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Christopher Rush on Thomas Hardy, Howard Phipps

The Great-aunt and the Author

I love finding things that have been stuffed long ago into old books – a letter perhaps, a photograph, or just an old laundry bill with its pounds and pence redolent of an older England, where once Chaucer rode to Canterbury and Falstaff drank his fill. Or more recently, where the Brontës conjured moonlit paths and Hardy drowned a mill.

The great-great-aunt Elspeth whose house we lived in during my 1940s Scottish childhood was a terrific reader of poems, many of which she recited to me from memory. In one forbidden drawer there was a quarto copy of Walter Scott’s Marmion, which many years later I realized was a first edition. Among the other poetry books was the Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy, published by Macmillan in 1932. I didn’t know it was there until the old lady died and my mother inherited a few of her possessions. It still sits on my shelves, in rather good condition.

And it still contains the items slipped between its pages by Elspeth. One of these is an original typescript of the poem ‘Before Marching and After (In Memoriam F. W. G.)’, dated September 1915, the month in which it was composed. It would be nice to suppose that it came from the Max Gate study and had been typed out on an old Remington by the slender fingers of Florence Emily Dugdale, Hardy’s second wife and secretary. But a pencilled annotation in my great-great-aunt’s hand reads: ‘This was sent to me by Mr Herman Lea after my visit to Thomas Hardy in July 1915.’

Lea, the much likelier typist, was a Dorset photographer and an intimate friend of Hardy – who shared very few intimacies with anyone, including his two wives. F. W. G. (Frank George) was a young relative of whom Hardy was sufficiently fond to be considering him as a potential heir, a possibility that was ended by Frank’s death at Gallipoli in August.

That my Scottish great-great-aunt should have visited Thomas Hardy, getting through the combined defences of Florence Emil

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I love finding things that have been stuffed long ago into old books – a letter perhaps, a photograph, or just an old laundry bill with its pounds and pence redolent of an older England, where once Chaucer rode to Canterbury and Falstaff drank his fill. Or more recently, where the Brontës conjured moonlit paths and Hardy drowned a mill.

