The Phantom of Thomas Hardy

by Floyd Skloot

  Hardy sighed and bent closer to the paper before him. He was mostly bald, mostly gray where he did have hair, beardless but with a dapper gray moustache, its tips carefully twisted. This was Hardy, circa 1900. A sixty-year-old man possessed by his work, fraught and struggling in the act of composition.

  He wrote in bursts, sometimes raising his pen off the page entirely and tapping its top against his teeth as he stared out the window. To his left, rising from the clutter, was a thick stack of manuscript paper, the pages face down, haphazardly aligned. Hardy lifted the top page off the stack—which would have been the last page he’d placed there—and began reading it. He looked up at the view through his window, then back down at the page and spoke a line aloud: “Saddened even as he felt such joy, Patrick Stone lay with his dearest rue under a canopy of bird song.” Satisfied, Hardy put it back and began writing again.

  Given its layout on the pages, and the unmetered and unrhymed sentence I’d heard him read, Hardy was engaged in a work of prose, not poetry. Obviously a novel. A very substantial novel that looked to have been in progress for many years.

  Hardy abruptly stood. I was afraid he might somehow have detected my presence. Did a Visitor give off shadows? Could I be seen reflected in his window? I could see his reflection there, but where mine should be I saw only the wall behind me.

  Hardy took off his coat and vest and flung them on top of a cabinet beside him. He opened his collar, yanked off his cravat. His movements looked desperate, like those of a man struggling to catch his breath. Then I heard a sob, and a series of deep inhalations.

  Like a man surrendering, Hardy sank back down. He opened his desk drawer, took out a page of sketches and studied it. There were faces drawn in his expert manner, quick and deft, a man and woman. The man was recognizably Hardy as a young man and below his image was the word Stone. The woman resembled the photograph Beverly had shown me earlier that day: Tryphena Sparks. Below her image was the word Heart. Hardy studied them for maybe thirty seconds, though the time felt endless.

  Then he put the sketches away, shut the drawer, and picked up his pen. He continued writing as I approached the desk and stood behind him. I could see the new sentences as they were created: “That week Patrick Stone and Ruby Heartsfield met by the crooked tree at the edge of the leaze every afternoon at the same hour. He had not known such happiness was possible. Nor such elation. His Ruby. His Rue.”

  I felt certain Hardy was writing a scene set in the place where Beverly and I had just been, Coomb eweleaze. It was a scene between Hardy and Tryphena, loosely disguised. He shook his head, crossed out “He had not known such happiness was possible,” and scrawled, “He had always hoped such happiness was possible.” Then he slashed his pen through that line and wrote, “He had known such happiness was possible but had not dared to risk seizing it.”

  With the same ferocity, he revised the rest of the passage. He was working, I knew, to make it as honest and true as he could. When he paused, I reread the lines: “That week Patrick Stone and Ruby Hearts-field met by the crooked tree at the edge of the leaze every afternoon at the same hour. He had known such happiness was possible but had not dared to risk seizing it. Nor had he dared such ecstasy, lest losing it later destroy him. What a fool he had been. What a fool he still could be. His Ruby. His Rue.”

  The page now complete, Hardy added it to the stack, which he then lifted, turned face up, straightened, and placed back on his desk. I could read the title page:

  Something I Missed:

  A Novel of Love

  Found and Lost

  and Mourned

  By

  Thomas Hardy

  He was, it seemed, at the end of his day’s work. He stood, but didn’t turn around to leave. Instead, he reached into his drawer again. He withdrew the sketches and lifted the page to his lips.

  And then I was no longer at Max Gate. There was no fade, no final glimpse of the man or his study. I was just comfortably in the easy chair by the bed in our B&B and could hear Beverly’s bathwater begin to drain. She was singing from an old English folk song, “the water is wide, I can’t cross over,” and I knew I was back where I needed to be for good.

  Was it possible? Had Thomas Hardy, long after he supposedly quit writing novels, written one called “Something I Missed,” which he never published?

  To my knowledge, the story of Hardy’s split career has never been doubted. Novels for twenty-eight years / no novels for the next thirty-three years.

