The Phantom of Thomas Hardy

by Floyd Skloot

I don’t stutter or stammer but I don’t speak smoothly either, my sentences lurching and hitching along as I search for words, lose thoughts, forget questions, sense my ideas freefalling into the silences. I bump into walls; can’t remember where I’m going or why; load laundry and soap into the washing machine and forget to turn it on; pick up a nearby stalk of celery rather than the ringing telephone and put it to my ear, surprised when no one responds. As I never did before getting sick, I cry over music, over sudden sunlight, acts of kindness and the ringtone that lets me know my daughter is calling and the discovery that my grocery store has begun to stock my favorite brand of organic nonfat Greek yogurt.

  I came to understand that while I was different than I’d been before getting sick, that my cognitive powers had been measurably altered and my emotional responses had become less inhibited, there were noticeable benefits too. I was slower, more intuitive, open. I could sit still, could be content doing nothing in a place like our woods where there was so little to do. Sitting for hours under the trees one afternoon, I had a realization: this land was covered in second growth. Much of the hill’s trees had been harvested many years ago and I was living within the density of what grew back. It was a good lesson in the slow process of returning from damage. I learned to live more fully in the moment because I could never be sure I’d remember that moment later. The moment might be all that I had.

  I was off-kilter, yes, and for six months in the spring and summer of 2009 I had a sudden eruption of relentless vertigo that forced me back to my cane, and my sense of balance wasn’t always stable even after I could walk caneless yet again. I had classical migraines for the first time. And I had Visitations. I had electrical disturbances in the brain.

  But no doctor—and I’ve been seen by a vast array of medical specialists—found me to be psychologically ill. Not even the United States Social Security Administration, which for long-term disability purposes wanted very badly to find me mentally rather than neurologically disabled. They had me examined and tested, reexamined and re-tested by psychiatrists they hired themselves. They didn’t send me to neurologists, but to shrinks for assessments of my mental status and to physical therapists for Functional Capacity Evaluations. I had to name in order all the presidents since Kennedy and count backward from one hundred by sevens, remember a list of words to recite twenty minutes later, stand on my left foot for as long as I could, fit a series of odd shapes into their proper slots on a form-board before time ran out. I had to lift weights, carry heavy boxes, push and pull loaded crates, climb stairs, play catch. I even had to crawl around the perimeter of a wrestling mat. They interviewed me over and over. One psychiatrist asked me to explain what was meant by the expression “People who live in glass houses should not throw stones.” I knew that this sort of proverb relied on metaphor, which as a poet should be my great strength, and began to explain. Except that I couldn’t. I must have talked for five minutes, in tortuous circles, spewing gobbledygook about stones breaking glass and people having things to hide, shaking my head, backtracking as I tried to elaborate. But it was beyond me, as all abstract thinking is beyond me. I lapsed into stunned silence. And in the end they determined I’m not schizophrenic, bipolar, psychotic, delusional, depressed. I don’t have post-traumatic stress or dissociative identity disorder.

  What I am is a man with post-viral encephalopathy, a man with brain lesions. Patchily rewired and glitchy. My IQ diminished by about 20 percent. It was as though I’d been geezered overnight. Fragmented. But there were compensatory gains and forays into strange territories. I know my perceptive abilities can sometimes be shaky, and that can be troubling. But I’ve learned to see that it can also be weirdly trustworthy, an opening into understanding hidden just an electric misfire away from me.

  I bring all this up to get the he’s-just-crazy card onto the table. I’m not, and yet when I heard Thomas Hardy speak to me, I felt a familiarity with the situation. It had been a while—there’d only been a few Visitations since our Yurt Era ended a half-dozen years ago, when Ezra Pound came to scold me for abandoning my home in the woods—but I felt right away that Hardy’s contact was another Visitation. Real, vital, revelatory. But also intense and close-up, more intimate than previous Visitations had been, and more discomforting.

