"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.

"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.}

"Mr. Hardy was of medium height and figure . . . his expression placid rather than sad."

{Photo of Thomas Hardy's boyhood home by rocketlass.}

Earlier this week I raved about the many pleasures to be found in The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes (2007), offering a couple of examples from the entry for Lord Byron, whose life spun off enough rich anecdotes to fill a personal Decameron.

It would seem wrong, however, to close discussion of the book without also turning to another of this blog's favorite preoccupations, Thomas Hardy; fortunately, the volume doesn't disappoint when it comes to Dorchester's greatest export. First, we learn that Hardy had something unexpected in common with Vladimir Nabokov: both were synesthetes, as Elliot Felkin's "Days with Thomas Hardy" (published in Encounter in 1962) reveals:

He went on to talk about days of the week and colours and associations. Monday was colourless, and Tuesday a little less colourless, and Wednesday was blue--"this sort of blue" pointing to an imitation Sevres plate--and Thursday is darker blue, and Friday is dark blue, and Saturday is yellow, and Sunday is always red.

And Tess fans can't help but marvel at this story, told by Hardy's second wife, Florence, in her The Later Years of Thomas Hardy (1930), of a hospital visit to Hardy's friend Lord Pembroke:

He [Pembroke] was now ill at a nursing home in London, and an amusing incident occurred while his visitor was sitting by his bedside one afternoon, thinking what havoc of good material it was that such a fine and handsome man should be prostrated. He whispered to Hardy that there was a "Tess" in the establishment, who always came if he rang at that time of day, and that he would do so then that Hardy might see her. He accordingly rang, whereupon Tess's chronicler was much disappointed at the result; but endeavoured to discern beauty in the very indifferent figure who responded, and at last persuaded himself that he could do so. When she had gone the patient apologized, saying that for the first time since he had lain there a stranger had attended to his summons.

The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes includes a handful of additional Hardy stories, all good--but really nothing can touch the trove that is Thomas Hardy Remembered (2007), edited by Martin Ray. A compilation of firsthand accounts of Hardy by both the well- and the little-known, it offers page after fascinating page of sheer pleasure for the Hardy fan. Sure, it costs £55 (which, until John McCain unsuspends the suspension of the suspension of his campaign and flat-out superheros this economic crisis, is something like $1,000,000,000.34), but where else are you going to find such a collection of Hardy anecdotes?

Hell, I would argue that this one from Augustus John's Chiaroscuro: Fragments of Autobiography (1952) is worth nearly £55 on its own, if for no other reason than the vehemence of Hardy's protest:

Thomas Hardy had good reason to view with anxiety the demonstrations of some of his admirers. One of these, hailing from the USA, on the strength of a few minutes interview, produced a book entitled Thomas Hardy's Universe [Ernest Brennecke, 1952--ed.], in which the poet was described as soliloquizing before the fire, while smoking a succession of cigarettes. "But," said Hardy, with a gesture of despair, "I have never smoked a cigarette in my life!"

Or this nuanced appraisal from Edmund Gosse's obituary of Hardy in the Sunday Times of January 15, 1928:

[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 estimation 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.

Or, returning to Tess, this account of authorial travails from Frank A. Hedgcock's "Reminiscences of Thomas Hardy" (published in the National and English Review of October 1951):

He thought that public opinion was probably right in regarding it as his best novel; but he had put too much feeling into it to recall it with pleasure.

However, my favorite of Hardy's references to Tess (aside, that is, from this one) comes from Desmond MacCarthy's "Thomas Hardy: The Writer" (published in the BBC magazine The Listener on June 6, 1940). For its sheer disingenuousness, this anecdote alone is definitely worth £55, exchange rates be damned:

Once when we were passing some spot in Tess he said to me, "If I had thought that story was going to be such a success, I'd have made it a really good book."

Methinks a re-read of Tess may be on my autumn calendar.


{Photo by rocketlass.}

Travelers and affinities, expected and unexpected

{Photo by rocketlass.}

1 I nodded off on the L on my way home from work yesterday while reading Thomas Hardy's The Hand of Ethelberta (1866), and my half-dreams were of the novel--but as if it had been written by Alvaro Mutis, whose Maqroll stories I had spent the weekend reading. Waking, I was amused at the ease with which the world-weariness of Mutis had infiltrated Hardy's uncharacteristically comic novel.

