Thomas Hardy

...Agatha Thornycroft, whom Hardy considered to be the most beautiful woman in England, then Millgate is the man to consult...

...He had his say about Hardy's novels in an earlier book...

...Ximma Hardy died in 1912, after thirty-six years of steadily cooling marriage...

...One of Mill-gate's themes, which the biography amply supports, is that Hardy all his life was a self-contained man...

...I cannot think of a life offering better material for a great biography...

...Human contact, especially domestic love once the initial excitement had worn off, meant little to him...

...What he lived for was recapturing spots of time and imbuing them honestly with the spirit of a past era...

...Hardy had commented, "I scarcely think that love proper and enduring is in the nature of men...

...She was probably being unfair to the masculine gender as a whole, but she had her husband pegged fairly well...

...In the memoir supposedly written by his second wife but actually dictated by Hardy himself there is the assertion that he cared "for life as an emotion rather than for life as a science of climbing...

...It's a rare man of fifty or sixty who can feel with the same intensity that came naturally at twenty, but Hardy retained his boyish sensibilities right up until his 88th year...

...Millgate is aware of the same quality but he expounds it in more measured and cautious tones...

...Millgate is not quite up to the quality his subject invites, he has nonetheless written a good book which will probably stand as the foremost assessment of Hardy's life for a long time to come...

...By his mid-fifties, Hardy had made enough money to do what he wanted, and struggling with plot development and the transitions of prose was never an element of his desire...

...That ability was at least partly the source of his astounding poetic vitality...

...Hardy himself captured his alienation quite clearly in his poem "Epitaph": "I never cared for Life: Life cared for me,/And hence I owed it some fidelity...

...Though Hardy could, especially in his later years, appear to be a caring and congenial old gentleman, and though he undoubtedly felt intensely the privations of his own characters, there was at the core of his being a peasant-like mistrust of other people which held him back from ever experiencing a full, close affection...

...Hardy derived more satisfaction from being the wife of a great man...

...He does, of course, relate the incidents of Hardy's life to events in the novels and poems, which gives him plenty of work because Hardy was, in a sense, an intensely autobiographical writer...

...His celebrated decision to give up writing novels after Jude the Obscure was berated for being sexually explicit had little to do with his sensitivity to criticism...

...Most of his characters were strongly modeled on people he had known...

...But it's not hard to understand what Clodd meant...

...No passage in Millgate's work, for example, is as searching as the following exposition by Gittings: For Hardy, more than most creative artists, was deeply self-centered...

...If one is interested, for instance, in the relationship between Tess Durbeyfield and Mrs...

...A little over a year after Emma's death, Hardy married Florence Dug-dale, thirty-nine years his junior, whom he had known and not-so-secretly courted for years...

...Millgate finds nothing in the record to negate the claim...

...Life was largely important as the material for his art...

...The main feeling one brings away from this massive compilation of incident is a distaste for Hardy's ruthlessness coupled with an awe and respect for his devotion to his work...

...As Mitigate abundantly demonstrates, Hardy had a crabbed sort of sensual relationship with almost every woman he met...

...One doesn't have to agree to recognize that this biography honorably attempts through scholarship to match the integrity that Hardy achieved through creative doggedness...

...Millgate doesn't stint the description of this later career which is fully as fascinating as the years of novel-writing...

...Hardy was best epitomized by his friend Edward Clodd, a man noted for his generous opinions, who wrote just three days after Hardy died that he "was a great author: he was not a great man: there was no largeness of soul...

...Though Mr...

...He could be very cold, very inconsiderate...

...Millgate's shortcomings are highlighted when his book is compared with another recent biography, Robert Gittings's two-volume treatment published in 1975 and 1978...

...He regarded himself as one of the chosen few who had a mission to his age...

...So he set off on a thirty-year quest to become a major poet and to make his verse ascend beyond anything he had achieved as a novelist...

...In his eighties, he was capable of recalling a girl he had known only briefly sixty years before and becoming just as aroused by her as he had been on the day they met...

...He made Florence almost as miserable as he did Emma, with the main difference that the second Mrs...

...But Gittings, himself a poet and playwright, seems more willing to confront the darker aspects of Hardy's character, more ready to ask himself what the price of Hardy's art really was...

...Hardy cared for life as an emotion, and every ounce of emotion he could summon he poured into a second creation, in words, of the people and the feelings of the Dorset of his boyhood...

...It's easy to see that Millgate's scholarship is superior to Gittings's: if one judges by accuracy of detail, there is no contest...

...here he concentrates strictly on the man...

...Precision of that kind is a definite virtue in a biography, but Millgate is able to be so lucid only because he avoids criticism almost entirely...

...Mr Lillgate's book is long, detailed, and clear...

...From Max Gate, the house he built for himself on the outskirts of Dorchester just a few miles from his birthplace, Hardy sent forth such a volume of poetry that the critics finally were almost overwhelmed into recognizing his genius...

...Mary's College of Maryland and author of the column "An Idea of Freedom...

...his obsessive markings in his Bible show a belief not in the message of that book-like so many Victorian thinkers, he lost his faith in the 1860s-but in himself as a kind of latter-day seer and prophet, an Isaiah or an Ezekiel...

...Speaking of the series of touching love poems, written in memory of his wife Emma, with whom Hardy had had distant and sometimes frigid relations during the last decade of their marriage, Millgate comments: Indeed, it is clear from the verbal and rhythmic control of these poems that Hardy remained very much in command of his emotions at this period, that he cherished his melancholy rather than surrendered to it...

...When the story is of a boy born in a rural cottage to almost illiterate parents in a backward section of the country who goes on to become the acknowledged literary master of a great literary people, it is more than a good story, it intrigues...

...Michael Millgate was wise to choose Thomas Hardy as his subject...

...John R. Turner is an administrative officer at St...

...He enjoyed the acclaim, but he didn't really need it...

...That is a skewed interpretation, for how can a man be a great author with no largeness of soul...

...The latter, I suppose, is so well known that a biographer need not bother with it...

...A reader is never left in doubt about what year it is, or where Hardy is living, or what book is about to be published...

...A reader consequently learns a lot about the way Hardy worked but not much about the quality of the result...

...Neither biographer quotes this revealing couplet, but I think Gittings comes closer to its spirit...

...Outwardly, his was a conventional life, lived mostly at home, with occasional trips to London and other cities where he was increasingly feted by social bigwigs...

...THOMAS HARDY: A BIOGRAPHY Michael Millgate/Random House/$25.00 John R. Turner J. he drama of a life that commences among humble surroundings but manages to clamber into the realm of finer things always makes for a good story...

...Millgate makes the best case that can be made for Hardy's treatment of both women, but his relentless reporting of the facts also makes clear that their happiness was mostly sacrificed on the altar of literary grandeur...

...How the latter came about, given his unlikely beginnings, is not adequately explained, but the fact of it is made undeniable...

...In 1899, giving advice to a newly married friend, Mrs...

...In Millgate's opinion, that was the price exacted by Hardy's art, a price well worth paying...

...The women themselves may not have known it, but Hardy instantaneously constructed a fantasy about them which stayed with him all his long life...