Though billed as a radical reappraisal, it is really the opposite. It counters most of the radical suggestions that have been made about Hardy's life with sturdy common sense. The supposition, fostered by Robert Gittings and Michael Millgate, that Hardy was impotent; the alternative theory that he was sexually predatory and had an illegitimate son by his 17-year-old cousin (or, some say, niece) Tryphena Sparks; the allegation (Millgate again) that his friendship with the Dorset parson's son, Horace Moule, "must have been homosexual" - all these Seymour-Smith dismisses, rightly, as speculation. The "ghoulish and footling" charge of impotence irks hm most, almost as if it were a personal slight. Hardy, he reports, told Edmund Blunden (who told Seymour-Smith) that he was still capable of "full sexual intercourse" at the age of 84.
Gittings's imputation that Hardy was simply yokel who wrote best when guided by a "trained mind" also makes Seymour-Smith see red. Hardy he points out, was one of the best-educated of English authors, though raised in a stonemason's cottage and short on formal schooling. As a young man working in an architect's office, he got up at four in summer - five in winter - to study. The trained mind of Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf's father, who persuaded Hardy to bowdlerise Far From the Madding Crowd, was a thoroughly mediocre article by comparison.
A big objective of Seymour-Smith's book is to rehabilitate Hardy's first wife, Emma Gifford. They were more or less like any other married couple, he contends: the unhappiness of their union has been greatly exaggerated. True, Hardy yearned to be free, but that is no more than what "three-quarters of people, husbands and wives, have done, and still do privately". True, Gifford said insulting things about Hardy, but "not much more than most wives have thought, and many have said".
None of this will quite do. Hardy and Gifford were both, as Seymour-Smith well knows, singular people, and the pains they inflicted on each other were not commonplace. Neither of them fully recovered from the blow of childlessness, and Gifford, in later life, behaved bizarrely. "So does everyone's grandmother," urges Seymour-Smith, in defence. But his suggestion that Gifford suffered from Alzheimer's disease concedes that she was a special case.
His challenging emphasis on Hardy's "gaiety" and sense of humour also rings hollow. The conventional notion of him as gloom-ridden seems truer, and more aligned with his own insights. Laughter, he insisted, "always means blindness, either from defect, choice, or accident". All comedy is tragedy "if only you look deep enough". He felt like this because he was abnormally sensitive to the cruelty of the world, but could not convince himself of the truth of atheism. The horrible conclusion followed that God was helpless, malign or indifferent. He sometimes grew ashamed of this superstition, and indignantly denied that the famous reference to "the President of the Immortals" at the end of Tess of the d'Urbervilles meant that he believed in a "man-shaped tribal god". Nevertheless, that is what the reference implies.
In stressing Hardy's humour, Seymour-Smith seems to confuse homour with irony, which is a bitterer thing. Hardy, it is true, did enjoy hoodwinking and needling people, especially educated strangers, in writing as well as conversation. His description of Tess, in the novel's subtitle, as a "pure woman" is a calculated provocation of this kind. "In one's heart of hearts one did not of course really think one's heroine was as good and pure as all that," he admitted privately. Hardy's teasing may have been more pervasive than Seymour-Smith imagines. He quotes approvingly Blunden's comment that he realised Hardy was a "real countryman" when he urinated as he walked along, without stopping what he was saying or adjusting his stride. Had the scholarly Blunden, one wonders, often observed mobile urination among the rural classes? Or was "Tom" having him on?
Humour of this sort does not exactly increase Hardy's likeability. But it was his way of paying back the world for hurting him. Seymour-Smith usefully reminds us of the abuse he had to put up with: resentment of a "low-born churl" (his father-in-law's phrase) who presumed to marry a lady; newspaper witticism about "Jude the Obscene"; dismissal of his poetry by reviewers as "balderdash". He always felt an outcast, and estrangement was vital to his creativity. Literature, he stipulated "is the written expression of revolt against accepted things". He sympathised with women because he saw them as social victims, like himself. The perception he gives to Bathsheba in Far From the Madding Crowd - "It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs" - became one of the seminal tenets of feminism.
