Happy Birthday, Thomas Hardy.

 Happy Birthday, Thomas Hardy

Where do the years go? Time seems to fly when you're having fun. It hardly seems possible but today Thomas Hardy is the ripe old age of 184. Now, this is incredible, unbelievable and you don't look a day over 100, Thomas. The mischievous glint in your eye is still there, twinkling away as if you'd never been away from the public domain. One moment you're the most distinguished author in Victorian times and the next you're in the great coffee houses of the West End of London, rubbing shoulders with Charles Dickens and, allegedly, not seeing eye to eye with him and never really on amicable, buddy, buddy terms.

Yes everybody, Thomas Hardy celebrates another birthday today but sadly, the master literary craftsman who grew up in the rural idyll of Dorset on England's shining South Coast Riviera, won't be present at his own birthday party. Hardy died in 1928 so therefore he'll be conspicuous by his absence but his legacy will remain indelible. If some of us had it our way, Thomas Hardy would have been a knight of the realm and appropriately proclaimed as Sir Thomas Hardy with all whistles blowing and bells ringing.

Time was, when everybody in England and Great Britain would have been acknowledging Hardy's birthday with dancing in the streets and hogging social media triumphantly in recognition of one of England's most poetic of all novelists and short story writers. Of course, Hardy wrote love poems with a beautiful command of the English language and he illuminated Victorian literary salons with words, sentences and paragraphs that did much to influence your thinking on your writing. Hardy made his grammar sing and chant, an author with the kind of descriptive prose that will never be forgotten.

And yet some of us were shocked to hear about the dark shadows that hovered over Hardy's life and that tragedy followed his illustrious career. My lovely wife Bev and I paid a brief visit to the house where Hardy lived with his estranged wife Emma about ten years ago. The memories were horribly overshadowed by a marriage that was never on the same page from a matrimonial point of view, so to speak. Hardy and Emma Hardy were just incompatible.

On our tour, we were taken upstairs to Emma's bedroom where, much to our surprise, we discovered a woman who, we were told, was almost permanently sick. Next to her bed was a jug of water accompanied by a hairbrush and an ornate mirror on her dressing table. The room looked both spartan and soulless, a hollow reminder of a marriage that may have been doomed from the start. And yet because Hardy was the incurable romantic poet, some of us might have assumed that everything was sweetness and light, wine and roses around the thatched cottages that decorated the English countryside and still do so.

But downstairs we saw all the incriminating evidence of a loveless relationship. There were glass cases holding now well preserved, if ancient, yellowing letters written by Emma. It became abundantly clear that Emma never really loved Thomas and the feelings were mutual. Emma was confined to bed, incapacitated almost constantly while Thomas would slouch around the house in his pyjamas for part of the day.

We were told that Thomas Hardy would wake in the morning bright and early, ready to write, pen and ink poised with perhaps a reverential homage to the quill on his table. Then he would sit at his desk and,  in the coldest of winter mornings, would throw on his night gown before embarking on one of those magnificent writing marathons that would culminate in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Far From the Madding Crowd, Jude the Obscure, Return of the Native, the Woodlanders, A Laodicean, the Woodlanders  and the Trumpet Major. 

For some of us though, Hardy described his Dorset countryside with vivid, illustrative prose, purple prose, painting perfect word pictures that suited the landscape so accurately. He became immersed in his characters, lived their lives, breathed their every breath, ate their meals and drunk their ale and mead with a hearty relish. He rubbed shoulders with both Dickens, Anthony Trollope and, quite possibly HG Wells, fraternising with the great and good of these stately scholars of the written word.

You remember your first introduction with four of the novels as mentioned above with well over a thousand pages that left you mesmerised. In the frontispiece of the book, a neatly drawn map of both Wessex, Dorset and Dorchester gave you a picturesque illustration of all of Hardy's farmlands, pubs, cottages and homely homes. Here Hardy must have been at its happiest. Here was a man who knew exactly what he was both writing and then talking about to all of his loyal followers and enthusiasts.

You could close your eyes and almost see Hardy's wondrous images: the waving sunflowers, horses lumbering up and down rows of wheat and barley, meticulously preserved grass lands, carefully nurtured cornfields, farmers in cloth caps and wearing tight braces, girls and boys chasing each other in and out of sun kissed shadows. And then there were chapters of hope, loss, grief, desolation and blissful optimism. There were Hardy's tales of a Dorset so far removed from London's metropolitan hustle and bustle that you find it hard to believe that Hardy could find so much tranquillity amid all the obvious chaos.

But he did and today we celebrate the anniversary of a man and writer who elevated English literature to its highest Empyrean plateau. You can still remember the transformative effect Thomas Hardy had on your style of writing and could only have dreamt of emulating the great man. But then you could only laugh at your foolhardiness since nobody did it better than Hardy. 

You remember the elegant turn of the phrase, the technical wizardry of Hardy's grammar,  descriptions that became a dream sequence in your mind. You remember being transported to a world where the summers used to last a lifetime, a time and place where the imagery and symbolism could be almost smelt, felt and touched. Above all, you remember the man himself, who, for all of us rustic sensitivity, never held back on all the raw human emotions and fiercely criticised those who attacked him. Happy 184th birthday Thomas Hardy. Enjoy the celebrations. Some of us will always lavish you with compliments.