Several Strangers

by Claire Tomalin

  It is a hard truth that men of genius may have bad characters, as Gittings shows Hardy had. Fortunately most Hardy-lovers are not his wives and not obliged to live with the bad character. They can slide away to the ‘silent man who forces himself to speak’ of John Bayley’s phrase. Bayley’s loosely structured essay is continuously interesting on the poetry and the novels. He suggests that Hardy used the conventions of Victorian extrovert fiction for his own ends, remaining unobtrusive within, ‘a deer in the thickets’. It’s a perfect image for Hardy, recalling incidentally the boy in the grass with his hat over his face. And although his book is not strictly biographical, he does restore to us that vulnerable Hardy who has somehow disappeared from Gittings’s account.

  Sunday Times, 1978

  2. Memory and Loss: On Hardy’s Poetry

  Thomas Hardy is the great exception to the rule that lyric poets lose their voices as they age. The best of Hardy’s love poems were not written, like those of Keats and Donne, when he was in his twenties but in his seventies. In them he addressed the wife he had slighted and neglected for decades, restoring her to youth and happiness -a young woman with ‘bright hair flapping free’ as she rode her pony along the wild Cornish cliff-edges, with ‘gray eyes, and rose-flush coming and going’. He summoned her up in her ‘original air-blue gown’, and offered passionate elegies to her ghost: ‘Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me

  It was too late for poor Emma to enjoy the tribute, and the poems caused anguished jealousy to Hardy’s second wife, Florence, long secretly loved but now herself relegated to the dusty indifference he accorded to accessible women. But the greatness of the poems was seen by critics and public alike, and Hardy has remained one of the most popular of English poets ever since. He went on writing until his death in 1928, and his collected verses cover nearly nine hundred pages, on every one of which there is something odd, powerful or poignant.

  Hardy is the poet of memory, loss and regret, not only for women, but for a whole world centred on his native Dorset. His forebears were all countrymen and women. Although he cast them off and concealed their existence in the name of Victorian respectability, it was they who nourished his writing, their history and the changing features of their lives that filled both novels and poetry: the vanishing world of isolated villages, the culture of woodland and moor, the itinerant workers, shepherds, schoolteachers and tranters (carriers), the farm labourers and church musicians such as his father and grandfather had been.

  His first known poem was inspired by his Dorset past, a remembrance written at the death of his grandmother of her telling him about his own birthplace when she first came to it:

  Our house stood quite alone, and those tall firs

  And beeches were not planted. Snakes and efts*

  Swarmed in the summer days, and nightly bats

  Would fly about our bedrooms. Heathcroppers

  Lived on the hills, and were our only friends;

  So wild it was when first we settled there.

  And his first published poem told a village story of the girl forced to marry against her will and saved for her true love by a fire on her wedding night. When it appeared in the Gentleman s Magazine in 1875, the editor changed Hardy’s ‘her cold little buzzoms’ to ‘her cold little figure’: sadly, the ‘improvement’ remains in the collected works to this day.

  Hardy kept all his life a child’s eye for detail and a wondering sense of the tricks played by time. A poem about landscape paintings at the Royal Academy broods on the fact that all the models for the greenery – leaves, blossom and grass – are now brown, withered and dead. Bird song, in another poem, prompts him to reflect that a year ago none of the singers yet existed, but were mere ‘particles of grain,/And earth, and air, and rain’. Inanimate objects inspire similar thoughts: finding the metal skeleton of a sunshade under Swanage cliffs, he speculates how long ago it was abandoned there, and in what circumstances. Noticing how a woman smiles at a blank wall, he elicits the reason, that someone had once traced the shadow of her son upon it, and she keeps the memory of the faint drawing under the new whitewash.

  On a summer walk, winged thistle seeds rise at the brush of a petticoat; on a winter walk, the drops on a gate bar look like a row of silver buttons. A city shopwoman, thinking of the family she hopes to have, imagines how her future children’s ‘shining heads would dot us round / Like mushroom balls on a grassy ground’ – a characteristically awkward and delightful image.

