Thomas Hardy
Page 36
Hardy was not yet ready to make any decisions about the future. Part of him was ecstatically absorbed in recalling Emma and their early love, another part sorrowing for his neglect and unkindness to her. He wanted to keep hold of Florence but was fearful of scandal. He also wanted to look after Lilian, preferably at Max Gate. He had no one to turn to for advice. Gosse knew too little of his circumstances, Clodd too much. His sisters and brother were sympathetic but in no position to do anything. Mrs Henniker could be relied on for sympathy but could not solve his problems. So he struggled with them alone, and a black comedy continued to be played out at Max Gate.
On top of this there were all the usual accretions to a literary career to distract and keep him busy throughout 1913. He was preparing a last collection of stories – ‘mostly bad’, he told a friend – as well as the new poems, which were to make a section in his third volume of poetry. 9 He was asked to allow some of his work to be put into Braille, and agreed. He gave assistance to Hermann Lea with his Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, suggesting that his American publishers might like to use Lea’s photographs as illustrations to a new edition of his novels, which they did. He corresponded with Elgar about the possibility of collaborating on an opera and said that A Pair of Blue Eyes would be ‘good for music… and has a distinct and central heroine, with a wild background of cliffs and sea. Two poets, Tennyson and Patmore, were attracted by the novel.’ 10 Elgar promised to reread some of Hardy’s books again with music in mind, but nothing came of the plan, which would have needed an English Boito to write the libretto. Meanwhile a film was being made of Far from the Madding Crowd and an option was taken out for The Mayor of Casterbridge. Tess, already filmed, was on at a picture-palace near Marble Arch, and Hardy made a special day trip to London for a showing in October. ‘You would be amused to see an Americanized Wessex Dairy,’ he told a friend. 11
In the summer Florence went to Southwold, and Southwold is close to Aldeburgh. Hardy turned up at the Swan Hotel in Southwold for a few days and then moved on to stay with Clodd. Both he and Mrs Henniker were sympathetic to Florence, which may have encouraged Hardy to take action. By the summer there was an understanding between them that they would marry – a secret understanding, although she gave away the secret to Clodd in July. However pleased Hardy was with the engagement, his thoughts were not all with Florence, and in August he wrote two more poems about Emma. The brilliance of the ‘Poems of 1912– 13’ was beginning to fade, but the impulse to set down all the phases of his grief stayed with him. In one her ghost comes to claim him:
Something tapped on the pane of my room
When there was never a trace
Of wind or rain, and I saw in the gloom
My weary Belovéd’s face.
‘O I am tired of waiting,’ she said,
‘Night, morn, noon, afternoon;
So cold it is in my lonely bed,
And I thought you would join me soon!’
I rose and neared the window-glass,
But vanished thence had she:
Only a pallid moth, alas,
Tapped at the pane for me. 12
The other is both stronger and more ambivalent:
That day when oats were reaped, and wheat was ripe, and barley ripening,
The road-dust hot, and the bleaching grasses dry,
I walked along and said,
While looking just ahead to where some silent people lie:
‘I wounded one who’s there, and now know well I wounded her;
But, ah, she does not know that she wounded me!’
