Fear is the Key

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[Thomas Hardy]

‘WHAT HAS PROVIDENCE done to Mr Hardy’, wrote a reviewer of the Victorian writer’s novel Jude the Obscure (1895), ‘that he should rise up in the arable land of Wessex and shake his fist at his Creator?’¹ The reviewer was referring to the long and painful series of misfortunes that befall Jude, culminating in the moment when his eldest child, aged twelve, is found to have hanged his younger brother and sister and then himself. So harrowing is the scene, and so apparently gratuitous, that the reviewer’s cry for some explanation from the author’s experience is understandable. The new biography of Hardy by Claire Tomalin would seem to be the place for today’s reader to get an answer, but she declines to offer one. ‘Neither Hardy nor anyone else’, she tells us, ‘has explained where his black view of life came from.’² Most of his time, after all, was spent working at his desk. Tomalin does suggest, however, that ‘part of the answer might be that he was writing at a time when Britain seemed to be permanently and bitterly divided into a nation of the rich and a nation of the poor.’³ Elsewhere she mentions the author’s loss of Christian faith. But while it is true that Hardy’s novels contain scathing criticism of the English class system and that he himself had been on the receiving end of much snobbery and elitism, still, for many of his contemporaries, even from his own background, even agnostics, this was a period of progress and confidence.

Another question about Hardy that remains largely unanswered is why he stopped writing novels relatively early in his long career. He was fifty-five when Jude was published. It was his fourteenth novel. He was at the height of his powers. Yet in the thirty-two years that remained to him he would never write another. Tomalin accepts Hardy’s explanation that he had always thought of himself as a poet and that having now made sufficient money he could afford to withdraw from the pressures and compromises involved in writing serialised fiction and concentrate on his verse. Yet a certain mystery remains. Was there some relation between the intensity of the negative vision in Jude and the decision to stop writing? Why was poetry more congenial to Hardy and what is the relation between the two sides to his work?

Hardy was born more dead than alive in the small village of Bockhampton, Dorset, south-west England, on 2 June 1840, less than six months after his parents married. His father, a small-time builder, named the boy Thomas after both himself and his own father, giving no second name to distinguish the newborn. He was just another generation. His mother, Jemima, a servant and cook, had reached the relatively mature age of twenty-six without marrying, had had no desire to do so before this unwanted pregnancy, and would always warn her children against the move. Jemima’s own mother had married in the last month of a pregnancy (her second) and brought up seven children in extreme poverty. Jemima would have three more after Thomas.

Frail, not expected to survive, Hardy was kept at home till age eight, learning to read and play the fiddle from his parents. Throughout her long life his mother would always refer to him as ‘her rather delicate “boy”’⁴ while in his memoirs Hardy recalls that when asked what he wished to do as a grown-up he would protest that ‘he did not want at all to be a man, or to possess things, but to remain as he was, in the same spot, and to know no more people than he already knew.’⁵ As late as 1917 he was describing himself at his first school as a still unfledged bird, ‘Pink, tiny, crisp-curled’.⁶

The desire to be spared adult experience is repeated in Jude the Obscure: ‘If only he could prevent himself growing up!’ Jude thinks, ‘He did not want to be a man!’⁷ All Hardy’s major novels, in fact, present us with a child, or childish adult, who is, as it were, thrust out into the world before he or she is ready for experience. Orphans abound and even where parents are present the question of shelter and protection is always to the fore. Of Tess and her six younger brothers and sisters in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) we hear: ‘All these young souls were passengers in the Durbeyfield ship – entirely dependent on the judgement of the two Durbeyfield adults for their pleasure, their necessities, their health, even their existence.’⁸ In the event, Tess is sent off into service dressed (by her mother) in such a way that ‘might cause her to be estimated as a woman when she was not much more than a child’.⁹ The consequences are disastrous.

