The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [306]
His last major novel, Jude the Obscure (1895), was a fitting conclusion to the sequence of stories he had written in just over 20 years, because it was little more than an unconscious spiritual autobiography. It is the only one to be set almost entirely away from Dorset. But in the eagerly self-improving young country boy, of firm religious faith, whom we meet at the beginning in a little Berkshire village, it is not difficult to see the young Hardy of 30 years before. Jude Fawley's great ambition is to journey to the university city of Christminster (Oxford), shining on the horizon: the place where he would be able to realise himself to the full, in the company of scholars and men of intellect and distinction, just as Hardy himself had dreamed of when he was young. But on his way to the distant city, in an echo of what happened in Hardy's own life, he foolishly gets lured into marriage with a gross, stupid girl who in no way measures up to his lofty spiritual aspirations. Arabella abandons him, and he meets his soulmate Sue Bridehead, an idealised version of one of those liberated young women who had so taken Hardy's fancy in the London of the 1870s, when he was already engaged to his future wife.
From then on Jude's story is one of growing agony and disillusionment. Although he has arrived in Christminster, it in no way lives up to his idealised expectations. After seeming to have won Sue, the love of his life, she then, as an elusive anima, slips away from him again, to marry his academic mentor Phillipson. He wins her back again and they have two children. But just when Jude has a last moment of hope that he and Sue might now remain together, this is shattered by the last of those horrendous, inwardly symbolic moments which chequer Hardy's last novels. Jude's young son by Arabella, `Old Father Time', stabs the two babies, then hangs himself, leaving the message `Done because we are too menny. It is the final catastrophe: the death of the children Hardy himself never had. Abandoned by Sue for the last time, Jude loses himself in an alcoholic haze. He is drawn back to live in poverty with the raddled Arabella and, before reaching the age of 30, dies a lonely, miserable death, amid the most alien surroundings imaginable.
When Jude was published it provoked uproar. Described by one reviewer as `Jude the Obscene', it was castigated as `indecent' `degenerate' and `nihilistic'. By now Hardy's outward estrangement from his roots and the world of his upbringing was so complete that when he bicycled through the village outside Dorchester where many of his relatives lived and they crowded to their cottage doors to wave to the great man, he stared stonily ahead and cycled on. The row over the book also marked his final estrangement from the increasingly evangelical and straitlaced Emma Lavinia (who signed letters to the papers 'An Old-Fashioned Englishwoman'). His only solace lay in an absurd series of infatuations with fashionable ladies up in London, would-be writers like Mrs Henniker and Agnes Grove. The scene was set for the last 30 years of his life, dominated creatively by that great flood of poems of nostalgia and loss which reached its climax after Emma's miserable and painful death in 1912: poems in which he sought to recapture that contact with the feminine which had proved so elusive through his life, and whose presence, as in Sergeant Troy's outpouring of grief over the corpse of Fanny Robin, never seemed so real to him as in death.
The other great task of Hardy's last years was the attempt to build up, through the biography he dictated to his second wife Florence, the picture of himself he wanted the world to see; in which, for instance, he portrayed his father, quite untruthfully, as feckless, and himself as the son who had single-handedly restored the fortunes