REVIEW OF BOOKS
Simon Raven on growing up Hardy
This new biography*, as its title declares, deals with Thomas Hardy's youth. The bulk of it is a blow by blow account of his struggles and his progress from his birth in 1840 (he was chucked aside for dead by the doctor, but a percipient midwife spotted a tiny spark of life) up to and just beyond his first substantial success with Far From The Madding Crowd and his first marriage in 1874. In a final chapter Robert Gittings outlines, as a kind of appendix, the subsequent achievements and miseries that were to fill the remaining fifty odd years of a most instructive life.
Instructive, because it embodies the classic virtues and the classic errors. But more of that in a moment. The first thing to notice is Hardy's eagerness to edit to his own taste the information which would be passed on about him after his death, and the stratagem by which he sought to do so. Quite simply, he wrote his own version of his life, this to be copied out by his second wife, Florence, and later to be passed off as her work (Life of Thomas Hardy by F. E. Hardy). The resulting biography, which upgraded Hardy's social origins and played down his sexual problems, is therefore unhelpful where it is not positively misleading. Furthermore, the detection, some twenty years ago, of this dodgery set off wild volleys of speculation and invention, about the 'real' Hardy, all of which turmoil has the more impeded Dr Gittings. However, long research in official archives and careful discussions with surviving relatives and connexions have now revealed, as Dr Gittings avers, at least the approximate truth; and certainly he presents it efficiently and persuasively, writing in an even and lucid prose that occasionally becomes monotonous but makes one feel very safe.
As Dr Gittings proceeds, it is made clear that Hardy's existence was riven by one fundamental dichotomy: whereas he made his money and his reputation by writing novels which describe rural behaviour and celebrate the atavistic wisdom and endurance of his kin close to the soil, he himself desired nothing more than to be quit of this crude peasant world and to live • among the urbane and the educated. The outcome of this removal was unhappy. The labours through which he accomplished it were undoubtedly productive and ennobling; but his promotion was soured by his inability ever to understand (until far too late) the true nature of the society into which he was promoted. Hence of course the virtues and errors to which I referred earlier. Let us take the virtues first. Hardy was a learner and a self-improver; _ and he was patient with it. The course of reading which he set himself in the meagre spare time of an apprentice, a course which ranged from Homer to the most subfusc works of theology, would have crazed or killed most full-time students. Likewise, the tact with which he gained the goodwill of educated *Young Thomas Hardy Robert Gittings (Heinemann Educational £4.95)
friends, such as the Moule family of dons and clergymen, and the attention with which he assimilated everything they had to teach him, show insight and providence (to say nothing of sheer persistence) of a most uncommon order. Again, remark the self-control with which he abstained from present pleasures, the bedrock commonsense with which he ignored 'current events' and political issues in order to devote himself to permanent knowledge, and the bleak courage with which he faced his loss of faith (at that time a very serious matter), remark all these, and then deny, if you can, that the young Hardy had qualities not far from heroic.
No question of it: he had the classic virtues and then some. These were never more in evidence than when his first published novel, Desperate Remedies, though praised for its writing, was a financial flop. Patience and grit saw him through the composition of a second book (Under The Greenwood Tree), which, eschewing the 'coarseness' of the first, had wider appeal; and downright application enabled him to master, at very brief notice, the technique of serial writing and so to produce two works (A Pair Of Blue Eyes and Far From The Mudding Crowd), which carried him into the good graces of Leslie Stephen himself and gave him a firm footing where he wished to be, in an upper-middle class world of sophisticated intelligence and moneyed culture.
So Thomas Hardy had arrived; but he had arrived very vulnerable. He had been so fiercely occupied during the journey that he had had no time to think carefully about his destination. And here, of course, we come to his classic error. Poor Hardy. As soon as he was beginning to win what he wanted, he picked the wrong woman to share it with.
Emma Lavinia Gifford had a fresh face, a refined accent, an enthusiasm for the easier kinds of poetry, and a great deal of physical energy. Her family was of the professional classes: she lived with her sister, who was married to a clergyman, on the coast of Cornwall. To Hardy all this added up, not quite. indeed, to the glamour of Leslie Stephen and his circle, but to something not so very far removed from it — to a certain ease and breadth of cultivation, to superior attainment and circumstance. And then Emma was accommodating and she was wholesome (if not precisely in her first youth) and she said that she loved him. To a man whose love affairs, even when he had had time for them, had never prospered, this was enough. Here was romance — and at an excellent social level as well. Poor Hardy, indeed. Had he exercised just a little of the patience and the shrewdness which he had shown during the long years of bettering himself, had he taken time for a good close look at Emma in the light of the society he was now entering, he might have realised that she was what she later turned out to be — a shallow, simpering, possessive and bigoted shrew, of indifferent birth and with a rapidly increasing weight problem. Hardy, like so many parvenus before and after him, had married a five-star dud: for parvenus never have learnt that the very single-mindedness which they dedicate to escaping from their old world renders them quite incapable, for many years, of making sane judgements about the new.
Simon Raven has most recently wmtten Bring Forth The Body, in his 'Alms for Oblivion' series.
Previous page
