{"id":98859,"date":"2016-06-02T19:07:16","date_gmt":"2016-06-02T23:07:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=98859"},"modified":"2016-06-02T20:08:51","modified_gmt":"2016-06-03T00:08:51","slug":"thomas-hardys-letters-will-ruin-your-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/02\/thomas-hardys-letters-will-ruin-your-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Hardy\u2019s Letters Will Ruin Your Day"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Have a bad day.<\/p><\/div>\n

Are you enjoying yourself at the moment? Please stop. It\u2019s Thomas Hardy\u2019s birthday, and he will wipe the smile right off your smug, contented, life-affirming face. You\u2019re dealing with a man who knew how to deploy the word Niflheim<\/em>, defined by the\u00a0OED<\/i> as \u201cthe region of eternal darkness, mist, and cold inhabited by those who died from old age or illness.\u201d Hardy uses it to dispirited perfection in The Woodlanders<\/em>, relating a kind of failure to connect: \u201cBut he continued motionless and silent in that gloomy Niflheim or fog-land which involved him, and she proceeded on her way.\u201d Actually, The Woodlanders <\/em>is full of an evocative, despondent murkiness. It extends even to the tiny twigs on the ground, which Hardy takes care to describe as they\u2019re destroyed by a passing carriage: \u201cthey drove on out of the grove, their wheels silently crushing delicate-patterned mosses, hyacinths, primroses, lords-and-ladies, and other strange and common plants, and cracking up little sticks that lay across the track.\u201d<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ve already digressed. I\u2019m writing mainly to share a few excerpts from his letters that find him at his morose peak (nadir?). As a kind of warm-up, here\u2019s a note from 1898 in which he critiques a prime minister\u2019s funeral\u2014always an exercise in good taste.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

I went to see Gladstone \u201clying in state\u2019\u201d this morning\u2014thought it can hardly be called in state\u2014so plain, even to bareness was the whole scene\u2014a plain oak coffin on a kind of altar covered with a black cloth, a tall candle at each corner, a cross, & \u201crequiescat in pace\u201d embroidered on the white<\/em> pall under the coffin. Two carpenters in front of me said \u201ca rough job\u2014\u00be panels, & 1\u00bc framing\u201d referring to the coffin, which was made by the village carpenter at Hawarden.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Imagine the relish with which he must have recognized those two workmen as brothers-in-arms. Hardy wrote with a special zeal\u00a0for death, and his sense of the morbid often lapsed into tone deafness. He witnessed two executions when he was a boy\u2014maybe that had something to do with it. One of them was the hanging of\u00a0Elizabeth Martha Brown, who was convicted of murdering her husband. By his own account, Hardy, then only sixteen, stood close enough to the gallows to hear her gown rustling; the hanging left an indelible mark on him such that seventy years later, in 1926, he could render it vividly in a letter to Lady Pinney, casting Brown\u2019s final seconds\u00a0in an unmistakably erotic light:<\/p>\n

\n

I am ashamed to say I saw her hanged, my only excuse being that I was but a youth and had to be in the town at that time for other reasons \u2026 I remember what a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, and how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half-round and back.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He added later:<\/p>\n

\n

The hanging itself did not move me at all. But I sat on after the others went away, not thinking, but looking at the figure \u2026 turning slowly round on the rope. And then it began to rain, and then I saw\u2014they had put a cloth over the face\u2014how as the cloth got wet, her features came through it. That was extraordinary. A boy had climbed up into a tree nearby, and when she dropped he came down in a faint like an apple dropping from a tree. It was curious the two dropping together.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

You\u2019d think a latent, adolescent sadomasochism would be hard to top. You would be wrong. More dubious\u00a0still is the letter of condolence Hardy wrote to Rider Haggard in 1891, when Haggard had just lost his ten-year-old son:<\/p>\n

\n

Please give my kind regards to Mrs Haggard, & tell her how deeply our sympathy was with you both in your bereavement. Though, to be candid, I think the death of a child is never really to be regretted, when one reflects on what he has escaped.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That thought in itself is unremittingly bleak. It gets worse when you discover that Hardy lived out a kind of punch line: in 1904, he helped to judge a contest in search of Britain\u2019s most photogenic babies.<\/p>\n

Dan Piepenbring is the web editor of\u00a0<\/em>The Paris Review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Are you enjoying yourself at the moment? Please stop. It\u2019s Thomas Hardy\u2019s birthday, and he will wipe the smile right off your smug, contented, life-affirming face. You\u2019re dealing with a man who knew how to deploy the word Niflheim, defined by the\u00a0OED as \u201cthe region of eternal darkness, mist, and cold inhabited by those who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1900],"tags":[189,22610,2186,513,14974,13194,182,22607,22609,22608,7859],"class_list":["post-98859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-correspondence","tag-children","tag-condolences","tag-death","tag-depression","tag-executions","tag-funerals","tag-letters","tag-martha-brown","tag-morbidity","tag-the-woodlanders","tag-thomas-hardy"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThomas Hardy\u2019s Letters Will Ruin Your Day<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Read these short excerpts and behold the brilliance of a truly morbid mind.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/02\/thomas-hardys-letters-will-ruin-your-day\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Thomas Hardy\u2019s Letters Will Ruin Your Day by Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"June 2, 2016 \u2013 Are you enjoying yourself at the moment? 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