The Phantom of Thomas Hardy

by Floyd Skloot

  I remembered Nan Swain saying, as we sat with her and Anthony over tea at their B&B, that people want to see Hardy so badly they somehow manage to succeed. She was right, as Beverly was right. I’d wanted to see Hardy. Seeing him, and engaging in the search for what he missed, fulfilled a deep need—too long postponed—to express in action my grief over Russell’s death, and my love and gratitude for how these men had repeatedly helped me speak.

  I read eight biographies of Hardy, along with Lois Deacon’s book of sordid allegations and Robert Gittings’s demolition of its claims, discovering that each writer revealed a sometimes slightly / sometimes vastly different Thomas Hardy. Each had a different view of Emma, of Tryphena, of Hardy’s marriages and romances, of events and their meaning. I read Emma’s recollections, books of Hardy criticism and letters, and books about the landscape of his work. The thing that most writers agree about is Hardy’s essential secrecy. This could mean he had awful things to hide but it also could mean he didn’t want to be known except by his work. And in the end, there was work he didn’t want known too. Until he did. Until his restless spirit cried out for the work to be seen.

  There’s no consensus. There never is and never can be. There are, instead, stories. Some more credible than others.

  I can’t tell you how many times I looked at the photographs Beverly had taken while we were in Dorset. We had them loaded onto her computer and we also uploaded them to a lab that printed them out. For months as I read all those books, I kept returning to the photos, making notes, writing scenes and descriptions in my journal. I kept studying the images, in particular, of places where Hardy had appeared to me—South Street in Dorchester, the bedroom at his cottage in Bockhampton, the Nut Walk and study at Max Gate. I found additional images of these places online too.

  Since I kept our photos in chronological order, and since the ones from the Nut Walk and the Pet Cemetery were together, I got caught up in looking at the tombstones. It was only possible to identify a few of the names. Some were fully clear—Wessex, Moss, Comfy, Chips—and some partially clear. Even with a magnifying glass, or with the zoom feature on our computer, I couldn’t make out all the pets’ names, and it seemed like the engraving on some of the stones had eroded away. Some stones had sunk into the grass. I wanted to identify as many of the pets as I could, get their names and stories into what I was writing. It was driving me crazy.

  One clear afternoon in late fall, when the sunlight over the river was most intense and shining into our living room, Beverly was at her computer and I was sitting on the couch nearby holding the photos up one-by-one to have yet another look. We both wore baseball hats as usual to shield our eyes from the glare, and mine was my lucky Brooklyn Dodgers hat. In a close-up shot of the very southern edge of the Pet Cemetery, on one of the semisunken stones, in the brilliant beam of sunlight coming through our windows, I thought I saw some letters I hadn’t been able to make out before. Or rather, had taken for shadows before. I didn’t want to move.

  “Can you bring over the magnifying glass?”

  Beverly and I traded the magnifying glass back and forth. As the light shifted, so did we, keeping the photo aglow.

  “Shadows?” I asked.

  “Across the top, maybe. But on the stone’s face I think there are two, maybe three letters.”

  “I do too.”

  “This is amazing.”

  “Tell me what you see.”

  “R. U.” She stopped. “Can’t be sure, but it sure looks like there’s a B too. And there’s room for one more letter if the engraver centered the name.”

  “I know the names of eight Hardy pets. None were named Ruby.”

  We’d been keeping in e-mail contact with Jason Abbott III. He’d begun sending along chapters of his work on Love’s Geometry, which was now subtitled The Secret Formula of Relationship in the Novels of Thomas Hardy. He’d also been telling us about his own relationship, no longer secret or geometrical, with Katie Pole Crosbie.

  He was surprised when we wrote that we’d solved that equation months earlier, after seeing them together on the night of the play. But he was even more surprised when we wrote about what might be buried under a stone in the Pet Cemetery.

  I told him I had a theory that Hardy had written and hidden a novel. Told him what I thought it was about, and why I believed Hardy had written and hidden it. Though he knew I had neurological issues, I saw no reason to tell him about my Visitations. Just suggesting there was a hidden book manuscript was nutty enough already. I hoped he didn’t dismiss my theory as just another kind of brain misfire.

