So I am praising Mr. Gittings' biography when I say that his Hardy is a secretive, class-conscious, gloomy little man, a bourgeois gentleman who cut himself off from his embarrassing lower-class relatives, though he built his greatest novels out of particulars of their misfortunate lives. Gittings sets the tone early in the book when he compares his subject to the Grossmiths' Mr. Pooter: you can't get much more bourgeois, or less heroic, than that; and the figure that emerges as one reads on is indeed very Pooter-ish - weak, petty, passive, and altogether small-scale. But he is also convincing; Gitting has done his work with such meticulous industry, has researched so widely and so intelligently, and written so judiciously, that one must conclude that indeed Hardy was like that. If we find the portrait unattractive, unadmirable even, so much the worse for us: we must learn to live with it.
The primary problem for the biographer of Hardy has always been that secretive streak in him - the side of his nature that moved him to write his own biography in his wife's name, and so construct an "official" life of blameless dullness, and that led him to burn his papers, and to leave instructions for further burnings after his death. I suppose most people do this (who would want everything he had ever written or received to survive? who, for that matter could contemplate his own life truthfully told?). But Hardy went farther than most men do. He virtually destroyed his own past, and then wrote a new one.
No fact that any biographer - including Gittings - has discovered makes Hardy's painstaking suppression of his own history quite rational to a modern reader. There were no crimes in his life, no scandals, no vices no dark betrayals. He courted some girls who he didn't marry, and he had a friend who committed suicide - that's all. But it isn't only wickedness that makes a man reticent. Hardy had risen in the world, and like many another self-made Victorian gentleman (Victorian fiction is full of them) he was anxious to obscure the actual extent of his rise. Gittings calls his secretiveness "abnormal," but if it is, it is only because Hardy worked at it abnormally hard. He worked just as hard at appearing to belong to the social world to which he had ascended. One sees this effort expressed baldly (and pitifully) in his letters to the Honourable Mrs. Henniker, the grand lady with whom he fell so hopelessly in love in his fifties. The letters are full of references to social occasions and highborn acquaintances, as though he though he might make his way into the lady's bed across the tea tables of peeresses; but nothing is said there of his own class. When he mentions Dorset at all it is to praise the healthiness of its drainage, as a country squire might; the actual Dorset world that he knew - the set of impoverished relatives that surrounded him in a ring of neighbouring villages, the family bastards and drunkards and wife-beaters - does not enter at all. Not surprisingly, the letters are very boring, and it's no wonder that Hardy's wooing didn't prosper.
It is interesting, and a fundamental truth of Hardy's mind, that what his public self suppressed, his imagination fed on; and indeed it could digest nothing else. Though he dined with the rich and the wellborn, he could not imagine them, and when he tried to put them into a novel (as in The Hand of Ethelberta, for instance) they died on the page. He could not even create their London; Dorchester was the largest community that he could handle. What he was best at was the world that he had concealed, the village and market-town world of mid-Victorian Dorset, and within that world, he was most at ease with characters who were socially insecure in it. His peasants, so long as they remain peasants, are simply stock rustics, seen with the superior, patronizing eye of a District Visitor or a Poor Law Inspector, and his gentry tend to be melodramatic and literary. It was the characters who were socially displaced by fate or fortune that fired his imagination - characters who moved up like Henchard and Bathsheba, or down like Gabriel Oak and Clym Yeobright - and he made them the living centers of his best work. These characters, socially and economically insecure, cut off from class roots and not belonging where they are, and often concealing some ostracizing secret, act out over and over again Hardy's vision of the human situation. It was a personal vision, Hardy reenacting his own case; but it was a vision that came out of a social truth of Victorian England. The social mobility, the economic uncertainty, the threat of poverty, the breaking up of stable rural life - these were all realities, and Hardy's novels are in this sense valuable historical documents. But these uprooted characters, thrust up or down out of their places in the world, are more than historical: they are exemplars of the modern myth of human homelessness. Jude is the final example, the fullest and most relentless, and it is not surprising that, having created him, Hardy stopped. What more was there to be said?
What Gittings has done, and done brilliantly, is to trace Hardy's fictional versions of this myth to their origins in the history of his own family. He has restored to the family tree those embarrassing branches that Hardy pruned - the mother who had been a domestic servant, and who was three months pregnant when she married, the uncle who was a common laborer and the one who was a cobbler and a drunkard, the lady's-maid cousin, the whole collection of impoverished failures who embody in their lives the cost of Victorian social change. In the course of putting the record straight, Gittings has written what amounts to a social history of Victorian Dorset, which in turn serves as a valuable commentary on the novels.
