Another look at Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man. Claire Tomalin. Viking. [pounds sterling]25.00. xxv + 486 pages. ISBN 978-0-670-91512-5.

Claire Tomalin begins her biography of Thomas Hardy brilliantly, casting chronology aside to describe the most dramatic moment of his life, that of witnessing the sudden death of his first wife, Emma. It is the moment, she says, when he became a great poet. The wife he had ignored for years and lived separately from, even in the same house, suddenly became the beloved, just as she was when he first met her. Hardy had been writing poetry for many years before, but remorse stirred him to greater intensity of feeling and the poems he wrote out of his grief and regret are his most moving. The husband who had even arranged separate staircases for their bedrooms made amends for the physical distance that had grown between them in life by moving her body in its coffin to the foot of his bed, and kept it there for three days.

After this prologue, the author reverts to the conventional chronology of biography, but does not lose the domestic closeness to her subject. The man and his house come before us. She tells us that he sprinkled brown sugar on his bacon, that he kissed his dog goodnight and put the wireless on for him. This domestic detail marks this biography off from that of another recent biographer, Ralph Pite, who gives a less personal account. Perhaps this marks the difference between a man's and a woman's perspective? Mr Pite's biography, The Guarded Life, makes much of the life written by Hardy under the name of his second wife, Florence, a highly censored account for public consumption. Claire Tomalin makes little of the subterfuge: 'There is nothing very unusual in writers seeking to control what is said about them.... It was a deception, but not a very serious one'.

Most biographers assign a larger role to an early sweetheart, Tryphena Sparks, in Hardy's life. Claire Tomalin does not, nor does she devote time to Hardy's notebooks, or the cuttings from local newspapers which provided plot inspiration. Her focus is very much on the influence of women on Hardy, his mother, wives and lady friends, and the relationship between the life and the works. Her analyses of the novels and poems are genuinely insightful. The choice of quotations from the poetry well illustrate Hardy's ability to 'touch the marrowbones'. In a poem to his dead sister, Mary, he watches the burning log of a tree they used to climb, and imagines that she has risen out of her 'chilly grave' to grasp the bough with her 'warm brown arm'. It sends a shiver down the spine.

Claire Tomalin shows much sympathy for the unfortunate Emma, whose behaviour grew so inappropriate in dress and personal appearance that a doctor has recently suggested in the US that she had been infected with syphilis by Hardy. This could have caused their estrangement, but Claire Tomalin has refuted this by saying that their real estrangement came later than suggested by the doctor, and that Emma's mental instability was inherited. Hardy certainly thought so.

The relentless pessimism of Hardy's work has been much commented on. Tomalin can find little justification for his black view, since he had a life spent mostly at a desk. But he had reverses. He was disappointed in his university ambitions, and class distinction delayed his marriage until he was a successful author. However, I think she supplies a possible answer herself with a quotation from Hardy: 'Mother's notion and also mine: "That a figure stands in our van with arm uplifted, to knock

us back from any pleasant prospect we indulge in as probable."' Surely this 'notion', endorsed by mother, would encourage a pessimistic view of life? This was written after the rejection of his first novel, The Poor Man and The Lady.

Hardy's abandonment of the novel form has divided biographers. One view is that the harsh reviews of Jude the Obscure made him decide never again to write fiction. Claire Tomalin herself remarks that reading Jude is like being hit in the face over and over again, but she accepts Hardy's assertion that he wrote to make money, and that he now had enough. He could do what he liked--express himself most truly in poetry. In death he also returned to his first love. His body was buried in Westminster Abbey, but his heart was extracted, first placed in a biscuit tin and then in a burial casket and finally where Hardy had always intended, with Emma. There would be no more distance between them.

COPYRIGHT 2007 Contemporary Review Company Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning