A New Biography of Thomas Hardy

I passed by Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin today as I was wandering around the book store. I knew it was the cover review of this week’s New York Times Book Review but I had not yet read the review so I didn’t pick up this new biography. I read the review when I came back home. The review is positive and Tomalin even presents an intriguing view of Hardy’s later poems, those he wrote after the death of his first wife. Now, I am not particularly appreciative of Hardy’s poems, taking the lead from Marian who read through them whilst earning her BA in literature. But Tomalin’s advocacy of his Emma poems (Emma was his first wife) leads the reviewer to ponder a “tentative reconsideration”.

To say that Hardy was a solitary and morose figure is to gloss over the depths of his dismal view of the world he lived in. He wrote a letter of condolence to Henry Rider Haggard upon the death of Haggard’s 10 year-old son. Hardy’s condolence was

To be candid, I think the death of a child is never really to be regretted, when one reflects on what he has escaped.

Well, ok then.

This moroseness informs his novels, of course, filled as they are with fateful suffering and assured failure. Even Tomalin, who lives with Hardy through 486 pages says reading Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure

is like being hit in the face over and over again…It was Job retold for a godless world that offers no final consolation or redress.

Despite such modern evaluations of his work (contemporary criticism focused more on Hardy’s frank approach to his characters’ frailties) Hardy though of himself as an evolutionary meliorist. I suppose so. A meliorist thinks the world can be improved through human action. An evolutionary meliorist thinks that the worst of human suffering must first be experienced before improvements can be considered. Well, yes, this certainly sounds like Hardy.

The review of Tomalin’s book is positive but quite so laudatory as the Guardian’s review last fall. Here is a sample of the Guardian’s tone. On the bye and bye, the observations here are echoed in the NYT Book Review piece.

Tomalin’s fine, fresh handling of Hardy’s poetry breathes through the whole book. She refers to more than 100 individual poems, and quotes stanzas from nearly 60. Her little nudges of commentary are wonderful. She spotlights key phrases: “the original air-blue gown [from "The Voice"] lifts and lights the whole poem”.

She is never trapped into tedious identity-hunting – who was that girl? – the bane of much previous Hardy scholarship. She sees how the bitter or gloomy conclusions of so many poems have a musicality that lifts them towards something transcendent. The reader can go back to the beginning, and “call up the delight again”.

In any case I’ll have to tromp back to B&N to buy the book whilst averting my eyes from offending stickers obscuring names and titles.