The Phantom of Thomas Hardy

by Floyd Skloot

  “Wow,” I whispered. “It’s like she’s just waiting. Like she knows the ending and it’s up to us to find our way there.”

  “If we’re going to do that, it’s time to ask what we really know at this point.”

  “I think there are three twined mysteries. My mistake so far has been trying to think about all of them at once. I have enough trouble just thinking about one thing at once.” I started flipping through my notes. “First there’s the old mystery of what really happened in Hardy’s love life. Who did he love and when did he love her?” I thought of my dream, the woman I couldn’t recognize riding beside Hardy, the sudden appearance of the child. “If the gist of the Hardy-Tryphena stories is right—kid or no kid—then it seems like he allowed himself when he was in his late twenties, early thirties, to lose the one woman he truly loved. Then right away he married Emma, a woman for whom he couldn’t sustain love. When she died, he made a marriage of convenience with Florence, who was young enough to be his daughter.”

  “I found something he wrote in a letter about marrying Florence,” Beverly said, looking back at her laptop. “Listen to this: ‘Having known each other so many years, & having been long associated in literary doings, we thought this step would be prosy and formal to a degree.’ Romantic, huh?”

  “Prosy and formal. That’s pretty cold.”

  “Did he give his heart to anyone, really? All the covering up, and the conflicting stories.”

  “So that’s one mystery: What’s real, what’s false in Hardy’s love life? And, you know, am I going to be the one who solves it all?” We looked at each other, and I knew the answer: Well, maybe I can offer a credible story about what Hardy meant by what he’d said to me. “Then there’s the mystery of why the Visitation happened. Why he came to me, as you asked.”

  “And why now?”

  “I’ve been thinking about both of those things. Maybe there is no reason why he came to me, or came to me now—maybe he’s been going around saying ‘Something I missed’ to lots of people who just didn’t pick up on it. Or saying it to himself. But I caught it. Because I’m here now. Caught it and felt it was significant and personal. I was ready to hear it. Maybe that’s the key to all my Visitations.”

  “Let’s take that a little further,” Beverly said. “Why would you have felt the words something I missed were significant and personal?”

  “Well, I hadn’t thought about that before. I suppose that finding what’s missing has been my mission since I got sick, you know? The fragments of memory, the bits of thought or perception, the words and images. The link between the person I was before getting sick and the person I became. The person I am. So the chance to put some things together is another step toward coherence. ‘Something I Missed’ should be printed on my T-shirt.”

  Beverly and I looked at each other in silence for a few moments. “Right,” I said. “I should make a note of all this so I don’t forget.”

  When I’d finished, Beverly said, “Back to Hardy and why he was out there. Was he always a lost soul or has he been, I don’t know, a lost soul only since he died?”

  “Or maybe it started after that book came out, the one about Tryphena and their incestuous family relationships, and Randy. The horror of the rumors.” That sounded plausible to me. “When he lost control of his story’s dark heart. Could certainly be what he missed—safeguarding his love?”

  “Tryphena.”

  “Or love in general.”

  As we talked, Beverly typed notes. I watched her fingertips skipping over the keys, becoming mesmerized in my fatigue, and waited till she came to a stop. She looked at me and smiled. “You said there were three mysteries.”

  “The third is why Hardy is the focus of this kind of attention. And about these kinds of subjects. Some people, many from here in Dorset, seem to need a Hardy who behaved like a rogue, a sexual predator, a scoundrel. Who was like some of the seedy characters in his books. Too full of himself. They want to take him down. And his fervid defenders need him to be pure, the Great Man, though there’s ample evidence against that, too. Why turn mild-mannered, timid Thomas Hardy into a Charles Dickens?” I thought about that for a moment and said, “But why not? It was Victorian England and there were few writers who didn’t have a scandal attached them. Just took a while to get around to Hardy. All that apparent rectitude in the life, and the shocking transgressions in the work. Hardy’s doublings and cover-ups. They couldn’t resist. It was blowback. You’d think he’d imagine that something like this would happen no matter what he did to prevent it.”

