Versatile Monomaniac

By BRAD LEITHAUSER

Thomas Hardy lived to be 200 years old, or so it must have seemed to his literary competitors. He reached prominence in 1872 with his second novel, Under the Greenwood Tree, and was going strong half a century later. His last / book, a volume of poems titled Winter Words, appeared in 1928, shortly after his death at 87. In his introduction to Winter Words, Hardy crowed that he was the "only English poet who has brought out a new volume of his verse" at so advanced an age.

The deathless man keeps resurfacing, most recently in a Masterpiece Theatre adaptation of The Return of the Native and now in a huge biography, Martin Seymour-Smith's Hardy (St. Martin's Press; 886 pages; $35). The latter is bulky enough to allow carrying it to qualify as aerobic exercise; its readers may wind up as hardy as Hardy. You might expect a smaller volume, given his relatively uneventful life. Born into a family of masons, he spent his days mostly in rural Dorset. Max Gate, the mansion he built for himself and lived in for more than 40 years, was located about two miles from his birthplace.

The work by Seymour-Smith belongs to that peculiar subspecies of biography in which the author seems less intent on etching a life than on erasing previous lives: he is obsessed with discrediting earlier biographies. Hardy in recent years has been the subject of two substantial portraits, Michael Millgate's and Robert Gittings', both of which bathe him in a cold, harsh light. Seymour-Smith strives "to see how much gaiety and good humor coexisted in Hardy, with the too celebrated gloom." That's a noble-sounding goal, and yet the paradoxical result is dispiriting: a spiteful-seeming attempt to prove another's magnanimity. Seymour-Smith spends so much time snapping at his predecessors that the effect, finally, is like a scene from one of those unblinking nature documentaries where jackals, hyenas and buzzards all jostle over the same bloodied carcass.

Hardy himself seems to have viewed biographers as carrion feeders, and he labored mightily to ward them off. He did so manipulatively and obliquely -- by writing an autobiography that would appear as a biography under the name of his second wife Florence. Seymour-Smith can't quite acknowledge how characteristically -- and fascinatingly -- underhanded this step was. Things turned still more devious when Florence, after Hardy's death, reworked some passages to make his first wife Emma look more guileful and sly. What spy thriller could possibly top this for intricate ironies? Florence actually opened herself up to accusations of dishonesty for expressing her own opinions in a book published under her own name.

It's a pleasure when Seymour-Smith leaves off squabbling to examine Hardy's verse. Of course, the poems are full of squabbling too, but mostly it's the poet arguing with himself. Seymour-Smith does an admirable job of promoting Hardy's poetry above all else -- above the television adaptations, the novels that inspired them and all the unsubstantiated but unshakable rumors about the writer's romantic pursuits. (he was -- take your pick -- impotent, licentiously heterosexual or repressedly homosexual.) Hardy's life makes clear that his poetry was paramount. He trained initially as an architect, abandoned that profession for novel writing, then abandoned that one for verse writing.

Unfortunately, Seymour-Smith treats the poems as interesting chiefly for their personal revelations. He scants the trait that more than anything else defines Hardy as a poet: his structural inventiveness. The former architect retained a love of building. A recent study of Hardy estimates that he composed in more than 790 metrical forms. (A comparison with two other poets celebrated for their versatility is instructive: Swinburne wrote in about 420 forms; Browning in 200.) There's a great irony in this statistic. The most formally restless of English poets was, in his daily life, one of the most rooted.

This restlessness saves Hardy the poet from his obsessions -- you might even say his monomania. His singular stanzaic shapes, his deliberately bumpy meters, his weird triple rhymes (frowardly/untowardly) all enliven and diversify his subject matter, which otherwise would be claustrophobically narrow. The number of his poems that concern romantic triangles, with, typically, one of the three parties represented by a ghost, must surely run into the hundreds.

Emma most frequently plays the deceased member of the trio. Although in life she was a trial (like her husband), in death she became a perfect angel. It seems inevitable that Hardy would work this transformation on her behalf, given his rueful temperament. His poems are brooding, self-chiding. His life seems a variation on the biblical injunction that a man must lose himself to find himself. In Hardy's case, anything and everything had to be lost before its value could be found. He was a man for whom happiness was always just around the corner -- the corner he'd last turned. It lay forever behind him, and there was no way back.