I walked in loamy Wessexlanes, afar
From rail-track and from highway, and I heard
In field and farmstead many an ancient word
Of local lineage like ‘Thu bist’, ‘Er war’,
‘Ich woll’, ‘Er sholl’, and by-talk similar,
Nigh as they speak who in this month’s moon gird
At England’s very loins, thereunto spurred
By gangs whose glory threats and slaughter are. 27
‘I cannot do patriotic poems very well – seeing the other side too much,’ he told John Galsworthy. 28 Another poem that went far beyond patriotism was ‘In Time of “The Breaking of Nations” ’, dug out of the past from a memory of the summer of 1870 when he was in Cornwall with Emma during the Franco-Prussian War, and contrasting the immemorial life of the countryside with the sound and fury of battle. 29
In August 1915 a second cousin, Frank George, a lawyer by profession, likeable and intelligent, was killed at Gallipoli. Hardy had thought of making him his heir and pulled strings to get him a commission, and he sorrowed for his death. He looked with interest and pity too at the German prisoners in the big camp now holding 5,000 men outside Dorchester. He had visited them in the spring, sent them German books from his shelves and on one occasion sat with a wounded prisoner, ‘in much pain, who died whilst I was with him – to my great relief, and his own. – Men lie helpless here from wounds: in the hospital a hundred yards off other men, English, lie helpless from wounds – each scene of suffering caused by the other!’ 30 In the autumn he asked the authorities if some of the German prisoners could do paid work in his garden. He kept up his interest throughout the war, telling Cockerell later,
We are having some trees rooted, so as to enlarge the kitchen garden for more potatoes, and the Commandant of the prison camp here has sent me out some prisoners for the job with guards, rifles, interpreter and all complete. Nothing has made me more sad about the war than the sight of these amiable young Germans in such a position through the machinations of some vile war-gang or other. Nevertheless they seem perfectly happy (though they get only ld an hour each of the 6d each that I pay). 31
Some of the Germans inscribed their names on a shed door in the garden, and Hardy used to point these out to visitors years later. 32
He refused an invitation from Gosse in November 1915 to a dinner with the Prime Minister, Asquith, excusing himself with ‘between ourselves my dining-out days are nearly over.’ But he and Florence happily joined a November house party given by Lady Ilchester at Melbury, the great mansion of his mother’s childhood. They stayed for four or five days, returning to Max Gate on the 20th to find that Mary was dying at Talbothays, where she had moved with Kate and Henry. She had been ill for some time – and she died of emphysema on the 24th, almost exactly three years after Emma. While Hardy grieved for the loss of his sister, Florence was appalled by Kate’s insistence that she should kiss Mary’s corpse, not once but many times. There was a quarrel when Hardy said he did not want to go back to Talbothays after the funeral. Florence thought he dreaded meeting the relatives who would be there, but he braced himself and went.
In the same letter in which Florence wrote to a woman friend about Mary’s funeral, she described Lady Ilchester’s charm as a hostess.
