REVIEWS OF MICHAEL MILLGATE, THOMAS
John Lucas.
Times Literary
Supplement. No. 5317 (25
February 2005).
Richard Nemesvari. Letter to the Editor, Times
Literary Supplement. No. 5324
(15 April 2005).
John Lucas. Letter to the Editor, Times Literary Supplement. No. 5325 (22 April 2005).
Keith Wilson. Literary
Review of Canada 13.5 (June 2005).
Robert
Schweik. University of Toronto Quarterly (Winter
2005).
John Lucas.
Times Literary
Supplement. No. 5317 (
Trade Terms
Although he was an admirer of Thomas Hardy’s
fiction, Leslie Stephen felt that the novelist too frequently allowed his
heroines to marry unsuitable men. But women often did marry the wrong man,
Hardy explained. “Not in magazines”, Stephen said firmly. The interchange tells
us something about both men. Stephen had serialized Under the Greellwood Tree in the Cornhill
Magazine, of which he was Editor, but he did not take Hardy’s
subsequent novels. He had a readership to maintain, and if that readership
demanded happy endings, then happy endings it should have. Hardy, keen though
he was to secure financial benefits from his writing, was obdurate when it
came to aesthetic proprieties, even though these were liable to bring him into
conflict with editorial and reviewerly sensibilities
that more often than not shaded into Grundyism. And to read
Two years later, Sir Walter Besant, in a lecture
to the Society of Authors (of which he was then President), championed the
cause of fiction as “an art in every way worthy to be called the sister and
equal of all other arts”. Writing fiction is, he maintained, a profession; at
the same time, fiction makers must consider their readers. Readers, indeed, are
the central consideration of Besant’s lecture. If a
novel fails to gain popularity, the blame almost certainly lies with the
novelist. It was this, of course, that prompted Henry James to produce his
magisterial reply, “The Art of Fiction”, in which he opposes the popular and
the good, and argues that the writer’s sole responsibility is to his art. Hardy
was without doubt on James’s side. This didn’t save him from James’s famous
moment of condescension towards the critical and financial success of “the
good little” novelist’s Tess of the
D’Urbervilles (though by then James’ novels had become the victim of what
he, only half ironically, called a conspiracy of silence). Hardy, by contrast,
had achieved fame and even modest fortune, and all, it
would appear, without becoming any less obdurate in defence
of
his art.
When the blether of the Grundys became intolerable,
as it did on the appearance of Jude the Obscure, he made that his excuse
to turn from novels to poetry.
Whether he was equally obdurate in his private life has been much
debated. At the heart of this debate are his two marriages, especially his long
and increasingly unhappy marriage to Emma Gifford. Explanations for the growing
rift between them have been endlessly sought by Hardy’s
biographers. During their courtship each deceived the other over the exact
nature of their social status. In their early married life they shifted from
house to house with what might seem an almost indecent frequency, and shuttled
between town and country, always at Hardy’s behest.
Emma wanted to move in social circles, Hardy was all for privacy. Both were
grieved at not having children. There were no doubt other tensions; there
always are. Yet when, in the autumn and winter of 1880-81, and while he was
immersed in the writing of A Laodicean, Hardy
fell dangerously and painfully ill, Emma behaved with unimprovable
consideration to her husband. Millgate remarks that during the long months of
his illness, Hardy’s “only recourse was to dictate
the text to Emma, and in the event it was only her devoted assistance in the
multiple roles of nurse, housekeeper and amanuensis that enabled him to keep up
with the printer and so meet his obligations”. Admiration for Hardy’s determination to keep going in such circumstances
has surely to be matched by admiration for Emma’s equal capacity for drudgery.
That the marriage later iced over is as undeniable as it is sad, but nothing is
to be gained by trying to apportion blame. As Henry James said, a propos of J.
A. Froude’s attempts to write history as biography,
we cannot view individuals singly, and in order to “judge them morally we are
obliged to push our enquiry through a concatenation of causes and effects in
which, from their delicate nature, enquiry very soon becomes impracticable, and
thus we are reduced to talking sentiment”.
It should be said that, for the most part, Millgate spares us any finger-pointing.
Yet there is inevitably something reductive about his biography, which shows
itself in what he must presumably feel is his duty to
trace art back to its roots in life. The upshot is an amount of speculation
that is frankly beside the point and no more than a way of “talking sentiment”.
