Thomas Hardy the Obscure: Hardy's Final Fiction

Thomas Hardy the Obscure: Hardy's Final Fiction SUZANNE R JOHNSON Gettysburg College THOMAS HARDY seems to have designed his career with the requirements of the college English literature curriculum in mind. The nearly equal division of his life between prose and poetry and the coincidental timing of his decision to abandon fiction for verse (at that "transitional" point between the Victorian and modern periods) have contributed to our image of Hardy as a particularly divided figure: novelist-poet, Victorian-modern, traditionalist-innovator. Tess of the d'Urbervilles or Jude the Obscure might be the capstone text of a Victorian novel class, while "The Darkling Thrush," "Neutral Tones," or "The Impercipient" might be the first works discussed in a modern British poetry course. Thus, Hardy's career lends itself to our critical and pedagogical needs first to identify categories and then to provide links between those categories. But if Hardy has been dichotomized by the academic establishment —and I would contend that he has—we must also recognize that this process was initiated by Hardy himself. Around 1915, Hardy began compiling (I hesitate to use the word "writing") what would eventually appear as his two-volume biography, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy and The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, published in 1928 and 1930 under the alleged authorship of Florence Emily Hardy.1 Hardy continued to work on this strange text, under conditions of the utmost secrecy, until his death in 1928. The portrait which Hardy paints of himself—that of a bookish young man from a good family brought low by circumstances, a man with a natural sensitivity to beauty but also to pain, an instinctive poet who goes against his aesthetic sensibilities in order to make a living as a novelist, but who finally, victoriously returns to his natural vocation as poet after battling against an ignorant, prudish public and vicious, philistine critics—this portrait has continued to influence critical discussions of Hardy's life and work despite the 300 ELT: VOLUME35:3 1992 understanding that, as Robert Gittings and others have pointed out, Hardy's ghost-written biography is little more than a "deliberate deception ," a "barrier against biography."2 Of course, no autobiographer is obligated to give "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." In writing one's life, one creates a textual self, a self which is scrubbed clean and made presentable to the world at large. So Hardy's decision, for example, to exclude from the narrative of his life his rather low social origins (there were numerous domestic servants among Hardy's relations, including his mother) is neither surprising nor particularly blameworthy. We have other biographers -—some more reliable than others—to ferret out the "facts" of the artist's life.3 We look to autobiography, then, not for some sort of empirically verifiable accuracy, but rather for a glimpse behind the curtain into the writer's private self, or at least for an understanding of how the writer sees him or herself. The text which Hardy compiled takes on a special relevance when set against the background of recent scholarly attempts to understand autobiography. The last two decades have witnessed an explosion of critical and theoretical debate surrounding autobiography as a genre, and the autobiographical act as a process.4 Most of those involved in these debates concern themselves with several vexing problems: genre definition (where, for example, can we place the autobiographical novel, where fact and fiction converge?); intentionality (must the writer sincerely desire to reveal him or herself in autobiography?); reader response (must we read an autobiography differently than we read a novel or a poem?); and finally, perhaps most vexing of all, ideology (must the autobiographer and/or the reader believe, perhaps naively, in the existence of some "essential" self which exists before, behind, or beyond language?). Thomas Hardy's biography/autobiography provides a fascinating subject for all of these debates. Until the day he died, Hardy denied that he would ever write his memoirs. "My reminiscences; no, never!" he exclaimed in a letter to Sir George Douglas.5 And while his denials were to some extent disingenuous (since he was in fact compiling The...