Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  40. Quoted by Ann Thwaite in Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape (1984), 461.

  22. A FRIEND FROM CAMBRIDGE

  1. See Florence Hardy’s account of this to Rebekah Owen, 18 Jan. 1916, Letters of E & F Hardy, 113–114.

  2. Cockerell also worked for Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in Egypt and was shipwrecked with him in the Gulf of Suez. He visited Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana in 1903, and Tolstoy spoke to him of his admiration for Dickens: ‘All his characters are my personal friends… What a spirit there was in all he wrote!’ and his dislike of Shakespeare, who ‘had no feeling for the peasants. He never introduces a “clown” except to make fun of him. That is why I cannot read him with pleasure.’ These notes from Friends of a Lifetime: Letters to Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, ed. V. Meynell (1940), 81, 83–4.

  3. This was Charlotte Mew and her sister Anne’s name for him, according to Penelope Fitzgerald, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (1984), 176, which gives a good account of Cockerell.

  4. Cockerell (1964) by Wilfrid Blunt, 269, given as a direct quotation but without a source.

  5. Cockerell’s diaries are unpublished and held in the British Library. For 1911, Add. MSS 52648.

  6. Howard Bliss, who sold it back when he got into financial difficulties. See Letters of E & F Hardy, 175–6, 217.

  7. The remark is in Benson’s long diary entry describing the visit to Max Gate with Gosse in 1912. Hardy did give Florence the MS of Under the Greenwood Tree, as she informed Cockerell firmly in 1916: ‘We have been looking at “Under the Greenwood Tree” (which belongs to me now).’ Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 12 Aug. 1916, Letters of E & F Hardy, 118.

  8. Cockerell’s diary for 1912, British Library Add. MSS 52649. Hardy was on friendly terms with Shaw and saw his Man and Superman performed. He does not mention Synge in the Life.

  9. ibid., summary of year at beginning of diary.

  10. See Note 15 below.

  11. Mary Hardy to TH, 12 June 1913, DCM, also cited in Biography Revisited, 454.

  12. The performance was given by the ADC, the Amateur Dramatic Club of Cambridge. At that date none of the Newnham or Girton students could belong. The Cambridge Magazine critic remarked on A. E. Moorsom, who played Gwendolen, having ‘just that doll’s beauty which fits with the Comedy’, otherwise regretting ‘what it means to give women’s parts to men: angular shapes and solid voices to the daintiness of feminine dress’. Siegfried Sassoon noted Hardy’s reference to ‘that man Wilde’ and his innocence about homosexuality in his diary for 28 June 1922, passage given in Interviews and Recollections, 130.

  13. Diary of Arthur Benson, Wednesday, 11 June 1913, Magdalene College, Cambridge. His appreciation of Hardy is in the issue of 6 June 1913.

  14. Sydney Cockerell’s diary for 1913, British Library Add. MSS 52650 for this and further quotes in this paragraph.

  15. Cockerell wrote a memo in his diary explaining that ‘At my original suggestion, backed by Dr Verrall & all who stand for English Literature in Cambridge, Thomas Hardy received Doctor’s degree with great applause on June 11 and stayed with us at Wayside [SC’s house] for the purpose.’

  16. All quotes and information in this paragraph from Sydney Cockerell’s diary for 1913, British Library Add. MSS 52650.

  17. Arthur Benson’s diary, November 1913, notes: ‘That ass Ogden, in the Cambridge Magazine, said that Thomas Hardy “the celebrated Atheist” had been elected an Hon. Fellow. He meant it he said as a compliment to the Dons; but I wrote sharply to him to say that the word was simply an insulting word, both to Hardy & to us.’ C. K. Ogden founded the Cambridge Magazine in 1912 and an undergraduate association ‘The Heretics’. In 1923 he wrote The Meaning of Meaning with I. A. Richards and went on to invent and promote the idea of Basic English as an international language.

  18. Alan Rusbridger was told this by I. A. Richards and kindly passed it on to me. Richard Luckett, friend and executor of Richards, believes it must have been the Benson building, finished in 1913, and tells me that Benson’s diary shows that he knew and liked the young Richards.

  19. Florence Dugdale to Sydney Cockerell, 30 Nov. 1913, Letters of E & F Hardy, 85.

  20. Sydney Cockerell’s diary for 5 May 1914, British Library Add. MSS 52651.

  21. Arthur Benson’s diary for Friday, 8 May 1914, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

  22. Information about Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones, Mistress of Girton from 1903 to 1916, kindly provided by Kate Perry, Archivist of Girton College.