From this angle, the section of Seymour-Smith's book that would have offended Hardy most is that on Florence Dugdale, who became the second Mrs Hardy in 1914, 15 months after Emma's death, when Hardy was 74 and Florence 35. Seymour-Smith hates her because she spread the "myth" of Hardy's miserable first marriage, and he spares no effort to defame her. She was "feeble" and "drab", but known to "grizzle, grouse, sulk and whinge" her way into people's confidence. A previous employer, Sir Thornley Stoker, whose wife she had nursed, left her £2,000 in 1912, and Seymour-Smith imagines this was for sexual services ("she may have masturbated the old man; Florence most certainly was the sort of woman who would prefer this to intercourse"). Possibly, he speculates, Dugdale used the same means to ingratiate herself with Hardy, then threatened to withdraw her favours unless he married her, and unless he agreed to write an autobiography (the marvelous two-volume Life of 1928 and 1930), which she would pass off as her work. "We need have no doubt," Seymour-Smith affirms, "that this famous literary deception was Florence's idea, not Hardy's."
There is no firm evidence for any of this, as Seymour-Smith frankly admits. The whole
farrago is an exercise in sadistic fiction, designed to punish Dugdale for being the kind
of woman he imagines her to have been. He accuses Gittings of having a "sick"
mind, because he unfairly twists biographical data. His own savaging of Dugdale seems
equally unfair. Yet, without the passionate engagement that betrays him into these
indiscretions, the vitality of this remarkable biography - its stamina and bravado - might
have been lost as well.
There is much that is appealing in this fable; talent triumphs over handicaps of rusticity and class, native Englishness succeeds in the modernist literary world, polite society recognizes simple genius. But in its bare bones it is the sort of story that is a biographer's despair - nearly ninety years in which nothing much seems to have happened, except for the writing. It may look like a rags-to-riches tale, but in fact the rags weren't very ragged (Hardy's father was a prosperous enough country builder), and the riches weren't very visible when they came. There were no scandals connected with either marriage, and no visible mistresses; there wasn't even much gossip, except for a little Dorchester grumbling about the old man's tight-fistedness. You might as well try to write the life of Maiden Castle.
Nevertheless, there have been many biographies of Hardy over the years, a dozen at least, beginning with a chapter in F. A. Hedgcock's Thomas Hardy: Penseur et artiste, in 1911 (how odd that the first life of the most English of English novelists should have been written in French), and continuing on to the two most recent, Robert Gittings's two volumes in 1975 and 1978, and Michael Millgate's one in 1982. These many versions of the life vary in tone, accuracy and completeness, but they all have this in common, the all lack revelations - the caught-in-the-act misdeed, the letter that should never have been written, the eye-to-the-keyhole witness - those records of imprudent moments that can enliven a dull life (or a dull political party, come to that).
One such story did surface in the 1960s, concerning a bastard son of Hardy's by his cousin Tryphena. Some people believed it, mainly, I think, because they wanted Hardy's life to contain something with a bit of spice to it; but it was soon shown to be founded on nothing. Since then scholars have laboured to add particulars to the record; they have found Hardy ancestors (some authentic, some probably not), and a few women whom Hardy admired, and seven volumes of Hardy's letters have been published - far more than anyone could bear to read. But for all that effort, the known life of England's greatest modern novelist still isn't much of a story.
One reason for this boringness is that, like many another man, Hardy wanted to control what posterity would know about him. He hated the biographies that were published during his lifetime, and thought that they damaged his reputation. And so, in his late seventies, he wrote his own "authorized" version, leaving it to be completed and published by his wife as her own work. These two posthumous volumes, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy and The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, are not so much the story of a life as the history of a career. Drawing on notebooks, diaries and letters, Hardy compiled a public record: the books, the social occasions, the travels, the honours, with here and there a literary or philosophical reflection taken from old notes. It is a record of remarkable literary and social success - so many famous names dropped, so many titles, so many invitations. But no private life to speak of; in his self-protective reticence, Hardy had refined himself out of his own story.