And so, when he comes to the great sequence of poems that Hardy wrote after
Emma’s death, Millgate says only that there is “general consent” that the
sequence is “probably the highest point of [Hardy’s]
achievement in verse”. He then quotes “The Voice” in its entirety and it seems
reasonable to suppose he will take some time to discuss this wonderful poem.
Not a bit of it. We are told that Florence Dugdale, Hardy’s newly acquired second wife, found herself defenceless in the face of
this and the other poems, “unable to prevent herself from reading them as a
series of directly personal statements of the most negative kind”. When a
correspondent, Lady Hoare, pointed out that the poems were “essentially dramatic”,
Florence was only partly reassured. She still felt “a sense of grievance at the
inclusion of so many poems to Emma”. And that is that.
But surely the best - perhaps the only good reason for writing about
Hardy is that he is a great writer. This being so, it is not unnatural to
expect some attempt to establish the worth of his writings as works of art.
Unfortunately, on neither the poetry nor the prose does Millgate have anything
to say that is truly illuminating. (And
this, it has to be remarked, is in steep contrast to the late Martin Seymour
Smith, who goes unmentioned in Millgate’s
bibliography, but whose biography, wild though it undoubtedly was, contained
any number of telling discussions of Hardy’s work.)
To take just one example: of The Hand of Ethelberta,
Millgate remarks
that
it is possible to argue that many aspects of Hardy’s
own situation are reflected in Ethelberta’s. . . he must in some sense have been writing
an allegory of his own career. But Hardy had already shown himself in A Pair of Blue Eyes to
be capable of extraordinary innocence in dealing with autobiographical material. . . .
“Possible to argue”; “must in some sense”: these and other such phrases
that are thickly sown throughout Thomas Hardy: A biography revisited, exemplify
that besetting sin of biography, evasiveness masquerading as both knowledge
and judgement. They certainly don’t tell us whether A
Pair of Blue Eyes is any good.
Or is it unfair to expect a biographer to do the critic’s work? A
thirty-pound book is there to give you all the facts, and this Millgate undoubtedly
does. As a result, he earns our thanks for providing, if not the definitive
biography that his publishers announce, then one that ought to be the standard
reference work for years to come. It is especially pleasing to be able to
report that there are some additions to the illustrations of Millgate’s Life, and that others
have been cleaned up and are as a result far easier on the eye than were those
of the earlier version. Anyone demanding more information about Hardy’s life than Millgate supplies would be impossibly
hard to please. Even here, though, I find myself not entirely convinced by the
enterprise. In keeping his gaze so unswervingly on his chosen subject, the
biographer doesn’t sufficiently see in what ways Hardy is representative of
movements and forces that define the period during which he grew to maturity
and which helped to shape him. As a writer, Hardy was uniquely gifted. But he
didn’t come from nowhere. His early labours at what
was called in the long stretch of the mid-nineteenth century,
“self-improvement”, especially his before- and after-hours slog at learning
foreign languages, are in no sense unique. Nor is his reticence and (even)
deception about his class origins, nor his determination to make his way as a
man of a “respectable profession”, and with luck become someone of “independent
means”. (Before he was able to devote his life to writing, and while he was
still practising in an architect’s office, Hardy had
considered the possibility of that most respectable of middle-class
professions, the clergy.) At one point, Millgate invokes The Rainbow in
order to suggest that Hardy anticipates Lawrence’s acting as “interpreter of
that rural world to an urban world that had grown from it”; true, but of far
less interest or relevance than the work of John Clare, or Richard Jefferies,
or
Hardy Serialized
Sir, – John Lucas’s rather Laodicean review
of
John
Lucas. Letter to the
Editor, Times Literary Supplement. No. 5325 (
Hardy Serialized
Sir, –
Literary Soul-Mates
Despite the substantial amount of time I have spent
over the years in the company of his writings, Thomas Hardy has only ever
figured once in my dreams. I was hosting
a dinner party at which Hardy was proving to be an amiable guest, particularly
after a glass or two of wine. He had
been commenting at some length, and plausibly enough given their shared Dorset
associations, on what a nice man he had found John Fowles
to be. Lulled into a false sense of
confidence by his apparently easygoing relationship with conventional temporal
constraints, I asked him if he had ever met
Notwithstanding
the unfaultable logic displayed by my dream-conjured Hardy, readers of Thomas Hardy: A
Biography Revisited might be forgiven for coming away from this book with
the impression that Hardy and Millgate must have been on exceptionally intimate
terms. How else could a biographer,
however assiduous, have accumulated and synthesized such a remarkable quantity
of sensitively interpreted circumstantial detail about the life of a man as
reticent as Hardy? Why does every fact
asserted and judgement made feel so right,
particularly given the amount of biographical writing on Hardy that before the
publication of the original 1982 version of Millgate’s
biography managed to get things so wrong?
