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Journal
of the T. E. Lawrence Society Vol. VI, No. 2, Spring 1997 Edited by Philip Kerrigan Thomas Hardy and T. E. Lawrence:
A Literary Friendship If friendship can be defined as a mutual regard cherished by kindred minds, then the relationship between Thomas Hardy and T. E. Lawrence was surely a friendship of the highest order. By the end of World War I, due to his exploits in Arabia, Lawrence had become a household word. Hardy, meanwhile, forty-eight years Lawrence's senior, was a highly respected author and poet who was still a voice from the Victorian era through his novels and poetry. Though it is widely acknowledged that Hardy's poetry remained somewhat static in style; that the mature Hardy's poems were similar in theme to his early works and, therefore, difficult to date accurately; it is possible that some of Hardy's poems written between 1923 and his death in 1928 show traces of influence from this remarkable friendship. Exploration of several areas of both men's writings, their philosophies, and the friendship itself, reveals interesting similarities and phrases in at least two of Hardy's dateable poems, which may be a result of Lawrence's frequent presence at Max Gate, Florence and Thomas Hardy's Dorset home. In 1922, Lawrence, with the Arab Revolt a mere five years behind him, tried to shake the fame that had been thrust upon him, by joining the fledgling Royal Air Force under the assumed names of Ross, and later on, Shaw. During the years between the war and the RAF, Lawrence had spent several months in residence as a Fellow at All Souls' College, Oxford1 where he had the chance to cultivate the acquaintances and friendships of many men of letters: George Bernard Shaw, E. M. Forster, Edward Garnett (Nutting, p. 196), Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden (Mack, p. 286). It was through this friendship with Robert Graves, who knew the Hardys, that an introduction was arranged. In a letter dated 20 March 1923, Lawrence commented to Graves: 'He's a proper poet and a fair novelist, in my judgement, and it would give me a feeling of another milestone passed if I might meet him. . .' (J. Wilson, p. 258). Five days later, at Graves' suggestion, Lawrence wrote to Mrs Hardy, introducing himself, requesting a meeting, and offering the compliment that 'The Dynasts and the other poems are so wholly good to my taste' (ibid., p. 258). On 29 March, Lawrence made the first of many calls to Max Gate (ibid., p.715). Lawrence had long admired Hardy's poetical style as he had included four of Hardy's poems - 'To the Moon,' 'When I set out for Lyonnesse,' 'The Ivy-Wife,' and 'The Impercipient: (At a Cathedral Service)' plus the final chorus from The Dynasts - in a personal anthology of poems later published under the title of Minorities2 (Lawrence, 1971, p. 53-64). A Hardy biographer, Michael Millgate, firmly states that there was a camaraderie from the start: 'liking and admiration on both sides was immediate and strong, and Lawrence returned to Max Gate whenever his duties would allow him to do so, trying (not always successfully) to avoid encounters with other visitors who might know and recognise him.' (p. 549). During that first spring, Lawrence made three visits and Mrs Hardy felt he was 'a most brilliant, magnetic young man'3 (Gittings and Manton, p.96). In June, Lawrence returned their hospitality by entertaining them and E. M. Forster at a 'sumptuous tea' at his cosy, yet simple cottage located near Moreton in Dorset (Millgate, p. 554). Jeremy Wilson, in his 1989 biography of T. E. Lawrence, maintains that 'during the summer Lawrence's new friendship with the Hardys had deepened. He now visited Max Gate. . . at least once a fortnight' (p. 722). This meant he had to contend with the Hardys' fearsome Caesar terrier, Wessex. Apparently the 'indulged dog was a menace to all guests. . . According to Cynthia Asquith, [a guest], it "contested" every forkful on the way to her mouth. . . The respectable trousers of both John Galsworthy and the surgeon, Sir Frederick Treves, were reduced to tatters. . . Only T. E. Lawrence of Arabia, perhaps by some esoteric desert magic, managed to remain unscathed' (Brown and Cave, p. 178; Gittings, p. 207). Lawrence's mesmerizing effect had obviously reached beyond Wessex to the Hardys themselves, and to their tight circle of acquaintances. In a letter to Florence Barger, E. M. Forster wrote: 'To be with him [Lawrence], or to read him, is a great experience, as he has the power of making one feel one could do all he has done. I don't know whether this is a mark of genius, certainly few people have it' (Brown and Cave, frontispiece). Florence