The great-great-aunt Elspeth whose house we lived in during my 1940s Scottish childhood was a terrific reader of poems, many of which she recited to me from memory. In one forbidden drawer there was a quarto copy of Walter Scott’s Marmion, which many years later I realized was a first edition. Among the other poetry books was the Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy, published by Macmillan in 1932. I didn’t know it was there until the old lady died and my mother inherited a few of her possessions. It still sits on my shelves, in rather good condition. And it still contains the items slipped between its pages by Elspeth. One of these is an original typescript of the poem ‘Before Marching and After (In Memoriam F. W. G.)’, dated September 1915, the month in which it was composed. It would be nice to suppose that it came from the Max Gate study and had been typed out on an old Remington by the slender fingers of Florence Emily Dugdale, Hardy’s second wife and secretary. But a pencilled annotation in my great-great-aunt’s hand reads: ‘This was sent to me by Mr Herman Lea after my visit to Thomas Hardy in July 1915.’ Lea, the much likelier typist, was a Dorset photographer and an intimate friend of Hardy – who shared very few intimacies with anyone, including his two wives. F. W. G. (Frank George) was a young relative of whom Hardy was sufficiently fond to be considering him as a potential heir, a possibility that was ended by Frank’s death at Gallipoli in August. That my Scottish great-great-aunt should have visited Thomas Hardy, getting through the combined defences of Florence Emily Dugdale and a ferocious terrier that helped keep visitors at bay, did not surprise me in the least. As a young woman in the 1890s she’d gone to Paris, got herself pregnant, and come back childless but with a nude painting of herself which still hangs in our house. So the intimation of a visit to the famous Mr Hardy by the formidable old lady struck me as just part of a life that was obscure but not without incident, not unlike the lives of many of Hardy’s characters. A second bookmark is a cutting from the Daily Mail of 26 April 1922, containing ‘a new poem by Mr Hardy: News for Her Mother’, which had just taken pride of place in the newly published Dorset Year Book of 1922, produced by the Society of Dorset Men in London. And a third is a single-column undated newspaper article covering a lecture on Thomas Hardy by Lord David Cecil to a local Scottish branch of the Association for the Speaking of Verse. In Oxford female students were wont to swoon at his lectures. The Scottish audience merely observed his hands, elegantly and expressively fingering the large manuscript volume of notes, to which however he rarely referred, speaking almost entirely from memory. Cecil said that while Hardy could be called a romantic, expressing what he felt, deeply, personally, he did not conveniently fall into any category, and seemed to write almost for himself, following the impulse of the moment. This could easily have made him an introspective and egotistic writer, but the truth was that Hardy remained at heart a countryman. He was a very simple type. The speaker went on to identify three strains in Hardy’s writing: the lyrical, the dramatic and the philosophic. Hardy was a singer and a scripter, intensely alive to the bold storyline. He had the ballad strain in him, part of his upbringing. But behind lyric and drama and atmosphere lay his huge brooding view of life. His was a speculative mind, which argued from the particular to the general, forcing up from the depths of his meditations the questions that most concerned him, questions about man’s position in the universe: why are we here? what conditions our lives? what are we striving for? what hope have we of getting it? And the conclusion appears to be a sad and gloomy one. Man is the victim of forces which do not share his own moral feeling, hence the tragic irony of his life. At the same time Hardy conveys in his work an extreme sense of the sheer pleasure of life – not at all a gloomy affair, if the affair happens to go your way. Whether my great-great-aunt attended that meeting, I shall never know. She died in 1947 and the meeting took place well before then. But those who did listen that evening were privileged to hear a simple, succinct and penetrating analysis of Hardy, the like of which our contemporary literary criticism, lost in its wasteland of jargon and academic abstraction, simply can’t provide. In one of her journal entries Elspeth draws the distinction between chastity and virginity, with reference to Mr Hardy’s Tess. In another she writes simply: ‘Far from the Madding Crowd, his favourite, and mine’. His favourite. Did Hardy ever say so? Not to my knowledge. And if there ever were a stated preference, I doubt whether it was made public until long after she penned this note. My delightful conclusion finds Elspeth sitting with the great man in 1915 and asking him which of his own books he liked best. I wonder what he thought of her. He was 75 at the time. She was 45 – and very striking. I read Hardy’s novels in my late teens without knowing much about the author. And my own position hasn’t changed in 50 years. With The Return of the Native running a close second, it is still Far from the Madding Crowd that offers the most satisfying read. A country boy with a fossilized village upbringing and a close affinity with the natural world, I was naturally drawn to Hardy, and to this story in particular with its deliberately evocative title. And I imagined the book would be a literary extension of my own rural habitat. We lived out between the sea and the fields – where horse-gear still jingled and the farmers still laid out the harvest as they had done for centuries in house-high haystacks. Hardy’s rustics were people I knew personally. In my adolescence I conducted the customary love-affair with language and literature. I mooned around country churchyards, pretending I was – not Thomas Hardy, but Thomas Gray. I loved his Elegy, written for the dead of Stoke Poges, and I had it by heart. Roaming the curving beaches and broad acres of the East Neuk of Fife, I spouted the poem aloud to an audience of seagulls and sheep, enjoying the moment when I stood among my own village tombstones and spoke the famous stanza:

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife, Their sober wishes never learned to stray; Along the cool sequestered vale of life They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

