Hardy Letters VI

31:4 Book Reviews pace of behavior, of to-ing and fro-ing, of meeting in various places in England and also abroad, and a pledge, never realized even for the survivors, of gathering together in Basel in May 1933. We now have the details of why Brooke was not a hero; he is rather a deeply flawed but intriguing young man, enjoying and wrestling with the implications of his looks, his talents, and belonging to a privileged class. Perhaps the tale is worth the telling because we now have a fuller understanding of his life, a rich sense of the frustrations that he felt as he tried to reconcile the paradoxes within his own character. They accurately reflected, as George Orwell pointed out in his memoir of his own prep school days before the first World War, the tensions between asceticism and opulence, puritan and roundhead, the obligations imposed by Britain's power and a desire to revel in its fruits. The book in its careful and richly documented way recaptures without a hint of nostalgia, sentimentality or patronage, an aspect of those years in England before the first World War. Peter Stansky ____________________________________Stanford University HARDY LETTERS VI The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, Volume VI, 1920-1925. Eds. Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. $52.00 One could be forgiven for assuming that by the sixth volume and the beginning of the ninth decade, Hardy's letters are likely to offer few surprises. As Harold Orel observed in his review of Volume Five (ELT, 29:1 [1986], 95), "Hardy is not the world's most entertaining correspondent," a view with which on any objective ground it would be hard to disagree. That being so, the source of the continued fascination that these volumes provoke must be sought elsewhere, and might in part even be most easily identifiable in those letters that reveal Hardy at his most mundanely inconsequential. The three-letter correspondence with Harold Monro over a poem for The Chapbook is a case in point. On 17 January 1923, Hardy writes: "At last I send up one—a very poor thing—for the March number. Unfortunately I raked together all those I thought the best for the volume published last summer. If you don't like this one please send it back, and I will look for another" (179). A week later he writes: "I am compelled to dictate my reply to your letter as I am in bed with a bad cold. I think that upon the whole the poem is as good as any I shall be able to find and I will insert another verse that occurred to me after I had posted your copy and this will I think, improve it" (180). The episode ends with a letter on 22 February: "I think that to lengthen it would be inadvisable, so return the proof with a slight correction, or rather improvement , only. My cold is very slowly going off, thanks" (185). 469 31:4 Book Reviews I am not suggesting that such modest little groupings make for high epistolary drama but they do convey a compelling sense of personality. The mixture of business-like formality, desire to please, and self-assurance, shadowed by the fragility of physical circumstance that becomes more apparent as the years pass (the volume's opening letter sounds what becomes a recurring strain: "I have kept all right so far this winter, but won't brag" [I]) is very distinctive and fits exactly the Hardy who has emerged through the recent years of biographical revision. To those who find that personality intriguing, the limited tonal range is surprisingly unrestrictive, and the reconstruction of a life on a postal installment plan addictively enjoyable. As January 1928 moves slowly closer, its arrival thankfully postponed for one more volume, the tension between Hardy's experience of the life as it is being lived through in daily pieces and the reader's retroactive knowledge of its completed shape is poignantly gripping. A mortuary tone is inevitably in evidence. "So friends & acquaintances thin out, & we who remain have to 'close up'" (120), Hardy writes to Florence Henniker, little more than a...