Bennett in the "Evening Standard"

142 2. Hardy's Cornish Romance Kenneth Phelps. The Wormwood Cup: Thomas Hardy in Cornwall (Padstow, Cornwall, England» Lodenek P, 1975). £3·75· A Pair of Blue Eves (I873) was Thomas Hardy's third novel to be published. That it echoes in many ways his meeting Emma Gifford in Cornwall and his courtship of her is well known. (This is not to deny that Blue Eyes is fiction. Emma did not, like Elfride Swancourt, die; she married Hardy.) The Wormwood Cup points out that many of Hardy's attitudes and adventures in Blue Eyes were based on fact, but it also points out that Hardy's love-poems more than his novel tell the true story. In poem after poem, Mr. Phelps identifies the facts on which the poems rest. A basic value in The VJormwood Cup is that it can help Hardy's readers separate the facts of his courtship from the fiction of Blue Eyes. Dozens of Hardy's poems, in whole or in part, treat his courtship in Cornwall, his marriage to Emma, and facts in their married life that are only touched upon in Hardy's autobiography (published as by his second wife, Florence). The Wormwood Cup meditates the effects upon Hardy of the romantic scenes of Cornwall : its quaint villages, meandering streams, old churches, and cliff-surrounded bays. In interpreting these scenes, the book seems to make use of every detail known of Hardy's courtship. Though of course Mr. Phelps was not present to overhear the lovers' talk, his surmises, drawn from letters, newspaper sources, village gossip, places visited, etc. have the ring of truth. Besides the poems of courtship, Phelps discusses various later poems in which Hardy meditated the actualities of his marriage to Emma. He finds echoes of Hardy's most intimate feelings about Emma in portraits of various women, from Elfride Swancourt of Blue Eyes to Sue Bridehead of Jude. He points out that many poems written after Hardy married Emma suggest disillusionment in such items as Hardy's introspective dreaming and idealizations and Emma's tendency toward snobbishness. Among other interesting interpretations, Mr. Phelps suggests that Hardy's The Queen of Cornwall is a cryptic allegory in which Tristram stands for Hardy, and the two Iseults of the legend for Emma Gifford and Florence Dugdale. The Wormwood Cup contains twenty-two full-page pictures» some photographs and some drawings by Hardv or Emma. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill J. 0. Bailey 3. Bennett in the "Evening Standard" Arnold Bennetti The Evening Standard Years. Books and Persons I926-I93I. ed with an Introduction by Andrew Mylett (Londι Chatto & Windus» Hamden, Conn» Archon Books, 1974). $6.50. 143 This is a collection of Bennett's articles, which were written to appear each Thursday in Lord Beaverbrook's Evening Standard. Andrew Mylett's Introduction discusses the New Age reviews written by Bennett under the pseudonym of Jacob Tonson, from 1908 to 1911, some of which were published in 1917 as a collection entitled Books and Persons. Mylett points out, quite rightly, that the New Age reviews opened the eyes of an English literary generation to the merits of Continental writers (notably Chekhov and Dostoievsky) and that it is probable that Bennett was directly responsible for Heinemann's publication, announced in ICIO, of Dostoievsky's novels translated by Constance Garnett. It was, Mylett feels, Bennett's journalism rather than his plays or novels which was responsible for his popularity, at least until the publication in 1923 of Riceyman Steps. I923 was the year in which Lord Beaverbrook purchased the Evening Standard. Mylett finds it a "considerable coincidence" that Henry Earlforward, in Riceyman Steps, sends Elsie out to buy a copy of the Standard. Why this should be coincidental is mysterious, since Mylett himself reprints a letter from Bennett to Beaverbrook in which Bennett savs that the Standard is the only evening paper "which appeals even a little to educated people" and Earlforward is educated enough to be a seller of antiquarian books, a profession for which Bennett had respect. Mylett traces to some extent the relationship between Bennett and Beaverbrook, which began when Bennett went to work in 1918 for Beaverbrook's...