  I didn’t need to spell out why—if I were correct and Jason found it—“Something I Missed” and its story of the love between Patrick Stone and Ruby Heartsfield would be a career-making discovery for him. Jason didn’t press me to reveal how I’d come up with the book’s title or the main characters’ names. Within ten minutes he confirmed that the stone, sunken and badly eroded, did contain the faintly etched name Ruby. And that there had been no pets that bore the name Ruby.

  In his fourteen published novels, Thomas Hardy had said all he wanted to say. That’s what he told the inquiring journalist in 1906 and that still rings true. But in his hidden, secret novel, Hardy tried to say what he had to say. And eighty-four years after his death, he appeared ready for that secret to emerge.

  The day after he’d opened the grave, Jason and I spoke by Skype. He was at the desk in his upstairs bedroom. Through the door behind him I could see the hallway Beverly and I had walked along when we were at Max Gate. He held up before the screen what he’d found buried in the Pet Cemetery, a thick stack of paper.

  “A manuscript all right,” he said. “Four hundred and seventeen handwritten pages. Elaborately wrapped and secured. Very little damage to the paper. Handwriting looks like Hardy’s, no question. But Hardy on speed. Quite a mess.”

  “Can you read it?”

  “Already have. It’s unfinished, breaks off in midsentence with no resolution in sight. Guess what the last two words are.”

  “Love is . . . ,” I said.

  “I missed . . . ,” Beverly said.

  “No rest,” Jason said.

  Then he held up the book’s title page. I wasn’t sure it was Hardy’s handwriting—I’m no expert—but seeing the inked script was haunting. This was a page that had been written calmly:

  Something I Missed:

  A Novel of Love

  Found and Lost

  and Mourned

  By

  Thomas Hardy

  There were legal matters to deal with, and forensic work to rule out forgery, to establish that the manuscript was in Hardy’s hand, written on paper and with ink that would have been available to him between, say, 1890, when Tryphena died and the writing most likely began, and 1928, when Hardy died. The National Trust would be brought in, the Dorset County Museum and the Hardy Society. International scholars. But Jason assured me he would follow through and keep me posted.

  “It’s Hardy,” he said. “Most likely a second or third draft. Even so, all marked up with corrections. Still reads with the intensity of a first draft.”

  We spoke for a few more minutes about logistics. Then Jason glanced at his watch and said he had to go. “An unknown Hardy novel,” he added just before signing off. “It is, as you Americans say, a game changer.”

  “You know what, Jason? I feel like I’ve already read it.”

  Hardy had said, “No rest.” But maybe now there would be rest.

  Until Becka suggested it, I’d never thought of trying to track down the surviving copy of my college thesis on Hardy. “Since I was a kid you’ve been talking about Thomas Hardy. And your thesis.”

  When she said that, I instantly saw her sitting on a brown shag rug in the living room of our home in Springfield, Illinois. Given that rug, and the floral-patterned green and yellow hide-a-bed couch behind her, and the moving boxes stacked against a wall, the year had to be 1973. Late autumn, as we were still settling in to t
he rented house on South Glenwood. So Becka was just one year old in that moment. Smiling, wearing her grandmother’s fox-fur earmuffs, she held my Hardy thesis open across her knees, pretending to be halfway through reading it.

  If nothing else, Becka pointed out, getting hold of the thesis would further establish continuity with myself as I was then. With Robert Russell too and with my initial and therefore essential reactions to Hardy. And wasn’t all that, especially reconnecting with the past, what my work had been about since I got sick in 1988? Isn’t it why I went to Dorset?

