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Thomas Hardy: Interviews and Recollections PDF

265 Pages·1999·27.11 MB·English
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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,

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Hardy was an unknown architect in 1870, a famous novelist by 1895, and acknowledged as a great novelist, poet and epic-dramatist when he died in 1928. With fame came a never-ending stream of friends and writers anxious to record their impressions of the Grand Old Man of English Literature. Among the
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