Thomas Hardy, "the man behind the pen"

Ever since I got back from London, I've been carefully rationing Nina Stibbe's always hilarious, sometimes poignant Love, Nina, a collection of the letters that the then-twenty-year-old Stibbe sent her sister in 1982 and '83 describing her experiences as the nanny for the two young children of London Review of Books publisher Mary-Kay Wilmers. The letters are full of absolutely hilarious dialogues among Stibbe, the boys, Wilmers, and their neighbor Alan Bennett, who's constantly dropping by for dinner (and usually supplying the mordant punchline to the group's exchanges). The dialogues are so good--so odd and funny and surprising--that I think I've read half the book out loud to rocketlass by now, to her great amusement.

The letters aren't solely of comedic interest, however. They also offer an interesting picture of early 1980s London as seen for the first time by a girl from Leicestershire, and of a moment in life that will be familiar to those of us who came from rural or lower-class backgrounds: when we begin to see higher culture, to know we want to be involved with it somehow, and yet we remain fundamentally (and often comically) ignorant of what that would entail. Stibbe's vacillation between confidence and fear, interest and frustration, knowledge and ignorance are charming and touching; they remind me a bit of similar moments in Caleb Crain's brilliant novel Necessary Errors, re-creating as his book did a very particular youthful feeling of inchoate ambition and hope.

I could spend the rest of this blog's year quoting from this book, but for today I'll just share an amusing--and far from unperceptive--observation that Stibbe made after encountering Thomas Hardy's poetry for the first time. She had been assigned some of his novels as part of her A-Level syllabus, and someone had suggested that she delve into the poetry as well in order to better understand "the man behind the pen." She subsequently wrote to her sister:

Got some of Hardy's poems out of Holborn library as per the letter. Most of them are rubbish and do not help me understand him. They make me think of him as wallowing and moaning and wishing for the olden days and that he hadn't been such a cunt to his wife.

Which I already knew from the introduction to The Return of the Native.

Later, she tells a university interviewer that Hardy makes her feel insignificant, which, given the high drama and fatalism of his fiction, seems like a not unreasonable response for a twenty-year-old.

I'm sure I'll share more from Love, Nina soon. Stateside readers, meanwhile, should go ahead and have their local bookstore pre-order a copy: it will be published over here by Little, Brown in April.

From the more cryptic letters of Thomas Hardy

I've been flipping through Volume Two of Thomas Hardy's letters, which covers the years 1893 to 1901, and there are many pleasures to be found within, particularly Hardy's flirtatious letters to Florence Henniker--which, were it an era when women were wearing pants, you'd be hard pressed not to read as a sustained effort to get into hers. Ahem.

That's a good note on which to lead into the first of the two letters I want to highlight today. Both are short, almost to the point of being cryptic, and both are amusing. The first, to Havelock Ellis, was sent on July 29, 1895:

Dear Mr Ellis
Pamphlet received. Shall read it with interest.
Yours very truly,
Thomas Hardy

Ellis, you probably know, was a pioneering sexologist, and the pamphlet? Editors Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate helpfully note that it was likely Sexual Inversion in Women. If a famous sexologist sends you, unsolicited, that pamphlet, in that less open era, what other response is possible? (And presumably he kept it hidden from his wife?)

The second letter is from May 4, 1895, and it reads:

Dear Sir,
I am in receipt of your note. I will if possible call on you about 5 this afternoon.
Faithfully yrs,
Thomas Hardy

What makes this one of interest is that it is to an unknown recipient. Oh, sure, it's probably innocuous. But what if it's not? Couldn't that be the response to a blackmail demand? To a note from a private detective who has some information that he's sure will be of interest to the eminent Mr. Hardy?

Could May 4, 1895 have been the day Thomas Hardy met Sherlock Holmes!

Good birthday wishes for Thomas Hardy and Barbara Pym!

In a diary entry for May 20, 1977, Barbara Pym noted,

Seeing a handsome Dorset woman at a petrol pump I thought a Hardy heroine of today might well follow such an occupation. Tess for instance.

She mentions reading Hardy a couple of times in her diaries and letters, once accurately describing the right atmosphere for taking comfort from his poetry--

The weather is dull but not unpleasant--rather calming and saddening and I'm glad i have brought Hardy's poems with me.

--and later trying (and failing) to imagine him driving.

If she knew they shared a birthday, she didn't mention it. Yesterday, June 2, would have been Pym's hundredth birthday, Hardy's 173rd. They overlapped for fifteen years, long enough for us to imagine a young Pym, having fallen for Tess, saddened at hearing of Hardy's death. They're not similar writers at all, but in a talk written for the BBC in the spring of 1978, "Finding a Voice," Pym did reveal some passages from Hardy's notebooks that, while she doesn't explicitly make this point, feel like part of the Pym universe:

Let me quote this entry for Sunday, February 1st 1874: "To Trinity Church, Dorchester. The rector in his sermon delivered himself of mean images in a sublime voice, and the effect is that of a glowing landscape in which clothes are hung up to dry." Or another entry, for October 25th 1867, more likely to have inspired a poem: "Martha R --, an old maid whose lover died, has his love letters to her bound, and keeps them on the parlour table."

The latter has the self-aware wistfulness of Pym's characters, the former a hint of her judgment and humor--though if we encountered it in the context of Hardy's work the judgment would predominate.

Which leads to the unanswerable question: Would Hardy have liked Pym's work? It seems wildly unlikely, doesn't it? Hardy bridges the Victorian and Edwardian eras, but for all their ventures into psychology his novels remain nearly as full of incident as their predecessors, whereas Barbara Pym's books turn on such modest changes of heart and fortune that a reader more accustomed to the violence and passion of Hardy could miss them entirely. In fact, the developments in Pym's plots so often don't exist, involving as they do the raising and surrendering of unexpressed dreams--whereas dreams in Hardy are rarely (if ever?) repressed, finding life in wild, dramatic action.

The humor, too, would be a problem. Hardy's novels are almost entirely humorless, at least when it comes to their central characters and concerns, as Anthony Powell noted in a 1971 review for the Telegraph:

Hardy's failing was a total lack of humour, which, one feels, might have prevented some of the absurdities. He could do knockabout up to a point, or irony, but one has only to think of Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Proust, or Conrad, to see the missing quality that is possessed by most of the great novelists in one form or another.

Hardy's humor is almost always found in the rustics around his protagonists, the characters who see no disjunction between their dreams and their surroundings, who harbor neither hope nor fear of change--they're Shakespearean jesters (though fortunately less irritating). Gentle satire of Pym's sort, even if you could explain its essential reference points of contemporary social intercourse, would I suspect fall entirely flat with Hardy. As Penelope Fitzgerald notes in her perceptive review of Pym's last novel, A Few Green Leaves,

High comedy needs a settled world, ready to resent disturbance.

--and Hardy's world is anything but settled. What we get in Hardy is the friction caused by different rates of change, between an old way of life that is inexorably being lost (but slowly enough that the fact can be denied) and a new freedom that is emerging too fitfully (and that ultimately may not wholly compensate for what's been lost). Tess as a gas station attendant in Hardy would involve disgrace and rage in at least equal parts with fierce independence; as a Pym character she would be merely a figure of speculative village gossip.

No, much as Pym loved Hardy, the reverse seems unlikely. But birthday mates they are despite. This year, Pym, rightfully, is getting the lion's share of attention: her centennial has sparked a wonderfully astute appreciation by Carrie Frye for the Awl, while bloggers at My Porch and Fig and Thistle are hosting a Barbara Pym reading week. From My Porch's gallery of Pym covers I learned that the New York Times once called her "the novelist most touted by one's most literary friends," while Shirley Hazzard simply noted that "her books will last." Indeed. It's unlikely we'll be around for her bicentennial, but I hold out hopes that her books will.

Round and round with Hardy and James

I make no promises that this post bears anywhere near the inspiration and joys of juxtaposition of Craig Brown's wonderful daisy chain of a book, One on One, about which I've written before (and which, oddly enough, remains unpublished in the States), but it shares a bit of that book's haphazardly paired DNA.

