Syphilis at the TLS

If Thomas Hardy lived and wrote in the permanent fear of his own syphilis on top of searing guilt at his wife's death from the disease, we must look again at everything we have ever thought about the greatest English writer after Shakespeare.

The TLS office today is full of boxes as we prepare to move to new offices on the other side of London.

But the talk here is still of Robert Alan Frizzell's analysis (see below) and the difference it makes to how  we will now see Hardy's doom-laden heroes, the sexual daring, that poetic expression guilt beyond any previous understanding.

When we are ensconced in our new home, we will return to these themes. In the meantime, we wait to see what others think.

Comments

[Candadai Tirumalai]

Hardy is arguably "the greatest English writer after Shakespeare". Moving away from the "pox", I reflect that neither writer was a university man. The University Wits of his time could be condescending towards Shakespeare, and Hardy presented a less than flattering portrait of Oxford in "Jude", though he accepted honorary fellowships at both Oxford and Cambridge. There is bound to be a certain tension between writers and the academy but one wonders if genuinely congenial relations would not help both. Matthew Arnold comes to mind as a mediating figure, as does Professor John Carey in our own time, for he has both interpreted and encouraged contemporary writing.

[Clayton Burns]

The Frizzell diagnosis notes that "the evidence of the poems" shows that Hardy intended that his infection of his wife with syphilis should become known. Dr. Frizzell identifies "The Interloper" as perhaps "above all" containing pointers to syphilis. Dr. Frizzell quotes the motto "And I saw the figure and visage of Madness seeking for a home," as if that "dreadful epigraph" might somehow support the diagnosis of syphilis. The "pale Form" in the final stanza is to be preferred, according to the doctor, to "Pestilence, 'under which best lives corrode.'"

But Samuel Hynes's notes to "The Interloper" tell us that Vere Collins asked Hardy what it was "under which best lives corrode." When Hardy replied Madness, and later changed it to Insanity, and mused about how he could make the point clear, it was Collins who recommended a motto. Therefore, that "under which best lives corrode" is not Pestilence. Patently not.

Dr. Frizzell asks: "Was there ever a better and more succinct description of tertiary/quaternary syphilis than these five words?" That the words could be seen as a good description of syphilis is beside the point. Totally. If the motto is a pointer to a diagnosis, the diagnosis is madness, not syphilis. How could such an obvious point have gotten past both Dr. Frizzell and another person?

The doctor offers suggestions and then abruptly decides to present quite wild leaps in his reasoning as facts. He should not have said this: "But however unlucky [Hardy] was to contract the disease, he was well aware that Emma, whom he must have infected in his turn, had by far the worst of it...". The diagnosis is in fact a sham.

Let's start with fundamentals. Where is there a shred of evidence about syphilis in "The Interloper"? You could index this "diagnosis" under "chimerical--pin the tail on the donkey."