The Phantom of Thomas Hardy

by Floyd Skloot

  “If I may,” Jason said. “By your logic, Sharon, they were on the Emma Pilgrimage too. Spent hours at Max Gate, after all. Lingered in Emma’s attic room. Pet Cemetery.” He looked at us and said, “You’ve been to Cornwall too?”

  “Yes,” Beverly said. “Four days last week. But we didn’t visit any places connected with Emma or Hardy.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Circumstantial evidence lets us conclude you were definitely on the Emma Pilgrimage.”

  “And don’t forget they visited Hardy’s cottage,” Katie said. “Surely they were on the Pole Pilgrimage as well.”

  Undeterred, Sharon said, “I don’t see what the big deal is. Don’t get me wrong, I love the man’s work. But people have known for more than eighty years that our placid old Thomas Hardy had much to hide. Bonfires in the garden and all. What does that tell you? And for fifty of those years they’ve known precisely what he had to hide. It’s all in the poems, if you know what to look for. Hardy acolytes just didn’t want to admit the incest, the secret child, the shameful cover-up. It’s a totally credible story.”

  “As long as you don’t concern yourself with evidence,” Anthony said. “The slightest shred of proof or corroboration. Verification. Official papers. No, it’s all based on the ravings of an aged woman with dementia who was being led on by a, you’ll forgive me Sharon, Hardy wacko.”

  “Hardy destroyed the proof.”

  “All of it? And silenced all of Dorset in his own time? Somehow purged the official record?” Anthony took a drink of ale. “Let me tell you, for the benefit of our American guests, a far more credible story: Nothing happened between Thomas Hardy and Tryphena Sparks. She was sixteen and his cousin. A girl who’d been a child all Hardy’s life.”

  Sharon tried to interrupt but Anthony held up his hand. “Let me finish. I know cousins could marry. I know girls married quite young. Hardy was ill, lonely, at loose ends. He visited her family in their time of troubles. This does not constitute grounds to assume an affair, Sharon, or any of the other rot that follows from that assumption. Because it’s nothing more than that: a series of assumptions.”

  “There’s a middle ground, is there not?” Jason said. “More credible still. Had a romance of some kind. Anything from a brief fling to full-on engagement. Broke up. Meant a little or meant a lot. Either way, world didn’t end when they parted.”

  “As happened with Hardy over and over,” said Katie. “Often simultaneously.”

  “Hardy became famous. Gossip followed.” Jason grabbed a couple of olives and popped them in his mouth. “Pattern of behavior, you know. In his affairs just as clearly as in his novels. Needed to be involved with two or even three at once. Could never choose.”

  “You know,” Beverly said, “sometimes it’s hard not to be repelled by Hardy’s pattern of behavior. As an adult he seems to be interested in a woman only to the extent that she listens to him and adores him. What he’s after is an audience. Or a staff assistant. It’s shallow. He’s not there for the women he supposedly loves. Not until they die and he can perform his grieving act.”

  “Agreed,” Katie said. “He suffered because of it, but so did Emma. So did Cassie. All his other quote unquote Beloveds.”

  Sharon had been jotting notes on her paper napkin. When the talk stopped, she looked around the table and smiled. “One thing I will say that can’t be argued. Hardy is good for business.”

  “Hear, hear!” Nan said.

  “It’s a bit of a drive back to Wareham. I’d better go.” Sharon stood and we all got up with her. She took one of my hands and one of Beverly’s and held us for a moment. “It was lovely to see you again. I feel you’ll be back with us in the future too. Don’t forget Tea Is for Tess.”

  After she’d left, conversation drifted to other topics. Cool weather. Relief that the Jubilee holiday was almost over. The 2012 Olympic Games beginning next month in London. But my thoughts remained on Hardy. On “Something I Missed” and all this discussion of Hardy’s loves, what was known and what was not.

