The value of the range of materials used by Millgate is evident when one remembers the special problems Hardy presents to a biographer, taking into account the consequences of the famous bonfires at Max Gate before and immediately after Hardy's death. After writing sections of his autobiography (posthumously published, and under the "authorship" of Florence) Hardy burned much of the material on which the typescript is based; and after he died Florence, Hardy's literary co-executor Sir Sydney Cockerell, and the Max Gate yardman burned masses of his papers (and probably Emma's as well, and possibly some of Florence's), a job that occupied them for days. Most of this detritus likely consisted of invitations to incidental social engagements, newspapers and clippings, proof sheets (which also would be invaluable for reasons other than biographical), outdated or otherwise invalid business papers (Hardy was a landlord and investor), and the like; but there surely was also a good deal of material - letters, rough drafts of replies, papers dealing with family matters, notebooks, diaries - that could have been applied to many of the biographical puzzles in Hardy's life that remain dead ends for the inquisitive and even indefatigable biographer. By other means - including silence - Hardy disguised or obscured many aspects of his life about which he was sensitive. No biographer has overcome Hardy's determination to secure a measure of privacy and to maintain it after his death. Still, Hardy could not have anticipated that he would become the object of such devotion and curiosity as have led to scannings of church and public records through the Western Counties in search of evidence of his and his ancestors' doings, an activity that has led to the unveiling of a series of illegitimacies and short-term pregnancies culminating in Hardy's own birth less than six months after the marriage of his parents, and to such disputes as to whether the Mary Head arrested in 1797 for theft and imprisoned in Reading under threat of hanging according to the stern laws of that time (the charge was dismissed when the accusers failed to appear to give evidence) was Hardy's grandmother or someone entirely unrelated to his family (Millgate takes the latter position, thereby removing a biographical or familial aspect from Tess's execution). Such obsessive biographers simply were not around in the 1920s, although Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians could well have made Hardy apprehensive lest skeptical glances be turned to his own background, however modestly reversionary of the facts his public claims were. On the other hand, his irritation with F. A. Hedgcock's 1911 biography for reading fiction as personal fact certainly now seems prescient: every biographer fits the characters, plots, and situations of Hardy's stories and poems into biographical speculations, but then indeed Hardy's own autobiography hints at personal connections, sometimes through disclaimers that he surely knew would fool no one, once they were in print, such as the quotation from his 1912 letter asserting that Clym Yeobright is "not a bit like me" (The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1930, p. 151).
If Hardy had any dark secrets he has preserved them; but Millgate has turned up a mass of new information that helps to fill out our picture of his character. A few points: Hardy kept by his bedside all his life a copy of The Thoughts of the Emperor M. Aurelius Antonius, a gift from his friend and early literary mentor Horace Moule (p. 87); after Emma's death the calendar on Hardy's desk was permanently set for the day they had met forty-two years earlier, 7 March (p. 125) - a memorial that must have aggravated Florence all the years of their marriage; a letter from Hardy to Florence in 1915 says he is willing to pay the extra expenses if she needs to stay longer at the nursing home before returning to Max Gate after her nose operation, amending the general criticism of Hardy hinging upon his supposedly forcing her to pay her own medical expenses (p. 503 n.). There are numerous biographical identifications, some that amplify or modify already accepted ascriptions, as, for example, that Hardy's uncle John Antell was "central to the whole conception of Jude the Obscure" (p. 108). Millgate pins down the "originals" of Tess Durbeyfield (pp. 293-94), usefully suggests that both Alec and Angel stem from the two sides of the personality of Horace Moule (p. 295), thinks that Hardy drew upon his father as a model for Giles Winterborne (pp. 279-80), and points out parallels between Mary Wheeler, whose trial and execution for murder were reported in London newspapers in 1890, and Sue Bridehead (p. 347). Millgate superbly analyzes Hardy's poetic use of some of his materials (pp. 87-90) and the autobiographical aspect of such novels as The Hand of Ethelberta (p. 174) and The Mayor of Casterbridge (pp. 248-55). One of the identifications that will probably be controversial is that of Eliza Nicholls, previously unnoted by Hardy biographers, as "the most important figure in Hardy's early emotional life" (p. 84), to whom, Millgate speculates, Hardy was engaged from 1863 to 1867, and who served (according to her own claim) as the model for Cytherea in Desperate Remedies (p. 118) and (according to Millgate) as the inspiration for Hardy's "She, to Him" poems and "Neutral Tones" (pp. 100-101, 118). The evidence for Millgate's strong claims for Eliza Nicholls consists of notes of conversations with Eliza's niece and letters from the niece, all in Purdy's collection (cf. n. 37 on p. 587), as is a photo given by Hard to Eliza "ca. 1862" (n. 39). Millgate's confidence that the letters burned at the beginning of the serial version of The Well-Beloved are Eliza's (p. 119) perhaps stretches the limits to which an event in fiction can be identified with a putative even in an author's life; but, all in all, Millgate's confident tracings between real and imagined occurrences are plausible.
