Two Novels about Thomas Hardy

One of the many synchronicities that contributed to my starting this reading and writing journey was what seemed like a tiny explosion of novels written about Thomas Hardy - and by tiny explosion, I mean, two: Christopher Nicholson's Winter (January 2016) and Damien Wilkins's Max Gate (due in July of 2016). I was lucky enough to pull an advanced review copy of Max Gate, which I just finished today and it left me full of enough feels that I thought I might share my impressions of both books with you.

Winter retells the story of Hardy's late life infatuation with Gertrude Bugler, an actress local to Dorset who played in a number of his stories adapted for stage with local amateur players. Nicholson uses three points of view (Florence Hardy, Bugler and Hardy himself) to tell this rather maudlin tale that also serves as a snapshot of the final years of Hardy's life. Nicholson adopts Hardy's magisterial tone throughout the book, a rather postmodern conceit that traps Hardy inside of one of his own plots.

While Nicholson is far from apathetic to how Florence was slowly eroded by her marriage, he manages to keep Hardy a sympathetic if slightly frustrating player in this beautiful novel mostly at her expense. The reader is similarly grateful for the spare moment spent alone with Gertrude, just as Hardy must have been, if only for the contrast with Florence's relentless neuroses and complaints. As one might expect, Gertrude comes across the most sympathetically, something of a helpless pawn caught between an elderly man with a blurred sense of the line between fact and fantasy and his jealous wife who understands her husband's weaknesses all too well.

Winter is something of a wish fulfillment for the Hardy admirer as it offers one more chance to slip into a credible facsimile of Hardy's Wessex to experience a tragic love story. Nicholson doesn't skimp on the physical details that makes so much of Hardy's best work a pleasure to read. My only criticism of the novel was also one of its saving graces in that Nicholson spares us the worst tragedies that might have happened in an actual Hardy novel. Hardy's inevitable death (spoiler warning!) happens well off-stage and after the conclusion of the novel proper, in a denouement delivered by Gertrude Bugler. The execution is a little bloodless but I was grateful for his restraint.

Max Gate, from New Zealand's Damien Wilkins, is a very different kind of novel but no less compelling. Told from the perspective of a housekeeper at Hardy's home, Max Gate, the book captures the last days of the author's life with Hardy himself kept all but off-screen throughout. Its central concern is how it came to be that Hardy's ashes were interred in the Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey while his heart was buried in the cemetery at Stinsford, with his family and late wife, Emma.

Wilkins really carves out his own voice for this book and it's a little dizzying at times. Much of it works on basic blocking and dialogue inside of fixed spaces, not unlike a stage production. Nellie Titterington, the narrator, provides us with our rare forays outside of the vigil, usually in the form of flashbacks (and forwards). Hardy comes across as less sympathetic in the book as Florence manages our insights into his character as her husband and, less often, as a poet and writer.

The book is divided into two parts with (spoiler warning!) Hardy's death being the line of demarcation between them. Wilkins seems fascinated by the almost Byzantine maneuverings that led to the double burial and calls Sir Sydney Cockerell and Sir J.M. Barrie (of Peter Pan fame) out for orchestrating Hardy's admittance into the Poet's Corner without resolving either the issue of whether Hardy would have objected or if it was a good thing that they did comfortably for the reader.

Max Gate doesn't give the Hardy admirer as much to love but, as a novel, it seemed to meet its own goals in a stylish and thoughtful manner. There was one glaring historical inaccuracy that bugged me through the whole book and Wilkins turns it around at the end to make an important statement about the difference between history and narrative in a fashion that impressed me.

In conclusion, both novels were enjoyable and represent a rich moment for Hardy enthusiasts to get a Wessex fix of a new and unexpected kind.

Thomas the Architect

Thomas Hardy's architectural drawing of his home, Max Gate.

Before he was a published author, Thomas Hardy was directing his ambitions toward becoming an architect. All told, Hardy spent more than fifteen years learning and plying his craft. Advancing himself as an architect competed with his ambitions of becoming a writer for at least ten of them. Though he would go on to be remembered for his writing, there is much in Hardy the writer that is dependent upon the experiences he had working in architecture.

Almost immediately after beginning his apprenticeship, Hardy began associating with men in Dorchester who would provide him with some of the social and intellectual polish he would need to someday transition into a writer of novels. Perhaps the most important was Horace Moule, a Cambridge student whose father was a vicar. In him, Hardy found not only a friend but someone through whom he could see precisely what would be expected of him should he aspire to attend college in order to be a scholar or a cleric. Though Hardy would, at first, diligently undertake the self-education to pass the entrance exams, he discovered that there was simply not enough time in the day to learn enough to pass in a timely fashion. If Hardy had not given up those aspirations, it is doubtful he would have turned to a democratic form like the novel in order to fulfill his urge to publish.

Moule also introduced Hardy to many of the important ideas and writings of the day, connecting him to the currents of thoughts that were circulating as far afield as London herself.

Hardy's early years as an apprentice gave him the opportunity to travel quite widely throughout the country for a man of his age and status. His work took him into many diverse communities where his journalistic eye and ear could soak up visual details, folk lore and dialectic tics that separated one from the next as well as exposing him to the deep history of each place in its oldest, most important buildings now in need of repair.

After several years of apprenticing, Hardy moved to London to work as an assistant to a well-known architect who specialized in the restoration of old churches into a contemporary style ironically known as the Gothic Revival. He took full advantage of cultural opportunities that were simply unavailable in Dorchester and, again, socialized with people well-above his natural station of the son of a stonemason from Dorset. After five years, it appears that his health suffered from city dwelling and he returned to his home territory. His experiences had taught him that he had ambitions that went beyond merely being an architect but also gave him a social framework to understand Londoners' tastes and expectations.

Of course, Hardy would later borrow extensively from his direct experience with stonemasonry, carpentry and architecture in his novels and poems. Both his first and last published novels feature major characters who occupy some point on the spectrum of building crafters and his insider knowledge of how the vocation worked (literally) could be called upon to provide a "sense of truth" to his writing in the same way he might highlight a local turn of phrase or an almost forgotten folk ritual. Moreover, Hardy's characters seem to occupy real physical spaces, often modeled from his memory on homes, offices, churches and other types of buildings that he himself had occupied or studied.

Perhaps I'm stretching credulity with my final point here but, as he began to tackle the idea of producing a novel, I think it would be unwise to overlook his experiences as a designer of spaces in relation to his ability to create within the very structured form of the English novel of the period. The creative journey from serialization to three volume release and finally into one volume form imposed three different sets of structural demands upon his stories. This ability to think about the structure of a story in three-dimensions as it were was no small feat and yet it was one he seemed to master by his fourth novel, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), completed only four years after his first, the unpublished The Poor Man and the Lady.

Hardy all but abandoned the craft of architecture after his first novel's publication with the grand exception of his home, Max Gate, the home he designed and had built for him outside of Dorchester. As I hope I've been able to demonstrate here, Hardy benefitted generously from not only the skills and experiences he gained in his time as an architect but also the opportunities the profession offered him to expand himself socially and intellectually into the man he would eventually become.