If you'd asked me, I would have said the two writers had nothing in common, but the dream reminded me that Hardy's more typically tragic novels do share with Maqroll a certain fatalistic vision. I was reminded of an exchange I've quoted before from a conversation that Hardy had with Princeton professor Henry Van Dyke in 1909, about Tess:

"Yes," he said gravely, "I love her best of all."

"Why, then, did you kill her? Was there no other way to end the book"

"There was no other way," he replied, still more gravely. "I did not kill her. It was fated."

Maqroll would understand, though whereas he tends to complacently accept, or even welcome, his fate, Tess is unforgettable because she rails against hers--and by vigorously opposing it, hastens its tragic arrival.

2 Near the end of John Updike's review of The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll in the January 13, 2003 issue of the New Yorker, he writes,

Lone rangers, from Don Quixote to Sam Spade and James Bond, are customarily engaged in combat against bad guys; they afford themselves the escapism of a virtuous quest, a perpetual cleanup. Maqroll instead presents himself as one of the bad guys, "on the periphery of laws and codes," and proposes that bad guys aren't so bad, as they smuggle and pimp and deal their way through the world.

When I read that yesterdy morning, it crystallized a thought that had been nagging me all weekend: Maqroll is also strange kin to Richard Stark's robber, Parker. Maqroll is wildly different from Parker in that he is essentially harmless, his underlying innocence somehow surviving the questionable morality of many of his occupations. But this weekend as Maqroll demonstrated again and again his preternatural ability to wait out events--as in this scene from Un Bel Morir,

Then two booming explosions echoed down the ravine. They sounded like bazookas or high-powered grenades. . . . An unexpected sense of relief lightened his step. What he had feared so much was finally here. Uncertainty had ended, and with it the anxiety that deforms and poisons everything. Once again men had begun the dark work of summoning death. Everything was in order. Now he would try to get out alive.

--I was reminded of the following exchange, between a police artist and two officers, from Stark's most recent Parker novel, Dirty Money (2008):

"I think, Gwen Reversa told her, "the main thing wrong with the picture now is, it makes him look threatening."

"That's right," Captain Modale said.

The artist, who wasn't the one who'd done the original drawing, frowned at it. "Yes, it is threatening," she agreed. "What should it be instead?"

"Watchful," Gwen Reversa said.

"This man," the captain said, gesturing at the picture, "is aggressive, he's about to make some sort of move. The real man doesn't move first. He watches you, he waits to see what you're going to do."

But while Parker waits for your move so that he can make his, Maqroll waits for your move so that he can figure out which exit to start wandering quietly towards.

3 Finally, there's the inescapable link with Italo Calvino's best book, Invisible Cities (1972), and its inspiration, Marco Polo's captivating, untrustworthy account of his travels to the far East. In Calvino's hands, Polo's journeys are stripped of their purpose as trading missions and transformed into compulsive wanderings, real and imagined:

"Journeys to relive your past?" was the Khan's question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: "Journeys to recover your future?"

And Marco's answer was: "Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and never will have."

As portrayed by Calvino, Marco Polo's travels, and his fantastical accounts of them to Kublai Khan, are in some sense quest for the home, with its clarity and understanding, that for the compulsive traveler lies forever just around the corner--or perhaps in the irretrievable past. As Polo, locked in a jail cell in Venice, first set down his adventures, I think Maqroll would have been welcome company:

He thought perhaps there really was no place for him in the world, no country where he could end his wandering. Just like the poet who had been his companion on long visits to countless bars and cafes in a rainy Andean city, the Gaviero could say, "I imagine a Country, a blurred, fogbound Country, an enchanted magical Country where I could live. What Country, where? . . . Not Mosul or Basra or Samarkand. Not Karlskrona or Abylund or Stockholm or Copenhagen. Not Kazan or Kanpur or Aleppo. Not in lacustrian Venice or chimerical Istambul, not on the Ile de France or in Tours or Stratford-on-Avon or Weimar or Yasnaia Poliana or in the baths of Algiers," and his comrade continued to evoke cities where he perhaps had never been. "I, who have known them all," thought Maqroll, "and in many have turned life's most surprising corners, now I'm running from this shit hamlet without knowing exactly why I let myself be caught in the most stupid trap that destiny ever set for me. All that's left for me now is the estuary, nothing but the marshes in the delta. That's all."

Or, as the Bible puts it,

Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.

