"The Mayor of Casterbridge" By Thomas Hardy

Published: January 28, 2007

When Thomas Hardy drew his first chancy breaths inside a Dorset cottage in 1840, Wordsworth had yet to become England's poet laureate. By his ninth decade, still writing, Hardy enjoyed listening to the wireless with his dog, Wessex, and had seen the silent-film adaptation of his own "Tess of the D'Urbervilles." The author's life span seems somehow even vaster than it was, a match for the cosmically long view Hardy took of his fictional characters, fate's playthings set in motion on a "blighted star."
His mother, Jemima, is described by Claire Tomalin in this excellent new biography as having been "powerful, rather than tender," with a "dark streak of gloom and anger." A literate, book-hungry servant, Jemima had been exposed briefly to London life before her shotgun wedding to Hardy's father, a rural builder who proved, like his wife, a conscientious parent to their clever, undersize son, whom they provided with a nonconformist education and then apprenticed to an architect.
Much of Hardy's work in that early position derived from England's 19th-century vogue for "indiscriminate church restoration," an ahistorical endeavor he came to regret. From religion itself he never fell fully away, Tomalin argues. In the midst of his later meditations on the universe's blind cruelty, he "cherished the memory of belief," as if it were an original stone church underneath all the neo-Gothic gimcrackery.
━━ a. 非歴史の; 歴史に無関係の.

Lucky enough to secure a place with Arthur Blomfield, "one of the most successful architects in London," Hardy nonetheless began seriously to pursue his ambition of becoming a novelist. Finding something to say about the manners, economics and morality of his society was hard enough work; convincing himself that he had the right to say it — at a time when his lack of property meant he was not entitled to vote — must have been an even taller order. Class was the vise in which he lived his early life, and Tomalin makes her readers feel the squeeze, as Hardy manages his slow rise into the middle class and then toward the upper echelons of authorship.
This new biography makes its subject a fascinating case study in mid-Victorian literary sociology. Hardy struggles — with an industriousness befitting the age — against editorial rejection, rapacious contract terms and enforced prudery. Leslie Stephen, known chiefly to the 21st century as Virginia Woolf's father, edited his magazine, The Cornhill, under the watchful, prissy eyes of so many others that he sometimes made "few suggestions beyond bowdlerizations" when working on Hardy's copy. Serialization often forced the author "to pack in far too much plot" and thereby throw novels like "The Mayor of Casterbridge" significantly off-kilter. Finally, there were reviewers to contend with; Hardy remained overly sensitive to all they had to say.
━━ n. 好調.
 in [out of] kilter　調子がよい［悪い］.

Tomalin herself examines the novels with the confident judgments of a critic, not the hedged and sometimes overawed appraisals of a scholar. Appreciative of Hardy's genius, she still finds his body of fiction "exceptionally uneven.""Tess," the novel that made him rich, remains by Tomalin's measure an awkward production in spots, and yet it "glows with the intensity" of Hardy's imagination. In a fine example of biography's usefulness to criticism, Tomalin notes that what Hardy called Tess's "invincible instinct towards self-delight" was a quality the novelist "himself possessed in very small measure," and thus, perhaps, judged all the more laudable in his heroine. "Jude the Obscure," written when he was in his mid-50s, reprised Hardy's earliest "theme of a penniless young man with ambitions and radical ideas." But so inexhaustible were his feelings on the subject that even today, as Tomalin puts it, "reading 'Jude' 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." Reviews of the book were often scandalized and savage, and if they did not actually cause Hardy to abandon novels for poetry — something he'd long wished to do — they seemed to provide him with the right moment. Having secured his place among the English novelists, he had 30 years left to write nothing but verse.
Hardy tended toward second thoughts and withdrawn behavior, as well as toward the sense of himself as a kind of living ghost: "Even when I enter into a room to pay a simple morning call I have unconsciously the habit of regarding the scene as if I were a spectre not solid enough to influence my environment." Many, like Virginia Woolf, were struck by his kindliness, and he insisted on calling himself an "evolutionary meliorist," not a pessimist. But Tomalin quotes an astonishing letter of condolence that he wrote when Henry Rider Haggard, the adventure writer, lost his 10-year-old son: "To be candid, I think the death of a child is never really to be regretted, when one reflects on what he has escaped."
Hardy's long — and childless — marriage to Emma Gifford was marked by ever increasing estrangement and what Tomalin calls "mutual incomprehension." Emma's liveliness and complicated nature had made her, early on, a kind of muse and "mine"— Hardy's own word — of material, but her own frustrated desire to write left her jealous of her husband's success and even of his heroines. Annoyed by her habit of referring to "our books," Hardy worked hard at being both loyal and oblivious to her.
In the 1880s, two decades after he "set out to become a Londoner," he decided to return home to Dorset for good and build the house he called Max Gate; he took up residence and even served as a local justice of the peace. Emma did not favor the move but put up with it, as she put up with Hardy's attraction to the married Florence Henniker, a published novelist and the daughter of a lord, whose desire for friendship but not sex with Hardy helped inform his portrait of the neurotic Sue Bridehead in "Jude." In 1905, when Hardy was 65, another Florence, Miss Dugdale, entered his and Emma's life by means of a fan letter. She thoroughly insinuated herself into the Max Gate household and became the second Mrs. Hardy following Emma's death in 1912. And yet, any humiliation from this would come to her, not Emma, when Hardy began to produce an extended series of questioning, penitential elegies for his first wife, the whole set of them racked with guilt and wonder.
Tomalin calls the Emma poems "one of the finest and strangest celebrations of the dead in English poetry," shrewdly observing of their author: "The more risks he takes the less he falters." The elegies have been strongly appreciated by other Hardy biographers (including Martin Seymour-Smith a dozen years ago) but perhaps never so convincingly as they are by Tomalin, who chooses to begin her book's prologue with Emma's death, what she calls "the moment when Thomas Hardy became a great poet." To those, like this reviewer, who have always thought Hardy as unwise to have given up fiction as George Meredith was to neglect poetry, even for a time, Tomalin's treatment of the Emma poems prompts at least a tentative reconsideration. What she sees as "the contradictions always present in Hardy, between the vulnerable, doomstruck man and the serene inhabitant of the natural world" may actually have been better conveyed by verse, which allows the clashing elements a lyric near-simultaneity, something unachievable in the slower alternations of narrative fiction.
Surely, at points in writing this biography, Tomalin must have pined for the subject of her previous one, Samuel Pepys, whose whole exuberant existence derived from an "instinct towards self-delight" such as even Tess never knew. Nonetheless, Tomalin comes through, recounting Hardy's life with the amiable authority of a 19th-century novelist, unafraid of gentle, but firm, pronouncements ("Like most people, he gave different accounts of what he believed at different times"). She has visited each important locale of Hardy's life, noticing the large and seemingly simple things academic scholars often miss: "Most of his characters are prodigious walkers. Tess and Jude both walk themselves through the crises in their lives, and Jude effectively kills himself by walking in the rain." This is an observation that helps readers to square the circle of recognitions, to remember Hardy as a writer whose books they would once finish with the sudden need to get up from the chair and out of the house, to walk, alone, filled with the ancient surefire feelings of pity and fear.