[Ttha-potm] re: Childhood among the ferns

[Niemeyer, Paul J.]

Rosemarie wrote,
 
". . .I think the one of the most disturbing things about 'the biographical hints [that] threaten to lead away from the poem'
is that -- like seeing Polanski's Tess before 'seeing' Hardy's Tess one can never really get rid of the first impression and thereafter Hardy's Tess is never autonomously her own self -- or Hardy's."

There's a book out there, the introduction of which deals with this very same phenomenon.  Alas, the title escapes me. . .
 
Kidding aside, this discussion of childhood--and who or what we see when we read Hardy--has made me realize that I find it very difficult to imagine Hardy as a child or to see any of his characters having real childhoods.  When I first read the poem under discussion, the lines "as I conned / With pride, my spray-proofed house" threw me for the proverbial loop, as I envisioned the elderly Hardy under the ferns, leaning on a walking stick and looking out toward Max Gate.  Who is the child? I thought.  I concluded it must be the elderly Hardy recalling a childhood incident.  Of course, on re-reading it, I discovered I was supposed to be seeing everything through a child's eyes.  Still, I couldn't shake the feeling the poem is in the voice of an old man, not a boy.
 
Part of my problem here could indeed be that most of the pictures we have of Hardy are from the time he was middle aged until he was an octogenarian.  But I think a greater problem is that Hardy's writings have relatively few children in them, and their voices and points of view are rarely portrayed "naturally."  It's easy to imagine a childhood for Dickens and Wordsworth, since their works abound with children and are extremely sympathetic to a child's perceptions; but Hardy--who I know was very fond of children--seems to relegate them to the background (the Durbeyfields' largely indistinguishable brood) or to use them for symbolic and didactic purposes.  The child Jude is on the scene a relatively brief time before he is replaced by Jude the young man (and how many of the child's ideas and attitudes still characterize the man?); Abraham Durbeyfield is largely a sounding board for his sister's pessimism, and Liza-Lu is groomed by Tess's widower to be her replacement; and Little Father Time is less a real child than the embodiment of that oncoming universal wish not to live.
 
Is it possible, then, that Hardy just didn't know how to accurately recreate a child's voice and thoughts?  Or maybe it's something else.  None of us can see ourselves aging.  When I look in a mirror today I know that the face that looked back at me 35 years ago was that of a tow-headed, freckle-faced boy; but I cannot consciously recall seeing that face.  In my eyes, my face is always what it was, and it is only in looking at photographs that I can detect how I aged.  (Just as seeing a movie from 10 years ago or looking at footage of George W. Bush from 2000 makes you aware of change in others.)  Perhaps time in the poem is similarly collapsed; that the child is as the man, yearning for comfort, yearning to never grow old?
 
Just musing. . .
 
Paul Niemeyer
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/ms-tnef
Size: 6266 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://coyote.csusm.edu/pipermail/ttha-potm/attachments/20080420/2e55495f/attachment.bin