It began when I was flipping through a volume of the letters of Robert Louis Stevenson and came across a letter to Henry James of December 5, 1892.* After bringing James up to speed on his threatened deportation from Samoa, Stevenson settled down to discussing books:

Hurry up with another book of stories. I am now reduced to two of my contemporaries, you and Barrie -- O, and Kipling! I did like Rider Haggard's Nada the Lily; it isn't great but it's big. As for Hardy -- You remember the old gag? -- Are you wownded, my lord? -- Wownded, 'Ardy. -- Mortually, my lord? -- Mortually, 'Ardy. Well, I was mortually wownded by Tess of the Durberfields. I do not know that I am exaggerative in criticism; but I will say that Tess is one of the worst, weakest, and least sane, most voulu books I have yet read. Bar the style, it seems to me to be about as bad as [sensational novelist George William Macarthur] Reynolds -- I maintain it -- Reynolds: or, to be more plain, to have no earthly connexion with human life, and to be merely the unconscious portrait of a weak man under a vow to appear clever, or a rickety schoolchild setting up to be naughty and not knowing how. I should tell you in fairness I could never finish it; there may be the treasures of the Indies further on; but so far as I read, James, it was, in one word, damnable. Not alive, not true, was my continual comment as I read; and at last -- not even honest! was the verdict with which I spewed it from my mouth. I write in anger? I almost think I do: I was betrayed in a friend's house -- and I was pained to hear that other friends delighted in that barmecide feast. I cannot read a page of Hardy for many a long day, my confidence is gone.

Editor Ernest Mehew's quite good notes to the volume of Stevenson's letters reveal both James's initial opinion of Tess, which, it appears, is what prompted Stevenson to take it up, and his later, more damning assessment. In a letter the previous spring James had written,

The good little Tommy Hardy has scored a great success with Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which is chock-full of faults and falsity and yet has a singular beauty and charm.

Though I'm more forgiving of Hardy's faults, that assessment is far from unfair. After receiving Stevenson's broadside, however, James replied,

I grant you Hardy with all my heart and even with a certain quantity of my boot-toe. I am meek and ashamed where the public chatter is deafening -- so I bowed my head and let Tess of the D's pass. But oh yes, dear Louis, she is vile. The pretence of "sexuality" is only equalled by the absence of it, and the abomination of language only by the author's reputation for style.

James would surely be pleased to learn that Hardy's reputation as a stylist has taken a hit, as these days, he's praised in spite of his sometimes clunky prose, but if James thought Tess's sexuality was overplayed to the point of falseness, just think--D. H. Lawrence is still to come!

Longtime readers will know that I disagree heartily with Stevenson's and James's assessments (though I admire Stevenson's passion--oh, the books that provoke us to actual anger!**). Hardy is far from perfect, certainly, but while I am willing to give Hardy critics Jude the Obscure, a book whose determination on doom is so pervasive as to render it laughable, I can read Tess again and again and find myself swept up in it anew each time. The same goes, to a lesser extent, for his other major novels; The Mayor of Casterbridge, Far from the Madding Crowd, and The Return of the Native all have substantial charms.

After reading these letters, I went in search of a favorite Anthony Powell line about Hardy, which I found in a 1971 review of a critical biography of Hardy for the Daily Telegraph:

Hardy's failing was a total lack of humour, which, one feels, might have prevented some of the absurdities. He could do knockabout up to a point, or irony, but one has only to think of Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Proust, or Conrad***, to see the missing quality that is possessed by most of the great novelists in one form or another.

On the next page of Miscellaneous Verdicts, the collection in which I found that review, is one from 1972 of a collection of Hardy's letters to his ill-situated semi-paramour Florence Henniker. Powell quotes the following passage from one of Hardy's letters:

In my enforced idleness, I have been reading H. James's Wings of the Dove--the first of his that I have looked into for years and years. I read it with a fair amount of care--as much as one would wish to expend on any novel, certainly, seeing what there is to read besides novels--and so did [his wife] Em; but we have been arguing ever since about what happened to the people, and find we have wholly conflicting opinions thereon. At the same time James is almost the only living novelist I can read, and taken in small doses I like him exceedingly, being as he is a real man of letters.

I absolutely love this letter. How often do you find someone acknowledging, not simply that James is complicated, but that he can be so subtle as to leave readers with wholly different--and irreconcilable--understandings of what he was trying to say? And then there's the reminders of Hardy's perpetual insecurity: there's the dig about "what there is to read besides novels," from a man who'd seven years earlier given up the form; and also the reasons for his approval of James, that he is "a real man of letters," a contrast with Hardy, who seemed to perpetually need reassurance that he had reached the inner circle.

I'll close with the letter that sent me to Stevenson in the first place--and which, conveniently, pulls together most of the threads herein. It was sent by George Lyttelton to Rupert Hart-Davis on March 8, 1956; after airing a dislike of Austen (and a belief that Emma deserved spanking), Lyttelton writes about the Irish novelist and critic George Moore,

D[esmond] MacCarthy somewhere hints that G.M. had really read very little and that mere deliberate mischief played a great part in his dicta which listeners were glad to have for their wit and sometimes were shrewd enough. "What is Conrad but the wreck of Stevenson floating about on the slip-slop of Henry James?" is beastly good, though (of course) unfair. But how I do enjoy the old rascal; how attractive are complete absence of principle and an unlimited love of mischief, both apparently quite unselfconscious!

True on all counts.

"This is not so much the first over, as a gentle limbering up," or, Embarking on the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis letters

While waiting to get back to my local bookstore to pick up a copy of Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies--I'm nothing if not loyal!--I've been reading the first volume of the collected correspondence of George Lyttelton and Rupert Hart-Davis, a book that made its way to my shelves a few years back on the recommendation of Michael Dirda. In the course of a piece on the pleasures of James Lees-Milne's diaries at the Barnes and Noble Review, Dirda included the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis correspondence in a list of his ten favorite books, alongside such IBRL favorites as Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Casanova's memoirs, Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel, and In Search of Lost Time. About the list Dirda wrote,

If literature is news that stays news, as Ezra Pound famously said, then such books as those on my list represent what one might call the higher gossip. Their pages are packed with amusing anecdotes, erotic adventures, moral observations, lyrical evocations of the past, bits of biography, encounters with unusual people, and glorious descriptions of nature, art, places, and society. These are, in short, works that recreate a time and a place, while also plunging us deep into a tattered human heart.

I'm only 150 pages into the six volumes of Lyttelton/Hart-Davis letters, and I've already encountered all these elements. These are truly wonderful letters.

The correspondence began in charming fashion: Hart-Davis, a publisher, had been a pupil of Lyttelton at Eton, and when they met again at a dinner party in 1955 Lyttelton complained of being lonely in rural Suffolk:

"Nobody even writes to me," he said. Flushed with wine, I accepted the challenge.

"I'll write to you, George."

"When will you start?"

"Next week-end."

"Right. I'll answer in the middle of the week."

For seven years, until Lyttelton's death, that's what they did.

The first couple of letters are, as you might expect, a bit awkward: tentative and self-consciously literary. But amazingly quickly the pair settle into a true exchange that feels as comfortable as any rambling conversation with an old friend. They're both highly educated and steeped in English literary culture in that oh-so-English public school way that can positively boggle even the relatively literate mind at times. References--most caught, some requiring resort to research--abound, as do quotations, all feeling organic, markers of the mind at work. Hart-Davis, dismissing Lyttelton's apology for the "tediously otiose" act of quoting Dr. Johnson, sums up the pleasure of quotation:

[I]t's such a pleasure to write down splendid words--almost as though one were inventing them.

The most fun part of these early letters is the simple joy these two men are discovering in each other's company--finding that this lark on which they've embarked is, after all, a genuine meeting of the minds, a friendship that seems almost from the start to be infinitely capacious. Most collections of letters are best suited for dipping into rather than reading straight through; this one, at least thus far, seems the rare exception where following the trajectory and growth of the correspondence would more than make up for any of the inevitable tedium brought on by letter after letter after letter.