  Disgusted by the outpouring of brutal and often personal criticism over Tess of the D’Urbervilles in 1891 and Jude the Obscure in 1895, Hardy claimed that the experience completely cured him of further interest in novel writing. The reaction to his work, he said, compelled him, “if he wished to retain any shadow of self-respect, to abandon at once a form of literary art he had long intended to abandon at some indefinite time.” He would henceforth focus only on poetry. Writing novels, he insisted, was something he’d done for money, and—ironically—after the scandalous, controversial reception of his last novels he had money aplenty. Those novels, which he said were the least important half of his work from a purely literary standpoint, were not where he practiced true art. That was in the poetry, the higher calling, and poetry was all he would write in the future.

  Some biographers and critics have suggested that there was more to the decision than Hardy merely reacting to his critics. They noted that he’d reached the point where, as Martin Seymour-Smith put it, “he was now finding prose no longer adequate for what he wished to say and was writing more poems” anyway. Robert Gittings thought “the highly personal themes of his secret youth were now beginning to force themselves uncomfortably into his novels. . . . When he attached them to a novelist’s human characters, they became too self-revealing. Poems could reveal more of the emotion, but less of the biographical circumstances.” Claire Tomalin viewed it as a savvy career move, “a dramatic gesture from a novelist at the pinnacle of success, controversial but hugely admired, translated, discussed all over the Western world and rich from his royalties.”

  So they all saw additional motives, but never doubted that Hardy had, indeed, quit writing novels.

  But, my God, what if he hadn’t? What if Thomas Hardy had secretly written another novel and never published it, never let anyone know he was doing it, never even risked having it typed? A novel written out of such personal urgency and so revealing, so true about his life, that—if he even could finish it—Hardy destroyed it. Or hid it.

  While Beverly dried her hair, I thought about what Hardy might have done with “Something I Missed.” That is, if it ever existed.

  Knowing what I did about him, I couldn’t imagine he’d actually destroy it. Not this manuscript. He’d burned so much, but this, I felt, would be different. This seemed like a book written to assuage decades of guilt and sadness, to understand and atone for what he’d destroyed once already. He couldn’t destroy it again.

  If he’d hidden the manuscript, and it hadn’t been found by Florence when she executed the terms of Hardy’s will and gave his things to the Dorset County Museum, or in the process of various Max Gate remodelings and rehabilitations, or by the many tenants who’d lived there before it became a tourist site, or by the swarms of visitors, I thought it might be hidden someplace other than Max Gate. And therefore nearly impossible to find. There were too many possibilities: The cottage at Bockhampton? The heath? A site associated with Tryphena—in Puddletown or Weymouth or Topsham or buried somewhere in Coomb eweleaze? In London?

  This wasn’t something I could envision discussing with anyone other than Beverly. Not even with Anthony and Nan, who knew about my Visitations. Nor was I going to start hunting for “Something I Missed.” It was just too crazy. If Hardy wanted me to know where it was now, he would show me.

  When I told Beverly about my Visitation she said the existence of a secret Hardy novel sounded so plausible that it was surprising rumors about it weren’t already in circulation. A cache of u
nknown work, à la J. D. Salinger. She also mentioned that a ruby was a talisman of passion. And that, in addition to its connotations of regret and loss, the word Rue also referred to an herb that, when chewed, was known to ease the wild beating of a heart. It soothed. It improved vision. It warded off witches’ spells.

  I showered and we went for a drive. If some time on British roads didn’t clear my head, nothing would. There was a pub that would cater to our diet located about a dozen miles east in Church Knowle, and on the way we listened to a call-in show. Sir Elton John’s performance at last night’s Jubilee concert was rubbish, Sir Paul McCartney should let the younger performers have their day, Sir Tom Jones was over. It was all too safe and Sir-ish. And not everyone in the country approved of the celebrations or of the monarchy, either. Waste of money. Country’s gone to pot, all the foreigners and all.

  The pub was busy and loud, just what we needed, and the fish was fresh. Nobody was talking about Thomas Hardy.

