IMAGINING HARDY:

...that Tryphena (the subject of Hardy's haunting memorial poem "Thoughts of Phena") was merely his cousin, that their walking-out very well may have been chaste, by the narrow definition...

...The split is virtually absolute...

...and in effect invented a genealogical table, which he called "The Hardy Pedigree," reaching far aloft for a remote branch of his mother's distant relatives for no other reason than that it boasted some professional men...

...Hardy shook his fist at his creator in the arable land of Wessex...

...He revised poems written in London in the mid-Sixties...

...He was left with his success, money, a ruinous marriage, a fine house, and a willed isolation from his sources...

...While the imperious ladies and gentlemen at Max Gate were "making their important, national arrangements without consulting her," Kate Hardy, the younger sister, viewed her brother's body and "gazed at the family face...

...In any case, as seen by the moonlight of the Deacon-Coleman thesis, that's why Mr...

...that great moment in the history of the English lyric written in 1867 during his London years, commemorates not love but its withering and blasting (and resurrects the shadowy presence of the unknown "H.A...

...Sympathy had run out decades earlier, though, good Victorians both, they remained lashed to each other, by convention, inertia, necessity, fate, Providence, whatever name an age gives to incurable affliction...

...The exception was Horace Moule, his friend and mentor, "university" to the country boy who, like Jude, was excluded by fate from the university...

...It is at least arguable that he remained suspended through his life...

...Nothing so drastic as Kafka's (equivocal) command that the entire record of his life and work be expunged, or, say, Eliot's that no biography ever be written of him, or Auden's that his letters be destroyed (the examples are countless of documents burned or placed under seal for a stipulated period -the Yeats-Maude Gonne correspondence comes to mind...

...Robert Gittings (Keats' excellent biographer) demolishes this particular romance with ingenuity and finesse, making a mockery of its more vulnerable elements but retaining its historic center (Hardy and Tryphena did walk out, there was an engagement of sorts, and a ring), though in altered perspective...

...gradually suspicions darkened...

...It bore, she wrote in her diary, "the same triumphant look . . . that all the others bore-but without the smile...

...When he died, a Prime Minister was one of his pallbearers and his body was virtually snatched from his family...

...IMAGINING HARDY SAUL MALOFF Young Thomas Hardy ROBERT GITTINGS Atlantic-Little, Brown, $10.95 Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been...

...That sense of life was grounded in disappointment, failure, transience, grief, regret, remorse, longing, loss, violent death, the workings of blind, ironic, cruel fate, the fundamental disarrangement of things...

...Death moved his imagination with a strange, uncanny force, almost always the death of women...

...Having done what he could to suppress his life from his life, Hardy left instructions to his second wife and his executor to destroy the rest, taking special pains to burn all materials bearing on his early life...

...Richard Holmes's generally valuable recent biography of Shelley also turns up an equally improbable bastard for the poet...

...What "life" did he suppose he "ought to have led"-what "life," pieced together from the debris of his life and appropriate to his achieved status as the Great Man of English Letters, as against the actual life he lived...

...he was "probably a relative, one of the Hands of Melbury Osmund...

...Especially dismaying for those who think him a great writer (both a great poet and for all his faults a great novel-ist) and still harbor illusions about what a great writer "ought to have been," in despite of the most shattering evidence to the contrary, he was a snob of the most craven, most vulgar sort, going so far as to transform or simply erase his actual family and provide himself with a genteel one...

...If she had known, and could, she might have buried the heart where their mother lay, and their sister Mary, and as close as possible, perhaps, to Tryphena Sparks, if she can be thought of as representing not only herself but all the lost girls he never possessed and who never left him...

...Besides, as one English critic pointed out, what about stables and other shelters that their watchful mothers needn't have known about...

...Poems tell us more than records can...

...Granted that most imaginative writers require their native air for life's breath, Hardy, to the extent that he was a "regional-ist," more than most...

...Never mind that little or no hard evidence exists...

...And while a birth required registration, miscarriages (a half-truth, so to speak) don't...

...The portrait is carefuly composed, the light and shade blocked-in: we see what the portraitist wants us to see, and what he cannot prevent us from seeing (though in kindly colors)-and nothing else...

...Love," he once said, "lives on propinquity, but dies of contact...

...Yet so concerned was he with propriety that he needed to convince posterity that nothing of emotional consequence had occurred in his life until he met his first wife at the age of twenty-nine...

...One strongly senses the profound feeling of kinship in the inscription Hardy wrote for Antell's tombstone in 1878: "He was a man of considerable local reputation as a self-made scholar, having acquired a varied knowledge of languages, literature and science by unaided study, and in the face of many untoward circumstances...

...For the longest time he didn't present his wife to his immediate family, and at no time was anything resembling a relationship allowed to develop, not even of the conventional, merely courteous kind...

