The Phantom of Thomas Hardy

by Floyd Skloot

  I spent so much time in the English Department offices, being in close contact with Russell daily, that it wasn’t surprising I became an English major. When I took Major British Writers or Intro to Drama from him while also working for him, we were sometimes together six hours a day. When I played my first game for the college’s freshman baseball team, and slid into third base for a lead-off triple, I was astonished to find Russell sitting on a small hill in foul territory cheering me on. It was a powerful relationship for me, and he became the closest thing to a father I’d had since my father, like Russell’s, had suddenly died.

  I was fourteen when my father and mother had gone to a resort in upstate New York for the weekend. He’d been active and happy there, horseback riding, swimming, playing pinochle, glad to have a Saturday away from his working life. Sunday, after a few minutes under the poolside sunlamp, he wanted a quick cool-off before heading upstairs to change for dinner. So he dove into the water, where he had a heart attack and drowned.

  I believed for years that if I’d been there I could have saved him. Would have seen him flailing in the deep end and known he was in trouble. Or I could have changed the entire scenario by asking him to play catch with me, pinball. We could learn croquet. I believed I would not have let him die.

  Obsessed with my father’s death, I was unable to stop thinking about the last moments he’d been alive and what might have been going through his mind. Had he thought about me? We were both going about our business unaware that the seconds were ticking down. I replayed in my mind the last time I’d seen him alive, his back to me as he walked through the door with luggage in his hands, the smell of his Havana cigar lingering in the air. Did he kiss me? Did I remember the rough feel of his whiskers or the scent of Old Spice?

  Under Russell’s influence, I began trying to write poems and read them to him. How kind he was to listen, and to encourage, when the poems were so awful. So inauthentic, with no notion of how to speak about what I felt. Instead of commenting about the poems, he asked me questions.

  “What did your father do for a living?”

  “He owned a live poultry market and killed chickens all day.”

  “Did you ever see him do that?

  “A few times. The chickens screamed whenever he came near their coops. He’d grab one, draw his super-sharp knife from someplace inside his apron, and slit the chicken’s neck. It made me cry and he stopped letting me come to the market.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “People say he looked like me. Or I guess they say I look like him.”

  “Well, that’s fine, that’s very evocative, but it doesn’t tell a blind man much. What did he look like?”

  “Short, maybe five-three. Bald, blocky. His nose was flat from when a chicken coop fell on him and his fingers were all gnarled and nicked. He sometimes had blood or feathers still stuck to his neck when he got home. He smelled.”

  “Like what?”

  “Meat.” I thought for a moment and added, “Cigars. He smoked big fat ones.”

  “What did you talk about together?”

  I’d never thought about that, could hardly remember the sound of my father’s voice anymore. “We didn’t talk much, Dr. Russell. He was already gone to his market when I woke up in the morning and he got home late, seven o’clock. Mostly what he wanted from me then was silence. I saw him on Sundays. Sometimes we all went to visit his widowed mother. Sometimes we went to the cemetery where his father was buried. We talked about who would get buried where in the family plot.”

  I remember the sound of Russell breathing as he processed my answer, the room so still around us. “That day when he died,” he asked, “how did you get the news?”

  “Someone called.” When Russell didn’t say anything, I understood what his silence meant. “His friend Harry.” Which startled me to remember because my father’s name was also Harry and their voices were similar.

  “What were you doing when the call came?”

  “I was in my room playing a game I’d invented.” More silence. “Dice baseball. I used to keep endless statistics in a notebook.” Then I found myself unable to speak. Russell waited. “Oh. I remember once my father got so angry that he tore my notebook apart. A year’s worth of statistics.”

  “Go on, there’s more, isn’t there?”

  “Yes. The next night. He didn’t exactly apologize—not with words, anyway—but when he came home from the market he walked past my bedroom and flipped a pack of baseball cards onto my bed. He’d never done anything like that before. A few seconds later he walked by in the other direction and flipped another pack. He did that five times without saying anything.”