  Heading back to the B&B, we followed the road through the Lulworth Firing Range that we’d noticed yesterday. The range was a Ministry of Defense zone normally closed to all traffic and used for training at the Armored Fighting Vehicles Gunnery School. They shoot live shells in there. But in honor of the Jubilee holidays the shooting was halted and the road opened, though few tourists seemed to know. We had it to ourselves except for the occasional tank hulks scattered on the landscape. And for the sheep. As I came out of a blind curve a dozen of them were spread across the road. I braked and had to laugh, thinking that after all the nightmare-inducing narrow overhung shadowy roads with their concealed hazards and speeding onrushing dangers, it would be a perfect cartoon ending for a flock of sheep to be the thing that finally caused me to crash or our tire to explode. Still, the view was astounding on this ancient ridge road, a clear panoramic line of sight to Dorset’s Jurassic Coast. Beverly got out her camera and took some landscape photos to use as inspiration for her painting after we got home.

  Anthony and Nan were waiting when we returned. He’d offered to walk us to the makeshift theater and be sure we got good seats, and since the other three guests had already checked in, Nan joined us.

  “Don’t forget to bring jackets along. Gets cold there by the cove, come evening.”

  It was just a quarter mile down Main Road, but the walk took longer than we anticipated because we kept having to stand aside for passing cars. As we descended into the bowl of Lulworth Cove, about forty or fifty people had gathered.

  “Look there,” Nan whispered. “Dear me.”

  “Don’t worry,” Anthony replied. “This could be entertaining.”

  I thought they were talking about the man in long flowing white hair and an overcoat who stood by the side of the road declaiming Hardy’s poem “At Lulworth Cove a Century Back.” Around his neck hung a sign with the word Time printed on one side in heavy black ink. The word Hardy was printed on the other side. He flipped the sign to indicate whether it was Time or Hardy speaking particular lines in this elegy for the young John Keats, whose final steps on English soil were taken right here at Lulworth Cove. But the man had trouble projecting over the same trio we’d seen yesterday playing old-time reels and jigs in the parking lot. Now the hubbub of the gathering audience was adding to his problems. He was looking downcast. But maybe this was due to the poem itself. “That man goes to Rome—to death, despair.”

  Watching and listening to him as we walked, Beverly and I nearly bumped into Sharon Taylor. She’d been the target of Anthony and Nan’s hushed exchange, and though she couldn’t have overheard she greeted them without any of the warmth we’d seen in her yesterday. I wasn’t sure she recognized us. But then she shifted her gaze in our direction and smiled.

  “My gluten-free, Hardy-loving Americans,” she said, grabbing Beverly’s hands and shaking them. “I see we didn’t poison you after all.”

  “We feel so lucky to be in Dorset on a show night. Just happened to hear about it today from the caretaker at Max Gate.”

  “And speaking of the devil,” Sharon said as Jason stomped down the path behind us.

  “Made it, I see!” He patted me on the back. “Hope it’s worth your time. Hello, Ms. Taylor. Know they had to cast a new Sergeant Troy only three days ago?”

  “I hadn’t heard about that,” Sharon said. “What happened to Laurence White?”

  “Actually got a small part in Game of Thrones. Agent phoned up. Two episodes. Fill in for someone. Be on set in Morocco by yesterday.”

  “What lovely news for Laurence.”

  “Who replaced him?” Nan asked.

  “That’s another unfortunate bit. Edgar Ellis.”

  “I see. Had to redo the costumes, did they?”

  Anthony turned to us and said, “Edgar, bless him, is quite a bit shorter and let us say bulkier than Laurence (Don’t-Call-Me-Larry) White.”

  “Awkward, that, what with Serena Mulry being six foot tall,” Sharon said. “Her height worked well next to Laurence, no doubt. And I believe there was also an extra, well, an extra connection between Serena and Laurence as things went on.”

  “Sharon, really,” Anthony said. “Nothing but gossip. Serena has been with Alison Patel for years now. You know that.”

