Thomas Hardy: Interviews and Recollections

265 Pages·1999·27.11 MB·English

by  James Gibson (eds.)

THOMAS HARDY
INTERVIEWS AND RECOLLECTIONS
Thotnas Hardy
Interviews and Recollections
Edited by
Ja mes Gibson
formerly Principal Lecturer
Christ Church College
Canterbury
First published in Great Britain 1999 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London
Companies and representatives throughout the world
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-333-24788-4 ISBN 978-1-349-27546-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-27546-5
First published in the United States of America 1999 by
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 978-0-312-22582-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Thomas Hardy : interviews and recollections / edited by James Gibson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-22582-7
1. Hardy, Thomas, 1840--1928 Interviews. 2. Hardy, Thomas,
1840--1928-Friends and associates. 3. Authors, English-19th
century Interviews. 4. Authors, English-20th century Interviews
5. Authors, English-19th century Biography. 6. Authors,
English-20th century Biography. I. Gibson, James, 1919- .
PR4753.T495 1999
823'.8---dc21
[B] 99-15266
CIP
Selection and editorial matter © James Gibson 1999
Text © the various copyright-holders where applicable -see acknowledgements
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made
without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with
written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by
the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP OLP.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to
criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The editor has asserted his right to be identified as the editor of this work in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and
sustained forest sources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Preface viii
Abbreviations xiii
1 The First Thirty Years 1840-1870 1
2 The Nine Years 1871-1879 7
3 The Ten Years 1880-1889 12
4 The Ten Years 1890-1899 28
5 The Final Years 1900-1928 62
Part I From the Boer War to the Great War, 1900-1918 62
Part 11 The Post-War Years, 1918-1928 125
Index 245
v
Acknowledgements
The author and publishers wish to thank the following for permission
to use copyright material:
Mrs Joane Atkins
Carcanet Press for material from Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, 1929
The family of Mr John Cave
Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ud for material from Vere Collins, Talks
with Thomas Hardy at Max Gate, 1928
Mrs Lucy Dynevor
Godfrey, Lord Elton
Ms Valerie Haig-Brown
Mrs Aileen Hawkins
David Higham Associates on behalf of the Estate of the author for material
from Ford Maddox Ford, Mightier than the Sword, Bodley Head, 1938
Miss Vanessa Austin Hinton
Mr Michael Hurd and The Rutland Boughton Music Trust
Mr Patrick and Miss Margaret Mann
Mrs Mary Mardon
John Murray (Publishers) Ud for material from James Milne, A Window
in Fleet Street, 1931
Peter Newbolt for material from Margaret Newbolt, ed., The Later Life
and Letters of Sir Henry Newbolt, Faber & Faber, 1942
Mrs Christine O'Connor
Peters, Fraser & Dunlop Group Ud on behalf of the estate of the author
for material from Edmund Blunden, 'Notes on a Visit to Thomas
Hardy',1922
Mrs Dorothy Phillips
Random House UK and Harcourt Brace & Company for material from
Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary. Copyright © 1954 by Leonard Woolf,
renewed 1982 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett
Mrs Diana Reed
Mrs Diana Rothenstein
Royal Literary Fund for material from Eden Phillpotts, The Angle of 88,
Hutchinson, 1951
Meriel, Lady SaH
George Sassoon for material from Siegfried Sassoon, Siegfried's Journey
1916-20, 1945, and Siegfried Sassoon's Diaries 1920-1922
vi
Acknowledgements vii
The Society of Authors as literary representatives of the estate of the
author for material from John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield
and Other Literary Portraits and a BBC broadcast on 19 February 1955;
as the Literary Trustees of the estate of the author for material by
Walter de la Mare from an article in The Listener, 28 April 1956; and
as literary representatives of the estate of the author and the Provost
and Scholars of King's College, Cambridge, for material from E. M.
Forster, Selected Letters of E. M. Forster, vol. 2, 1985
Raglan Squire for material from J. C. Squire, Sunday Mornings, Heinemann,
1930
Mrs Diana Toms
Tweedie & Prideaux on behalf of the Trustees of the Seven Pillars of
Wisdom Trust for material from T. E. Lawrence, The Letters of Lawrence
of Arabia, Jonathan Cape, 1964
Virginia Quarterly Review for material from an article by Llewelyn Powys
in Virginia Quarterly Review, winter 1939
Miss P. E. G. Voss
A. P. Watt Ud on behalf of The Royal Literary Fund for material from
W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale, Heinemann, and G. K.
Chesterton, Autobiography, 1936
Mr Hugo Wood Homer
Mrs Norrie Woodhall
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright-holders but if any
has been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to
make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.
Preface
When Hardy's publishers, Macmillan, asked me to be the editor of the
Hardy volume in their 'Interviews and RecoHections' series, I knew
wh at an arduous and difficult task lay ahead of me. He had lived for
nearly ninety years. Unknown to the world for the first thirty years,
1840-1870, he became a famous novelist in the period 1871-1897, and
a famous poet in the last third of his life, 1898-1928. With farne came
many hundreds of new friends and acquaintances anxious to meet the
Grand Old Man of English Literature, ask hirn for his autograph, and
return horne to write about meeting hirn. Some of these accounts, those
of Virginia Woolf, Robert Graves, and T. E. Lawrence, for example, were
already weH known, but there were obviously many others waiting to
be brought out into the open from the brooding shelves of the British
Library.
My work proceeded slowly through the 1980s and was greatly ex
tended by Michael Millgate's edition of The Life and Work of Thomas
Hardy and by his editing with R. L. Purdy of the Collected Letters of
Thomas Hardy, both of which led to new areas of investigation because
of the enlarging of our knowledge of the circ1e of Hardy' s friends and
acquaintances. May I here acknowledge the debt I owe to Michael, not
only for the widening of the field of research and for the immense
value of the index and information contained in Collected Letters, but
also for his generous offer of help when I first began my work on this
volume.
The research might have gone on for ever if my publishers hadn't at
