Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  Charlotte Mew came to their notice through Cockerell. Although Hardy found her shyness difficult, he admired her poetry, invited her to stay, and did what he could to encourage and assist her by getting her a small pension; Florence also corresponded warmly with her. Edmund Blunden, war poet and friend of Sassoon, introduced himself with a volume of his verse and came for weekends. So did Walter de la Mare, who had pleased Hardy first with a review of The Dynasts and then with his mysterious poem ‘The Listeners’. Another friend of Sassoon, Robert Graves, wrote to Hardy on being demobbed: ‘I must confess with shame that I have just read “Jude” for the first time only. What an amazing book!’ 7 He was running a magazine and asked for poems, then brought his young wife Nancy Nicholson – the Nicholsons were friends of Cockerell – in the summer of 1920. Hardy told him he did not like to make more than four drafts of a poem for fear of it losing its freshness: a remarkable confidence, suggesting how well the spinal cords of the poems were laid down in his mind before he wrote anything down. 8

  His poetic output remained prodigious. Macmillan published a Collected Poems in 1919, far too soon, because there were three more volumes to come, containing 408 new poems in all. In 1922 Late Lyrics and Earlier was ready, the proofs read by Cockerell. Hardy wrote a prefatory ‘Apology’ in February 1922, in which he expressed his fear that the effect of the war might be to send the world into a new Dark Age. Yet he refused to be labelled as a pessimist. He was an ‘evolutionary meliorist’, he insisted, who believed that the world needed both religion and rationality, and that they might be reconciled and interfused through poetry. His theories are less interesting than his poetry, and Late Lyrics is not read for its ideas. It starts with ‘Weathers’ (‘This is the weather the cuckoo likes’), which might be called an Elizabethan song – four and a half centuries late. ‘The Fallow Deer at the Lonely House’ magically incorporates a visual trick or puzzle:

  One without looks in to-night

  Through the curtain-chink

  From the sheet of glistening white;

  One without looks in to-night

  As we sit and think

  By the fender-brink.

  We do not discern those eyes

  Watching in the snow;

  Lit by lamps of rosy dyes

  We do not discern those eyes

  Wondering, aglow,

  Fourfooted, tiptoe.

  The trick is that the person speaking the poem from inside the house cannot see what the reader is allowed to see, the animal outside in the snow, surprised by the light gleaming out. It makes it more mysterious, because nobody knows it is there except the reader, who is not there.

  Another short, mysterious poem, ‘Without, Not Within Her’, seems to be about Mrs Henniker and credits her with a sanity that was able to drive out Hardy’s demons:

  It was that strange freshness you carried

  Into a soul

  Whereon no thought of yours tarried

  Two moments at all.

  And out from his spirit flew death,

  And bale, and ban,

  Like the corn-chaff under the breath

  Of the winnowing-fan. 9

  Hardy wrote to Mrs Henniker after the publication of Late Lyrics: ‘I ought to have sent you a copy of the Poems. But I don’t send books to women nowadays – not because I despise the sex, far from it! but because I fear they will not like something or other I have written, and will be in the awkward position of having to pretend they do.’ 10 She came to Dorset at midsummer, and the Hardys drove with her through the Blackmore Vale and to Sherborne. It was their last time together. Nine months later she died, in April 1923, ‘After a friendship of thirty years!’ wrote Hardy, needing to say no more. He had loved her, and she had acted as a muse. Some of his letters she had discreetly destroyed, the remainder she bequeathed, with perfect tact, to Florence, who preserved them and refused to let Hardy destroy or cut them further. They are among his best.

