Modern Nerves

By Melvin Maddocks

THOMAS HARDY by Michael Millgate Random House; 637pages; $25

It was the destiny of Thomas Hardy, a quiet little man whose principal excitement consisted of a bicycle ride followed by afternoon tea, to remind his fellow Victorians of an England darker and madder than anything in literature since Lear roamed the heath. The novelist made contemporary by film (Tess) and television (The Mayor of Casterbridge) was born in 1840 in a remote Dorset village. There, farmers, shepherds and artisans lived in a kind of Elizabethan time warp. But something dour and reductive in this son of a stone mason drove him back beyond morris dances to a pagan Britain haunted by ancient superstitions and druidic spells.

In one of his poems Hardy suggests the way the world looked to him: a primeval landscape dotted with "wind-warped" thorn, where a hawk circles above a hedgehog in a permanent Celtic twilight. Yet, somewhere on the far horizon of his stories, a tiny solitary figure can usually be found: a latter-day Adam, as lost as on the first day after the Fall--or, more likely, an Eve. The storms Hardy stages on his heath are nothing compared with the tempests of sexual passion that tear at the hearts of these lonely wanderers among the thorns: Bathsheba of Far from the Madding Crowd, Eustacia Vye of The Return of the Native, Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

Hardy himself best described the theme of a Hardy novel: primitive feelings rubbing against modern nerves. For if Hardy was the last "child of the oral tradition," as Michael Millgate proposes in this awesomely thorough biography, he was also the first modern English novelist. It is the predicament of Hardy's readers to find themselves stretched out on Freud's couch in the shadow of Stonehenge.

As if frightened by his own demons, Hardy kept a decent distance in his life from all whirlwinds. He spent the better part of his days in the upstairs study of an ugly, respectable villa called Max Gate. Even his walks into the Dorset countryside--referred to as Wessex in his novels--tended to be circumscribed: the strolls of a suburbanite. Visitors expressed surprise at his pallor.

Nor did Hardy ever have his Tess firsthand. As a young architectural draftsman specializing in church restoration, he courted Emma Gilford, a solicitor's daughter. It proved to be a mismatch worthy of one of his own plots. "What very strange marriages literary men seem to make," Fanny, the wife of Robert Louis Stevenson, remarked after meeting Emma. She might have said the same thing after meeting Florence Dugdale, Hardy's second wife, who suffered from chronic depression. Typing up poetry that addressed Emma as "woman much missed" did little to cheer up the second H..

As diligent as a Dorset peasant, Hardy stuck to his desk and produced 14 novels and three volumes of short stories in his first 28 years of full-time writing. After 65, he became the Grand Old Man of English letters. The Prince of Wales came to tea. Lawrence of Arabia gave Florence a ride in his sidecar. Hardy's steadily growing prestige and popularity would have seduced most pessimists to optimism. Not Hardy. He simply turned increasingly from tragic fiction to tragic poetry: "After love what comes?/ A few sad vacant hours,/ And then, the Curtain."

Millgate, professor of English at the University of Toronto and co-editor of The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, argues that Hardy's bleak vision has been grossly exaggerated. He also defends him loyally against charges of being a miser, a snob and an ungracious husband. "He was an artist," Millgate explains. "He had work to do." Because this will be the definitive biography for years to come, Millgate's occasional tendency to fuss over blemishes, like a zealous undertaker, becomes the more regrettable. Hardy was too good a writer and too good a man to need apologies. After all, despite his stoicism, the man who looked like a retired railroad conductor had a passionate heart that turned even despair into a lyrical act. What further justification does a writer need?

When he died in 1928, his literary friends successfully requested interment in Westminster Abbey for Hardy -- the first novelist since Dickens in 1870, the first poet since Tennyson in 1892. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was among the pallbearers. But, though Hardy's ashes were interred in Poets' Corner, his heart was buried in a country graveyard beneath the Dorset soil to which he was as attached as a yeoman to his field. It remains an arrangement to satisfy Hardy's sense of irony and a Hardy reader's sense of justice. -- By Melvin Maddocks

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