Books
Death of the soul
Christopher Booker
The Older Hardy Robert Gittings (Heinemann E6.95) The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, Volume One (1840-1892) edited by Richard Little Purdie and Michael MilIgate (Oxford £12.50) Talks With Thomas Hardy at Max Gate Vere H. Collins (Duckworth E5.95) What is the real explanation of the air of gathering doom and despair which hangs over the sequence of major novels written by Hardy between 1870 and 1892 — and Why, in terms of television serials and Paperback sales, have they soared back in the past decade into such astonishing popularity? Although Robert Gittings does not address himself directly to these questions, not the least tribute one can pay to his now completed two-volume life is that, more than anything previously written on Hardy, It may help us towards answering them.
No writer can ever have taken more trouble to conceal the truth about himself than the mournful old boy who died in Dorchester fifty years ago. The pedestrian, highly tendentious Life which he left to be Published under the name of his second wife after his death is now largely and deservedly forgotten. His surviving letters, which are to be published in no less than seven volumes of which the first now appears, could scarcely be less revealing (can it really be a contribution to scholarship to publish, with full apparatus criticus, page after page of such items as 'Dear Sirs, I beg to acknowledge with thanks receipt of the cheque and return the form signed, yours faithfully'?). Vere Collins's book, a short series of conversations between sycophantic Admirer and Grand Old Novelist originally Published in 1928, is equally thin stuff (although it is rather startling to find Hardy recalling how he had recently been present In America at rehearsals for a film version Of Tess). The Gittings life, in contrast, works for our view of Hardy much the same miracle as a restorer who, by removing several layers °„f varnish and overpainting, reveals to the light of day an almost entirely new picture. ere at last is a portrait of Hardy which rings true, recognisably the author of some ef the most melancholy stories and poems in !he English language —the wretched, deeply insecure man who, for fifty years after hav
ing been estranged from his rustic roots and !us youthful faith, wandered through an Inward world in an ever increasing con fusion of bitterness and despair, seeking a !ecurity, an innocence and a sense of wholeness which would never come again. Two things above all strike one about Hardy's novels. The first is the extent to which the world they describe is so sharply polarised. On the one hand, there is the simple, timeless, rooted world of the Dorset countryside, of characters like Gabriel Oak, Diggory Venn and Giles Winterborne living so close to nature that they seem almost part of it. On the other hand, casting an ever longer shadow over these rustic simplicities, are the destructive and self-destructive agonies of those who have lost their roots — children of the restless future, like Edred Fitzpiers; those who are longing to get away, like Eustacia Vye; and, most tragic of all perhaps, those who, like Mayor Henchard, Clym Yeobright or Grace Melbury, having lost roots, are desperately and vainly trying to find them again.
The other thing one cannot help noticing about Hardy's stories is the extent to which they are centred on the hopeless search of their characters for the 'other half' who would make them whole. No other writer has ever been so obsessed with mismatches, with the hero or heroine whose life seems blighted through having been landed by a grim and malevolent Fate with the wrong woman or man.
More than ever before, Gittings gives us the clues to see how the growth of these two obsessions reflected the evolution of Hardy's own inner life. When he wrote his first successful story, Under The Green wood Tree (1872), Hardy was in his early thirties, had done his spell as an architect in the great world of London, but was still closely linked to his rural Dorset back ground. He had shown his volatile susceptibility to the opposite sex in passing passions for various girls (Gittings shows how deeply 'mother-dominated' he was, and dreadfully ill at ease over matters of sex), but was now in love with Emma Gif ford, the socially superior daughter of a Cornish clergyman. This is reflected in Under The Greenwood Tree, a simple 'wish-fulfilment' tale.