At this time in the study of Hardy's life the large issues appear to be settled, with many comparatively minor points still in dispute. Emma was mentally unstable; and whether one wishes to call that condition "legally certifiable" or simply the manifestation of the strain of living with a man like Hardy, ruthless in finding time and a place to write, distant in personal relations (he hated to be touched), and famous to a degree that lifted him right out of Emma's ken, seems to be a matter of opinion despite all the evidence that can be parceled into one or the other positions. Another point of general agreement is that Hardy fell in love constantly and easily and that he never forgot the emotion connected to a particular person and place; whether this reflected emotional propensity or, especially after middle life, largely a creative writer's means of collecting material to write about (in much the way that he frequented London social scenes partly for material for use in novels) has not been fully argued. Hardy's mother dominated a good portion of his life, and one of Millgate's contributions - not previously known to me, anyway - is the information that Jemima Hardy strongly urged her children not to marry but to live together as a sort of mutual defense society against the world; Jemima's behavior, in time, also helped mar Hardy's first marriage; but even Millgate's great amount of research and careful sifting of evidence do not finally determine the causes of the uneven relationship between Emma and her husband's family, which eventually collapsed totally, Emma forbidding Hardy's mother and siblings to come to Max Gate and remaining at Max Gate herself while Hardy continued to visit his family regularly at their nearby homes.
To a remarkable extent writers and readers of biographies of modern writers are
insistent upon the accuracy of portrayals of events and situations, and for no writer
is this more the case than for Hardy. His life was most probably humdrum; but readers
seem all the more determined to have the truth about its details, as if they need to
have the security of knowing the literal facts of events affecting this writer, the success
of whose works relies on the impression of complete honesty. The greatest remaining
source of unpublished information about Hardy is unquestionably the notes and
reminiscences deriving from conversations with Florence. Millgate's biography should
provide adequate demand that these notes be published. Hardy evidently talked about
nearly everything with Florence. How else to explain her knowledge of Emma's attire
in Dublin in 1893 and her ability to characterize it as "ludicrously inappropriate"
(pp. 335-36), and n. 28 on p. 602), her knowing that Hardy and Mrs. Henniker had once
during an innocent tryst been ushered into the same bedroom at an inn so they could
wash their hands (p. 340, and n. 39 on p. 603), and her ability to "confirm" that "Hardy
and Mrs. Hennniker never exchanged a single kiss" (p. 340, and n. 41 on p. 603)?
Florence was a promulgator, if not the originator, of the stories about Emma's mental
condition and the hellishness of Hardy's first marriage; the precise ways in which people
heard her refer to such matters as these would contribute to our understanding of Hardy's
life and possibly also some of his works. To help us grasp the complex emotions
surrounding the relations among Emma, Florence, and Hardy - Florence initially was
Hardy's friend (probably not mistress, Millgate believes), then was Emma's confidante
(her loyalty to Hardy being divided as she was told something of Hardy's behavior as a
husband), and then became Hardy's secretary/wife (publicly humiliated as Hardy published
poem after poem about or to Emma, most of the testimonies to his death-transcending
devotion) - it would be invaluable to have as many as possible of these interview notes
to read for ourselves.