  It seemed impossible that anyone could find one forty-four-year-old thesis among 225 years’ worth of Franklin and Marshall College theses. No way. To locate it, I thought, would require so many steps to have been taken successfully in the past: “To Christminster: A Study of the Development of the Novels of Thomas Hardy” would have had to go from the English Department offices to the college library to some shelf somewhere in that building and to wherever it was stored when the library had been extensively remodeled fourteen years after I graduated. It would have had to come back to the library again, perhaps been copied in some electronic manner, and followed through generations of tracking-system updates. Among all the other theses in every department throughout all those years.

  That night, I had a version of the dream I have two or three times a year. I’m wandering the familiar campus of Franklin and Marshall College, feeling at once deeply at home and completely lost. Landmarks—Old Main, Hartman Oval, the twin water towers, the gnarled Protest Tree before the bookstore entrance—are not in the right places. Buildings are oriented in strange ways. The baseball field on which I played for the freshman team was located where the Green Room Theatre should be. I’m late for class, can’t find the right room though I know where it’s located, don’t have the books I need.

  The next morning, I sent e-mails to some friends at Franklin and Marshall asking for suggestions about locating my thesis. They put me in touch with the Information Literacy Librarian, who put me in touch with her College Archives colleagues, one of whom sent me two PDF files, each containing half of my thesis. The process had taken just under twenty-four hours. They wrote to say they were able to make a copy from the original onion-skin paper, and then scan into searchable PDF documents.

  By now, it’s surely not a surprise to know what happened next. I cried.

  In the introduction to my thesis, I’d said I was “attempting to establish a sense of unmistakable continuity in Hardy’s work as a novelist, with a view of each novel in terms of its relationship to the ones that precede it.” At the end of such investigation, I declared, “it will be possible to judge the total performance of creative genius with clearer insight.”

  Not quite, Floyd, eh? But forty-four years later, and after three days in Dorset, you’re a little closer. To Hardy and to yourself. And that, I feel, is what the encounter with a great writer, a writer struggling to speak, to say what he’s trying to say, is supposed to do.

  It was Russell who put me together with Hardy and brought that issue into focus, connecting Hardy’s struggle to speak with my own. “This is it, you know,” he had said to me. And I’d needed to hear him then, in 1968, when I was first finding my voice as a person and writer, and I needed to hear him again in 1988, when I was silenced by illness, and I needed to hear him once more, after he had died and I was in search of “something I missed.”

  I’d spent the day reading my thesis and rereading key passages it led me to in some of Hardy’s novels. I’d also been rereading Robert Russell’s autobiography, its yellowed and densely printed pages now detached from the binding so that I held each one in my hand as I read it. My eyes felt strained, my head muddled.

  Around six o’clock that evening, as I began dicing red peppers and Kalamata olives to go with the broccolini and feta cheese, Beverly said, “That looks good.”

  When I glanced over toward the couch to smile at her, bright light from the reading lamp tilted above her head made my vision explode. Just a quirk of the angles. A sudden flash of light is the most frequent trigger for my migraines, which always last about twenty minutes and follow a predictable course. Already I could see a blazing yellow hole open up in my vision field and begin to fill with sharp, sizzling images, a dazzle of toothy Picasso-esque jagged pieces flickering faster and faster.

  I put down my knife, took off my glasses, and stood stock-still. The air seemed to pulsate. I could see Beverly, but I could also now see a sequence of black and yellow interlocking gears churning between us. There was a green and red flickering off to the south as though the room was filling with hummingbirds. Seeing me frozen in place, eyes open but unfocused, Beverly understood at once what was happening and came to help me over to the couch.

  “I’ll get the feverfew tincture,” she said, and walked toward our bedroom.

  Alone on the couch, I kept my eyes closed. That was my usual way of dealing with the intense part of these attacks. It wouldn’t stop the flow of forms but at least the migraine’s visual chaos wouldn’t be competing with perceptions of the room around me or of the darkening skies. Locked into a view that included only pure disturbance—optical static—I looked around that inner space and decided to reject it. No, I will not dwell in that, will not close myself off inside its strangeness. I realized that what I wanted most was to let the outside world in too, let it coexist with the crazed emanations from within my flaring brain and optic nerve.

  I knew these distortions would soon begin to fade and the visions become a memory—if I made a note about it. They were just another part of the story, another kind of Visitation.