But what was so hard about growing up? One of the childhood anecdotes in Hardy’s memoirs tells us how he fell in love with his first schoolteacher Mrs Martin. He recalls sitting on her lap, the rustle of her skirts, her smell. His mother, however, having decided to travel to Hertfordshire to assist her sister with the arrival of a fifth child, took Thomas away with her ‘for protection … being then an attractive and still young woman’.¹⁰ This was clearly a family obsession. What protection could a nine-year-old offer a woman in her mid-thirties? Presumably what we are really talking about is her determination to protect him. The young Thomas was upset about losing his beloved teacher and even more so when, on returning to Bockhampton, he found he was to be sent to another school further afield. Desperate to see Mrs Martin now, he escaped from home to attend a harvest supper dance at which she would be present. There was a brief emotional meeting, after which he was abandoned and, tired and afraid, had to wait outside in the dark till three in the morning to be brought home and scolded.

The scene reads very much like something in a Hardy novel: it is a mindset where desire and fear battle for the upper hand in the absence of any moral content. Throughout his life, perhaps influenced by his parents’ shotgun wedding, Hardy would be awed by the consequences of romantic and above all sexual experience. As a boy he hated to be touched. Years later he would visit the widowed Mrs Martin at her London home and even in his memoirs he would be reflecting that their love might have been ‘in the order of things’¹¹ if only he had got back to her earlier. In line with his general anxiety about exposing himself to criticism and derision, Hardy removed these lines from the manuscript to be sent to the publishers.

What was ‘in the order of things’ for the boy now was a three-mile walk to school in Dorchester, the nearest town. Thomas didn’t like going so far from home. He complained of being sent when he was ill. All the same, ‘born bookworm’¹² as he was, he became a prize pupil. Deeming their son too delicate for building work, his parents seized on this intellectual success and had him articled to an architect, again in Dorchester. He was sixteen (‘still a child’ he later remarked). Upwardly mobile, he rose in his parents’¹³ esteem and, of course, architects and builders might one day hope to work together. At the same time he became different from the rest of the family and there were the embarrassments of moving in a class which might despise his manners and accent. Apparently it was impossible to have a positive thing without a negative.

Aged twenty, Hardy received his first salary and was able to rent a room in town, returning home at the weekends. It was the beginning of a long habit of oscillation between separate worlds, between bold independence and the safe protection of home, that would remain with Hardy all his life. In Dorchester he met the influential and intellectual Moule family who directed his reading and gave him encouragement with his first attempts at writing. Back home he went with his father to play the fiddle at village festivals, not so much the carouser as the one who provides the music, in the reassuring company of a parent. What romantic crushes there were at this stage were unconsummated; often Thomas flirted with his many female cousins, as if it might somehow be safer to keep love in the family. Then in 1862 this cautious young man suddenly decided to be brave, quit his job and set off to London.

One of Hardy’s finest novels is entitled The Return of the Native (1878), and the expression might aptly be applied to many moments in the writer’s own life. For after five years in London, years in which he fell on his feet, found a job with an architects’ firm, won two Architectural Association prizes, immersed himself in the life of the capital, made friends and courted girls, in 1867, again rather suddenly, Hardy ‘fell ill’,¹⁴ ‘felt weak’ and, nothing diagnosed, abandoned all he had achieved to return home. In The Return of the Native, nothing is less convincing than the motives given by the handsome young Clym for his return to his tiny village after five successful years in the jewellery business in Paris. He claims to have grown tired of worldly ways, says he wishes to offer instruction to local village children. But clearly the most important person in Clym’s life is his beloved mother; the passionate young Eustacia, who destroys his relationship with Mother, is portrayed in a most ambiguous if not negative light.

Aside from his ‘health’, Hardy’s ostensible reason for abandoning London was that his lowly origins made it difficult for him to start an architect’s practice of his own, or at least would involve ‘pushing his way into influential sets’.¹⁵ Whether this was really such an obstacle is hard to say. In any event, what saved the retreat to Dorset from feeling like complete failure was that Hardy brought back with him more than 400 pages of a novel-in-progress. Hence while resuming part-time architect’s work in Dorchester he was able to get on with the book at home. Mother’s protection in Bockhampton was thus combined with aspirations that would be fulfilled in the big city.