  I looked out over Lulworth Cove and thought about the scene in Far from the Madding Crowd where Sergeant Troy plunged into the sea right there at the cove’s center where the water was calm. Disgusted with the tedium of farm life, gloomy over the death of his beloved Fanny Robin, disliking the company of his wife Bathsheba, Troy sought escape. How many times, I thought, Thomas Hardy must have had that fantasy. How many ways he imagined escaping from the torment that love was for him. He could not. Neither could Sergeant Troy, though he survived his swim, rescued by passing seamen and serving aboard their ship for a few months before returning to Dorset and his death at the hands of one of Bathsheba’s thwarted suitors. Edgar Ellis, playing Troy, had resisted theatrics and used a simple tightening of his voice to convey his character’s desperation. It worked, and it reminded me of Hardy’s desperate efforts at control. Of himself. Of his story. Of his world. His effort to make them all cohere. My travels in Hardy country these last two days have helped me recognize how hard he worked at that.

  I could imagine him as I’d seen him just a few hours earlier, driven nearly wild at his desk by an urgent need to reveal the truth, writing at the thin edge of control. I understood what he meant by saying “Something I missed.” What I’d seen felt like the deepest truth I could know.

  The next morning, before leaving Dorset for Heathrow Airport, we visited Thomas Hardy’s grave at the St. Michael’s churchyard in Stinsford. Hardy and his family worshipped in this church, played in the choir here, even helped restore the thirteenth-century building. We sat on a bench before the family’s graves and looked at his memorial stone, which read “Here Lies the Heart of Thomas Hardy.” And, I have to admit, we began to laugh.

  “What it should say is ‘Here Lies Thomas Hardy’s Cat Cobby Inside Whom Might Lie the Heart of Thomas Hardy,’” I said.

  “Or a pig’s heart.”

  On one side of Hardy’s stone was an inscription in memory of “Emma, Wife of Thomas Hardy.” On the other, an inscription in memory of “Florence, Second Wife of Thomas Hardy.” They were all in there together.

  “It’s a gravestack.”

  We were, of course, tired out. After the play last night, we’d stayed up later than usual talking with Anthony and Nan. They’d googled us, visited our websites, visited my daughter’s website, loved Beverly’s abstracted landscapes, and wanted to talk about her art. Did she paint in the field or in a studio? Some of her things, they said, called to mind Turner, others Monet. Would she paint some Dorset scenes? And would I write about Hardy? What was Becka working on now? They insisted on a small nightcap. Then Beverly and I packed so we’d have extra time to sleep in the morning. But we woke up early anyway, had an early breakfast, said our good-byes, and were ready to begin the long, long trip back to Oregon. Just the thought of all those hours on airplanes made me loopy.

  And this was our second Hardy grave, since we’d already paid our respects to his ashes in Westminster Abbey. Hardy actually had three simultaneous funerals. At two o’clock on the afternoon of January 16, 1928, there was one in Westminster Abbey, attended by his wife Florence and his sister Kate, with the prime minister among the pallbearers. A spadeful of earth from back home in Dorset had been sent along by a local farm laborer and was sprinkled on the casket. At the same hour here in Stinsford churchyard, Hardy’s brother Henry led a crowd of local mourners in remembering the great author. They buried his heart in the same grave as Emma, among the tombstones of other Hardys, under a great yew tree. Also at the same hour in Dorchester all business was halted so the mayor and other notables could gather to celebrate Hardy at St. Peter’s Church in Dorchester.

  We were able to stop laughing when a young woman on a bicycle rode up to the churchyard gate and stopped. She removed her helmet and stashed it in the bicycle’s basket, ran her fingers through her close-cropped hair, tugged her cell phone from the pocket of her pants, and stepped among the tombstones. When she found the tombstone she was looking for, she snap
ped a couple of pictures. Then she held the phone at arm’s length and took a photo of herself before the tombstone. Studying the results made her frown.

  “Sorry,” she called to us, holding up the phone, wiggling it. “Selfie doesn’t cut it. Would you mind taking a picture?”

  Beverly was happy to help and the break gave us a chance to shake our giddiness. When we walked over I saw the name on the tombstone the woman was visiting: Cecil Day-Lewis 1904–1972 Poet Laureate.

  “I didn’t know he was buried here,” I said.

  “Brilliant, isn’t it?” the woman said. “Daniel Day-Lewis’s father! His mum too, right there.”

