Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man

After reading Claire Tomalin’s biography of Jane Austen for my class on that author, I was tempted, in spite of the couple of small but significant reservations I had about that book, to pick up her biography of Thomas Hardy.  The Austen book had been well-written and –researched, though I didn’t always love the conclusions she came to, and with impending coursework deadlines and exams –what’s a nerd to do to put off doing real work except to start reading something equally worthy but, crucially, not on her course?  The Hardy biography it was.

See the rest of the review after the jump!

The Hardy book was a far more enjoyable experience for me than the Austen book, largely due to my own ignorance.  I know perhaps too much, or have too decided opinions, about Austen to be able to settle into a contented reading state, instead questioning and quibbling with anything that doesn’t meet with my approval.  In Hardy’s case, though, beyond the broad brush strokes (Dorset, modest beginnings, not entirely happy first marriage, younger second wife), I knew very little about the life of an author whom I admire so much, and it is a really remarkable life.  His background – a builder father and a mother who had been a servant – meant that even his fairly modest education, which enabled him to take up an apprenticeship as an architect, was a significant step up in the world for him.  He built on this foundation with much dedicated, if in the short-term thankless, work to establish himself as a writer.

While much of the first half of the book is given over to this early life and the context in which it was set — Tomalin is good at situating her subjects in their family and local history, I find — the book really gets going once Hardy meets Emma Gifford, who was to be his first wife.  Both his personal and professional life really take off from this point.  Even with this said, though, and in spite of the professional life well evinced throughout, I feel Tomalin’s own bias is towards the personal life.  This is understandable, because it’s a very twisty, almost soapy, story.  Hardy married Emma after some years and with much disapproval from both families (each was stepping out of their proper social sphere in marrying the other), and then had many ups and downs, including times when, if Hardy was not actually unfaithful to Emma, it was not for want of trying.  This culminated in some years of decided emotional estrangement between the pair; though living in the same house, Emma had taken to an attic room to get away from Hardy.  A little before Emma’s death, a young woman called Florence Dugdale, in what seems a highly calculating manner, made herself known to Hardy and married him on Emma’s death — only for Hardy to manifest a most unexpected and profound grief for Emma, which gave rise to some amazing poetry.

Tomalin is good at refraining from judgment, but in a way this makes it a puzzling story to me, with far too many cross-currents to make sense of.  Should we pity Hardy, for marrying, somewhat rashly, the first genteel woman to give him the time of day, before he had the chance to encounter other upper-middle-class women?  He would apparently later in life become quite a social favourite, and could potentially have made a far happier match for himself.  Or should we sympathise with him for Emma’s astonishingly bitter, and public, resentment at his success?  Should we pity Emma, who was frustrated in her own attempts at writing fiction and was profoundly hurt by Hardy’s lack of public acknowledgement of her own contribution to his work?  Or for the way she was sniggered at by seemingly everyone they ever knew for her oddities of behaviour and dress?  Or for the conniving way Florence Dugdale insinuated herself on to the scene before Emma’s own death?  Or that Hardy was such an outspoken critic of marriage while she was still alive?  Or, again, should Florence be pitied, for having to withstand her husband lamenting in verse his first wife (with whom he had not got on in years) for two decades after that first wife’s death?  Real life is messy, and I think there is hardly a book that demonstrates more succinctly how it can get extremely messy extremely quickly than this one, though Tomalin deals with it all with great even-handedness and clarity.

One of the great things Tomalin does is argue for Hardy as a poet rather than novelist, which is the distinction he himself wished to preserve — fiction was the craft by which he earnt his bread and butter, but poetry was his art.  Certainly, this biography has spurred me on to investigate the poetry, an entirely new avenue to me in Hardy’s work, as well as to properly read both Return of the Native and The Mayor of Casterbridge, both of which I know from TV (Catherine Zeta-Jones as Eustacia Vye!  Clive Owen as Damon Wildeve!  Ciarán Hinds as Michael Henchard!) but which I’m now itching to explore in prose.  I found it a curious move that Tomalin was so markedly coy about talking about Tess at all, which was from its publication the runaway success of Hardy’s fiction, whereas the poetry got relatively close textual analysis.  This is also perhaps part of my quibble with the Austen book — she’s a bit too ready to read Hardy’s poetry as a window into his life, just as she made a few too many awkward leaps between Austen’s written work and what she was “really” thinking.

I don’t really expect biographies to be page-turners, but this was one, dealing with an extremely varied, eventful life of 87 years in 400 brisk, information-filled pages.  It’s even better when you’re supposed to be slogging your way through a Homi Bhabha reader.