It is usually said of The Poor Man and the Lady that it was rejected for publication and much is made of Hardy’s sufferings as an aspiring man from a poor background seeking space for himself in the literary world. The circumstances are complicated. Since the manuscript was destroyed we have little idea what was in the novel, but he himself described it as a ‘dramatic satire of the squirearchy and nobility, London society, the vulgarity of the middle class, modern Christianity, church restoration and political and domestic morals in general … the tendency of the writing being socialistic, not to say revolutionary.’¹⁶

No doubt this was hard for London publishers to swallow, especially if the writer was still unaccomplished. But one publisher, Chapman, said it would do the novel if Hardy were willing to make corrections and pay £20 against losses. Chapman’s reader, however, George Meredith, himself a novelist from a humble background, warned Hardy that publication of such inflammatory material might compromise his future. It would be better to write something else. Later, yet another publisher, Tinsley Brothers, offered publication if Hardy would guarantee the company against losses, not an unusual arrangement. He declined, complaining he couldn’t afford it, though only a year later he would make a contract with Tinsley for his second attempt, Desperate Remedies, which involved handing over to them the very large sum of £75 against possible losses.

Perhaps, then, rather than this being a case of outright rejection, Hardy, cautious as he was, had taken Meredith’s advice. He would also describe The Poor Man and the Lady as telling ‘the life of an isolated student cast upon the billows of London with no protection but his brains’.¹⁷ Isolation, lack of protection, are so often the key with Hardy. This was how he thought of himself. A book that set the world against him was not what he had in mind. In any event, this first venture into publishing suggests how ambiguous, in his mature novels, is the relationship between social criticism and the misfortunes and defeats of his characters: snobbery, injustice, discrimination there may be, but these horrors can also offer the insecure child-adult an excuse to give up and return home, or they may confirm a preconception that life away from the parental hearth is unspeakably dangerous.

Despite his lowly origins, Hardy eventually published his first (now determinedly innocuous) novel at thirty-one and his second at thirty-two, at which point, with a contract signed to write a third, this time serialised, novel, he was already able to dedicate himself entirely to writing. Even today such an achievement would be remarkable. The London literary world was not after all so hostile to a country boy.

Meantime his last years in an architect’s office were to bring Hardy to an even more momentous initiation than that of big-city life or publication. Having always specialised in church restoration, he was sent to Cornwall to assess the condition of a church in the tiny hamlet of St Juliot where he fell in love with Emma Gifford, sister-in-law of the incumbent clergyman. She was interested in literature and a bold horsewoman, something that a man with his history of frailty was bound to admire. In this poem, dated 1870, St Juliot is renamed Lyonnesse, a mythical land in Cornish legend:

When I set out for Lyonnesse,

A hundred miles away,

The rime was on the spray,

And starlight lit my lonesomeness

When I set out for Lyonnesse

A hundred miles away.

What would bechance at Lyonnesse

While I should sojourn there

No prophet durst declare,

Nor did the wisest wizard guess

What would bechance at Lyonnesse

While I should sojourn there.

When I came back from Lyonnesse

With magic in my eyes,

All marked with mute surmise

My radiance rare and fathomless,

When I came back from Lyonnesse

With magic in my eyes!¹⁸

Typical of Hardy is the presentation of a before and after, with, elided in the middle, an experience that transforms someone absolutely, but cannot be spoken. In this case the transformation is positive; more often, and particularly where sexual, rather than romantic, experience is involved, it will be negative. After the beautiful young Tess has been deflowered by the rake into whose service she was so carelessly dispatched, we hear: ‘An immeasurable chasm was to divide our heroine’s personality thereafter from that previous self of hers who stepped from her mother’s door to try her fortune at Trantridge poultry farm.’¹⁹

In love, Hardy did not hurry to marriage. His mother was against it. Emma was a middle-class woman, and hence marriage to her would complete Hardy’s move away from his kinfolk. She was also penniless. It was the worst of both worlds. Emma’s father too was against her marrying into a lower class. In short, there was good reason for hesitating and enjoying an exciting romantic correspondence which Hardy later compared to that between Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, though they of course had thrown caution to the winds and eloped. Again and again in Hardy’s novels, which are above all stories of attempted and usually failed partnerships, one partner will prefer ‘perpetual betrothal’²⁰ to consummation. Sexual experience, when it comes, will be all-determining, fatal even. Or will it? It is on this question, the fatal quality, or otherwise, of experience, that all Hardy’s fiction turns.

In Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), Hardy’s fourth novel and first major success, comedy prevails. Written while Emma was still at a safe distance in Cornwall, the novel reads like an extended betrothal. Independent shepherd Gabriel Oak proposes to orphan girl Bathsheba. Bold and beautiful, she rejects him, but not outright. He loses his flock in an accident. She inherits a farm from an uncle where he finds salaried work. Socially above him now, she unwisely attracts the attention of proud local landowner Boldwood who bullies her toward marriage. Courageous in running her farm, Bathsheba is a child when it comes to romance. Before she can succumb to Boldwood, the disreputable Sergeant Troy seduces her with a dazzling display of swordsmanship that involves having his blade flash all around her body as she stands frightened and adoring. Desire and fear are fused. Later we discover that she married Troy because she was afraid that he had found someone else, afraid that her reputation was already compromised.

But in this early work the mistake is not allowed to be fatal. Exposed as a rake, Troy is murdered by Boldwood. With both pretenders out of the way, humble, hard-working Gabriel who has done everything to protect Bathsheba and her farm from ruin finally claims his prize. His loyal friendship has been more worthy than their passions, another constant theme in Hardy.

Following the author’s marriage, however, there would be no more happy endings. Having tied the knot in 1874 Hardy began to move his wife back and forth from the suburbs of London, a short distance from where his career was developing, to the country round Dorchester, a short distance from his family. Seven moves in eight years. The family the couple wanted for themselves did not arrive. Allowed to help with his writing during betrothal, the childless Emma was now slowly frozen out. She did not mix well in London, where she preferred to live, or at all in Dorchester, which he preferred.

In 1880 Hardy managed to revamp the relationship by falling ill, confining himself to his bed for many months and allowing Emma to run his life. The recurring mystery illness, vaguely described years later as a bladder inflammation, did not prevent the writer from meeting the demanding deadlines of serialised novel publishing. On his recovery, Emma was sufficiently reassured about her role in the partnership to agree to the building of a permanent home not far from Dorchester.

Designed by Hardy himself, Max Gate, as the house was called, was small, unimaginative and surrounded by a protective belt of trees which he would never allow anyone to prune. To guarantee even greater security, the house was built by members of his family: his younger brother Henry and his now ageing father. Guests complained it was gloomy and suffocating. No sooner were they installed there in 1882 than Tom and Emma began to rent accommodation in London for the summer season. The marriage sank into its previous torpor. Hardy was approaching that age when, as Emma would say, ‘a man’s feelings too often take a new course altogether. Eastern ideas of matrimony secretly pervade his thoughts, and he wearies of the most perfect, and suitable wife chosen in his earlier life.’²¹ In short, Hardy had adultery in mind. It was an exciting and anxious period, out of which he produced two of the finest novels in the English language, Tess and Jude.

Returning pregnant to her family after her catastrophic period in service, Tess gives birth to a baby that promptly dies. There are many dead babies in Hardy’s work. The dead child is ever the sign that it would have been better never to have got involved in love. Vowing never to marry, Tess goes to serve as a milkmaid in a farm far enough away for her shame not to be known. Here she meets the perfect man, Angel Clare, trainee gentleman farmer. The scene is set for Hardy’s characteristically tantalising mix of desire and trepidation. To sharpen our sense of anxiety, both characters and their possible but difficult union are made enormously attractive. Here is Tess after an afternoon nap, viewed by Clare:

She had not heard him enter and hardly realised his presence there. She was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it had been a snake’s. She had stretched one arm so high above her coiled-up cable of hair that he could see its satin delicacy above the sunburn; her face was flushed with sleep, and her eyelids hung heavy over their pupils. The brimfulness of her nature breathed from her. It was a moment when a woman’s soul is more incarnate than at any other time; when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself flesh, and sex takes the outside place in the presentation.

