The Phantom of Thomas Hardy

by Floyd Skloot

  Max Gate wasn’t as ghastly and inhospitable as I’d expected. From the edge of its horseshoe-shaped driveway, I imagined a flickering overlay of photos taken from right there: Hardy at fifty reading his mail in the garden while his dog, Moss, gazes up at him; Hardy at sixty standing beside his bicycle; Hardy in his seventies with Florence and their dog, Wessex—faithful, unflinching—famous for biting notable literary guests; Hardy in his eighties on the porch with his friend Edmund Gosse; Hardy wizened and wispy by a hedge in the weeks before his death.

  This building had been sneered at for 127 years. It had been called oddly uninviting, mean and pretentious, cheerless, a brick mediocrity with no grace of design or detail, a building lacking conventional architectural distinction and proportion, deficient alike in aesthetic qualities and domestic arrangements, the solidification in brick of Hardy’s intermittent mood of helplessness at the ugliness of life. Having read all that, and seen dozens of images, I was braced for the building’s inelegance and asymmetry, its heavy presence. But being there in person, I felt Max Gate was consistent with Hardy’s patterns as I was beginning to understand them: a bland, even off-putting exterior that deflected interest, that covered up and contradicted the life roiling inside. It was architectural disinformation, a front. I felt the force of his intentions everywhere around there, his resolve to be seen but not seen. To erect another space around his Self into which the attention of others was meant to flow.

  I posed beside the front door with the Max Gate sign above my left shoulder, where I’d first felt Hardy’s presence on South Street. I was dressed in shades of gray—clothes, hair, beard—and the wall behind me was splotched with gray so that I seemed to fade into the building, to or take shape from within it like a developing image on film.

  Max Gate was built by Hardy’s father and brother according to plans developed by Hardy himself. We’d noticed his smudged sectional drawings yesterday at the Dorset County Museum. This was a project that would combine all that mattered most to him: shaping a place to accommodate and support his writing, contain his marriage, satisfy his need for privacy and solitude, express his assertion that he belonged. It was all that he meant by Home. Meticulous, always concerned about nuance, Hardy first placed the house so it faced his childhood home at Higher Bockhampton some three miles northeast. Then he turned the design around so it faced south and away from the past. There aren’t even windows looking back.

  He named it Max Gate in tribute to Henry Mack, who’d once managed a toll gate nearby. Mack’s Gate became Max Gate, which acknowledged Mack but, by removing the apostrophe, clarified that he was not the owner of the place, a simultaneous and typically Hardyean nod to tradition and change in one gesture. For me, Hardy’s rechristening of Mack’s to Max highlighted another intimate coincidence between us. Max was the name my crusty maternal grandfather Markus took when rechristening himself upon arrival in America, and it’s the name Beverly and I chose to rechristen our tabby cat, who’d been named Rufus when we adopted him from the Willamette Humane Society.

  Work on Max Gate went slowly. The Hardys did most of it themselves, with few laborers onsite at any time. Materials came from the family brickyard at Broadmayne. Hardy planted thousands of beeches and Austrian pines as a windbreak and shield against onlookers. There was contentiousness on the job, an undercurrent of tension as Hardy’s aged father offered advice, Hardy’s brother had other priorities, costs intensified, and Emma complained about having to settle in Dorset instead of London. It took nineteen months before Hardy and Emma could occupy the house in June 1885, three years before part of the drawing-room ceiling collapsed, ten years before he swore off writing novels and turned to poetry, fourteen years before Emma moved upstairs to live in the attic.

  “Whether building this house at Max Gate was a wise expenditure of energy is one doubt, which, if resolved in the negative, is depressing enough,” Hardy wrote.

  Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, a British scholar of the history of architecture, offset his scathing judgment about the building—“Unfortunately the house has no architectural qualities whatever”—by acknowledging that the environs speak more eloquently of Hardy’s personality than the house itself. That’s something I felt as soon as I entered the grounds. The environs were all about gardens and the flow of light; about being enveloped by nature, as in the long, narrow tree-enclosed zone called the Nut Walk, perfect both for hiding and contemplative isolation; about having room to lavish attention on his pets whether living or dead.