...and in 1966 with the assistance of Terry Coleman she published a book called Providence and Mr...

...Another emblematic- moment should be recorded: Emma dismissing his novel Ethelberta with the comment, "Too much about servants in it...

...Gittings is surely right to lay heavy stress on his flight from class and the costs it exacted-the pain of amputation and the conflicts of renunciation...

...Ortega y Gasset Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) resorted to extraordinary duplicity, even for a writer, in an attempt to confound posthumous invasions of his private life...

...Discrepancies appeared, omissions were noted...

...I have a faculty," he once wrote, "for burying an emotion in my heart or brain for forty years, and exhuming it at the end of that time as fresh as when interred...

...and leaving the pages of her inscribed copy uncut at her death...

...Nevertheless, it is one thing cleverly to demonstrate, as Gittings does, that the season was a wet one, with an unusually heavy rainfall, and another to insist, as Gittings does, that therefore lovers could not lie down on the heath...

...World famous, indeed in his great age already a "posthumous" figure (it's always shocking to recall how recently he died), this ancestral figure, drawing on his long memory of a rural England already remote in his time, was enraged and wounded by the hounds of celebrity, and so he undertook to construct his own monument in the form of an "authorized" biography-not an autobiography but a kind of official life of Thomas Hardy written by himself in the third person and destined for posthumous publication as the "work" of his second wife...

...the heart lies buried in the parish churchyard at Stinsford between the graves of his two wives, close by his native village of Higher Bockhampton in Dorset, three miles across the heath from his mother's (and Tryphena's) native Puddletown...

...but the Prince of Wales played no part in his buried life...

...So much for the inner life and so much for its extensions into a world-view...

...questioned, the man proved to have known Hardy very well indeed...

...On another, deeper level he "might have been," but for his genius, some version of John Antell, his uncle-by-marriage and partly the original of the obscure Jude Fawley (a surname derived from his maternal grandmother's native village...

...Neutral Tones" ("Since then, keen lessons that love deceives, / And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me / Your face, and the God-cursed sun, and a tree, / And a pond edged with greyish leaves...

...Burn they did...

...Although the truth of its creation began to emerge over thirty years ago and is by now thoroughly established, the two-volume Life bears Florence Hardy's name to this day and to this day many writers on Hardy still carelessly accept the work as hers, and praise it for its acuity...

...Moule-a brilliant failure, the man who probably did father a bastard upon a Dorchester girl, and undone by drink, intermittent madness, disappointment, ended as a suicide-figured steadily in Hardy's sense of life...

...Gittings, by this conceit, is a master cryptographer and debris-collector who, starting from a powerful sense of his duplicitous, furtive prey, is able by assembling a set of initials, an underscored passage in John Keble's The Christian Year, a Biblical verse, some lines from a Hardy poem and some others from Shelley, to compose these fragments into a persuasive likeness...

...saul maloff is the author of Happy Families and, most recently, Heartland (Scrib-ner's).ntly, Heartland (Scrib-ner's...

...a young man till I was 40 or 50...

...In the 1960s, one Lois Deacon thought she could answer Gosse's baffled question...

...What he most desired, or thought he desired, or wanted to desire, had most eluded him...

...late to ripen," he said, referring to himself as a poet...

...No member of his family attended his wedding in London-not his mother, the "most powerful presence in his life," nor his beloved sister Mary...

...making such allowances, we are still hard put to account for that cold cutting-off while he lived in their midst, needing what he disclaimed, a returned native self-alienated, a kind of spy and stranger in his own land...

...He had long since abandoned fiction for poetry, his first, last and enduring literary love...

...He was still more specific: "I was a child till I was 16...

...The ashes were buried in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey...

...Hardy, which greatly embellished truly valuable information, and added reckless conjecture-and, worse, highly dubious death-bed "testimony"- to transform Tryphena from cousin to niece, establish time and place of the fateful encounter, and beget from it a son...

...The Prince of Wales visited him at Max Gate and stayed for lunch (roast chicken...

...The joke is a famous and bitter one: the Life, cast in bronze, is only another public statue, like the one that today sits atop Dorchester alongside the ruin of a Roman wall and overlooks a gasoline station and public toilet-an eventuality, one feels, which Hardy could almost have foretold...

...I was quick to bloom...

...and where the deceit registered, and its possible motives and implications were pondered, speculation was inevitable, some of it inevitably wild, the biographical enterprise being what it is...

...Women occupied the center of his imagination and sensibility, were agents of his deepest responses to life, though none of this in obvious ways...

...The Thomas Hardy who committed these nasty little execrations, it seems necessary to say again, was a world-famous writer in his old age, and far, far beyond all that, one would have thought...

...and guilt, sin, incest underlie and account for the brooding pessimism, despair, remorse of the novels and poems...

