Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  There is no doubt that he wanted her to be there all the time, but, looking at the fourteen years they spent together as man and wife, you notice how silent he was about her, while she experienced and presented her life as a series of discontents and dramas. One long-running drama revolved around her health. In 1915 she was in a London nursing home having surgery on her nose for ‘nasal catarrh’. A year later her friendly specialist told her she was severely run down – she suffered from depression and sleeplessness – and needed a three-week holiday, but, because it was wartime and Hardy was opposed to holidays, nothing happened. In 1917 she was persuaded to have a series of expensive ‘inoculations’ which even her sister Eva, a nurse, thought useless. Florence grumbled, ‘Were I a Gifford of course all this would be paid for me,’ but Hardy let her pay for herself. 31 She had frequent X-rays and many discussions with her doctors about operations that might become necessary. In 1919 she was seeing a London surgeon about a ‘displaced toe’. 32 In 1921 she told Cockerell she suffered from ‘almost intolerable pains’ as long as she was at Max Gate, which cleared up as soon as she got away. 33 In 1923 a swollen gland appeared in her neck which her surgeon was in two minds about. She consulted E. M. Forster, who recommended another specialist early in 1924, and he advised her against surgical intervention, as it was in any case getting smaller. 34 Hardy was fearful of her undergoing surgery, but she made up her mind to have it removed in any case, and alarmed Cockerell greatly by describing the swelling to him as a tumour. She was booked into a nursing home in Fitzroy Square on 30 September, and he was in London on the 29th to see her before the operation, and travelled up again from Cambridge on the next day. He made two visits on 1 October, writing to Hardy after each, and returned to the nursing home on the 2nd, 3rd, 6th and 7th. 35 She had other visitors, among them Sassoon, bearing a bunch of violets, Charlotte Mew and Virginia Woolf – something of a salon assembled around her bed. 36 But the most devoted and attentive was Cockerell. Florence now began to call him Sydney and confided to him ‘how she dreaded the winter in Max Gate, its dismalness, and how she hated most of the furniture there’. 37 Afterwards she told him that ‘the days in the nursing home remain as a happy memory.’ 38 Her symptoms look more like an expression of her need to get away from Max Gate and a yearning for attention, sympathy and warmth than like anything clinically serious. You can feel sorry for her and at the same time believe Hardy was right to be sceptical about the various treatments she sought. The last operation at least roused him to arrange the luxury of a car to fetch her home from London, and to send his brother to escort her. He wrote a poem about his wait for her arrival – ‘Nobody Comes’. Too late, too little, poetically, to please Florence, and more about his anxiety than about her:

  A car comes up, with lamps full-glare,

  That flash upon a tree:

  It has nothing to do with me,

  And whangs along in a world of its own,

  Leaving a blacker air;

  And mute by the gate I stand again alone,

  And nobody pulls up there. 39

  There were lesser dramas over bringing modern technology to Max Gate. Hardy was happy to go on living with hip baths in the bedrooms, oil lamps and candles to light the house and no main drainage, and Florence had to fight to have a bathroom and hot water installed in 1920, and in the same year the telephone (Dorchester 43) and wireless. She was right to do this, of course, and guests and maids must have been as pleased with the improvements as she was, but the master was too old to change his ways, and for him water was still carried up and down stairs. It was habit, but it was also a way of remaining true to the early experience that was so important to him.

  The clash of past and present and Florence’s sensitivity sometimes made her feel she was a usurper in the house. She told Sassoon that she disliked being called Mrs Hardy because she felt the name belonged to ‘someone else, whom I knew for several years, and I am oppressed by the thought that I am living in her house, using her things – and, worst of all, have even stolen her name.’ 40 It is a pathetic confession.

  Her feeling herself a usurper may have been what made her fearful of being usurped in turn. Otherwise it is hard to explain her behaviour over Gertrude Bugler. This was the biggest drama of her marriage, centred round a Dorset girl who took part in productions put on by the amateur players active in Dorchester from 1908 specializing in adaptations of Hardy’s novels. In 1913, when Gertrude was sixteen, she played Marty in a production of The Woodlanders, and in 1918 she, her parents and her sister Eileen were all in a revival of The Mellstock Quire. Hardy lent his father’s working smocks to the boys in the Mellstock cast and also addressed the company about the origins of the story. 41 For him these were delightful occasions in which he saw his novels brought to life. Two years later Gertrude was Eustacia in The Return of the Native, and she also appeared at Max Gate at Christmas with a group of Mummers. Gertrude was a beauty, dark, lush, gentle, large-eyed, and a naturally talented actress. Florence joked to Cockerell, ‘T H has lost his heart to [Gertrude] entirely, but as she is soon getting married I don’t let that cast me down too much.’ 42 And indeed in 1921 she married her cousin, Captain Ernest Bugler, MC, a war hero and a farmer, and they settled in Beaminster and began a family. Perhaps this too aroused Florence’s jealousy: here was a girl whose beauty appealed to Hardy, and who was now married to a young husband and expecting a baby – whereas Florence’s beauty had departed, her husband was old, and she had no children.