And not an air stirred,
Nor a bill of any bird; and no response accorded she. 13
The problem of who was to live at Max Gate apart from ghosts remained. In December 1913 Hardy wrote to Mrs Henniker that ‘My niece [Lilian] & Miss Dugdale are here, ministering to my wants: I don’t know what I should do without them, and I am sorry to say that just now Florence has a bad cold. I want her to stay in bed, but cannot get her to.’ 14 Florence was not going to leave the field to Lilian, and Lilian was still in fighting form. Florence wrote to Clodd, ‘She runs about Dorchester telling tales to all the idle gossiping women in the place… She does nothing in the house… she says she is “not a servant”.’ 15 But Florence, who had endured a terrible Max Gate Christmas before, was determined to stay on her feet throughout another. She knew she had the support of Henry, Mary and Kate against any Giffords. There had been a putsch, surely organized by Florence, to get rid of all Emma’s cats, and she was awaiting the arrival of the dog Hardy had helped her choose. 16 The house was being redecorated, removing almost all traces of its former mistress, and a conservatory added to the drawing room. Rooms in the attic were still crammed with Emma’s things, but the doors were simply shut and locked on them. At the end of the year Florence delivered an ultimatum to Hardy: either Lilian went back to her mother and went for good, or she would not marry him. ‘If the niece is to remain here permanently as one of the family then I will not enter into that compact of which I spoke to you last summer. This must be decided in a week and if it is settled that she stays, I return to my own home, and remain there,’ Florence wrote to Clodd. 17
Hardy gave way at last. He remained very fond of Lilian, and arranged for an allowance and an annuity for her, but he told her she must go home to her mother. Florence wrote to Clodd, ‘Of course her brother is an imbecile – one of them at least – and an uncle died in an asylum, and her grandfather was mad at times, so I ought to be profoundly sorry for her – but I can’t be that.’ 18 As Lilian departed, Florence’s dog arrived: Wessex, a rough-haired terrier, white with brown ears and a brown splotch above his tail. Already a biter, he was soon known to one visitor as ‘Florence’s unspeakable dog “Wessie”’. 19 Neither Florence nor Hardy would ever attempt to discipline him: ‘all of his kind are fighters,’ she said, as though to justify his attacks. They doted on him together, ignoring the fear he inspired in postmen, maids and visitors alike, as well as repeated demands from local people that he should be put down. He was fed from their own plates at table, and sometimes on the table. Hardy laid an eiderdown on the floor of his study for him to sleep on during the day and kissed him goodnight at bedtime. 20 They indulged him in every way, like a delicate, delinquent child, and he behaved accordingly.
Florence returned briefly to Enfield in January. Hardy visited her there at the end of the month and went to the Dugdales’ parish church, St Andrew’s, for Sunday service with the whole family. On 6 February 1914 he obtained a marriage licence. Four days later, at eight in the morning, he and Florence were married in the same church, accompanied only by Henry Hardy, Florence’s father and her youngest sister, Marjorie. Florence wore a dark costume and felt hat: ‘there never was a more unbridal dress and hat than mine, both atrociously ugly,’ she wrote. 21 After a quick breakfast at the Dugdales’, the newly married couple walked to the station and started on their journey back to Dorchester. It was even bleaker than Hardy’s first wedding, and he was so frightened of publicity that they had told none of their friends about it. Soon after they left Enfield, reporters arrived at the Dugdale house, and that afternoon the story was in the papers. It was all over the next morning’s press. Hardy and Florence had to spend the day writing to their closest friends to announce their marriage. ‘We thought it the wisest thing to do, seeing what a right hand Florence has become to me, & there is a sort of continuity in it, and not a break, she having known my first wife so very well,’ he told one friend. To Clodd he wrote, ‘I am going to put over my study door, “Business as usual during alterations.” ’ 22 All the same, he now had a sexually compliant wife, and this must have made life much more cheerful for him, even if it was only a matter of duty for her. 23
Business as usual did not prevent them spending a few days on the Devon coast or visiting Cambridge together in April, where Benson thought that Hardy seemed ‘very spruce and gay’ and ‘they seemed happy together.’ 24 After this there were two celebratory dinners in Lo
ndon, one given by Frederick Macmillan, the other by Hardy’s old friend Lady Jeune, now transformed into Lady St Helier by her husband’s ennoblement and still an indefatigable hostess. Mrs Winston Churchill, placed next to Hardy, impressed him by telling him she had made her husband promise not to go up in an aeroplane – he was training for a pilot’s licence – until she had given birth to the child she was expecting. In July they went for a weekend to Stourhead, the magnificent country place of the banker Sir Samuel Hoare, and Lady Hoare, an effusive admirer of Hardy’s work. Meanwhile in June the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo, and on 4 August Britain declared war on Germany. Hardy observed that all the nations were praying to the same God. 25
The effects of the war erupted at once even into quiet Dorset. Several hundred German mechant seamen were soon held prisoner in the Dorchester barracks, the streets were full of drunken English soldiers, and every householder was told to expect to have men billetted on him, although the Hardys never did. At the beginning of September he was summoned at the behest of the Cabinet along with a large group of eminent literary men to a meeting in London intended to encourage them to make public statements on the strength of the British case for war; Hardy dutifully produced ‘Men who March Away’, adopting the required tone and asserting the confidence of the British soldier in the justice of his cause:
In our heart of hearts believing
Victory crowns the just,
And that braggarts must
Surely bite the dust…
It was printed in The Times, The Times Literary Supplement and the New York Times, and was enormously popular. Then Granville-Barker asked if he might put on a shortened version of The Dynasts as a form of highbrow patriotic entertainment, and Hardy gave what help he could to the production, contributing a special prologue and epilogue. It attracted distinguished audiences, including the Prime Minister, Asquith, and ran for seventy-two performances at the Kingsway Theatre.