...but he could not reach to alter the deep ineradicable sources where his art formed, nor burn out the traces of memory where his life was inviolate...

...Not all were taken in...

...The point is it feels true, as good fiction does...

...Gittings, in short, relies too heavily at times on demonstrable fact, forgetting that not all truths, including the most important ones, can be demonstrated from the archives...

...in his great age Hardy, naturally so reticent and reserved a man, talked indiscreetly (to a visiting nephew of Twain's who published the interview in 1943...

...But the rejected life fed the springs of imagination...

...One may with as much reason offer the obverse for the discredited thesis-that the sources of Hardy's life and work lie in his failure to attain the fair Triffy, and multiply...

...Hardy," Edmund Gosse asked thirty-odd years before the novelist's death, "that he should rise up in the arable land of Wessex and shake his fist at his creator...

...What has Providence done to Mr...

...The Hardy of the "official" Life is a proper Victorian gentleman who might just as well have made his dim mark in the civil service, the bar, medicine, the academy, the clergy-indeed as the successful provincial church architect he might well have become had he continued in that profession...

...His proper middle-class marriage was a fatal mistake: what terrible toll it took we can readily imagine where we don't in fact know...

...He exalted the social status of his parents (a domestic servant and bricklayer-mason, respectively), obliterated his numerous close kin-the virtual "extended" family of his boyhood...

...and in the third person in his Life of Thomas Hardy he spoke of "his lateness of development in virility, while mentally precocious...

...Yet, though Emma's roots lay elsewhere, and as a writer he was free to live elsewhere, Hardy built his house, Max Gate, in Dorchester within walking distance of Bockhampton and Puddletown and lived out his long life there...

...At the funeral service in Westminster Abbey the daughter of a Dorset vicar who was a friend of Hardy was seated in the "reserved and ticketed" section next to an "obvious tramp in ragged clothes...

...resurrected poems: "so personal he had not dared publish them before . . . mysterious colloquies with past women, so emotionally charged and yet so obliquely expressed that one can only guess at their meaning...

...Lovers can and do, wet season and sopping wet...

...mined his youth for material for new ones...

...there is no other...

...and of the latter, the scattered debris of a life, and-importantly-heavily, often obscurely, marked and annotated books in his personal library, which constitute a kind of coded private diary...

...For biographical researchers of a certain stripe incest is marvelous, bastardy nearly as good and the two together very heaven...

...A chilling image captures, and pinions, this Hardy-bicycling rigidly through the main street of Puddle-town-a street crowded with his family's cottages-accompanied by Emma, neither of them looking to the right nor to the left, neither giving nor acknowledging greetings...

...In our time, darkness is glandular, mystery sexual...

...Not the emotions associated with Emma but those associated with his courtship of her charge, the outpouring of poems released by her death in 1912 after decades of sterile estrangement in the bonds of their marriage...

...More so: he had a long memory which stretched across his own life into his mother's and her mother's, his family's and theirs, and seemed to enclose as well the collective memory of his native Dorset, all those silent blighted lives which he redeemed by his art...

...And so with his sister Mary, who died in 1915 and for whom, Gittings feels, though the case here is less than compelling, Hardy felt a deeper sympathetic affection than he did for "any other love...

...Compelling legends resist mere factuality: this one gained immediate wide acceptance, and will perdure, one may be certain, long after it has been in large part demolished...

...The question, for Gittings and us, is: What public monument did Hardy, standing amid the "ruin" of his life, desire to erect...

...Miss Deacon learned, through a chance encounter in 1959 with the then-aged daughter of Hardy's cousin Tryphena Sparks that the pair had "walked out" for a time before his first marriage...

...Blind to certain aspects of himself, he was the closest observer of others...

...The problem for the biographer, in the absence of the usual evidence, records, documents, is to discover-track down, sense out, deduce, imagine the lineaments of a recognizable, plausible life in what remained-in what Hardy couldn't (or couldn't bring himself to) rub out or, one may say, didn't realize he had left behind: of the former, other lives, public records, and of course the work of his life...

...in another of Gittings's triumphs of meticulous research and intuitive detection...

...As a boy he had been morbidly fascinated (the overtones of sexual excitement are unmistakable) by the public execution of a woman, by tales of other executions and suicide, with the burial of suicides in the old barbaric manner: in an unmarked unconsecrated grave on the public highway, a stake driven through the heart...

...Tryphena's death released a burst of poetry, as did the death of a girl of his adolescent years scarcely known then and not at all since and worshipped (dreamed-of, transformed into the stuff of fantasy) from afar, the emotion sixty years later (she died in 1913) "as fresh as when interred...

...Like us he was stuck with his life...

...a youth till I was 25...

...We are hopelessly wedded to the romantic idea of the single decisive event the knowledge of which unravels all mysteries...

...Nothing so simple and humanly understandable, not with Hardy...