Silences (26 page)

*
The newsstory-obituary erred as to when
Life in the Iron Mills
was written, saying that Rebecca “was then less than 20 years old.” The lead paragraph and the account as a whole gave as much space to her family as to her: “Mrs. Rebecca Harding Davis, 79 years old, widow of the late L. Clarke Davis, at one time editor of The Philadelphia Public Ledger, mother of
Richard Harding Davis, the novelist and dramatist, and herself a novelist and editorial writer of power, died here to-night of heart disease.”

**
Since 1971 when this was written and published with
Life in the Iron Mills
in the Feminist Press reprint series, there has been a revival of interest in her work.
Life in the Iron Mills
is increasingly taught in literature courses, American Studies and
Women’s Studies classes. I first taught it, in Xerox copies made from the 1861
Atlantic,
at Amherst College in 1969.

*
From Walt Whitman’s “Yonnondio.”

**
C. E. Norton was Charles Eliot Norton, editor, man of literature, Harvard professor. He left his library to that university.

*
Only Elizabeth Stuart Lyon Phelps, herself largely forgotten, acknowledged the debt, the influence, paying tribute
to Rebecca as “writing with an ardor that was human, and a passion that was art.” In her reminiscences,
Chapters in a Life
, she writes of
Life in the Iron Mills
as: “a distinct crisis for one young writer at the point where intellect and moral nature meet. . . . One could never again say that one did not understand. The claims of toil and suffering upon ease had assumed a new form. For me they
acquired a force which has never let me go.” Phelps’s “The Twelfth of January” (
Atlantic Monthly
, November 1868), in which 112 mill girls are burned to death in a textile mill fire (an actual incident), and her
Silent Partner
(1871) were directly inspired by Rebecca’s work. So, less directly, were the
Story of Avis
and
Dr. Zay
.

PART TWO

Acerbs, Asides, Amulets, Exhumations, Sources,

Deepenings, Roundings, Expansions

                  
Much of this aftersection is the words of others—some of them unknown or little known, others of them great and famous. Each quotation, as each reference to lives, is selectively chosen for maximum significance; to become—or to become again—current; to occur and recur; to aim.

     
             
The organization follows the order of thought in the original essays, page by page, and is so keyed.
^▴

▴
ESSAY PAGE NUMBER TO WHICH EACH REFERS
.

SILENCES IN LITERATURE–II

SILENCES OF THE GREAT IN ACHIEVEMENT:

(Primarily in Their Own Words)

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
^▴

“Less and less shrink the visions then vast in me,” writes Thomas Hardy in his thirty-year ceasing from novels after the Victorian vileness to his
Jude the Obscure
(“so ended his prose contributions to literature, his experiences. . . having killed all his interest in this form.”)

It was a twenty-eight year killing. Every aim and aspiration of Hardy’s in the writing of fiction (except for the getting of his living by it) was thwarted. He had sought to write “the substance of life only”—(of working people, of women; illuminating their constricted circumstances; according them and their lives full dimension and tragedy)—and to create fiction “near to poetry.” Tenaciously
though he fought, always he ended up not being able to attain—or having to damage—“his artistic whole.”

In the earlier writing years, he had had neither the confidence (by reason of origin) nor the means, to write what or how he wished. Later, even with
Tess,
even with
Jude,
the great mature novels written when he was financially less at the mercy of publishers, there yet remained the massive
class and sexual (i.e., sexist) censorship of his time; the rigidly circumscribed form of the novel as then practiced, to continue to defeat him. He was fifty-eight when he was “grated to pieces by the constant attrition,”
gave up imaginative prose, thirty years of writing vitality still in him.

The record is in his own statements, understatements rather—for he was the most reticent of writers.
Whether in first or third person, these are all Hardy’s own words:
^*

1873

            
He perceived that he was . . . committed by circumstances to novel-writing as a regular trade; and that hence he would, he deemed, have to look for material in manners—in ordinary social and fashionable life, as other novelists did. Yet he took no interest in manners, but in the substance of life only. So far,
what he had written had not been novels at all as usually understood.

