Who despised whom
David Wright
THOMAS HARDY: HIS LIFE AND FRIENDS by F.B. Pinion Macmillan, £45, pp. 438 The best life of Thomas Hardy — if one excludes that purportedly written by his widow but in reality by Hardy himself — is Michael Millgate's, which superseded Robert Gitting's racy but prejudiced 1975 biography. Both owed something to the pioneer researches of Professor Pinion,
editor of the Thomas Hardy Society Review, who 20 years earlier planned to write a life of his hero but was forestalled by Gittings and Millgate. Now, drawing on a mass of unpublished and recently pub- lished sources, Professor Pinion has pro- duced a life of Hardy in which he says
the overriding aim has been to avoid fictional assertion, and to present facts as far as they are ascertainable.
In effect his biography acts as umpire to Gittings and Millgate, especially where the relations between Hardy and his two wives, Emma Gifford and Florence Dugdale, are concerned — to say nothing of the rela- tions between Emma and Hardy's family. According to Gittings, Emma the arch- deacon's niece despised the working-class Hardys and would have nothing to do with them; whereas Millgate, with more under- standing of peasant class-divisions and how they operate — in particular of the social gap between the self-employed and the wage-labourer — contends that it was the clannish, upwardly mobile Hardys, suspi- cious of such 'poor gentry' as the Giffords, who cold-shouldered Emma — especially Hardy's remarkable mother, who had immense ambition for her son and regard- ed Emma as a useless interloper. On this point the present biographer offers no opinion but neutrally presents the facts. Emma seems to have visited and been visit- ed by Hardy's parents and siblings till com- paratively late in their marriage, when Emma began to show signs of mental dis- turbance and took against her husband — 'detestable . . . a low-born churl, utterly worthless' who, as she ominously observed to the lady who became his second wife, looked like the murderer Crippen. Git- tings, who came to dislike Hardy in the course of writing his biography, comes down heavily on the side of both wives, and even suggests that Hardy was impotent. On this matter Pinion does not comment, but has no doubt that Hardy, obsessed with his work, proved a difficult husband. Though well-off from middle-age onward, due to his penurious boyhood Hardy remained too much of a pennypincher. When he was 80 his second wife found him patching his trousers with string. On the other hand Emma was a chatterbox, an egomaniac and no kind of intellectual companion, whereas Florence, though well-read and talented, was manic-depressive. In marrying her, Hardy hoped that
the union of two rather melancholy tempera- ments would result in cheerfulness, as the junction of two negatives forms a positive.
And it was only after Emma's death that Hardy regained 'the same happy laugh he had had as a young man', according to his sister. Yet Florence's verdict was almost as dismissive as Emma's: she told a friend that Hardy 'was a great writer, not a great man.' Professor Pinion's subtitle, 'His Life and Friends', is well earned, especially where the latter is concerned. Hardy seems to have known or met all of the great, and nearly all of the talented Victorians, Edwardians, and Georgians who flourished in his long lifetime — from William Barnes, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Richard Jeffries, R. L. Stevenson, Henry James, Kipling, Wells, Housman, Charlotte Mew — even Marie Stopes — to Robert Graves, Ezra Pound and T. E. Lawrence: the one exception being T. S. Eliot. This list is far from exhaustive and rather in the style of Pinion's biography. Too often it reads like the précis of a longer and fuller work — or the potted news in 'Portrait of the Week'. One yawns over passages of almost non-sequitur information:
In London during December, Hardy noticed a strong Impressionist influence at the Soci- ety of British Artists' exhibition, and was reminded of a study by Whistler he had seen at the gallery, when Mrs Jeune in a rich pinkish-red gown, chatted with him by fire- light. A cabman drove him furiously as snow fell to Lady Carnavon's party. The New Year at Max Gate was uneventful, and he contin- ued The Woodlandets, finishing it early in February.
Still, the information is all there, and one must be grateful, not least for Professor Pinion's meticulous linking of small events, persons, landscapes, houses, and episodes in Hardy's life to the poems, stories and novels these suggested or inspired. In this biography Hardy is seen first and last as a novelist and prose writer, though this is not how Hardy, who began and ended as a poet, saw himself. In between, he earned his living: first as architect, then as novelist. The hostile reception by prurient critics of what they nicknamed 'Jude the Obscene' probably came as welcome excuse to con- centrate on poetry alone.
No more novel-writing for me. A man must be a fool to deliberately stand up to be shot at.
Perhaps significantly, Hardy was amused when the Bishop of Wakefield threw his copy of Jude into the fire, but furious when the same bishop got W. H. Smith to withdraw the book from its circulating library.
The story of Hardy's life, told in brief, sounds like the plot of one of his own nov- els: the self-educated son of a stonemason and servant-girl rising to the professional classes, first as architect, then as author; attaining the highest national and academic honours but never quite abandoning his peasant roots (on his deathbed he asked for kettle-broth — parsley, bread and onions boiled in water — and a rasher of bacon grilled in front of him on the bed- room fire); all the ironies, if few of the melodramatics, are contained in the tale of his uneasy marriages, amities amoureuses, and above all in the affair of the burial of his divided body, not beside his parents' grave as he planned, but in Westminster Abbey, while his heart, removed and kept in a biscuit-tin, remained behind in Dorset.
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