  Beverly snapped a photo of the woman, looked at it, moved a few steps closer so the tombstone’s inscription would be clearer, and took another. She handed back the phone. “I can take more if you’d like.”

  The woman looked at the screen, nodded once in satisfaction, and put the phone back in her pocket. “I wonder if Daniel comes here to visit them sometime. Be ace to run into him, wouldn’t it.”

  After she left, we sat on the bench again. Beverly lay back with her head in my lap. We looked at each other and smiled. I’d imagined seeing Hardy’s grave would be a solemn, climactic moment for me. But this was turning out to be even better. I was at home with Hardy and his spirit now, his world and ours aligned in a suitably antic peace.

  We were in the only place where Thomas Hardy had ever seen a ghost. He’d always wanted to see one, claimed he’d give ten years of his life for the chance. Then on Christmas Eve in 1919, at the age of seventy-nine, he was sitting here in the churchyard when a figure wearing eighteenth-century clothing appeared. It said “a green Christmas” and vanished into the church. I thought about that, and realized it too sounded like the wind. Christmas.

  “I think the Hardy Visitations are over,” I said, looking out over the family plot.

  We drove out Church Lane toward the intersection with A35. It would be wide and easy all the way from there to Heathrow. At the last turn before the roundabout, I could see Dorchester in the distance. Closer, about a mile and a half from where we waited for the traffic to clear, was Max Gate. Smoke drifting above it, probably from a neighbor’s chimney, was the last image I had of Hardy’s home before accelerating north toward London.

  “Bonfires in the garden and all,” Sharon Taylor had said last night at the pub. In the weeks after his death, Florence Hardy had carried out her husband’s wishes by burning his papers. The gardener had helped, raking over the ashes to be sure nothing escaped destruction. There had been other, earlier burnings in the Max Gate garden as well. Hardy had burned Emma’s diaries, her writings about their marriage and about Hardy himself. He burned letters, manuscripts—including his first, unpublished novel, the one he was writing when he became involved with Tryphena.

  But I don’t believe he burned “Something I Missed.” At eighty, shortly after the ghost in Stinsford churchyard had spoken to him of a green Christmas, Hardy wrote to a friend, “I have not been doing much—mainly destroying papers of the last thirty years & they raise ghosts.” But raising ghosts was the purpose of “Something I Missed” and I believed he needed those ghosts to remain at large. As he remained at large.

  In a further act of literary incineration, he’d omitted certain years and certain people from his self-ghostwritten biography (you can’t find Tryphena Sparks anywhere in its 613 pages). He omitted relatives from a family tree he drew, and from his few surviving notebooks. Sure, this attempted smoke screen looked bad, even incriminating. The bonfires might as well be signal flares announcing that there was something to hide. Hardy could live—and could die—with that. Because “Something I Missed” remained.

  Hardy was far from the only writer to have torched the record. Charles Dickens did it, at least twice, and wished he’d been able to find every letter he’d written so he could add them to the fire. Henry James did it too, including one famous burn that consumed forty years’ worth of manuscripts and notebooks and letters. Samuel Johnson, Sigmund Freud. In the end, none of these writers could truly control the way their stories were told or the conclusions drawn. That part of the afterlife is in the hands of the living, and its narrative is always an act of hypothesis.

  For all that, I still didn’t believe Hardy burned “Something I Missed.” It had to survive him. The problem was what to do with it.

  The road curved toward the northeast. We passed a sign showing Puddletown straight ahead. To the left was the turnoff for Cuckoo Lane.

  We stopped at a gas station near Heathrow for a fill-up. Beverly went into the small market and bought a tube of superglue. As I topped off the tank, she knelt beside the ravaged front left tire and glued the flaps of rubber back in place.

  “I know it won’t last,” she said. “But I had to try. It just looked so sad.”

  When we returned the car at the Avis lot, an attendant came over to inspect it. He checked the dashboard and noted we’d driven 1,512 miles.

  “Enjoy your travels?” he asked.

  “Very much,” I said, and knew at once I’d said too much.

  Hearing my American accent, he knew what to do. He walked directly to the left front of the car. He crouched to study the tire and wheel, touched them, made a few notes on his clipboard, and stood up. “Did you hit a pothole?”