  Half the ‘new’ poems in Late Lyrics were in fact old ones. He went back to 1867 for ‘A Young Man’s Exhortation’, with its Yeatsian conclusion about ‘the passing preciousness of dreams’. 11 Something like twenty-five are concerned with Emma, moving backwards and forwards in time. ‘On a Discovered Curl of Hair’ recalls how she gave him the curl before they were married, ‘to abate the misery of absentness’, and muses sadly on how it has kept its ‘bright brown’ through the years that turned the hair on her head grey. In ‘Penance’ he takes responsibility for his failings, answering his own questions about his past refusal to listen to Emma playing at her keyboard, and finds the grisly image for remorse quoted earlier, ‘the chill old keys, / Like a skull’s brown teeth / Loose in their sheath’. 12

  The collection ends with a poem of general contrition in which Hardy sits by the fire and listens to his own voice accusing him of arrogance and failure to love, using the language of the Bible:

  ‘You slighted her that endureth all,’

  Said my own voice talking to me;

  ‘Vaunteth not, trusteth hopefully;

  That suffereth long and is kind withal,’

  Said my own voice talking to me.

  ‘You taught not that which you set about,’

  Said my own voice talking to me;

  ‘That the greatest of things is Charity…’

  – And the sticks burnt low, and the fire went out,

  And my voice ceased talking to me.

  His relationship with the Christian faith was a puzzle, but what poet can resist the words of the King James Bible? Florence gives a good example of his tipping further to the ‘churchy, conservative’ side as he aged in a letter to Cockerell:

  We had another tea-party, of a kind you would not appreciate. The Rector of West Stafford and his wife, the Vicar of Stinsford and his wife, an elderly and religious peer, Lord Ellenborough, and our neighbours at Syward Lodge – all good Conservatives and staunch Anglicans. T.H. declares that he understands that type of person better than any other, and he prefers to know the rather narrow, churchy, conservative country person to the brilliant young writer who is always popping in and out of the divorce court. An interesting statement from the author of ‘Jude’. 13

  He enjoyed his old man’s privilege of making contradictory pronouncements and showing a different face to different people. If he went to church, he explained that it was not ‘because he believed in it, which he did not, but because it was good for the people to get clean and come together once a week – like discipline in the army’. 14 And, while he listened to Florence read him Jane Austen and compared himself happily to Mr Woodhouse in the winter of 1919, in 1920 he was poring over the most modern of poets, Ezra Pound, and corresponding with him. E. M. Forster found him ‘a very vain, conventional, uninteresting old gentleman… but perhaps at 82 one rots a little. His great pride is that the county families ask him to tea.’ 15 Yet a young postman who delivered mail to Max Gate in the 1920s and told Hardy he liked reading was invited in to borrow two books, and when he brought them back Hardy made time to sit down and talk about them with him, and lent him another two. 16 He told Florence he had seen a ghost in Stinsford churchyard on Christmas Eve 1919, as he put holly on his father’s grave; they exchanged words about it being a green Christmas; he followed it into the church and found no one there. He bought himself Einstein’s Relativity: The Special and General Theory. A Popular Exposition in the 1920s, read and pondered over it, and took it to confirm what he believed, ‘that neither chance nor purpose governs the universe, but necessity’. Einstein and the Universe by Charles Nordmann, published in 1922, was listed among other books he meant to acquire. In June 1923, thinking about Relativity again, he wrote in his notebook, ‘Relativity. That things and events always were, are, and will be (e.g. E.M.F. etc. are living still in the past).’ 17 And, in spite of his liking for the narrow, churchy and conservative, in 1924 he publicly attacked the Dean of Westminster for refusing to allow a memorial to Byron in Poets’ Corner. ‘Whatever Byron’s bad qualities
he was a poet, and a hater of cant.’ 18

  Florence did a good deed in 1919, when there was news that the detested Lilian Gifford was in a London County Council mental hospital in Essex. Rather than triumphing over this evidence of more madness in the Gifford family, she made the journey to visit her, discussed her case with the doctors and decided she should be rescued. Hardy was talked out of any idea that they should have Lilian at Max Gate, and Florence helped to make other arrangements for her. These inevitably included more financial help from him, which he was happy to give and could easily afford. Money meant little to him: he spent a mere £600 a year out of an income of over £2,000. He was silently accumulating a fortune. The only extravagances of his life had been taking Emma on holiday abroad and renting smart London houses for the Season in the 1890s. Florence would have liked him to spend more freely, and in Dorchester he had the reputation of being mean. It had not helped that, sitting on the bench during the war, he had imposed fines on local tradesmen for profiteering. Florence complained in 1918, ‘I shall soon be unable to enter a shop in Dorchester. The last was our own grocer!’ 19