  I opened my eyes. The off-white ceiling, the track lights, the water sprinklers in their cozy cages, wavered above me. A glimmer like light off the river below could have been as real as the sunset or could have been a symptom of misperception. I heard Beverly approaching before I saw her. Then she was beside me, a cup of feverfew in her hand, smiling, helping me sit up.

  It was just before the winter solstice, a few weeks after our Skype visit with Jason. He’d sent an e-mail saying he was working to authenticate “Something I Missed.” But for now its existence was a secret shared by us and what he called “a few trusted allies on a need-to-know basis.” There had been no public announcement yet. I appreciated his scholarly caution, his sense of responsibility, and was glad he was in control of the manuscript going forward. I felt it would be Jason’s job eventually to tell the story of Hardy’s unfinished novel and define its position and properties in the author’s geometry of love. I had a different story to tell.

  All the reading I’d been doing since we got home from England, the notes I’d been collecting in their color-coded file folders, the photographs and conversations with Beverly or Becka about what had happened in Dorset, had left me confused about how to begin the story I had to tell. My desk looked migrainous.

  Shortly after noon, as we shared an omelet, Beverly and I talked about the year that was nearing an end. In 2012 I’d turned sixty-five, she’d turned sixty, and we’d been together twenty years. We’d celebrated each of those milestones. Part of that celebration had been finally getting to England, and having those last three days in Hardy country.

  “I think I know what we need to do,” Beverly said. “We need a ceremony for what happened there. We need to honor it. And then I know you’ll be ready to tell your story.”

  I put down my fork, wiped my mouth, and tried not to cry.

  “What kind of ceremony?”

  She smiled at me and shrugged. “Why don’t you just start gathering things. Let’s see what happens.”

  I was surprised by the immediate rush of clarity. Over the half year since we’d gotten home I’d failed to give thanks for what had happened in Dorset. Failed to express gratitude for the opportunity it gave me to acknowledge how Robert Russell and Thomas Hardy affect my life. For how much I had learned about myself as well as about Hardy. All I’d been doing was worrying about how to explain it. But now I kne
w exactly what I wanted to gather, knew exactly where I wanted to place it all, and knew exactly when the ceremony should occur.

  I spread a piece of cloth on the couch, placing it where I’d been sitting when sunlight flooded into the room and revealed Ruby’s name in the photo I’d been holding. Over the next two hours, I selected items and brought them to the cloth, carrying only one at a time, savoring the process of assembling the ceremony’s pieces, the integration of each into the whole.

  By the time the sun reached the couch, Beverly and I were sitting there with the cloth between us. It held my copy of To Catch an Angel, the pages kept in place by a rubber band. It held a copy of Jude the Obscure, the novel of Hardy’s that once restored my hope in finding a way back from illness. I’d photocopied Hardy’s poem about Tryphena, written after he learned of her death, where he’d called her “my lost prize” and said, “I do but the phantom retain.” Online I’d found an image of heath-ponies and printed it out. At the center of the cloth was a collage of photographs: the Barclays Bank building in Dorchester (home of the Mayor of Casterbridge, where Hardy’s mingled real and imagined worlds first appeared to us and where the Visitations began), images of Hardy, Emma, Tryphena, the room where Hardy was born at Bockhampton, Hardy’s study, Emma’s attic room, the Nut Walk, and the Pet Cemetery at Max Gate. There was a photograph of our five Dorset friends taken at the pub after we’d watched the play, Jason and Katie leaning together with their glasses raised, Anthony and Nan holding hands, Sharon scribbling notes on her paper napkin. There was a photograph of Beverly and me standing at the cliff ’s edge overlooking Durdle Door as the wind blew. And because she’d been in my mind and heart all during the trip, been an inspiration to pursue the story wherever it led, there was a photograph of my daughter.

  Beverly and I sat together holding hands over the cloth and feeling the December sun warm on our backs as it also drenched the items I’d assembled. We closed our eyes for a few minutes.