Thomas Hardy
By Claire Tomalin
(Penguin Press, 486 pp., $35)
Thomas Hardy's life could have made a novel: a poor provincial boy rises to unthinkable eminence by dint of talent and sheer hardwork, overcoming every obstacle placed in his way. But people havestopped writing novels like that, and one of the reasons is ThomasHardy. Hardy changed his life by changing the way novels werewritten, discarding their familiar patterns and their reflexiveoptimism. He is the father of some of English modernism's mostradical discoveries, and the grandfather, through Faulkner, of muchof what has mattered in global fiction since World War II. Andthen, well into his fifties and at the peak of his success, he gaveup writing fiction altogether, launching the most improbable majorcareer in English poetry. Divided between two genres, his careerwas also divided between two centuries, and fittingly so, since hiswork is everywhere marked by the transition from the Victorian tothe modern age--from faith to skepticism, from prudery to frankness,from belief in progress to despair before an indifferent universe.Indeed, his imaginative power and his iron clarity wereinstrumental in bringing that transition about. Hardy belonged tothe generation that grappled with the death of God before it hadhardened into its own easy orthodoxy. The boy born into ruralDorset in the first years of Queen Victoria's reign is still in manyways more modern than we are.
Claire Tomalin's new biography gets in pretty much everything thatmatters about Hardy's story and does it with impressive economy,wit, and grace. Tomalin, the author of seven previous biographies,including lives of Jane Austen and Samuel Pepys, is building hereon the work of Michael Millgate, the dean of Hardy studies.Millgate's biography, recently republished in a revised edition,will remain the scholarly standard; but Tomalin does so much sowell precisely because she does not try to supplant Millgate, thusrelieving herself of the obligation to be comprehensive. Millgatemarches chronologically through the details of Hardy's life,whereas Tomalin permits herself to step back and appraise wholeperiods at once, giving a stronger sense of its larger movements.Her lifetime of work in the nineteenth century enables her to evokeconditions and contexts--what London smelled like, what itsliterary world felt like--with a swift hand. Her lifetime ofwriting biographies gives her the imaginative power to draw scenescolorfully and intuit motives convincingly. Details are cunninglychosen; important ancillary characters get mini-biographies oftheir own. Tomalin's style is simple, terse, and at times evengrand, with flashes of humor and mordant wit. Her biography ispoetry to Millgate's prose, but if Hardy's own poetry, as Poundsaid, was made possible by his prose, Tomalin's was made possibleby Millgate's.
The dominant social fact of the world into which Hardy was born wasclass, and it remained in many ways the dominant social fact of hisentire life. In the Dorset of 1840, the year of his birth, thetraditional structure of rural society was still largely intact. InTomalin's words, this remote and backward county remained a placewhere "those who owned the land and those who worked it were hardlythought of as belonging to the same species." Hardy's family waspoor, but they were not indigent, a distinction of enormousimportance both to them and to him--as was every one of theinfinitesimal gradations of the English class system, to everyone.Not long before Hardy's birth, a local boy, hanged for merelywitnessing an act of political vandalism, had to have weightshung from his half-starved body to force his neck to break. ButHardy's father was a self-employed builder--a step above thelaborers, a step below the farmers, a whole Jacob's ladder belowthe gentry.
Still, if the class system in Dorset remained largely untouched bymodernity, it had begun to relax just enough to allow Hardy'sformidably strong-willed mother to dream of a better life for herbright, sensitive, bookish son. It was she who insisted that he getan education. By sixteen, he was apprentice to an architect in thenearby town of Dorchester--and finding himself the target of asermon back home in which the local vicar preached against thepresumption of members of the lower orders who aspired to join theprofessions. It was a slight that Hardy never forgot, and he wenton to make novel after novel out of the drama of thwarted ambition.The opportunity for self-improvement made Hardy's life possible,but the resistance that he encountered gave it its texture. Hiscareer, his art, his consciousness-- all are unthinkable outsidethe context of an entrenched class system that had begun to giveground, but only an inch at a time.
As with many self-made men, the amount of effort that went intoHardy's self- creation is enough to make one weep. He neverintended to become an architect; architecture was just a way toearn a living until he could pursue his true passion, poetry. Hisplan was to go to university, find a living as a parson, and writein his hours of leisure, as many clergymen did. But he as yet hadnothing like the education, nor his father anything like the money,that would have made university possible. So he kept swotting awayon his own, as Jude Fawley was to do in his last novel: at hisbooks by 5 a.m. to get in three hours of reading before heading offon the long daily walk to Dorchester, adding Greek to hiscontinuing study of Latin.
At twenty-one, Hardy went up to London to advance his architecturalcareer, and it was around this time that he began the incrediblelabor--with no training, no encouragement, and no guide--of willinghimself into existence as a poet. He worked from six to midnightevery evening. He bought copies of Milton, Thomson, and Coleridge,an Introduction to English Literature, a Standard PronouncingDictionary (which says a lot about where he came from and how hefelt about it), and a Rhyming Dictionary. He bought notebooks andfilled them with vocabulary-building exercises, imitations,coinages, memoranda about specific literary effects, and pages andpages of quotations. He started jotting down notes about what hewas seeing, reading, feeling, overhearing-- ideas and images andphrases on which he would draw throughout his life. He also startedwriting poems such as this one, which gives a fair sample not onlyof his presumptive feelings at the time, but of the sardonic witthat would characterize much of his later verse:
A senseless school, where we must
give
Our lives that we may learn to live!
A dolt is he who memorizes
Lessons that leave no time for prizes.
What he was not doing was publishing any of those poems, and by thetime Hardy turned twenty-six he had given up on his dream of auniversity education followed by a lifetime of idle hours in therectory--the recognition that probably precipitated the foregoingepigram. The next year he took ill, and when his old Dorchesterboss wrote to offer him a job, he came back from London, after fiveyears, with his tail between his legs. He had few prospects, littlemoney, and virtually no connections in the literary world. But hedid have one thing: the beginnings of a novel.
Print
