The Fighter_Literary Essays

by Tim Parks

  Designed by Hardy himself, Max Gate, as the house was called, was small, unimaginative and surrounded by a protective belt of trees which he would never allow anyone to prune. To guarantee even greater security, the house was built by members of his family: his younger brother Henry and his now ageing father. Guests complained it was gloomy and suffocating. No sooner were they installed there in 1882 than Tom and Emma began to rent accommodation in London for the summer season. The marriage sank into its previous torpor. Hardy was approaching that age when, as Emma would say, ‘a man’s feelings too often take a new course altogether. Eastern ideas of matrimony secretly pervade his thoughts, and he wearies of the most perfect, and suitable wife chosen in his earlier life.’21 In short, Hardy had adultery in mind. It was an exciting and anxious period, out of which he produced two of the finest novels in the English language, Tess and Jude.

  Returning pregnant to her family after her catastrophic period in service, Tess gives birth to a baby that promptly dies. There are many dead babies in Hardy’s work. The dead child is ever the sign that it would have been better never to have got involved in love. Vowing never to marry, Tess goes to serve as a milkmaid in a farm far enough away for her shame not to be known. Here she meets the perfect man, Angel Clare, trainee gentleman farmer. The scene is set for Hardy’s characteristically tantalising mix of desire and trepidation. To sharpen our sense of anxiety, both characters and their possible but difficult union are made enormously attractive. Here is Tess after an afternoon nap, viewed by Clare:

  She had not heard him enter and hardly realised his presence there. She was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it had been a snake’s. She had stretched one arm so high above her coiled-up cable of hair that he could see its satin delicacy above the sunburn; her face was flushed with sleep, and her eyelids hung heavy over their pupils. The brimfulness of her nature breathed from her. It was a moment when a woman’s soul is more incarnate than at any other time; when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself flesh, and sex takes the outside place in the presentation.

  Then those eyes flashed brightly through their filmy heaviness, before the remainder of her face was well awake. With an oddly compounded look of gladness, shyness and surprise, she exclaimed –

  ‘O Mr Clare! How you frightened me …’22

  Hardy wished, he said, ‘to demolish the doll of English fiction’,23 to present woman’s real sexuality. He is rightly given credit for doing so. But there was no question, as some critics imagine, of any campaign for female emancipation. What mattered was the freedom to evoke the lure and terror of sexual experience. Who but Hardy would have compared the interior of a girl’s mouth to a snake’s? Not only threatening in her beauty, woman is also frightened herself. And her fear too is unnerving. Here, somewhat earlier, is the couple’s first conversation alone:

  ‘What makes you draw off in that way, Tess?’ said he. ‘Are you afraid?’

  ‘Oh no, sir … not of outdoor things; especially just now when the apple-blooth is falling, and everything so green.’

  ‘But you have your indoor fears – eh?’

  ‘Well – yes, sir.’

  ‘What of?’

  ‘I couldn’t quite say.’

  ‘The milk turning sour?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Life in general?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Ah – so am I, very often. This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?’24

  Two ‘tremulous lives’25 move toward consummation. Will Tess be forgiven her early deflowering and dead child? Will Angel overcome class divisions to marry her? In short, is life a tragedy or a comedy? All kinds of hints suggest the latter. In the farmhouse where milkmaids and farmhands get together comic stories of infidelity are told. Hilariously and charmingly, three other milkmaids are also swooning over Clare. It is a world fizzing with fun and farce. Yet when finally Angel kisses Tess and she responds with ‘unreflecting inevitableness’26 to ‘the necessity of loving him’,27 we are told that ‘the pivot of the universe for their two natures’28 has shifted.

  Against her mother’s advice, Tess finds the courage to write a letter to Clare about her earlier misadventure. She puts it under his bedroom door but there is a carpet on the other side, underneath which the note is invisible to him. Hardy is frequently accused of introducing too many coincidences into his work, almost always at the expense of his characters’ happiness. But they have the effect of confusing the issue of responsibility, begging the question of fatality, while also giving the disquieting impression that a chance meeting or a mislaid letter can be quite as devastating to an individual destiny as class discrimination or moral hypocrisy. There are simply so many things to be afraid of.