  Oxford caught up with Cambridge in 1920 when he was given an honorary D. Litt. there, and later an honorary fellowship at Queen’s College. In the same year he made his last trip to London to attend the wedding of Harold Macmillan to Lady Dorothy Cavendish, and was asked to be one of the witnesses. The bridegroom, grandson of a founder of the publishing firm, was about to leave it for a career in politics, and in the 1950s he became a liberal Conservative Prime Minister, which might have won Hardy’s approval. In June his eightieth birthday brought telegrams from the King, the Prime Minister and the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, and he wrote some ‘Birthday Notes’, expressing the view that civilization might be at risk: ‘it makes one feel he would rather be old than young.’ Yet his best friends now were younger ones, not only Cockerell and Sassoon but T. E. Lawrence, who asked Graves for an introduction and called on Hardy from his nearby cottage at Clouds Hill in 1923. Lawrence, archaeologist and writer, soldier and strategist, statesman and spokesman for the Arabs in their fight against the Turks, was a legendary figure before he was thirty, achieving fame and power and then fleeing from both, changing his name and enlisting as a common soldier. What he was seeking has never been entirely clear, but appears to have been some sort of moral cleansing. He was drawn at once to Hardy’s ‘dignity and ripeness’ and to the simplicity of life at Max Gate; and both the Hardys responded to his friendliness and good humour, and read his book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom with admiration. He took to coming over on alternate Sundays, and, since he and Cockerell were already friends, they formed a congenial circle when he was also visiting.

  In 1923 Hardy finished The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall, a short and violent verse drama about the last hours of Tristan and Iseult, culminating in two murders and the suicide of Queen Iseult, who stabs her husband and jumps from the castle parapet into the sea below. Hardy said he had tried to avoid ‘turning the rude personages of, say, the fifth century into respectable Victorians’, but much of the language is archaic, and even the usually admiring Cockerell commented on ‘a good many inversions and old words which may make it difficult to follow when acted’. 20 It is heavy going, and the most curious feature is the speech given to the second Iseult, which Hardy based closely on the words of Elfride, his heroine of A Pair of Blue Eyes, as she begs for forgiveness; whether this was writer’s thrift or had some private significance is impossible to tell. He had planned the play in 1870, seeing Emma as Queen Iseult, and started it in 1916 when he visited Tintagel with Florence, then set it aside again, perhaps thinking a drama of marital jealousy inappropriate. It is the only work to which he put a dedication: to Emma, her sister Helen and brother-in-law Cadell Holder, with Florence’s name tactfully added to the list. It was published and acted in Dorchester that winter, and soon afterwards the composer Rutland Boughton asked if he might make it into an opera. Boughton had achieved a wild success with his musical drama The Immortal Hour, opened at the first Glastonbury Festival in 1914, and his intention at Glastonbury was to bring art to ordinary people. He was a serious communist and did his best to establish a commune in Somerset. He found Hardy modest and generous, and Hardy took to him, listened to his communist ideas with interest, ‘though he could not share them,’ and went to Glastonbury to hear the musical version. It was no more successful than the commune, although Broughton’s music still has admirers. 21 But it shows Hardy’s continuing interest in the theatre and belief that it mattered to try to reach a wide audience. In March 1925 he put his signature to an appeal for funds to rebuild the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford after a fire: Shakespeare, and a country theatre, were both good causes to him. 22

  In July 1923 the Prince of Wales was due to make a short tour of Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire, to meet tenants on his estates, and also to show himself to the people of Bath and Dorchester. Lord Shaftesbury persuaded him to open a Drill Hall for the Dorset Territorials in Dorchester, and someone had the bright idea that the visit might be more entertaining if he combined it with lunch at Thomas Hardy’s house. The Prince had never read a line of his work, but he was made aware that he was a very old and famous Dorset writer, and that some of his books were in the royal collection. Florence was thrown into panic by the idea of having to entertain the Prince and his considerable retinue, but Hardy, she noticed with surprise, was pleased. 23

