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266 GITTING'S HARDY: A NEW INTERPRETATION A Review Article By Harold Orel (University of Kansas) Robert Gittings. Thomas Hardy's Later Years (Boston: Little, Brown; Atlantic Monthly Press Book, 197bT; $12.50. The sequel to Young Thomas Hardy is less surprising than the first volume of Gittings' masterly biography; much has been known, and more suspected, about the years that are covered here (I876-1928), if only because Hardy's fame inevitably made him more of a public man than his years as an architect and struggling novelist could possibly have done. Still, this new installment contains a fair share of surprises, and moves along at an astonishing pace (Gittings has always been highly readable, but this book may be his finest performance in handling large quantities of data). The discussions of Hardy's books are limited mostly to considerations of how Hardy conducted research , and of what biographical elements in both the fiction and the poetry may be identified by a careful reader. This book does not offer a detailed critical examination of any single work by Hardy, and some of the readings of lines of individual poems may be a little overconfident. After all, Hardy's strategy of obscuring his past did succeed on occasion, and even Gittings cannot get at the whole truth. Three matters of concern will catch the attention of all readers: Gittings' reassessment of Emma's character, Hardy's indifference to Emma's health and happiness (repeated, with uncanny faithfulness , after he remarried), and Florence's personality as a frustrated, and ultimately bitter, prisoner of Max Gate. The evidence, no less than the interpretations, may strike many of us as controversial. We have long understood that Hardy's unhappy marriage was more than a difference of opinions about the existence and nature of God. Biographers for many years have emphasized Emma's pretensions to a family background superior to that enjoyed by Hardy, her "pathetic" literary productions, her conviction that her ideas contributed greatly to Hardy's success, her growing physical unattractiveness, her dismay at her husband's ideas about marriage and social hypocrisy , and even her mental balance. Gittings, like others before him, has a tendency to use the known facts to explicate the creative work, and then, almost without realizing it, to move back from the novel or poem to explain what is happening in the life. This process is almost inevitable for a biographer when a writer like Hardy continually exploits the materials of his life for the sake of his art, and much of the information about Emma used by biographers in the past has been precisely that which Hardy filtered for the Life and for his poems. Gittings' great contribution is to show us how suspect Hardy's editing really is. If the long silences at the dinner 267 table prove anything, it is that both Hardy and Emma had run out of things to talk about in an amicable fashion,· we ought to be very careful about judging who is primarily to blame for the last twenty years of their relationship. At any rate, Gittings is passionately partisan. He believes that Emma has been much maligned. Her writings, for the most part, show great good sense, and Some Recollections, which Hardy did not improve when he used part of it for the Life, is judged as "charming" and "spontaneous" (as indeed it is). She did talk over with Hardy the basic situations and believability of his characters, and what she added to his fiction is probably more than he ever publicly acknowledged. And those who liked Emma (she was never without defenders; her husband did not inspire most residents of Dorchester with reverent feelings) have thought of her as a tormented, lonely, and mildly eccentric woman rather than as one whose sanity could be considered in question. Emma emerges from Gittings' treatment as a woman infinitely more sinned against than sinning. As for Hardy's indifference, it manifested itself in his unwillingness to share social occasions with Emma (many times, in London, he discouraged her from making the trip from Dorchester to be with him at important parties); his failure to pay attention to her complaints about...

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