Thomas Hardy Book

You love not me,
And love alone can lend you loyalty;
-I know and knew it. But, unto the store
Of human deeds divine in all but name,
Was it not worth a little hour or more
To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came
To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be
You love not me.

In one of the BBC's Book Club programmes Claire Tomalin disarmingly tells how she was more or less forced by her publisher to come up with a decent by-line to her biography of Thomas Hardy, which she had hoped to call, in all simplicity, Thomas Hardy. And how she scoured, once more, the poems, desperately hoping for an idea, any idea. 'Time-torn', taken from his poem A Broken Appointment, how about that? Float that with the editor, does he like it? He did indeed, and by one of those felicitous fancies of fate, it resonates beautifully with her wonderfully nuanced portrayal of this figure.

Time torn: a man who was born at the beginning of the Victorian age, in 1840, just three years after Victoria became queen, and who lived on until the roaring twenties, friend of Virginia Woolf and T.E. Lawrence. Torn, too, by the vagaries of rigid class lines, by his own sense of guilt over his treatment of Emma, by the contrasting demands of solid country gentility and the glamour of London literary life, by the commercial necessity of writing novels in order to finance his life as a poet. This was a man who travelled an even longer, stonier path than Dickens, despite the latter's stint in the blacking factory. Dickens at least was born into a fairly genteel, lower middle class family, even if they had their financial ups and downs. Hardy, on the other hand, was the son of a builder, at a time when the divide between labourer and even the lowest middle class gentility was as wide as it ever had been at any time before or since. Small and weak when born, his very survival on earth seems a miracle. What he went on to achieve is more miraculous still, but Tomalin holds a steady tiller. She is no dewy-eyed breathless enthusiast, even if she obviously loves Hardy's work and very much likes the man too. She keeps her ship on an even keel by a cautious layering of differing views, carefully flagging her speculative conclusions with phrases like 'It makes you wonder if...'
Does that make Tomalin sound finicky and over-zealous in her attention to detail? I hope not, for even if, as she freely admits herself, the early chapters contain rather too many names and facts, she has written an amazingly compelling account of what on the outside looks like a rather dull and ordinary existence, living with his wife and his dog and writing novels that grew more and more bleak, and then, when he had earned enough money and opprobrium, turning to poetry. And Tomalin's warmth and generosity are not reserved only for the man himself: she is, if anything, even more generous towards the women who tried to soothe that time-torn man. You have to feel sorry for Emma: headstrong and lively and spirited. And damn it, she had to be. She had to defy her parents, break with her family forever in order to marry this builder's son, and yet at the same time bear the humiliating dismay of his family too, who considered that she brought nothing to the marriage at all; not youth, nor beauty, nor money and not enough intellect. And what could a headstrong, spirited young woman do with herself in a Victorian marriage? What role for her? She must have hoped to share in Thomas's creative life, for she was denied any field of action of her own. No wonder she turned a little odd and eccentric, cooped up at home, in a social no-man's land, with a husband who shut himself away in order to write them out of poverty.
For once, the puff on the back can be wholeheartedly endorsed: 'Another triumph..' '..an object lesson in how to write a life...' 'It is a moving story and Tomalin tells it as vividly, with as great a fund of sympathy and sense, as can be imagined.' Who am I to disagree with James Wood? Nor would I want to.