by Floyd Skloot
The Phantom of
A novel by
Floyd Skloot
The University of Wisconsin Press
The University of Wisconsin Press
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Copyright © 2016 by Floyd Skloot
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Skloot, Floyd, author.
Title: The phantom of Thomas Hardy / Floyd Skloot.
Description: Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, [2016]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016013570 | ISBN 9780299310400 (cloth: alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Hardy, Thomas, 1840–1928—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3569.K577 P47 2016 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016013570
For
Beverly
“For winning love we win the risk of losing, And losing love is as one’s life were riven.”
Thomas Hardy, “Revulsion”
“That her fond phantom lingers there Is known only to me.”
Thomas Hardy, “Memory and I”
“Time unveils sorrows and secrets.”
Thomas Hardy, “The Flirt’s Tragedy”
“Things and events always were, are, and will be (e.g., Emma, Mother and Father are living still in the past).”
Thomas Hardy’s diary, June 10, 1923, a week after his eighty-third birthday
A Note to the Reader
Though characters and events in this novel resemble those in my life, most are entirely creations of the imagination. In such cases, any resemblance to real characters and events is purely coincidental. After publishing four memoirs in which I never got to make anything up, writing this fictional memoir was something else entirely, which was the point.
Thomas Hardy had his own oddball approach to presenting his life story: the self-ghostwritten biography. As an old man, he composed his memoirs and instructed his wife to publish them after his death as though they were a biography she herself had written. So The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840–1891 and The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892–1928 were duly published under Florence Hardy’s name in 1928 and 1930. The ruse didn’t fool many readers. Despite the profound gaps, evasions, and mis-directions of those memoirs, and despite the burning of his papers, Hardy failed to discourage interest and scrutiny into his life. Instead, he called attention to the fact that there was much he wished to hide.
The Phantom of Thomas Hardy
Beverly and I walked up South Street in Dorchester, following a tourist map past Trespass Outdoor Clothing, Carphone Warehouse, Top Drawer Cards & Gifts, a shuttered O2 Store. All the bold signage and trendy commercial space made the street feel very twenty-first-century England. But above storefront level, the nineteenth-century world of Thomas Hardy was present in the worn masonry of squat, flat-topped buildings huddled together, their severe faces brightened by an occasional bow window.
It was Monday, June 4, 2012. We’d been touring England for two weeks, driven 1,377 miles from London to Oxford to Wales to Cornwall and finally to the place I’d hoped to visit for the last forty-four years, ever since I was a college senior immersed in Hardy’s novels. I’d come to honor the bond I felt with both Hardy and the teacher who’d led me to his work.
After last night’s Queen’s Jubilee party in Dorchester Borough Gardens, the old county town was quiet that morning, rain gone but heavy clouds still lurking. Back home in Portland, Oregon, the full strawberry moon as it set was being swallowed by a predawn partial eclipse. Just as this thought occurred, and with it the sense that Time was off-kilter at the moment, I felt something brush my shoulder.
I ignored it, figuring a passerby had grazed me because we’d stopped abruptly. Beverly raised our joined hands and pointed them at a building set back a few feet from the others. “Oh look, Floyd.”
There at 10 South Street, beside the heavy wooden door of a Barclays Bank, we saw a round blue plaque: “This house is reputed to have been lived in by the MAYOR of CASTERBRIDGE in THOMAS HARDY’S story of that name written in 1885.”
The building still appeared as Hardy had described it in the novel, faced with dull red-and-gray old brick, its small paned Georgian sash windows enlivened with three coats of white. Once past the notion of the place as a bank, I could imagine its interior appointed to profusion with heavy mahogany furniture of the deepest red-Spanish hues, its large lofty rooms, the chimneypiece intricately carved with garlanded lyres and ox skulls. That an actual building was being proclaimed as the home of a fictional character made it seem like the perfect gateway for our visit, a mystical spot that linked Hardy’s real and imagined worlds.
I walked over to stand beneath the blue plaque and posed for a photo. Cross-legged, back resting against the bank’s night safe, I beamed at Beverly, filled with love for her, gratitude that she took this journey with me, delight at being there. We planned to go to Hardy’s birthplace at Bockhampton next, then over the final two days of our travels we would visit his home at Max Gate, the gravesite at Stinsford Churchyard where his heart is buried, and the landscape of the region he called Wessex. I thought of this as a kind of homecoming to a place I’d never been, only known through books and poems, films, dreams.
After I returned to her side, Beverly raised the camera to take a photo of the building without me in front of it. The wind rose, the chill making me zip up my vest.
That’s when I felt another glancing contact against my shoulder, followed this time by an unmistakable, firm tap. What I thought was the wind spoke into my ear: “Something I missed.”
There was no doubt I’d heard it. Three distinct words. Nor was there doubt about whose voice had spoken, gentle, level, refined, precisely modulated, just as it was said to have been by his contemporaries. A soft-cadenced voice with a faint suggestion of rough rustic flavor in it, according to an acquaintance of Hardy’s who sounds like he’s describing red wine.
