Hardy's Return to Verse: Part 1--A New Chronology
William W. Morgan
In this essay and its sequel I intend to treat four inter-related theses about Hardy's work in the decade of the 1890's--the first in some detail, since it makes possible the claims of the other three, and the last three only suggestively. My first thesis (presented in this essay) is that Hardy's decision to give his best attention once again to verse-writing is neither simultaneous nor identical with his decision to stop writing fiction, although virtually every commentator (including Hardy himself, in his letters and in the presiding narrative of his Life and Work) has treated the two events as if they were at least simultaneous if not identical.1 I think I can make a good case that in fact his decisions to return to verse and to give up fiction were quite separate from one another and were, between the two of them, stretched out over a minimum of 15 years and perhaps as long as 25 years. And between those decisions there was yet a third: the decision to begin publishing his verse (both his older pieces and his newly-written ones) and consequently to begin writing new poems with publication in mind. My other theses, arising from this first one and to be treated in the second essay, are (1) that the often-noted aggressive rhetoric of Jude is more easily accounted for and more interesting when the novel is read within the chronology of Hardy's decisions about fiction and poetry, (2) that "Wessex Heights," understood as an exemplary Hardy poem of the troubled 1890's, is an even more resonant and interesting piece when it is seen as perhaps the first poem Hardy wrote with publication in mind, and (3) that Hardy's characteristic voice as a political poet commenting on public affairs finds its origin in this same period in his life and comes into being because of his new thinking about the possibilities of verse and fiction as modes of social rhetoric. By pursuing these four theses, I hope to break the grip which a particular narrative of Hardy's professional life in the 1890's has had on our critical reading of his work of the period, and I hope to point the way toward a new, more complex, and (to me) more interesting image of Hardy the writer.
Hardy's "decision" to return to poetry seems to have consisted not of a single clarifying moment but, instead, of a series of irregularly-spaced episodes of resolve and retreat, stretching over a period of some seventeen years between late 1880 and the summer of 1897 when he actually sent off the manuscript of Wessex Poems to his publishers. The decision to publish this first volume must have been firm by early 1897, since his diary shows that by February 4 of that year he had settled on the title the volume would eventually bear (Life and Work 302). But it seems clear that the choice to make a full-blown career-change--by which I mean not only resuming verse but also choosing to publish it and choosing to abandon fiction--was not made until well after Wessex Poems was published. Indeed, for a period of several years after 1898, Hardy kept open--at least vaguely--the possibility of continuing to write fiction. He wrote two short stories in late 1899 (Purdy 156), he answered William Dean Howells' June 14, 1900 letter requesting a short story in such a way as to suggest that he might be willing to oblige him, and there is even evidence that he was still considering fiction as late as 1905. In April of that year, J. Louis Garvin, editor of The Outlook, wrote to thank Hardy for submitting a poem ("Geographical Knowledge") and asked him if he was in the mood to do "that story now--anything up to 3000 or 4000 words" (Hardy Memorial Collection). Hardy replies "I should like to send you up something more, as you suggest, but I fear that I must go on with The Dynasts, if I am ever going to finish it" (Purdy and Millgate 166). If he is not still considering fiction, then he is at least willing that others should think he is doing so. Because of the overlapping of various patterns of evidence, it is very difficult to mark the date of the full-scale career-change, in spite of the fact that Wessex Poems seems, in retrospect, to be such a watershed.
Here follow nine passages from The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy that make up what I take to be a skeletal chronology of Hardy's three decisions--to resume verse writing, to begin publishing his poems, and finally (although this last is less clearly, less precisely indicated) to cease writing and publishing fiction. I have interspersed among them six factual reminders of dates and events in order to help to flesh out the chronology of the decisions more fully.
[1] [November 1880] It is somewhat strange that at the end of November he makes a note of an intention to resume poetry as soon as possible (150).
[2] [November 1889] Hence the labour [of bowdlerizing Tess for serial publication] brought no profit. He resolved to get away from the supply of family fiction to magazines as soon as he conveniently could do so (232).
[3] [Christmas Day 1890] While thinking of resuming 'the viewless wings of poesy' before dawn this morning, new horizons seemed to open and worrying pettinesses to disappear (241).
[4] [November 1891] Tess of the d'Urbervilles: a Pure Woman Faithfully Presented was published complete about the last day of November, with what results Hardy could scarcely have foreseen, since the book, notwithstanding its exceptional popularity, was the beginning of the end of his career as a novelist (252).