  “About those Dorset people, you know, this is the world he came from,” Beverly said. “I mean, the world that shaped them shaped him too.” Her fingers rested on the keys. “Let’s go back for a second to what we said about the Visitation.” She checked the screen. “Do you think Hardy was always a lost soul? Or could he be lost now because he could never lose himself when alive?”

  “Maybe that’s the key. Was he always like that? If not, when did he lose himself ?” The next words came out in a whisper. “Was the loss of his love like Hardy’s version of my viral attack—the thing that changed him in a flash?”

  “Targeting his heart instead of his brain.”

  We shut down the laptop and left for our walk. My mind felt much clearer, which made me feel less tired, eager to be outside, in the landscape. The day was deep into afternoon, cloudy and cool enough for us to wear hooded jackets. Following Anthony’s instructions, we headed over a rolling field toward Hambury Tout and the sea.

  In his work, Hardy called “Lulworth” “Lulwind” and “Lulstead.” It was a sheltered cove where the sea wind lulled and a ship could rest. But up on the bluffs the wind was fierce enough to convince us we should avoid the hilltop path across the tout and stay tucked on its leeward side. The view was still magnificent, green hills behind, the Jurassic coast ahead, the essential Dorset pastoral scene.

  As we neared the sea, though, we encountered a massive crowd of walkers using the famous coastal path, 350 miles down to Land’s End. It seemed the half-million annual visitors Anthony had referred to all showed up on the same day. A truck selling Typhoo Tea was parked on the bluff. So many people were speaking so many languages that it overwhelmed the sound of the surf below. We laughed as we waited for enough space to merge into the line.

  On the platform above Durdle Door, we stood at the railing that faced west. From there, the view was toward Swyre Head and Weymouth, a dozen miles away. I remembered the scene in Far from the Madding Crowd when shepherd Gabriel Oak’s sheepdog drives his flock over the cliff right there at Scratchy Bottom. It already seemed natural—unavoidable—to be thinking of the Dorset landscape in terms of Hardy and his work.

  Beverly and I took pictures of each other, and asked a fellow walker to take one of the two of us together. Then I took a few steps west until Beverly grabbed my hand and turned me around so we could head toward Lulworth Cove. Hardy had used the cove as the place where his loutish and deceitful Sergeant Troy, also in Far from the Madding Crowd, disappeared, swept off in the current. The cove was where smugglers landed illegal brandy in “The Distracted Preacher,” where an excursion steamer arrived in Desperate Remedies, and most famously where Time whispered in Hardy’s ear about the fate of young John Keats, who had stopped there on his short life’s final journey toward Italy.

  If I’d wanted to stand in Hardy’s footsteps, this was another promising location, one he’d come back to at crucial moments in his work. A place of escape by boat or on foot, but also of powerful connection to the literary past he loved.

  We paused at the path’s high point, where it began its descent into the vast parking lot stretching toward the village from the cove’s back. In a gust of wind, I decided to call out Hardy’s name. Not so much to summon him, which I didn’t believe would work anyway, but just to put it out there, to express my intention to be open and clear as I dug and probed around in his life. To say that I would try to see what was there truly. I unders
tood that Hardy wasn’t at my beck and call, and it was possible that I’d never see him again. But still, I felt committed to following through what had begun for me, to find out how the pieces fit.

  On the walk downhill, we stayed off the main path to avoid the crowd and the depressing view of the parking lot. We had a clear line of sight to the cove’s full arc, carved ten thousand years ago by glacial meltwater. Nearing the bottom, in a meadow barely visible from the shops and restaurants lining the village street, we saw a long wooden table covered with platters of food and pitchers of foamy drink. Two benches along either side of the table were packed with picnickers. Near the table a trio of musicians sat on stools—a burly cellist, two elderly fiddlers swaying as they played—and now I could hear a faint tune within the sounds behind me. A cluster of onlookers stood on a slight rise. I couldn’t tell if they were waiting their turns or simply gaping at the noisy, laughing dinner scene.

  “Look at what they’re all wearing,” Beverly said.

