Book Review

Long wessex road to destiny

Thomas Hardy: the time-torn man

This book begins with a death - that of Thomas Hardy's first wife, Emma. They had been estranged for some time: although they still lived together, they had separate rooms and were out of sympathy with each other. She was cranky with him, dismissive of his work and had returned to the Anglican Church that he had rejected years earlier. She resented him paying attention to other women and hated the way his writing excluded her. Yet on her death, Hardy was heartbroken and, from then on, his writing took a new direction. For Claire Tomalin: "This is the moment when Thomas Hardy became a great poet." Over and over, he returned in memory and poetry to the scenes of their first love. Emma was reborn in elegy, loved again and then lost.

This detailed and intelligent description of the death of a woman and the birth of a poet shows Claire Tomalin's biographical skill at its best. Her great talent as a biographer is the way she brings together human passions and the creative impulse. She can appreciate the things that touched Hardy - the beauty of the West Country, the sense of frustration experienced by people forced by class and education to lead uncongenial lives, the sense of a malign and overwhelming Fate - and trace how they found their expression in his great brooding novels, his mighty, unforgettable characters and his poetry. Tomalin's gift for empathy makes her biographies of writers evocative of their novels. Her life of Jane Austen had something of the spiky brittleness and caution of an Austen novel, and here her biography of Hardy shares some of his writing's grand tragedy. It will certainly send you back to his novels with new insights and a keener appreciation.

Tomalin reads Michael Henchard, the central character in The Mayor of Casterbridge, as a Shakespearean hero - "with strength that turns into self-destructiveness" - and sees the influence of A Midsummer Night's Dream in The Return of the Native. And yet she can also have an immediate and straightforward response to the novels, memorably and accurately describing the experience of reading Jude the Obscure as "like being hit in the face over and over again".

Hardy's output was uneven. He was prolific and also produced some forgettable and even embarrassing work. Who nowadays, aside from Hardy scholars, has read his novel Desperate Remedies or his blank verse war epic, The Dynasts? He was also complex. Made wealthy by his own hard work and dedication to his art, he adored the company of the wealthy and well born, particularly aristocratic women who both lionised him and toyed with his passionate nature. Tomalin calls him "time-torn" - his novels seem typically Victorian while his poetry, written in the twentieth century, seems very modern.

Nobody has ever written so well and so unpatronisingly of the rural poor as Hardy, yet as soon as he could afford to, he spent the season in London. He lived, as all good writers must, in his head and in worlds of his own making but he loved parties and being a member of the Savile Club. Emma Hardy complained that he preferred the women he created to her, and she was probably right. His second wife was enraged by his passion for a young actress who played Tess on stage.

Hardy's work has become so much part of the literary canon that it's fascinating to be reminded just how scandalous his books appeared to his contemporaries. He made compromises: Tomalin traces the preparation of his novels for serialisation and for publication in book form. For the Graphic, Tess had to be married (falsely) to Alec D'Urberville and had no child, changes that seem unthinkable now and that must have robbed the story of half its power. For the book version, he got the story he wanted and his chance to "demolish the doll of English fiction". Tomalin reminds us how fiercely challenging the novel's subtitle, A Pure Woman, was to its first readers. Tomalin is able to hold both our Hardy and the Victorian one in her gaze, showing us the society he lived in and his place in literary history.

There is so much to appreciate in this book: the close analysis of the poetry, the warmth and wisdom that Tomalin brings to Hardy's complex, difficult but always meaningful marriage to Emma. She understands how naked the Victorian man felt once he admitted to a loss of faith in Christianity. When she speculates - and there is plenty of guesswork because many letters have been destroyed - her speculations are always convincing.

She has a particular knack of linking scenes from the novels and snippets of correspondence with her own impressions to create a rounded portrait. When she talks about Hardy's childhood and his long walk to school, she reminds us of the way his characters often walk to their destiny. Fanny Robin walks to the workhouse, Gabriel walks to find work, Tess and Jude walk great distances while undergoing their greatest suffering. As Tomalin puts it: "the road became a theatre for action in his imagination and walking a central activity in his writing, used dramatically and to establish or underline character." As with the death of Emma, biographical detail and literary creation combine.

The tone of the biography is affectionate and clear-sighted. Tomalin defends him from attack, for example softening over the question of whether he was any good as an architect. Probably not is the answer, but she thinks the question is "unfair". She can't help being aware that Emma Hardy was a rotten writer. "She lacked judgement to assess her own efforts," she says, but adds kindly, "but this is a common fault and she had the spirit to keep trying."

She sometimes takes Hardy too literally, quoting without comment, for example, his self-assessment: "I was never intended to be a prose-writer, still less a teller of tales, still, one had got to live". Yet it's impossible to read his best novels and believe that he thought so little of them. He was a thorough writer, keeping notebooks throughout his life, jotting down words and phrases, finding pleasure in the dictionary. The day he found himself unable to write, he took to his bed and waited to die.

Back to homepage

       

The clear message that emerged from the symposium on child sexual abuse held in Rome from ...

According to the chairman of governors at the Cardinal Vaughan School, west London, one ...

There was an old Sixties TV series, Branded, about a disgraced soldier that always began ...