“Something I missed,” Thomas Hardy said to me.
When I spun around, Hardy was gone. But he was also not gone, not quite, and the first thing that registered for me was the lingering physical impression of his touch, a sense memory still palpable at my shoulder. The breeze contained a fading echo of his final word. This man who never liked to touch or be touched had touched me twice. This private, secretive soul, a formal and socially cautious spirit, had made contact, had spoken. And now that he had my attention, Hardy was withdrawing.
Beverly snapped a photo of me then, one of the candid shots she loves to take from about three feet away. They often end up on my website or Facebook page or book covers because she has a knack for seeing right into me, for capturing me at my most open. I’m standing there, face in profile, looking confused as I gaze toward the Marks & Spencer store window, right hand raised to my left shoulder joint.
She let the camera dangle from her neck and studied me, worried, having recognized something in my face. “Let’s rest for
a minute,” she said, and headed to a bench a few yards up the street.
Before I sat, I looked around for any trace of Hardy. It was difficult to concentrate. I tried to focus full attention on each individual I saw but it was a struggle to sort through the comings and goings. A tall man in a white vest and straw hat limped past our bench, hands clasped behind his back, listing left as he spoke to a woman half his size. Clearly not Hardy. Two middle-aged men, both far too bulky to be Hardy, stood with their heads cocked and arms akimbo, studying the display of shoes in Stead & Simpson’s window. Twins, I’d guess. At 39 South Street, a few doors down and on the opposite side of the street, was the Gorge Cafe, an establishment featuring breakfast-all-day and brewed coffee. This was the building where Hardy at sixteen had begun his training as an architect, apprenticed to the esteemed John Hicks. Hicks had often hired Hardy’s father, a mason, to work on church restorations, so this was a place the family knew well. Below the window was a sign saying “Great food is our pleasure” and below that was another sign saying “Even Thomas Hardy would be delighted.” As I watched, a teenager drifted out of the Gorge and my heart quickened. But the boy flipped his hoodie over his head, checked his cell phone, and walked away. I turned to glance again at the mayor’s house. Two buildings north, directly across from the bench, I saw Hardy’s face. Faded and sketchy, it seemed to flicker there at the edge of sight. Then I realized what I was seeing. In a window of the WHSmith bookshop there was a sun-bleached sign with Hardy’s visage looming above the covers of his most popular novels, on sale three for the price of two. Most of the glass storefront was doorway and a breeze rippled the sign.
I took a deep breath and sat beside Beverly. Just being there close to her calmed me. We leaned together over her camera’s monitor to look at the South Street photos she’d taken in the last few minutes: the town pump, the narrow Antelope Walk alleyway, storefronts, the mayor’s house. The close-up of me taken just after Hardy had touched my shoulder was weird, slightly blurred in a way Beverly’s photos seldom are, as though autofocus had sensed a point of interest a few feet beyond me. The hazy, misty weather added a dimension of otherworldliness to the image. It could not have been a more accurate representation of my state of mind at that moment.
I should probably mention something here. Over the last two decades, I’d had a few episodes that we called Visitations.
They began during the years when Beverly and I lived in the middle of twenty acres of woods, in a small cedar yurt she’d built on a hillside in rural western Oregon. The ground was hard basalt from old lava flows, part of a dark crystalline column almost a thousand feet thick. It wasn’t water-friendly land up on the hill, and it had been invaded by poison oak and wild blackberry, and on windy nights we thought the old oaks and evergreen would crash down on us. But despite its harshnesses this was the landscape of happiness for me. Living there taught me that paradise is approximate and never what we imagine it to be. We lived there together for thirteen years, a few miles outside a tiny town named Amity, and we loved the quiet, the isolation. Our nearest neighbor, a winery whose owners didn’t live onsite, was more than a quarter mile away. Days would pass without our seeing another person.
In the silence on our land, occasionally I’d detect movement among the oak to our east that was different from the way deer or skunks or raccoons moved through the space. Or an unfamiliar shape would be illuminated deep in the woods when late-afternoon light found its way through the swaying canopy of Douglas fir. Keeping still, watching, I’d realize the deer was Paul Gauguin wearing a saffron-colored shirt, with a fringe of hair dangling where I thought I’d seen leaves. He was furious, radiating rage at having found himself in a different sort of paradise from the one he’d always yearned for. He stalked along the hill’s crest till he reached a lush thicket of color, lilac and lily and bleeding heart, then surrendered to its embrace. Or the flash of light would clarify as Johann Sebastian Bach standing in a tangle of vines and upheaved stones, his arms raised as he conducted darkness down, finding beauty and harmony within the confusion and apparent havoc around him.
