Deleted by Florence

Francis King

The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy Thomas Hardy ed. Michael Millgate (Macmillan Press £30)

Some years ago I was asked by the Times to produce obituaries of some still living authors, all friends or acquaintances

of mine. I repeatedly attempted to do so, but found it so painful to write of liked and admired people as though they were dead, that eventually I had to withdraw from the undertaking. When I told Olivia Manning, one of the authors concerned, that I had done so, she was far from pleased. 'Why on earth did you do that?' she chided me. 'I could easily have told you what to write.'

It was in this spirit that Thomas Hardy composed the bulk of the book that in the Macmillan catalogue still appears as 'The Life of Thomas Hardy 1840-1928 by Flor- ence Emily Hardy'. In fact, the contribu- tion of Hardy's long-suffering second wife consisted largely of typing and then, in many cases, retyping and retyping yet again material composed by Hardy, with the aid of diaries and copies of letters sent and received, in a longhand subsequently destroyed. After Hardy's death, Florence added not merely two chapters at the close, `Some Farewells' and 'The Last Scene', but also a number of anecdotes provided by such people as James Barrie and Sydney Cockerell, to whom Hardy had originally related them. More significantly and sadly, Florence also deleted some of the refer- ences to the dead woman, Hardy's first wife, Emma, who had proved a far more formidable rival than any of the living young women for whom the octogenarian celebrity had still felt the throbbings of noontide as the night began to close around him. Yet, even with those dele- tions, Emma appears far more frequently in the text than poor Florence.

What Matthew Millgate has done in this new edition is to disentangle Hardy's re- cord from Florence's subsequent additions, deletions and alterations. The result has its interest, even for those who are not Hardy scholars, but not the excitement of, say, a first hearing of Boris Godunov approx- imately as Moussorgsky conceived it, with- out Rimsky-Korsakov's well-intentioned rewritings and rescorings. When Florence's version was first published in two volumes, in 1928 and 1930, the general critical view was that it was, on balance, a worthily dull piece of work; and even though Hardy now speaks directly to the reader, there is little

reason to revise that opinion.

Professor Millgate rightly thinks that Hardy himself emerges less attractively from this new edition than from the Life previously known to us. This is because, often guided by James Barrie (whom, pathetically, she even nursed vain hopes of marrying), Florence tampered with the original text in order to make the dead man seem more magnanimous and less petty than he really was. From the present version one has a vision of the octogena- rian, world-famous writer turning over yellowed newspaper cuttings, in order to

have the last word with some critic long since dead and forgotten.

There are also now a number of pas- sages, deleted by Florence, in which Hardy does no more than copy from his diaries lists of people, important in his eyes but wholly unimportant in those of any modern reader, whom he met, as a result of achieving fame, in fashionable London. A typical passage, quoting from his diary, runs: '14th. To Lady Carnarvon's with E. . . . A Rajah there. Talked to Lady Winifred, Lady Camilla Wallop, &c. Intro- duced to her sister Lady Kath: Milnes- Gaskell.' The presence of these lists, de- void of any comment on the people listed, has led to a charge of snobbery — which would seem to be supported by the manner in which Hardy, in earlier pages, constant-

ly exaggerates his family's class and econo- mic status. But if there is, indeed, snob- bery here, it is the kind of snobbery that derives (as Professor Millgate shrewdly points out) not from a man's exaggerated sense of his worth but from his unjustified conviction that his has been, on the whole, an unexciting existence and therefore one uninteresting to others except when 'celeb- rities' have impinged on it.

There are certainly remarkable passages in the book, whether in the form of quirky anecdotes or poetical descriptions. An example of the former is the story of the doctor at Maiden Newton who, after de- livering a woman of a still-born child, accepted the corpse in lieu of payment for his services, subsequently keeping it on his mantelpiece in a jar of spirits, which gradually stained it brown. An example of the latter is the evocation of a river in November flood: 'Lumps of froth float down like swans in front of our house. At the arches of the large stone bridge, the froth has accumulated and lies like hillocks of salt against the bridge; then the arch chokes, and after a silence coughs out the air and froth, and gurgles on.'

There are also some wonderfully vivid portraits of people. Walter Pater's manner is 'that of one carrying weighty ideas without spilling them'. After a call on Leslie Stephen, Hardy records: 'He is just the same or worse; as if dying to express sympathy, but suffering under. some terri- ble curse which prevents his saying any but caustic things, and showing antipathy in- stead.'

But, in general, the impression that is left with one is of some great singer who, after many years of retirement, is once again tempted on to the operatic stage. His sense of pitch is now uncertain, he has little control of his breathing, and the voice itself is reedy; yet, from time to time some inimitable phrase reminds one of the great heldentenor of the past.

Curiously, while Hardy was composing this public autobiography, in which he was so much at pains to reveal nothing of his inmost self, he was at the same time composing a private biography, in which all the agonies and raptures of that inmost self were revealed for all to read. This private biography is of course contained in

the three collections of poems, Moments of Vision of 1917, Late Lyrics and Earlier of 1922, and Human Shows of 1925, in which

he demonstrated precisely what he meant

when he wrote: 'I have a faculty for burying an emotion in my heart or brain for forty years, and exhuming it at the end

of that time as fresh as when it was interred.' As Robert Gittings has shown in his masterly biography, Hardy was a man of extraordinary secrecy, and a result of this secrecy was the plot that he hatched with his second wife to head off future biographers by producing 'her' biography. Yet, while putting this plot into effect, he was at the same time revealing, his soul in all its nakedness in superb poem after poem. The paradox is a weird one.