In Millgate's work, the dangers of triviality and contention disappear under the calm weight of measured authority that has become familiar to us from his co-editorship of Hardy's Collected Letters. That editorship has stood the present volume in very good stead. To the extent that it is possible to have a day-to-day familiarity with the events, both major and minor, of Hardy's life, Millgate has it. He also has a luxury denied to other Hardy scholars, access to materials in the possession of the co-editor of the Letters, Richard Little Purdy. These include notes on the conversations that Purdy had with Hardy's widow between 1929 and 1936, a "Studies, Specimens &c" notebook kept by Hardy in the 1860s, and a photocopy of a notebook containing "Poetical Matter." Combined with the research materials collected by the late Professor Harold Hoffman (currently being worked on by Michael Rabiger), these resources provide information unavailable even as recently as the publication of the second volume of Robert Gittings' biography five years ago. Millgate's vast knowledge of the minutiae of Hardy's life, culled from his years of work on the letters, makes him the ideal repository for this newly available material.
Of especial interest is Hardy's relationship with Eliza Bright Nicholls and her sister Mary Jane, to the former of whom hardy seems "to have been more or less formally engaged from about 1863 to 1867." Many of the poems formerly appropriated by the champions of Tryphena Sparks as evidence of the stages in her relationship with Hardy (including the "She to Him" sonnets and "Neutral Tones") become far more plausibly associated with Eliza Nicholls, an association buttressed by Hardy's illustration for "She to Him. I." in Wessex Poems. Millgate also brings out of the shadows Hardy's possible relationship with another Dorset girl, Cassie Pole, further lightening the emotional load that for so long, for lack of other contenders, rested on the shoulders of Tryphena.
But as important as the emergence of new personalities is the renewed interest that Millgate bestows upon familiar ones: the relationships with Horace Moule, Florence Henniker, Mary Jeune, and Edmund Gosse are all enlarged. Most importantly, Hardy's relationships with both his wives are presented sensitively and with a reluctance to make facile judgments on complex matters. Particularly well developed are the difficulties faced by both women as a result of marrying into the clannish Hardy's, and marrying the only one of the Hardy children to marry and thereby upset the mother's fantasy of her two sons and daughters living in pairs, son with daughter, and preserving the Hardy solidarity against all comers. The roots that Hardy needed, and by which his best works were nourished, were as much roots of family as of place, and neither the Hardys nor Dorset assimilated newcomers particularly enthusiastically.
Millgate wears his compendious knowledge easily. The vast quantity of endnotes that such a work necessitates are consigned discreetly to the back pages and do not trammel up the ongoing momentum of the narrative; nor do the occasional footnotes with their confident correction of past misconceptions or their elaborations of peripheral matters. The different stages of Hardy's life are judiciously balanced and discussion of individual works often locked into those stages in a way that illuminates both life and works (one remembers the useful matching of the two, with the greater emphasis then on the works rather than the life, in Millgate's earlier work Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist [1971], which is still one of the best studies of Hardy's prose). If there are errors in the meticulous scholarship, they too are discreet; the only one this reader noticed came with the citing of a letter to Florence Henniker as one to Frederick Harrison. Even the choice of photographs provides a pleasant bonus, with some old faithfuls retired and replaced by less familiar ones.
Since the scholarship is so meticulous it might logically carry with it the corresponding disadvantages of dryness and pedantry, the frequent consequences of too sharp a focus. That those pitfalls are avoided is a function of Millgate's ability to make fact serve interpretation and instinct. Never merely fanciful but always imaginatively convincing, the picture of Hardy that emerges may not invite a radical modification of preconceptions but it does give him a substance that, for all the traditional emphasis on local history and reminiscence, has hitherto been lacking. The sense of a Hardy shaped by family experience and a growing social prominence that sorted ill with it does much to explain the paradoxes of his personality: the desire for seclusion matched by the fascination with the socially prominent, the preoccupation with private history matched by the desire to conceal that turns it into art. Whether or not the story of Hardy's mother, Jemima, waving her handkerchief from the side of the road at the hundred prominent journalists on their way to honour Hardy and take tea at Max Gate is apocryphal, it provides an image that does much to illuminate the conflicting but complementary impulses in Hardy's life.
Given the close relationship between Hardy's own experience and his work, a useful
biography of him has inevitably to be a literary biography. It is one of the great merits of
Millgate's book that in pursuing the man it never loses sight of the works. And because
Millgate, like Hardy, is a man who notices the minor detail and, unlike many biographers,
knows what to do with it, we now have a life that makes of Hardy the man and Hardy the
writer the single person that we always sensed they were.