  Sometimes Visitations coincided with a flaring of my illness, or occurred as part of the classic migraine aura, or when I’d taken pain medication or various herbal remedies or when I was overtired, stressed. But not always. Sometimes they simply happened, with no extenuating circumstances, as when Charles Dickens appeared out of the fog on the riverbank one Saturday in 2010. I was feeling fitter than I had since my vertigo had gone away the year before, taking a walk with Beverly, fresh from making love, holding her hand and hearing “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” by the Four Seasons in my head. Dickens emerged and was gone in an instant, but not before letting me know how fortunate I was to have what I had with my wife, and reminding me of all he’d risked for something similar.

  As I said, I’ve had a few Visitations since getting sick. To be precise, I’d experienced twelve Visitations between 1993 and 2012. But none of the Visitors had come so close or physically touched me before. And none had returned to Visit again. Hardy’s Visitation was different. And it felt incomplete. I knew in my soul he would be back.

  Beverly rested the camera in her lap and gazed across South Street. Overhead, a red and yellow DORSET ART WEEK banner strung across the pedestrian walkway flapped in the wind. A man dressed in black from his fedora down to his trekking shoes stood at the NatWest Bank ATM and danced to the tune coming through his earphones.

  “You saw something back there?” Beverly asked.

  I nodded. “Felt and heard something too.”

  Though she never saw my Visitors, Beverly didn’t doubt me. In part, that was because she’d had Visitations of her own, particularly during the Yurt Era. Most of hers were animal Visits.

  In the spring months after she’d bought the twenty acres but before building the yurt, she’d spent a few weekend nights camped on the land, imagining potential home sites. She wanted to build near the center of the square-shaped property, and to clear as few trees as possible in the building process. The key was finding such a spot that was also near a water source where the well could be drilled and near the overgrown old logging road that would become the driveway. One night, as the problem of water was in her thoughts, Beverly drifted to sleep and woke in her down sleeping bag to hear great horned owls calling from nearby trees. When she sat up, there was a deer standing in a hoop of moonlight exactly where a dowser had told her the well should be dug. The deer looked at her and seemed to nod. A Visitation, all right, but it’s too bad that deer failed to consider the effects of drought ten years in the future.

  Besides, Beverly’s years of dedicated spiritual practice had convinced her that such events were more than—and other than—hallucinatory, even if no one else could see them. There were dimensions to life that humans simply didn’t understand. Hidden fields of force, like those warning wild animals to shelter before storms arrived or leading dowsers to water. She and I had lived so closely together for so long, it wasn’t uncommon for us to experience shared thoughts, to finish—or even to start—each other’s sentences, for the conventional barriers of Time and Space occasionally to be porous.

  So when she said, “It was Hardy,” I wasn’t really surprised.

  “Let’s look at those pictures you took this morning in the museum,” I said. She scrolled back through the camera’s stored images, holding the monitor up so I could see it. “There.”

  Part of the Dorset County Museum’s second floor is devoted to an exhibit called “A Writer’s Dorset,” complete with diaries, tributes, photographs, a startling reconstruction of Hardy’s study that had been moved intact from Max Gate after his death. According to the museum brochure, its Hardy collection is the world’s largest. Outside the room harboring his study, in the middle of the hallway, there’s a life-size car
dboard cutout of Hardy. His beard thick and dark, his hair trimmed, this Hardy is about half the age I am now. He’s turned sideways in a desk chair with his elbow perched on its top rail, and he looks wary, sitting tight, as though certain that he’s about to be torn from happy solitude. Which is exactly what I did, taking advantage of the early morning emptiness of the space, posing for two photographs with my arm draped around his shoulders.

  As I studied the images in Beverly’s camera, I was struck by the resemblance between Hardy’s domed forehead and mine, and by our vigilant eyes, our similar size. I wondered if my act, that partial embrace in the museum hallway, had somehow summoned Hardy. At least let him know I was in Dorchester. Perhaps he’d summoned me, or rather any person with Hardy in mind, and my draped arm had signaled a readiness to rendezvous.

  “He spoke to me.”