The answer lies in the cumulative power of an incisive analytical mind,
a sensibility matched sympathetically with Hardy’s
own, and a forty-year span of exemplary scholarship. There are many Hardy
scholars in the world, but only one who could have written this book in either
its new or original incarnation, so grounded is it in Millgate’s
previous work and his unrivalled engagement with his subject.
Even
for those Hardyans old enough to remember the
scholarly context for Hardy studies before
The
biography and the letters would in themselves have been enough to assure the
enduring association of Millgate’s name with Hardy’s. But his
biographical work has still wider dimensions that place him in a recuperative,
not to say quasi-collaborative, role, in relation to the terminal unfulfilled
intentions of Hardy’s own publishing career. It was only twenty years ago that references
to the Hardy-authored Life – fruit of
a touchingly devious exercise in self-protection that saw him preparing his own
biography for eventual publication under the name of his second wife, Florence
Emily -- still perforce had to come from the version doctored by Florence, with
the assistance of the well-meaning Sir James Barrie, and published in two
volumes, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy,
1840-1891 (Macmillan, 1928) and The
Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892-1928 (Macmillan, 1930), soon after her
husband’s death. Millgate reconstructed
the version that Hardy himself intended for publication and at last made it
available under its original title, The
Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (Macmillan, 1985). This is now the edition of preferred citation
for all Hardy scholars.
As
recently as four years ago Millgate’s edited
collection of Hardy’s miscellaneous non-fiction prose
Thomas Hardy’s
Public Voice (Clarendon 2001) increased more than three-fold the quantity
of such material that could be found collected between a single set of
covers. The selected edition of Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy (Clarendon, 1996); the co-edited
Thomas Hardy’s
‘Studies, Specimens &c.’ Notebook (Clarendon 1994), his co-editor being
Pamela Dalziel of the University of British Columbia,
one of the numerous Canadian Hardy scholars Millgate has helped train; Thomas
Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (re-issued by Macmillan in 1994, more than
twenty years after its original appearance), the best single study of Hardy’s fiction – all attest to Millgate’s
unassailable position as the world’s foremost Hardy scholar. He has placed the
English Department of the University of Toronto firmly in the consciousness of
Hardy scholars and enthusiasts everywhere.
It is therefore fitting that when some of the results of his research
recently found expression in electronic form with the preparation of a website
providing a reconstruction of the contents of Hardy’s
library at Max Gate, the house in Dorchester in which the author lived for
close to half his life and where he died in his 88th year, its
address should have been www.library.utoronto.ca/fisher/hardy.
One
vicarious access to Hardy granted Millgate in the earlier years of his work and
now lost to all future scholars has been conversation with numbers of people
who had known in person this last survivor of the truly great Victorian
writers. A man of modest rural origins,
by the time of his death Hardy was so eminent that while his heart (excised by
macabre executor’s fiat the night before the funeral and sealed in a Max Gate
biscuit tin before encasement in its burial casket) was interred in Emma Hardy’s grave in the churchyard at Stinsford, the
parish in which Hardy was born and with which his family and writing were most
intimately associated, his ashes were deposited in Westminster Abbey – and this
despite his long-standing identification as one of England’s most outspoken agnostics. A further testimony to his stature is that
his pall-bearers were the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, the two
heads of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges of which Hardy was an Honorary
Fellow, and six fellow writers (Sir James Barrie, John Galsworthy, Sir Edmund
Gosse, A. E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling, and George
Bernard Shaw), two of whom had received for their services to literature the
knighthood that Hardy himself had declined.