The two volumes that Florence Hardy eventually published are essential reading for any Hardy scholar, but they are not lively. Martin Seymour-Smith observes that they were written in the style of the High Victorian "Life and Letters" biographies, and thinks that Hardy must have been parodying the literary voice of his drab, untalented wife. He's right about the style, but wrong, I think, about the parody; Hardy simply wrote his public life in his public manner, in the voice that he adopted when he wrote a letter to a newspaper or a speech for some public occasion. It was the voice of the respectable Victorian Man of Letters, a role that Hardy sought and valued, even while he was writing novels that other respectable folk found shocking.
Hardy began destroying old papers after the death of his first wife, and probably destroyed more during the writing of the Early Life and Later Years; there were further bonfires of papers after his death, by his instructions. One can easily imagine what burned in those fires; all the details that are left out of the biography, the pieces that would fill in the story of the private life. By destroying his personal papers, Hardy made certain that all subsequent biographers would face the same problem - how to recover the lost life, how to avoid the bland boringness of the authorized version.
In Hardy's own story of his life there are particular cruxes, points where the curious reader is frustrated by what Hardy does not tell. These mainly concern his relations with those who were closest to him; his mentor, Horace Moule; his first wife, Emma Gifford; his friend, Florence Henniker; his second wife, Florence Dugdale. In all these cases, Hardy's reticence and the bonfires have left the story incomplete and unsatisfactory. Moule was an older, better-educated bachelor with literary connections who helped the young Hardy to launch his career. He was also a depressive alcoholic who committed suicide in 1873. Was he or was he not homosexual? Emma was or was not happy with her husband, did or did not become mad. Mrs. Henniker was or was not urged by Hardy to a love affair. Florence was or was not her husband's mistress before she married him; she did or did not have a sexual life with him after her marriage.
There are two things to be said about all these cruxes: first, they all turn on sexuality, a subject that Hardy - a proper Victorian in personal sexual matters, however frank he wished to be in fiction - avoided talking or writing about in connection with his own life. And second, they all have poems associated with them. For example, Hardy's late poem, "Standing by the Mantel-piece", which is subtitled "H.M.M. 1873", seems to me to tell a story of homosexual love offered and rejected, which is compatible with what is known about Moule and about Hardy (who was certainly heterosexual). For Emma, there is the poem "The Interloper", with its epigraph: "And I saw the figure and visage of Madness seeking for a home", which sounds like Hardy's premonition of his first wife's mental disintegration. Most critics take "The Division" and "A Broken Appointment" to be about Hardy's failure with Mrs Henniker. "I sometimes think" is dedicated to "F. E. H.", Hardy's second wife, and seems intended as an old man's tender praise, though it ends with despair.
These poems all seem to be personal and autobiographical, but they are enigmatic, concealing more than they tell; they lack the tidy certainty that a private letter or a doctor's diagnosis or a birth certificate would provide. We are beyond accurate biography when we deal with such texts; there is no sure supporting evidence outside the poems for a personal reading of any of them.
In such circumstances, a biographer can either speculate or be silent. Earlier biographers generally chose silence; more recent ones have been inclined to reach toward probabilities. Both Gittings and Millgate created versions of the principal players in Hardy's life that are based on such hints and fragments as they found. They agree on some matters; that Emma in her later years became mentally unstable; that Florence was a poor drab depressive caught in a tedious marriage. They disagree on Moule: Gittings's Moule is heterosexual; Millgate's is probably homosexual. They agree on Mrs. Henniker: a fashionable but conventional woman. These are all reasonable enough guesses, but they are only guesses, and are offered as such. Neither man has much to say about their characters' sex-lives, adopting the sound Wittgensteinian position that when one has nothing to say one should say nothing. The price, in both biographies, is a certain lack of excitement in the reported lives; the reward is credibility.