  “A Visitation,” she said.

  I nodded and repeated Hardy’s words.

  “‘Something I missed’ could mean almost anything.”

  “True, and I’m not sure I heard everything he said because at first I thought it was just the wind in my ear. But it sounded urgent. What mattered most to him. Say his writing or God or love—something he missed with those. Or about peace of mind, rest. A child? Maybe he missed having a child? Or acceptance from the highbrow critics? Travel beyond Europe?”

  When I finally wound down, Beverly said, “You know, there’s a whole other way to think about this. Is there something in you that prompted Hardy’s Visit? Something connected to him or his writing. I don’t know. Something you missed that only he can lead you to?”

  She was right, of course. The Visitations sometimes seemed to answer questions I didn’t know I had. Or made connections between fragments. “Like with T.S. Eliot,” I said, “back in the woods when our well went dark. I mean dry. When our well went dry.”

  “His Visitation helped, didn’t it? Gave you a way to face what we had to do. I still remember what you told me after he vanished: who better to remind us to look deep—something about tracing the history of our water all the way down to where the past became the future.”

  “When I saw him fading away, I was sure he said, ‘There’s a place where water always flows.’”

  Beverly slipped her hand into the pocket of my vest and fished out one of the gluten-free snack bars we carried everywhere. We were silent for a minute or two as we ate. Then Beverly asked, “I mean, why did Thomas Hardy come to you? And is he answering a question for you?”

  “Right. I have to find that out, too.”

  I’m hardly the first reader to have given himself over as a young man to Thomas Hardy’s work. I came to him through his fiction, not his poetry. And I came to him through the influence of a teacher named Robert Russell, who was fond of saying “Thomas Hardy is not a good writer. But he is a great writer.”

  Russell was the first person I knew who had actually written a book. His memoir, To Catch an Angel: Adventures in the World I Cannot See, was published in 1962 and was selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club and included in the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books series. My aunt Evelyn had read it and I remembered her talking during a family Seder about a courageous blind professor, making him fleetingly part of the family three years before I met him. The book was also reprinted in a sixty-cent paperback edition that I still own, tattered, emblazoned with testimonials about this “tough,” “brave,” “inspiring” man.

  Russell was chair of the English Department and a specialist in Victorian literature at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, when I arrived there as a freshman in the fall of 1965. Each year, he was provided with two student readers, and before classes began I was sent to meet him by the college’s financial aid office. On the way, I stopped at the bookstore to leaf through To Catch an Angel and prepare myself to encounter a living writer. I remember the excitement of holding the book, seeing his photo, then closing my eyes and running my fingers around the edges to imagine how he felt when it first arrived.

  Blinded at the age of five by a splintering croquet mallet, Russell had gone from being, as he wrote, “a citizen of the night,” to being a graduate of Yale University and even a varsity wrestler there. Assertive, resourceful, resilient, he’d learned to navigate a world of obstacles, survived a wild bull attack, ridden a bicycle. After completing his doctoral work at Oxford University, he married Elizabeth Shaw, sister of the British actor Robert Shaw, who played the blond assassin in From Russia with Love. Russell had been teaching at Franklin and Marshall since 1955.

  I was eighteen when we met, and had just spent the summer in bed recovering from a recurrence of mononucleosis, which I’d first contracted when I was eleven. Stuck there, I did enough concentrated reading, for the first time in my life, to learn that I needed eyeglasses. The reading had been haphazard and mostly provided by Aunt Evelyn because we didn’t have books in our home. Well, that’s not strictly true. As living room decor, never to be touched except when dusted, we had a matched set of a dozen red-covered books by French writers whose surnames my mother loved to declaim, Zola, Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, Stendhal. But focused boyhood reading—the novels of adventure and escape and survival, the stories of friendship and its power, of exploration and discovery—was something I missed. No Robinson Crusoe or Captain Nemo or Sherlock Holmes, no Robert Louis Stevenson or H. G. Wells or Jack London. I have no recollection of being in a bookstore as a child. My mother left school after the ninth grade and my father, a poultry butcher, worked fourteen-hour days six days a week. I have no recollection of being read to or of hearing a conversation in my family about literature. What I read was comic books, the backs of baseball cards, the occasional Hardy Boys book passed along by a friend.

