Hardy

Martin Seymour-Smith

Bloombury £25

Alas, poor Hardy. He was a great novelist and a great poet. His works are now all in print and even fashionable, which would amuse him. Now along comes a vast biography of 886 pages by Martin Seymour-Smith, which is simply not up to snuff. I shall say why later. For the moment I want to ask why so great a man has attracted no single great biographer, and now a real dud.

I can attempt to answer this question because once, in 1966, I published a book on Hardy. It was reviewed everywhere, and, as is sometimes the case with widely reviewed books, it made me a total of £229 17s. I make no claims for it. The book is useful for my present purpose only because the furore of its reception gave me an insight into the workings of Hardy critics, scholars, and biographers.

The book was called Providence and Mr Hardy. I was co-author with the late Lois Deacon, who had devoted 10 years to a study of Hardy. She had met by chance an old lady who said her mother, Tryphena Sparks, had once been engaged to Thomas Hardy, that Tryphena had jilted him, and that there had perhaps been a child. I was a young reporter on the Guardian. I wrote a story, and then, since Miss Deacon was desperate for a publisher but could not find one for a rather diffuse manuscript, obtained a joint commission from Hutchinson.

I saw the old lady myself, and wrote a text which satisfied Miss Deacon, the publisher, and me. Miss Deacon was convinced of the entire truth of what the book proposed. I thought it an honest thesis well worth putting. Whatever merit it has is entirely hers.

The reviews were abundant and mixed. John Bayley thought the book scholarly, and wrote that it implied a radical criticism and reassessment of Hardy's imagination. Cyril Connolly thought it a fascinating piece of literary detection. D J Enright said, at the length of a whole page in the New Statesman, that it was rubbish. Take your pick.

But I had seen nothing. The Hardy Festival of 1968, in Dorchester, was a dogfight, and the bone fought over was Providence and Mr Hardy. The Bishop of Salisbury preached an inaugural sermon expressing at length his entire concurrence with the thesis. This did not prevent unbelievers hissing at Miss Deacon in church that she was a wicked woman. Remote descendants of the Sparks family accosted the bishop saying the book was a slander. At a lunch in a pub called the Trumpet Major, Harold Macmillan - formerly prime minister and before that Hardy's editor and then pallbearer - publicly snubbed the bishop, declaring himself not interested in muddy scandal consecrated with the name of research.

For the week of the festival the bickering rolled on between academics from England, America, and Scandinavia. Evelyn Hardy (no relation), an early biographer whose sympathetic work I admired, refused to take tea with me. He that was not for the received truth (whatever that was), was against it. I, who was well used to the civilised infighting of politics, was amazed. Only the Japanese scholars listened to both sides and said, 'Ah, so.'

And so it went on. Later I met C Day Lewis and Edmund Blunden. Both had known Hardy. Both reserved judgment. Abuse and fulsome praise arrived by post from all over the world. Margaret Drabble found Miss Deacon's thesis fascinating - 'and a great deal more than that.' I lunched with WR Rutland, a fine Hardy scholar, who had examined Hardy's reading in the Classics and in the European philosophers and shown how this helped form his mind. Rutland's judgment was for the Tryphena thesis. Most others were against.

I briefly corresponded with but never met RL Purdy, the best of all Hardy scholars, a Yale man and a gentleman who, from 1928 until her death in 1937, enjoyed the confidence of Hardy's second wife, Florence. He should have written Hardy's biography himself. Instead he wrote a magnificent bibliography which, with its many notes and insights, remains to this day the best single work on Hardy. And I talked to Dorchester people who had known Hardy - his secretary, his parlour maid, his gardener, the doctor who saw that his heart was removed so that it could be buried in Westminster Abbey.

Hardy was born in 1840, only three years inside the Victorian age, but he died in 1928, so these people were then still about. I ought to say that Jim Stevens Cox, an antiquarian bookseller and a former police officer, had already taken statements from many of these people and published monographs which add much more to our knowledge of Hardy than Seymour-Smith's oeuvre. They were happy to talk. Nellie Titterington, the maid who probably heard Hardy's last words, exacted, as I recall, an appearance fee of £2.

Then the biographies began to appear. Robert Gittings won the James Tait Black for his two volumes of 1975 and 1988. His biography has great virtues. He examined the contemporary records and local newspapers, which few had bothered to attempt. He thought Providence and Mr Hardy had 'exercised some sort of hypnotic effect', and devoted an appendix of 11 pages to lambasting it. By then I was writing other things and didn't much care. But I was interested in his account of Hardy's last words. Nellie Titterington told anyone who paid her £2 that he said, 'Eva, Eva, what is this?' This confirmed the earlier recollection of Eva Dugdale (Florence's sister) who was nursing him. But Gittings went on from there.