So the travelers shoulder their packs and keep on with their journeys:

Carried by the current, the barge sailed into the night as if it were entering a lethal, unknown world. The Gaviero, without turning around, waved goodbye with his hand. Leaning on the tiller, he looked like a tired Charon overcome by the weight of his memories, on his way to find the rest he had been seeking for so long, and for which he would not have to pay anything.

That little goblin of melancholy

From The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), by Robert Burton

All my griefs to this are jolly,
Naught so damn'd as melancholy.

Yesterday I suggested that we could do worse than to start the new year hoping for the undimmable enthusiasm and lust for life (if not for other things) of Samuel Pepys. Today, therefore, I'll provide an example of one of the ways we could do worse: we could adopt the deep-rooted pessimism of Thomas Hardy.

Though certain scenes from his life and writings remind us that he was capable of taking real joy in life, Hardy as he has come down to us seems more comfortably at home in a fatalistic melancholy. In the following reminiscence, collected in the enthralling Thomas Hardy Remembered (2007), he delivers himself of an account of his pessimism so succinct and epigrammatic as to be almost risible. The memory comes from scientist and writer Sir Bertram Coghill Alan Windle, an acquaintance of Hardy who first mapped the real-life analogues of Hardy's imagined towns of Wessex:

Hardy was a quiet, courteous, somewhat reserved man, but an admirable conversationalist when he was interested, as he was in his beloved Wessex. The first thing anyone says about him is, of course, that he is a pessimist, and no doubt that in a sense is true, and perhaps must be true, of anyone who held—if he really did hold—the horrible philosophy to be met with in his books and summed up once and for all in the end of the account of the death of Tess. But perhaps he summed himself up better than anyone else could when he said to me once, "I am so constituted that, when it begins to rain, I find it impossible to believe it will ever be fine again." That might be a quotation from many of his characters in any of his books, but it came directly from his own lips.

Thomas Hardy Remembered is a bountiful treat for Hardy fans--we owe its editor, Martin Ray, great thanks--and I can't help but share a couple more memories from it. I love the following account of a 1919 meeting with Hardy by Llewelyn Powys, brother of John Cowper Powys; it seems fitting that a story from a Powys brother would introduce an element of the supernatural into a description of Hardy.

[Hardy] came in at last, a little old man (dressed in tweeds after the manner of a country squire) with the same round skull and the same goblin eyebrows, and the same eyes keen and alert. What was it that he reminded me of? A night hawk? A falcon owl? For I tell you, the eyes that looked out of that century-old skull were of the kind that see in the dark.

A note that Ray appends adds to the fun: he explains that Powys's account was published in the Dial in May of 1922, prompting Hardy to comment that

those young interviewers who take notes without one's knowledge are a pest.

I'll leave you with this brief, idiosyncratic description from Hugh Walpole, who met Hardy in 1910:

Tea with Thomas Hardy—a little nutcracker faded man with a wistful smile and a soft voice.

Oh, I won't deny that that little nutcracker faded man is appropriate for some days and some moods, but I'm sticking with my plan: Pepys for the New Year!

Premonitions and apparitions

{"The Ghost of Bernadette Soubirous," photographer unknown, circa 1890}

Too busy to do any real posting today, but in keeping with the Hallowe'en theme, how about a couple of warnings . . . (cue scary organ music) . . . of impending Death!

The first warning wouldn't have actually been all that helpful, taking as it did the form of barking. It's a memory of a story Thomas Hardy told publisher Sir Newton Flower, collected in Thomas Hardy Remembered (2007), edited by Martin Ray:

Here is an odd thing about [Hardy's dog] Wessex. One November night, William Watkins, who founded the Society of Dorset Men in London, went to call on Hardy after dinner, as was his custom whenever he was in Dorset. It was a night of wild storm. This is Hardy's story of the episode to me:

"For some reason Wessex rushed wildly round the house, growling and barking. He dashed at the front door; then came back again. Watkins and I opened the door, and Wessex ran out into the storm, still barking. I thought there might be marauders about, but we could find nobody. We came in; we got Wessex in. An hour later, Watkins, after a final cup of coffee, went back to his hotel in Dorchester, and died in his bed that night. What did Wessex know?"

