In a letter of May 1919 Hardy told his friend Sir George Douglas he hadn't been doing much, 'mainly destroying old papers'. 'How they raise ghosts,' he added. He was still at it in September when he complained of the 'dismal work' of destroying papers that were of 'absolutely no use for any purpose God or man's'. Such remarks must sound particularly dismal to Hardy's modern editors and biographers. They could certainly find a use for his papers. Hardy's marvellous late harvest of lyric poetry is riddled with ghosts like those he mentions here, and many, like 'The Photograph' with its vivid account of a woman's portrait burnt in a 'casual clearance of life's arrears', must have been by-products of the literary bonfires at Max Gate. For all that, the ghosts of the papers are bound to haunt the scholars.

LRB 5 December 1985 | PDF Download