  Everything about Max Gate forced a visitor to face the fact that Hardy was an architect. In fact, he had far more serious training as an architect than as a writer, apprenticing to a Dorchester architect at sixteen, working around Dorset and Cornwall as well as in London, where he won prizes from the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Architectural Association, continuing to practice until the age of thirty-two. Whether he was a good architect, or rather whether he was a suitable one to design warm, intimate spaces conducive to love, is beside the point. Max Gate was his architectural brainchild, and he approached the building of his home as he approached his writing and his life and ultimately his legacy: as things to be neatly, precisely designed and shaped by himself. Each detail had purpose. In the study’s windows there were no mullions or transoms to block his garden view. The living room windows and corresponding dining room windows were at different heights because in one he wanted to allow a view out and in the other he wanted to block the view in. He made sure the house had rooms for him to work and hide in, a secret door for him to escape from visitors and vanish into the trees. In time, his wife withdrew from the living areas. The place could hardly have been more his, which in part explains why Emma ended up in the attic.

  Without guests on the grounds, and with the window cleaner gone into the house, I could sense the ghostly presence of the past everywhere. Max Gate had always been like that. In 1883, when the site was being prepared and foundations dug, Romano-British skeletal remains, urns, and relics were unearthed. The bodies had each been folded into oval holes in the chalk like chicks in their eggshells. Though he and Emma thought the omens might be gloomy, Hardy took a pair of Iron Age brooches from one skeleton’s forehead, and turned a huge sandstone block found atop another skeleton into a Druid stone tucked into his garden hedge. There was a ring-neck flask from the time of Emperor Claudius. Hardy read an account of his findings at a meeting of the Dorset Field Club in 1884. Through the years, pottery and tableware kept being discovered in the garden and stored in Hardy’s study, where he mined the past for stories, poems, and drama.

  This feeling of being awash in the past, of being loose in Time again, made me think of the conversation we’d had with Anthony over breakfast that morning. He’d brought plates of fruits and yogurt, a pot of tea, asked how we wanted our eggs prepared. But instead of returning to the kitchen, he pulled over a chair from the adjacent table.

  “You don’t mind if I sit for a moment?”

  “We’d like that,” Beverly said.

  I’d reached for the teapot, but hesitated, not sure if I should continue. Anthony poured, passed the milk.

  “Nan and I were talking about what happened to you yesterday in Dorchester. I hope my response didn’t seem inhospitable. Believe me, I had no intention to be flippant about what you experienced.”

  “I didn’t take it that way, Anthony.” Where was this was going to lead? “And I know what I said must have sounded very strange.”

  Anthony was looking away as if unwilling to speak too directly at me. “Not to me. Not at all, actually, and last night Nan reminded me of something. This goes back to 1982. Falkland Islands.” He paused and let his eyes meet mine long enough to determine if I knew what he was referring to. “I was part of the invasion task force, you see. Aboard the Hermes. It was April, spring here but autumn in the South Atlantic. Topsy-turvy, and when you’re out there at sea, at war, you can lose track a bit. Time of day, time of year, where you are. Lose touch. I’m going on a bit,
sorry.”

  We both urged him to continue. I still didn’t get how this was tied to my having been Visited by Hardy, and I hoped Anthony didn’t think I was just disoriented and in need of care.

  “Well, then. This one night—it was three in the morning—I woke up and understood myself to have entered some sort of fold or rift in time. Or outside of time. I’ve tried to explain it for thirty years. Sir Francis Drake, Jack Hawkins, Charles Darwin, Percy Fawcett, all around me were people who had sailed those waters throughout history. There were my mates aboard, too, clear as stone. And also faces I felt sure were from the time to come, as if I were remembering the future. I was awake, I was of sound mind. But I was what you might call ‘between dimensions.’ Time stopped dead. For a moment, over—or I should say within—the engine’s thrumming and the sound of moving air I either heard or imagined, there was a voice. Whose voice I do not know.”

  Anthony drew himself up in his chair, where he’d slumped as he spoke. He stiffened his back and stretched, determined to continue.

  “The voice spoke to me the words Call him Hermes as unmistakably as Thomas Hardy spoke to you the words Something I missed.”