1884

            
Hardy fancied he had damaged [his
Mayor of Casterbridge]
more recklessly as an artistic whole in the interest of the newspaper in which it appeared serially, than perhaps any of his other novels; his aiming to get an incident into almost every week’s part, causing him . . . to add events to the narrative somewhat
too freely.

1887

            
The ending of [
The Woodlanders
] hinted rather than stated . . . that the heroine is doomed to an unhappy life with an inconstant husband. I could not accentuate this strongly in the book, by reason of the conventions of the libraries, etc. Since it was written, however, truth to character is not considered quite such a crime in literature as it was formerly.

1889–1890

            
In October [1889], as much of
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
as was written was offered . . . to
Murray’s Magazine.
It was declined and returned . . . virtually on the score of its improper explicitness. . . . The editor of
Macmillan’s Magazine
. . . declined [it] for practically the same reason.

            
Hardy would now have much preferred to finish the story and bring it out in volume
form only, but there were reasons why he could not afford to do this. . . . Some chapters or parts of chapters [were] cut out . . . till they could be put back in their places at the printing of the whole in volume form. In addition several passages were modified. . . . But the work was sheer drudgery.

1890

            
If the true artist ever weeps, it is at the fearful price he has to pay for
the privilege of writing in the language, no less a price than the complete extinction of sympathetic belief in his personages in the mind of every mature and penetrating reader.
^*

1891

            
. . . During the publication of
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
as a serial in
The Graphic
. . . the editor objected to the description of Angel Clare carrying in his arms, across a flooded lane, Tess and
her three dairymaid companions. He suggested that it would be more decorous and suitable for the pages of a periodical intended for family reading if the damsels were wheeled across the land in a wheelbarrow. This was accordingly done.

                  
The Graphic
[also] refused to print the chapter describing the christening of Tess’s illegitimate infant. This . . . was afterwards restored
to the novel, where it was considered one of the finest passages.

1892

            
. . . The tediousness of the alterations and restorations had made him weary of [
Tess
].

1893–1895, during the writing of
Jude the Obscure
(“the tragedy of unfulfilled aims”), eight years in the gestation and closest of all his novels to his heart, Hardy again had to continuously alter, invent substitute scenes
and prose suitable for magazine serial publication.

1894

            
. . . Restoring the Ms. of
Jude the Obscure
to its original state.

            
. . . On account of the labour of altering [it] to suit the magazine,
and then having to alter it back, I have lost energy for revising and improving the original as I meant to do.

1895

            
You have hardly an idea how poor and feeble the
book seems to me, as executed, beside the idea of it that I had formed in prospect.

1896, in the midst of his private despair over his failure to make
Jude
the book he had wished, and of the public revilement of it, he wrote in his notebooks:

            
Poetry. Perhaps I can express more fully in verse, ideas and emotions which run counter to the inert crystallized opinion—hard as a rock—which
the vast body of men have vested interests in supporting. . . . If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone.

1897

            
. . . So ended his prose contributions to literature . . . his experiences of the few preceding years having killed all his interest in this form of imaginative work (which had ever been secondary to his interest in verse).

1897–1898

            
. . . [All] wellnigh compelled him, in his own judgment at any rate, if he wished to retain any shadow of self-respect, to abandon at once [this] form of literary art. . . .

            
. . . The change, after all, was not so great as it seemed. It was not as if he had been a writer of novels proper, and as more specifically understood, that is, stories of modern artificial
life and manners showing a certain smartness of treatment. He had mostly aimed at keeping his narratives as close to natural life and as near to poetry in their subject as the conditions would allow, and had regretted that those conditions would not let him keep them nearer still.

How deeply he lived his books in their creating—the younger writer so possessed that in

            
. . . writing
Far From the Madding Crowd
—sometimes indoors, sometimes out—when he would occasionally find himself without a scrap of paper at the very moment that he felt volumes . . . he
would use large dead leaves, white chips left by woodcutters, or pieces of stone or slate that came to hand.