Among those younger contemporaries known personally to this almost
legendary “grand old man of English letters” and who lived long enough to be
interviewed by Millgate were the novelist E. M. Forster, the publisher and
Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, the poet and critic Edmund Blunden,
and the amateur actress, Gertrude Bugler, Hardy’s
ideal Tess Durbeyfield and
unwitting focus of the last of his at times unwise infatuations with
unavailable women. Along with the two
American Hardyans Richard Little Purdy and Frederick
Baldwin Adams, who in youth had known Florence Hardy and in maturity became
renowned scholar-collectors of Hardy manuscripts and editions, such observant
eye-witnesses have helped give Millgate’s
biographical work that living texture suggestive of first-hand engagement with
its subject. Even if Thomas Hardy and
This
is, as Millgate’s Prologue indicates, a “new,
expanded, and extensively revised” (2) edition of the biography, containing
substantial new information that has come to light over the last twenty
years. This is particularly true of
matters pertaining to the relationships between Hardy and his wives, between
Emma and Florence themselves, and between them – most particularly Emma – and Hardy’s parents or siblings. Perhaps the most astonishing item in any of
the surviving correspondence by either Hardy, Emma or Florence is the vitriolic
letter, quoted by Millgate in full, sent in 1896 by Emma to her sister-in-law,
Mary Hardy, after more than twenty years of difficult relations with this
inward-looking family into which she had married, and whose strong-willed
matriarch, Jemima Hardy, had nurtured the hope (destroyed by the incursion of
Emma) of her two sons and two daughters living in paired solidarity, son with
daughter. What convoluted mazes of cross-class suspicion, what parental and
spousal jealousies, emotional deprivations and betrayals, must lie behind such
an outburst as the following:
You
have ever been my causeless enemy – causeless, except that I stand in the way
of your evil ambition to be on the same level as your brother by trampling upon
me. . . .You are a witch-like creature & quite equal to any amount of
evil-wishing & speaking – I can imagine you, & your mother & sister
on your native heath raising a storm on a Walpurgis night
(327).
One
of the greatest strengths of Millgate’s work is that
in face of the often sad and sometimes hysterical demonstrations by Hardy’s two wives of just how difficult being married to
eminence must have been (especially when, as in Florence’s case, the eminence
attached to a husband who was nearly forty years her senior), he knows how to
convey the sorrows, unkindnesses and frustrations of
those ensnared in these domestic coils with a degree of compassion and
affection that always resists the temptation of facile judgement. Yes, no doubt Emma Hardy became a
progressively more eccentric and difficult woman, making her, perhaps
understandably, a butt for the condescension and mockery of some of Hardy’s celebrated and fashionable friends. But her poignant if often self-induced
isolation is conveyed in tones of such understated sympathy as to be at times
wrenchingly moving, as in the description of the occasion when, less than six
months before her death in the attic room to which she had increasingly
withdrawn, Henry Newbolt and W. B. Yeats journeyed to
Max Gate to make a birthday presentation to Hardy on behalf of the Royal
Society of Literature. After a strained
lunch, Hardy insisted, over the protests of Newbolt
and Yeats and the initial demurrals of Emma herself, on her exclusion from a
“ceremony” attended by only the three principals: “she quietly left the room and the
presentation went forward with all the formality of a public occasion”
(439). It is almost certainly Millgate’s detailed working with the correspondence of Emma
and Florence in the years since publication of the original version of this
biography that has led to such minor but telling changes as the excision of a
reference to Emma’s “derangement” in favour of the
less blunt identification of her
“elderly religiosity . . . the culmination of three decades of marital
difficulty and discomfort” (441).
Given
such adjustments of emphasis in Millgate’s discussion
of Hardy’s wives, it is perhaps not surprising that
the most overt structural manifestations of revision are signalled
in those later chapters that chart the ending of one marriage and the beginning
of the next. In the original version of
the biography, Chapter 24 was entitled “A Funeral and a Marriage,” with the
impact of both events diminished a little for the reader by their shared
space. Now the period leading up to
Emma’s death has a chapter to itself, one that concludes with the wording on Hardy’s wreath, “From her Lonely Husband, with the Old
Affection” (447). This provides not only
a perfect curtain-line to the poignancies of the chapter it closes but also
anticipatory preparation for the subsequent discussion of the remarkable
outpouring of creative grief that generates the great elegiac sequence “Poems
of 1912-13,” occasioned in part by Hardy’s journeying
back to St. Juliot in Cornwall, site of his initial
experience of the old affection more than forty years earlier. Since Emma would remain, often to Florence’s
mortification, an ongoing presence
throughout Hardy’s second marriage – with his desk
calendar permanently set to March 7th, the date of that first
meeting Cornish meeting with Emma – there is some appropriateness to the
exploration of this extended grieving for Emma within a chapter now entitled “A
Second Marriage.”