Then those eyes flashed brightly through their filmy heaviness, before the remainder of her face was well awake. With an oddly compounded look of gladness, shyness and surprise, she exclaimed –

‘O Mr Clare! How you frightened me …’²²

Hardy wished, he said, ‘to demolish the doll of English fiction’,²³ to present woman’s real sexuality. He is rightly given credit for doing so. But there was no question, as some critics imagine, of any campaign for female emancipation. What mattered was the freedom to evoke the lure and terror of sexual experience. Who but Hardy would have compared the interior of a girl’s mouth to a snake’s? Not only threatening in her beauty, woman is also frightened herself. And her fear too is unnerving. Here, somewhat earlier, is the couple’s first conversation alone:

‘What makes you draw off in that way, Tess?’ said he. ‘Are you afraid?’

‘Oh no, sir … not of outdoor things; especially just now when the apple-blooth is falling, and everything so green.’

‘But you have your indoor fears – eh?’

‘Well – yes, sir.’

‘What of?’

‘I couldn’t quite say.’

‘The milk turning sour?’

‘No.’

‘Life in general?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Ah – so am I, very often. This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?’²⁴

Two ‘tremulous lives’²⁵ move toward consummation. Will Tess be forgiven her early deflowering and dead child? Will Angel overcome class divisions to marry her? In short, is life a tragedy or a comedy? All kinds of hints suggest the latter. In the farmhouse where milkmaids and farmhands get together comic stories of infidelity are told. Hilariously and charmingly, three other milkmaids are also swooning over Clare. It is a world fizzing with fun and farce. Yet when finally Angel kisses Tess and she responds with ‘unreflecting inevitableness’²⁶ to ‘the necessity of loving him’,²⁷ we are told that ‘the pivot of the universe for their two natures’²⁸ has shifted.

Against her mother’s advice, Tess finds the courage to write a letter to Clare about her earlier misadventure. She puts it under his bedroom door but there is a carpet on the other side, underneath which the note is invisible to him. Hardy is frequently accused of introducing too many coincidences into his work, almost always at the expense of his characters’ happiness. But they have the effect of confusing the issue of responsibility, begging the question of fatality, while also giving the disquieting impression that a chance meeting or a mislaid letter can be quite as devastating to an individual destiny as class discrimination or moral hypocrisy. There are simply so many things to be afraid of.

Tess’s secret still untold, the couple get married. At last they are alone. No one can interfere. The sexual experience towards which a hundred and more very lush pages have been leading is imminent. Clare, however, chooses this of all moments to confess to a sin, some years before, of ‘eight and forty hours dissipation with a stranger’.²⁹ Tess instantly forgives him and responds with her own sad history. Angel instantly rejects her. There will be no lovemaking.

The scene is an extraordinary one. Suddenly both lovers’ fears are entirely confirmed. For Angel, Tess is a different person, the decision to marry a girl from the lower classes has proved a terrible error: ‘I repeat, the woman I have been loving is not you.’³⁰ With ‘terror upon her white face’,³¹ Tess feels all the weight of Victorian morals and class division come down upon her. Meantime the reader cannot help but feel that both partners were all too ready to see ‘the terrifying bliss’³² of sexual love thwarted. Sooner than expected, ‘Having nothing more to fear’,³³ Tess falls asleep. Two days later, of her own accord, she returns home.

On a much lower key Hardy’s poems suggest that his own life was beset by similar anxieties to those of his more melodramatic characters. A few years before Tess, in a poem entitled ‘He Abjures Love’, the poet announces that he will no longer make the mistake of idealising women: ‘No more will now rate I/The common rare’.³⁴ Was Angel right then when he abruptly retreated from his romantic vision of Tess? Three years later, writing a poem to a woman he had hoped would become a lover, Hardy speaks of a moment when they were trapped by the pouring rain ‘snug and warm’³⁵ together in a hansom cab that stood motionless at its destination. As so often, fear of sexual experience is at once hinted at and disguised behind coincidence:

Then the downpour ceased, to my sharp sad pain,

And the glass that had screened our forms before

Flew up, and out she sprang to her door:

I should have kissed her if the rain

Had lasted a minute more.³⁶

Such frustrations, alleviated by a sense of relief, more or less sum up Hardy’s midlife flirtations. The famous author would not become an adulterer. The obstacle was not a moral one.