All this is done with a thoroughness that is admirable. Gittings has gone to the records, to Somerset House and Stinsford census reports and Parish Registers, and has put family genealogy and family history together in a way that is lucid, well documented, and absolutely convincing. The history of Hardy himself is rather more difficult; there is unfortunately no Parish Register of Broken Engagements, and no Census of Sexual Inclinations, and very little solid evidence has survived Hardy's reticent bonfires. What does a biographer do with the gaps that exist in the record? If the biographer is Lois Deacon, she invents a scandalous affair with a niece, conceives a bastard child (which is more than Hardy was able to do), and calls the whole romance Providence and Mr. Hardy. Gittings demolishes Miss Deacon's fancies in a sharp, carefully reasoned appendix that should be read by every serious Hardy scholar - as much for its exemplary method as for its sound conclusions (after which he will chuck Providenc and Mr. Hardy in the wastebasket). What he does with the gaps, instead, is to fill them with the only facts that exist: letters, notebook entries, and the dates that Hardy habitually placed beside passages in the Bible and in various favorite poems. Sometimes these dates simply record the Collect for Evensong that day, but often they seem to indicate a personal association, though it is sometimes obscure. For instance, Gittings takes it to be significant that on 31 July 1863 Hardy underlined the biblical text, "The spirit truly is ready but the flesh is weak," but he does not explain the significance beyond noting that Hardy was feeling "stress and uncertainty." The facts offered are often of this sort - a remark in a letter, a dated quotation in a book, set down because they are facts, and so properly part of the record. This biographical method has its weaknesses: it creates a person who is less vivid than he might be in a more speculative treatment. But it has the very great merit of being trustworthy, because it does not try to make speculation do the work of facts.
Gittings does have his theories of why Hardy behaved as he did, and though he has not (thank Heaven) written a psychobiography, he does go tentatively into the question of Hardy's psychological and sexual nature. Hardy, he thinks, preferred remote relationships to close ones, and that seems correct - certainly there were few close friends in his life, and not many women for eighty-eight years. He was "mother-fixed," and that, too, is probable; his mother, Jemima, was certainly a strong-willed woman who had the advantage, for a mother who wished to dominate, of a personal history of hardship and suffering (though one might expect that a mother-fixed writer would have put more domineering mothers into his novels than Hardy did - I can think offhand only of Mrs. Yeobright). The son, under her influence, was late in maturing, sexually passive, and, Gittings thinks, subconsciously envious of virile men all his life (though he seemed to like those two great begetters, Leslie Stephen and Robert Graves, well enough). Though he fell in love readily, there is not much sexual passion either in his personal writings (his honeymoon journal never mentions his wife) or in his novels until Jude (for which Mrs. Henniker may have provided the new theme of sexual frustration), and one must conclude that, like Cytherea in Desperate Remedies, he was "not at all used to an organ."
An important figure - perhaps the most important one - in Hardy's psychological and intellectual growth was his friend Horace Moule. As Gittings observes, Moule "took virtual control of Hardy's life in the year 1857," and his influence continued for nearly twenty years. Gittings treats the friendship in detail, but not, I think, altogether satisfactorily. The facts, briefly, are these: Moule was a member of the Dorchester gentry, the son of a local clergyman; he was eight years older than Hardy, university educated, and, at the time Hardy first met him, a regular reviewer for the Saturday Review. He was intelligent and literate, and to the young Hardy he represented the sophisticated literary world of London and the universities, and a source of advice on literature and life. For a time he was a schoolmaster; later he moved to Cambridge, belatedly took his degree, and became Assistant Inspector of Workhouses for East Anglia. He never married, though he was once engaged; he was subject to periods of deep depression, drank heavily at such times, and in 1873 committed suicide by cutting his throat with a razor.
Hardy recorded his relations with Moule with characteristic reticence: in the Early Life there are scattered references to him, only one of which even suggests the depth of the attachment; on 20 June 1873, Hardy visited his friend in Cambridge, and wrote in his journal:
By evening train to Cambridge. Stayed in College - Queens' - Went out with
H.M.M. after dinner. A magnificent evening: sun over 'the Backs.'
