Thomas Hardy
Page 2
Are the poems true? His second wife, Florence, indignantly rejected the notion: ‘All the poems about her are a fiction, but a fiction in which their author has now come to believe.’11 She was too angry and jealous to accept that there had been another Hardy and another Emma before she knew them, or to understand that poems have their own internal truth to which both fact and dream may contribute. Maybe it does not matter whether they are true or not, although Hardy himself evidently thought they were. A year after Emma’s death, in November 1913, he had a conversation about them with Arthur Benson in Cambridge in which ‘He told me he had enough verses for a book, but he didn’t know whether he ought to include in it some verses he wrote when his wife died “very intimate, of course – but the verses came; it was quite natural; one looked back through the years and saw some pictures.”’12 Benson’s account suggests that Hardy felt the poems showed his past, and that they had come to him almost unbidden: ‘one looked back through the years and saw some pictures.’It may be how he preferred to remember and simplify the work that had gone into them, packing fluid feeling into solid shapes, making patterns with words and rhyme, exploring the tension between idea and form. The manuscripts are effectively fair copies with just a few emendations, and, although there were rough drafts, which he always destroyed, it may be that they were composed almost like music in his head even before he put anything down on paper.
Benson added, ‘I have forgotten to put down by far the most interesting thing Hardy said. He was talking about his wife’s death, and wondering if it was indecent to write poetry, and he said “It’s natural to me to write poetry – I was never intended to be a prose-writer, still less a teller of tales – still, one had got to live.” ’ The question about whether it was proper to publish the poems did not worry him for long. The volume containing them appeared in November 1914, three months after the outbreak of the First World War, which partly explains the small attention given to them. He wrote to a friend in December, ‘My own favourites, that include all those in memory of Emma, have been mentioned little… I am so glad you like “When I set out for Lyonnesse.” It is exactly what happened 44 years ago.’13 In that week a review of the poems appeared in the New Statesman, by Lytton Strachey, who wrote: ‘They are, in fact, modern as no other poems are. The author of Jude the Obscure speaks in them, but with the concentration, the intensity, the subtle disturbing force of poetry… He is incorrect; but then how unreal and artificial a thing is correctness! He fumbles; but it is that very fumbling that brings him so near to ourselves.’14 Hardy would not have liked the accusations of incorrectness and fumbling, but Strachey did see that his poetry is the real thing, able ‘to touch our marrow-bones’.
Hardy went on writing poems about Emma, returning again and again to incidents in their life together, to the end of his own life fifteen years later. Some, by no means all, of the later verses rise to the heights of the ‘Poems of 1912–13’, and at least eighty poems belong to her. Inspiration came to him all the time, from a curl of her hair that she had cut for him once to console him on parting, which had stayed a bright brown; from the memory of a walk when her long skirts gathered ‘Winged thistle-seeds’which
… rose at the brush of your petticoat-seam…
And sailed on the breeze in a nebulous stream
Like a comet’s tail behind you…15
Also from the sight of the keys of the piano she had played when he refused to listen – in the poem ‘Penance’he finds the grimmest of images to stand for his guilt in his own failure in love:
I would not join. I would not stay,
But drew away,
Though the winter fire beamed brightly… Aye!
I do to-day
What I would not then; and the chill old keys,
Like a skull’s brown teeth
Loose in their sheath,
Freeze my touch; yes, freeze.16
He said he was prouder of his poetry than of any of his prose, even of his great novels, because he felt that in all the novels there was an element of compromise. His professional life, which appears from most aspects as a triumphal progress, always seemed to him to be a struggle against publishers determined to censor what he wrote, and the wilful misunderstanding and lofty disapproval of the critics. When he talked to Benson of having to write novels because ‘one had got to live’, he was still showing his sensitivity to criticism, remembering the hard labour of writing against time for serial publication and the many struggles with editors and publishers to be allowed to say what he wanted. He was often despondent even once he had become successful and rich. Only in poetry was there no compromising, and in the ‘Poems of 1912–13’he bared his heart as he had never fully allowed himself to do before. It gives them their immediacy and power, allowing us to eavesdrop on his train of thought and feeling as he moves between an old man’s sorrow and a young man’s bliss.
This book is about how Hardy became a writer, poet and novelist. It starts with his mother, from whom he took a way of thinking and many of his ideas and ambitions. Her story sets the background to his life.
PART ONE
1840–1867
1. Mother
Hardy’s life began like this. His mother went into labour on 1 June 1840. She sent for the midwife, a neighbour. The short hours of darkness passed, the sun rose and filled the bedroom with its light, she had a bad time, and at eight o’clock the child was born, apparently lifeless. He was put aside while his mother was seen to. Then the midwife, turning back to the small scrap of humanity, looked closely at him and exclaimed, ‘Dead! Stop a minute, he’s alive enough, sure!’1 And so he was: tiny, weak, hardly expected to survive for long, but not dead yet.2
He was so feeble that his future remained doubtful. For five weeks he was kept at home, and then on 5 July he was taken to be christened in church. And, although, as Hardy himself put it later, ‘he showed not the physique of his father’, he was named Thomas Hardy after his father and his grandfather.3 Three Thomas Hardys in three generations, and not one of them allowed the luxury of a second given name to distinguish one from another: you can understand why he said he wished he had been called something different, such as Christopher, the name his mother wanted to give him.4 But Thomas Hardy he was and remained.