  I hadn’t noticed. Some women wore hooped skirts, others frilly dresses in bright primary colors. Some had bonnets or woolen shawls tied with broad silken ribbons. Bearded men were dressed in rough and well-worn jackets with baggy trousers, some with vests or cravats and high collars. A soldier in full uniform, scarlet and black, stood at the head of the table. One hand clasped his sheathed sword, the other held a mug of beer raised as though he were making a toast. He gestured and beer sloshed onto his wrist, which made him burst into laughter and begin again.

  We walked around the edge of the action. The onlookers were also dressed in Victorian costume. No one we could see wore contemporary clothes. I reached for Beverly’s hand, steadied by its reality. She was smiling. I tried not to believe we’d gone through a wormhole or a time portal.

  One of the fiddlers stopped playing, put down his instrument, and stood. The other musicians stopped then, and everyone watched the fiddler walk toward the table.

  “Okay, right,” he said. “Very good. Let’s take a moment, then start the scene again from where you all say the toast ‘To Sergeant Troy and Bathsheba!’ But remember, no one’s really very happy about this match, all right? Don’t be quite so jolly. You know it’s not going to end well. Far from the Madding Crowd, scene 3. Ready, all?”

  The next morning we drove to Max Gate, the so-called atmospheric Victorian home designed by Thomas Hardy. It only took half an hour. The first shock was that Max Gate was now part of a sprawling suburban neighborhood girdled by traffic and clusters of young trees, lacking the view and sense of open landscape beyond the walls that I always associated with Hardy’s home.

  We parked on a weedy border across from the shrub-shrouded red-brick privacy wall. I took a deep breath—the aroma a mingling of blossoms and exhaust—and ran my hand over the entrance post as we walked onto the grounds. A tall man in jeans and baggy sweatshirt was cleaning the lower windows of the conservatory on the building’s east side.

  Hardy had willed the contents of his Max Gate study to the Dorset County Museum. So now, when you visit Max Gate and look at his study, what you see—the worn, handwoven carpets; the various chairs; the glass-fronted bookcases with their matching vintage volumes; the writing desk with its blank paper, leather blotter, empty wooden manuscript box, pen holder, lamp, magnifying glass, hole punch, framed photograph of Hardy, calendar set forever to the date he and Emma met—is a phantom study. Sure, most writers’ houses open to tourists contain facsimile furnishings and knickknacks. But leave it to Hardy to have the real stuff available over there in downtown Dorchester where it had not been during his life, and the fake stuff over here in Max Gate where the real stuff belonged, and where you would look for it. Leave it to Hardy to preserve the real stuff elsewhere, for posterity, while offering the fake stuff at home. Just as in his work, which is where the real Hardy dwelt while the carefully managed façade of Thomas Hardy was offered to the world and to his wife at home. Now you see him, now you don’t. All deflection, distraction, smoke and mirrors.

  This is the same man whose body’s ashes were buried up there in London, in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, while his heart was buried down here in Dorset’s Stinsford Churchyard. Or at least that’s the official story handed down since his death in 1928. Because, as with so much else about Hardy, there are rumors about that. Yes, his heart was cut out of his dead body before cremation, and yes, his ashes were then interred in Westminster Abbey. No argument there, and the scenario is certainly weird enough to have come straight from one of Hardy’s own later novels. But wait, there’s more: his heart was then wrapped in a tea towel and placed inside a biscuit tin for burial in the same grave that housed Emma, the wife he loathed until she died, at which point his love for her erupted in grief and longing and much of the greatest poetry he ever wrote. With attention diverted in the hours after Hardy’s death, the undertaker arrived to find the biscuit tin and gory tea towel empty on the kitchen table where the housekeeper had left them. Nearby, Hardy’s cat, Cobby, sat licking his stained snout, breath foul with blood’s telltale rusty metallic odor. The story would end there if it was about anyone else, but since it’s about Hardy, there’s a further extreme: the undertaker then killed Cobby, wrapped him in the tea towel with Hardy’s heart presumably inside the cat, and put him in the grave. Or the undertaker didn’t kill Cobby, but purchased a pig’s heart to wrap and bury in the grave. Either way, you still didn’t have Hardy’s heart where you thought you did.

