Thomas Hardy: A Literary Life

Contemporary Review, Sept, 1996 by Geoffrey Heptonstall

Shame, no doubt, played its part in the painstaking defences the dying Hardy erected. But there was also a concern that too much reality might shadow the fiction, that prurient eyes might look too closely in the work for the man. And so they did. Admirers still seek out the combe where Bathsheba and Troy conducted their courtship. Who was the real Tess? Questions like these evade the truth they seek. The real life of a writer is the work, the vision honed from quite ordinary things.

Yet the biographies continue to search over and over the same ground, though it might be well to let it lie fallow. We are too near, though too distant, from Hardy to understand any more than is already understood. A High Victorian, he survived everyone, at work well into this century as a living bridge between two worlds of experience. His fiction was a revolt against the Victorians. His poetry was a testament against the twentieth century. Hardy's feelings were contrary. His vision was deeply disturbed, for his protest was not against society, but against creation and providence. For all his kindliness, he was angry, and his anger was cosmic. Such a life is hard to understand unless we can make the imaginative transition.

This proves difficult. Hardy's crisis is not ours. We can see the revolt against sexual hypocrisy and the dominance of the machine. The first is a given of our times. The second accords some respect. But Hardy is not about a return to the country. He is about the workings of fate, of hubris and consequential tragedy. Hardy closed his Bible and saw a pagan world. His vision of nature is terrible, though his artistry is of great beauty.

Writing of Hardy (whom he disliked) Patrick Kavanagh wrote: 'Real roots lie in our capacity for love and its abandon.' Hardy for Kavanagh was a man looking down from a great height on a landscape he did not know. It is useful to recall that Hardy was an architect. He has grandeur without simplicity or humility. He isn't wilfully cruel, but he does seem loveless. How far this vision relates to his personal life is, I think, of secondary interest. Seeking direct connections is a false and philistine misreading. Writers do, if they are any good, use their imaginations.

Literary biography is thereby at a disadvantage. The shaping forces of childhood and education provide a fertile ground. The rest is increasingly enveloped in the mists of creativity and in the mythic sense a great writer is bound to generate.

James Gibson is most useful on the early years. For the rest he treads well-worn paths. The history of Hardy's relation with Alexander Macmillan, his publisher, is recounted in full in Charles Morgan's The House of Macmillan which Mr Gibson quotes without additional material or fresh perspective.

On other matters Mr Gibson is unreliable. 'We shall probably never know what he thought of . . . D H Lawrence . . .' In fact, we know for certain Hardy never read Lawrence, and had only a vague notion of who he was. Of modernism in general, Hardy's dislike is recorded in Robert Graves's memorable passage in Goodbye to All That.

Worse still is the author's confusion in believing it is Angel Clare who seduces Tess. It is Alec d'Urberville. The point is crucial to understanding the narrative. Clare's unfeeling hypocrisy compares badly with Alec's genuine wish to make amends for his brutal conduct, though in Victorian propriety it is Clare, the deceived husband, who behaves well. The tragic irony of this is perhaps the quintessential situation in all Hardy's work. For Hardy morality was not a code but an existential response to the workings of fate. Therefore Tess shows herself by her stoic dignity to be as noble a soul as she is genteel by ancestry. Tess is the most tragic and most archetypal of all Hardy's heroines, as one who endures her situation without surrendering herself. There are other ways of seeing women, but Hardy's is surely preferable to the patronising attitude of Dickens, though Dickens may be the greater artist.

The modern preference is in Hardy's favour, but it can be Hardy without a full realisation of the tragedy. The Wessexery of Hardy is difficult to take. Possibly to offset the pessimism, he elaborated an artifice of twee regionalism, complete with maps of a renamed landscape. It is easy to respond to the work for its picturesque sepia quality. Gentle Tess, poor and proud, in bonnet and smock does not serve the true heroine and her situation.

In brief, we really ought to pause before writing the life of one who wrote of life so deeply and so darkly that it may have disturbed him more than we can, or should, know.

GEOFFREY HEPTONSTALL