Hardy echoed these sentiments in a letter of her own to Louisa Yearsley, her younger, more urbane friend (Gittings, p. 181): 'he "utterly captivated" Hardy by a life and personality that had been so unlike Hardy's own' (ibid., p.204). Gittings states further that members of Hardy's tight literary circle such as Siegfried Sassoon, Walter de la Mare, E.M. Forster, John Galsworthy and J.M. Barrie (ibid., p. 194) were frequent guests at Max Gate and were fascinated by Hardy: 'To them he seemed a living link with an incredible past of English letters, a Victorian who had achieved his reputation before the Queen died, now creating work that was as much of the twentieth century as their own' (ibid., p. 204). This statement alone indicates forward-thinking changes in Hardy's style, which critics, in general, seem reluctant to acknowledge. As the months of 1923 and 1924 passed, the childless Hardy developed an extraordinary affection for Lawrence (a role Lawrence also played to the [George Bernard] Shaws) - almost as a surrogate son (Brown and Cave, p.178). Since Thomas Hardy left no intimate journals and apparently wrote few letters of a personal nature (Hynes, p. 8), the inner details - his private feelings about people, books, triumphs, despair - are denied to scholars. For glimpses into the mind of Hardy, we must turn to Florence Hardy, who maintained a lively correspondence with friends. She may have spoken for both of them when she wrote to Sydney Cockerell in 1927: 'He [Lawrence] is one of the few entirely satisfactory people in the world. He can be so very kind' (Mack, p. 344). And in a letter to Robert Graves, the man responsible for their friendship, Mrs Hardy wrote: 'I consider him the most marvellous human being I have ever met. It is not his exploits in Arabia that attract me, nor the fact that he is a celebrity: it is his character that is so splendid' (Mack, p.447). With shining recommendations such as these, Lawrence must have had some impact on Hardy. It is unimaginable that conversational topics encompassed only such mundane issues as Wessex's latest escapades or Lawrence's newest Brough Superior motorcycle, when Lawrence himself recorded in a letter to Robert Graves that 'he [Hardy] takes me as soberly as he would take John Milton (how sober that name is), considers me as carefully, is as interested in me. . .' (Lawrence, Letters, p.430). Lawrence did not write compliments such as this one capriciously. If Lawrence did indeed have an impact on Hardy, he was not the first to do so. Although most critics hold a consensus of opinion that Hardy's poetry shows little sign of outside influence, Hardy himself, in a rare personal note, wrote of his friend, Sir Leslie Stephen, remarking that, 'Stephen's philosophy influenced [my] own for many years, indeed, more than that of any other contemporary' (Orel, p.139). Mr Orel, in his article on the literary friendships of Thomas Hardy, maintains that 'Stephen gave Hardy more lucid, usable advice than any other editor in his entire career' (ibid., p.139). Lawrence may not have given Hardy advice, but their minds had similar attitudes towards life and literature. Lawrence may have been a celebrity of sorts and a quasi-eccentric, but he was also known to have a streak of stoicism which must have appealed to Hardy. According to critic Samuel Hynes, three themes constantly reappear in Hardy's poetry: 'mutability and the passing of time, mortality, and the courage of stoicism' (p.179). Lawrence had made a career out of self-denial, testing himself, and pushing his limits. 'In Lawrence was a hardness with self, an unforgivingness, a stoicism, a refusal of indulgence' (Pfaff, p.115). Thomas Hardy may have seen in Lawrence the person he longed to be when he wrote in his poem 'Epitaph': 'I never cared for life: Life cared for me | And hence I owed it some fidelity' (Poems, p.695). In his own individual expression, Lawrence felt so strongly about not caring for life that he personally carved 'Does not care' in Greek letters on the stone lintel of the front door to his cottage (Mack, photograph between pp. 420 and 421). Lawrence would later write in The Mint, his account of RAF recruit training: 'Service life in this way teaches a man to live largely on little' (p.248). 