I'm sure I'll be sharing more in the coming weeks--this post, actually, was a sidetrack from what was to be a simple post about a tossed-off remark by Lyttelton about M. R. James's handwriting, which I promise I'll get to soon. For now, I'll leave you with a line that Hart-Davis quotes from the notebooks of another IBRL favorite, Thomas Hardy*:

Nine-tenths of the letters in which people speak unreservedly of their feelings are written after ten at night.

Being as we're long past that hour, I'll attempt to retain my reticence by retiring.

"If I keep on reading Hardy, it will come."

I've spent the past week head over heels in What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, which is looking likely to become the only letters collection I've ever read straight through. I've been, and will continue to be, drawing on it in my Twitter feed and over at the Annex; few writers are as dear to my heart as Maxwell, and the correspondence seems likely to turn me into a Welty fan, too.

There are many reasons to love these letters, and I'll get into a number of them in the coming weeks, but one of the chief reasons is the way the pair share their reading--and the fact that they're both perpetually reading a couple of my favorite authors. They talk continuously of Virginia Woolf, voraciously reading every new book about her and her coterie that appears; they're gone on Forster, whom I suspect it's time for me to revisit; and they both revel in the high tragedy of Thomas Hardy.

My favorite passage about Hardy thus far is this, from a letter sent by Maxwell on March 7, 1967:

I am so glad you are working. Able to. I think about working. This idea and that. But don't take off my hat and sit down to it, for some reason. I almost had an idea in France last summer, but it faded away like the Cheshire cat's smile. But I tell myself if I keep on reading Hardy, it will come. I have just finished Tess of the D-- ---. When Angel Clare found her in that seaside resort, living with Alec D'Urbeville, and she said, "Don't come near me," and "Too late, too late," and he went away, and she went upstairs to her bedroom and [threw] herself on the floor with her head on that chair, and said "O,O,O" and then "I can't bear it," it was she and I that couldn't bear it. I will never be the same. But what do you think they talked about for those five days, in that empty house that didn't belong to them? Brazil?

This hints at a crucial aspect of Hardy: either you vibrate to the tones he works in, are willing to go with what Anthony Powell calls his "at times clumsily expressed" account of life's grotesqueries and tragedies, or you see it all as overblown and ridiculously operatic. If you're in the former camp, Hardy's novels--Tess especially--can wrench you like little else, you can't bear it; if you're in the latter, your response is likely to take the form of, "Really? Really?"

Having taken great pleasure in reading and re-reading Hardy over the years, I am glad to be in the former camp, and, now, to know that I have such distinguished company as Maxwell and Welty.

It's White Fang or Nothing!

One of the great pleasures of Deborah Mitford's charming and funny new memoir, Wait for Me!, is its portrait of David Mitford, Baron Redesdale, whom Mitford fans long ago came to know in the guise of Uncle Matthew in Nancy's The Pursuit of Love. Deborah acknowledges that in many ways her father really was like Matthew, but she paints him in a much gentler light:

Nancy made him sound terrifying but there was nearly, though not always, a comic undercurrent not apparent to outsiders. I adored him. He was an original, with a total disregard of the banal or boring.

In other words, exactly the sort of character best met in the pages of a novel or memoir--and for all Deborah's attempts to show her father's lighter side, it's hard not to come to the conclusion that, yes, he was essentially terrifying. If he was more bluster than anything, well, that's still an awfully large quantity of bluster to live with on a daily basis.

But in a memoir? Oh, there he's vastly entertaining. As when he went to the dentist in his mid-thirties,

and asked him to take out all his teeth. The dentist refused, saying it was dangerous. "All right then," said Farve impatiently. "I'll go to someone who will." An hour or so later there was not a tooth left in his head. Thereafter "my good dentures" chewed up Muv's excellent food.

Or his inordinate "horror of anything sticky":

I once asked him what his idea of hell was. "Honey on my bowler hat," was the answer.

Or this exchange about his brother-in-law, Denis Farrer, the Old Dean:

Fare was once talking to an acquaintance about the Farrers and said, "The only trouble with the Old Dean is that he married a ghastly woman." "Oh?" said the acquaintance. "I thought she was your sister?" "Yes, she is. A poisonous creature."

Or his brutal manners when Nancy brought home friends:

[M]y father waited for a pause in the conversation and said loudly to my mother at the other end of the table, "Have these people no homes of their own?"

The anecdote that made me laugh the loudest, however, also happens to be the most suitable for this blog: it's about books, and, specifically, about one of my old favorites, Thomas Hardy. According to Deborah, her father read only one book in his life, White Fang, "which he enjoyed so much he vowed never to read another." Learning this soon after their marriage shocked Mrs. Mitford, and she came up with a plan:

She persuaded him to listen to her reading aloud some classics, starting with Thomas Hardy. She chose Tess of the d'Urbervilles with its descriptions of farm and heath land, which she thought he would enjoy. When she got to the sad part, my father started crying. "Oh, darling, don't cry, it's only a story." "WHAT," said my father, his sorrow turning to rage, "do you mean to say the damn feller made it up?"

Which makes one wonder: Is it possible that David had misunderstood the nature of White Fang?

I suspect that Hardy--who was alive and well at that time--of all people would have enjoyed knowing that Tess was selected because of its depiction of the humble activities of rural life. The dismissal of it all as made-up, and thus pointless, however? I expect he would have replied with the self-righteous asperity of this passage from his explanatory note to the first edition of Jude the Obscure:

I would ask that any too genteel reader, who cannot endure to have said what everybody nowadays thinks and feels, to remember a well-worn sentence of St Jerome's: If an offence come out of the truth, better is it that the offence come than that the truth be concealed.

"He was anything but great in personality."

Having mentioned in passing a few days ago the difficulties of Thomas Hardy's first marriage--so often attributed almost entirely to Emma's "very countryfied and scatter-brained" manner and high self-regard--it seems only right to close the week with a couple of accounts found in Thomas Hardy Remembered that remind us that there was plenty of social awkwardness on both sides, with Hardy himself was seen by many as less than scintillating company. First, a couple of passages from the diary of George Gissing, who, having known Hardy casually for years, stayed with the Hardys at Max Gate from September 14th to 16th, 1895:

He seems to me to be a trifle spoiled by success; he runs far too much after titled people, and, in general, the kind of society in which he is least qualified to shine. . . . Cannot let himself go in conversation, is uneasy and preoccupied.

Similarly, American novelist Gertrude Atherton, in her Adventures of a Novelist (1932), described her first conversation with Hardy as a bit of a struggle:

I floundered about, broaching one subject and another, but he never even glanced at me, much less made any response to my embarrassed efforts. He appeared to have fallen into a reverie, quite oblivious to his surroundings. Then, heaven knows how . . . I lighted upon cable cars in San Francisco. Abstraction fled. His face lit up. He turned to me eagerly. He asked me a hundred questions.

When she met Hardy again at a reception a fortnight later, he

drifted in, looking absent and weary as usual. But he no sooner caught sight of me than he was at my side, and plunged at once into the exciting subject of cable cars in San Francisco. I managed to divert him after a time, being heartily tired of the topic myself.

Not that Atherton has any good words for Mrs. Hardy, either:

In his wake was an excessively plain, dowdy, high-stomached woman with her hair drawn back in a tight little knot, and a severe cast of countenance. "Mrs. Hardy," said [Atherton's friend] T. P. [O'Connor.] "Now you may understand the pessimistic nature of the poor devil's work." No doubt Hardy went out so constantly to be rid of her!

Gissing, too, shares unpleasant interactions with Emma:

In a short private talk with Mrs Hardy, she showed me her discontented spirit. Talked fretfully of being obliged to see more society than she liked in London, and even said that it was hard to live with people of humble origin--meaning Thomas, of course. She then scolded her servants noisily for being late with lunch--oh, a painful woman!

