Hardy and Kipling's "They"

Hardy and Kipling's "They" JOHN H. SCHWARZ Villanova University BIOGRAPHERS OF HARDY cannot have an easy time of it as they try to discover and reveal the inner man. They must cope with the omissions and incomplete revelations of Hardy's autobiography, with the destruction of many of his notebooks and much of his incoming correspondence, and with the tantalizing difficulty of distilling out the confessional moments in the imagined world of his stories and poems.1 Even the recently completed edition in seven volumes of The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy2 seems to hold back more than it reveals. Bemoaning Hardy's characteristic "reticence," Irving Howe, reviewing Volume One, calls Hardy "one of the worst letter writers in English literary history,"3 a judgment that possibly reveals more about the ill disposition of a book reviewer faced with difficult material than it does about Hardy's epistolary manner. Still, now that the other six volumes have been published, Hardy's usual reticence and distancing business-like mode of procedure as a letter writer are easily enough demonstrated. He seldom, for instance, discusses in anything more than a perfunctory way the complimentary copies of books that were fairly regularly delivered to his door. His reply to an American writer named George Viereck who had sent an evidently unsolicited copy of his Nineveh and Other Poems (London, 1907) is typical: I have received your letter & the kind present of your book of verse that accompanies it. I cannot do justice to reading it while I am here in town, but when I get back to the Country I shall be able to do so. The one or two poems that I have already looked at impress me much.4 George Viereck probably received as much of a response as his book of verse deserved—a polite acknowledgment of receipt and a polite few words of encouragement. Notice that Hardy does not promise to write ELT: VOLUME 34:1, 1991 again. He has thus rid himself of an unasked-for responsibility without criticizing the book in any detail whatsoever and is free to discontinue reading it. It is a method that—to take another example—he used years later in a letter to St. John Ervine who had sent his novel The Wayward Man (London, 1927): As I see that "The Wayward Man" (good title) will take some reading I write at once to acknowledge the arrival of your kind gift, which I have only as yet looked into, though far enough to see that there is sound stuff in it. I hope you & Mrs Ervine are well in your snug quarters. . . .5 When Hardy receives a copy of a new book from a Galsworthy or a Wells, he usually goes into more critical detail about the work, but even then he does not ordinarily probe very deeply. At the age of 86, for example, Hardy twice wrote to H. G. Wells to express his admiration for The World of William Clissold, a long novel he had obviously read with some care and, by his second letter, in its entirety. His approval is partly a matter of his identifying with Wells's attempt to advance rational thought as he remembers the frustrations of his own attempts years earlier. But his remarks at least amount to something like literary criticism when he considers Wells's artistry in his handling of two of his characters. Hardy wrote the following on 5 September 1926: I have a half-ashamed feeling at accepting this beautiful edition of your new book, as I have done nothing to deserve it, & an ordinary copy would have been good enough for me. However, I thank you much for such a handsome gift. I have begun it, but perceiving it to be a book of much more solid & philosophic quality that [than] I at first expected I find it will not be one to hurry over. No book worth reading is. Although I do not see far into it as yet, I anticipate that you will get some buffets from the thoughtless—which happily you are well able to bear. It is a most depressing business to endeavour to advance thought ever so...