close to earning a majority. WhennAllende tried to parlay this tepid endorsementnby the voters into a sweepingnMarxist revolution, there was resistancen—and it did not come merely fromnfascist army officers, CIA agents, andnassorted dupes of Yankee imperialism.nIn the months preceding Allende’snouster, hundreds of thousands—ntmckers, miners, gas workers, bus driversn—went on strike against his economicnprogram, a mishmash of socialist dogmanand wishful thinking that threatened toncmsh small business, wreck the middlenclass, and paralyze Chile with a Weimarianninflation. By his own admission,nAllende was willing to overcome thisnresistance by choosing to “abandon thendemocratic road and embrace violence asnan instrument.” This is precisely what hendid, arming his supporters (with thenassistance of Fidel Castro), crackingndown on Chile’s independent newsnmedia, and exploiting emergencynpowers.nThe generals acted with enormousnand gratuitous brutality. The bloodbathnpitted right-wing extremists against leftwingnextremists. Much to the bitternregret of Allende’s contemporarynapologists, the Chilean masses did notnrise in his defense. Like so many Marxistncliques, the “Popular Unity” governmentntook its tide far more seriously thannthe people for whom it pretended tonspeak. An honest Marxist might admitnthat what Chile truly shows is how incompatiblenthe totalitarian impulse isnwith a society in which businessmen,npeasants, soldiers, the Church, and journalistsnare traditionally autonomousnfrom the state. Dictatorship of the proletariatnrequires politically enforcednsocial uniformity and thus official terror.n”Democratic Marxism” remains, as ever,nan oxymoron. DnCounties, Connections, & VorticesnMichael Millgate: Thomas Hardy: AnBiography; Random House; NewnYork.nNicholas Delbanco: Group Portrait;nWilliam Morrow; New York.nJeffrey Meyers: The Enemy: AnBiography of Wyndham Lewis;nRoutledge & Kegan Paul; London.nby Gregory WolfenA he “standard” biography of annovelist or poet is usually 400 to 700npages in length and written by a scholarnwho has devoted a good deal of his life tonthe subject of his book. It is often thenpreferable type of literary biography as itnis the least likely to be tendentious: sincenit is not a polemic or an occasional work,nit can make the case for its subjectnwithout falling into the error of hagio-nMr. Wolfe is editor o/Hillsdale Review.n36inChronicles of Culturengraphy. There is a high authority to supportnthis belief: the originator of modernnliterary biography, Samuel Johnson.nReading a biography was for Dr. Johnsonnan exercise in moral reflection, and henpreferred biographies of artists and scientistsnto those of statesmen and aristocratsnbecause the latter were usually removednfrom the quotidian moral realities ofneveryday life.nMichael Millgate’s biography ofnThomas Hardy fulfills all that otie couldnask of such a work. Throughout the narrativenthe author is almost anonymous,nand when he steps forward to offer an interpretation,nit is based on sustainednthought. It is not surprising that Millgate’snother books are on William Faulkner,nfor Hardy and Faulkner are two ofnthe finest regional novelists of Britainnand America. Both authors’ creative inspirationnderives from the rural communitiesnthey were raised in; they feltnimpelled to transfer their native regionsninto semifictional places in order tonnndistance them: Faulkner’s Mississippinbecame Yoknapatawpha County, andnHardy’s Dorset merged with the morenancient name of Wessex. In an age ofnurban dislocation and alienation, thenregional fiction of Hardy and Faulknernstands out with a richness and power inherentnin the traditional rural community.nIt would be a mistake, however, tondesignate Hardy merely a “regional” artist.nJust as there is the rich countryside ofnWessex which Hardy associated withnhimself and with characters like GabrielnOak, Clym Yeobright, and Tess Durbeyfield,nso there remains an alluring urbannworld of the professional middle class tonwhich Hardy and his character JudenFawley aspired. Throughout his life,nHardy was torn between the workingclassnworld of his parents and the professionalnand literary life of London, whichnhe visited so often. This tension in Hardynwas catalytic artistically, but it also producedna kind of resentment and fatalismnwhich undercut his art.nHardy lived in the late 19th-centurynintellectual milieu which believed thatnmassive social forces (like economicnupheaval or jingoistic nationalism) andnoverwhelming personal motivations (likensexual passion) produced an environmentnbeyond individual control. Tolstoynsaw this in grand historical terms, hencenthe concept of historical fate whichnunderlies War and Peace. Though thendarkness of the fatalist vision would seemnto indicate otherwise, it is in fact a logicalnoutgrowth of Romanticism. The optimismnof Shelley and Keats, whose artistprotagonistsnstruggle for and attainnvision, quickly darkens in Byron andnlater writers. The Romantics overturnednthe classical and Christian ideal of ordernin harmony and rest and glorified the individual’snstmggle for self-afiSrmation inna hostile universe. What became evidentnto the late Romantics was that the hostilenuniverse was too much for them.nUnlike Matthew Arnold and othernVictorian intellectuals, Hardy never experiencednany traumatic “loss of faith.”nThough he loved the rituals of the churchn