  I could hardly breathe. I had to fight against an impulse to embrace him.

  “That was the name of the ship you were on,” Beverly said.

  Anthony nodded. “Her Majesty’s Ship, the Hermes. Named after the Greek god of transitions and boundaries.”

  “I’d forgotten that,” I said.

  “So had I, till one of the Royal Navy pilots reminded me. Transitions and boundaries. Quite astounding.”

  “Did you know what that voice in the night meant?” Beverly asked.

  “Not then. But in a letter a few weeks later, Nan told me she was pregnant.” He pointed to a photo on the wall near the kitchen door. “That young man in uniform? That’s our son, Hermes. Hermes Christopher Evans Swain. Goes by Herm.”

  We all looked across at the photo in silence. Herm looked so much like the photos of his father in uniform scattered around the B&B, I was sure I’d walked by a few and thought they were Anthony.

  “So you did what it told you to do,” I said.

  Anthony rubbed one of his large hands over his freshly shaven face and sighed. “We lost 255 British during those seventy-four days of the war. Including my cousin and dearest friend, Christopher Evans.”

  Oh. Anthony looked at me, then at Beverly, then stood up. “There are voices one must listen to, aren’t there?” He smiled. “I’ll deal with your eggs now.”

  All I could do was stir my tea. He—and Nan—had given us a generous and intimate gift in sharing this story, and I felt grateful for the implicit acceptance of my own experience. Also, subtly encouraged to continue following after Hardy and his voice. Anthony had heeded a message he’d received in the same way I’d received mine, though it must have caused him pain not to name his son directly for the cousin he’d lost.

  Now, walking down the driveway to the front door of Max Gate, I thought again of Anthony’s face in the moment he’d spoken the name Hermes Christopher Evans Swain. I realized what it recalled: a photo of Hardy’s wife Emma Gifford Hardy in her fifties, but looking older. She is facing the camera squarely in a way she seldom did, hair parted and pulled back flat against her head rather than stacked and curling as customary for her. She isn’t smiling. There is nothing childlike or innocent here, nothing pretentious or haughty either, as in so many other images of Emma. This is a person stripped of artifice and carrying an intense hurt, a person who reckons all that has been lost and—for just this moment—lets us see her pain, her sadness, and her strength.

  There was an unopened guest book on a table in Max Gate’s entrance hall. A pen dangled from it on a gold chain, stirred by our arrival, catching meager lamplight. The space was small and cold, filled with the ticking of grandfather clocks coming from the dining room, drawing room, beside the staircase, and somewhere back behind it as well. It seemed right only to whisper there.

  I leaned close to Beverly. “God, it’s eerie.”

  “And dark, even with the door open.”

  The staircase, now that I looked more closely, appeared wide for such a modest nook, designed in the old manner to accommodate a loaded coffin coming down. The stairwell wall was lined with framed maps and Dorset landscapes, a few faded faces, illustrations from several of Hardy’s novels.

  We heard footsteps above. A throat-clearing cough. Then the man I’d seen cleaning windows peeked around the corner of the landing, his hair wet.

  “Just changing clothes. Down in a few moments. Why don’t you have a look around the drawing room there and I’ll be right with you.” He waved and withdrew, then returned. “I’m Jason, by the way. Jason Abbott. The third. Max Gate’s caretaker this year.” He waved again, then added, “I mean, you can sit in there, if you wish. Not only look around. In the drawing room. Oh, and forgive the stuffed terrier by the fireplace. Won’t bite. Sorry. Just a bit of Hardy humor.”

  “Then his name mustn’t be Wessex,” I said.

  “Hah! You know your Hardy trivia.” With that, and without waving, he vanished and we heard him tromping back upstairs.

  The ticking hush returned, and the chilliness. I took a National Trust / Max Gate pamphlet from a stack beside the guestbook, and glanced at the floor plan on its back page. It showed that besides the dining and drawing rooms, the only rooms available to the public were two of Hardy’s first-floor studies, and two attic rooms—one belonging to Emma and the other to her young maid, Dolly Gale. It felt quite right to be only somewhat welcome to but a part of Hardy’s home.

