THOMAS HARDY: The Guarded Life
by Ralph Pite
Picador, £25; 522pp
THOMAS HARDY HAS been incorporated into England’s national heritage industry as a lyrical and narrative poet and a novelistic tragedian. We could not now do without him.
His works have ossified in the public mind as classic texts, now often adapted for the television or cinema screen. Much loved by ruralists and nostalgists, the novels have brought prosperity to the tourist trade and tea towel manufacturers. This is permanent fame, if not quite Parnassian glory.
Ralph Pite’s biography succeeds by virtue of a persistent attempt to get behind the guard of a writer who attempted to control posterity’s attitude by writing his own Life in the third person, published after his death in 1928.
It was not deliberately misleading but, as Jeanette Winterson has observed, “autobiography is art and lies”. It was intended to establish the serene image that Hardy wished to present, to divert attention from his emotional life and to emphasise his character as philosophical, dispassionate, introspective and meticulous, and his role as a model of propriety who led a quiet life. That life had been, in fact, regularly rattled by trouble and strife. Hardy gave his readers what they wanted to believe.
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Modernism and postmodernism have done for the idea of a novelist being symbolic of the nation’s psyche; as the keeper of its historical sense of itself. In popular terms, Hardy is now probably regarded as a literary Constable — lots of landscape, lots of weather. For all his mid-Victorian roots, he lived a long, productive life. Thus, Pite gives us a modern biography, covering a long period of literary and social transition from 1840 to 1928.
Hardy may be said to have existed between two Eliots: George, to whom, in novels such as Far From the Madding Crowd, he owed some positive, progressive influence, and T.S. who, together with F.R. Leavis, condemned him almost unreservedly and for a while put him into critical cold storage.
Pite has revived Hardy for a readership which no longer requires its heroes to be paragons of propriety. The character of most writers tends to be construed from the tone of their work, so it is a pleasure to be reminded that Hardy was not simply “a bleak, stoical figure, prompted to write by his grief and anger at the cruel treatment which the universe dishes out to the sensitive and the innocent”.
Pite evokes positive images of the clubbable Hardy, who liked a joke, and whose wives caused serious difficulties. In portraits Hardy habitually looks downwards or aside, avoiding direct contact. In this biography, Pite has caught his subject’s eyes and held his gaze.