The Phantom of Thomas Hardy

by Floyd Skloot

  He was to be found, I thought, somewhere between the dining room’s impassivity and the drawing room’s turbulence. Maybe he was in the vestibule’s hushed ticking.

  “What are you thinking?” Beverly whispered.

  “That I can sense the bitterness here.”

  It was like an odor that couldn’t be covered over by any cleansing agent, a stain that couldn’t be hidden by any number of diverting what-nots, a bruise spreading rather than being contained by time and the process of healing. It was all of that at once, a disruption of atmosphere.

  The chandelier didn’t rattle, but there was no mistaking the sound of Jason storming back downstairs. We heard him stop on the landing as though gathering himself, then take the final flight down more lightly. He opened the guest book and placed the pen beside it before joining us.

  “Right. Sorry. Wasn’t quite ready. Official welcome.” He shook our hands. Then he took hand sanitizer from his pocket, squirted a dab in his palm, and passed the container to us. “Can’t be too careful, I say. So, a Hardy scholar?”

  I shook my head. “Just a longtime reader. Also written about him a few times, trying to figure out what I think.”

  “Ahhh. Very good.” Jason seemed relieved that I wasn’t a scholar. “And what do you think?”

  “That keeps changing.”

  “Of course.” Jason used more hand sanitizer, since Beverly and I had touched the container, then repocketed it. He turned toward Beverly and said, “That’s the most exciting reading, isn’t it? When you haven’t made up your mind.”

  “Well, there’s something to be said for reading a writer you know you love, too.”

  It was clear that Jason hadn’t been expecting an actual, thoughtful response. He blinked several times—a Hugh Grant moment—before saying “Quite right, quite right. Who would that be for you?”

  Beverly closed her eyes. “These days I’m into novels by contemporary women.” She kept her eyes closed, taking silent inventory. “I always love Ann Patchett’s work and look forward to the next one. Barbara Kingsolver. Pam Houston. In the UK there’s Maggie O’Farrell, Hilary Mantel, Helen Simonson. Just discovered Claire Morrall.”

  As she was speaking, Jason plucked a notebook and pen from another pocket and wrote frantically. “Great! Will text this list to my girlfriend. In Dublin until autumn. Desperate for good novels by women.”

  “Tell her Jennifer Johnston and Deirdre Madden, then.”

  “Wait. What am I doing?” He stopped writing. “Ex-girlfriend. Separation, my idea, no contact until the end of September.” He shrugged and repocketed his notebook and pen. “That’s part of it, you see. Everything between us had become habit.”

  “Were you together a long time?”

  “Seemed like it, at the end.” Then he squared his shoulders and said, “Sorry. So shall I give you the speech?” He assumed a robot voice, cocked his head, spread his arms, and recited, “Max Gate was built on one and a half acres Thomas Hardy purchased from the Duchy of Cornwall. Max Gate was designed by Thomas Hardy. Max Gate was where Thomas Hardy wrote the following books . . .”

  “No, that’s all right. We’ll just rout the rest of the house.”

  Jason blinked at me. “You’ll what?”

  “He means tour,” Beverly said. “We’ll just tour the rest of the house.”

  Jason studied me for a moment, as though concerned I’d just revealed my intention to damage Max Gate.

  “I have some neurological issues,” I told him. “Some word-finding problems. Sorry.”

  “No problem. Fascinating, actually. Right then, you’ll tour the house. Happy to escort you. Until others arrive, anyway.” He took a step toward the dining room, then stopped. “Oops. Been there, done that, right? Upstairs we go.”

  As we approached the staircase, Beverly asked Jason how long he’d been working at Max Gate. He didn’t answer till we’d reached the landing.

  “Actually, I’m in residence here. Two years. Technically, tenant slash caretaker slash scholar-in-residence. Began March the first.”

  “I didn’t know there was such a program,” I said.

  “I’m the second one. Before me, a woman came over from America. Wrote her dissertation, kept the place up, got Hardy’s studies ready for public display.”

  “What are you working on?”