'Airmen have no possessions, few ties, little daily care. . . And airmen are cared for as little as they care' (p.249). Hardy must have felt that here was a man cut from the same cloth as he himself. Besides stoicism, both Hardy and the younger Lawrence shared other obsessive ideas which appear in Lawrence's only poem, 'To S. A.', a dedicatory work (first drafted in 1919-1920, well before Lawrence met Hardy, and polished slightly for the subscribers' printing) prefacing his monumental Seven Pillars of Wisdom,4 and in a short, reflective poem written by Hardy on the occasion of his eighty-sixth birthday, 'He Never Expected Much' (Poems, p.886). Samuel Hynes lists these obsessive ideas' of Hardy's as: 'infidelities of all possible kinds, the inevitable loss of love, the destructiveness of time, the implacable indifference of nature, the cruelty of men, the irreversible pastness of the past' (p.4). Considering the fact that 1926 saw both Hardy's eighty-sixth birthday and the publication of Seven Pillars of Wisdom5, it seems no accident that there are correspondences in both poems. Lawrence writes in the first two stanzas of 'To S. A.' of the inevitable loss of love: I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands Hardy's version of the inevitable loss of love comes in the second stanza of his poem, 'He Never Expected Much': (p.886)
As a point of curiosity, it should be noted that in line four, Hardy chooses a particular combination of words which I find interesting. He employs the phrase 'From clouds and hills around,' which I take as a subtle reference to Lawrence, as the name of Lawrence's cottage was Clouds Hill. Just as Hardy phrases the loss of love through death in the line: 'Till they dropped underground,' Lawrence expands on this thought in the third stanza of 'To S. A.': Love, the way-weary, groped to your body, our brief wage The idea of the implacable indifference of nature is set forth by Hardy when he ends the first verse with: 'Never, I own, expected I | That life would all be fair. ' Lawrence's words are stronger, but still convey a similar message: Men prayed me that I set our work, the inviolate house, What can be said about Hardy's poetry can, I feel, be said about Lawrence's only poetic effort: 'His poetry is about the effort, and the failures, not about the answers' (Hynes, p.41). The limit of tone in Hardy's poems - 'nostalgic, ironic, pessimistic'
(ibid., p.4) - rings true for Lawrence's 'To S. A.' Lawrence felt that he had betrayed the cause for Arab independence in 1918 by being party to British ambitions in Arabia and the Levant once the Germans were defeated. From the time he was a young boy who held a romantic fascination with the Crusades, he had dreamed of being the instrument by which a people would win their freedom (Hart, p.5). All his life had focused on this goal. His bitterness in 1920 over the outcome of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, which carved up the Middle East and gave Britain the mandate over Palestine, was forever a blemish on his conscience. With this background in mind, several lines in 'A Philosophical Fantasy' may be direct references to Lawrence's personal disappointment via Hardy's debate between God and man. Several lines into the second verse, Hardy writes:
Hardy's version of Lawrence's disappointment is similar to that of Lawrence's which was discussed earlier in 'To S. A.': 'But for fit monument I shattered it, unfinished. . .' Lawrence struggled all his adult life for the answer as to why he 'let his aim be thwarted,' but there is no evidence that he ever found it. The Hardy-Lawrence friendship flourished at this intense level for only about four years, for in 1927, Lawrence was assigned to a posting in India. He and Mrs Hardy would continue to correspond, but the closeness of the relationship had come to an end. Florence Hardy describes Lawrence's final departure from Max Gate:
It is more than likely each felt that he would not see the other again, as was the case, for Hardy passed away in 1928. Mrs Hardy was convinced that had Lawrence been in England rather than in India, her husband might have lived. After the funeral, Florence Hardy wrote to Lawrence: 'You seem nearer to him, somehow, than anyone else, certainly more akin' (Brown and Cave, p.178). Assessing the influences of one man upon the works of another is hardly an exact science, especially when both are famous in their own right. Hardy's lack of personal writings does not help the situation, nor does Lawrence's habitual self-effacement. We must rely on Florence Hardy's insights and comments as to the bond between the two men, along with marked similarities in personal philosophies and poetical ideas, to piece together the total picture. If indeed Lawrence was as close to Thomas Hardy as the evidence and personal memoirs indicate, then, human nature being what it is, the elder Hardy would have incorporated traces of this unique and cherished liaison into at least a few of his later poems, if for no other reason than to honour this unusual friendship.
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