Far creepier--though just as impossible to verify--is Alec Guinness's story, from Blessings in Disguise (1985), of meeting James Dean in Los Angeles; as with so many other stories this week, I owe D. J. Enright for including this one in his Oxford Book of the Supernatural:

[O]n the way back to the restaurante he turned into a car-park, saying, "I'd like to show you something." Among the other cars there was what looked like a large, shiny, silver parcel wrapped in cellophane and tied with ribbon. "It's just been delivered," he said, with bursting pride. "I haven't even driven it yet." The sports-car looked sinister to me, although it had a large bunch of red carnations resting on the bonnet. "How fast is it?" I asked. "She'll do a hundred and fifty," he replied. Exhausted, hungry, feeling a little ill-tempered in spite of Dean's kindness, I heard myself saying in a voice I could hardly recognize as my own, "Please, never get in it." I looked at my watch. "It is now ten o'clock, Friday the 23rd of September, 1955. If you get in that car you will be found dead in it by this time next week." He laughed. "Oh, shucks! Don't be so mean!" I apologized for what I said, explaining it was lack of sleep and food. . . . We parted an hour later, full of smiles. No further reference was made to the wrapped-up car. . . . In my heart I was uneasy--with myself. At four o'clock on the afternoon of the following Friday James Dean was dead, killed while driving the car.

A sinister, deadly automobile--sounds like a topic for Stephen King, whose appearance at Fenway Park recently was responsible for this week's delving into the ghostly in the first place.

I'll bring the week of Hallowe'en postings to close--for now!--with a passage from M. R. James's "A School Story." What's great about the passage is that you don't even need to know its context to enjoy the dread that grows through this account of a night visitation:

"I didn't hear anything at all," he said, "but about five minutes before I woke you I found myself looking out of this window here, and there was a man sitting or kneeling on Sampson's window-sill and looking in, and I thought he was beckoning." "What sort of man?" McLeod wriggled. "I don't know," he said, "but I can tell you one thing--he was beastly thin: and he looked as if he was wet all over: and," he said, looking round and whispering as if he hardly liked to hear himself, "I'm not at all sure that he was alive."

In such cases, I recommend that one err on the side of assuming that the creepy stranger is, in fact, not alive.

Finally, for those of you who are bored at work: a Google search on "I don't believe in ghosts, but" is guaranteed to keep you entertained for many an hour. It even led me to a great line supposedly from Edgar Allan Poe, which, though the attribution appears sketchy, does seem apt:

I don't believe in ghosts, but I've been running from them all my life.

The dangers of intemperate criticism, as presented by H. Rider Haggard

Perhaps it's best that I have had no time to write today . . . after all, look at the risk I run every time I criticize a novel!

From H. Rider Haggard's The Days of My Life: An Autobiography (1926), collected in Thomas Hardy Remembered (2007), edited by Martin Ray

Of professional critics already I began to feel a certain repletion. Little do these gentlemen know the harm that they do sometimes. A story comes into my mind in illustration of this truth. One day, years later, I was in the little writing room of the Savile Club, that on the first floor with fern-cases in the windows where one my not smoke. At least, so things were when I used to be a member. Presently Thomas Hardy entered and took up one of the leading weekly papers in which was a long review of his last novel. He read it, then came to me--there were no others in the room--and pointed out a certain passage.

"There's a nice thing to say about a man!", he exclaimed. "Well, I'll never write another novel."

And he never did.

Haggard is long dead, so I suppose it's not too dangerous for me to point out how much his little narrative wanders--into fern-cases, smoking, and such--in just that brief paragraph. I'm not surprised to learn that his autobiography was in two volumes.

All the cold dark nights

No time this morning, so I'll just share the following reminiscence by literary critic Arthur Compton Rickett of meeting Thomas Hardy in 1909, collected in Thomas Hardy Remembered (2007), edited by Martin Ray:

When the weather was suitable Hardy would accompany a visitor down the quaint little drive to the gate. I remember one lovely September evening when he paused at the gate and looked round wistfully at the pastoral landscape. It was the first fine evening for weeks, and there was that peculiar luminosity so characteristic of the month at its best. I made some common-place remark about the beauty of the evening. Hardy shook his head gently. "Autumn," he said; "don't forget that. Winter is ahead and all the cold dark nights. Give me the roughest of spring days rather than the loveliest of autumn days, for there is death in the air."

I've sung the praises of this book briefly before, but the more I dig into it, the more fun it is. As the editor notes in his introduction, Hardy would have hated it, with its wonderfully fragmentary, yet telling impressions of him in relatively unguarded moments--but a Hardy fan is bound to love it nonetheless.