  Jason began walking up the remaining stairs. “Don’t like to talk about it, you see. Jinx.” He looked back over his shoulder. “Well, not so much a jinx. You know, so many people come to Max Gate for research. Don’t want to accidentally give someone ideas, right?”

  “I understand.” Clearly, the notion of scholarly competition made him edgy.

  But he couldn’t help himself. The desire to reveal what he’d dedicated himself to study was as strong as the desire to conceal its secrets. He stopped as we reached the first floor and spoke to the wall ahead rather than to us.

  “Say this much: its title is Love’s Geometry: The Coordinates of Relationship in the Novels of Thomas Hardy. Although this morning whilst cleaning the conservatory windows I thought perhaps the subtitle should be Measuring Love in the Novels of Thomas Hardy instead. Or maybe Formulas for Love.” He shrugged and pointed toward the rooms that were closed off. “That’s my part of the house. Study and bedroom.” He motioned behind us. “Over there, Hardy’s second study and beyond that his final study. We can go in.”

  But he didn’t budge, so neither did we. He was moving his lips as though arguing with himself, and losing the struggle to hide his ideas for the subject of his book. “One more thing. Since you asked. My view, the central drama in the novels is always a character trying to choose among two or three or even four potential loves. Hence love’s geometry.”

  He looked at me, perhaps to see if I agreed. Or was taking stealthy notes. I said, “The Tess-Angel-Alec triangle.”

  “Exactly. Hardy was working like that quite early. Does the heroine pick the rustic musician, the wealthy farm owner, or the stodgy Parson? Next book: does the heroine pick the small-town architect, the big-city book reviewer, or the wealthy local lord? Next book: does she pick the sturdy shepherd, the wealthy farmer, or the dashing soldier? Next book: the returning native with education and character, or the wild innkeeper? Next book: the heir to the estate, the sailor, or his brother the trumpet-major? And so on, for fourteen books.”

  Thus far, Jason hadn’t revealed anything casual readers of Hardy’s novels wouldn’t have recognized on their own. The basic Hardy plot. I thought, He’s pulling a Hardy. He’s confiding without disclosing. Beverly was motionless and watching Jason closely, reading him, and I could sense her disciplined patience. Okay, she’s right, I need to give him time.

  “I’m interested in the forces that made Hardy obsess about having to choose among competing lovers. Did that even before it became a reality in his own life. Or to put it differently, what made him obsess about how rare it is to find all one yearns for in a single person? So that choosing this love means losing that love. Never getting it all. Missing out.”

  “And the solution is never found.”

  “No, the solution is never found. He just stops looking.” Jason turned his head toward Hardy’s final study. “In 1895, after Jude the Obscure was published and savaged by the reviewers, Hardy quit writing novels.”

  “And you think that’s why he quit? He gave up trying to solve the problem, or work out the angles, or whatever?”

  Jason seemed to nod, but I wasn’t sure he’d even heard me. In fact, I wasn’t sure I’d spoken aloud. I was trying to keep up with him, but felt myself starting to drift away at the same time.

  “The geometry of love,” Jason had said. Twice. It was a phrase that brought me back to my mentor, Robert Russell, who had died just a year ago, at the age of eighty-six. We’d kept in touch over the years since I graduated, and I’d last seen him five years earlier, when I returned to Franklin and Marshall to receive an honorary degree at their 2006 commencement exercises. Being with him then had
spurred me to reread Hardy when I got back home. I would phone Russell to talk about my reading, and then wrote an essay—dedicated to him—about the way he and Hardy had helped give shape to my life.

  Russell’s high-pitched voice told me the same thing it told me nearly forty years before: “Thomas Hardy is not a good writer.” Knowing what came next, I nodded, though he couldn’t see me. “But he is a great writer.”

  I had him on speakerphone so I could keep both hands free to take notes. I swear I smelled his pipe, saw ashes on his clothing, papers scattered around his desk. His hair flared wildly on the sides, where it was white, and rose to a neat black mound on top, like Egdon Heath. Brows twitched, smile widened, hands settled after brief flight. Only his closed eyes seemed still.