Little did I realize that in Stinsford, close to Hardy’s birthplace, Hardy had done exactly the same, and when his secretary once remarked to him that Stinsford was ‘a Gray’s Elegy sort of place’, Hardy answered: ‘Stinsford is Stoke Poges.’ Gray’s Stoke Poges, Hardy’s Stinsford, my own St Monans, they all embodied the obscure and timeless tranquillity I imagined awaited me in the novel. In fact it’s not a pastoral idyll at all. Sheep don’t safely graze, storm and fire wreak havoc, and in one grotesque scene a demonic gargoyle spouts holy rainwater from on high, to churn a newly planted grave into a mush of mud and upturned bulbs, making a mockery of Christian burial. And in his troubled landscape Hardy places people whose lives are equally troubled. Three men chase the same woman. One is driven mad and murders another; one abandons another woman to a wretched workhouse death. The third, virtuous man gets the girl and the gold in the end, but by then three people have died, four lives have been wrecked, and you are left with an alarming understanding of just how fragile is our apparent integration with our environment. I recall closing the book thinking: well, if this is far from the madding crowd, give me daffodils! Later on of course I realized I’d been reading Hardy at his most refreshingly idyllic. The book is a picnic compared to the novels that follow, and there’s a spaciousness about it that is invigorating and elemental. It’s a cliché of Hardy criticism that his novels are like Greek dramas, bible stories, old ballads, Shakespearean plays, and the story of Bathsheba Everdene and her three lovers has something of all these in it. But ultimately it’s a classic example of the accuracy of the Lord David Cecil critique, as delivered to that Scottish audience. Hardy’s deepening pessimism was to lead to a kind of literary imbalance, but in Far from the Madding Crowd he is still singer, scripter and sage par excellence. He is still what Cecil calls him – a simple type. The novel was originally called The Poor Man and the Lady, echoing Hardy’s own social frustrations, but by adding not only a soldier (Francis Troy) and a gentleman farmer (William Boldwood) but also an abandoned woman (Fanny Robin) as the unscrupulous soldier’s sweetheart, Hardy transcends the simple ballad with a rich narrative that is beautifully balanced and integrated and that keeps you on the edge of suspense. It’s easy to imagine Victorian readers running down to the newsagent’s first thing in the morning to pick up the next serial instalment. But you don’t fall in love with a book on account of its symmetry. The characters have to engage you, and they do me. Infatuation, flirtation, sincerity, self-seeking, obsession – they ring the changes on human love. Boldwood’s descent from dignified bachelor untouchability to blind compulsion bordering on madness is a story that is upsetting and unforgettable. It speaks to me in a Shakespearean way about the seeds of self-destruction contained within us all. Most of us manage to maintain our equilibrium in this world. Gabriel Oak does and Francis Troy doesn’t, as their names may imply. The Boldwoods of the world must beware the Bathshebas, as again the ironic echoes of the names suggest. Bathsheba is a biblical image of temptation. Eve, Everdene, evergreen – a beautiful woman may make you happy forever, but her merest whim can smash your world to pieces. Fate is fickle – and female. Ultimately I must be an optimist – I like the Virtue Rewarded plot. The poor man wins both lady and land, returning the story to its simple classic level, and at the end of this book I experience the ‘feel good’ factor, as if I’ve just eaten a full English breakfast.Everything’s on the plate And it wouldn’t have worked without the rustics. They are the pastoral equivalent of Shakespeare’s artisans, the rude mechanicals of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As such they are not just rustic stooges, there for local colour, choral comment or comic relief, but the backbone of the older England Hardy loved, a personification of a country that has all but disappeared. There is no better portrayal in our literature of the harmony that used to exist in our old communities. They are also an embodiment of the natural world itself, which informs this particular novel so intimately that the setting becomes a character in the plot, perhaps its chief character. Quite simply it fills me with a sense of spiritual healthiness. Bad things do happen in nature, but nature has its own way of sorting them out. In the end, Hardy gives me hope. Elspeth died when I was 3. She’d met Hardy, who was born in 1840, and who in turn knew older people who belonged essentially to the eighteenth century. The landscape he depicts in Far from the Madding Crowd is the pre-industrial landscape of his forebears. His novel tells me that quite simply time is a trick played on us. We are told that life is short – and it is. But at times it also seems long, especially when people of vastly different ages interconnect. I’m standing with one foot solidly in the third millennium . . . and there’s another ghostly footprint somewhere in the eighteenth century. When you bridge time like that, through people and books and scribbled notes, you do feel, even momentarily, that you are indeed far from the madding crowd.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 35 © Christopher Rush 2012


About the contributor

Christopher Rush has been writing for over 30 years. His books include To Travel Hopefully and Hellfire and Herring, and Will, a novel about Shakespeare. He is currently working on a novel about Odysseus.

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