Two well-received biographies of Hardy in the past twenty years: how is another to be justified? Seymour-Smith's strategy has been to make the publication of his Hardy not so much an act of scholarship as a crusade, and to announce that crusade in some extraordinary pre-publication statements. I can't recall any other biographer, whatever his subject, who has so loudly proclaimed the importance of his own work, or so violently abused his competitors, outside the covers of his book. Readers of the Observer for January 16 may recall his declaration there that there had never been "an at least half-decent, and a respectful biography" of Hardy, until his own; but they are not likely to have come on the manifesto distributed with review copies of the book. One would not ordinarily pay much attention to a publisher's handout, but this one contains a paragraph over the author's name that is so extravagant as to be worth quoting in its entirety:
"Thomas Hardy. Never has such an indisputable giant, so loved by the reading public, one of the bestsellers of all
time, been so consistently maligned and abused for so long by the literary critics. Granted, he was no more a saint than the rest of us - if he had been how could he have written as he did? But he was certainly not the bumbling, ingnorant,
slow-witted, specious, "improper," sexually impotent, awkward, insensitive,
parsimonious, voyeuristic and snobbish "poor figure" of a male chauvinist presented by his previous biographers Gittings and Millgate. Why has the literary establishment - with only a few exceptions - been so persistently mean about his literary achievements as a poet, novelist and dramatist? Far from having been the unconfident and humourless ignoramus of Millgate's biography, or the impotent sadist of Gittings', he had one of the best minds of the nineteenth
century. It is time that a more judicious, humbler, warmer and more generous look was taken at this great Englishman, that he was given back to those to whom he belongs, his readers. This is why I wrote Hardy."
Much that is good in Seymour-Smith's book, as well as much that disfigures it, is in this statement; on the one hand, the exaggerations, the melodrama, the boastful humility, the enemies and plots (if one man could be paranoid on another man's behalf, I'd say that was the state in which this book was written); on the other hand, the genuine desire to deal generously with a writer who has not always been sympathetically treated.
Let us look first at what is good. "one of the best minds of the nineteenth century" is a characteristic overstatement, but Seymour-Smith is right to insist on Hardy's intellectual capacities and range of knowledge. One has only to look into his notebooks to see how determinedly he worked to master the advanced thought of his time. If the copied-out passages and reading lists seem a bit naive, that's not surprising - Hardy's intellectualism was home-made, but it was none the less genuine.
Seymour-Smith does Hardy and his readers another good turn by insisting that Hardy was a religious man. Not a conventional Christian, certainly, but a frequent church-goer, who loved the language and the music of the Church. Seymour-Smith says that Hardy was a "communicating member of the Established Church all his life". This is news to me, and is based on a recollection of Ford Madox Ford (that most untrustworthy of mermoirists); but it could well be true. Hardy said, near the end of his life, that he had been looking for God for fifty years; and though he added that he hadn't found him, the point is that he went on looking. He also went on quarreling in poems with the God he couldn't find. He was never an atheist or a secularist. To understand Hardy, one must see that the search and the quarrel with God were at the centre of his mental life.
On Hardy's sexuality, Seymour-Smith is also sensible and sympathetic. It is a point on which there is not much solid evidence - there were no witnesses to Hardy's sex-life - but he married twice, hoped for a child by the first marriage and allowed for the possibility of one by the second, and fancied pretty women when he met them. There is no reason to thing he was other than a normal heterosexual man, though perhaps a sterile one.
On Hardy as a social person, Seymour-Smith is again generous. Socially, Hardy was a common Victorian type, the man from a humble background who rises by his own efforts above his class. Most biographers have assumed that when he came up to London as a young man he had the appearance and manners of a countryman, and that he must have been shy and awkward in that strange urban world. Seymour-Smith's young Hardy is rather different: intense, intellectually eager, confident of his own qualifications, and convinced of his genius. He makes him an attractive youth, though there is no evidence to support this or any other view of Hardy's social behaviour at that time. It seems more likely that he had periods of self-doubt, that he was sometimes ill at ease in society, but that he quickly learned the rules. Certainly, within a decade, when he had begun to establish himself as a writer, he moved easily into London society, met writers and editors, joined clubs, dined with the rich and the titled, and lived a successful Man-of-Letters life there. It was the life he wanted, and it is well to be reminded that he got it, though perhaps not quite so quickly and effortlessly as Seymour-Smith believes.
On these aspects of Hardy's being and behaviour, Seymour-Smith manages to be both generous and credible; we can imagine his Hardy writing the novels and poems and plays, and living the life that he lived. But other elements of his book are neither generous nor credible, and have no place in what purports to be a serious literary biography.
