Graham Hough

I first met William Empson fifty years ago, when he was teaching in Japan and I in Singapore. I was rather frightened of him. Only about my own age, he was a great deal more sophisticated and infinitely more intelligent. It was plain that he didn’t suffer fools gladly, and in his presence I often felt rather a fool. He had an impatient way of being always two jumps ahead of you in any discussion. The best response to that was to slow the pace and insist that the steps of the argument should be trodden one by one. This he would not resist; if pulled up, he would always make things plain. But I often got shy of these delaying tactics, and so was left stumbling in the rear.

It is not the easiest thing to discuss a novel that is the fourth of a series of five. Sebastian is not properly intelligible without an acquaintance with its predecessors, Monsieur (1974), Livia (1978), Constance (1982); and the ultimate destination, if there is to be one, is not yet visible. As it happened, I read them in the wrong order, but such is the vitality and attack of Durrell’s writing that it hardly mattered. Enter them anywhere and one is sucked into the stream.

There has been an abundance of good critical writing about Thomas Hardy, from Lionel Johnson in 1894 to our own day, but his biography has been in a curious condition from the start. The authorised version (Early Life, 1928; Later Years, 1930) is supposed to be by Florence, his second wife, but is wholly composed from notes by Hardy himself, and for the most part actually dictated by him. Along with a record of the basic external facts it gives, often unknowingly, an incomparable insight into certain aspects of Hardy’s mind. But there is a good deal that it leaves out. Ordinary family discretion was compounded by an anxious secretiveness to produce something like a touched-up Edwardian photograph, not exactly false, revealing more of the truth than it means to, yet keeping a great deal in the shadows. The standard life apart from this is Carl Weber’s Hardy of Wessex (1940). It fills out and amends the quasi-autobiography with good judgment and reasonable candour, but it relies heavily on self-revelation in the novels, and is rather short on concrete detail. R.L. Purdy’s invaluable Bibliographical Study (1954) gives far more than its name implies, and is packed with biographical information. And innumerable references to Hardy, pen-portraits and sketches, appear in the memoirs of others. So altogether a completer picture than the one he issued himself has long been beginning to form. But the full-scale biography has never been attempted till now. There are times when a nail gets knocked in so thoroughly that no one need touch it again, and this is the case with Michael Mill-gate’s biography, which is surely, if the word means anything, definitive. Millgate has been in a strong position to make it so. He has already written a detailed study of the novels, he is evidently a close student of the poetry, and with Purdy is co-editor of Hardy’s letters, of which the third volume (of a projected seven) has just appeared. This is a superb edition, comprehensive, full but discreetly unobtrusive in its annotation, and impeccable in its editorial method. Without embarking on the troubled sea of interpretation, Purdy and Millgate between them have given as detailed a study of Hardy’s career as any that exists for any 19th-century author. The edition of the letters is complementary to Millgate’s biography, and evidently planned in parallel with it. No source of information has been left untapped, printed, manuscript or oral; and I cannot suppose that this record can be added to or in any substantial way altered.

It is not often that a literary critic receives the crown of a collected edition, and if he does he is probably something more than a literary critic. So it is with Lionel Trilling, whose complete works are now appearing from the Oxford University Press. There is indeed a novel, and a few short stories, besides the works of literary history and criticism, but it is not chiefly by these that he exceeds the limits of the man of letters. It is as a critic of culture, habits of thought and feeling, extending on occasion to the borders of politics, that Trilling has chiefly presented himself. ‘My own interests,’ he says, ‘lead me to see literary situations as cultural situations, and cultural situations as great elaborate fights about moral issues.’ He speaks of his ‘cultural and non-literary method’, and defines as his first concern ‘the animus of the author, the objects of his will, the things he wants or wants to have happen’. This brings Trilling a good deal nearer to the Victorian sage than to the 20th-century New Critic; and, as has often been said, his purposes, his relation to the life around him, were close in spirit to those of the subject of his first book – Matthew Arnold.

It is a curious thing that while so many critics are busy telling each other that literature is a linguistic game, that novels are purely formal structures and that their pretensions to represent the world are illusory, novelists continue to write what in any serious sense must be considered historical novels. By a historical novel I mean, not period romance, but a fiction that is tied by close and numerous links to a real place at a real time, its essence being to tell a truth about an independently verifiable world, outside the realm of fiction. One of the most famous of these came out in 1948: it was Alan Paton’s Cry, the beloved country, so intimately bound up with South African history that Paton had to write a preface to distinguish those parts which are formally fiction. ‘As a social record,’ he concluded, ‘it is the plain and simple truth.’ Of course it is not merely a social record: it is the deeply imagined story of an individual life. And Paton has had to devise a language to tell the story in, for the simple Zulu parson who is the protagonist does not deal in the current coin of modern English speech. So that the literary question was as demanding as the historical one; the political act cannot be separated from the work of art. Now, after thirty years, comes Ah, but your land is beautiful, with similar themes and settings, the date of the action a few years later, the conflicts more distinctly those of the modern world. And though the continuity with Paton’s earlier work is complete, this is a different kind of book. Cry, the beloved country is an exploration both of the racial problem and of personal suffering; and its quasi-Biblical language is a means of penetrating into a sorrowful and bewildered consciousness. Ah, but your land is beautiful is a panorama, a chronicle, with a wide variety of characters and the interest distributed between them. It is a less lyrical and more political book, in part an evident roman-à-clef. The period is the 1950s, the time of the Passive Resistance campaign, the Sophiatown removals, the emergence of the South African Liberal Party and the early stages of the Nationalist government.