While the world was changing around him his mind was still taken up with his new collection of poems. In July he had told Macmillan he hoped to send it off at the end of the month. At the same time he wrote to Mrs Henniker, ‘Some of them I rather shrink from printing – those I wrote just after Emma died, when I looked back at her as she had originally been, and when I felt miserable lest I had not treated her considerately in her latter life. However I shall publish them as the only amends I can make, if it were so.’ 26 Hesitating again in August, he wrote to Macmillan, ‘I am not anxious to issue them at all, and perhaps they might be brought out in paper covers.’ 27 After war was declared he asked Macmillan once more if they wanted the poems, and, when they said they did, he insisted there was no hurry, and publication might wait ‘until people get tired of the war’, but at the same time he wrote to a friend that what he most cared about was that ‘the poems should be brought out by the Macmillans at some time or other’. 28
He did not show the poems to Florence or, it seems, discuss them with her. Indeed he seems to have let no one see them but his publisher. The volume in which they appeared was published in November 1914 and named Satires of Circumstance after another section of short, harsh poems, vignettes describing people behaving badly – rather appropriately, as it turned out, since Florence was bitterly offended by the section devoted to Emma, ‘Poems of 1912–13’, which she saw as parading his love for his first wife, both falsely and insultingly to her. In Florence’s mind Emma had become a figure half mad and wholly dislikable, and she now saw her rising up as a permanent rival. To be jealous of a former love, and a dead one, might seem another form of madness, but, as Emma had once resented Hardy’s failure to acknowledge her help and dedicate books to her, so Florence resented still more furiously his writing about Emma. Her teeth were set on edge, and she was not mollified by Hardy giving her a copy inscribed ‘in all affection’. Having married the world-famous writer, the least she expected was to be celebrated as his muse. Instead she felt a humiliation from which she seems never to have recovered.
If Florence was oblivious to the power and beauty of the ‘Poems of 1912–13’, which she read only with pain and ‘terrible fascination’, the reviewers failed to notice them at all. 29 Satires of Circumstance could hardly have appeared at a more unpropitious time, in the first winter of the war, and the few critics who wrote about it gave their attention to other parts of the collection. Hardy inscribed a copy to Gosse, ‘the mixture as before, of unstable fancies, conjectures, and contradictions’, hardly expecting him to fathom what had gone into the poems, and indeed Gosse later described the volume as being the ‘most dispensable’ of all Hardy’s poetry. To Mrs Henniker he wrote, after some reviews had appeared, that ‘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.’ 30
In January 1915 Virginia Woolf sent a letter thanking him for the sonnet on her father Leslie Stephen included in the collection, going on to say that she considered it to be ‘the most remarkable book to appear in my lifetime’. Her singularly enthusiastic tribute has to be put into context: a few days after writing she was overtaken by an acute mental breakdown and became incoherent. 31 Hardy’s personal confidence in the poems was made plain when he published his Selected Poems, made at the request of Macmillan, in 1916, in which ten of the eighteen ‘Poems of 1912–13’ appear alongside others relating to Emma from Satires of Circumstance: ‘When I set out for Lyonnesse’, ‘Wives in the Sere’ and ‘Under the Waterfall’. J. C. Squire, writing in the New Statesman, singled out these poems for praise and quoted the closing lines from the end of ‘The Phantom Horsewoman’. 32 In Hardy’s Collected Poems of 1925 he added three more poems to the group. Very slowly they began to be seen for what they are.