Sometimes familiar shapes or movements were not what I took them to be. I’d catch glimpses of a buck’s antlers drifting west to east through the mist across the hill’s crest and realize after a while what I was seeing wasn’t antlers at all. In that particular case, it turned out I was seeing Vladimir Nabokov stalk a spring azure butterfly near our blueberry bushes. He was blind to me but rapt in noticing everything else, a lesson in itself. Once, shortly after our first well went dry, as I sat in a cracked Adirondack chair under twin fir and waited for a late afternoon dose of analgesic to kick in, I saw an oak branch sway and realized, no, it was an umbrella floating through a clear spot where there was an abandoned beehive. I thought an umbrella would be the last thing anyone would need in our drought-stricken county. Then I saw that the umbrella was actually a bowler hat, and it was resting on the head of T. S. Eliot, Mr. Waste Land himself, who was muttering about dry months and rock and no water.
I know how this sounds, how strange it seems. But sane people are known to have hallucinations. Oliver Sacks—in a book, not a Visitation—said that more than 10 percent of normal people in normal circumstances experience hallucinations. In the newest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-5, hallucinations are recognized as perfectly normal phenomena. Phantoms appear, and as Sacks says, “the feeling that someone is there, to the left or the right, perhaps just behind us, is known to us all.” It’s even more common in unfamiliar surroundings. A person hears voices, sees figures move, smells odors.
For me, however, these Visitations went beyond the hallucinatory because they had content, had depth. They seemed intended to teach me, and sometimes the Visitor too, something essential. The great Brooklyn Dodgers shortstop Pee Wee Reese appeared from within the woods on the first anniversary of his death, drifting out of evening shadows the way he once drifted under a windblown pop fly, passing from sunlight to shadow as he approached home. Though he moved with familiar grace, Pee Wee looked tired and old, ravaged by his long illness, but also elated to be back in the game. Without speaking he shared with me what he’d come to teach, that things would be all right, pain is nothing, stability is overrated, shattered sleep begets waking dreams. We can—we must—learn from our losses, Pee Wee reminded me, and illness is but a high pop fly that pulls us into shadow.
My Visitations were narrative, interactive, cohesive, and—unlike hallucinations—filled with factual information or detail I hadn’t known previously. Although Eliot didn’t speak, and remained beyond reach, he was right to remind me of voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells. It cost us $15,000, at thirty dollars a foot, to find the deep aquifer under our dry land. But the water was there.
I couldn’t will them to happen, couldn’t summon Visitors. If I could, there would have been Visits from Shakespeare or from Jules Verne, master of the marvelous, whose work I treasure. From Maurice Ravel after aphasia silenced his music. From Flannery O’Connor or Vincent van Gogh, from Emily Dickinson. Hardy certainly would have appeared sooner. I’d have liked to see our landscape through Georgia O’Keeffe’s eyes, and to have had time again with my father or brother. But my Visitations were spontaneous occurrences, surprises always. I came to think of them as an unfolding of the possible world.
I should also mention that a quarter century ago, at the age of forty-one, I contracted a virus that targeted my brain. All I’d done was take a flight from Portland to Washington, DC, but my doctors concluded that a virus carried on the plane’s recirculating air supply was the likely pathogen. Human herpesvirus 6, they thought. Ubiquitous, but known for its neurovirulence among people whose immune systems can’t manage it. Mine couldn’t. The lesions made my brain look scattershot.
At first, the illness threatened to silence me. To dis-integrate me. Sometimes I would fail to find words at all, my mouth opening and closing, emitting a strangling squeak. Or I would s
ay the same thing over and over. “How could it be August 8?” It took me a year to be able to read books with even minimal comprehension again, six years to be able to drive, fifteen years to walk without a cane, and I’m still learning to accommodate the ongoing persistent results of the lesions that have damaged my neurological functioning. Since 1988, I’ve been working to re-integrate myself.
I still say things like “Please fast the smooth” when I mean to say “Please pass the butter,” or I tell Beverly that I’ve “numbed” the television rather than “muted” it. I use words that don’t quite exist in the language, saying “the greenvers were swindy” when I meant “the evergreens were swaying in the wind.” I carefully remove an empty cup from underneath the espresso maker’s spout before turning the machine on and watch in confusion as the dark liquid cascades onto the countertop. We’ve lived in our current home for three years and I still can’t remember if the window blinds should be slanted upward or downward to block the intense summer sun, though Beverly has told me I-don’t-remember-how-many times.
To compose my work I learned to write fragments of thought on notepads or Post-its or index cards without worrying about errors and incorrect words, gather them in folders color-coded by topic or character or place, and go back over them later to see how they fit together. On longer projects, my desk becomes a kind of tidy but densely layered storyboard, one sheet for each idea or image or phrase, sheets shifting as related ones appear, a pathway toward discovering where I’m going. In a sense, my writing process embraces the gapped nature of my memory process, leaping across spaces that represent all I’ve lost and establishing fresh patterns within all that remains.