Meanwhile Tess of the D’Urbervilles was enthralling and dividing its Victorian public. ‘Dinner parties had to be rearranged’, Tomalin tells us, ‘to take account of the warring opinions.’³⁷ Was Tess as the book’s subtitle provocatively claimed ‘A Pure Woman’, or, as many suspected, a ‘little harlot’, heroine of ‘a coarse and disagreeable story’,³⁸ told in ‘a coarse and disagreeable manner’?³⁹ Readers were used to thinking of sexuality in terms of morals, of good and bad behaviour. They expected to see the characters of a novel rewarded accordingly. But Hardy had other polarities in mind. His characters are bold or afraid, generous or mean, strong or weak. He insists on Tess’s innocence. To make matters worse, Victorian justice is nevertheless done; Tess dies on the gallows after murdering the man who first deflowered her and now returns to ruin her life again. But this is so extreme as to be a travesty of justice, a horror story. Poring over the conundrum, Victorians were invited to suspect that the moral rhetoric in which they smothered sexual mores was a pathetic cover for deep underlying phobia. It was far more disquieting than any straightforward attack on moral hypocrisy could have been.

If Hardy’s lush lingering over budding womanhood was a problem for Victorians and even for some critics today, when the same treatment was given to the English countryside he could only be applauded. Indeed, there are many for whom Hardy’s representation of landscape and country life, his creation, through a series of novels, of an imaginative world he calls Wessex, roughly corresponding to Dorset, remains his great achievement. Certainly the richness of the evocation of fields, flowers and farming life in all its varied seasonal activities offers welcome relief to the dashed hopes of his young characters. I can think of no other author whose descriptions give such pleasure. I speak as one who usually wearies after only three or four lines of description. Yet Hardy’s treatment of the landscape, the weather and the peasant community from which his characters emerge is more than a backdrop or compensation. It is essential to his preoccupations.

Far From the Madding Crowd begins with a shepherd tending his flock on Norcombe Hill:

… one of the spots which suggest to a passer-by that he is in the presence of a shape approaching the indestructible as nearly as any to be found on earth. It was a featureless convexity of chalk and soil – an ordinary specimen of those smoothly outlined protuberances of the globe which may remain undisturbed on some great day of confusion when far grander heights and dizzy granite precipices topple down.⁴⁰

This is Hardy’s most profound attraction to his Dorset landscape. It is supremely resilient. Through lavish and loving description of it he hoped perhaps to accrue to his anxious self something of this longed-for quality.

Almost all of The Return of the Native takes place on the wild Egdon Heath (‘civilisation was its enemy’),⁴¹ much of it at night. One early chapter is entitled ‘The figure against the sky’. A woman is described standing on an ancient burial barrow that commands the flat dark landscape beneath. ‘Her extraordinary fixity, her conspicuous loneliness, her heedlessness of night, betokened among other things an utter absence of fear.’⁴²

Silhouetted above the landscape, passionate Eustacia is looking for her lover. This bold detachment from both landscape and community is a position of maximum vulnerability, and glamour. How magnificent and unwise of her not to be afraid. By the end of the novel, Eustacia’s defeat and mental torment will be such that, far from wishing to stand out, she seeks relief by sinking into the landscape, drowning herself in the weir. Hardy’s suicides almost always seek death by drowning, by immersion in the imperturbability of the physical world. Jude seeks to drown himself standing on the thin ice of a pond. Tess threatens to drown herself in the river. In The Mayor of Casterbridge the main character Henchard chooses, like Eustacia, the weir.