Such accounts, relatively common among those who knew the Hardys, make their long-running collaboration on the production of his novels seem more impressive. Though Emma's habit late in life of hinting that she should be regarded as a coauthor is clearly absurd, her diligent copying, research, and occasional suggestions were unquestionably of great help, and the fact that he never deigned to dedicate a novel to her is perhaps the simplest summation of his own inadvertent cruelty.

The mutual wounding of the Hardys, though never rising to the gothically awful level of the Tolstoys, does bring to mind that toxic marriage; to this fan of quiet and domestic harmony, it's astonishing that either writer was able to extract from that antagonism the peace of mind required to write, let alone write so well.

Thomas Hardy and Ford Madox Ford, as Thomas Hardy Week concludes . . . maybe?

As I explained earlier this week, thinking about Thomas Hardy has sent me back to the inexhaustible treasure trove that is Thomas Hardy Remembered (2007), a collection of contemporary accounts of encounters with Hardy by a wide range of figures. Oh, would that we had such a book for all our favorite authors--it's a sheer joy to read these overlapping, kaleidoscopic descriptions of Hardy's conversation, appearance, demeanor, and preoccupations through the years.

Today, I'll share some observations from another I've Been Reading Lately favorite, Ford Madox Ford, which give insight into Hardy while also offering a taste of Ford's wonderful prose style. (And oh, if you've not read his Parade's End, quick, cancel your weekend plans and settle in! You won't regret it.)

Ford first met Hardy at age eighteen, when he'd just published his first book, a fairy tale called The Brown Owl, and continued to see him regularly thereafter; though editor Martin Ray notes that "Ford's reminiscences are notoriously unreliable," the following scene that Ford recounted in an article for H. L. Mencken's American Mercury in 1936 has the ring of truth:

But indeed the whole of his poetic work forms such another immense panorama . . . of the great landscape of the human heart. It is a matter of observation of minuteness rendered with an immense breadth and breath. You would imagine there is nothing human, hodden, and down to the ground that he had not noticed with his quick glances. They penetrated right in behind nearly all surfaces as if he had been an infallible sleuth of all human instance. I still remember my extreme amazement--as if of a Doctor Watson--when looking at a fisher boy who was patching an old boat, he told me that that boy whom he had never seen before was probably the stepson of a woman lately widowed--who got on well with him. . . . He had deduced it--and it was quite correct--from the boy's red canvas trousers which had been cut down and patched with blue cloth.

I like the image of Thomas Hardy as a rural Sherlock Holmes: they share a hatred of injustice, an appreciation for the implacable workings of fate, and, as discussed in the case of Hardy in the previous post, a near total lack of humor.

Thomas Hardy and the tragic and the (lack of) comic

Thinking about Thomas Hardy this week sent me back to Anthony Powell's take on him, which found its fullest expression in a review of J. I. M. Stewart's Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography for the Daily Telegraph in 1971. Powell opened the review by quoting T. S. Eliot's unforgettable damning of Hardy the novelist,

What again and again introduces a note of falsity into Hardy's novels is that he will leave nothing to nature, but will always be giving one last turn of the screw himself, and of his motives for so doing I have the gravest suspicion.

I expect that anyone who has read Jude the Obscure, jaw dropping in horror and astonishment at the worst of its scenes, would have trouble refuting Eliot's statement.

If, however, we can separate the worst of Hardy's excesses from the overall thrust of his novels, it's hard to deny the power of his fundamentally tragic vision--and Powell agrees:

Hardy . . . had a real grasp of the genuinely grotesque things that happen in life, even if at times these may be clumsily expressed. To this he added an enormous sense of "seriousness" in the motives of his writing. He wanted to do nothing less than rival Aeschylus and Shakespeare in representing the eternal conflicts of right and wrong, duty and inclination, and so on. At the ame time he hoped to propagate the supposed "new truths" that were making themselves known.

Powell goes on to quote a marvelously compact and insightful passage from Stewart, which he rightly notes "states the whole critical situation of Hardy and his novels":

Hardy in his novel-writing practice seems almost unhesitatingly to assume somethign really far from clear: that the elaborately "made up" plot of the popular Victorian novel could be manipulated or refined or elevated in such a way as to subserve both these grave intents.

It's a realization that would certainly not necessarily flow from reading Dickens, Thackeray, or even the relative realist Trollope, but it does seem to have informed Hardy from the almost the very start of his career.

Powell also pinpoints Hardy's greatest failing--to which, really, could be ascribed the tendency that so frustrated Eliot--a failure ever to see that the flip side of the grotesque is the funny:

Hardy's failing was a total lack of humour, which, one feels, might have prevented some of the absurdities. He could do knockabout up to a point, or irony, but one has only to think of Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Proust, or Conrad, to see the missing quality that is possessed by most of the great novelists in one form or another.

Which leads me to a side note, mentioned by Powell: Proust and Hardy were fans of each other's work, a pairing that I find very hard to get my head around, its clash of styles, temperaments, and eras almost too much to contemplate.

Anyway, back to the main point: Edmund Gosse, in a passage I've quoted before from his obituary appreciation of his friend Hardy for the Sunday Times of January 15, 1928 addresses the central paradox that confronts anyone who knows Hardy's novels and his biography:

[Hardy] needed all the natural magic of his genius to prevent his work, interpenetrated as it was by this resigned and hopeless melancholy, from becoming sterile, but joy streamed into it from other sources--the joy of observation, of sympathy, of humour. Yet, after all, the core of Hardy's genius was austere and tragical, and this has to be taken into consideration, and weighed in every estimate of his writings. It was a curious fact, and difficult to explain, that this obvious aspect of his temperament was the one which he firmly refused to contemplate. The author of Tess of the D'Urbervilles conceived himself to be an optimist.

In a generous world we must all, I suppose, allowed to be wrong about ourselves, so long as we accept the fact that our friends, if they're worth the label, will always know better.

"This quietest figure in literature," or, Back under Hardy's spell

{Photo of a grave in Dorset by rocketlass.}

The problem with happening across a reference to Thomas Hardy, like the one that inspired my previous post, is that no sooner have I consulted my favorite sources on Hardy's life than I find myself weltered by their countless worthy anecdotes--and in a blink, a week of planned posts go by the wayside. Interested in learning more about the delicious Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime? Charles Ardai's fun new swashbuckling adventure series starring Gabriel Hunt? The jeweled viciousness of Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution? Sorry, but you'll have to wait while I give Hardy his due.

For this first anecdote, at least, I can claim the excuse of continuity, as it does feature characters who figured in the previous post: not just Hardy, but also J. M. Barrie and Cynthia Asquith, the daughter-in-law of H. H. Asquith, the prime minister whose threat to ennoble Hardy and Barrie (alongside 498 others) so frightened the House of Lords in 1911. And surely not even the most hardened anti-Hardyite could begrudge me the sharing of a tale like this, from a 1956 article in the Listener by Cynthia Asquith, who at the time of this 1921 visit was Barrie's secretary:

I have such a vivid visual memory of Thomas Hardy. I see him on the threshold of the cottage in which he had been born. He is anxiously watching his friend, J. M. Barrie, climb a rickety ladder to get in through a window and open the locked door of the cottage from the inside, when Barrie was sixty-one years old.

Shades of Peter Pan there, no?

After a few dismissive comments about the architecture of Max Gate, typical of educated visitors to that odd abode that Hardy had designed for himself, Asquith remarks on Hardy's

resigned eyes, unforgettable. They looked as if nothing could ever surprise them again. They were sad eyes--very sad--but unflinching, as though, after long sorrow, a certain serenity had been arrived at.

The best part, though, comes with the appearance of Hardy's dog, Wessex:

The moment we arrived I was formally introduced to the most despotic dog guests had ever suffered under. This notorious dog, who was called "Wessex," had, I am sure, the longest biting list of any domestic pet. His proud master lost no time in telling us that the postman, who had been bitten three times, now refused to deliver any more letters at the door. The thick tousle of Wessex's unbrushed coat made it impossible to guess to which, if any, breed he was supposed to belong, and I did not think it would be civil to ask. Wessex was specially uninhibited at dinner time, most of which he spent not under, but on, the table, walking about unchecked, and contesting every single forkful of food on its way from my plate to my mouth.

