just going into the Cabinet talked with no greater insight than you would expect from a group of Oxford Street shopkeepers, or how the political conversation at another dinner was ‘when the next election would be – of the probable Prime Minister – of ins and outs – of Lord This and the Duke of That – everything except the people for whose exist
ence alone these politicians exist’.29 Looking at the expensively dressed ladies at an evening party, he famously asked himself, ‘If put into rough wrappers in a turnip-field, where would their beauty be?’30 He also found himself face to face with many landowners who spent the winter doing what he most detested, shooting game birds for pleasure.31

  Yet Hardy was delighted to receive invitations from the aristocracy. These were the people who ran the country. They had the power and the money, and if they offered a glimpse into their privileged world, it was hard to resist. He saw too that entry into high society impressed Emma and made her happy. To her it was the proof of his success, the answer to her family’s disapproval and condescension. When Lady Portsmouth invited the Hardys to stay in the country, Emma wrote to her uncle, now Archdeacon Gifford, to boast about this social conquest.32 And Hardy was every bit as gratified as Emma. The snobbery of titles is still strong in the twenty-first century, and in the nineteenth it reigned supreme. Hardy might mock ‘Lord This and the Duke of That’, but he enjoyed being taken notice of by them, and he liked other people to know that he was taken notice of by them. He was also susceptible to the charm and flattery of their ladies, and they liked him, not only because he was a well-known author, but because he did not challenge or make demands; small, gentle and respectful, he was no danger to their daughters.