There is, most noticeably, Seymour-Smith's literary populism. In his view, Hardy is a people's favourite who has been wickedly hijacked by critics and the literary establishment, and must be restored to his common readers; so the literary situation becomes a melodrama, and the biographer is the hero of his own book. In this melodrama, there are many villains, but the principle one is a caricature-figure called "Millgate", who pops up in the text from time to time, like a Punch and Judy puppet, to be whacked down again. "Millgate" is a Professor - "grimly donnish", "stern and solemn", fastidious, Victorian. In Seymour-Smith's populist view, professors are the enemies of the literary values that he is defending. But in reality, most of them aren't; they are rather his allies. At a time when literature has so many real enemies, it seems a pity that a literary man should direct his animosity at people who are on his own side.
Perhaps it is his populism that makes Seymour-Smith indifferent to the professional custom of identifying sources; perhaps he believes that his book doesn't need footnotes because the common reader probably doesn't care about critical analysis or critical history either; yet Seymour-Smith has stuffed his fat book with both. Under the accumulating weight of arguments for the excellence of Hardy's weaker novels, and summaries of critics' comments, the biographical narrative stumbles and halts. And what will the common reader do? Somewhere along the way he will surely depart.
I said that Seymour-Smith has crated a biographical melodrama in his book, of which he is the hero. That heroic role makes him a very prominent figure in what is, after all, Hardy's life, not his. He raises his authorial voice in anger and contempt against his opponents, he offers his own aphorisms on life, women and sex, he digresses into literary analogies. By his language and references he locates himself, if not exactly at the present cutting-edge of things, then at some point in the recent past: he uses words like "Thatcherite", "patriarchal", and "male-centred", he knows about chauvinists and women-as-objects, and recognizes a phallic image when he sees one (Dairyman Crick's "great knife and fork...planted erect on the table", in Tess, resemble, we are told, "a gross penis determined to plunder, to 'eat,' Tess"). Of course, a biography is a story, and must have a story-teller; but as I read through Hardy, I became convinced that the less obtrusive the story-teller is, the better for the story, and that when an assertive narrating personality shoulders his way between the reader and the subject, biography suffers.
Another biographical principle is at issue in the speculations to which Seymour-Smith turns when facts fail him. What is a biographer to do when his subject destroys the evidence? He must either rest content with what survives, or he must fill in the gaps with guesses. Seymour-Smith has gone a long way long the latter path. His pages are cluttered with conjectural phrases: "doubtless", "it can be assumed", "probably", "surely", "it seems likely", "my contention is". Faced with an unrecorded event, he tells the reader what he thinks happened, though he has no good reason to think so. Sometimes, what is first offered as speculation turns into fact, "What I think she told him", in one paragraph, becomes "the dilemma which she put before him", in the next. If you write out enough guesses and contentions, you will fill a lot of pages. But what will you have added to the story of what happened?
Speculation becomes most excited, and the authorial voice most audible, when Seymour-Smith addresses the question of Florence Hardy's sex life. In 1910, Florence served for a time as companion to the dying wife of a Dublin surgeon, Sir Thornley Stoker; two years later, when Sir Thornley died, he left Florence £2,000 in his will. Now to Seymour-Smith's speculations; Florence may have been Sir Thornley's mistress, "she may very well have, at the least, shown him sexual consideration. I mean, not to be too mock-delicate about the matter, that she may have masturbated the old man." On the following page, he admits there is "no strong evidence" for this startling conjecture (in fact, there is not even any weak evidence); nevertheless, a few pages on, he is referring to Florence's "sexual kindliness to Sir Thornley Stoker", as though it had been proven. (There are similar speculations about what Florence did for Hardy a bit further on in the text.)
Seymour-Smith is clearly proud that he is not "mock-delicate" in this passage; it is part of his populist stance to be a plain, outspoken, honest fellow. But is it honest to daydream such a sex life for an unhappy woman, when there is no evidence at all for any of it? Maybe she did show Sir Thornley "sexual consideration"; maybe she blew in his ear, or brought him his slippers at the end of the day. Or maybe she was simply kind to a dying woman. The assumption that no man leaves money to a young woman unless she has performed some sexual service for him strikes me as a gross failure of human understanding. It is only one instance, but it typifies the sensibility of this over-long, over-heated book.