Fortunately, it is possible in Hardy’s view to alleviate suffering through partial rather than final merging with the natural world. Alone in a wood at night, for example, ‘the plight of being alive becomes attenuated to its least possible dimensions’.⁴³ So in happier moments Tess’s ‘flexuous and stealthy figure became an integral part of the scene’.⁴⁴

This yearning for absorption into nature is as much Hardy’s as his characters’. How he relishes describing characters covered with seed spores and cobwebs, surrounded by buzzing insects, ankle-deep in leaves, butterflies on their breath, grasshoppers tumbling over their feet, dew on their hair, rabbits at their feet, rain on their lips. What a pleasure for pen and personalities to fuse themselves in beautiful impersonal natural phenomena. What a pity such restful retreats from adult life cannot last, or not until, as Tess reassures herself at one point, we will all at last be ‘grassed down and forgotten’.⁴⁵

A powerful death wish drives Hardy’s writing. In a letter in 1888 he remarked: ‘if there is any way of getting a melancholy satisfaction out of life it lies in dying, so to speak, before one is out of the flesh; by which I mean putting on the manners of ghosts, wandering in their haunts, and taking their view of surrounding things. To think of life as passing away is a sadness, to think of it as past is at least tolerable. Hence even when I enter into a room to pay a simple morning call, I have unconsciously the habit of regarding the scene as if I were a spectre not solid enough to influence my environment.’⁴⁶

The desire to remain a child and be spared life, the desire to be a ghost and beyond life are intimately related. In between, terrible in its intensity, lies adult life, narrative. One could usefully think of Hardy the narrator as a ghost within his own fiction, accompanying his wonderful, fearful child-adults through the initiations that will lead them to wish they were dead and indeed to die, if not through suicide, at least without much resistance. The word ‘haunt’ recurs with remarkable frequency. The archaic vocabulary and sentence structures frequently suggest a story whose melodrama is long over, ready to sink away into some ancient collective memory. Reading a magnificent description of the wind singing in the trees, or following a charmingly comic conversation of village rustics (another timeless world in which Hardy loves to submerge himself), it is all too easy to forget that this is the man who wrote to a friend on the occasion of the death of his son that ‘the death of a child is never really to be regretted, when one reflects on what he has escaped.’⁴⁷ His is a strong, shocking and above all defeatist vision. A ghostly existence is preferable because a ghost cannot influence his environment, which is a good thing because action in the world always leads to trouble.

But if Hardy hoped that a writer too might be spared influence in the real world, he was mistaken. He had forgotten Meredith’s warning of years before. In the Victorian age a novel could cause a great stir and where Tess in 1891 might have charmed as much as it shocked, Jude four years later simply raised hell. ‘Jude the obscene’, ‘a shameful nightmare’,⁴⁸ critics wrote.

Renouncing the reassuring descriptions of country life, the pleasing chorus of village rustics, with Jude Hardy arrives at the core of his vision. A poor orphan trying to hide from life in scholarship has a rude awakening when seduced by a raw country girl. Married and separated in a matter of pages, he falls in love with a refined cousin, Sue, a girl so terrified by sex that when she marries a much older man to escape Jude she denies him consummation, returns to Jude in the hope that he will be willing to live with her without sex, then gives herself to him only when she fears that physical need will drive him back to his wife. This was not easy material for Victorians. Coincidences and misfortunes abound. When the child got from Jude’s wife kills the children got from Sue and then himself, it is the death of hope tout court, the proof that all attempts to achieve happiness will end in disaster. It would surely have been better never to have tried. To provoke his Victorian readers further, Hardy again offered an ending mockingly in line with their moral convictions: appalled by the death of her children, Sue gets religion and returns to her husband while Jude is seduced by his wife and returns to her shortly before his death. The shape of Victorian justice is thus again in place, as a nightmare, a terrible constriction of human potential.

* * *

A ‘pale gentle frightened little man’⁴⁹ Robert Louis Stevenson had described Hardy in 1885. On receiving a bad review for the novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1878, Hardy had written in his diary, ‘Woke before it was light. Felt that I had not enough staying power to hold my own in the world.’⁵⁰ Not unexpectedly, then, the storm of criticism over Jude shook him deeply. His wife loathed the book and said so in public. The bad news even reached the rustics in Bockhampton. To the extent to which all his novels had been a melodramatic exploration of his own dilemmas, to which all his characters, as he himself said, ‘express mainly the author’,⁵¹ it must have been clear that with his emotional life absolutely stalled any further work of fiction could only be deeply disturbing to write and very uncomfortable to publish. As a poet on the other hand he might more easily play the cryptic and inconsequential ghost. It was a medium that spared him too much narrative, too much contact with the sufferers who were his characters. Tomalin accepts Hardy’s claim that poetry would require fewer compromises than serialised fiction. But there is nothing in terms of content that Hardy put in his poetry that he could not have put in a novel, nor is there much sign of compromise in Jude. Rather the contrary. It had been an act of enormous courage and artistic integrity to write such a book. By comparison, the huge and tedious patriotic poem The Dynasts (1904) looks far more like an appeal for public approval than a decision to be uncompromising. Perhaps the truth is that the decision to stop writing narrative went hand in hand with a decision to struggle with his problems no more. He would no longer seek to change his life.