  “These are the things you need to be writing in your poems, Floyd. You loved your father and you miss him, of course you do. But simply saying those words won’t let others feel what’s really in your heart. Your heart. The poem doesn’t sound like you, it sounds like everyone. To love someone is to speak your heart to them.”

  “Even if you don’t use words.”

  “Like your father? Well, yes. But in a poem or a story you do need words.”

  As my junior year was ending, Russell said that, during the summer, I should think about a topic for my senior honors thesis. He’d be happy to supervise me. I wanted to work with him as well, though that narrowed my options primarily to Victorian writers. So in the fall of 1968, having done little more about the matter than glance through an anthology of Victorian literature, I sat in his office just before classes began and said what I thought he wanted to hear: “Browning,” thinking, Oh no, not ten months of Browning! Russell’s brows twitched, a language I now knew how to read, so I said, “Or maybe Arnold.” He rocked back and remained silent. “Not Tennyson,” I added.

  “How about Thomas Hardy?”

  I’d recorded those 16 pages of Hardy’s gloomy poems, and seen the 1,002-page volume of Collected Poems in the bookstore. “You mean all the poetry?”

  “I was thinking of the novels. I have a feeling for Hardy, and I think you might too.”

  I recalled tolerating The Return of the Native in high school, and sort of liking The Mayor of Casterbridge when I’d read it for extra credit. But that was four years ago, and I didn’t remember much about either book except they both had a bunch of explosive, angry characters storming around the Dorset countryside. I’d seen the film of Far from the Madding Crowd the previous fall, though, and Julie Christie was a gorgeous Bathsheba. Okay, since I already knew three Hardy novels, and had heard of two more (Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure) in my introduction to Hardy’s poetry, I had a good head start on the work. After all, how many novels could Hardy have written?

  We agreed on Hardy. “Draw up a schedule,” he said. “Let’s do each novel in sequence, one every two weeks, all right?”

  He took my inhalation as agreement.

  “Why don’t we use the first week for you to give me a summary of the plot and characters. Second week to go over your commentary.”

  I remember that day very clearly. I walked from the English Department office across campus to the library in a Pennsylvania version of British mist. But passing the brick buildings of the campus core made me feel the familiar sense of being exactly where I belonged, in a setting I loved, doing what I loved. Nothing better than starting a new term, getting new books, plunging into new material. As a twenty-one-year-old who imagined himself a budding writer, I was getting a chance to immerse myself in the work of a master, someone who wrote both poetry and prose, as I hoped to do. My creative future felt very close.

  Just a few minutes after clacking across the library’s marble floor I’d found the shocking answer to my question. Thomas Hardy had written fourteen novels. With a full load of classes, daily work as Russell’s reader, acting in the college theater, and trying to write poetry, it was going to be a busy senior year.

  After completing my senior thesis, I kept copies of Hardy’s novels with me as I moved from one house and one state
to another, sixteen moves in all, Hardy always hauled along, even when I had to get rid of so many books in order to share Beverly’s yurt in the woods. Not just hauled along, but reread. A touchstone for me, across time and place.

  Also, that first year after I got sick, a source of hope. For months during the most acute phase of my illness—winter and early spring of 1989—I could read nothing more complicated than People magazine or TV Guide. Those would take a week to complete and I could recall little of what I read. In July, I managed to finish a thriller, forgetting details and names as I went along but carried forward on a scene-by-scene narrative current. I felt as surprised and stupefied by its plot developments as the story’s unsuspecting characters. Spending all day in bed or in my recliner, I began using a yellow highlighter to help reinforce the retention of detail, and read Elmore Leonard, Ross Thomas, Sue Grafton, going over sentences again and again, trying to keep details clear, voices distinct and present. At the end of autumn, fully a year after that plane trip to Washington, DC, I picked up Thomas Hardy’s last novel, the dark impassioned, fate-harrowed Jude the Obscure. Being able to read it, to really read again, following the story and characters with all their twists and turns, gave me my first real sense of hope that I would be able to come back. Makes me laugh to think about that now, about deriving hope from the most hopeless novel written by one of the most hope-deprived novelists in literary history. But finishing Jude the Obscure not only let me feel that I was getting back some minimal capacity to focus and think and hold things in mind, it let me feel that I could connect with who I’d been before getting sick. That I would find my way back to coherence in my life. Hardy, once again, at the center for me.