  23. Quoted in Michael Millgate’s edition of Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice (2001), 374. Bernard Shaw, Sassoon, Masefield, I. A. Richards (later co-editor) and the young historian Eileen Power were among contributors to the English part of the magazine.

  24. This was in Mar. 1917. Hardy always took care with group letters and suggested changes because this one seemed to be attacking the whole of the British press, ‘which would have the effect of setting it all against you, which I am sure you do not wish to do’. His emendation was accepted, and the letter appeared in the Morning Post and in the Cambridge Magazine itself. See Letters, V, 207–8.

  25. TH to Florence Henniker, 23 Mar. 1915, Letters, V, 86.

  26. TH to Florence Hardy, 28 May 1915, Letters, V, 101.

  27. Printed in Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917), in a small section of war poems at the end.

  28. TH to John Galsworthy, 15 Aug. 1918, Letters, V, 275.

  29. See Chapter 7, above, for genesis of this poem, which was first published in the Saturday Review, 29 Jan. 1916.

  30. Life, Chapter 33.

  31. TH to Sydney Cockerell, 23 Feb. 1917, Letters, V, 203.

  32. He showed them and talked about them to John Squire in Aug. 1927 as part of the history of the garden, along with the Roman remains. From his Sunday Mornings, quoted in Interviews and Recollections, 234.

  33. Florence Hardy to Rebekah Owen, 3 Dec. 1915, Letters of E & F Hardy, 111.

  34. Made in a letter to Emma, 28 Jan. 1881, after the Lock family had invited her to dinner. DCM, H.6302.

  35. Vere H. Collins, Talks with Thomas Hardy at Max Gate 1920–1922 (New York, 1928; reprinted St Peter Port, 1971), 58, a conversation held on 29 Oct. 1921. Florence added that Mary collapsed at the station the last time she went.

  36. Mary Hardy to older Nat Sparks, 16 Jan. 1905, Sparks Archive, Hardy Collection, Eton College.

  37. Diary of Sydney Cockerell, 17 Apr. 1916: ‘He told me that his surviving brother and sister (born eleven years or so after him and his favourite sister who died at the end of last year) are wholly without interest in art and letters, and that he has very little in common with them – with them the family becomes extinct.’ British Library Add. MSS 52663.

  38. ‘Logs on the Hearth (A Memory of a Sister)’, dated Dec. 1915, published in Moments of Vision.

  39. Florence Hardy to Rebekah Owen, 18 Jan. 1916, Letters of E & F Hardy, 113.

  40. Sydney Cockerell to TH, 7 Dec. 1915, DCM, given in Michael Millgate, Testamentary Acts (1992), 123.

  41. TH to Gertrude Bugler, 7 Dec. 1915, Letters, V, 137.

  42. His diary shows that he sent her forty letters in 1916 alone, and he kept up a tremendous volume of correspondence with her for many years, rarely writing less than once a fortnight except when he was abroad.

  43. For example, he suggested she come and hear Quiller-Couch lecture in Cambridge in Feb. 1918, but she felt it her duty to stay with Hardy: Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 2 Feb. 1918, Letters of E & F Hardy, 137. He took her to Shaw’s St Joan with his wife and saw her off on the Dorchester train on 4 June 1924. Diary of Sydney Cockerell, British Library Add. MSS 52661.

  44. Diary of Sydney Cockerell, 19 Feb. 1916, British Library Add. MSS 52653, as are all entries for 1916.

  45. Diary of Sydney Cockerell, Sunday, 24 Sept. 1916, British Library Add. MSS 52653.

  46. Diary of Sydney Cockerell for 1920, British Library Add. MSS 52657, for this and all other quotations in this paragraph.

  47. Rober
t Gittings made a bold attempt to claim that Hardy’s grandmother Mary Hardy, née Head, born in 1772, was the original for Tess, and he did discover that she had almost certainly given birth to an illegitimate child some years before her marriage, but that isn’t enough to make her Tess. There are too many discrepancies, starting with her not being a Dorset girl, and going on to her happy marriage to his grandfather and long life with more children and grandchildren at Bockhampton. It is extremely tempting to try to make out a case for Jemima having had some of Tess’s experiences before her marriage – a rich lover, a lost child – but there is no evidence at all to support it.

  48. ‘Private Memorandum/Information for Mrs Hardy in the preparation of a biography’ in DCM, quoted in Millgate’s introduction to his 1984 edition of the Life, p. xix.

  49. They were published as her work, she died in 1937, and by the 1950s the truth of their composition had emerged. R. L. Purdy’s Bibliographical Study of 1954 gave the true facts and described the process by which the Life, originally in two volumes published in 1928 and 1929, was put together from Hardy’s manuscript, which was then destroyed, along with most of the source materials. Michael Millgate’s edition is outstanding, combining the two volumes as The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, with notes and index, first published 1984 and revised 1989.