By 1889 Tom and Emma were sleeping in separate beds. She had begun to write furious attacks on him in her diary. Hardy continued his sterile flirtations and never missed attending a funeral. In the mid-1890s they took up bicycling together. It offered a circumscribed adventure, a tolerable togetherness. Then in 1905 the twenty-six-year-old Florence Dugdale appeared on the exhausted scene, flattered both partners and soon became part of their lives. When Emma died in 1912, Florence was well placed to kick out the relatives, take over the author’s life and eventually marry him. Afraid as always of the world’s censure, the ageing author insisted the wedding take place in great secrecy.

Hardy had always gone out of his way to avoid conflict. Despite the social criticism in his novels he never made political statements, was extremely careful not to argue with relations. Yet his writing had always caused offence. The natives of Dorset felt farming people had been portrayed as simpletons. Emma complained that he had betrayed their marriage and the church. Now, no sooner was he married again than he offended his second wife, with a handful of poems about the first. They were among the finest he ever wrote.

The formula was simple: the ageing widower is allowed a glimpse of his wife as she was when they first met so long ago. So we have the moment of first love and, simultaneously, the sad relief of afterwards, with nothing in between but a poignant forty-year gap. Here is ‘The Voice’:

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

Saying that now you are not as you were

When you had changed from the one who was all to me

But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,

Standing as when I drew near to the town

Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,

Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness

Travelling across the wet mead to me here,

You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,

Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,

Leaves around me falling,

Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward

And the woman calling.⁵²

Real ghost and would-be ghost dissolve together into mist and verse. Florence was furious. ‘I expect the idea of the general reader will be that T. H.’s second marriage is a most disastrous one and that his sole wish is to find refuge in the grave with her with whom he found happiness.’⁵³ Once again Hardy had taken revenge on those whose protection he needed. Once again he could protest it was only art, spectral, inconsequential. What reality could one ever ascribe to such a beautiful word as ‘wistlessness’?

Any biographer of Hardy faces the problem that he lived long after there was anything to report. It is hard to interest the reader in a list of public honours and the many titles of his fine poetry collections. Still, his death in 1928 affords a good anecdote. Hardy’s wish was to be buried in the local churchyard at Stinsford: home. His literary friends wanted him at Westminster Abbey: town. In life he had been able to go back and forth between the two, but for a corpse this was impossible. The problem was solved with a gruesome bit of surgery: his heart was buried at Stinsford and his body cremated and interred in the Abbey. The decision as to which part should go where was definitely right, but it was a compromise that left everyone dissatisfied.

And afterwards? Hardy had had the epitaph ready for decades. It is a poem in which he imagines himself being remembered as a man attentive to the most subtle phenomena of nature. Thus he takes refuge simultaneously in the collective memory and in landscape, indeed he links the two. These are verses from which all the turmoils of narrative are scrupulously absent, as if, in his long life he had had the great good fortune never to have been involved in action of any kind, the only positive effort mentioned being a failed attempt to help small defenceless animals. Most of all, there are no women.

Afterwards

When the Present has latched its postern behind my

tremulous stay,

And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,

Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,

‘He was a man who used to notice such things’?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink,

The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight

Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,

‘To him this must have been a familiar sight.’

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and

warm,

When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,

One may say, ‘He strove that such innocent creatures

should come to no harm,

But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.’

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand

at the door,

Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,

Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no

more,

‘He was one who had an eye for such mysteries’?

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the

gloom,

And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,

Till they swell again, as they were a new bell’s boom,

‘He hears it not now, but used to notice such things’?⁵⁴