Or perhaps (maybe for those of you who harbor unruly dogs of your own?) the most memorable--and undeniably the most telling--part of the article is Asquith's account of one of Hardy's morbidly self-obsessed quirks that Barrie had shared with her:

[H]e often smiled over Hardy's preoccupation with his plans for his own burial--plans which were perpetually being changed. "One day," said Barrie," Hardy took me to see the place where he wants most to be buried, and the next day he took me to see the place where he would like next best to be buried. Usually he says he is to be buried exactly in between his two wives, but sometimes he is to be so many inches hnearer to the first; sometimes so many inches nearer to the second."

If you suspect a little friendly exaggeration in Barrie's account, you're not alone: that was Asquith's response, too, until

the present Mrs Hardy, a little wearily, if unresentfully, told me that her husband had one day made her walk six miles to show her the bench on which he used to sit while he was courting her predecessor. I wondered, but did not like to ask, whether he kept her up to date with his changing arrangements for her burial.

Longtime readers will already have guessed that I found this article in Thomas Hardy Remembered (2007), a compilation of contemporary accounts of Hardy so full of pleasures that I can't imagine a Hardy fan's bookshelves being complete without it, despite its libraries-only price of £57.00. If you're not yet convinced, just wait: as threatened, I'll share more from it in the coming days.

{And after all this talk of Wessex and burial, I must direct you to this photo by Flickr user Grueneman--which, its rights being sadly reserved, I can't reproduce here--of Wessex's grave in Hardy's pet cemetery. He truly was an honored friend, for all his incorrigibility.}

Peer pressure, or, the Lord Novelist-Poet of Dorset

{Photo by rocketlass.}

While reading Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1941 (1966) last week, I was surprised to find that her account of a 1909 English Parliamentary crisis brought in an old I've Been Reading Lately favorite. The crisis came about when the Chancellor of the Exchequer,David Lloyd George, in need of extraordinary new revenue to make good on the Liberal Party's campaign promises while also continuing to build England's new fleet of dreadnoughts, proposed what became known as the People's Budget. The budget was one of the earliest salvos in the slow march of serious taxation on the hereditary holdings of the English nobility, and its proposed taxes on inherited and undeveloped land "aroused the whole of the landowning class in furious resentment, as it was intended to." Tuchman notes,

Lloyd George pressed it home in public mockery and appeals to the populace as blatant as when Mark Antony wept over Caesar's wounds. Personifying the enemy as "the Dukes," he told a working-class audience of four thousand at Limehouse in London's East End, "A fully equipped Duke costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts . . . is just as great a terror and lasts longer."

The budget was passed easily by the Liberal-dominated House of Commons, after which it was sent to the House of Lords, which at that point technically still exercised veto power over all legislation.

Traditionally, however, the House of Lords had always allowed finance bills to pass, for reasons that Tuchman explains:

[A]s Lord Salisbury had once pointed out over an earlier budget, there was no constitutional bar to the Lords throwing out a Finance Bill--only a practical one: they could not throw out the Government of the day along with it. To reject a budget and leave the Government in power would amount to deadlock.

As a budget, unlike other legislation, is absolutely necessary for the continued running of the government, its rejection by the House of Lords, if followed by the Commons standing strong and refusing to amend the bill, would have left England in an untenable position. The Government's response was to threaten the unthinkable: they would

advise the King to create enough Peers to provide a Liberal majority in the House of Lords, as many as five hundred if necessary, a deluge that would drown the hereditary peerage.

The next year saw wrangling and intransigence, followed by a general election that returned a similar majority for the Liberals, after which Prime Minister H. H. Asquith convinced George V to agree, at least in principle, to the creation of the necessary new Liberal Peers--which is where our literary friends unexpectedly enter the picture:

At some undated stage in the proceedings Asquith drew up, or caused to be drawn up, a list of some 250 names for wholesale ennobling, which, though it included Sir Thomas Lipton, did not altogether deserve Lloyd George's sneer about glorified grocers. On the list along with Lipton were Asquith's brother-in-law, H. J. Tennant, as well as his devoted admirer and future biographer, J. A. Spender; also Sir Edgar Speyer, Bertrand Russell, General Baden-Powell, General Sir Ian Hamilton, the jurist Sir Frederick Pollock, the historians Sir George Trevelyan and G. P. Gooch, the South African millionaire Sir Abe Bailey, Gilbert Murray, J. M. Barrie, Thomas Hardy, and Anthony Hope, author of The Prisoner of Zenda.

The thought of any of those last three being named to the House of Lords is a definitely amusing, but of course it's Hardy who really caught my eye. It's so hard to imagine the odd, quiet, apolitical country man that Hardy was by the early 1900s being made a Peer--especially for such openly political reasons. I wonder if he would even have accepted the honor? Though Asquith knew him to be a Liberal supporter, following a meeting between the two arranged by Edmund Gosse, Hardy had just a few years earlier shown himself reticent about accepting honors, dithering to the point of stasis about a mere knighthood. As Claire Tomalin describes it,

Mr Asquith, as Prime Minister, offered Hardy a knighthood, an honour Englishmen traditionally accept with the excuse that they are doing so to please their wives. Hardy sent a curious reply to Asquith, expressing his warm admiration for his policies, but saying he would like to think over the proposed knighthood for a year. Although this was politely agreed to, it does not seem to have been brought up again, and Emma remained plain Mrs Hardy.

Oddly enough (but in keeping with the difficulties that Emma faced as Hardy's wife--and her tendency to carefully nurse them into thriving grievances), he later accepted the Order of Merit,

a much more distinguished award but one that carried no "Sir" or "Lady." The nearest she got to her wish was that among her Dorset neighbours some of the children called her "Lady Emma" behind her back, in mocking tribute to her sense of her own importance.

Thomas, Lord Hardy of Dorset--is that what he would have been had Asquith acted on his plan? And if, as despite my doubts is not impossible to imagine, Hardy had embraced his new role, how might that have changed his later career? Mightn't a public role, with all the renewed attention and even adulation that might have accompanied it, have mitigated the grief occasioned by his Emma's death, which seems to have fueled so much of his subsequent poetry? Is there, in some parallel universe, an aging Hardy who, fat and happy, recites patriotic verse to rapt society audiences on the eve of the Great War?

"Too often when a publisher entertains an author at the midday meal a rather sombre note tinges the table talk."

{Photo of an erroneous erratum in the Regenstein Library's copy of Richard Stark's Plunder Squad by rocketlass.}

In my recent reading I've happened across three little bits about publishing that seemed worth sharing. First, from Vere H. Collins's Talks with Thomas Hardy at Max Gate (1928), a discussion between the author and Hardy about publishing errata:

H: There are a considerable number of misprints in the Collected Edition [of his poems]. Macmillan has issued an errata slip. Had your copy one?

C: No, but I bought the book when it first came out.

H: I will get a copy of the slip for you. [He leaves the room and returns with an errata slip.] That will save you from having to buy a revised edition. I cannot understand how mistakes occur in a printed book when a proof has been corrected properly.

C: Sometimes a word or line drops out when the formes are being moved and the printer resets carelessly without referring to the proof.

H: I remember Tennyson being very much annoyed because one of his poems was printed with "hairy does" instead of "aery does." On another occasion "mad phrases" became "mud phrases."

I'm disapointed that "hairy does" didn't become "hairy toes" instead; we could have had hobbits decades earlier!

Then there's this scene from P. G. Wodehouse's Uncle Dynamite (1948), wherein a woman recounts how her brother, a small publisher, found himself in trouble after printing taking on a job for a wealthy--and stodgy--old man:

"[H]e said one thing that gripped my attention, and that was that he had written his Reminiscences and had decided after some thought to pay for their publication. He spoke like a man who had had disappointments. So I said to myself, 'Ha! A job for Otis.'"

