New Biography of Thomas Hardy

Very interesting review by Adam Kirsch of the latest biography of Thomas Hardy, Thomas Hardy, by Claire Tomalin.

Any Hardy fans, or any literature fans, will want to take the time to read that review.

Quotes that stood out for me:

Yet, as Hardy grew older, it was failure that increasingly occupied his thoughts and inspired his best writing. Tomalin tries to account for this by suggesting that ?the wounds inflicted by life never quite healed over in Hardy.? But such bland psychologizing misses the essential point: Hardy?s pessimism was not a helpless reaction to traumas but the cast of his sensibility, that indispensable and unaccountable lens through which every artist makes sense of the world.

Yes. Yes. Stop with the Freudian analysis. Not everything is traced back to childhood. Some things, some human qualities, just ARE.

Another quote:

For the rest of his life, then, Hardy set to writing poetry with the grateful fervor of an escaped prisoner; his ?Collected Poems? fill more than eight hundred pages.

I love Hardy’s poetry. Here’s the one he wrote about the sinking of the Titanic:

The Convergence of the Twain

I

In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

II

Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

III

Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls — grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

IV

Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

V

Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: “What does this vaingloriousness down here?”. . .

VI

Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

VII

Prepared a sinister mate
For her — so gaily great —
A Shape of Ice, for the time fat and dissociate.

VIII

And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

IX

Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history.

X

Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one August event,

XI

Till the Spinner of the Years
Said “Now!” And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

Now it’s odd but I think a lot of people still don’t think of Hardy as a poet. They think of him as a novelist. Even though he stopped writing novels completely (that is all explained in the New Yorker piece) and devoted himself to poetry.

Ezra Pound, discerning critic and champion of genius, had this to say about Hardy’s poems:

“Now there is clarity. There is the harvest of having written 20 novels first.”

Fascinating.

Thomas Hardy created “Wessex” in all of his books – a place based on the places he knew. Even during his lifetime, “Wessex” tourist tours began. People coming out on pilgrimages, looking for the places in the novels. He did not venture forth, he did not write about anything other than the world he knew.

Hardy said, when criticized for being “provincial”: “A certain provincialism is invaluable. It is the essence of individuality, and is largely made up on that crude enthusiams without which no great thoughts are thought, no great deeds done.”

One last quote from the article that struck me:

No matter what the subject, Hardy devoted his poetry to laying out his magnificently sombre, completely disillusioned view of the world. The central fact of that world was the disappearance of God, and with it any reason for believing in providence or justice.

It’s funny to me that the “establishment” who so vilified him during his heyday – then turned around and canonized him. Even gave him a huge Christian burial, which has to be amusing, since his fury at the church knew no bounds. Ah, hypocrisy. Also “self-delusion” (quote from article). A society has an endless capacity for “self-delusion”. Almost like Ireland now “claiming” James Joyce (as well they should) – but still: Joyce had to FLEE from your country in order to live life as a bohemian artist libertine – because the society was so rigid, close-minded, hypocritical, and backwards. You claim him NOW, NOW when it’s easy. Of course I think Ireland should claim James Joyce – but at least don’t be deluded about it, at least don’t be a jackass about it. Realize that it wasn’t always the case, and perhaps acknowledge the shortcomings of your own nation. Thank you. (I say all of this knowing that James Joyce could never have written Ulysses while he was in Ireland. He NEEDED to leave, and he knew it. However, he didn’t start writing books about Trieste or Paris. Oh no. All of his books about Ireland. Sometimes you need to get away, get far enough back, in order to write about a certain locale.)

I think even now some people don’t GET just how anti-establishment Thomas Hardy was. He’s just a “great novelist”, who wrote “great books”. Yeah. But have you READ those books? They seem vicious and bleak even today! The issues he writes about are STILL issues. Hypocrisy lives in every generation.

Speaking of poetry, and Hardy’s atheism – here is one of his more famous poems. It’s called “God’s Funeral”. And if you think that stuff like this doesn’t still ruffle feathrers … The words “self-delusion” again come to mind.

God’s Funeral
by Thomas Hardy

I
I saw a slowly-stepping train —
Lined on the brows, scoop-eyed and bent and hoar —
Following in files across a twilit plain
A strange and mystic form the foremost bore.

II
And by contagious throbs of thought
Or latent knowledge that within me lay
And had already stirred me, I was wrought
To consciousness of sorrow even as they.

III
The fore-borne shape, to my blurred eyes,
At first seemed man-like, and anon to change
To an amorphous cloud of marvellous size,
At times endowed with wings of glorious range.

IV
And this phantasmal variousness
Ever possessed it as they drew along:
Yet throughout all it symboled none the less
Potency vast and loving-kindness strong.

V
Almost before I knew I bent
Towards the moving columns without a word;
They, growing in bulk and numbers as they went,
Struck out sick thoughts that could be overheard: —

VI
‘O man-projected Figure, of late
Imaged as we, thy knell who shall survive?
Whence came it we were tempted to create
One whom we can no longer keep alive?

VII
‘Framing him jealous, fierce, at first,
We gave him justice as the ages rolled,
Will to bless those by circumstance accurst,
And longsuffering, and mercies manifold.

VIII
‘And, tricked by our own early dream
And need of solace, we grew self-deceived,
Our making soon our maker did we deem,
And what we had imagined we believed,

IX
‘Till, in Time’s stayless stealthy swing,
Uncompromising rude reality
Mangled the Monarch of our fashioning,
Who quavered, sank; and now has ceased to be.

X
‘So, toward our myth’s oblivion,
Darkling, and languid-lipped, we creep and grope
Sadlier than those who wept in Babylon,
Whose Zion was a still abiding hope.

XI
‘How sweet it was in years far hied
To start the wheels of day with trustful prayer,
To lie down liegely at the eventide
And feel a blest assurance he was there!

XII
‘And who or what shall fill his place?
Whither will wanderers turn distracted eyes
For some fixed star to stimulate their pace
Towards the goal of their enterprise?’…

XIII
Some in the background then I saw,
Sweet women, youths, men, all incredulous,
Who chimed as one: ‘This is figure is of straw,
This requiem mockery! Still he lives to us!’

XIV
I could not prop their faith: and yet
Many I had known: with all I sympathized;
And though struck speechless, I did not forget
That what was mourned for, I, too, once had prized.

XV
Still, how to bear such loss I deemed
The insistent question for each animate mind,
And gazing, to my growing sight there seemed
A pale yet positive gleam low down behind,

XVI
Whereof, to lift the general night,
A certain few who stood aloof had said,
‘See you upon the horizon that small light —
Swelling somewhat?’ Each mourner shook his head.

XVII
And they composed a crowd of whom
Some were right good, and many nigh the best….
Thus dazed and puzzled ‘twixt the gleam and gloom
Mechanically I followed with the rest.

Wow. This is powerful stuff.

I’ve never read a biography of Hardy – perhaps I should. I want to know more about his marriage. Like – what was THAT about??

Robert Louis Stevenson is just one of the many MANY people who visited the Hardys and had a visceral response to that wife. He wrote:

[He was] a pale, gentle, frightened little man, that one felt an instinctive tenderness for, with a wife — ugly is no word for it! — who said, “Whatever shall we do?” I had never heard a human being say it before.

Ha!

Here’s a link to the New Yorker piece again. It’s made me want to re-read Jude the Obscure.