Wednesday
Jun. 2, 2004
A Private Man on Public Men
WEDNESDAY, 2 JUNE, 2004
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Poems: "A Private Man on Public Men," by Thomas Hardy, from The Complete Poems (Macmillan Publishing Co.)
A Private Man on Public Men
When my contemporaries were driving
Their coach through Life with strain and striving,
And raking riches into heaps,
And ably pleading in the Courts
With smart rejoinders and retorts,
Or where the Senate nightly keeps
Its vigils, till their fames were fanned
By rumour's tongue throughout the land,
I lived in quiet, screened, unknown,
Pondering upon some stick or stone,
Or news of some rare book or bird
Latterly bought, or seen, or heard,
Not wishing ever to set eyes on
The surging crowd beyond the horizon,
Tasting years of moderate gladness
Mellowed by sundry days of sadness,
Shut from the noise of the world without,
Hearing but dimly its rush and rout,
Unenvying those amid its roar,
Little endowed, not wanting more.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of columnist Frank Rich, born in Washington, D.C. (1949). His parents divorced when he was a young child, and his mother started taking him to see Broadway plays because she knew that it was a form of escape for him. He saved all of his ticket stubs, and when he grew up he could remember exactly where he sat in the theater and what was happening in his life when he saw each play. He became the drama critic for the New York Times in 1980, but in 1993 he switched to feature and opinion articles. He's now an Associate Editor for the Times. His memoir Ghost Light (2000) came out four years ago.
It's the birthday of the Marquis de Sade, born in Paris (1740). He wrote about cannibalism, necrophilia, rape, and murder, and it's from the Marquis de Sade that we got the word "sadism," which means, "the deriving of pleasure from cruelty."
His work was banned for much of the nineteenth century, but some writers and artists got their hands on it, and it had a big influence on the French novelist Gustave Flaubert and the French poet Charles Baudelaire. "Sadism" was introduced as a pathological term in 1886, by a German psychiatrist.
It's the birthday of novelist Barbara Pym, born in Shropshire, England (1913). She published five novels in the '50s and '60s, including Some Tame Gazelle (1950) and No Fond Return of Love (1961), but then her work fell out of fashion and didn't publish another novel for the next sixteen years. She retired to the countryside with her sister in 1974.
Then, in 1977, in an article in the Times Literary Supplement, the writers Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin both named her as one of the great neglected authors of the twentieth century. She suddenly became one of the most popular novelists in both England and America. She published three more novels, including Quartet in Autumn (1977), and all of her earlier novels were reissued.
It's the birthday of novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, born in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, England (1840). Dorset was a poor, rural county where life hadn't changed very much for hundreds of years and older people spoke a local dialect similar to German. Hardy would stay up late reading poetry and magazines, and listening to his grandmother tell stories about the time of Napoleon. His father was a mason and a building contractor, and when Hardy was sixteen he left school and became an apprentice to a well-known architect.
He was more interested in poetry than architecture, though, and he would get up early every morning to study Latin and Greek. When he was twenty-two he moved to London, where he began writing his own poetry. He wasn't able to publish it, and so he tried writing novels instead. His first novel, Desperate Remedies, was published anonymously in 1871. His first big success was Far from the Madding Crowd, published in 1874. He went on to write The Return of the Native (1878), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895), and became one of the most popular novelists of his time.
Most of his novels were first published serially in popular magazines, and Hardy made sure not to write anything that might be considered too offensive to his readers. But when he published Tess of the D'Urbervilles in book form, he included several chapters that were cut from the magazine version.
Tess of the D'Urbervilles is about a young woman who has an illegitimate child and eventually goes on to murder the child's father, but Hardy portrayed the woman sympathetically and gave the novel the subtitle "A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented." Critics called the book shameless and immoral. His next novel, Jude the Obscure (1895), created an even bigger scandal; a bishop publicly burned the novel, and convinced several bookstores to remove it from their shelves.
Hardy had always thought of writing novels as no more than a way to make a living, and by this point he was so fed up with the criticism that he announced he would never write fiction again. He had been writing poetry for over thirty years, and now that he had become a famous novelist he was able to publish much of what he had written. His first collection, Wessex Poems, was published in 1898, and he would publish nothing but poetry for the last thirty years of his life. His Collected Poems came out in 1930.
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