"I begin to see. Otis took it on and made a mess of it?"

"Yes. In a negligent moment he slipped in some plates which should have appeared in a book on Modern Art which he was doing. Sir Aylmer didn't like any of them much, but the one he disliked particularly was the nude female with 'Myself in the Early Twenties' under it."

If we were were playing "one of these things is not like the others," this last item would stand out like an unindicted tenant in the Illinois governor's mansion, but since I already had the first two passages on the brain it seemed worth appending when I came across it this afternoon. From Ross Macdonald's The Underground Man (1971), a glimpse of a way of looking at the life of a city that's nearly disappeared:

I walked past the closed door of the Wallers' apartment and down the street to the nearest newsstand, where I bought the weekend edition of the Los Angeles Times. I lugged it home and spent most of the morning reading it. All of it, including the classified ads, which sometimes tell you more about Los Angeles than the news.

The Times is still with us, but the classifieds are just about gone; would Craigslist offer Archer the same insight into the hope and desperation of his city?

"The attitude of a crafstman towards a trade, with no tendency to regard the writing of books as an elevated pursuit," or, Talking with Thomas Hardy

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Though I almost exclusively buy my books new--my neat streak working in tandem with a desire to support publishers and authors--once in a while a used bookstore will offer up an utterly unexpected treasure, a book I might never have come across in decades of glancing through bibliographies and following recommendations from bloggers.

Sunday was one of those days: after seeing my friend Carrie Olivia Adams read from her new book of poems, Intervening Absence, at Myopic Books, I wandered to the criticism section, where in search of Hazlitt, I happened instead to find a slim volume entitled Talks with Thomas Hardy. Published by Vere H. Collins in 1928, two years after Hardy's death, it was (inexplicably) reprinted in cloth by Duckworth in 1978, and for a mere $6 I was able to take it home. Callooh, callay, indeed!

As Collins explains in his introduction, he was more or less a nobody: he became of fan of Hardy's novels as an undergraduate, then a fervent believer in Hardy's poetry after the Great War, and,

For many years I had felt as Browning felt about Byron when he said that he would "at any time have gone to see a curl of his hair or one of his gloves."

So in 1920, out of the blue, Collins wrote to Hardy, praising his poetry and asking for a short interview. To his surprise, Hardy wrote back days later inviting him to Max Gate; a series of visits followed over the next two years.

Why did Hardy grant this total stranger, who came bearing no credentials or introduction, access to his house and person? Collins traces it, convincingly, to his stated preference for Hardy's poetry over his fiction; though Hardy's poetry has plenty of partisans now, at the time it was still comparatively neglected, his decision to eschew fiction still considered unfortunate. The resulting conversations--in which the second Mrs. Hardy, less odd but possibly more possessive than the first Mrs. Hardy, participated--are at times remarkably light, but in their focus on the poetry and their unguardedness they offer many pleasures.

As I've done with the more extensive (and much more expensive!) volume Thomas Hardy Remembered that Ashagte put out a couple of years ago (and in which Collins doesn't figure), I'll almost certainly return to this book over time. For now, I'll share just two brief passages, neither one focusing on the poetry.

First--this one's for DC Cairns--Hardy's take on early cinema's embrace of his novels:

C: I see that Tess is being shown on the films.

H: I was present at a rehearsal of it in the United States.

C: Are others of the novels to be done too?

H: I don't know. I leave all that to Macmillan. My experience of seeing film plays has been unfortunate. There always seem to be motorcars rushing over cliffs and people jumping out of windows. What effect do you think the cinematograph will have on the sale of books?

C: I should have thought that it would appeal to a public that read only sensational novels.

H: I was surprised that people cared for Tess on the film, for it always seems to be mainly young people who go to see the cinematograph. . . .

Hardy's point about the spectacular nature of silent film sounds like something that might have come out of Bertie Wooster's mouth--only, from Bertie, it would have qualified as praise. I wonder how much Hardy's lack of interest in films came from their silence; as a devoted fan of drama, who had enjoyed seeing, and even participating in, performances of his novels, I could imagine him frustrated by the necessary reduction of dialogue and narration to the brevity of intertitles.

Second, I think you'll enjoy what I found on the page I turned to when I first opened the book, a passage that seemed appropriate to a late March weekend that had been honored by the visit of a thundersnowstorm:

C: I was very lucky to have such a fine day after the gale of the night before. When I was here at Easter it was also extraordinarily mild. I remember your husband telling me of some flowers that were out unusually early. He dislikes cold weather very much, does he not?

Mrs. H: Yes, he says it freezes his brains.

Frozen brains. I think I've identified my problem. But hark! Is that the crack of the bat I hear? The hideous mating call of the umpire? We may just survive this winter after all!

"We inherited from him early his abounding sense of the possibilities of the countryside."

In response to my post last week about the shared desire of Thomas Hardy and Wendell Berry to preserve rapidly disappearing rural ways of life, Frank Wilson of Books, Inq. commented,

The idealization of country life seems to be about as old as literature. But it is the work of writers, who have a tendency to airbrush out the grinding poverty and back-breaking labor that went with pastoral scenes. Which is not to say that I do not find myself susceptible to such idealization.

It's a sensible response to a post in which I confessed to finding Berry's and Hardy's visions of rural life seductive, but fairness to both authors dictates that I make clear that they actually spend a lot of time chronicling the hard work necessitated by such a life. In fact, they're two of the best writers about work, period, that I know.

At the same time, however, neither man denies the pleasure to be had in good company while you're working with your hands. It's a feeling I know from the work I did as a boy on farms, and as a young man in food service and the retail trade: when you're performing straightforward manual tasks, your mind--and your conversation--can roam free in a way that even the best office life can't replicate.

Tess offers some great examples of both aspects of manual labor. While Tess find little but happiness--despite the early hours and tiring work--at the dairy where she begins her working life, at the farm where she labors later she finds toil at its most draining. The following scene is a good example: Tess and her fellow laborers are working with the itinerant owner of a rudimentary steam-powered threshing machine hired by the farmer. Because the machine's time is precious, the farmer forces them to take advantage of the full moon and keep working through the night until the hayrick has been completely threshed. Night wears on:

By degrees the freshest among them began to grow cadaverous and saucer-eyed. Whenever Tess lifted her head she beheld always the great upgrown straw-stack, with the men in shirt-sleeves upon it, against the gray north sky; in front of it the long red elevator like a Jacob's ladder, on which a perpetual stream of threshed straw ascended, a yellow river running up-hill, and spouting out on the top of the rick.

The threshing concludes in a scene that can only be horrifying to our modern eyes, but was simply an accepted part of the job in nineteenth-century Dorset: the hubbub that ensues when the work reveals the layer of live rats at the bottom of the hayrick.

The time for the rat-catching arrived at last, and the hunt began. The creatures had crept downwards with the subsidence of the rick till they were all together at the bottom, and being now uncovered from their last refuge they ran across the open ground in all directions, a loud shriek from the by-this-time half-tipsy Marian informing her companions that one of the rats had invaded her person--a terror which the rest of the womeon had guarded against by various schemes of skirt-tucking and self-elevation. The rat was at last dislodged, and, amid the barking of dogs, masculine shouts, feminine screams, oaths, stampings, and confusion as of Pandemonium, Tess untied her last sheaf; the drum slowed, the whizzing ceased, and she stepped from the machine to the ground.

Writing about farm life as lived nearly a century later, Wendell Berry, too, conveys both its responsibilities and rewards. The former is summed up nicely in this paragraph from the funny and moving story "Never Send a Boy to Do a Man's Work":

Carter Keith was a good father. He kept Athey with him as much as his work and, later, Athey's schooling would alow. The Keith place was always asire with work in those days. Everybody on the place would be up and the men and boys at the barns while the stars still shone, and at work by first light. Carter Keith followed the rules that he handed on to his son: He made use of all the daylight he had and would ask no man to do anythign that he would not do himself. His tenants and hands knew this and so respected him, and they worked hard.