  But the summer I turned eighteen, there was a pile of books on the chair beside my sickbed. I read popular novels that my aunt read, two weeks after she finished them. Arthur Hailey’s Hotel, Bel Kaufman’s Up the Down Staircase, James Michener’s The Source. And I read Harvey Cox’s The Secular City and B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two, both assigned by Franklin and Marshall for freshmen orientation week. I could feel myself filling with language, ideas, scenes, like a parched man finally reaching water.

  As of September 1965, when I arrived at college, the only classics I’d read were those required in high school, Silas Marner, Great Expectations, The Return of the Native, Romeo and Juliet. Unformed, with no idea what I wanted to be or do or study, just yearning to get away and grow, I didn’t even know enough to know how little I knew.

  Still weak, anxious to impress Russell, barely balanced between awe and fear, I found him, covered in pipe ash, rocking back in his office chair. He instructed me to sit beside his desk, handed over a sheet of paper, and said, “Read this letter to me, would you?”

  He was the best listener I’d ever been around. He seemed to listen with his entire head, eyebrows aquiver, forehead wrinkling and straightening, the plane of his skull undergoing minute adjustments as I spoke. His hands were clasped and feet crossed as though shutting down everything that wasn’t part of the hearing mechanism. Even his hair, stuck out like antennae, seemed part of the process.

  A few minutes later, I was hired as his reader, a job I held through the next four years. Squeezed into a side chair between his desk and door, I read student papers aloud to him, pausing so he could type comments. I read personal correspondence and departmental memos, magazine and newspaper articles, proofs of his forthcoming novel, An Act of Loving. Pacing my words to match his strokes, I read passages from poems or essays as he typed them in braille. After a few months, in those days before audio books were widely available, he occasionally asked me to record novels or extended selections of poetry onto tape for him. Using a vacant storage room near his office as my studio, and working with his enormous reel-to-reel machine, I read works of literature in a way few young, would-be authors get to do, experiencing stories or poems in the old way, orally, passing them along as a conduit between author and audience, giving them vo
ice.

  I recorded all the selections of Victorian writers included in The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Major Authors Editions: 40 pages of Carlyle, 100 pages of Tennyson, 74 pages of Browning, 104 pages of Arnold, and 16 pages of Hardy. I recorded a half-dozen novels, too, but can only remember William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, probably because reading them aloud drove me nuts.

  Russell himself, and what Russell required me to do as a reader, had exposed the great possibilities for human contact within the acts of writing and reading. In To Catch an Angel, he’d written about the moment when literature had first moved him deeply. He was eighteen, a college freshman, still recovering from the shock of his father’s sudden death, when a literature teacher assigned “The Wife of Usher’s Well.” This Scottish ballad deals with the death at sea of a woman’s three sons who, in answer to her wish, miraculously return home for one night. When they must leave in the morning, one of the brothers says farewell to the scullery maid as well as to the mother, and Russell’s teacher asked the class why. To his surprise, Russell found himself answering the question. He understood that the servant “symbolized all the comfort and pleasure and security that home had meant” for the brother. He understood, too, “the longing for the familiar pattern of life at home,” and connected that longing with what had happened in his own life when his father died. “I understood then that this ballad was about people, real people, people who lived and felt as I did,” and “for the first time, I was deeply moved by a poem.”

  Something similar happened to me in my storage room studio, alone with the work Russell assigned. Great writing, I saw, could stop time and thereby make time come to life, transporting the reader, as it must have transported the writer, into another dimension. It could break down the barriers between writer, reader, and characters. Speak for and through them all. I became avid for reading, for literature and the discussion of literature. I didn’t know how to speak about it yet, had no voice for what I was feeling, but knew I was in the right place to learn how.