  In the summer of 1922 Gertrude was pregnant. A production of Desperate Remedies was planned for the winter, and under the circumstances it would not be possible for her to appear in it. Hardy had told her to come over to Max Gate whenever she liked, but when she called and asked for him she was coldly received and sent away by Florence, who followed this up with an incredible letter of reproach, suggesting she had no manners and telling her that a lady did not call on a gentleman: ‘As you must know this is a most extraordinary thing to do. In the first place, all invitations to Max Gate naturally come from me… and again it is not usual in our station of life for any lady to call upon a gentleman. It is simply “not done”.’ Florence had either forgotten or perhaps remembered all too clearly her own first approach to Hardy.

  A letter to Cockerell telling him about the production of Desperate Remedies shows the tone she took about her imagined rival: ‘Poor Gertrude Bugler seems to have suffered agonies at being cut out by a rival leading lady… and the tragic climaxis that she had a still-born son on the day of performance. What a gossip I am.’ 43 Happily Gertrude gave birth the next year to a healthy daughter, and in 1924 she appeared on stage in Dorchester again, this time as Tess. It was Hardy’s own adaptation, and he involved himself in the production. He found Gertrude intelligent, and seeing and hearing her in the part of his favourite heroine moved him deeply – enough perhaps for her to become his ‘well-beloved’, according to his own theories. 44 He was eighty-four, she was married and the mother of a small baby, and the love was all in his mind, but Florence reacted with jealous fury. She wrote to Cockerell to tell him that Gertrude ‘twitters affectedly in the tragic parts’ and that ‘she’s so satisfied with her performance that I’m afraid she is not going to be the gigantic success that is anticipated.’ 45 Cockerell saw the performance quite otherwise when he attended it in November. He praised the reserve, pathos and charm of Mrs Bugler’s performance as Tess, saying she took the part to the life, so much so that you could overlook the bad acting of the men playing Clare and Alec. 46 He enjoyed the matinée so much that he returned for the evening performance.

  Bugler’s performance was generally agreed to be outstanding. J. M. Barrie wrote that she had delighted him ‘beyond most actresses’. A theatre manager was now eager to take her to London in a production of Tess. As this was being set up, in January 1925, Cockerell returned to Max Gate to find Florence hysterical, convinced that Hardy was so besotted with Gertrude that everyone in Dorchester was laughing about it. There was some go
ssip, but Cockerell urged her to see the situation as a comedy, given Hardy’s age. She said she was trying to, but that he spoke roughly to her and showed her that she was in the way. She may have remembered how she had once heard him speak to Emma. In spite of this she, Hardy and Cockerell went for a stroll together with Wessie after lunch and, according to the diarist, had a very agreeable talk. During the rest of the day he saw no sign of any trouble or quarrel. But in the morning Florence again sought him out alone, told him she had spent the night thinking she was going mad and begged him to stay, since the theatre manager and Mrs Bugler were coming over to discuss the plans for Tess being played at the Haymarket in April. He complied and wrote of Gertrude afterwards that he could not see her as presenting much danger to anyone.

  Indeed there was no harm in Gertrude Bugler, who was naturally proud to have the approval and affection of a celebrated writer. Neither Cockerell nor Hardy knew the full extent of Florence’s rage and bad behaviour. In February she sent a telegram to Gertrude to say she was coming to see her and arrived on her doorstep ‘terribly upset and agitated, and said at once that her husband must not know of her visit to me. Then I listened with incredulous amazement to what she had to say.’ She begged Gertrude to withdraw from the play, telling her that if she went to London Hardy would follow her there and that it would be bad for his health and lead to damaging publicity; and that he had been writing poems to her in which he spoke of running away with her – poems Florence had destroyed. Gertrude was taken aback by all this; she was also aware of her own husband’s lack of enthusiasm about her going to London and anxious herself about the effect on their child. She therefore agreed to give up the part. ‘So I wrote to Thomas Hardy and to Frederick Harrison to that effect. I never saw Hardy again.’ 47

  Not satisfied with stopping Gertrude’s chance of becoming a professional actress, Florence determined to bring an end to the amateur dramatics in Dorchester: ‘if I can manage it the Hardy plays will stop now. I cannot go through another experience like that, and it would be bad for him also.’ 48 She succeeded, and prevented Gertrude even from reciting one of Hardy’s poems at a dinner for Dorsetmen; and she continued to complain about Hardy’s infatuation. 49 Even after his death, in 1929, she explained her absence from the first night of a London production of Tess in which Bugler was to appear briefly by saying she thought ‘my husband’s heart was weakened by excitements connected with the production here in Dorset, & had it not been for that I think he might have been alive now.’ 50 The suggestion is absurd and acts as a reminder of Florence’s long-established habit of inventing stories to produce the effect she wanted. We shall never know whether she also invented the poems she said Hardy had written about Gertrude, but to have invented them would be easier to forgive than to have destroyed them.