While these passages from "Where Did They Go?" offer a small glimpse of the pleasures of manual labor in a crew:

Though talking put Leaf to extreme effort, tightening the cords of his neck, when he sang his voice came sweet and free. To hear him stop talking, which he seldom did, and start to sing "The Wabash Cannonball or "Footprints in the Snow" always seemed a sort of miracle to me, as if a groundhog had suddenly soared into the air like a swallow. . . . It was pretty work when you had time to think about it, and weren't too tired to care. We drew the white-stemmed, green-leafed plants out of the moist ground of the beds, and laid them neatly in bushel baskets and old washtubs. R. T. hauled them to the patch where the setter crew spaced them out in the long rows. They would wilt in the heat that day, but by the next morning or the next, they would be stickign up again, pert and green and orderly, in the dew-darkened ground. Each night when we quit, Jake would say to me, fairly singing: "We're getting it done, Andy boy! We're leaving it behind!"

And that "leaving it behind," I can tell you from walking beans as a teenager, is one of the best feelings in the world.

Thomas Hardy and Wendell Berry

{Photos of Dorsetshire by rocketlass.}

When I went to shelve Tess of the D'Urbervilles tonight I realized that I first needed to add one more post to the string inspired by my recent re-reading of this most heartfelt of Thomas Hardy's novels.

I wrote a bit already about Hardy's tinkering with the text between the novel's first appearance in 1891 in the Graphic and its inclusion in the Wessex edition of his works in 1912. The most obvious and important changes Hardy introduced were to the relationship between Tess and Alec, but another set of alterations seems worth noting, particularly for a reader coming to the book more than a century later. As David Skilton, editor of the 1978 Penguin Classics edition, explains,

On the whole there is an increase in dialect and colloquialism in the dialogue between the 1891 and 1912. . . . The spoken language is generally rather neater, more economical, and less "literary" in the later version.

The increased employment of dialect, alongside the occasional added reference to some old country practice--such as Angel Clare's wearing of a cabbage leaf under his hat to keep cool, which only appears in the 1912 edition--suggests that Hardy revised with an eye towards preserving details of a way of life that, in the decades since Tess's first publication, had almost entirely disappeared.

Even at the time of writing, Hardy was aware that the old country ways, having held from time immemorial, were slipping away, obsolescent in the face of the machine age. Late in the novel Hardy writes of the increasing hubbub of Old Lady-Day, when farm laborers who want to change situations moved to their new homes:

These annual migrations from farm to farm were on the increase here. When Tess's mother was a child the majority of the field-folk around Marlott had remained all their lives on one farm, which had been the home also of their fathers and grandfathers; but latterly the desire for yearly removal had risen to a high pitch.

At the same time, Hardy explains, the villages were also being depopulated, their non-farm residents--carpenters, smiths, and other skilled workers--were being forced out; when their leaseholds expired, which often happened on the death of the head of the family, their cottages were torn down, the land beneath them going under the plow. As Hardy explains,

These families, who had formed the backbone of village life in the past, who were the depositaries of the village traditions, had to seek refuge in the large centres; the process, humorously designated by statisticians as "the tendency of the rural population towards the large towns," being really the tendency of water to flow uphill when forced by machinery.

That passage, written in close to a pure editorial voice, reminds me of Wendell Berry, who takes on the same mission of preservation in his novels. Berry draws on more than a century of unbroken chains of story and memory to recall rural life as it was lived in the years just before and after World War II, when the largely self-contained, pre-petroleum economy still held sway in the more remote hill farms of Kentucky. Berry's belief in that mostly lost way of life as more sustainable, human, and fulfilling than our contemporary industrial culture is implicit in all his fiction, echoed in the relationships of characters to one another and to the land, and in his emphasis on the importance of stewardship in all our interactions.

Berry makes those points explicit in his non-fiction, as in this passage from his essay "People, Land, and Community," collectd in The Art of the Commonplace:

People are joined to the land by work. Land, work, people, and community are all comprehended in the idea of culture. These connections cannot be understood or described by information--so many resources to be transformed by so many workers into so many products for so many consumers--because they are not quantitative. We can understand them only after we acknowledge that they should be harmonious--that a culture must either be shapely and saving or shapleless and destructive. To presume to describe land, work, people, and community by information, by quantitites, seems invariably to throw them into competition with one another. Work is then understood to exploit its people. And then instead of land, work, people, and community, we have the industrial categories of resources, labor, management, consumers, and government. We have exchanged harmony for an interminable fuss, and the work of culture for the timed and harried labor of an industrial economy.

It was only when I read Wendell Berry, more than a decade after I left my rural birthplace for Chicago, that I understood how my hometown, like the smaller farming communities around it, had entered upon the decline that, by the time I left, had trimmed its population and largely shuttered its downtown. Berry's accounts, in fiction and nonfiction, showed me what those towns had been as recently as a generation ago, and it made me ache for their loss in a way I never had when I lived there.

The city is my home, and I love it far too much to ever want to leave it, but through Berry's eyes I finally saw what a small town could be even now, if propelled by a dynamic, decidedly local economy. It's a seductive vision, and one that I think Thomas Hardy would recognize and approve.

Pages and pages and pages . . .

{Photos by rocketlass.}

In the preface to the Wessex edition of Thomas Hardy's works, a definitive collection published in 1912, when Hardy had long since turned from novel-writing to poetry, Hardy wrote,

The more written, the more seems to remain to be written; and the night cometh.

Why isn't that a well-known line? A Google search only turns up two instances of it online aside from this post and my Twitter feed. Sure, it's a bit overwrought--it wouldn't quite be Hardy if it weren't--but it expresses an agony that seems to afflict many writers, who realize to their frustration that with each year and each work, they know more and have more to say. I'm far more of a reader than a writer, but I think a reader feels it no less: there's always so much unread, let alone all that deserves to be read again, and with each passing day there's less time available to us.

That's true of all life's pursuits, of course. But reading seems particularly susceptible to that sense of Sisyphean challenge: we have only so much time in life to make friends, too--but our unmade friends don't loom over us, neatly ordered on shelves, when we settle in with a novel each night. And once our attention is drawn to the unread books on our shelves, it can't help but move on to the unread books beyond them, the ones they drew on, the ones they influenced, the ones they scorned and wrote against.

Perhaps it was the arrival of autumn darkening my thoughts, but when I came across Hardy's lament last weekend, I had been beginning to feel a bit oppressed by the stacks of unread books, many of which I desperately wanted to read right that moment. Hardy's lines crystallized that feeling, while shading it with his typical fatalistic tints.

So perhaps it's only right that a different book, newly added to the stack, should instantly invite me to take a more optimistic view. In his Journal, Jules Renard writes,

When I think of all the books still left for me to read, I am certain of further happiness.

Until a few days ago, when A Journey Round My Skull recommended him, I had never read Renard, but I can already tell he's going to be a favorite. Being reminded of that fact alone--that the universe of unread books might still offer us new favorites--is enough to shake this reader out of autumnal Hardyean gloom for at least a few days.

Annotations, or, What's a gam'ster?

The edition of Tess of the D'Urbervilles that I'm currently reading is the 1978 Penguin Classics edition, edited and with notes by David Skilton. I usually find that the editors of Penguin Classics append a bit too much annotation, to the point that the superscripts become distracting, whereas for most of the past week I've been frustrated at how scanty Skilton's notes are: while he flags every biblical reference (which I mostly don't need, since I'm reasonably strong on the Bible), he does nothing to clarify the many wonderful Dorset slang terms with which Hardy lards his characters' speech. Some terms--such as "skillentons," meaning skeletons, or "hobble," meaning a spot of trouble--are easy enough to figure out from context. But what on earth is a pummy? Or a gam'ster? Or a rozum?