  It cost us £135. We’d thought it would surely be more than that.

  The night we got home to Portland, I had trouble sleeping. After a restless hour, I got out of bed and walked to the front of our home to see the river shimmer in the full moon’s light. I thought that something in the way current and reflected clouds worked on the river’s shifting surface would settle me down, tell me for sure where I was. I saw driftwood flicker on the bank. Almost lost in shadow, a sailboat rocked at anchor near Ross Island’s north tip. From time to time, because I knew they must be there, I saw the great blue heron nests clustered at the top of the cottonwoods. I thought if my body knew I was home, sleep would come. But when Beverly called to me from bed, I knew I’d gotten up only to return to her.

  There’s a moment early in Jude the Obscure when young Jude Fawley sees the city of Christminster for the first time. It’s twenty miles away, revealing itself in sundown light after a long day trapped in mist. Christminster—Hardy’s stand-in for Oxford—strikes the orphaned country lad as a bejeweled vision, with points of light gleaming like the topaz.

  To see this sight, Jude has walked two or three gloomy miles from his great-aunt’s bakery in the hamlet of Marygreen to a hilltop vantage point. He imagines Christminster as a magical place full of books he yearns to read and scholarship he yearns to join.

  Though men of Jude’s class had no chance of admission, what drives him is a touching, innocent, utterly absurd fantasy of becoming a son of the university and, by doing so, raising himself from his humble background. It’s a glorious dream of education’s power, and by the time I read this scene, in the last of Hardy’s novels, in the last months of my transformative undergraduate years, under the guidance of my beloved mentor, I felt myself to be fully there with Jude.

  I was moved by Jude’s—and Hardy’s—passion for education, the belief in what occurs behind those brick walls, within those brick buildings, in the pages of books and the mind opened to the world by knowledge.

  I wasn’t an orphan, came from a family of butchers rather than masons, but I’d been fatherless since the age of fourteen and yearned to get away from the small apartment where I ended up living with my desperately unhappy mother. There weren’t necessarily points of light gleaming like the topaz in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, or on the campus of Franklin and Marshall College during my time there. In fact, the most noticeable effect was the odor of tobacco from the Hess and Millysack cigar factories nearby. But the place, which I came to with no idea of what I was seeking, took me in at a crucial moment in my life, brought Robert Russell and then Thomas Hardy into my life, and allowed me to find my life’s work. Exactly as the dream of an education, as
Jude’s dream, was supposed to work, though it didn’t for Jude.

  Now the team had reunited and expanded. Again with no idea what I was seeking other than to offer homage to Thomas Hardy and the recently deceased Robert Russell, I was allowed to discover something I’d missed about Hardy. With Beverly by my side and fully in my heart, with Hardy Visiting me and Russell there for me, I’d reached a kind of understanding about the writer whose work and life haunted me for nearly half a century. He’d hoped to shield himself from suffering the pain of losing love by turning away from love. But it didn’t work and he knew it didn’t work. This was an even deeper suffering, because he could neither stop falling in love nor stay in love, and it took him more than a lifetime to see that what we learn from such suffering is what makes us most capable of love. I think now that I always knew this about Hardy. I just didn’t know I knew it.

  Along the way, a quest emerged in which the chance to make sense of Hardy’s strangeness and struggle gave me a chance to make sense of my own. I was engaged in an ongoing process of learning to live as a brain-damaged man and resist neurological disintegration.

  Once we got home from England, I began to read and reread Hardy. All I knew was that, as I told Beverly only moments after Hardy had touched and spoken to me in front of Barclays Bank in Dorchester, Hardy had passed a story to me, a book whose pages as yet had no words. I would have to write the true story of the Visitations. All of them, including the last one, including what I’d seen there.

  Even if there were no such book as “Something I Missed,” the truth of Robert Russell’s and Thomas Hardy’s legacy to me had been revealed: the struggle to speak from the heart—even if in the end Hardy failed to be able to speak fully, even if he failed to be heard—was what mattered most. Such speaking was a form of self-surrender, an end to withholding, a risk. But it was self-surrender that paradoxically allowed for self-survival.