  Tess’s secret still untold, the couple get married. At last they are alone. No one can interfere. The sexual experience towards which a hundred and more very lush pages have been leading is imminent. Clare, however, chooses this of all moments to confess to a sin, some years before, of ‘eight and forty hours dissipation with a stranger’.29 Tess instantly forgives him and responds with her own sad history. Angel instantly rejects her. There will be no lovemaking.

  The scene is an extraordinary one. Suddenly both lovers’ fears are entirely confirmed. For Angel, Tess is a different person, the decision to marry a girl from the lower classes has proved a terrible error: ‘I repeat, the woman I have been loving is not you.’30 With ‘terror upon her white face’,31 Tess feels all the weight of Victorian morals and class division come down upon her. Meantime the reader cannot help but feel that both partners were all too ready to see ‘the terrifying bliss’32 of sexual love thwarted. Sooner than expected, ‘Having nothing more to fear’,33 Tess falls asleep. Two days later, of her own accord, she returns home.

  On a much lower key Hardy’s poems suggest that his own life was beset by similar anxieties to those of his more melodramatic characters. A few years before Tess, in a poem entitled ‘He Abjures Love’, the poet announces that he will no longer make the mistake of idealising women: ‘No more will now rate I/The common rare’.34 Was Angel right then when he abruptly retreated from his romantic vision of Tess? Three years later, writing a poem to a woman he had hoped would become a lover, Hardy speaks of a moment when they were trapped by the pouring rain ‘snug and warm’35 together in a hansom cab that stood motionless at its destination. As so often, fear of sexual experience is at once hinted at and disguised behind coincidence:

  Then the downpour ceased, to my sharp sad pain,

  And the glass that had screened our forms before

  Flew up, and out she sprang to her door:

  I should have kissed her if the rain

  Had lasted a minute more.36

  Such frustrations, alleviated by a sense of relief, more or less sum up Hardy’s midlife flirtations. The famous author would not become an adulterer. The obstacle was not a moral one.

  Meanwhile Tess of the D’Urbervilles was enthralling and dividing its Victorian public. ‘Dinner parties had to be rearranged’, Tomalin tells us, ‘to take account of the warring opinions.’37 Was Tess as the book’s subtitle provocatively claimed ‘A Pure Woman’, or, as many suspected, a ‘little harlot’, heroine of ‘a coarse and disagreeable story’,38 told in ‘a coarse and disagreeable manner’?39 Readers were used to thinking of sexuality in terms of morals, of good and bad behaviour. They expected to see the characters of a novel rewarded accordingly. But Hardy had other polarities in mind. His characters are bold or afraid, generous or mean, strong or weak. He insists on Tess’s innocence. To make matters worse, Victorian justice is nevertheless done; Tess dies on the gallows after murdering the man who first deflowered her and now returns to ruin her life again. But this is so extreme as to be a travesty of justice, a horror story. Poring over the conundrum, Victorians were invited to suspect that the moral rhetoric in which they smothered sexual mores was a pathetic cover for deep underlying phobia. It was far more disquieting than any straight
forward attack on moral hypocrisy could have been.

  If Hardy’s lush lingering over budding womanhood was a problem for Victorians and even for some critics today, when the same treatment was given to the English countryside he could only be applauded. Indeed, there are many for whom Hardy’s representation of landscape and country life, his creation, through a series of novels, of an imaginative world he calls Wessex, roughly corresponding to Dorset, remains his great achievement. Certainly the richness of the evocation of fields, flowers and farming life in all its varied seasonal activities offers welcome relief to the dashed hopes of his young characters. I can think of no other author whose descriptions give such pleasure. I speak as one who usually wearies after only three or four lines of description. Yet Hardy’s treatment of the landscape, the weather and the peasant community from which his characters emerge is more than a backdrop or compensation. It is essential to his preoccupations.