There was nothing idyllic about his start in life. Jemima was a reluctant mother, and his parents had married unwillingly under pressure from her family, less than six months before his birth. Both were Dorset country people, his father a builder in a very small way, living with his widowed mother in a hamlet a few miles from Dorchester. His newly acquired wife, born Jemima Hand, had earned her own living as a servant since the age of thirteen and had hoped to make a career as a cook. She was twenty-six when she found herself trapped by pregnancy. She came from the village of Melbury Osmond in the north-west of the county, close to Somerset, among the apple orchards. To this day it is idyllically pretty, with a church, a green, thatched cottages set at different angles to the road and a watersplash where two streams meet. Both rise in the parkland of the lords of the manor, the Fox-Strangways. In Jemima’s day the third Earl of IIchester ruled over the estate and lived in the great house, Melbury Sampford, a sprawling mixture of styles crowned by a hexagonal Tudor tower with magnificent windows looking out in five directions. The park had been enclosed by the builder of the tower and was stocked with deer. There was a private church for the family, and lions on the gates. Here they sometimes entertained royalty; from here their younger sons went to the university and into the Church, assured of good livings in local parishes; and from here the family set off for London every spring with the object of making good matches for their children in the aristocratic marriage market. One daughter had defied them: in 1764 Lady Susan Fox-Strangways married herself to an actor, William O’Brien. Although O’Brien was a friend of Garrick, gentlemanly and gifted, the scandal was great, but the O’Briens made a happy couple and were in time forgiven. They were allowed to live in one of the houses belonging to th
e Fox-Strangways, at Stinsford near Dorchester, and the Earl fixed a gentlemanly job for O’Brien, who became Receiver General of the taxes of the county. He died in 1815; Lady Susan lived on until 1827. She chose to be buried with her husband in a vault beneath Stinsford Church. It was made by a local builder named Thomas Hardy. So the Fox-Strangways played their part, remote and heedless forces of destiny, in the meeting of Hardy’s parents.
None of this was known to the young Jemima Hand. Her own family’s problems took all her attention. She was her parents’ fifth child, and there were two more after her, but it was not a happy family. Her father, George Hand, had married her mother, Elizabeth – or Betty – Swetman, with small enthusiasm and against her father’s wishes. That was in 1804. The young couple reached the altar in the last month of Betty’s pregnancy. Both had grown up in Melbury Osmond, but otherwise they had little in common. The Swetmans were an old-established family, steady yeomen farmers with a bit of land; there is still a ‘Sweatman orchard’ in the village. Although the village census of 1801 describes her as working as a ‘spinner’, she is said to have enjoyed enough leisure and money to indulge her taste for reading Richardson, Fielding and Paradise Lost, to have dispensed to the village from Culpepper’s Herbal and to have worn pretty clothes.5 She could expect to inherit her father’s savings, whereas George had nothing to offer but dark good looks, defiant intelligence and, presumably, charm. His mother was a Melbury woman, his father had come from Puddletown in south Dorset, he was the eldest of nine, now in his thirties, and he was a drinker. In 1801 he appears to have been a servant in the household of the village clergyman.6 Betty paid a high price for whatever she found romantic about him when her father washed his hands of her and his grandchildren. Her mother, Maria Swetman, who might have smoothed things over, had died two years before. Betty gave her name, Maria, to her firstborn.
George picked up work as a shepherd or a gardener, but it never amounted to much. Times got worse as the war with France went on year after year. Things were especially bad for rural workers, and George suffered with the others. Betty may have kept up her spinning, and they seem to have crammed themselves into a small house, part of what had been an ancient monastic building known as Barton Hill Cottages. Drink made him violent. He despised the Church – perhaps a result of being employed by the rector – and refused to allow his children to be baptized. Betty contrived secret baptisms. He had another woman. His lungs were attacked by tuberculosis. Still, the marriage lasted for eighteen years, and children kept arriving. When Jemima was nine, in 1822, he died. Whether she felt more relief than sorrow we don’t know, because whatever memories she had of her father she did not talk about him. The family story is that Betty buried him beside his mistress, as Hardy shows Bathsheba burying Troy in Fanny’s grave in Far from the Madding Crowd.
As a couple, the Hands were originals, thinking for themselves and refusing to follow the paths expected of people in their situation so low down in the social heap. They were also desperately unfortunate. After George’s death his parents, who had moved back to Puddletown, took in the eldest girl, Maria, and there drew the line. Betty’s father died, stubbornly unforgiving to the end, and she was left with seven children and no income. She considered herself cheated of her rights, and continued to complain ‘I should not have been poor if right had took its place’ throughout her life; but she had to apply for support to the Poor Law Overseers of the parish.7 Some help was forthcoming, but in the 1820s it was administered with chill harshness. The parish grudged every penny spent on a child, requiring that at the age of thirteen he or she should become self-supporting and cutting the mother’s money accordingly.