  Hardy himself remained silent and calm. He had given Gertrude inscribed copies of The Return of the Native and Tess, and written her a few simple letters signed ‘Sincerely yours’ and ‘Your affectionate friend’. When she wrote to tell him she was giving up the London production, he answered, ‘Although you fancy otherwise, I do not believe that any London actress will represent Tess so nearly as I imagined her as you did.’ 51 Gertrude saw that Florence was driven by jealousy, and she remembered Hardy with affection. His last words to her, she said, were spoken when he saw her off as she left Max Gate in January 1923: ‘If anyone asks you if you knew Thomas Hardy, say, “Yes, he was my friend.” ’ 52

  To arouse an emotional storm between two women at the age of eighty-three is not given to many men. If Hardy was in any sense in love with Gertrude, it was because she embodied his most intimately imagined heroine, ‘My Tess’, so well. 53 If Florence could have understood that it was the dream of Tess he loved, she might have been more understanding. And he was wholly bound to Florence as his wife, depending on her for her affection and care in seeing to his needs and comfort.

  He was pleased to find one of his own theories of love taken up by Marcel Proust, who believed that the lover creates an image of the beloved in his mind that may bear little resemblance to the real person. ‘It appears that The Theory exhibited in “The Well-Beloved” in 1892 has since been developed by Proust still further,’ he wrote in his notebook, followed by a quotation from À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs :

  Peu de personnes comprennent le caractère purement subjective du phénomène qu’est l’amour, et la sorte de création que c’est d’une personne supplémentaire, distincte de celle qui porte le même nom dans le monde, et dont la plupart deséléments sont tirés de nous-même… Le désir s’élève, se satisfait, disparait – et c’est tout. Ainsi, la jeune fille qu’on épouse n’est pas celle dont on est tombé amoureux. 54 (Few people understand the subjective nature of love and the way it creates another being, different from the actual person bearing the same name, and endowed with characteristics for the most part imagined by the lover… Desire arises, satisfies itself and disappears – that’s all there is to it. So the young woman you marry is not the person you fell in love with.)

  Hardy already understood this perfectly and had demonstrated its truth many times, in telling the story of Clym and Eustacia, of Bathsheba and Troy, and of Angel and Tess.

  In the autumn of 1923 he sat for Augustus John. The portrait in oils and the preparatory sketch are both exceptionally fine, showing a man who has come to terms with old age, his face carved, seamed and furrowed by a long, reflective life. Two comments are attributed to Hardy, the earlier a jocular, ‘Well, if I look like that the sooner I am under the ground the better.’ The second, made several years later, has him saying, ‘I don’t know whether that is how I look or not – but that is how I feel. ’ 55 Within weeks of its being finished, Cockerell noted in his diary, ‘Having heard from Augustus John that he would take £500 for his portrait of Hardy I went up to London by the 1 pm to see him and secured it, though I may have to raise the money.’ 56 Cockerell never failed to raise the money when he was determined on a purchase, and the portrait was soon displayed among the treasures of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

  24. Winter Words

  What kept him going in these late years – eighty-four, eighty-five, eighty-six, eighty-seven – was the simple daily habit of picking up his pen. ‘I never let a day go without using a pen. Just holding it sets me off; in fact I can’t think without it. It’s important not to wait for the right mood. If you do it will come less and less,’ he told a visitor. 1 Dramatized versions of his work delighted him still, but his gaze turned increasingly inward, and not only because his eyes were tired. There were still drafts of old poems to be reworked, and memories of places, ghosts and loves to be summoned up yet again. Cockerell read the proofs of the 152 poems Hardy was proposing for a new collection and suggested changes, about half of which Hardy accepted. It is a pity they left no record of this collaborative process between poet and friend without an ounce of poetry in his soul. It began when Hardy read some aloud to him in March 1925. Cockerell went through them later by himself, and made up his mind they were good. In November of the same year the new volume was published, Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles. The first edition of 5,000 copies almost sold out before publication. Hardy had become a popular poet. There were two more printings before the end of the year, and Macmillan put out a trade edition in America, where his poetry had not appeared in volume form since 1898.

  As in any large collection there is weak material, but enough strong and original to carry the volume. ‘Snow in the Suburbs’ dates back to the freezing winter of his illness in Tooting in 1880, trimmed into a 1920s imagist shape with the crispness of a black-and-white print:

  Every branch big with it,

  Bent every twig with it;

  Every fork like a white web-foot;

  Every street and pavement mute:

  Some flakes have lost their way, and grope back upward, when

  Meeting those meandering down they turn and descend again.

  The palings are glued
together like a wall,

  And there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall.

  A sparrow enters the tree,

  Whereupon immediately

  A snow-lump thrice his own slight size

  Descends on him and showers his head and eyes,

  And overturns him,

  And near inurns him,

  And lights on a nether twig, when its brush

  Starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush.

  The steps are a blanched slope,

  Up which, with feeble hope,

  A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin;

  And we take him in. 2

  There are many autumn poems, one the terrific ‘Night-Time in Mid-Fall’, about bad weather, rain and the sort of wind that lets you hear from inside your house the sound of tree roots being wrenched underground outside, where conditions resemble a storm scene in Shakespeare:

  The streams are muddy and swollen; eels migrate

  To a new abode;

  Even cross, ’tis said, the turnpike-road;

  (Men’s feet have felt their crawl, home-coming late):

  The westward fronts of towers are saturate,