The Literary Friendships of Thomas Hardy

131 THE LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS OF THOMAS HARDY By Harold Orel (University of Kansas) We are all indebted to Richard L. Purdy and Michael Millgate for their meticulous editing of the Collected Letters of Thomas Hardv■It is a model of scholarship, and in a great tradition of edited manuscript material; its value to scholars and critics in the decades ahead can only be guessed at (only two volumes have appeared, and Oxford University Press anticipates another five), but it has clarified a number of obscure points, and the annotations shed light on a surprisingly large number of late Victorian figures and events. Yet, in the Introduction to Volume One, Purdy and Millgate record a surprisingly harsh judgment: "Few, indeed, of Hardy's friendships stood the long test of time. ..." That judgment was based largely on whatever correspondence between Hardy and other men and women still survives, i.e., on the letters that the editors have managed to assemble in several years of dedicated detective work. But not all the letters - important or unimportant - have survived. Friendships are not best measured in terms of the spoor left by correspondence. Hardy's letters are, for the most part, terse, concerned with business, and dry. Moreover, as William James once wrote, most men's friendships are too inarticulate. The tests for any definition of friendship are well-known-, indeed, self-evident. They include frequency of contact, length of duration , sympathy and harmoniousness of outlook, and our own commonsense view of what makes one human being a friend of another. Hugo von Hofmannsthal once noted that we have fewer friends than we imagine , but more than we know. It may be that Hardy would not have bothered to react indignantly to the charge that his friendships crumbled as he aged, or to the implication that he allowed them to do so. But it is curious that Hardy's contemporaries, many of whom detested what they conceived to be his "pessimism," and some of whom resented his success, ever claimed that a hallmark of his personal life was the repudiation or neglect of friendships. Indeed, the accusation, despite the fact that it is made in the same post-war years that have seen the publication of revisionist Hardy materials (the seventy-two monographs of the Toucan Press, Lois Deacon and Terry Coleman's Providence and Mr. Hardv. works by J. 0. Bailey and F. R. Southerington affected by the Deacon-Coleman hypothesis of a full-blown affair between Hardy and his niece Tryphena Sparks, the two-volume biography by Robert Gittings, and, most recently, Denys Kay-Robinson's life of Emma, and Robert Gittings and Jo Mantón's life of Florence, both published in 1979). does not stand up under examination. This essay deals with an aspect of Hardy's life that has not been treated at length before, although elements in it will be familiar to readers who have been following recent developments in Hardy scholarship. It reviews Hardy's relationships with six writers 132 whom he admired, and whose friendships he cultivated, and, perhaps equally as important, kept. I hope to go beyond the usual commonplaces about a tentative beginning and a successful, even complacent, career during which one commercial success followed another, until he was universally recognized as a Grand Old Man - perhaps the Grand Old Man - of English letters. Hardy's career is much like that of Dickens and Thackeray in this regard; he struggled for recognition , his peers finally accepted him, he enjoyed decades of success, and he dispensed wisdom to younger writers knocking at the door. Nevertheless, even though Hardy's career falls into this pattern, his case, for more than one reason, is rather special. First, he grew to manhood in a relatively isolated and remote market-town, and made a correspondingly delayed entrance on the literary scene. Not until July, 1868, did Hardy submit The Poor Man and the Lady to Macmillan. Not until March, I87I, did his first published novel, Desperate Remedies. appear - almost three years later. He was over thirty by then. Hardy knew a great deal about literature and the standards whereby literature might be judged, of course, long before he took up...