  At Christmas 1915, Hardy, now seventy-five, remembered how he was told as a child that the cattle knelt in their pens at midnight, and confessed that, if he were invited to look now, he would go, ‘Hoping it might be so’, despite his unbelief. The child who had played the accordion at four, and the fiddle soon after, kept the rhythms of village music and celebrated the traditions and secret stories of village life for eight decades. He said he never sought to present a ‘View’ of things, but relied on fugitive impressions; yet in his private movement from the land and the culture of speech and song to the town and the written word, he was part of the general cityward migration, and spoke for its aspirations and its regrets. His fugitive impressions have helped to form the images most of us still carry around, of a pastoral culture which was narrow and harsh, but with its own natural dignity and beauty; and which we join him in mourning, because we know it can never return.

  Country Living, 1990

  Snapdragon

  For Love Alone and Letty Fox: Her Luck by Christina Stead

  Christina Stead was born in Sydney in 1902; she came to Europe in 1928, lived in America during the forties, left for Europe again during the McCarthy period and has now completed the circle back to Australia. Her best-known novel is The Man Who Loved Children, a mammoth study of the family as a battleground of monsters prepared to fight to the last claw. It’s a book that has been much admired without becoming generally popular; her others are very little known in this country. But Lillian Hellman said last year that she ought to be given a Nobel Prize; other, younger critics have become interested in her work; and now Virago, with its usual excellent judgement, has put out two of her novels of the mid forties in paperback.

  Paperback monsters – they are huge books, like catalogues or encyclopaedias of the female condition. Somebody should have made her leave out a lot; she is like an unappeasable hostess piling up the plate. It’s all good, but it’s too much; the reader flags. (This is not just reviewer’s grouse.) But then one has to say that they are also magnificent books. They are cold and snappish, solid, very literary; with a great deal of digested reading of classic fiction behind them. Anyone who doubts whether there are still real books being produced should read one this summer.

  They are classically conceived, too, in spite of the elephantiasis. For Love Alone – the wrong title, suggesting a soft-hearted book -is the story of an obsession and its breaking. Teresa (of The Man Who Loved Children) determines to break away from the remnants of her family and from Australia and finds her motive power in her love for Jonathan Crow, a young university teacher who sails for London ahead of her. Crow is a wretch; he uses women to buttress his own shaky confidence and whines about his poverty. But Teresa needs an idol and he is smart and quick and helps her to see there are possibilities apart from the horrors of Sydney. The first third of the book makes one’s bones ache by its picture of the lives of those nice Australian women, spinsters, office and college girls, aunts and sisters all concentrated on trousseaux and prying into one another’s prospects. To get away from this Teresa takes a factory job, pinches every penny, walks miles to work, rejects a decent suitor and half starves herself for several years till she has the passage money to Europe. Crow writes her occasionally flirtatious letters; she dreams of and adores him.

  She arrives to find London grimy, dark and depressed; these are the thirties. Crow treats her with nonchalant cruelty. It becomes a tale of two city atmospheres, Sydney thick with genteel sweat, London poverty at the Gissing level, with Euston Ro
ad lodgings, rude landladies, and a cup of tea at Lyons a luxury. It also concerns itself with ugly cravings, since both Crow and Teresa are the victims of ideals of chastity and find no decent way of coming to terms with it. The good man who appears for her at the end is quite insubstantial, much less vivid than her last sight of the graceless Crow, luridly reflected in a cheap jeweller’s window.