Hardy was still ‘in flower’ as a poet, composing more rapidly and fluently than he had ever done. Between 1913 and 1916 he wrote something like 150 new poems. It was a heroic enterprise, and it must have taken the best of his time and energy, leaving Florence more solitary than a newly wedded wife expected to be. ‘He says that when the wheels are going round it is a mistake to stop them… He is working practically all day until after dinner… and yesterday feeling very much inclined for work he did not even go for the daily walk,’ Florence wrote in August 1916, adding, ‘I am going to make a tremendous fight for a few days holiday.’ 33 Poetry and marriage are not always easy to reconcile, and he was easily able to abstract himself from Florence’s feelings of loneliness, resentment and jealousy, and pursue his own mental and imaginative course single-mindedly.
The results of this intensive labour appeared in a further volume, Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses, published at the end of November 1917. It is Hardy’s largest collection, made up of rich, varied, confidently written and intensely personal poems. In it he relives parts of his life and rethinks various aspects of it. The opening image in the first poem is of a mirror that ‘throws our mind back on us, and our heart’, and the poem also evokes ‘night hours of ache’, giving a picture of a sleepless man brooding painfully over the past. The last poem is in direct contrast, the tranquil ‘Afterwards’, in which he sums himself up as a man who watches birds, protects small animals, glories in the constellations of the winter sky and notices the details of country life, for instance the way a cross-wind cuts the sound of church bells, making a pause in the ringing. So the first and last poems span the contradictions always present in Hardy, between the vulnerable, doomstruck man and the serene inhabitant of the natural world.
Between these two are personal memories going back to his first school, where he sees himself as an unfledged bird, ‘Pink, tiny, crisp-curled, / My pinions yet furled’. In ‘Old Furniture’ he thinks of the women of his family who had polished it over the years, leaving in the shining wood the image of ‘Hands behind hands, growing paler and paler’. A field gate hung with drops of February rain takes him back half a century to the bonneted girls who
did their courting at the same gate while they brought in the harvest. A poem about Shakespeare, son of a provincial nobody, is also of course about himself:
– ‘Ah, one of the tradesman’s sons, I now recall…
Witty, I’ve heard…
We did not know him… Well, good-day. Death comes to all.’ 34
The poems are not ordered chronologically or by subject – they appear to have been placed at random – but the outline of an autobiography is there. 35 At the centre of the story of his past was always Emma in her many different incarnations. Some thirty-six poems allude to her, and they run from minutely specific incidents of their wooing in Cornwall to his sad imaginings at Max Gate, where he persistently sees her in the garden as he walks there, and even fancies her head and hat moving towards him above the low-lying fog in the lane. There was plenty to upset Florence, and it seemed to her a fresh outrage, as she made clear in a letter to a friend when it was published in December: ‘I expect the idea of the general reader will be that T.H.’s second marriage is a most disastrous one and that his sole wish is to find refuge in the grave with her with whom he found happiness. Well – all things end somewhere.’ 36
There are tender evocations of their life together at Sturminster Newton, where he took Florence for a day in June 1916. 37 There is the sour memory of a Bournemouth hotel and a quarrel, a grim one of Tooting, and sorrowful ones of her singing at the piano, and of the time she declared she would play no more. There is also something new in the poems that shows he has been considering the idea, prompted by her hostile diaries, that there must have been a strain of madness in her. ‘The Interloper’ imagines an invisible presence haunting her from the beginning, one ‘Who ought not to be there’, and its epigraph, ‘And I saw the figure and visage of Madness seeking for a home’, makes his meaning unequivocal. Yet, even if he had decided she was partly insane, it made no difference to his regrets or his love for her. Her family might all be quite mad too, but their history figures in ‘During Wind and Rain’, a surreal and lyrical lament for the Giffords, calling up scenes at their Plymouth home described by Emma: how they had to leave it, and how the years brought everything bright to an end for them, as they do for everyone. The last verse goes,