Stepping stones

Earlier in the week, I mentioned John Aubrey in a post, and, thinking of him as I flipped between a biography of John Donne and a book of memories of Thomas Hardy, I began to wonder if I could get from Donne to Hardy through a game of literary stepping stones. The answer, I'm sure, is yes--but the real question is whether we can do so with a lazy game of stepping stones, on a Friday night, with just the resources at hand?

Well, no. But who knows what we might learn along the way? If you're willing to give it a try, to the bookshelves, and may we stay dry!

We start with Donne, who died in 1630 while the Dean of St. Paul's, where he is memorialized with a statue of himself in his shroud that he had carved late in life; Anthony Powell says the older Donne "looks a trifle like Lord Olivier as Lear." John Aubrey, only four years old when Donne died, doesn't profile him in Brief Lives, but the book is full of his contemporaries, and Donne turns up several times. One of those contemporaries is Donne's friend John Hoskyns, a lawyer and poet in his own right. According to Aubrey:

His verses on the fart in the Parliament house are printed in some of the Drolleries. He had a booke of Poemes, neatly written by one of his Clerkes, bigger then Dr. Donne's Poemes, which his sonn Benet lent to he knowes not who, about 1653, and could never heare of it since.

Of Hoskyns we also learn that he

Was wont to say that all those that came to London were either Carrion or Crowes.

Hoskyns doesn't really move us forward, though. I only included him because, well, how could I not share the story of his wastrel son and the misplaced book? Instead, in the nature of stepping stones, we drop back a step, as Aubrey leads us to Isaak Walton, Donne's first biographer, who used to feed Aubrey anecdotes about Ben Jonson. I suppose we could have reached Walton directly from Donne--but isn't any path that travels through Brief Lives more fun than the direct route?

With Walton, because of my relatively limited acquaintance with writers of the late-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, we ought to have our first splash between stones--but just before we fall, I change the rules! No longer do we need to rely on personal acquaintance--and thus here is James Boswell reaching out a hand to help us over the gap!

In his Life of Johnson Boswell records the following conversation:

He talked of Isaac Walton's Lives, which was one of his most favorite books. Dr. Donne's Life, he said, was the most perfect of them. He observed, that 'it was wonderful that Walton, who was in a very low situation in life, should have been familiarly received by so many great men, and that at a time when the ranks of society were kept more separate than they are now." . . . BOSWELL. "No quality will get a man more friends than a disposition to admire the qualities of others. I do not mean flattery, but a sincere admiration." JOHNSON. "Nay, Sir, flattery pleases very generally."

Surely Boswell, one of literature's great flatterers, took those words to heart.

Boswell was of course much more than a flatterer; his skills as a biographer allow us to make another big jump, now to the nineteenth century, to Thomas Babington Macaulay, who called him "the first of biographers. He has no second." Macaulay leads us to Trollope, who wrote in a letter to G. S. Rusden in 1879 that

An historian is bound to be true. Who can say otherwise? But amongst historians who is so often read as Macaulay,--who is inaccurate, but whose style is charming? What so readable as Herodotus, who tells us tales? What so unreadable as Allison who tells us facts? Men now very seldom are laborious readers. You must charm or you have no chance.

To be fair, we really ought to splash down again here, as the only link I find between Trollope and Hardy is the slimmest of threads, a line in a letter from a young Hardy to his sister Mary, that Barchester Towers "is considered the best of Trollope's." And if I'm going to allow as tenuous a connection as that, I might as well cut right back to Donne directly, as Claire Tomalin notes in her biography of Hardy that his friend Edmund Gosse sent him an edition of Donne's poems, for which Hardy offered "1000 thanks."

Oh, but I've shown so little regard for the rules so far that I'm no longer sure even gravity applies, and we float through the air, dry as can be, to the point I wanted to reach all along, safe on shore in Dorset, where we meet Hardy at his home. He's entertaining Princeton professor Henry Van Dyke in 1909, and as recounted by Van Dyke (and collected in the absolutely fascinating new book, Thomas Hardy Remembered), Hardy tells Van Dyke that Tess was his favorite character:

"Yes," he said gravely, "I love her best of all."

"Why, then, did you kill her? Was there no other way to end the book"

"There was no other way," he replied, still more gravely. "I did not kill her. It was fated."

That does sound like Hardy, doesn't it? If there's one active force you can feel behind all of his novels, it's an inexorable and dangerous fate.

Hardy at least would have understood how we made it over all those yawning gaps and got from Donne to him: clearly, it was fated.