Jemima’s childhood was the bleakest period of her life. She told her son she had endured ‘some very distressful experiences of which she could never speak… without pain’. She also recalled to him seeing ‘a child whipped at the cart-tail round Yeovil for stealing a book from a stall’ when she was herself a girl.8 Yeovil was the nearest town to Melbury likely to have a book stall in the market, and the question occurs as to whether she herself was the savagely punished book stealer. She and her brothers and sisters experienced all the deprivations of penniless village children: they knew what it was to be hungry and thought themselves lucky if they were warm and dry in rough weather. They wore other people’s cast-off clothes and often went shoeless. There were worse things, no doubt, but they survived. Two of her brothers went off to work as bricklayers in Puddletown, partly drawn by the presence of grandparents and an elder sister; also because it was a more thriving place than Melbury, with a market and close to Dorchester. The Hand boys became drinkers like their father; the girls showed a finer spirit. Jemima learnt to sew, to cook and to clean, and that was almost the sum of her education, but not quite, because she could read, and she loved books with the same passion as her mother.9 There is even a tradition that the family made up verses to entertain themselves.10 The streak of originality and defiance persisted under the hardship.
At thirteen, in 1826, she went to work. Her first job, as a live-in domestic servant, took her away from home. The biggest local employers were the Fox-Strangways, who required a great many servants for themselves and their relations around the county. The village of Melbury Osmond provided them with a good supply. Jemima went to the household of an uncle of the third Earl, an elderly clergyman, the Hon. Revd Charles Redlynch Fox-Strangways. His parish was seven miles south of Melbury Osmond, in the village of Maiden Newton in the valley of the River Frome. The vicarage was the largest house in the place, standing next to the church with gardens along the river bank, a very pleasant place where he had lived for forty years. Maiden Newton was bigger and livelier than Melbury, with busy corn mills on the river and several inns for travellers, being on the main road between Yeovil and Dorchester. It was also near enough for her to get home and back when she had a whole free day, on foot, walking being the only means of transport for the poor. She had the satisfaction of earning a few pounds a year, and could rely on regular meals and keep herself dressed to the standard expected of a maid in the vicarage. Entering a different world, with habits and tastes quite new to her, she had much to take in, and since she was quick and interested she learnt fast.
At Maiden Newton she grew from a child into a young woman. She gave satisfaction to her employers, and was promoted from the lowest levels of domestic service to work in the kitchen and then to cook for the family. They took her with them when they went to Weymouth, the most fashionable of coastal resorts and the largest town in Dorset. Weymouth had a broad sandy beach and a port, bathing machines and boats, strolling crowds and bands to entertain them. Army and naval officers were much in evidence. There was a theatre, and dancing in the summer. A statue of George III presided, demonstrating the gratitude of the citizens to the King, whose affection for the place had made it famous. The sea front was lined with handsome houses. In the basement of one of these she no doubt did her cooking, but in her free moments she could slip out to join the crowds, breathe the sea air, admire the view of the bay and listen to the bands.
She never grew tall, and she was not as pretty as her sisters, her head rather big for her body, but she was neat, lively and handsome, with good grey eyes and a bold Roman nose. She had an air of intelligence and humour, and looked like a person who could assert herself and who noticed what was going on around her. And, while she may have picked up standard English from her employers, she usually spoke like the Dorset countrywoman she was, using ‘thee’ and ‘thou’, ‘’tis’, ‘’twas’ and ‘’twould’, ‘voot’ for ‘foot’, ‘zee’ for ‘see’, ‘juties’ for ‘duties’, ‘’ee’ for ‘you’. Towards the end of her life her daughter Kate, planning a trip to Bristol with friends, reported her as asking, ‘Be ’ee all Bristol crazy?’11 Although Jemima was a reader, and her mother and two of her younger sisters could write reasonably well, nothing in her handwriting survives except for her name on her own marriage register and on her sister’s, as witness. There is
not even an inscription in a book, and her son wrote letters for her.12 You can learn to read without ever getting far with writing, and this may have been her situation.
With or without letters, she kept in touch with her family, divided between Melbury and Puddletown, where her sister Maria married a cabinet maker, James Sparks, in 1828, and began a family. The sisters were fond of one another, and Maria kept an eye on Jemima as well as she could. One of her memories is of how her Puddletown brothers, Christopher and Henry, arranged a treat for her in 1830, when she was seventeen. She had been given a free Sunday, and they got permission for her to be present at the Sunday morning ‘barrack-service’ for the soldiers in Dorchester, which was a garrison town. She needed to set off early to cover the eight miles from Maiden Newton to be in time, because the soldiers assembled in the riding school at nine in the morning; and she must have been a serious young woman for whom a special religious service was known to be a treat. The clergyman in charge, ‘a fine, noble-looking young man’ called Henry Moule, was newly arrived in the district and based in Fordington, an outlying district of Dorchester, with a rough population. She never forgot how he preached standing with the great regimental drum as a table in front of him, the soldiers also standing on the sawdust-covered ground throughout his sermon. ‘A guinea lay on the drum-head through the service, at the end of which the preacher took it up and hastened away to his parish service at the Church.’13