Seymour-Smith writes as a partisan of his subject, and therefore, in his own eyes, as a stern revisionist and scourge of other men's errors. On the cruxes in Hardy's life, he has strong opinions; his Emma is a lively, independent-minded woman who inspired her husband by making him unhappy, and who, though she was estranged from him at the end, was never mad; his Florence is a hateful, devious neurotic; his Horace Moule is heterosexual; his Florence Henniker is unhappy, inhibited and neurotic. Some of these opinions are feasible, even probable; others seem to me grossly wrong. But this book, for all its massive bulk, provides one with no reason for accepting or rejecting any of them. One may blame Hardy for the shortage of particulars; but for the bonfires, the story would have been clearer. Nevertheless that is the situation, and the biographer must acknowledge it. The fable that Hardy created is not the whole truth, and it is a biographer's job to add to it; but he does not have the right to fill in the chinks with fiction.
Martin Seymour-Smith must assume that there is an audience out there for the book
he has written. He must believe that there are Hardy enthusiasts, common readers
who have never yet read a biography of their favourite author, but are patient enough
to read 864 pages about him now, and gullible enough to believe everything that
they are told. I don't think the audience exists.
Unfortunately, when one has hacked away through the tirades of opinionativeness, misrepresentation and insult, Seymour-Smith really has nothing new to offer but his own indignation. This, for example, is his excoriation of Millgate for comments on Hardy's response to the First World War death of his distant cousin, Frank George: "...his grief and indignation have, with an astonishingly cruel and injudicious coldness, been called, in Millgate, 'factitious' and 'extravagant.'" This, by stark contrast, is what Millgate actually wrote (tracked down with the help of Millgate's own index since Seymour-Smith, presumably by way of establishing his superiority to literal-minded professors, doesn't deign to provide documentation for any of his quotations, some of which are inaccurate): "...although there seems a touch of extravagance and even of factitiousness about his grief for someone he did not in fact know especially well, there is no doubt that he was deeply moved...". This kind of inexcusable sleight of argument, which damns fellow writers by taking their words out of context and then making the context as difficult to locate as possible by not documenting it, is quite astonishing to find in a book that is attempting to market itself as "the definitive biography."
Even more remarkable is the extent of Seymour-Smith's indebtedness to the work of those benighted scholars he keeps trying to savage with his rubber teeth. Without the Hardy Collected Letters, edited by Millgate and Purdy (dismissed here as "an inexperienced bachelor, and no psychologist"), and without the Millgate and Gittings biographies, Seymour-Smith would have virtually no subject. He offers no significant new facts and has little that isn't derivable from published sources. His research consists of giving his own ponderous psychological spins to other people's discoveries and speculations, although admittedly the revelation that among the things most disliked by Hardy's trusty and tetchy dog, Wessex, was 'insincere or specious writing' can stake a claim to being one of the most striking insights ever offered by a Hardy biographer. The main agenda seems to be threefold: to rescue Hardy himself from the patronizing judgement that he was an untutored rustic genius, to rescue his first wife, Emma Gifford, from the myths of insanity and longstanding marital disharmony unfairly attaching to her, and to present the second wife, Florence Dugdale, as a manipulative, hypochondriacal, spiteful and whinging neurotic. Like many exercises in historical revisionism, this one works by creating simplistic distortions of supposed orthodoxies, which it then demolishes by hammering away at the caricatures of truth it has itself created.
T. S. Eliot once dismissed Thomas Hardy as a poet because he seemingly wrote
primarily for the expression of personality and Eliot thought that the personality
he had to express was not a particularly "wholesome or edifying matter of
communication." The
words have ironic application to Hardy's latest biographer. Those who want to know
what Martin Seymour-Smith thinks about Tom, life and the psychological problems
of great authors, their wives, and the callow academics who write about them have
a 900-page slog to face. Those
who would rather read an original, meticulously researched, subtle and
sympathetic life of Thomas Hardy can fortunately still rely on Michael Millgate's
Thomas Hardy: A Biography.
His personal life was equally unusual. His relations with his first wife, Emma Gifford, were less than happy. Soon after she died, Hardy - then in his early 70s - remarried. When he himself died, he was buried, according to the nation's wishes but against his own, in Westminster Abbey. A surprising and complex figure.