Next morning went with H.M.M. to King's Chapel early. M. opened the great West doors
to show the interior vista: we got upon the roof, where we could see Ely Cathedral gleaming
in the distant sunlight. A never-to-be-forgotten morning. H.M.M. saw me off for London.
Hardy was on his way to his fiancée in Cornwall: Moule was on his way to his death. Later Hardy added one final phrase to the note: "His last smile," and for an instant lowered the mask of reticence, and made the moment poignantly tender. At some later time he also wrote in the margin of his copy of In Memoriam, opposite the passage describing Hallam's "ethereal eyes," the note "Cambridge. H.M.M." Moule was Hardy's Hallam, with all the emotional complexities that that implies.
The one poem of Hardy's that is explicitly about Moule indicates that Hardy knew of Moule's suicidal intentions. The poem, "Standing by the Mantelpiece," carries the note "(H.M.M. 1873)"; presumably it refers to that final meeting. Hardy withheld it from publication all his life (it first appeared in the posthumous Winter Words), and there is no way of knowing when he wrote it. In the poem the speaker, who must be Moule, presses his finger into the standing wax of a burnt-down candle. In country superstition this was known as the "shroud," and the one who touched it claimed it for his own. So Moule was announcing his will to die. The person addressed in the poem is not identified, and in the absence of identification one would ordinarily take that person to be Hardy - characteristically silent and observing. But what then are we to make of these stanzas?
But since all's lost, and nothing really lies
Above but shade, and shakier shade below,
Let me make clear, before one of us dies,
My mind to yours, just now embittered so.
Since you agreed, unurged and full-advised,
And let warmth grow without discouragement,
Why do you bear you now as if surprised,
When what has come was clearly consequent?
Since you have spoken, and finality
Closes around, and my last movement loom,
I say no more: the rest must wait till we
Are face to face again yonside the tomb.
This seems a clear statement of love encouraged and then rejected, and some critics have
tried to make the situation tidy by making the silent witness a woman. Gittings recognizes
that it must be a scene between Moule and Hardy, but instead of confronting the
implications of that identification, he shifts to another issue, the "fatal secret of Moule's
personal life" - that he had fathered a bastard child. This is unsatisfactory for several reasons:
it doesn't deal with the question that the poem raises, and the fatal secret that it introduces
is the kind of dubious, third-hand gossip that he scolds Lois Deacon for indulging in. It
seems odd that, having sensibly dismissed Miss Deacon's invented bastard, he should
hasten to produce one of his own. Why this passion for bastards? Must Victorian life be made
to imitate Victorian fiction so closely?
Gitting's authority for the bastard is Richard Purdy's unpublished record of a conversation with the second Mrs. Hardy in 1933. Purdy's trustworthiness is beyond question (as any reader of his bibliography of Hardy knows), but Mrs. Hardy was capable of lying when she wished, to preserve her version of her late husband. Gittings devotes several pages to demonstrating that she did so in her account of Emma Hardy's "madness," which it suited her to exaggerate. So we can't trust Florence Hardy; and anyway, her version of the fatal secret doesn't explain the poem. The mystery of Hardy's Hallam remains a mystery still, and a central one; we won't entirely understand the young Hardy until we understand the Hardy-Moule relationship. Perhaps, we never will.
Gittings' book is, as the title announces, a truncated biography, which covers the years to
1876 with admirable thoroughness, and then bustles to the end in a single brief chapter,
more than fifty years in ten pages. The case for telling the story of Hardy's beginnings at
length is clear; Gittings says that "the true story of Hardy's early life is...essential to the
understanding of some of his finest work," and his book will persuade anyone that this
is the case: we will all read the novel differently now, because Young Thomas Hardy
exists. Still, the last fifty years happened, and life went on explaining art, and it is a pity
that Gittings' energies didn't sustain him through a second volume. Perhaps he grew tired
of his Mr. Pooter; perhaps he saw that as Hardy grew older he grew even less attractive (as
the recollections of his neighbors certainly suggest he did). Whatever the reason, he has
left the job unfinished. Perhaps he could be persuaded to take it up again and to carry the
young Thomas Hardy to his mean-spirited end as the Old Man of Max Gate, who snatched
coals off the fire to save money and undertipped the cook. Plenty of splendid facts
ahead, Mr. Gittings.