last told me that the time had come to stop the research and begin the
editing. Their patience has been quite remarkable and my thanks go
to Macmillan, too, and especiaHy to Tim Farmiloe and Charmian Hearne,
even if their call to publication me ans that research into whether Hardy's
friend the Marchioness of Londonderry, or his friends of the noble
Portsmouth family, or a hund red others, kept memoirs or diaries in
which they discuss meetings with 'Unc1e Tom' and give us their de
scriptions of hirn must wait for the attention of so me future PhO student!
Up to the moment when editing began, I had accumulated some
three hundred interviews and recollections, enough material to fill at
least two books of this size, and as the price of just one book was
likely to be beyond the pocket of Chaucer' s poor scholar, I found my
self faced with problems of selection and presentation, a problem made
viii
Preface ix
worse by the fact that there was too little material for the early part of
the life, and too much for the remainder. An early decision was made
to save space by eliminating the multiplicity of notes which so often
encumber academic books of this kind. I have assumed that my read
ers will be educated enough to look up for themselves any extra
information they may need, and that they do not require to know every
detail of the lives of those whose memories of Hardy are found here.
It is Hardy that we are concerned with. The need for pruning the material
available to me has meant many hours of agonising over what had of
necessity to be omitted, but I hope that what has resulted is a book
which is of interest in itself and which will prove to be a valuable
source of information about Hardy.
In an interesting article in Documentary Editing (June 1989), 'Conver
sations with Victorian Writers: Some Editorial Questions', Patrick G.
Scott and William B. Thesing discussed some of the problems faced by
authors of aseries such as this. They point out that 'interview texts ...
have in a sense two authors', and that an editor has a responsibility
towards both of them. Delicate judgements have to be made and I
have been well aware of this. Although a man of integrity and honesty
(most of the time) in his private life, Hardy the professional writer did
not regard hirnself as being on oath to tell the truth in his public life.
He was, after all, a writer of fiction. It was understandable in a class
ridden society that he did not want his middle-class readers and his
upper-class friends to know too much about his working-class back
ground and he was always ready to conceal or even He about the early
years of his life and education. He was sensitive enough to be aware
of the repeated descriptions of hirn as a 'peasant', and of the snobbery
of many of his acquaintances. His public persona was something he
worked hard at, particularly in the early years of his life as a writer.
During those early years, as a novelist striving to earn a living, public
ity, however much detested, was vital to hirn. He was willing to give
interviews, and, better stlll, was quite ready to write most of the ar
ticle about hirnself for a journalist to publish as his own work, just as
later he would pretend that his wife, Florence, had written his autobi
ography. However, with the success of Tess (1891) and Jude (1895) he
had more publicity than he desired, and now a wealthy man, there
was a radical change in his attitude towards those who did not just
want to interview hirn but were anxious to exploit hirn. There was the
same sensitivity about his early life, and interviewers were warned
repeatedly about interpreting the novels in an autobiographical way
although Hardy must have known that there was very much of him
self in the novels. Interviewers in those later years of his life were not
allowed even to write down notes at the time of the interview, which
x Preface
must cast doubt on the complete accuracy of the whole sentences given
as Hardy's own words. In these interviews Hardy is not above having
his little joke. Bored to te ars by one visiting Ameriean professor who
came to Max Gate not through any liking of Hardy's works but be
cause he was writing a book about British writers, Hardy asked hirn
whether Harvard was' a girls' scho01?' Horrified at his ignorance, the
professor put it down to Hardy's 'advancing years', when, of course,
it was just Hardy's ironie attempt to relieve the tedium. (see p. 198)
The same misleading trait can be seen in Harold Macmillan' s anecdote
on p. 61. Hardy was not, then, a simple and easy interviewee. His
deliberate obfuscations, his sometimes unrecognised irony, and the re
fusal to allow interviewers to take notes me an that caution is required
in our acceptance and appreciation of what he said or is supposed to
have said.
The same caution needs to be exercised in our interpretation of the
second element - what the interviewers chose to report and the man
ner in whieh it was reported by them. If we accept that an interview is
a formal meeting with the intention of writing an article for a journal
and/or book, and a recollection is something written at some time later,
possibly many years later, we have immediately an important differ
ence. What value can we give to the memories of a maidservant
employed by Hardy for aperiod of twelve months some seventy years
before she wrote them down? How can we compare her memories
with those of someone like A. C. Benson who wrote his recollections
in his diary within a few hours of experiencing them but is obviously
such a snob that the 'peasant' Hardy has little chance of a sympathetic
hearing? And how do we assess Virginia WooU' s penetratingly obser
vant but so coldly objective account of her short visit to Max Gate?
What I have tried to do is to give as diverse a group of interviews and
interviewers as possible and to give warning where it is needed.
Another problem whieh has to be faced with the interviewers is that
professional writers like Graves and Newman Flower exploited their
Max Gate visits to the fuIl, often reproducing the same material, some
of whieh was incorrectly remembered, again and again. Not infrequently
this me ans that an article written in 1940 on the centenary of Hardy's
birth has a somewhat different text from that written at the time of
Hardy's death in 1928, and from that originally written in, say, 1919.
In such cases one assurnes that the earliest version is the one to choose.
There is evidence to show that in the 1890s the material provided by
one or two interviewers was' cannibalised' by others in what were either
syndieate arrangements or brazen plagiarism. This seemed to happen
particularly in the United States, but the prize for pretending to know
Hardy weIl and for exploitation of that pretence must go to Clive Holland,