To these materials Millgate has added others: inscriptions and annotations in journals and books, many institutional records, and specific locations of places where Hardy lived or stayed. Such a gathering is never definitive, but is more than we have had assembled before and enough to give us a richer sense of a whole. The details in this record portray a man as he emerged from, and was sustained by, social relations of family, sex, class, culture, work. Yet for all his receptiveness to social detail Millgate avoids the extreme of reducing the life to social history; at the same time he avoids portraying the life in isolation and set apart, as in the sentimental or reverential "great man" biographies that strike us now as narrow and naive.
Because of its 1982 publication date this biography will inevitably be compared with the three-volume biographical series by Robert Gittings (1975, Young Thomas Hardy; 1978 The Older Hardy; 1979, with Jo Manton, The Second Mrs. Hardy). In any such comparison it should be useful to see the different attitudes each has taken to the "official" biography, the Life of Thomas Hardy written by Florence Hardy (1928, 1930) and authorized (and to a great extent authored) by Hardy himself, a work that can be read as a "great man" biography simply by virtue of the fact that is subject was famous, though not because Hardy made any such claim for himself. For Gittings, the trouble with the image presented in the Life is that, while it nowhere explicitly claims nobility and greatness (magnanimity motivated by generosity and good will) for the author, it implicitly, discreetly omits or covers over what is lowly, and considered by the author shameful, in that history. Gittings sets out to reverse positive and negative in the image, bringing the unflattering elements out of the shadows and making the flattering ones less important. In contrast, Millgate's attitude to the Life seems less revisionist and less deconstructive. He fills in details missing in the Life (in the background and in areas that the Life passes over), adjusting some of its points and emphases but on the whole accepting it. Because both biographies give us a valuable sense of social density and both treat many of the same points, yet both finally tell such different stories, I too shall use basic points of comparison between them to structure my discussion of Millgate's work.
First, as the later biographer, and one with privileged access to materials that Gittings and other scholars could not study, Millgate is able to fill in specific points that Gittings must leave blank. The chief of these is the name of the young woman to whom Hardy was engaged from 1863 to 1866, and whose letters were probably the source of the attitudes and even the phrases of the female speaker of the "She, to Him" poems. Second, there is a striking difference in the overall emphasis - in tone and in substance - of the two studies. Where Gittings posits a simple dichotomy between noble and mean motivation in Hardy (for instance, presenting a detail from the end of Hardy's life as revealing yet again that "tragi-comic contrast between mean and noble" that "haunted [Hardy's] living days"; The Older Hardy, p. 211), Millgate does not use those qualities as antitheses or hypotheses for Hardy. (Indeed, all the characters in his account are portrayed as though they had complex realities independent of the biography.)
Millgate brings to bear on the issues of Hardy's life a historical perspective that seems more informed, more able to "fuse horizons" between New World, late-twentieth-century social assumptions and those that held for Hardy's time and place. What Gittings attempts to expose and build on is the apparent contradiction between Hardy's lower-class birth and childhood and Hardy's portrayal, in adult life, of those origins as "higher" than they actually were. Millgate's biography puts this contradiction into historical context. Early in his first chapter he provides an objective basis for Hardy's claim: in the early 1800s the rural classes were being affected by the spread of literacy and changes in labor, and there were families at the upper level of the lower class who had special opportunities to contract their skills and services to the classes above them - a development which gave them an extra measure of mobility, enterprise, but also of risk. Millgate goes on to explain why this discrimination would have been important to Hardy: "Such discriminations mattered at the time - they have not, in England, ceased to matter even now - and it was a desire for accuracy rather than a sense of snobbery which led Hardy to insist, in his later years, upon distinctions which had to do not only with his own background but also with the fates of such fictional characters as Stephen Smith, Gabriel Oak, Michael Henchard, and Giles Winterbourne" (p. 26). Thus points that might seem to bear a dark significance to Gittings and other readers without this historical perspective are set in context, normalized, as Millgate reviews them. He turns this same historically sympathetic, normalizing light on other points in Hardy's life that readers have remarked on and found hard to tally with the compassionate, philosophic voice in Hardy's writings. Point by point the course of Hardy's life, from Bockhampton to Dorchester to London and the suburbs and back to Dorchester, to Max Gate, is shown by Millgate not as a climb or a flight but as a continuous line, frequently circling back upon itself, whose end point was steadily seeking to express and fulfill its beginnings.