Even so, it is still strange that three full-scale biographies of Hardy have appeared in the past 20 years: two volumes, Young Thomas Hardy and The Older Hardy, by Robert Gittings (1975, 1978); Thomas Hardy: A Biography by my colleague at the University of Toronto, Michael Millgate (1982); and now Martin Seymour-Smith's Hardy. Why this extraordinary flurry of interest?
Hardy himself and his second wife, Florence Dugdale, are ultimately responsible. The circumstances are not wholly clear, but, fearing embarrassing disclosures by outsiders, they decided that Hardy should write a detailed (and highly selective) biographical account to be published posthumously under his wife's name. The first volume duly appeared only two months after Hardy's death in 1928, the second being published two years later. One of their reasons may have been an attempt to cover the traces of their initial affair, which took place during the lifetime of the first Mrs. Hardy. Hardy's unconventional views had continually brought him into conflict with Victorian propriety or "Mrs. Grundyism" (the political correctness of its time). Besides, he firmly believed that private actions should not be considered public property.
Once the facts of their complicity became clear, however, impetus was given to a whole series of biographical investigations intent on giving a fuller, more objective account. Those by Gittings and Millgate are the most important since their studies draw upon extensive research in libraries, public archives, and private collections. They were able to throw light on many aspects of his life about which Hardy had been silent.
But what, after all this, does Martin Seymour-Smith have to offer? In terms of biographical fact, very little indeed, but he disagrees violently with his predecessors on the interpretation of the evidence. He considers that they have exaggerated Hardy's differences with his first wife, relied too heavily on the testimony of the second, continued a Victorian prudery in dealing with his sexual life, and underestimated the challenging aspects of his fiction and poetry.
Well argued, his case could have been healthily provocative and even valuable. Unfortunately, he gets side-tracked by a petulant animus directed against Gittings and, especially, Millgate. There are, to be sure, occasional expression of praise, but the text is peppered with sarcastic disparagements, contemptuous dismissals, and sneering innuendoes. Seymour-Smith protests too much, and in the process lays himself open to serious counter-charges.
At one point, he refers condescendingly to "Millgate the academic," yet the unscholarly absence of notes and page-references throughout his own book conceals from the unwary the fact that Seymour-Smith himself is dependent for most of his information on the researches of Millgate and other academic scholars. He leans heavily not only on the biographies he criticizes so severely but also on the seven-volume edition of Hardy's letters (which Millgate co-edited) and also, it would seem, on Millgate's 1984 reconstruction of the text of Hardy's self-biography (though Seymour-Smith unforgivably never so much as mentions its existence).
Because of his frequent failure to name names ("it has been suggested...," etc.) and his omission of page references when he does, it is difficult for readers to test the justice of his strictures. When I did so, I found that he sometimes misquotes, often misreads, and almost invariably distorts by quoting out of context. Guarded statements by Millgate and others are made to look exaggerated and extreme because qualifying sentences have been omitted. Above all, his tone is sourly irritating, and he spoils his case by tiresome and inordinate repetition. He sounds malicious, though the ultimate cause may well be carelessness as a result of excessive speed.
Indeed, this biography shows all the signs of unfortunate haste, sometimes reading like an unrevised draft. Paragraphs ramble, sentences lose themselves in contortions (a reference to Hardy's first marriage as "too infamous" is indicative of the deficiencies of style), and the ingratiating tone annoys (Hardy is plain "Tom" throughout). A good copy editor would have queried the roughness, the irrelevant digressive asides, the pettiness - and even, on occasion, the grammar.
This is not a definitive biography (though the publishers improperly make this claim on the dust-jacket) because no biography can be definitive. The life of a complex, multi-faceted figure like Hardy requires a variety of interpretations to do it justice. Seymour-Smith's reading is certainly worthy of consideration - it is not his argument but the conduct of his argument that jars. It should depend, however, on its own merits, not on the attempted disqualification of all rivals. In the final analysis, a richly Hardyan irony resides in the fact that the biography of "Millgate the academic" is not only more scholarly but better written and so more readable than that by Seymour-Smith the professional writer.