  It wasn’t just Hardy’s novels themselves that mattered. Increasingly, grateful for what felt like rescue, I’d become interested in his life too. Over the next twenty-three years I’d read eight Hardy biographies, including the self-ghostwritten one. I’m not saying I remembered all the details, but I felt that by the time we reached Dorset I had a strong sense of him.

  So okay, I’m a sixty-four-year-old man who’s been reading Hardy for 70 percent of his life, and who finally made the trip to Hardy country. I’m brain damaged and subject to Visitations, engaged in an ongoing struggle to integrate what has been shattered by neurological damage. I’m unabashedly in love with my wife of twenty years. I write poems and memoirs and fiction. All of that still doesn’t give me a full enough answer to Beverly’s question about why Hardy came to me. But I’m on the case.

  We began walking back to the car park. Higher Bockhampton, where Hardy was born and raised, was only about three miles away, but I found myself wondering, idiotically, whether he could reach me there if he wanted to. Maybe I should hang around Dorchester for a while, just in case. I stopped walking and looked around. We were back to High Street, in front of the Dorset County Museum again. Beverly was a few steps ahead, consulting her map as she walked.

  No, of course Hardy could reach me. We’d had contact and I felt that he knew where I was. The next move would be his to make. After all, he was at home everywhere around here, and accustomed to walking it all as freely as the butterflies in the cornfields flying straight down High Street without any apparent consciousness that they were traversing strange latitudes.

  As I watched Beverly, her long legs and strong back, her clear sense of where she was in space and where she was heading, it occurred to me that it could be us together—me and Beverly—that sparked the Visitation from Hardy.

  One thing his work and his life made clear was how terribly he struggled with love. I remembered reading about his thwarted, often overwhelming early passions; a long, fraught, anguishing first marriage shadowed by his feeble attempts at affairs, his compulsion to withdraw, conflict over matters of class, childlessness, and guilt-ridden grief after his wife died; a late-life marriage to a woman forty years his junior who had served him as a kind of secretary. Hardy seemed to believe love could happen, but not that it could last.

  And here he was now, eighty-four years after his death, so troubled over something missed that he haunted the landscape perhaps in hopes of finding it still. Maybe what he missed was some idea of love that went beyond the love he knew or could imagine for his characters, a love that would endure. Or maybe what he missed was writing about it in a way that satisfied him. Did he stop before he got there? Could it be that the scholars and aficionados all had it wrong, and there was—as rumored—a lost true love that served to torment Hardy throughout the rest of his life? Something he grasped but couldn’t or wouldn’t hold onto. Could it be that what he missed was the secret to keeping love alive? Or hope or faith?

  I felt that Hardy was handing me a gift, one that I could only understand by writing about it. I caught up to Beverly, and told her what I’d been thinking. Then I said, “This Visitation from Hardy feels like something to do with a book.”

  She nodded because she already knew that. “What kind?”

  All I could do at that point was shrug. Beverly didn’t necessarily expect an answer. She was helping me think. “When Hardy vanished, it was like he’d slipped back between pages of a book. For a moment, I felt he was still around. The story was in progress, the book was in my hands, there just weren’t any words written in it yet. I have to stay with that feeling.” We’d almost reached the car park. “I have to find out what that book is.”

  “Investigative journalism with phantoms as sources.”

  “And subjects.”

  The drive from downtown Dorchester to Higher Bockhampton took less than ten minutes. At Cuckoo Lane, a name straight out of Hardy’s novel Under the Greenwood Tree, we looped back over the highway and found the narrow road to his long low cottage with a hipped roof of thatch. The cottage was a National Trust site now, and no longer quite the lonely and silent spot between woodland and heathland.