  The patently autobiographical aspect may be responsible for the density of the atmosphere, the emotional charge of the book. Teresa is almost crushed, but the author is as near to being tenderly engaged on her behalf as one can imagine her being – whereas Letty, in Letty Fox, is a creature of tough, rubbery resilience and self-esteem who amuses her creator almost as much as Lorelei amused Anita Loos twenty years before. Letty is an American girl born about 1920. She quickly learns the lessons of her milieu: first, the necessity of trying to attach every male she meets to herself, by whatever means; second, the persistent extraction of money from men. Pleased with her successes and only briefly abashed by her failures, she narrates her own story without a trace of sentiment, as stoutly and straightforwardly as any young rogue bred to petty crime. The sexual act is nothing to her but a transaction; it’s what you get in return that counts. You can see why, when the book was published in 1946, it shocked by its matter-of-factness, its claim to represent the experience of ordinary New York college girls.

  Letty despises her mother, as all the women in the book do, because she has failed not only to keep her husband but – much worse – to extract any alimony from him. This is the essential, which everyone else manages much better. A wondering French observer remarks,

  What luck you have, you American women! Men who pay for everything and don’t ask for accounts. Yes, it’s Protestantism. The men believe they’ve done their wives insult and injury by sleeping with them. They must pay for ever!… And as for the women… they behave as if they are disabled for life as soon as they’re married.

  Letty’s grandmothers and aunts and cousins are all in this business of selling and blackmailing on a sexual basis, producing children as reinforcements. One virtuoso aunt claims to have four who, although they are never seen, are used entirely effectively against her humorous but doglike husband until he commits despairing suicide.

  Letty’s reminiscences take her to England (a progressive school, smartly put down) and France; to her two grandmothers, one a rich hotel-owner; to college and New York office life, until she does finally enter the haven of marriage to a rich man. Her obsession with her looks, her clothes, her talents, her constant self-appraisal and awareness of her family’s appraisal of her ‘chances’ have brought her to this necessary culmination.

  A certain perspective is opened on to all this by Letty’s father’s mistress, always named in a whisper as die Konkubine by the other women and mysterious to them because she lives outside the rules of their game. She works; she refuses to bear children; she laughs and displays no jealousy, nor does she fret for money or marriage. So un-American is she indeed that she advises Letty, seriously considering psychoanalysis, to take the alternative: only 35 cents, she points out, for a fortune teller. The book is full of these sharp asides.

  If Teresa’s story is an Education Sentimentale, Letty’s is a girl’s Tom Jones. Both are real feats of imagination, their triumphs lying chiefly in the way they convey atmosphere and state of mind. Each concentrates on a single figure, one refusing the pressures of her environment, the other adapting all too perfectly. There is otherwise almost nothing by way of plot, and the many peripheral characters are presented flatly, often as grotesques. One doesn’t credit them with inner lives. Instead, Mrs Stead’s prejudices bristle about the place; and there is a good deal of grim humour. She’s a formidable and entirely individual writer; I hope Virago will reprint more of her work.

  New Statesman, 1978

  Patron Saint

  E. M. Forster: A Life. Volume II by P. N. Furbank

  Dorothy Parker, not much given to reverence, said in the 1950s she’d go on hands and knees to reach E. M. Forster. If she had it might have flustered him; but it was an improvement on earlier Americans who had been inclined to congratulate him on his Hornblower books. By now he had become a figure to be ‘honoured for personal goodness and sanctity’. He was old – in his seventies – and he had lived through a period of amazing political upheavals and volte-face among intellectuals without shifting from his own consistently humane and temperate standpoint. P. N. Furbank suggests that the word ‘holiness’ had crept into some friends’ views of him. An agnostic saint? Certainly his physical presence in Cambridge had its awe-inspiring aspect; he would appear in the front court of King’s rather like an ancient, sacred tortoise who might decide to snap or draw in his head. One knew the wisdom was stored inside.

