Hardy, Allen, Smart, Jonson, Miller, Hesse

Since my last post, I've read biographies of: Thomas Hardy, with many critical comments to his wife despite the fact that he was repeatedly and constantly unfaithful; Elizabeth Smart, a Canadian writer of affluent background -- her life certainly doesn't resemble anyone else's life, at least none of anyone I know who was alive in the thirties, for example; Ben Jonson, about whom I knew very little; Henry Miller, who used his sex life to write, but in a much more direct way than many before him -- was this pornography?; and the memoirs of Walter Allen, a British writer I didn't previously know about, and whose reminiscences were not all that illuminating for me.

I'm now in the middle of a Herman Hesse biography. Overall, I'm starting to think that all writers are hard on the people around them, and suffer money problems. Not a novel conclusion, of course, but there it is.