  Just as it wasn’t rumor enough that Hardy was in love and had sex with his much-younger cousin Tryphena. The rumor had to metastasize into something nastier: she had to be his niece. Then she had to bear Hardy’s child. Anthony and Nan were right: I wouldn’t be surprised if a further extreme emerged in regard to Randy, and I heard that Hardy had indeed abandoned the child. Murdered the child. Ate the child.

  Beverly and I had visited Westminster Abbey and Hardy’s ashes nearly a month ago, at the beginning of our trip. We’d decided to spend three days in London, recovering from jet lag and exploring the art galleries, Tate museums, bookstores, landmarks, parks. But the heat and fatigue made us feel like finned snorkelers plodding through endless ankle-high breakers, never able to get far enough for the swimming to begin. We overslept and missed our prepaid breakfast. I lost my balance coming down the stairs of a double-decker bus when the driver braked, and landed in a heap at the bottom. I looked to the right when I should have looked to the left before crossing streets and was nearly splattered by a taxi, asked a waiter if the dressing on our salads was Goodness-free instead of Gluten-free, made a spectacle of myself trying to select the correct coins from my pocket at the Courtauld Gallery. I routinely turned in the wrong direction leaving our hotel, only to feel Beverly’s hand find me and set me aright. In St. James Park, where we went to see the pelicans, mute swans, coots, and greenfinch, I massaged Beverly’s feet as we sat on the grass in the Queens’ backyard, a simple act that would have been scandalous in Hardy’s day. At Parliament Square, raucous strikers protesting a tax on recycling had parked their trucks and were blaring horns, the sound an aptly cacophonous accompaniment to the way we felt.

  It was midafternoon of the third day by the time we got to Westminster Abbey. Guided by the voice of Jeremy Irons, I tried to pay attention to details of Henry VII’s Lady Chapel and Sir Edward the Confessor’s Shrine, statues of the saints, but was too impatient to reach Poet’s Corner. When we entered it, we shut the audio tour off and simply stood there. At first, my attention was held by footsteps and whispers and the hushed, disembodied sound of Jeremy Irons seeping from other visitors’ headphones. A large rose window provided the room’s light. In the marble floor there were engraved slabs or memorial markers, the names and sometimes the remains of writers whose work I had read aloud onto tape all those years ago: Browning, Tennyson, Hopkins, Byron. There were busts of Southey, Burns, Drayton; a statue of Shakespeare holding a manuscript in his hand while leaning against a stack of books, another of a demurely down-looking
Jane Austen seated in a chair.

  Hardy’s ashes were immediately to the north of Charles Dickens and the east of Rudyard Kipling. Dickens’s marker was larger than theirs combined. I stood before Hardy’s name, looking down, and found myself thinking about the story of Hardy taking Kipling on an autumn bicycle excursion to Weymouth for a few days as the younger man searched for a house to buy. At one they inspected, the elderly occupant hadn’t heard of her famous visitors and wasn’t sure she believed their claims. Now here they are.

  Glancing around, I noticed that Hardy was buried in an area of the room otherwise devoted to great actors (Laurence Olivier, Henry Irving, Peggy Ashcroft, and David Garrick), to writers who were extravagant performers of Self (Charles Dickens, Samuel Johnson, and Rudyard Kipling), or to artists who did their enduring work for performance (playwrights Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Richard Cumberland, and composer George Frideric Handel).

  This struck me then as a bizarre placement. Reticent, remote Thomas Hardy alone among nine artists of show, nine towering players or creators of roles? But it strikes me, now that I’ve come to know more about Hardy’s life, as stunningly appropriate. Hardy fabricated an understated persona, quiet and reserved, detached and settled, a man who wrote of emotional turbulence while living an outwardly calm life of probity and order, and sold it the way a great actor would. He created a space around his unruly Self into which the attention of others was meant to flow. Hardy’s performance seemed part of his nature, the way a killdeer is programmed to perform a broken-wing display in order to distract those who come too near its nest.