  Lionel Trilling’s wartime study praised Forster’s work for going beyond the limitations of the liberal imagination, but put the emphasis squarely on his reliability: ‘He is one of the thinking people who were never led by thought to suppose they could be more than human and who, in bad times, will not become less.’ Without raising his voice (literally: he was wholly inaudible at a European writers’ conference in 1935) or adopting a mandarin style, he had established his views on race, militarism, the Empire, the public schools, class, nationalism, business ethics, sexual orthodoxy and indeed most of the large issues of his time. He had taken on the burdens of the public man of letters, fighting with the BBC during one of its red-scare periods (1931), presiding over the National Council for Civil Liberties, signing joint letters protesting at book censorship, active for a while in the PEN club; but he had never grown what Coleridge, speaking of Wordsworth, called a ‘moral film over the eye’.

  Still, Furbank’s Forster is not a secular saint. He is a tetchy, honourable, mostly endearing creature. One of the virtues of this book – and the second volume is still more enjoyable than the first – is the dry affection with which it is written. Furbank never deflates his subject; his personal feeling for the man is clear, though not obtrusive, and his own diary notes have been a valuable source. But he looks straight at the less pleasing aspects of Forster’s personality: his misogyny, for instance, which led him to accuse women of wanting to destroy men’s club life, while at the same time objecting to the idea of female homosexuality on the grounds that they shouldn’t try to do without men. It also made him refuse Leonard Woolf’s request that his wife should be allowed to read his homosexual novel Maurice and then complain that her critical estimate of his work was based on insufficient knowledge of it. Women were to him at best ‘a sort of rich subsoil’ in which to rest and grow – this was his phrase for his tyrannous old mother. At worst they might be labelled ‘rubbishy little creature’, as Evie was in Howards End.

  A central theme of this book is inevitably Forster’s experiences as a homosexual, which led him into some curious scrapes and guilty feelings as well as contentment. Like Isherwood (who was very frank about this in Christopher and His Kind) he was drawn only to young men of lower classes or different cultures; thus although there might be much friendliness between him and his loves, there was never equality. Nor was he ever able to enact what he imagined in his fiction, the setting up of a domestic life with a partner. He enjoyed being the benefactor and educator. No doubt he saw a great difference between paid encounters with male prostitutes arranged by sympathetic friends and tender, long affairs. It is moving to read of his happiness when he met the policeman, Bob Buckingham, and believed himself loved, in his early fifties. But there was still a strong element of patronage, even though it came to include friendly patronage of Mrs Buckingham too. One can’t help feeling distinctly uneasy about the account of this affair, partly because Buckingham himself – incredibly – denied that he was aware of Forster’s homosexuality; and also because of the element of cruelty and exploitation which is clear in a letter from Sebastian Sprott to Forster in which he urges him to do everything he can to lure Buckingham away from his newly confined wife:

 
; ‘She is so miserable when I am away.’ And so on. Well then you have a nice line in counter-arguments, and among them FREEDOM, which is much thought of by any who want to appear modern.

  It is clear that both Buckingham and his wife to a degree had their heads turned by being introduced into Forster’s world; but the situation settled down into a fairly stable and happy one, with Forster godfather to their son and benefactor to the whole family.

  Furbank picks his way through these difficult areas without being coy or sensational: a triumph of his own sense and good feeling. He is also deft and funny describing Forster’s running battle with his aristocratic neighbours in Surrey over footpath rights, leases and a patch of woodland he cherished. But the two most absorbing sections of the book are probably the foreign ones. During the First World War, Forster, more or less a pacifist, got himself Red Cross voluntary work in Alexandria, visiting wounded British soldiers in hospital. Here he met Cavafy, studied Egyptian history, enjoyed his work and the sunshine but felt lonely until he fell in love, romantically, with a tram conductor called Mohammed, and saw through his eyes the horrors of colonialism. Furbank shows that A Passage to India owes something to Forster’s Egyptian experiences as well as to India, where he went after the war to be secretary to the Maharaja of Dewas, taking part in the preposterous intrigues and rituals of the court. He returned to England deeply depressed and wrote apropos the half-finished novel: