Tomalin’s Hardy Biography

Claire Tomalin’S new biography of Thomas Hardy opens with a brace of sentences guaranteed to establish from the outset a reader’s probable degree of sympathy with the expressive strategies employed in this book: “In November of 1912 an aging writer lost his wife. He was not expecting her to die, but then he had not been taking much notice of her for some time.” What follows is a scene-setting paragraph leading up to the actual moment of Emma Hardy’s death, which brings Tomalin’s first brief and overconfident sortie into literary criticism: “This is the moment when Thomas Hardy became a great poet.”

Rarely can a poet have had greatness thrust upon him with such peremptory brio, and under such distressing circumstances. Reflection on Hardy’s likely state of mind at the “moment” of Emma’s death might have encouraged reconsideration of the appropriateness of deploying this kind of journalistic phrase-making as the opening movement in a supposedly major new study of a figure whose life has not in recent years suffered from a lack of scholarly scrutiny. Questions of taste aside, greater critical familiarity with Hardy’s substantial poetic achievement down to the morning of 27 November 1912 might also have counselled caution.

One could, I suppose, argue that popular and scholarly biography are two distinct genres appealing to distinct audiences, although this is a position difficult to advance in the present instance when the most authoritative scholarly biography—Michael Millgate’s Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited (2004)—is as clearly and engagingly written as it is. The fruits of its vast research are as accessible to the general reader as to the Hardy specialist. But surely even popular biography needs more to offer than a sprinkling of variably convincing psychological aperçus, a capacity to synthesize other scholars’ published findings, and a less daunting page and endnote count than its more academic cousin.

In fact, without the work of Millgate and the late James Gibson to draw on, this book would have about enough new material to fill a slim pamphlet rather than the close to 400 pre-notes pages it weighs in at. It offers no new research findings of any significance and is therefore reliant on what promotional materials term the author’s “exceedingly subtle imagination” to provide its “characteristic freshness and insight.” Here is an example of that insight at work on Hardy’s Wessex Poems, a volume of particular interest to many Hardy enthusiasts because of the fascinating illustrations that Hardy himself made to accompany some of the poems:

They are the work of a skilful draughtsman, but some are distinctly weird, especially the drawing of a dead woman lying under a sheet accompanying the poem addressed to his late cousin Tryphena, and the blank humanoid shapes manoeuvring a coffin on a staircase to illustrate a grim architectural joke in a poem dedicated to Blomfield. You have to admire Hardy’s determination to extend his range by providing decorative drawings, but it is a relief that he did not repeat the experiment. All Hardy’s eight collections, making up something like 1,000 poems, were presented in the same jumbled way, partly divided into sections but made up of poems taken from different decades, with few signposts and no notes for the reader, and it took time for the world to see that something remarkable was in the making.

(281)

It’s difficult to know how to take such perkily jejune comments as this. It so happens that William W. Morgan, to give just one example, has done some extremely interesting work on the structural integrity of some of Hardy’s groups, and indeed volumes, of poetry. But even without benefit of Morgan’s insights, one might suppose that “distinctly weird” and “it is a relief that he did not repeat the experiment” should have struck Tomalin as lacking evaluative resonance. Incidentally, none of Morgan’s work nor Dennis Taylor’s (nor, in fact, any of the major work of recent...