  Far From the Madding Crowd begins with a shepherd tending his flock on Norcombe Hill:

  … one of the spots which suggest to a passer-by that he is in the presence of a shape approaching the indestructible as nearly as any to be found on earth. It was a featureless convexity of chalk and soil – an ordinary specimen of those smoothly outlined protuberances of the globe which may remain undisturbed on some great day of confusion when far grander heights and dizzy granite precipices topple down.40

  This is Hardy’s most profound attraction to his Dorset landscape. It is supremely resilient. Through lavish and loving description of it he hoped perhaps to accrue to his anxious self something of this longed-for quality.

  Almost all of The Return of the Native takes place on the wild Egdon Heath (‘civilisation was its enemy’),41 much of it at night. One early chapter is entitled ‘The figure against the sky’. A woman is described standing on an ancient burial barrow that commands the flat dark landscape beneath. ‘Her extraordinary fixity, her conspicuous loneliness, her heedlessness of night, betokened among other things an utter absence of fear.’42

  Silhouetted above the landscape, passionate Eustacia is looking for her lover. This bold detachment from both landscape and community is a position of maximum vulnerability, and glamour. How magnificent and unwise of her not to be afraid. By the end of the novel, Eustacia’s defeat and mental torment will be such that, far from wishing to stand out, she seeks relief by sinking into the landscape, drowning herself in the weir. Hardy’s suicides almost always seek death by drowning, by immersion in the imperturbability of the physical world. Jude seeks to drown himself standing on the thin ice of a pond. Tess threatens to drown herself in the river. In The Mayor of Casterbridge the main character Henchard chooses, like Eustacia, the weir.

  Fortunately, it is possible in Hardy’s view to alleviate suffering through partial rather than final merging with the natural world. Alone in a wood at night, for example, ‘the plight of being alive becomes attenuated to its least possible dimensions’.43 So in happier moments Tess’s ‘flexuous and stealthy figure became an integral part of the scene’.44

  This yearning for absorption into nature is as much Hardy’s as his characters’. How he relishes describing characters covered with seed spores and cobwebs, surrounded by buzzing insects, ankle-deep in leaves, butterflies on their breath, grasshoppers tumbling over their feet, dew on their hair, rabbits at their feet, rain on their lips. What a pleasure for pen and personalities to fuse themselves in beautiful impersonal natural phenomena. What a pity such restful retreats from adult life cannot last, or not until, as Tess reassures herself at one point, we will all at last be ‘grassed down and forgotten’.45

  A powerful death wish drives Hardy’s writing. In a letter in 1888 he remarked: ‘if there is any way of getting a melancholy satisfaction out of life it lies in dying, so to speak, before one is out of the flesh; by which I mean putting on the manners of ghosts, wandering in their haunts, and taking their view of surrounding things. To think of life as passing away is a sadness, to think of it as past is at least tolerable. Hence even when I enter into a room to pay a simple morning call, I have unconsciously the habit of regarding the scene as if I were a spectre not solid enough to influence my environment.’46

  The desire to remain a child and be spared life, the desire to be a ghost and beyond life are intimately related. In between, terrible in its intensity, lies adult life, narrative. One could usefully think of Hardy the narrator as a ghost within his own fiction, accompanying his wonderful, fearful child-adults through the initiations that will lead them to wish they were dead and indeed to die, if not through suicide, at least without much resistance. The word ‘haunt’ recurs with remarkable frequency. The archaic vocabulary and sentence structures frequently suggest a story whose melodrama is long over, ready to sink away into some ancient collective memory. Reading a magnificent description of the wind singing in the trees, or following a charmingly comic conversation of village rustics (another timeless world in which Hardy loves to submerge himself), it is all too easy to forget that this is the man who wrote to a friend on the occasion of the death of his son that ‘the death of a child is never really to be regretted, when one reflects on what he has escaped.’47 His is a strong, shocking and above all defeatist vision. A ghostly existence is preferable because a ghost cannot influence his environment, which is a good thing because action in the world always leads to trouble.