  23. THE WIZARD

  1. It was his third study at Max Gate, to which he moved after he had given up writing novels.

  2. Hardy bought the cello from his cousin Nathaniel Sparks of Bristol, a restorer of musical instruments, in 1902. See Letters, III, 38, TH to Nathaniel Sparks, ‘No doubt the old viol has many a score time accompanied such tunes as “Lydia” or “Eaton” – (the latter was the tune with which they used nearly to lift off the roof of Goddard’s chapel of a Sunday evening).’ This was a Dissenting chapel in Puddletown, obviously well known to them both from their childhood.

  3. Cynthia Asquith visited Max Gate in May 1921 and published her account in 1954 (in Portrait of Barrie, whose secretary she was, 105– 10). She thought there were no pictures hanging in the study except for a framed ‘wage-sheet’ from Hardy’s father’s or grandfather’s papers, on the shelf over the fireplace. She also gave her view that the study, ‘bare, simple, workmanlike and pleasantly shabby, was the only room in the house that had any character at all’. On the other hand Florence Hardy pointed out to R. L. Purdy in 1929 (after Hardy’s death) family photographs, portraits of Shelley and George Eliot, and illustrations to Tess and Jude, all hanging on the walls. It is of course perfectly possible that things changed between 1921 and 1928, and memories are fallible.

  4. May O’Rourke’s reminiscences are in the monograph Thomas Hardy: His Secretary Remembers (1965), reproduced in Interviews and Recollections, 188–91.

  5. Diary of Sydney Cockerell for 1919, British Library Add. MSS 52656.

  6. See Note 12 to Chapter 22, above. Sassoon described Hardy as the ‘Wessex wizard’ in his poem ‘At Max Gate’.

  7. Robert Graves to TH, 9 Jan. 1919, DCM, H.2633.

  8. Article by Graves in the Sphere, 28 Jan. 1928, reprinted in Interviews and Recollections, 135.

  9. These are the second and third stanzas. Bale means evil, suffering, injury, infliction of death; ban signifies a curse or malediction.

  10. TH to Florence Henniker, 29 May 1922, Letters, VI, 132.

  11. See Chapter 5, p. 81.

  12. See Prologue, p. xxv.

  13. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 6 Feb. 1919, Letters of E & F Hardy, 157.

  14. Elliott Felkin, ‘Days with Thomas Hardy: From a 1918–1919 Diary’, Encounter, 18, Apr. 1962, 27–33. Felkin was a young officer on the staff of the prisoner-of-war camp at Dorchester at the end of the war and afterwards, introduced to the Hardys by the Cambridge don Lowes Dickinson and welcomed by them. He kept a diary recording his visits to them between Oct. 1918 and Aug. 1919.

  15. This is from Virginia Woolf’s report of Forster describing a visit to Max Gate, in a letter to Janet Case, 23 Sept. 1922, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, II(1976), 559.

  16. This was Harry Bentley, a young Dorchester man with a liking for books but denied secondary education by his parents’ poverty. Personal information from Anne Blandamer, wife of his nephew, who talked at length with Mr Bentley in 1978 and saw the pictures of Hardy and William Barnes he put up in his house.

  17. The book is in the DCM, from Hardy’s library. His remark comes from Life, last words of Chapter 28. Notebook entry, The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, ed. Richard H. Taylor (1978), 71. The listing of the Nordmann book is on p. 99, at the back of the notebook.

  18. TH to Sir Rennell Rodd, 27 June 1924, Letters, VI, 262.

  19. Florence Hardy to Louise Yearsley, 10 Nov. 1918, Letters of E & F Hardy, 151.

  20. Hardy’s account of his intentions are in a letter to the music critic Harold Child, 11 Nov. 1923, Letters, VI, 221. Diary of Sydney Cockerell, 11 Aug. 1923, British Library Add. MSS 52660.

  21. Life, Chapter 37. Boughton’s account of their venture appeared in the Musical News and Herald, 15 Feb. 1928, 73, 33–44, and ends, ‘His work is not a refuge from the woe of the world, but the battleplain of a courageous spirit.’

  22. Hardy, when invited in 1917 to support a proposal for a memorial to Shakespeare to be put up in Rome after the war, had agreed, but insisted it should not be characterized as pertaining to ‘Christian civilization’, saying ‘I for one could not subscribe to a manifesto which did not keep silence on that point.’ TH to Richard Bagot, 7 June 1917, Letters, V, 218.

  23. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 30 June 1923, Letters of E & F Hardy, 197.

  24. Diary of Sydney Cockerell for 1923, British Library Add. MSS 52660.

  25. TH to Kate Hardy, 18 July 1923, Letters, VI, 204–5 and note.

  26. On 26 June the Council of the Duchy noted in their minutes that ‘Mrs Hardy is the wife of the celebrated novelist, Thomas Hardy O. M.’ The Duchy records say nothing about what prompted the Prince’s advisers to suggest his visit to Max Gate, but it seems just possible that the negotiations for the little plot of land gave them the idea, since the Prince’s visit was primarily to visit his tenants.

  Neither Hardy nor Florence appears to have explained why they wanted the extra land, or why it was negotiated for in her name, nor is it clear which of them actually paid for it, but the Duchy dealt only with her, mostly through the Hardys’ solicitors, Lock, Reed & Lock. In Sept. the £100 asked by the Duchy was paid through the lawyers, and in Oct. the land was pegged out and Florence formally took possession of it, but no gardener’s cottage was ever built on it.

  27. ‘Afterthoughts of Max Gate’ by Ellen Titterington, Hardyana (1969), 342.

  28. Description of Hardy in T. E. Lawrence’s letter to Robert Graves, 8 Sept. 1923, cited in Interviews and Recollections, 182.

  29. Florence Hardy to Marie Stopes, 14 Sept. 1923, Letters of E & F Hardy, 203.

  30. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 3 Jan. 1922, ibid., 179.

  31. Letter quoted by Robert Gittings and Jo Manton in The Second Mrs Hardy (1979), 87, no source but attributed to 1917.

  32. See letter from TH to Lady St Helier, 25 Sept. 1919, Letters, V, 325.

  33. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 31 Jan. 1921, Letters of E & F Hardy, 173.

  34. Florence Hardy to E. M. Forster, 6 Jan. 1924, ibid., 206.

  35. Diary of Sydney Cockerell for 1924, British Library Add. MSS 52661.

  36. Virginia Woolf, who was just finishing writing Mrs Dalloway, noted in her diary for 17 Oct. 1924 her musing about her own predicted fame:

  … very likely this time next year I shall be one of those people who are, so father said, in the little circle of London Society which represents the Apostles [exclusive Cambridge club]… on a larger scale… To know everyone worth knowing. I can just see what he means; just imagine being in that position – if women can be. Lytton is: Maynard; Ld Balfour; not perhaps Hardy. Which reminds me I ought to dash in Mrs Hardy in nursing home, having ha
d her tumour cut out with Miss Charlotte Mew. Nothing very exciting, even as a boast not very exciting now. H. remembers your father: did not like many people, but was fond of him; talks of him often. Would like to know you. But I cant easily fit into that relation; the daughter grateful for old compliments to her father. Yet I should like to see him; to hear him – say something. But what? One or two words about a flower, or a view, or a garden chair, perhaps.

  No doubt this led to her visit to the Hardys in 1926.

  37. Diary of Sydney Cockerell for 1924, British Library Add. MSS 52661. Florence Hardy mentions Virginia Woolf’s visit in a letter to her, 31 May 1925, Letters of E & F Hardy, 225. Woolf put a postscript to her letter to V. Sackville-West, 9 Nov. 1924, ‘I have met Mrs Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Mew… Siegfried Sassoon…’, all evidently at the nursing home. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, III (1977), 140.

  38. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, Letters of E & F Hardy, 213.

  39. This is the second of two stanzas. The poem is dated 9 Oct. 1924 and was first printed in Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles (1925). The word ‘whangs’, meaning to make a noise while moving along, is unusual and comes from northern and Scottish dialect, but it was used by Browning and also by Masefield in 1912, ‘the organ whangs, the giddy horses reel’, where Hardy is likely to have read it.

  40. Florence Hardy to Siegfried Sassoon, 30 June 1922, Eton College Archive, cited in Letters of E & F Hardy, p. xxii.

  41. This was in Jan. 1918. The production, a revival of one performed in 1910, was based on Under the Greenwood Tree. Information from W. G. L. Parsons, ‘A Mellstock Quire’ Boy’s Recollections of Thomas Hardy (St Peter Port, 1967).

  42. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 26 Dec. 1920, Letters of E & F Hardy, 171. Hardy must have known that Gertrude Bugler’s mother had grown up at Higher Bockhampton and worked in a dairy, like Tess. She married a Dorchester confectioner, and their children were brought up in South Street. Gertrude chose to be married in Stinsford Church.