Further
divisional adjustments result in a shift of emphasis in chapter titles from the
public to the private: “War Years” becomes “Life-Writing,” foregrounding as a distinct
focus of Hardy’s later years the composition of “The
Life and Work.”
Similar redistributions bring to prominence in a new chapter
title -- “Plays
and Players” – Hardy’s continued interest in the
early 1920s in stage performance of his work.
And one particularly fascinating addition reflects Millgate’s
agreement with the recent suggestion, made by Bernard Jones, that Hardy himself is probably – although
still unprovably – the author of a group of poems for
children formerly attributed on equally speculative, if less convincing,
grounds to Florence Hardy.
Millgate’s
pragmatic, and typically cautious, assertion that “No biography, of course, is
ever ‘definitive,’ in the sense of being absolutely the last word” (5) is
irrefutable, especially when one remembers the frequency with which the term
was used to describe Thomas Hardy: A
Biography, now forced by its author’s own hand to yield pride of place to Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited. But while the lure of definitiveness may be a
will-o’-the-wisp best ignored, it remains true that the special relationship
existing between Thomas Hardy and
Although at least sixteen biographies of Hardy have been
published, since
In no way is Millgate’s success more evident than in his even-handedness in treating complex human relationships—as in the remarkably balanced way he presents the strains between Hardy’s family and his first wife, Emma. He quotes, for example, Emma’s extraordinary letter to Mary Hardy which ends,
You are a witch-like creature . . . . I can imagine you, & your mother & sister on your native heath raising a storm on a Walpurgis night.
But he then continues,
The letter shows Emma at her paranoid worst, but it also generates sympathy for the difficulties of her situation—outnumbered by the Hardy family, excluded from its conclaves, and powerless in the face of its solidarity—and for the energy and independence with which she nevertheless sought to make her voice heard.
Such passages reflect some of the truly outstanding qualities of Millgate’s biography—his remarkable capacity to enter into the predicament of his subjects, his ability to render the complexities of their motives, his readiness to call attention to attenuating circumstances, and his insights into how humans caught in webs of trying relationships with others often behave in ways which can be illuminated by sympathetic attention to their own sense of their situations. It is precisely the absence of those qualities which has led many biographers—those less committed than Millgate to a circumspect and sympathetic view of human life—to reduce aspects of Hardy’s biography to more simplistic and often thesis-driven judgments.
Equally circumspect are Millgate’s
comments on intellectual influences on Hardy’s
work. His discussion of Matthew Arnold’s
ideas on Hardy’s fiction is characteristic both for
what it flatly asserts and what it cautiously qualifies. After spelling out what is known of Hardy’s readings of
Although he found Arnold’s idealism somewhat remote and rarefied and his specifically religious arguments tiresomely ‘hairsplitting’, Hardy was deeply sympathetic to his ethical approach and found in his analyses of such phenomena as the ‘modern spirit’ formulations which gave eloquent expression to some of his own deepest and most instinctive feelings about the great social and intellectual currents in which he was himself so ineluctable caught up. Arnoldian ideas are clearly apparent—which is by no means to say unambiguously endorsed—in novels as diverse as The Return of the Native, A Laodicean, and Jude the Obscure . . . .
This short passage is characteristic of another major aspect of Millgate’s style—the conjunction of clear assertions of well-established facts with judicious qualifications. In this case, there is an extended opening qualifying clause—`Although he found . . . ‘—followed by a firm assertion of Hardy’s `deeply sympathetic’ approach to Arnold. That, in turn, is followed by a flat statement of how Arnold’s ideas are `clearly apparent’ in certain specified novels—only to be followed by the monitory clause, `which is by no means to say unambiguously endorsed’.
In short, Millgate’s A Biography Revisited sets a new standard of excellence. Biographers who follow will certainly attempt to qualify it—and in part may succeed; but it is unlikely any will match the totality of Millgate’s achievement.