His Only Friend
Elaine Showalter
- Hardy by Martin Seymour-Smith
Bloomsbury, 886 pp, £25.00, February 1994, ISBN 0 7475 1037 7
In the midst of writing his biography of Philip Larkin, Andrew Motion was contacted by a spiritualist who claimed to have been speaking to Larkin in the Beyond; later Larkin sent a posthumous word of approval for the book. Could the cosmic wires have been crossed and could the spiritualist have been talking to Martin Seymour-Smith? For this massive biography of Hardy – or ‘Tom’, as Seymour-Smith chummily calls him – has the vehemence of divine revelation and the fervour of personal mission. ‘I wrote Hardy,’ the author explains in a remarkable press release, because ‘never has such an indisputable giant ... been so consistently maligned and abused for so long by the literary critics.’ The intention of his biography, according to the book-jacket, is ‘to restore Hardy to his rightful place as the greatest and most versatile English author after Shakespeare’.
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