Hardy and the Hag

Abstract

Most English novelists, however happy to indulge in literary gossip, are fanatically shy of talking of the realities of their private imaginative lives, just as they entertain an ancient preference for a narrating persona that is above all unpretentious and clubbable — a predilection that extends well beyond the strict arctic (where all is Snow) of the middle-class novel. I believe this proceeds far more from the cunning puritan in our make-up (our fear that investigation of the unconscious may lessen the pleasure we derive from being its playground) than from some fatuous association between amateurishness and gentlemanliness. The simple truth is that novel-writing is an onanistic and taboo-laden pursuit, and therefore socially shameful to the more conforming and morally dubious to the more fastidious. Hemingway’s is only an extreme case of the kind of public mask knowledge of this truth forces most novelists to assume.

— Then meseemed it the guise of the ranker Venus,

Named of some Astarte, of some Cotytto.

Down I knelt before it and kissed the panel,

Drunk with the lure of love’s inhibited dreamings.

Till the dawn I rubbed, when there gazed up at me

A hag, that had slowly emerged from under my hands there,

Pointing the slanted finger towards a bosom

Eaten away of a rot from the lusts of a lifetime …

—I could have ended myself in heart-shook horror.

‘The Collector Cleans His Picture’

‘I am under a doom, Somers. Yes, I am under a doom.’

The Well-Beloved