[5] [January 1892] As Tess of the d'Urbervilles got into general circulation it attracted an attention that Hardy had apparently not foreseen, for at the time of its publication he was planning something of quite a different kind, according to an entry he made: "Title:--'Songs of Five-and-Twenty years'. Arrangement of the songs: Lyric Ecstasy inspired by music to have precedence." However, reviews, letters, and other intelligence speedily called him from these casual thoughts back to the novel, which the tediousness of the alterations and restorations had made him weary of (255).
[6] [April 15 1892] Good Friday. Read review of 'Tess' in The Quarterly. A smart and amusing article; but it is easy to be smart and amusing if a man will forgo veracity and sincerity. . . . How strange that one may write a book without knowing what one puts into it--or rather, the reader reads into it! Well, if this sort of thing continues no more novel-writing for me. A man must be a fool to deliberately stand up to be shot at (259).
--Late 1892 through early 1895: Jude is written (Purdy 89-90).
[7] [October 17 1896] Poetry. Perhaps I can express more fully in verse ideas and emotions which run counter to the inert crystallized opinion--hard as a rock--which the vast body of men have vested interests in supporting. To cry out in a passionate poem that (for instance) the Supreme Mover or Movers, the Prime Force or Forces, must be either limited in power, unknowing, or cruel--which is obvious enough, and has been for centuries--will cause them merely a shake of the head; but to put it in argumentative prose will make them sneer, or foam, and set all the literary contortionists jumping upon me, a harmless agnostic, as if I were a clamorous atheist, which in their crass illiteracy they seem to think is the same thing. . . . If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone (302).
--December 1896: "Wessex Heights" is written (ms. of Satires of Circumstance [Hardy Memorial Collection]; Purdy 162).
[8] [February 4 1897] Title: 'Wessex Poems': With Sketches of their Scenes by the Author' (302).
--Summer 1897: sends ms. of Wessex Poems to his publishers (Purdy 106).
[9] [Spring-summer 1897] The misrepresentations of the last two or three years . . . turned out ultimately to be the best thing that could have happened; for they well-nigh compelled him, in his own judgment at any rate, if he wished to retain any shadow of self-respect, to abandon at once a form of literary art he had long intended to abandon at some indefinite time, and resume openly that form of it which had always been more instinctive with him, and which he had just been able to keep alive from his early years, half in secrecy, under the pressure of magazine-writing. . . . He had already for some time been getting together the poems which made up the first volume of verse that he was about to publish. In date they ranged from 1865 intermittently onwards, the middle period of his novel writing producing very few or none, but of late years they had been added to with great rapidity, though at first with some consternation he had found an awkwardness in getting back to an easy expression in numbers after abandoning it for so many years; but that soon wore off (309-10).
--Late 1899: Hardy writes two more short stories--"A Changed Man" and "Enter a Dragoon" (Purdy 156).
--June 14, 1900: William Dean Howells writes to request a short story for Harper's Monthly: ". . . something of about the dimensions . . . of The Distracted Young Preacher," and on September 24 Hardy notes in pencil on the bottom of the letter: "Ans. Will avail myself of the scheme if I shd. be in a position to do so" (Hardy Memorial Collection).
--April, 1905: Hardy has the exchange with J. Louis Garvin, editor of The Outlook, described above.
Of course I can't discuss each of these entries in detail, but I can provide a partial commentary on the first 6 of them, covering a period of nearly 12 years, by pointing out that in these 6 Hardy never talks about poetry and fiction in the same entry. I take this separation of the two genres to indicate something important about his identity as writer (a separation between his self-concept as novelist and his self-concept as poet), and later in the essay and in its sequel I will return to this point and try to account more fully for the curious either/or quality of the passages. The two passages that I wish to comment on now--in order to advance my claim about the separateness of Hardy's decisions about resuming verse and abandoning fiction--are numbers 5 and 7. [Scroll back or click here to review item 5.]
These "casual thoughts" of publishing a volume of verse, I believe, actually cleared the way in his psyche--allowed him to give himself permission, as it were--for the new and bold kind of rhetoric in Jude that I will try to characterize later. The casual thoughts, in other words, made up a provisional decision to begin writing verse for publication and to begin publishing both his new and his older poems alongside his fiction. And then, in the famous "Galileo" entry, he begins to record his musing about the political functions of the two genres. [Scroll back or click here to review item 7.]
