It all started some months ago with DVDs of ‘Wessex Tales’ and ‘Jude the Obscure’, BBC adaptations both.
Moved onto a collected edition on the Kindle from Amazon for £1.99 or some such and read ‘Wessex Tales’ and ‘Jude the Obscure’. The first for the first time. I rather liked them.
Onto a biography from the library by Claire Tomalin. Interesting, but irritated on the first reading by the sense that Tomalin liked neither Hardy nor his wives, irritation from thinking that one ought to like someone that one is going to spend serious time with. A sense which faded on a second reading.
Hardy an interesting chap. Physically small and initially thought weak – though strong enough to walk or cycle long distances well into old age – and from a modest background – a similar standing in social terms to that of my father, also a child of someone in business in a modest way in a country village – who married (rather late at thirty or so) someone of rather higher standing – something which clearly mattered in those days – and who became very famous. Writers, I think, being more famous in those days of circulating libraries and no television than would be likely now, the large flash in the pan of Harry Potter aside. Then, like many before him, marrying his young secretary as an old widower. Rather keen on gentry in his old age, having been excluded in his young age, and contemporaries noticed his enthusiasm for taking tea with them.
At this point someone pointed out that Hardy was rather obsessed with hangings. An observation which did indeed seem to be true. There was some of it in his life and a lot of it in his novels. Given which, perhaps not so inappropriate after all that at death his heart was cut out of his body by his GP for burial in his birth village, while his ashes went onto burial at Westminster Abbey (not enough room for a body), otherwise an extraordinary proceeding, less than a hundred years ago. He also had the rather morbid, if striking, thought that it was just as well one did not know the day of the week on which one was to die, as otherwise that day would be rather marked for ever more.
Then pulled the article about his reputed syphillis down from the TLS archive, in which the retired Doctor Frizzell made what I thought was a convincing case for Hardy having contracted a benign form of the disease as a young man, something which was common at the time, to have passed on a malignant version to his wife, who learned the truth somewhere along the way and eventually died of it. Thus accounting for her removal to the attic and for the outpouring of poems about her after her death, rather to the dismay of his second wife. A theory not mentioned by Tomalin and which appears to have been put aside by others: is this because it is not believed or because people want neither to know nor to believe?
Went to see his house in Tooting (illustrated). A substantial town house with blue plaque in what is now a rather mixed area, on a road running between Tooting Bec tube station and Wandsworth Common. A road which included a church which, rather surprisingly, was open and included decent public toilets. Very public spirited of them. I learn also that Lloyd George used to have a house in the area.
Went to see his house in Dorchester. An odd looking place outside and very ordinary inside. Very struck by the smallness of the attic to which his first wife more or less confined herself for the last ten years or so. Interesting to be able to see a copy of the sort of magazine which published his novels in serial form, with the one that I picked up having a couple of chapters of ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ printed very small and with a half page illustration, occupying maybe a couple of pages in all, in amongst all the other stuff. Was able to get a Wentworth jigsaw (see 17th June) of the place as a souvenir. Why had Wentworth seen fit to do such a thing? Was one of the directors a fan?
Which leads onto the thought that Hardy attracts the same sort of attention as Jane Austen or Conan Doyle. With people, like us, making the pilgrimage to his house. Perhaps dressing up in the costumes of his day. Having readings in upstairs rooms in public houses. In a way that D. H. Lawrence and Conrad do not. Is part of the answer the fact that we know so much about Hardy’s tangled if respectable life? We can really get into it.
Interesting also that I have started to take an interest in authors, perhaps more interest in the authors than in their books. Something I used to be rather sniffy about in the past when I used to think that the books were the thing and one had no business poking around in the lives of their writers.
Happening to be in Cambridge while all this was going on, took the opportunity to wander around the colleges and to actually go into St. John’s, which was open for a fee. And as a failed scholarship boy, albeit a long time ago, I still felt something of the exclusion which Hardy and his creation Jude felt in vaguely similar situations. Which leads me to wonder as I type whether my own father had feelings of the same sort, having had to settle for a Cambridge dentist, despite his academic & intellectual leanings. Something I had never thought of before.
Also took in the original of the portrait of Hardy reproduced in the Tomalin book which hangs in the Fitzwilliam.
And now, having finished the second pass of Tomalin, I am winding up the whole business with a further, rather desultory reading of Jude. And a rather quicker, at least so far, reading of ‘Cakes and Ale’, thought by some to be a rather cruel take on Hardy. It is certainly a take on his kind. For once, a book bought for the Kindle, in the interests of speed. A few seconds and one has the thing, rather than waiting the 48 hours or so it might take in the post.
Maybe I will give his poetry a go, said by some authorities, including the author, to be more important than his novels. With poetry being something which I rarely have a go at.
No comments:
Post a Comment