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57 "WESSEX HEIGHTS" VISITED AND REVISITED: PROFESSORS J. O. BAILEY AND NORMAN PAGE The reflection that it is possible to know too much about a poet's life may well be the ungrateful but irresistible response to Professor J. 0. Bailey's recent Hardy commentary (The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary, Chapel Hill, 1970). My present purpose is not to attempt a full assessment of this book, which deals with Hardy's entire poetic oeuvre, runs to more than seven hundred pages, and is clearly the outcome of many years of patient devotion to the subject, but to take specific exception to the sixpage note on "Wessex Heights." Most of Professor Bailey's space in this note (and elsewhere in his book) is concerned with tracing the relationship between the poem and the writer's personal experience; he is especially interested, it seems, in the search for what an earlier generation would have called "real-life originals" - the personalities, and the associated places and incidents, to which direct or indirect reference is made, or appears to be made, in Hardy's verse. In pursuing this object he has been undeterred by the statement in Hardy's Preface to Wessex Poems that "The pieces are in a large degree dramatic or personatlve in conception ; and this even where they are not obviously so." It is true that "Wessex Heights" was originally published not in Wessex Poems but in the later collection Satires of Circumstance; however, the words quoted were written less than two years after the poem, and it seems reasonable to presume that the authorial caveat applies to "Wessex Heights" no less than to other poems written in the same period. Professor Bailey's explication of the poem relies heavily on an unpublished letter written in 1914 by the second Mrs. Hardy (who, as she admits in the letter, had not met her future husband at the time the poem was composed); and the key statement is her observation that "the four people mentioned are actual women." She does not indicate whether this information or pseudo-informat ion was derived from Hardy or is her own unaided surmise; but since Professor Bailey comments that "When Hardy's reticence is considered, one may suppose that he asked Florence not to reveal the women's names even to an intimate friend" (p. 274), one may suppose that there is no evidence that her suggestion was prompted by the poet himself. On this brief passing remark in an unpublished letter is erected an elaborate structure of speculation. For although the commentator admits that "the identities of the 'actual women* . . . cannot be possitively determined" (p. 275). the bulk of his note is concerned with such identification. And since he is committed from the outset to the "four people" and the "actual women" of Mrs. Hardy's letter, the evidence of the poem Is stretched and trimmed to fit the procrustean demands of that lady's well-meant but ultimately baffling observation. To summarize Professor Bailey's hypothesis as briefly as possible: 58 stanza 2 of the poem refers to Emma Lavinia Hardy (the poet's first wife), stanza 5 to Jemima Hardy (his mother), stanza 6 to Tryphena Sparks (his lost love, their illesrit imate son Randy beine also alluded to in the second half of the stanza), and stanza 7 to Mrs. Henniker (friend, fellow-novelist and correspondent of the poet). We thus have assembled the four . . . women of Florence Hardy's letter. Unfortunately, these identifications involve a misread ins-, not too difficult to demonstrate, of several parts of the poem. Indeed, when Frofessor Eailey is driven to admit in connexion with stanza 6 that "It is possible to read the phrases [in the first two lines'] as referring to two women but, if we rely on Florence Hardy's letter, we would have too many women, five instead of four" (p. 277), one seems to detect a note of desperation, as if he has disturbing doubts about the fundamental soundness of his interpretation. If, as Lawrence suegested, we should trust the tale and not the teller, then a fort lor 1 we should surely trust the poem rather than...

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