He had very likely seen the manuscript and typescript of The Later Years of Thomas Hardy (published in 1928 by Florence). In these, a few lines have been deleted which say that just before the end he uttered a few sentences which 'showed that his mind had reverted to a sorrow of the past'. The MS is in Florence's hand. Miss Deacon very much wanted this to mean Tryphena. I declined to say as much, and left the reader to his own conclusions. Gittings writes that what Hardy said was, 'Em' - a reference to his first wife, Emma. In a note he says that this 'fact' was told by Irene Cooper Willis to Evelyn Hardy, the biographer, who then told him.

This is not unlikely, but he's a bit gullible to take it at face value. Both women were extraordinarily protective of Hardy. Cooper Willis became an executor of Hardy's estate and for years made it difficult to quote his published works, let alone anything which might be more revealing. Above all, she was not there when he died. So who told her?

For years Purdy had edited Hardy's letters, but his admirers despaired of ever seeing them in print. They did appear from 1978, in seven volumes, with Michael Millgate of the University of Toronto as co-editor. Then in 1982 Millgate published the biography that his mentor Purdy should have written. It is now the standard biography and deserves to be.

But even here there is the odd point that makes me wonder. There is a family tradition that Hardy was impotent, says Millgate, giving as his source an interview with John Antell, 1972. Now I know John Antell. In the mid-60s I met him several times in Dorchester, Puddletown, and London. He is a cousin of the Hardys or Sparkses. He invited me to his wedding. Not once in many conversations did he mention a tradition of Hardy's impotence, and I never heard a hint of it elsewhere.

So I am not uncritical of Hardy's previous biographers. But what is to be said of Martin Seymour-Smith's new book? His publishers call it definitive, and the Times has called it revisionary, but what is new? I'd say that FB Pinion's biography, which appeared almost unnoticed in 1992, is written from deeper knowledge and with infinitely less presumption. Seymour-Smith, having written on page 19 that Hardy called himself Tom with his intimates, thereafter has the gall to refer to the great man as Tom throughout. He asserts that Gittings and Millgate presented Hardy as ignorant, slow-witted, improper, awkward, voyeuristic, snobbish, and male-chauvinist. This is rot. They did nothing of the sort. Having set up these false windmills, Seymour-Smith tilts at them.

But I do him an injustice. He has one new thing. He believes that in the earlier days of their acquaintance Florence masturbated Hardy, as, he contends, she did a previous employer. He goes on about this, but what evidence can he conceivably have?

He also says that, to his 'own personal knowledge', Hardy told Edmund Blunden that he had been capable of full sexual intercourse until he was 84. This has been said before. And in his will, made on his marriage to Florence when he was 73, Hardy provided for any children of that marriage. But what personal knowledge can Seymour-Smith have? We cannot know because this vast, prolix book has only a pitiful three-page bibliography, an index composed mostly of entries followed by a useless string of page numbers, and not one footnote. Not one single source is given for anything.

Enough of him. But what is strange about Hardy biographers in general is what they leave out. Gittings found a personal letter from Asquith offering Hardy the Order of Merit in 1910, but did not quote it. Millgate found a letter from Hardy to Asquith, two years earlier, gently declining a knighthood - wonderful stuff - but did not quote that either.

And what about the opera made from Tess and performed in 1909 at Covent Garden? Seymour-Smith gives the longest mention to this, but no biographer has really looked into it. The Queen and Hardy were present at the premiere. Tess was sung by Emmy Destinn, who had created Strauss's Salome and Puccini's Fancuilla del West. The librettist was Luigi Illica, who was co-librettist of Boheme, Tosca, and Butterfly. Is there more to be dug up here? It may be nothing, but Hardy did once have a walk-on part at Covent Garden in the 1860s.

And no biographer I know has given more than a paragraph or two to Hardy's acceptance of the freedom of Dorchester in the same year as his OM, though his speech on the occasion is moving, one of the few he is known to have made in public, easily found, and worth quoting at length. Our power to preserve, he said, was largely an illusion. Of the town's shops as he first recalled them not a single owner remained; only on two or three did even the name remain. Dorchester had become almost a London suburb.

Or there is the matter of the heart. Hardy had wanted to be buried at his parish church. The literati wanted Westminster Abbey. The heart was therefore removed from the body and buried at Stinsford, and the cremated ashes taken to the Abbey.

Millgate, as usual, is best on this. But more has been published. Dr Edward Mann, Hardy's doctor, was still vigorous when I met him in 1967. Thomas Hardy's old grandfather clock, which the doctor had received as a legacy, ticked away in his sitting room. He showed me a note slipped through his door in 1928 by waiting reporters: 'Can you inform the Press if Mr Hardy's heart has been removed?' It was signed by the Chronicle, Express, and Press Association. He said he wrapped the heart in a towel and put it in a biscuit tin. Years later he heard a Bishop of Sherborne, telling an after dinner story, say the cat got at it. But it couldn't have done, said Dr Mann. He sealed the biscuit tin.