The fulcrum of the relationship between poetry and fiction in this entry is the politics of genre as Hardy had come to see them. To say the same thing in a passionate poem and in argumentative prose is to provoke different responses from the conservative public--largely because the public have different reading strategies for and social expectations about the two genres. In poetry--if they read it at all--they expect and forgive offensive theorizing about the nature of things because poetry is "supposed to be" speculative; in fiction they expect and will tolerate only an epistemological framework that matches their own. In this model, popular fiction is hopelessly mortgaged not only to the limits of public taste but also to the limits of popular philosophy, whereas poetry, even though it is read by fewer people, may be more effective as a vehicle of political argument because its readers are not so fiercely defensive. This is a crucial moment in Hardy's thinking about the two genres, since here for the first time, he entertains the idea that poetry might be an appropriate vehicle for public debate and commentary. A few months later, he has settled on the title for his first book of verse. [Scroll back or click here to review item 8.] And later on in the Life and Work, writing about a period only a few months further on, he is able to talk comfortably about fiction and poetry in contiguous paragraphs. [Scroll back or click here to review item 9.]
The passages from the Life and Work, taken as a group, reveal the familiar drama of Hardy's thinking about the two genres--with novel-writing cast as oppressive, alienated labor carried out in the interests of others and the writing of poetry as joyous self-expression--but his re-creation of the chronology of his decisions, although it is saturated with time-markers, seems to avoid dates with an anxiety that is almost manic--for some time, at first, for so many years, etc. The Hardy of the Life and Work, in other words, never gives clear dates to the various decisions his younger self was making.
It is possible, of course, that when Hardy set about narrating the story of his career change in the Life and Work he either didn't remember with any certainty just when he decided to give his best energies once again to writing poetry, or he didn't think a specific date worth mentioning. It seems more likely to me, however, that the decision was accompanied by anxiety of a kind that does not fit well with the after-the-fact image of the born-poet turned reluctant-novelist that the narrator of the Life and Work is constructing. If being a leading novelist exposed him to the confining limits of public taste and tolerance, it also guaranteed him a readership and allowed him to rest assured that his ideas would enter the stream of public debate; he could be sure that his work made contact with an ongoing literary and intellectual life and had an influence on the texture and direction of literary culture in England. Poetry-writing offered no such guarantees, and among the various uncertainties that Hardy must have had to face as he contemplated giving up the novel (uncertainties, for example, about sales, income, and status), there must have been some worry about the loss of influence he might suffer. The older Hardy who narrates the Life and Work wants to suggest that the decision brought a kind of pure liberation, but I am proposing that a part of the Hardy of the 1890's--the part that relished the struggle with "inert crystallized opinion"--was threatened by the loss of influence that the change seemed to offer. Literally none of his verse--not a single poem--before the mid-1890's suggests that he saw poetry as an appropriate vehicle for controversy and public debate, and it seems entirely plausible that in looking to poetry for a liberating career-change, he was also facing--or thought he was facing--the loss of one of the supports for his writerly self-image, the idea of himself as one engaged in the struggle to introduce clearer thinking and more progressive opinions into English cultural life. If this is the case, it would help to explain why he doesn't seem to be able to write about poetry and fiction in the same journal entry: the two genres involved not just different skills and attitudes, but different self-concepts as well, and therefore presented themselves to his imagination as enterprises hardly to be contemplated simultaneously. Before 1896 at least, to give up fiction seems to have meant to give up "the fight," just as much as returning to verse seems to have meant to achieve a kind of serene and untroubled literary privacy.
By October 1896 (the date of the much-quoted "Galileo" entry), however, something seems to have clarified itself in his mind, and the notebook entries for the first time mention both genres at once. Two months later he wrote "Wessex Heights," and two months after that, he had settled on the title for his first volume. By late 1896, in other words, he seems to have decided to give poetry a serious try. Having accepted the idea of writing poetry that was socially engaged, as well as the kinds of personal verse he was accustomed to writing, he was free to consider both of the moves that attracted him--not only returning to verse and beginning to publish it, but also giving up fiction. And if he did not finally let go of the idea of writing fiction until some 8 or 9 years later (this process seems to have been one of atrophy rather than one of decision), the fact may well be attributed to his prudence: in his 60's and 70's he was still rather like the young man who didn't give up architecture until he was reasonably sure of his success as a novelist.
Sources Cited
Hardy, Thomas. The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate. London: Macmillan, 1984.
Purdy, Richard Little. Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954.
Purdy, Richard Little and Michael Millgate, eds. The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, III. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.
Thomas Hardy Memorial Collection, Dorset County Museum, Dorchester, Dorset.