She is most unceremonious and by no means ‘dressy’… Her evening dresses were quite simple – black and black and white. But she wore her famous pearl necklace and lovely diamond ear-rings. She spent all the time with us – showing us the house the park and the villages and motoring us about. There was nobody there of much importance – some of the Digbys, her relatives – a Miss Sonia Keppell. 33
One of the villages they were shown was certainly Melbury Osmond, where Hardy’s mother was born and married. The irony of their being driven there as Mary lay on her deathbed must have struck Hardy painfully afterwards, the more so because, although he was devoted to his sister, his devotion to her had always been in the style of accepting her love rather than demonstrating his. He had made very little effort to involve her in his life, even before the falling out with Emma, and there was a wistfulness in her awareness that he had moved into another world while she remained in the old one. She murmured once that she was not asked to dinner or treated like a lady by anyone except the Locks, the family of her solicitors in Dorchester. 34 Mary lived like a hermit, Hardy said, and would not even stay overnight in London when she went up to see the summer show at the Royal Academy each year, insisting on returning to Dorchester on the evening train. 35 She made one trip to the Lake District after the death of her mother, alone, fulfilling a lifelong ambition inspired by her love of Wordsworth. 36 She was well read, a gifted painter and a good cook; also kind, for example sending small sums of money to her cousin Nat Sparks when his wife Annie, her old friend from the training college, was ill. But, as Hardy said, she scarcely made a mark on the world. Her pupils were simple Dorset girls with no aspirations themselves, and she was isolated by her position as a headmistress in a small country town, and by her culturally divided family. No one fell in love with her or asked for her in marriage. Instead she mothered Kate. Kate and Henry learnt to ride bicycles; Mary never did. She became deaf as she aged, and her world closed in around her. Although she had savings, and a friendly solicitor, she did not even write a will. Hardy told Cockerell that he had very little in common with either Kate or Henry; in practice he shared almost nothing with Mary either. 37 Yet he missed her and wrote a handful of small, sad poems in her memory. In the best of them he looks at a log of apple wood burning on the fire and remembers the tree it came from and how he climbed it as a child with her:
My fellow-climber rises dim
From her chilly grave –
Just as she was, her foot near mine on the bending limb,
Laughing, her young brown hand awave. 38
The young brown hand, the laughter and the tomboyish climbing suggest a Mary who might have made more of her life. Instead, she was trapped as a spinster schoolteacher, tied to the childhood home and her mother’s dominance, and she never belonged anywhere else.
After her death Hardy fell into gloom and kept his door shut even on Kate when she came to see him. Neither would he have Cockerell to stay when he proposed himself during the winter vacation, Florence complained, any more than he would let her accept invitations to go to friends in town or visit her own sick father. 39 Cockerell wrote urging Hardy to write his memoirs: ‘write down something about yourself – and especially about that youthful figure whose photograph I have got, and of whom you told me that you could think with almost complete detachment.’ 40 When Hardy’s old friend George Douglas wrote with the same suggestion, Hardy answered, ‘My reminiscences: no, never!’ 41
Yet Mary’s death had forced him to think of his own and about the arrangements he needed to make. He decided to ask Cockerell to become his literary executor in partnership with Florence. It was a sensible decision, given Cockerell’s experience in looking after Morris’s affairs, and he was willing. From now on Cockerell corresponded far more intensively with Florence than with Hardy. 42 She sometimes praised him for being like a son to Hardy, sometimes confided in him and at other times complained about him, but she depended on his friendship, and he was attentive to her, inviting her to Cambridge on her own and taking her to the theatre in London. 43 He made five visits to Max Gate during 1916, scarcely leaving himself time to fit in moving house with his wife and children in June, a move made necessary because Kate Cockerell had developed multiple sclerosis and walking was difficult for her. When Hardy heard this bad news, he at once offered to send Emma’s bath chair, which was, he said, ‘of the very best make and appearance’, and it was duly shipped off to Cambridge for Kate. Her life became tragically confined, but Sydney never even considered changing his habits, and he continued his frequent visits to Max Gate on his own.
In February he found both Hardys welcoming. Florence told him that Hardy had spent much of the past two months in bed with
a cold caught at Mary’s funeral, but he was now on the mend, and clearly pleased to have Cockerell to talk to again. He told him something of Horace Moule, how he had been his early friend and adviser, and the tragedy of his suicide in Cambridge. He also gave him a set of the Wessex Edition of his books, and they discussed literary copyrights. 44 During his April visit Hardy explained that his family would become extinct with his generation, and they settled the final details of the executorship. Florence entertained Cockerell and herself by summoning Hermann Lea’s car and taking him to meet neighbours, the Sheridans, who brought out the manuscripts of The School for Scandal and The Critic. In July they were all invited to lunch at Kingston Maurward House and walked there across the water meadows, pausing to visit the Hardy graves in Stinsford churchyard – now known to Cockerell by its fictional name of ‘Mellstock’. In September they went to Weymouth for tea, and the next morning Florence seized her moment to tell Cockerell her version of the truth about her predecessor. ‘Went for a short walk with Mrs Hardy who told me what a complete failure TH’s first marriage had been and that when the first Mrs Hardy died they were in the midst of a bitter quarrel and even about to separate. All the poems about her are a fiction, but a fiction in which their author has come to believe!’ 45 Cockerell wrote her words down carefully and without comment. In the afternoon there was a tea party, a stroll and ‘TH exceedingly cordial.’ The two men spent Monday morning talking happily, until it was time for Cockerell to go for his train. He was back in December, when J. M. Barrie was a fellow guest, and they dined at Kingston Maurward House and went to see a performance of the Wessexscenes from The Dynasts at the Corn Exchange in Dorchester, leaving Hardy in bed with a cold. Cockerell was now so much part of the family that in the morning he was invited to sit with Hardy in his bedroom for their talk.