Just now, however, as I was stupidly attempting to simultaneously read and stir the beginnings of bread dough, I dropped the book . . . and it fell open to a glossary. Oops. Pummy, it turns out, is the name for "crushed apples used in cider-making"; and a gam'ster is "a cudgel player, etc.; hence a plucky animal"; while a rozum is "a quaint saying or nonsense," and by extension a person with strange ideas. And, ooh, one more: a market-nitch is "the amount drunk after market. A 'nitch' is 'a burden; as much as one can carry of wood, hay, or straw, and sometimes of drink,'" drawn from William Barnes's A Grammar and Glossary of the Dorset Dialect (1863). Sometimes of drink!

The Penguin edition also marks all the changes Hardy introduced between the first publication of the novel, in the Graphic, in the fall of 1891, and the collected Wessex edition of his novels that was published in 1912. Some of the changes are bound to be of great interest to Hardy fans, as they show Hardy continuing to tinker in relatively serious ways with the details of Tess's relationship with Alec D'Urberville--long after he'd pointedly sworn off novel-writing.

One utterly minor emendation seems worth sharing, as it's hard not to enjoy despite Alec's horridness: on Alec's first appearance in the Wessex edition of the novel, he is described as having

an almost swarthy complexion, with full lips, badly moulded, though red and smooth, above which was a well-groomed black moustache with curled points, though his age could not be more than three- or four-and-twenty.

At the time of the Grapic edition, however, his moustache had been less impressive:

a sooty fur represented for the present the dense black moustache that was to be.

All this reminds me of a letter from Tolstoy to his publisher, M. N. Katkov, that I read recently. Sent from Yasnaya Polyana on January 3, 1865, it accompanied the manuscript of the first part of War and Peace, which Tolstoy encouraged Katkov to publish, preferably in one part, and soon:

But of course you have your own considerations, and if you find it better to divide the first part, it can't be helped. But in that case, write and tell me whether you wish to have the 2nd part this year, i.e. this winter. It woudl be a nuisance for me to leave it until next autumn, since I can't hold on to waht I have written without correcting and revising it endlessly. . . . The manuscript is full of crossings out, and I do apologise, but as long as it's in my hands I revise it so much that it can't look any different.

As I've said before: thank you, tireless textual scholars. Your loving drudgery is appreciated.

"But I miss you most of all / My darling / When autumn leaves / Start to fall"

{Photo by rocketlass.}

In Tuesday's post, I mentioned in passing that in my current re-reading of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, I have found myself paying attention to aspects of the novel that would never have held my attention the first time I read it, at age twenty. In particular, I find myself sinking pleasantly into Hardy's lush, detailed descriptions of the natural life of the countryside, just as I find myself these days far more attentive than I was at that age to the wildlife that shares my city, from the peregrine falcons who nest across the street, to the juncos who visit in the spring and fall, to the humble sparrows who are my year-round window companions.

This account of the mid-summer mornings of the milking crew, which because of the long English days of that season begin dreadfully early, offers a good example of Hardy's ability to focus his--and therefore our--attention on quiet moments of interaction with nature:

At these non-human hours they could get quite close to the waterfowl. Herons came, with a great bold noise as of opening doors and shutters, out of the boughs of a plantation which they frequented at the side of the mead; or, if already on the spot, hardily maintained their standing in the water as the pair walked by, watching them by moving their heads round in a slow, horizontal, passionless wheel, like the turn of puppets or clockwork.

They could then see the faint summer fogs in layers, woolly, level, and apparently no thicker than counterpanes, spread about the meadows in detached remnants of small extent. On the gray moisture of the grass were marks where the cows had lain through the night--dark-green islands of dry herbage the size of their carcasses, in the general sea of dew. From each island proceeded a serpentine trail, by which the cow had rambled away to feed after getting up, at the end of which trail they found her: the snoring puff from her nostrils, when she recognized them, making an intenser little fog of her own amid the prevailing one.

The precision of Hardy's language, married to what can only be termed love for the humble, easily missed details of his scene--the cow's puff of recognition; the dry islands in the sea of dew--is what makes this scene come to life. The wheeling of the herons is "passionless," the fog is "woolly," the cows "ramble," their trail is "serpentine." It's language born of a belief that these aspects of Tess's existence are important enough to get exactly right, that they contribute to the self she is trying to establish and the temporary pleasure and comfort she feels in these surroundings. It works: like Tess, we are almost lulled into believing that the past can be left behind.

On this first day of October, one which the cool weather and the start of baseball playoffs agree signals the true start of autumn, it seems right close this appreciation with Hardy's account of Tess's autumnal wanderings with her beau, Angel Clare:

Thus, during this October month of wonderful afternoons they roved along the meads by creeping paths which followed the brinks of trickling tributary brooks, hopping across by little wooden bridges to the other side, and back again. They were never out of the sound of some purling weir, whose buzz accompanied their own murmuring, while the beams of the sun, almost as horizontal as the mead itself, formed a pollen of radiance over the landscape. They saw tiny blue fogs in the shadows of trees and hedges, all the time that there was bright sunshine elsewhere. The sun was so near the ground, and the sward so flat, that the shadows of Clare and Tess would stretch a quarter of a mile ahead of them, like two long fingers pointing afar to where the green alluvial reaches abutted against the sloping sides of the vale.

This afternoon in Philadelphia, the shadow of the grandstand will creep across home plate, making pitches dart elusively between darkness and light; as it grows dark tonight at Wrigley Field, the chill we remember from Opening Day back in April will settle in alongside the hopes we harbored then, and are lucky enough to still maintain.

It's the best time of the year, time for chili and beer and magic jack-o-lanterns. Time to play ball.



{Ozzie-o-lantern, and photo, by rocketlass.}

Sure, you should put it in your tea . . . but seriously, folks--let's trust W. C. Fields and stop there.

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Nearly a year ago, with the help of Tobias Smollett and Peter Ackroyd, I warned about the perils of drinking milk, which range from dreadful sobriety to painful gout.

Had I recalled it at the time, I could also have drawn on the experienced opinion of Dairyman Crick, who gives Tess Durbeyfield employment as a milker:

She drank a little milk as temporary refreshment--to the surprise--indeed, slight contempt--of Dairyman Crick, to whose mind it had apparently never occurred that milk was good as a beverage.

"Oh, if ye can swaller that, be it so," he said indifferently, while one held up the pail that she spped from. " 'Tis what I hain't touched for years--not I. Rot the stuff; it would lie in my innerds like lead."

That exchange is followed by a scene of the milking crew in action together. It's rich with details of Victorian country life that I would have passed over inattentively on my first reading of Tess when I was in college, but that I now prize as an example of one of my favorite characteristics of novels--their tendecy to incidentally preserve the living details of lost ways of life. Here the dairyman and his crew run through some folk wisdom:

"To my thinking," said the dairyman, rising suddenly from a cow he had just finished off, snatching up his three-legged stool in one hand and the pail in the other, and moving on to the next hard-yielder in his vicinity; "to my thinking, the cows don't gie down their milk to-day as usual. Upon my life, if Winker do begin keeping back like this, she'll not be worth going under by midsummer."

" 'Tis because there's a new hand come among us," said Jonathan Kail. "I've noticed such things afore."

"To be sure. It may be so. I didn't think o't."

"I've ben told that it goes up into their horns at such times," said a dairymaid.

"Well, as to going up into their horns," replied Dairyman Crick dubiously, as though even witchcraft might be limited by anatomical possibilities, "I couldn't say; I certainly could not. But as nott cow will keep it back as well as the horned one. I don't quite agree to it."

Ultimately the crew decides to "life up a stave or two" to coax the recalcitrant cows, a practice that remained at least until 1951, when Alan Lomax took his Nagra out to collect folk songs in Scotland and had a milker assure him that her singing "Makes the cow more content, and she gives more milk when she hears me singing."

For their part, the cows in Tess seem unbothered by the fact that the song chosen is about "a murderer who was afraid to go to bed in the dark because he saw certain brimstone flames around him." The reader can easily imagine a young Thomas Hardy witnessing such a song and carefully storing it away . . . for the edification of us readers, supermarket milk-buyers all, more than a century later.

But good god, that doesn't mean we should drink the stuff! Why do you think gin was invented?!