  Still, I felt nervous, almost shy at the thought of being there, where a doctor in 1840, believing him dead, had thrown aside the newborn child. On the first evening in June, Jemima Hand Hardy had gone into labor attended by Lizzie Downton, a midwife who lived in one of the seven homes along this isolated lane beside the heath. Downstairs, Jemima’s husband of five months and her mother-in-law spent the night in their hard chairs or stepping outside for the cool spring air as the screams grew more desperate. When the sun rose on June 2, flooding the bedroom where Jemima lay exhausted, the doctor was finally summoned. “You should have sent for me sooner,” he said, glancing at the limp Hardy and tossing him into a nearby basket. “I must try to save the mother.” Hardy junkies know what happened next, and can recite Lizzie’s words as she rescued the frail and fragile thing: “Dead! Stop a minute: he’s alive enough, sure!”

  So Hardy was delicate from the get-go. Sickly. Came to life all tangled up with death, straddling the border, by birth a citizen of both realms. As we all are, of course, but Hardy more intensely so, his work saturated in doom, haunted by death, the last link in the chain of faith that rules his characters. He arrived on the verge of abandonment, of rejection, and from the first breath could never feel sure he was loved enough or mattered enough to keep. Grown up, he was sensitive to the least slights, defensive, a connoisseur of wounds and humiliations, slow to heal, a hoarder of grudges, scarred by the early absence of love’s certainty.

  The drama of his birth set the tone for his time at home. He called Higher Bockhampton quaint, passed it off as a quiet and isolated little settlement or snug homestead of his child-time, the treasured relic of bygone days. But it held drama aplenty for the young Hardy, drama he never ceased to draw upon in his fiction and poetry.

  For every story like the one about an infant Hardy found asleep in his cradle with a large snake curled upon his breast, there’s a counter-balancing story like the one about him lying on his back watching sunrays stream through the straw hat he’d placed over his face, leading him to conclude that he did not wish to grow up. And he didn’t grow up, or not at the usual pace. Hardy himself said his imma
turity was greater than is common for his years. He said he was a child till he was sixteen, a youth till he was twenty-five, and a young man till he was nearly fifty. He lived with his parents and three younger siblings in the secluded, crowded seven-roomed rambling house of his childhood—except for a five-year interlude in London during his midtwenties—until marrying at the age of thirty-four.

  Shy and aloof, he was also ecstatic of temperament and wildly sensitive to music. When his father played the violin, little Tommy—as he called himself—would stand alone in the middle of the smoky room and dance to the tunes while weeping at their lyrics. He learned to fiddle young and would play with such frenzied zeal that he’d eventually collapse by the hearth. Later, he traveled with his father and uncle to play at harvest suppers, wishing the songs would never end, his soul lifted beyond time or place, his rare smile real as a window.

  He learned to read almost before he learned to walk, learned to laugh without making a sound, learned to know a day was over by watching sundown set his home’s red staircase walls ablaze. He thought he was useless, invisible though everyone seemed to see whatever he did.

  His parents fought; his mother advised him never to wed, to live instead with his sister Mary. I recall the poignant picture of a round-faced, stiff-backed, unsmiling, self-conscious Hardy at sixteen, crafted sprig of moustache barely visible over his grim lip, hair no more successfully tamed than the cravat blossoming from his skewed collar, large zit on his brow, posing with a massive hat clutched under his right arm as he tries to appear twenty-five rather than twelve. The boy who didn’t want to grow up wanted to be a grown-up.

  A quarter-mile shy of the Hardy cottage, vehicle traffic was directed to a turnoff for the Thorncombe Wood parking lot. It was nearly empty. We got out of the car and looked around as we stretched. Directly across the pitted access road stood the Greenwood Grange Farm Cottages, a sprawling complex of brick, stone, and slate barns and outbuildings converted into luxury holiday accommodations. My first thought was that if we’d stayed there, Hardy could have sat down with us for dinner last night, in private, in a location where he’d feel comfortably close to home, a deluxe place named after his lovely second novel composed just a few hundred yards away, and maybe we could have gotten our business—whatever it might be—done right then.