He was there again during 1917, when Hardy was working on the proofs of Moments of Vision, and Cockerell volunteered to look over them. It is not clear from his diary whether he appreciated the privilege since he makes no comment about the poems, merely saying he talked about them with Hardy over breakfast. There were plenty of outings, people coming to call, lunches and dinners out, even though the war was at its grimmest. On 1 January 1918 Florence told him Hardy contemplated living into his nineties, ‘and there seems to be no reason why he shouldn’t.’ In September he offered to rehang the pictures in the repapered drawing room at Max Gate, staying for five days to get the job done and enjoying himself thoroughly as he worked.
During 1917 Hardy had embarked on another large literary project. This one needed Florence’s help from start to finish, typing out his notes and narrative as he compiled material for what was to be his own life story. He was giving way to Cockerell’s urging that he should write his memoirs, if not in quite the style expected. His system was to go through his accumulation of old notebooks, diaries and letters, copy what he wanted preserved and then destroy the original documents, giving him complete control over what was quoted or told. It was to be written in the third person and its authorship assigned to Florence. There is nothing very unusual in writers seeking to control what is said about them, and Hardy simply went a stage further than most. It was a deception but not a very serious one. Florence was open with Macmillan as well as Cockerell about Hardy’s intense involvement in every stage of the process of compiling the ‘biography’, and it was obvious that all the information came from him and that no further research was done. Work on this absorbed them both to the end of the war and beyond.
She kept Cockerell informed of progress on the book, and in June 1920, soon after Hardy’s eightieth birthday, she showed him the work she had done, and Cockerell had the impression that, after much labour, it was now finished, which was far from the truth. That evening he and Florence were invited to dine with the Ilchesters in their great house at Melbury, to which they were driven along lanes in midsummer flower. 46 Hardy had stayed at home, and when they arrived back at ten they found him ‘looking out for us. Talking about his family he said that he would have called his book Tess of the Hardys if it had not seemed too personal.’ Cockerell was naturally intrigued by this, and the next morning, as he and Hardy walked into Dorchester together, ‘I asked him about his wonderful mother.’ If he was hoping for a revelation that Jemima had been the original for Tess, he was disappointed. ‘He said she was short, with a fine head that looked a bit too big for her body. She had wonderful vitality.’ Tess’s history is impossible to match with what is known of any of the women of Hardy’s family, so either Hardy knew what no one else does or he was teasing Cockerell. 47
Florence was being hopeful when she described the Life as finished in 1920, because she was still taking Hardy’s corrections and insertions six years later, warning his publishers that there seemed to be no prospect of the work being completed. It was only his death that brought an end to his revisions, and he left further instructions allowing her to cut out anything ‘indiscreet, belittling, monotonous, trivial, provocative, or in any other way unadvisable’. 48 She took this as a licence to reduce the references to Emma, but she made a good job of the publication, and the two volumes are indispensable reading for anyone interested in Hardy, whatever is missing from them. They are idiosyncratic, sometimes entertainingly, sometimes infuriatingly, but the voice is unmistakably that of Hardy. 49
23. The Wizard
When the war ended Hardy was seventy-eight. He still walked with the vigour of a young man, quickening his pace on an uphill slope, and could bicycle the mile to his brother’s house and back. His days and weeks were run to a pattern: every Monday morning he wound up the three grandfather clocks in the house, one in the hall, one in the drawing room and one in the passage to the kitchen. The Times was still his daily paper, and he breakfasted at eight thirty or nine – accounts differ – drinking tea and sprinkling brown sugar on his bacon. He liked to walk to his front gate after breakfast to see what the weather promised, looking south to the monument to Admiral Hardy on Blackdown in the distance. Punctually at ten he was in his study. It was at the side of the house, with an east-facing window, and it was always dusty because he would not allow the housemaids to touch his papers or books. 1 The walls were a faded pinkish red, and he had hung his violin on the wall and put his cello in the corner, a reminder of how the musical instruments were kept at Bockhampton. 2 Round the fireplace were hung a framed sketch of Thackeray and prints of Tennyson and Meredith, and on his plain writing table was an inkwell given to him by Mrs Henniker and a perpetual calendar fixed on Monday, 7 March, marking his first meeting with Emma. 3 Most of the day was spent at this table, thinking, writing, thinking again. The best of his writing, he said, was done between tea and dinner. His poetry continued the process of mythologizing his life, and although the high sense of excitement and adventure that had driven the ‘Poems of 1912–13’ had dimmed, his imagination was still quick with memories and themes to be taken up.