  She sought the ever helpful Cockerell’s advice and dashed to town to meet him. His diary for Wednesday, 11 July, describes how he met her at the New Century Club in Hay Hill, finding her in a state of agitation about the visit of the Prince, who would be coming with Lord Shaftesbury, equerries and chauffeurs, all needing to be fed. Cockerell cheered her up with tea and ice cream at Gunter’s, helped her choose some glassware for her lunch table and introduced her to the worldly wife of a friend, who gave good advice about dealing with the Prince – ‘much on the lines of my own’, he noted with satisfaction. He then saw her to Liverpool Street on her way to her mother in Enfield for the night. 24

  The Prince’s visit was scheduled for 20 July. Hardy offered his sister Kate the chance of being installed in ‘the bedroom behind the jessamine – you would then see him come, and go: we could probably send you up a snack.’ She refused, but Henry put up a Union Jack on a flagpole at Talbothays, and neighbours rallied round to lend anything needed at Max Gate. 25 Someone had the sense to lock up Wessie. A police cordon was set up round the house. It was a day of scorching heat. Hardy drove to the Drill Hall and was introduced to the Prince on the platform; then they drove together through Dorchester in an open car, to cheers and photographers. The Prince was taken up to a bedroom with his valet, his secretary waiting on the landing, Florence hovering downstairs. By her account a balled-up waistcoat flew out of the bedroom at the secretary, and the Prince came down to lunch under the trees in the garden, very sensibly minus his waistcoat.

  A retinue of thirteen, mostly Duchy officials, had to be fed in the house, not counting the chauffeurs, while the grandees, who included Lord Shaftesbury and the gallant Admiral Sir Lionel Halsey, now an equerry to the Prince, ate in the shade of the trees. The Prince did not pretend to have read anything by his host, whereas Hardy knew that the Prince, as Duke of Cornwall, owned most of the land round Dorchester. It was after all from his grandfather that he had purchased the plot on which Max Gate was built, and only a month before Florence had applied to the Duchy to buy a further half acre, saying she wanted to build a cottage for her gardener on it. 26 So the conversation is likely to have turned on rural matters, rather than on literature, and indeed one of the maids believed that ‘Mr Hardy spoke to the prince about a piece of land we called The Paddock, that he would like to have it for a kitchen garden… and Mr Hardy had the extra ground’ – although it is highly unlikely that the Prince had anything to do with the negotiations over the land, which were in any case already proceeding smoothly. 27 Florence managed the arrangement
s for the lunch party well and hit exactly the right note with her principal guest. ‘I didn’t fuss around him, and I think he was grateful. He made himself very much at home… He grew rather gay and jocular during lunch… I had been told he ate nothing. He made an excellent lunch, and asked for a second helping of ham, and finished up with a glass of 40 year old sherry and one of the cigars.’ When it was time for official photographs, she tried to avoid being included, but he insisted on her being in all of them: ‘ “Oh yes, you must be photographed too. Come along.” So I did.’ And with her big white hat and dark eyes she looks charming.

  The Prince departed to visit his farm tenants around Dorchester, the police left, Wessex was let out, and ordinary life resumed. The next day the Hardys had themselves driven to Portland Bill to visit a new friend, Marie Stopes, who had settled in a lighthouse tower there. She found him boyish and twinkling, ready to talk indiscreetly of the lunch party, and eager to climb to the top of her tower and out on to the roof to see the circular view. Everyone found their own version of Hardy. To Lawrence he seemed ‘so pale, so quiet, so refined into an essence’. 28 Yet Florence told Marie Stopes later that he was ‘far more nervous and highly strung than appears to anyone outside the household’, and her account of how difficult he could be when she planned to be away for two days in London suggests he could panic and bully. 29 He announced that he felt ill just as she was about to leave. ‘He began to put his papers in order and told me he was doing it lest he should die suddenly… By this time I began to think it would be wrong to leave him and so I… cancelled all my engagements… whereupon he suddenly became quite well,’ she told Cockerell, adding forgivingly, ‘Perhaps it is that the prospect of being left really does alarm him and make him feel ill.’ 30