  The music stopped and we all headed toward the stage at the center of the parking lot. Folding chairs were set out in ten neat rows of about thirty each. The meadow where we’d seen the cast rehearsing was off to the right. To the left of the stage stood a crowd of actors in costume trying to be inconspicuous beside some small trees and shrubbery. It seemed as though almost all of the sparse audience were local people and they exchanged greetings for a couple of minutes. We had no trouble finding seats all together and close to the stage. There was a sharp whistle from behind us. Jason turned and put up his hand in response. Katie Pole Crosbie, the caretaker of Hardy’s cottage, joined us. She and Jason embraced, and he whispered something in her ear. She nodded and kissed his neck. I noticed that he didn’t reach for his hand sanitizer. Once the audience had settled, the director—still carrying his fiddle—strode to center stage.

  “On behalf of the Hardy Theatre Company, welcome, friends, to the partly real, partly dream-country of Dorset’s late great poet and novelist. I’m Geoffrey Mills. Tonight’s performance will be a partly real, partly dream-adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd. It will pay particular attention to matters of the heart, or The Geometry of Love as our young advisor, scholar, and script-rescuer Jason Abbott calls it. Jason? Stand up please and let us see you.”

  Jason rose an inch, waved, and said, “No, no. No need. No need, no.”

  “We make no claim to be telling the whole story or adhering to its local geography. There will be six scenes,” the director continued. “And, all going well, no intermission.”

  This made everyone except me and Beverly erupt in prolonged laughter. Anthony leaned across Nan and tried to explain to us why it was so funny. Around a series of noises I understood to be chuckles, he said the performances of Far from the Madding Crowd were being held here in the parking lot on a makeshift stage because the stage at their usual venue—Max Gate—had collapsed midway through closing night of their previous production, The Woodlanders, forcing a forty-minute intermission in which the set and all the props were moved onto the lawn before the play could continue. Indeed, this week’s performances were rushed into production as a fundraising enterprise to build a more durable and portable stage.

  The director thanked us for attending and left the audience in a giddy mood. He rejoined his fellow musicians at the side of the stage and they began to play one of Hardy’s favorite airs from childhood, “My Fancy-Lad.” After a minute had passed, a bearded young man built like a fullback and wearing shapeless old corduroys with a matching cap strode onstage. He carried a shepherd’s crook.

  After the play, the seven of us went to a pub across the street from the parking lot. It was located in a sixteenth-century thatched inn, with seats outdoors that overlooked the cove. Dog
s wound their way around and between tables, happy, nuzzling for handouts.

  Anthony and Jason ordered Star Gazer ales with plates of chips and mushy peas and olives for the table. Nan touted their cask beer and Sharon recommended the medium-sweet Dorset cider, which was gluten-free, but we stuck with red wine and Katie with a single malt scotch from the Isle of Skye.

  We all agreed that Gabriel Oak’s dowsing of the straw rick fire was the play’s most exciting scene. And the burial of Fanny Robin with her stillborn child was the most moving. All the actors did well.

  “Bathsheba,” Jason said. “Superb. Showed that she loved each of her three men differently. Held something back as well. Serena got the angles right.”

  “A toast! To Love’s Geometry,” Katie said, and smiled at Jason.

  “So embarrassing,” Jason sighed, blushing. “I do wish Geoffrey hadn’t done that.”

  “Well then, to Thomas Hardy!” Anthony raised his glass. When beer sloshed onto his wrist, he laughed and said, “Oops-a-daisy, just like our Sergeant Troy.”

  “He spilled his beer the same way yesterday,” Beverly said. “We happened to walk by during rehearsal.”

  That prompted Sharon to ask where we’d gone since she’d seen us for lunch. As we recounted our travels in Hardy country, Anthony watched and listened closely to see how much we’d reveal. I told about Max Gate, from the dining room to the attic to the Nut Walk and the Pet Cemetery, and about Durdle Door, about seeing heath-ponies at Rushy Pond and resting in Coomb eweleaze. But I didn’t mention Visitations or investigations or phantom sources. Nor anything about Hardy’s love life.

  But I didn’t have to. Our itinerary gave us away.

  “Ahhh,” Sharon said. “The Tryphena Pilgrimage.”

  “Now Sharon,” Nan said. “No need to get started.”