Gittings opens by reminding us why good biographies of Hardy have been so slow in coming forth: "Thomas Hardy determined to set up a barrier against biography" (p. 1). That barrier consists chiefly of the bland and ill-written "official biography" ostensibly written by Hardy's second wife but actually by Hardy himself. Its two volumes are still the main sources for the major facts of Hardy's life, though for some time now scholars and critics have found ways of contradicting or supplementing the picture of Hardy they provide. Gittings continues and consolidates the progress already made along these lines by showing concretely how much the "official biography" omitted and also the extent to which its truth was vitiated by a conscious intention to make everything appear as respectable and dignified as possible.
Another barrier is, and will continue to be, very nearly disabling for any biographer of Hardy: the unalterable fact that Hardy and his second wife destroyed the bulk of what would otherwise be his "private papers" - letters, diary entries, journals, miscellaneous notes, and recollections. Gittings's difficult task has been to make something coherent and reasonably thorough out of the materials that have survived, especially the so-called "Toucan pamphlets," the letters and papers of the Antell and Sparks families, and the Dorset County Museum and other archives.
Young Thomas Hardy very largely succeeds in doing this. We are given intelligent and often genuinely moving accounts of the major threads of Hardy's early life: his strong romantic attachment to this cousin Tryphena Sparks, which extended over a number of years and even led to an engagement; the almost magical and unpredictable counterforce of his meeting with Emma Gifford and the love, marriage, and final discontents which grew from that; his friendship with the doomed and tragic Horace Moule (whose story is forcefully told here with fresh facts and emphases); and, above all, Hardy's magnificently determined struggle to find expression for himself as a writer and to find his public as he progressed from the first effort of The Poor Man and the Lady on toward the assurance and power of Far from the Madding Crowd. Gittings is particularly good on this last and central theme and is excellent in creating a fresh sense of the importance of Leslie Stephen as editor, mentor, and representative of that far-off world of literary and social success that the Dorset Hardy was so distant from.
On almost every facet of Hardy's life he deals with, Gittings has some fresh information and emphases. He is adamant, for example, on the question of Hardy's working-class origins and family associations. His immediate relatives were laborers and domestic servants, men and women who worked with their hands and muscles. There was also a decent share of scandal and trouble among them. Yet, as Gittings shows, Thomas Hardy was frequently at pains to conceal or obscure these facts, at first from Emma Gifford, the middle-class girl whom he sought to marry, and later from the public at large through the official biography. Some of Gittings's best pages detail the torturous course Hardy pursued in detaching himself from an engagement to Tryphena Sparks (and from all association with her humble family) while simultaneously courting Emma and presenting himself in a favourable light to Emma's very different connections.
For most readers, the middle chapters, which tell the story of Hardy's early struggle for literary success and recognition, will be of prime interest. The earlier pages on his family background, childhood, and schooling are of lesser moment partly because the existing biographies have told of these matters fairly fully, but mainly because Hardy's life itself does not seem of much interest until that point at which he himself discovered that he wanted to be, and would be, a writer. That discovery, and the determination that flowed from it, give Hardy's life in Gittings's telling of it a force and a direction that justify and energize biographical concern. The later challenges of continuing creativity, of great success and fame, and of a new career as a poet, seem also to be prime material for a biographer of Gittings's capability. I hope that he will complete the task so well begun here with a volume on the middle and later years.
Gittings has included a valuable and closely argued appendix on "Hardy and Tryphena
Sparks." This may well be the first thing the reader turns to, as it was for me. It is
demolition work on Providence and Mr. Hardy, a bad book by Lois Deacon and
Terry Coleman, which has been too influential. In about seven pages of close analysis,
Gittings puts to rest once and for all, I believe, the myth of an illegitimate child fathered
by Hardy on Tryphena Sparks. The details of his analysis are convincing, and it seems to
me that Gittings's own account of Hardy's relations with Tryphena, admittedly a very
important one in his early life, is the true one so far as the truth can be known.
Such necessary carping aside, the pair of volumes make up the most reliable biography of Hardy to date, one which quashes many long-standing legends and misconceptions, and which manages to be objective about Hardy's failings as a human being while admiring its subject's tenacity as a literary artist. Few novelists have tried to live more private lives while mining their own backgrounds for their fiction, and Gittings is especially good on relating Hardy's untidy Dorset beginnings to his inventiveness as a writer. As a human being - whatever his aspirations for his art - Hardy comes off badly indeed.
