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Appendix Thomas Hardy Appendix Typescript Passages omitted from The Life of Thomas Hardy Introduction Many passages in the original typescripts of The Life of Thomas Hardy* were suppressed either by Hardy before his death or by his widow Florence afterwards, and until now they have never been published in fun. They are transcribed in the pages that fonow so that for the first time we now have a complete account of Hardy's disguised autobiography as he wrote it. Florence Hardy'sLife is one of the more curious literary deceptions of modern literary his tory since Hardy hirnself wrote, in the third person, an but the last two chapters, leaving instructions for the work to be completed and published after his death. Great pains were taken to conceal his authorship and for many years the work was accepted as genuinely having been written by his widow, an assumption not entirely preposterous since, as Florence Dugdale, she had earlier published a number of children's stories. But the situation is odd. It is common enough for an inexpert writer's autobiography to be 'ghosted' but Hardy is unique among major literary figures in reversing the pro­ cess; he is, in effect, 'ghost writer' of his own biography, and this unusual work shows Hardy in flight from the attentions of un­ authorised biographers. He willed the Life to posterity as the author­ ised version, see king to disguise its inevitable lack of objectivity through its third person narration and to pre-empt other biog­ raphers by the authoritative 'authorship' of his wife. The manu­ script was destroyed as soon as it was typed and subsequent revi­ sions were made by Hardy in a disguised calligraphic hand. But posterity has caught up with Hardy and discovered hirn doing a dance of the seven veils, wafting remnants before the reader's eyes, yet the dance is often more intriguing than what is revealed; the 'performance' is an. The Life is nevertheless indispensable. What it records is largely accurate and makes fun use of Hardy's copious memoranda (many • Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1962) com­ bines the two volumes originally published separately as The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840-1891 (1928) and The Later Years ofThomas Hardy, 1892-1928 (1930). For the standard bibliographical account of their publication see R. L. Purdy, Thomas Hardy, A Bibliographiall Study (London, 1954), pp. 262-7, 268-73. 190 THE PERSONAL NOTEBOOKS OF THOMAS HARDY of which were destroyed as the Life was written) and it remains a workmanlike and full account of one view of Hardy's life. It is fascinating too in so far as it implies Hardy's estimate of hirnself and his work and the self that he wanted to be remembered. Sut the very process of concealment is revealing and inevitably the work evades many issues and episodes. The original typescript does not repair an these omissions since concealment was Hardy's game from the beginning, but it is rather more telling. It has benefited structurally but suffered as autobiography from the revisions of Florence Hardy andJ. M. Sarrie, whoadvisedher. Tocitejustoneexample, Hardyis shown to be even more extremely sensitive to critics and reviewers than we already know, and in view of this the impulse to produce the disguised autobiography itself may be more clearly understood. Sarrie advised excision of many passages of sardonic invective against critics since he thought that the book 'leaves too much an impression that any silly unimportant reviewer could disturb and make hirn angry' (letter, 3 Feb 1928), yetthis is a true impression and their omission falsifies the record further. Hardy's reluctance to write an autobiography is wen established. In 1910 H. M. AIden, editor of Harper's Magazine, asked if he could serialise Hardy's memoirs. When Hardy replied that 'it is absolutely unlikely that I shall ever change my present intention not to produce my reminiscences to the world' (Life, 350), there is every reason to believe that he meant it. Sut when circumstances forced his hand, Hardy 'having observed many erroneous and grotesque statements advanced as his experiences' (Life, vii), the production of the work must have been a chore. This raises the teasing problem of Florence Hardy's precise role. Her secretarial abilities must have been invalu­ able yet she was surely more than an amanuensis. Sut although the venture was probably more co-operative than the standard account suggests, her function must have been mainly editorial; internal and stylistic evidence precludes any real doubt about Hardy's basic authorship to the end of eh. 36. He makes consistent and detailed emendations to the typescripts up to this point (the end of 1920) and then adds a note saying that material for continuing the work is to be found in the notebook 'Memoranda, 11'. In the remaining two chap­ ters the work is uniquely that of Florence: the style is distinctly even more perfunctory, the typescripts have new pagination, there are no amendments by Hardy, and so me of the manuscript in Florence Hardy's hand survives. 