  I was learning that even as he invited you in, Hardy eluded you. He was certainly doing that with me, having been in contact twice but vanishing behind the riddle of his message and the illusion of his presence. And the various Hardy tourist sites, as operated by the National Trust and local volunteers, appear to have caught that spirit, the mixture of exposure and circumspection, balancing the demand for access with the need for guardedness.

  We tiptoed into the dining room. Its linen-covered table was topped with two silver tea trays, an empty vase, a pair of unused red candles. I tried not to focus on what was missing—the cups, spoons, dishes, napkins, water glasses. An arrangement of purple irises and ferns filled the open hearth. According to the pamphlet, there was some of Hardy’s own furniture in the room, on loan from the Dorset County Museum. So that was his actual bookcase bureau, his scroll arm sofa, his chairs at the table’s ends. There were no obvious cobwebs or dust, but the impression was of long absence, not anticipation. Of life stopped, not paused. A vague memory of what families and friends did together. It was hard to imagine eating in this room, laughing, being relaxed and natural, open to intimacy. The rug with its deep purples and wines reminded me of one in my daughter’s Chicago home, and I tried to focus on that, to connect with the warmth or coziness that can come with dining together. But it was no use.

  We turned around and recrossed the hall to stand just inside the drawing room. What met my eyes was visual mayhem. For a re-created Victorian-era villa’s drawing room, I’m sure it was accurate, a typical homey, charmingly busy space. But for me, so easily confused by visual stimuli in the wake of neurological damage, the effect was overwhelming. What I saw was all clashing colors and shapes, arm chairs and easy chairs and desk chairs, a tumult of decorative touches and optical distractions. Available surfaces were covered with plates, baskets, figurines, odd pieces of pottery and metal. The glass-fronted bookcase and mirror over the fireplace threw back a clamor of images and light.

  Where was Hardy in all this? Near the room’s center was an oval table draped in a violet cloth on which a half-dozen photographs clustered. I tried to concentrate on them. Even from the entryway I could recognize the pointy-bearded portrait of the balding author in his midforties that had been on the cover of the first Hardy biography I’d read. There was an aging Emma beside him, there was Florence, his parents, everyone facing different directio
ns. Yellow English roses drooped from a vase and covered half of another photograph. The stuffed terrier lay on its side before the empty fireplace. By the window, a group of chairs and footstools was covered in upholstery so profusely flowered that I wanted to move them away from the light to stop their spread.

  I knew from images I’d seen in books that the Max Gate drawing room had been cluttered. But those images had been in fuzzy black and white and this was living color and we were right there. I felt a wash of tenderness for Emma. To me, the room seemed to express her nearly unmanageable energies, trapped as they were by her marriage, by living in Max Gate, in Dorset.

  What came to mind—again with the Yiddish—was the word tchotchkes, which refers to trinkets and baubles but also means bruise. You could, and I often did as a child because of my mother’s explosive rages, have a little tchotchke under your eye, the word implying that the mark was slight, was nothing, a trifle not to be spoken of, though the person bearing the tchotchke knew differently. The close link between the two—the jumble of stuff in Max Gate’s most public space as a homonym for the sort of small bruises that mark our passage—struck me powerfully as I tried to sort out what I was seeing.

  The drawing room was both physically and metaphorically the dining room’s opposite, loud instead of quiet, immoderate instead of austere. I don’t know what I expected to feel in visiting Max Gate, but it wasn’t this increasing sense of intense sadness. The deeper I found myself in Hardy’s private world, the longer I dwelt in it, the clearer I saw confusion, regret, and pain. Saw fragmentation rather than coherence.

  In the drawing room, he and Emma—and later, he and Florence—hosted the great figures of literary life in Victorian England, the people among whom Hardy had earned his place. Here they chatted with Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, T. E. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw. Here was where Wessex nipped John Galsworthy’s leg and Emma talked with W. B. Yeats about her cat and Hardy met Charles Dickens’s last surviving son, where honors were bestowed on Hardy and performances of his work were given and parties spilled out over the lawn. It was the one place above all where Hardy saw the dimensions of his achievement made manifest. But it didn’t look like a place where he’d be comfortable or at ease, where he’d smile.