  “It’s Hardy’s struggle to speak, that’s what matters. To say what he’s trying to say. Not the accomplishment, but the struggle.”

  “I remember you telling me that when I was working on my thesis, and I didn’t fully understand what you meant.”

  “Mmmm. But you do now, don’t you?”

  As he so often had done, Russell was saying several things at once, and saying it by asking a question I didn’t need to answer. He was acknowledging my illness and the way it forced me to evolve a new way of writing, of speaking. But he was also acknowledging the effect of time and experience and love on my ability to understand what was less apparent to me as a student. He was referring to my rereading of Hardy at the time we spoke. And he was, metaphorically, embracing me while also setting me free, suggesting that I might not need his mentorship any longer. I knew, though, that I still needed him.

  He’d been Dr. Russell to me throughout my college years. I just couldn’t call him Bob, though I called my other professors by their given names. In my thoughts and when I wrote about him, he was Russell. I’d managed a mumbled Bob earlier in this conversation, since he’d insisted, but now that we were talking about Hardy there was no way I could Bob him. So I skipped the name business and answered his question. Did I understand what he meant by the importance of the struggle to speak. “Nearly, I think.”

  “I remember the hard time you had with The Trumpet-Major,” Russell said, his voice soaring with amusement. “When you said you didn’t want to finish it, I suggested that you add The Dynasts to your reading list instead.”

  I remembered that too. The thought had terrified me as I sat beside him, midway through my project. Once I’d learned of its existence, I dreaded having to plough through Hardy’s three-part poetic epic drama about the Napoleonic Wars: 662 pages! 297 speaking parts! “Why didn’t you assign it anyway?”

  He chuckled. “Oh my, then you’d have had to read it to me, wouldn’t you?”

  Russell’s voice was so deeply lodged in my memory that its sound survives all the brain damage that ensued, and often returns in dreams. I loved how expressive its tones were, the melody of his speech, and the way his language was peppered with Britishisms from his years living in England.

  As I listened to him then, I was in two places at once, separated by nearly forty years. And I realized that at the time I’d begun reading the novels, Hardy had been dead for only forty years. Such a brief time. Forty years was only as long as Carson McCullers had been dead at the time we spoke, or Langston Hughes, or Dorothy Parker. Yet those writers seemed much closer to me than Hardy had seemed in 1968, contemporary in ways Hardy never could, even if he’d still been alive when I was reading him.

  Part of the reason was that he wrote his fourteen published novels during the quarter century between 1870 and 1895. So while he lived until 1928, those novels were more distant, the work of the middle third of his life, when he was between thirty and fifty-five. But even young, Hardy had an old man’s grumpy, bitter outlook, and he wasn’t writing about a world I recognized as a twenty-year-old.

  Yet for all his remoteness from life as I knew it, there was something about Hardy’s sensibility, a long-standing, childhood-borne feeling of gloom and radical dislocation, a yearning sadness, that resonated across the years. I felt drawn to Hardy, and still do. There was a core of longstanding deep pain in him, the pain of a rejected child, a child unable to express his deepest feelings and needs. I also associated Hardy’s pain with despondency over love. The novels are all driven by a crazed vision of love as torment. It was a vision I recognized viscerally, having witnessed my parents’ mutual harrowing, their volatile misery. When Hardy wrote of Eustacia Vye, in The Return of the Native, that “the only way to look queenly without realms or hearts to queen it over is to look as if you had lost them,” he could have been describing my mother on any given day. At the Russian Tea Room, for instance, presenting herself as an aristocrat and abusing the servants. When Michael Henchard, in The Mayor of Casterbridge, sold his wife to the highest bidder and hoped never to see her again, he was living out my father’s deepest wish. When Henchard dies a lonely death at the novel’s end, a clear failure to thrive in the wake of his lovelorn misery, it resonated with my unhappy father’s death by drowning while having a heart attack with no one around to save him. I found my parents’ enormous disappointment, thwarted ambitions, and explosive unhappiness enacted throughout Hardy’s work. I also found my own inheritance of pain and loss, the urgency to understand what love could be, how it might survive our wounds.