Two years later, Hardy for the last time wrote a novel in the cottage of his birth at Bockhampton, surrounded by his 'own folk'. The central figure of .Far From The Madding Crowd, the shepherd Gabriel Oak, still wins through to the hand of a socially superior heroine, Bathsheba Everdene (although the way is now much more tortuous, and Bathsheba's first marriage to the rootless Sergeant Troy is Hardy's first serious `mismatch'). But even by the time the novel was published, in the year he mar ried Emma, Hardy had already moved into the glamorous literary circle of his editor Leslie Stephen in London. He was already haunted by the possibility that he might have aimed higher than poor Emma Lavinia. He had severed his links with the world of his upbringing for ever, and as Gittings remarks of shepherd Oak `no Hardy herd from that time onward ever comes to such an assured and happy ending. From this moment on, the tragic and defeated hero arrives for good'.
Hardy's return to Dorset in 1876, to a middle-class villa in Sturminster Newton, for the only two really happy years of his married life, inspired The Return of the Native — the sophisticated wanderer Clym Yeobright, whose attempt to return to his roots on Egdon Heath leads to tragedy.
After another unhappy spell in London (which produced three lesser, and much more 'artificial' novels), Hardy again returned to Dorset, and in his newly-built house in Dorchester, Max Gate, produced his bleakest book so far, The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), on the theme of the man who has committed an offence against his 'feminine other half' so great that it can only be expiated by his death. In The Woodlanders (1887), the 'rooted world' appears for the last time, painted now with inexpressible poignancy.
Finally come the two most terrible selfrevelations of all. Tess (1888), Hardy's favourite character, his own 'inner femininity', wanders blindly to and fro across the face of Dorset until in ultimate despair she kills and is killed. In the oft-quoted phrase, 'the President of the Immortals' had 'ended his sport with Tess' — but of course the real power manipulating Tess from one coincidence to the next, stacking up the odds against her to such deadly conclusion, was Hardy himself. In the three men of whom Tess was the victim — her father and Alec D'Urberville, both living in fantasy above their station, and the high-minded progressive Angel Clare —we can clearly see aspects of Hardy. Unconsciously he was telling nothing more than the story of his own inner life, the death of his own soul.
By the time Jude The Obscure was published, Hardy's estrangement from his roots was so complete that when he 'bicycled through Puddletown, he could stare straight ahead as his relatives waved from their cottage doors. The row over the book marked his final estrangement from Emma (who signed letters to the papers 'An Old Fashioned Englishwoman'). His only solace lay in an increasingly absurd series of infatuations with fashionable ladies, would-be writers like Mrs Henniker and Agnes Grove. The scene was set for the last thirty years of his life, dominated creatively by that great flood of poems of nostalgia and loss which reached its climax after Emma's miserable and painful death in 1912, in which he sought to recapture the 'inner feminine' which had always proved so elusive in life, and whose presence never seemed so real to him as in death (Gittings show how, all his life, Hardy had been obsessed by dead women, ever since in adolescence he had witnessed the hanging of Martha Brown — a scene which was to
play its part in inspiring Tess).
The other great task of his last years was the attempt to build up, through his 'biography', dictated to his second wife Florence, the picture of himself he wanted the world to see — particularly as the son of a feckless father (untrue), who had singlehandedly restored the fortunes of a once important family long in decline (also untrue). It was a futile enterprise, partly because he had unwittingly left such a luminous record of the inner truth about his life in his novels and poems, partly because sufficient external evidence has survived for Robert Gittings now to tell us such a very different story. Ultimately there was no comment on Hardy's life more apt than the gruesome fate of his poor, tortured old carcase on his death in 1928 — his body, burned to ashes, buried amid empty pomp in Westminster Abbey, his heart returned to the little Dorset churchyard of Stinsford.
His heart had never left Dorset. His life in the great world had truly turned to ashes. And of course the real reason for the popularity of Hardy's novels today is that they are, in a sense, not just the story of Hardy himself, but of our civilisation. Today we are all the children of that restless future which Hardy saw sweeping away the folkculture of his youth. We are all as estranged as he from the rooted, timeless world of rural England, which has become (pace the yoghourt advertisements on television) such a conspicuous expression of that great perennial archetype, 'lost innocence', and in Hardy's novels we find that new 'Fall' more heartrendingly described than anywhere else in the English language —with no prospect of redemption.
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