'Memoranda, 11' is the notebook with entries from January, 1921, but it has the date 'Feb.1923.' written PASSAGES OMITfED FROM THE LlFE: INTRODUCTION 191 inside the front cover. That Hardy presumably wrote up this notebook, from which entries were (as he directed above) taken and reproduced in the Life, in 1923 suggests that by this time the Life chapters up to 1920 may have been completed, at least in draft form. Since Hardy's letters to Sir George Douglas (see introduction to notebooks) obliquely suggest that the work was begun about 1919, the bulk of the Life was probably drafted within these four years. But evidence will be adduced to show that Hardy was still involved with details of the work as late as November 1927, just two months before he died. Hardy and Florence must at least have worked in dose consulta­ tion: if Hardy was as stealthy as he appears to have been, Florence must have been his only critical arbiter. Since they were virtually partners in intrigue we may weIl wonder how much their friends were allowed to know of what was going on. Even here a fascinating ambiguity informs the extant materials from which we might seek an answer. An oblique due to the real authorship of the Early Life appears as early as 1929 in Lascelles Abercrombie's artide on Hardy for the Encyclopaedia Britannica: 'In 1928 appeared his Memoirs, writ­ ten in the third person.'· C. J. Weber deduces from this that Hardy had reposed his confidence in Abercrombie, t yet this 'revelation' might simply have been a reasonable inference from the title page statement that the Early Life (the only volume to have appeared before Abercrombie's entry on Hardy) is 'compiled largely from contemporary notes, letters, diaries, and biographical memoranda, as weIl as from oral information in conversations extending over many years. '. It has similarly been assumed that both J. M. Barrie and T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) were let into the secret but the epistolary evidence is incondusive. After Hardy's death Barrie kept up a dose and frequent correspondence with Florence Hardy, advising her on deletions and revisions as the Early Life typescript was prepared for the printers, but the tone of these letters is ambivalent and does not • Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed. (London, 1929), Vol. XI, p. 193. t c. J. Weber, Hardy o[ Wessex (London, 1940; rev. ed., 1965), p. 285. • eyril C1emens, in My Chat with Thomas Hardy (Webster Groves, Missouri, 1944), cIaimed that Hardy had 'in confidence' told hirn that 'each day I slant my memoirs as though my wife were writing them herself' and had described how Florence made 'invaluable suggestions ... almost always incorporated into the text' (p. 26). The oauthenticity of this 'chat' is highly dubious (see R. L. Purdy's letter, TLS (30 Dec1960), 845), since it is largely an unscrupulous pa stiche from other sourees, so that its value as evidence is negligible. 192 THE PERSONAL NOTEBOOKS OF THOMAS HARDY tell us how much he knew. As early as 18 March 1926 Barrie was wanting to read 'the first part of the book in type-writing', but evidently he was denied this until after Hardy' s death: on 23 January 1928 he wrote to Florence that 'the book of hirn is what I want to see more than anything.'t On 3 February Barrie could tell Mrs Hardy that 'the book is a remarkable achievement, and if 1 thought of you mighty weIl before 1 think even more of you now.' The impression that this praise reveals Barrie's belief in her sole authorship may be modified by his further re mark on 7 March: 'I can see what feelings must overcome you when you open the Biography and attempt to work on pages every one of which must have poignant memories to you of the actual moments when you and he discussed them' (though again the inference may have been drawn from the title page). And on 25 May Barrie says: 'I suppose you have not yet co me to any decision about whether you will do the whole second volume yourself or hand it on to another.' But nowhere is it made clear, either by implication or direct statement, that whatever he may have privately believed Barrie had been told that Hardy was the true author. It seems unlikely that Barrie, who was shrewd and percep­ tive enough and whose advice reveals balanced literary judgement, could have failed to recognise the idiosyncratic style that pervades the Life, or that he could have been entirely deceived by the callig­ raphic hand with which Hardy took care to disguise his emenda­ tions.
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