  My mother often talked about having chosen the wrong man from among her many suitors. A one-eyed chicken butcher when she could have married a doctor lawyer composer actor billionaire baron earl prince. As Jason Abbott III said to me and Beverly on the first floor of Max Gate, this sort of romantic dilemma was everywhere in Hardy’s novels. Love’s geometry. And in the rare cases when characters did end up in a tolerable union, it was by settling, as Bathsheba Everdene did with Gabriel Oak at the end of Far from the Madding Crowd, for “good fellowship—camaraderie,” which Hardy called “the only love which is as strong as death—that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam.”

  I didn’t believe Hardy believed that claptrap about camaraderie being better than passion, not deep down in his soul. His characters yearned for—needed—the passion that inevitably ravaged their lives. It seemed to be what made them come alive. Characters accidentally touched hands in a basin of water and were overwhelmed by desire. Characters bedazzled one another with sudden gentleness, or with displays of manly brio or feminine bravado. On passion’s flip side, a spurned lover cut off and sold her gorgeous locks of hair. Another discovered that the wife who abandoned him had financed her escape by selling his framed wedding portrait. Hardy was at his best in moments of love’s urgency or agony, its intimate wounding.

  I felt that I knew what Hardy was struggling to say in these extraordinary scenes, his heat and heartbreak evident in the rare imagistic eloquence of his prose, the ardor of the writing. I also felt that I grasped what underlay his sense of love’s geometry, and how we sometimes cannot want or desire what is good for us, how rare it is when the angles all balance. How ideals—theorems—are useless in the realities of love as it happens in the world.

  I remembered one meeting with Russell, sometime in early 1969, when we were discussing Tess’s sad fate, her abuse at the hands of Alec D’Urberville, her abandonment by Angel Clare. I tried to explain how much the novel disappointed me, with its heavy-handed heaping of debasement on Tess, but yet how powerfully it moved me. I knew from the way my parents acted toward each other and toward me that there might be no limit to what people do to those they love. The novel’s climactic scene at Stonehenge, so redolent of human sacrifice, particularly galled me even as it touched and terrified me. As a child I’d had dreams of being sacrificed, like Isaac bound on the altar, in just such a place. I stammered, and though he couldn’t see my eyes filling with tears Russell understood what was happening.

  “This is it, you know,” he said. “This is the struggle to say what you’re trying to say.”

  It’s the sort o
f thing some fathers say to their sons at such moments. I think I knew then, as our time together neared its end, that Russell had become much more than an employer or professor or even a mentor to me. He had led me to find my voice, to speak as myself. He had also led me to Thomas Hardy, helping me understand that Hardy was an example of struggling to speak the heart.

  I couldn’t call him Bob, and I didn’t want to call him Bob, for the same reasons I could never have called my father Harry. But it didn’t occur to me until forty years later, hearing him talk again about Hardy’s struggle to speak, but also alluding to my own struggles in the aftermath of my illness and to all I’d learned since being his student (Mmmm. But you do now, don’t you?), that if he’d suggested we study Arnold or Browning or Carlyle or Hopkins or Tennyson I would have agreed. But he’d suggested Hardy, said, “I have a feeling for Hardy, and I think you might too.” It was as though he’d known exactly who and what I needed. Then, and in the future.

  As our phone call neared its end, Russell said he’d enjoyed seeing me again when I was back on campus. I always loved how he’d used the verb see without self-consciousness, freeing people to speak more easily to him as well. I told him it had been good to see him too, that he’d looked well, had hardly changed at all.

  “That’s what I think when I look in the mirror too,” he said.

  “When I’m done with this essay on Hardy, I’ll make a recording and send it to you.”

  “I’ll look forward to that. And meanwhile, tell Beverly again how glad I was to meet her, finally. I can see that you’re both happy together.”