Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man, and: Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate (review)

In her new biography of Thomas Hardy, Claire Tomalin suggests that "reading Jude is like being hit in the face over and over again" (254). These remarks, while evoking the novel's harrowing bleakness, also capture the fraught and stinging experience of reading one of Tomalin's more prolix precursors. Martin Seymour-Smith's wildly eccentric Hardy (1994), for example, dedicated much of its immense length to contesting, with blunt fury, Michael Millgate's definitive authority. The index to Seymour-Smith's truculent tome lists about eighty references to Millgate, while Hardy's first wife Emma garners only sixty-eight and second wife Florence a meagre thirty-one. As if conscious of Seymour-Smith's raucously indecorous chronicle, Tomalin adroitly distils her own account into less than 400 pages. She eschews startling disclosures and bruising attacks on rival researchers such as Ralph Pite, whose Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life (2006) furnishes a more literary alternative to Tomalin. Yet her ability to cut such a sober and congenial narrative path through an intimidating array of sources indicates that while Millgate's Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited (2004) remains essential for scholars, his very fastidiousness tends to slow down the narrative, whose trajectory becomes obscured by impeccably detailed footnotes and parentheses. Tomalin's calm confidence in this book is such that she can survey and synthesise information with limpid clarity, compassion, and a delicate sureness of touch.

Tomalin begins her book, which was released in the US in 2007 as Thomas Hardy, by focusing on Poems of 1912–13, describing the death of Emma Hardy as "the moment when Thomas Hardy became a great poet" (xvii). This is an arresting but reductive view of how felt sensation is transmuted into poetic expression, and it is worth recalling that Hardy had already composed some exceptional poems such as "I Look into My Glass" (1898) and "In Tenebris" (1902). Tomalin contends that "the contradictions always present in Hardy, between the vulnerable, doomstruck man and the serene inhabitant of the natural world" may actually have been better conveyed through the imaginative patterns of his verse. The extended series of questioning, penitential elegies for Emma are, to Tomalin "one of the finest and strangest celebrations of the dead in English poetry," and she observes of their author: "The more risks he takes the less he falters" (xx). Perhaps Tomalin herself could have taken more risks with her subject. She psychologizes Hardy's dour disenchantment as an anguished reaction to personal trauma, but surely it is a cast of his writerly sensibility? Tomalin tends to reproduce the stereotype of a monolithically "pessimistic" author grimly dissecting the injustices of a world from which God has already absconded and which must now make the bitter adjustments enforced by modernity. This construction of Hardy—paralyzed by an intractable sense of deprivation—is the authorized version promoted through university lectures.

What I find in Hardy's status as a cultural embalmer, and in his obsessive fixation upon the dead, is rather different: a bizarre but compelling quality of wit. Tomalin says little about why Hardy's sometimes playful irregularities of tone and narrative tactic are so oddly enabled and stimulated by the fossil fragments of a lost yesterday. Hardy's perverse playfulness releases a creative gusto in sharp contrast to the unrelieved starkness of Tomalin's perception: her portrait of the "doomstruck" man consumed by the craft of writing, remorselessly draining vigour and brio out of the living, and turning his house at Max Gate, near Dorchester, into a kind of mausoleum. Tomalin is right to reveal how Hardy's writings are replete with memorable effects of eerie detachment, as if events are recounted by an industrious and ever-vigilant spectre. But I wanted more...