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BOOK REVIEWS Hardy the Writer F. B. Pinion. Hardy the Writer: Surveys and Assessments. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990. χ + 361 pp. $39.95 WHEN MANY students of Thomas Hardy were enchanted in the mid-1960s by glints of the existence and identity of his not-so-wellbeloved cousin, a generation of critics mined a thin biographical vein that, ultimately, turned up a lot of fool's gold and very little precious ore. After Tryphena entered the critical firmament and sparked their fancies , some critics and scholars, like astronomers in search of a new star, seemed compelled to probe all the cold, dark reaches of Hardy's life. It took a couple of decades of intense scholarship, the publication of one very sober biography and several thick volumes of, frankly, very dull letters, before the biographical will-o-the-wisps were exposed and the voyeuristic frenzy faded. The ablest, most sensible biographical scholarship , undertaken to recapture the "real" Hardy from his sensationalizing abductors, has established that the artist's life was, to say the least, not the stuff of which exciting books are made. Among the earliest Hardyans who understood the fatuousness of much of the speculative "biographical" research was F. B. Pinion, who kept calling the faithful back, in conferences he helped to organize and in volumes he edited, to examine and re-examine what Hardy actually wrote. Though a formidable challenger of biographical forts of folly, Pinion has never ignored the importance of an author's life for understanding his works. However, Pinion brought a different emphasis to the study: the most significant facts of Hardy's exceedingly uneventful life, and many of the most fascinating and relevant biographical influences upon the books written by this lifelong bookworm—the real biographical story, if you will—are the books he read by the authors he admired and loved. Above all, Hardy is a "learned" or "academic" writer, fully conscious of the extant literary and intellectual traditions. For over two decades, since the publication of A Hardy Companion, Pinion has labored to illuminate Hardy's art and thought and to engage and empower other scholars to contribute to that effort. His latest volume, Hardy the Writer, a collection of some 20 essays written in 1987-88 to "present the major aspects of Hardy's work as a whole," has as its "principal aim ... to reflect Hardy's intentions and assess his achievements." Several essays are reworkings of pieces originally published in books and journals in the early 1970s through the mid-1980s; 227 ELT : VOLUME 35:2 1992 some were originally given as talks to college students and the Thomas Hardy Society in England, which Pinion served for a decade and a half. All the pieces have been revised, some substantially, to eliminate repetition and to make Pinion's references and illustrations as varied as possible. By establishing numerous links between Hardy's fiction and his poems, Pinion pinpoints the source of Hardy's greatness: in expressing the emotion of all the ages and the thoughts of his own, Hardy "combines to an unusual degree a scientific vision of man's place in the universe with an artistic realization of the greatness in writing which has commanded assent through the ages." In elaborating Hardy's ranging vision and the works that represent it, Pinion illustrates "the extent to which the creative imagination and the style of Hardy the writer were stimulated and strengthened by literary influences, particularly from the Bible, a wide range of poetry, and great works from classical times to his own." Hardy the Writer attempts to document and explain how Hardy's reading encouraged his feelings and imagination, formed and re-formed his vision, and enabled him to produce "So Various" (to borrow a title of one of his most self-revealing poems) a range of works. Pinion attributes Hardy's literary longevity to his "ranging vision" of life, which combines imaginative experience of a personal sort with an unwavering sense of man's place in space and time. Early on, Hardy's reading of J. S. Mill and Auguste Comte confirmed a "philosophy of chance as opposed to Providence, and underlined the need for altruism...

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