One other remarkable feature in Millgate's handling of the facts of Hardy's story is his placement of those facts, the way he separates his evidence from the interpretations he draws from and around it. (Gittings's purpose, of doing battle with the authorized life, would seem to have ruled out his achieving objectivity in this particular way.) Millgate's handling of evidence is his thesis. In the text itself names and numbers specifying who, what, when, where, how, and why are presented carefully and calmly. After several such specifications, or at the end of a paragraph, a small superscript number directs the reader to notes at the end of the book listing the sources (in twenty-seven double columned pages) for each piece of the story; the presence of this substantiation is quiet, unobtrusive, and telling. Moreover, when Millgate in his account offers explanations or speculations on those recorded "facts," these narrative additions are consistently set off by wording that marks them as inferential (careful adverbs that range from "perhaps," presumably," "evidently," to "almost certainly"; discreet impersonal constructions such as "it seems tempting to give credence to"; "it seems necessary to assume that"; "it is proper to add that"). The combination - the biographer's "objective" treatment of data, together with the restraints he sets upon his persuasive (and self-persuasive) rhetoric - makes us more willing to entertain his "subjective" interpretations, some of which we have noted under the headings discussed above and all of which are offered as readings that can be checked against the record of evidence, just as that record can be checked against the reliability of its earliest witnesses and recorders. It is this leaving of a space between evidence and interpretation that makes this biography so useful for interpretations to come and should earn it a place on library shelves next to the "authorized" biography that it sympathetically and intelligently augments.
We come finally to the great challenge to the biographer, the relating of the art to the life; and here again we see the virtue of Millgate's tactful treatment of evidence. Prominent in his data are views articulated by Hardy on his own artistic intentions and practice. The main source for these in the past has been the Life; the comments Millgate includes are mostly drawn from other sources, many unpublished. He inserts them into his record much as Hardy did in the Life, chronologically, so that they are not pressed to serve any interpretive thesis but stand free to give us a sense of their own consistency of preoccupation, over time.
Many of the illustrate Hardy's efforts to set forth "emotion into measure" (his definition of poetry in the Life, but one we can extend to his imaginative prose also), using arrangements of words that would recapture the original sensory vividness and freshness of those experiences. To readers of Hardy the results seem so "natural," nearly sensed and closely felt and directly conveyed; yet Millgate's quotations show that they are the consequence of many highly conscious choices and practices regarding frequency of revisions; deliberate attempts to release emotion through memory; variations in diction, rhyme, and meter; and alterations of lyric with prosaic, rough with smooth, fluid with dry, to achieve naturalness of effect. The two impulses are one in Hardy's art: the direct allegiance to nature, to lived experience; the indirection that uncovers and newly covers that experience. In his descriptions of the composing of the novels Millgate makes us appreciate the fact that in them, also, Hardy's urge for "intense autobiographical recovery" is no simple matter to be simply identified, but a process of dismembering as much as remembering, transforming even while transferring.
"Associate with" is a phrase that Millgate sometimes employs for the people, places, experiences in the life that were imaginative sources for configurations in the literature. It is a tactful usage, another of the ways this biographer keeps from pinning down and reducing the life and freedom of his subject. But "association" carries touch, as well as looseness, in its meanings, and Millgate conveys this sense also, a sense important to Hardy himself, that the art took rise out of an actual world of historical time and visitable place. Often Millgate provides footnote references noting what can still be found in 1980s of the actual buildings and landmarks associate with hardy in his lifetime. Such asides can seem of limited interest, more for the tourist than the scholar and soon to be outdated; but they have a more lasting interest if they are read as illustrative of the associative connections between the world experienced and the world imagined. Millgate helps us to appreciate the power of association: visitable yet irrecoverable, tangible yet intangible, association persists, making possible metaphor, story, and poetry out of the original humane emotion that compresses into one imaginative imprint stimulus and response, vehicle and tenor, object and desire, place and place-feeling. Sometimes in their intensity the imprints issue into compelling languages that continues the process in reverse: from the word to the other's imagination and feelings and on out to the other's experience in the world - issuing forth even in the pilgrimages of the tourist.
We ask the impossible from the biography of an artist, that it show us how raw experience
is transmuted into art, how the prosaic becomes poetry, so that we may enjoy and
control this mystery in ourselves. Wisely, Millgate's biography resists our demand. We
cannot pluck out the heart of the mystery in Hardy or in ourselves; the nearest we can
come is by association.