  But if Hardy hoped that a writer too might be spared influence in the real world, he was mistaken. He had forgotten Meredith’s warning of years before. In the Victorian age a novel could cause a great stir and where Tess in 1891 might have charmed as much as it shocked, Jude four years later simply raised hell. ‘Jude the obscene’, ‘a shameful nightmare’,48 critics wrote.

  Renouncing the reassuring descriptions of country life, the pleasing chorus of village rustics, with Jude Hardy arrives at the core of his vision. A poor orphan trying to hide from life in scholarship has a rude awakening when seduced by a raw country girl. Married and separated in a matter of pages, he falls in love with a refined cousin, Sue, a girl so terrified by sex that when she marries a much older man to escape Jude she denies him consummation, returns to Jude in the hope that he will be willing to live with her without sex, then gives herself to him only when she fears that physical need will drive him back to his wife. This was not easy material for Victorians. Coincidences and misfortunes abound. When the child got from Jude’s wife kills the children got from Sue and then himself, it is the death of hope tout court, the proof that all attempts to achieve happiness will end in disaster. It would surely have been better never to have tried. To provoke his Victorian readers further, Hardy again offered an ending mockingly in line with their moral convictions: appalled by the death of her children, Sue gets religion and returns to her husband while Jude is seduced by his wife and returns to her shortly before his death. The shape of Victorian justice is thus again in place, as a nightmare, a terrible constriction of human potential.

  * * *

  A ‘pale gentle frightened little man’49 Robert Louis Stevenson had described Hardy in 1885. On receiving a bad review for the novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1878, Hardy had written in his diary, ‘Woke before it was light. Felt that I had not enough staying power to hold my own in the world.’50 Not unexpectedly, then, the storm of criticism over Jude shook him deeply. His wife loathed the book and said so in public. The bad news even reached the rustics in Bockhampton. To the extent to which all his novels had been a melodramatic exploration of his own dilemmas, to which all his characters, as he himself said, ‘express mainly the author’,51 it must have been clear that with his emotional life absolutely stalled any further work of fiction could only be deeply disturbing to write and very uncomfortable to publish. As a poet on the other hand he might more easily play the cryptic and inconsequential ghost. It was a medium that spared him too much narrative, too much contact with the sufferers who were his characters. Tomalin accepts Hardy’s claim that poetry would require fewer compromises than s
erialised fiction. But there is nothing in terms of content that Hardy put in his poetry that he could not have put in a novel, nor is there much sign of compromise in Jude. Rather the contrary. It had been an act of enormous courage and artistic integrity to write such a book. By comparison, the huge and tedious patriotic poem The Dynasts (1904) looks far more like an appeal for public approval than a decision to be uncompromising. Perhaps the truth is that the decision to stop writing narrative went hand in hand with a decision to struggle with his problems no more. He would no longer seek to change his life.

  By 1889 Tom and Emma were sleeping in separate beds. She had begun to write furious attacks on him in her diary. Hardy continued his sterile flirtations and never missed attending a funeral. In the mid-1890s they took up bicycling together. It offered a circumscribed adventure, a tolerable togetherness. Then in 1905 the twenty-six-year-old Florence Dugdale appeared on the exhausted scene, flattered both partners and soon became part of their lives. When Emma died in 1912, Florence was well placed to kick out the relatives, take over the author’s life and eventually marry him. Afraid as always of the world’s censure, the ageing author insisted the wedding take place in great secrecy.

  Hardy had always gone out of his way to avoid conflict. Despite the social criticism in his novels he never made political statements, was extremely careful not to argue with relations. Yet his writing had always caused offence. The natives of Dorset felt farming people had been portrayed as simpletons. Emma complained that he had betrayed their marriage and the church. Now, no sooner was he married again than he offended his second wife, with a handful of poems about the first. They were among the finest he ever wrote.