The Unhappy Idyl

'DEAREST EMMIE' by Carl J. Weber. 111 pages. St Martin's Press. $5.

The tragedy of Emma Lavinia Gifford, as she repeatedly confided to her diary, was that she married a man beneath her. He was a writer of sorts, but so was she; and when callers such as Ford Madox Ford and Sir Edmund Gosse dropped around, she was fond of pulling out her poems and rattling off lines like these:

There's a song of a bird in a tree,-- A song that is fresh, gay, and free, The voice of a last summer's thrush, Shaking out his trills--hush! hush!

On such occasions, a visitor once recalled, Emma's husband would sit in a corner listening without comment and with a "rather wry smile" on his face.

Emma was married to Thomas Hardy for 38 years.* Her style as a literary wife is suggested by the remark she made about the admiring ladies who thronged about her husband in London after he became famous: "They are the poison," said Emma complacently. "I am the antidote." Emma never let Hardy forget that his literary reputation was vastly inflated, and after she failed to talk him out of publishing that "vicious" novel Jude the Obscure, she lost virtually all interest in her husband's writings. But at the same time her interest in her own innocuous poems continued to grow.

Frightened Man. Emma was the daughter of a small town lawyer who, by her own testimony, had provided her with "exquisite home-training and refinement." Poor Hardy was born the son of a mason. Soon after their marriage she was belittling her husband in public; Robert Louis Stevenson's wife remembered Hardy as "a pale, gentle, frightened little man that one felt an instinctive tenderness for, with a wife--ugly is no word for it!" While Hardy suffered his fright in silence, Emma kept score of her numerous grievances against him in a notebook titled "What I Thought of My Husband"; Hardy himself discovered it as he was going through his wife's effects after her death and found it so appalling that he threw it in the fire.

Just what Hardy really thought of Emma nobody knows. His letters to her, here published for the first time, are brisk, brief, clear, and concerned with those few topics Hardy could discuss with his wife without getting into an argument--the weather, wedding receptions and funerals, train schedules and cats (Emma kept a houseful). Most of the letters were written from London, where Hardy went periodically on literary business, and addressed to Emma at the country home Hardy had built in Dorsetshire.

The tone is unfailingly pedestrian. When he misses his appointed train, Hardy dutifully writes to explain his absence, as on Oct. 12, 1892: "I have attended Tennyson's funeral--and find I cannot get back very well tonight--so I will wait till tomorrow--returning about the usual time--though possibly by the Salisbury train, about twenty minutes later than the 6:13. George Meredith was there--also Henry James, Huxley, etc." When Hardy becomes more solicitous, it is almost always to forestall a visit by his wife: "Though I should like to see you in London I feel, to tell the truth, rather anxious about your venturing up here. The hotel is so very noisy just now, and the heat so great, that I fear you will be prostrated."

Death on Contact. Yet the letters, without intending to, reveal things about the unhappy marriage. The tone becomes more strained, and "My dearest" gives way to "My dear" in 1893, following Hardy's meeting with the young Mrs. Arthur Henniker, who made the aging Hardy feel, in his own phrase, "a time-torn man" and came close to rupturing his marriage. The letters are full of mild, passing references to Emma's erratic behavior--her abrupt cancellation of a garden party without informing the guests, her abrupt departure for Calais without informing her husband. And continually there is apparently a kind of dreary obeisance to Emma's perpetual pains--her lame knee and sprained ankle, chills and influenza, shingles and failing eyesight. A reader can easily sympathize with a wry line in her husband's notebook: "Love lives on propinquity, but dies of contact."

What the letters do not suggest--and what Hardy himself apparently did not entirely understand--was the surprising flood of grief he felt when his wife died. For the last 16 years of his life he poured out poems to the memory of an ideal marriage that could scarcely have existed.

* Somerset Maugham has repeatedly--and plausibly--denied that he was attempting a portrait of their marriage in Cakes and Ale. Maugham's warmhearted Rosie bears no resemblance to Emma, and her aging novelist-husband only sketchily resembles Hardy.

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