He liked to work in old clothes, particularly a pair of trousers that went back to the turn of the century and that he mended himself with string. He also kept an ancient shawl, crocheted from fawn or beige wool, to put over his shoulders, and sometimes his head too, against the cold: it could have been his mother’s work, or Emma’s. There was an open fire, laid by the maid but not lit, because he liked to get it going himself. No other heat, since neither gas nor electricity had reached Max Gate, and light was provided by oil lamps. No telephone, although one was installed downstairs in 1920 which he refused to answer. In the same year the house acquired a wireless set, of which Wessex became so passionately fond that Hardy sometimes got up early and went down in his long nightshirt and short dressing gown to turn it on for him. He slept in an unheated bedroom and had his hot water brought up in jugs. Florence would join him for early morning tea at 7.45, coming through the dressing room between their rooms.
Florence dealt with much of his correspondence as well as working on the memoirs, and from 1923 a poetry-loving young woman, May O’Rourke, came for three
mornings a week. If there was more to be done than usual, she stayed on for the afternoon, and she observed that, when Hardy was thinking about his work, he ‘would be present at luncheon, but only corporeally’. 4 In good weather he might potter round the garden in the afternoon, seeing Emma out of the corner of his eye. The maid had strict instructions to put out food for the birds she had loved. He might take Wessie for a walk, with his overcoat flapping open, walking stick in hand, with or without Florence. Regular visitors and close friends such as Cockerell were accompanied on walks – to Stinsford Church, to the heath, over the water meadows – and driven further afield. In April 1919 he and Florence drove in Lea’s car with Cockerell through Bridport, stopping to look at the church Hardy had helped Hicks ‘restore’ and enlarge in the 1860s, and on to Seatown for lunch at the Anchor Inn. It stood beside a few cottages in a bay flanked by high cliffs. That afternoon mackerel came into the bay, and to Cockerell’s great joy he was allowed to help haul in the nets. 5 You can see why Hardy liked a man who could turn from running a museum to working with the fishermen and think it a treat.
When they were at home in the afternoon, tea was served by Florence in the drawing room, elegantly, with thin bread and butter and home-made cake on silver cake stands. Hardy would put on more formal clothes if he came down, entering quietly and invariably taking a straight-backed chair. There might be local friends, but increasingly there were visitors from further afield, because Thomas Hardy was now one of the sights of England. Pilgrimages were made to Max Gate, each pilgrim hoping to take away his own little impression or anecdote. It could be trying, but there was also a steady stream of men and women he was pleased to know, and real friendships were formed, remarkably for a man of his age. He especially enjoyed talking about poetry with young writers. One was Siegfried Sassoon, who made his name with fierce poems about the reality of the war, in which he fought in the trenches and against which he protested. In 1917 Sassoon dedicated a volume of verse to Hardy, and they met in November 1918. Sassoon was an attractive figure who had grown up in a privileged world and suffered not only from the war but from knowing himself to be a homosexual, and obliged to hide it. Sassoon thought Hardy would be shocked if he knew, and was probably right. 6 Both the Hardys were charmed by him, and he in turn felt a profound respect for Hardy, seeing in him a wizard who concealed his magic behind a deliberately ordinary appearance and behaviour. There were quarrels, because each enjoyed the other’s attention and praise for his poetry, and sometimes it fell short, but these clouds passed.
Thomas Hardy Page 38