A literary and social snob, despite (perhaps because of) his low origins, he needed literary ladies of higher social station around him "whom he could mastermind, and who would appreciate him." But not his wife, who brought with her modest social status, literary ability (which he ignored), and eagerness to help with his work (which he leaned upon). As late as the writing of Jude the Obscure, and its publication in 1895, the despised Emma was assisting him with details for the novel, and the image of the sour woman who wanted such novels suppressed, and who burnt his manuscripts, is "entirely false, even its smallest details." But after the break with Emma in the mid-1890s, the intellectual, society women she suspected of moving her husband into their orbit and out of her own were reproached by her as being "Jude-ite," perhaps (although Gittings does not say so) because of the Arabella figure in the novel who represented such types to the scorned wife.
One of the new women in Hardy's life early in the new century, as Hardy was moving into his late sixties, and had given up fiction for poetry, was the intellectual daughter of a schoolmaster, Florence Emily Dugdale, who was less than half the age of the distinguished elderly literary gentleman "who wandered eagerly and wistfully eyeing girls in London, where he was...,he confessed 'distracted' on the tops of omnibuses 'by young women in fluffy blouses.'" Hardy helped her with her writing, and literally rewrote some of the few stories she published under her own name. She even drew a tenderness from hardy which he had never lavished upon the now-ailing and bitter Emma, and there was a concurrent rejuvenation in Hardy and in his poetry as the attachment prospered; but when Emma finally died, Florence was wounded by Hardy's lack of interest in legalizing a relationship which had prevented her from marrying anyone else.
Finally, in 1914, Hardy gave in. Yet he did not cave in. She had asked for a settlement on their marriage, as Hardy was very likely the richest author in England, but Hardy was a peasant about money in the same way that he had never outgrown his adolescent emotions. "It seemed to annoy my husband," she said afterwards, "so I desisted." It was a mistake. He gave her instead a housekeeping allowance so small that she had to take money from her other allowance, for her own clothes, to make ends meet. When she needed minor surgery and a stay in a nursing home, Hardy made her pay for both out of her own savings, although six years earlier "no trouble had been too much for him to protect her health."
The old man's self-absorption was absolute, but Florence was loyal, and - however lonely and miserable - she hardly every left their remote and uncomfortable Dorset home from the time they married until Hardy's death at eight-eight, in 1928. The image of the devoted, admiring, protective young wife, novelized by Somerset Maugham in Cakes and Ale, does not tell the real story of the ungenerous and mean marriage which visitors to Max Gate never saw. Maugham reinforced the legend.
Always feeling threatened by his past - how, in a class-conscious country, revelation of his social and educational origins might undermine his literary eminence - Hardy became, in his late seventies, terrified by the likelihood of probing biographers, and determined to produce the authoritative (and flattering) version of his life himself. No one had recognized the deception when he published two stories under Florence's name in the Cornhill. Now in 1917, he began a literary imposture which succeeded beyond his expectations. Hardy wrote his biography, by hand and in the third person, as if the author were Florence, and as she typed the copy, the original manuscript and all the notes and diaries and letters upon which it was based were destroyed. As Gittings notes, alterations and additions were often made by Hardy in his own hand, arrogantly assuming the perfection of the concealment, and events he remembered very well were often described with a deliberate vagueness, as if Florence were unsure of the facts. Even when Florence found his snobbery about the country houses he visited, and the titled with whom he sat down to dinner, excessive, she dutifully typed everything, and abetted his concealment of the real man. And the pair, who now cared little for each other, became "the prisoners of this deception they had deliberately started," the decade-long process increasing the strain on the participants.
When Hardy died, on the eve of Florence's forty-ninth birthday, she managed to produce the first volume of the alleged Life with what should have been suspected as suspicious speed, taking time only to remove nearly every complimentary reference to Emma, who had become more dear to the old man after she had died. The phoniness of the biography remained unperceived for years, although a few close friends, like James Barrie, know of the fraud; and my fairly recent Macmillan reprint continues to describe the book on the title page as by Florence Emily Hardy, while library card files universally continue to misattribute the Life. Almost the only handiwork of the second Mrs. Hardy in it remains the wholesale deletion of references to the first Mrs. Hardy.
Florence survived only an "almost totally sad" nine years. All the things she had longed for - a car, a visit to Italy, replacement of the gloomy old furniture - were useless to her as she was a dying woman; the many minor operations she had undergone in her husband's lifetime to stave off cancer kept her going only until October 1937. Her Hardy secrets went with her - or at least those not brought to the surface by such dogged researchers as Robert Gittings.