by Floyd Skloot
I don’t know why I said what I said next, but am glad I did. “What do you think Hardy would have made of it?”
“Oh, he’ll tell you eventually.”
Late-morning light engulfed a writing desk by the east-facing window in Hardy’s study. It also blanched a pair of worn rugs in the middle of the room, ricocheted off the glass-fronted bookcase at the far wall, pooled on the polished surface of a small table in the corner. Hardy had achieved radiant overkill in the design of this space. There was no need for them, but the desk lamps and ceiling fixture were lit too. Looking at it as I had earlier, from outside—and knowing the gloominess of spirit shadowing Max Gate—I hadn’t imagined a study space anywhere near so bright. Hardy could work in this? Perhaps it let him see more deeply into his own darkness.
The desk held scattered piles of manuscript papers. I knew they couldn’t be Hardy’s, but walked over to examine them and found dozens of poems, drawings, and notes from recent visitors to Max Gate. “You will not be disappointed,” someone had written. Another had scrawled the name Thomas Hardy over and over, the signature diminishing in size as it neared the bottom of the page, where it stopped in midname: Thomas Ha. A child had drawn the lopsided outline of a house with three stick figures towering over it and the sun in five different locations. In purple ink and deft calligraphy, there were lines from Hardy’s poem “Old Furniture”: “I see the hands of the generations / That owned each shiny familiar thing.”
I sat in the desk chair. My absurd impulse was to tidy the writing surface, smooth out the blotter, align the glue pot with the pen box. And draw the blinds. But this was supposed to be his space, not mine. Except we all knew it was only the illusion of Hardy’s space. It smelled like wall paint and furniture polish.
What is it, I wondered, that drives us to pursue writers beyond the boundaries of their books? Why do we need more from them than they give us there? Hardy certainly despised this pursuit: “I think,” he wrote to a journalist in 1906, “that to get behind a book at the author of a book, who has naturally said in his own pages all that we wants to say, is a vicious custom which ought to be discontinued.”
How does sitting at a desk that was not Hardy’s real desk and picking up a pen that was not his pen and even writing his own words there on paper that was not his paper bring us closer to the writer whose words fill our minds? Apparently the writer’s words alone are not sufficient, but seeing or touching the relics of a life might be. As though this brings us closer to the place where the life and the art alchemize.
Of course, I was guilty of doing it myself. I’m a reader who loves literary biography, loves visiting the homes of writers I admire, touching up against their lives. Earlier on this trip to England, I’d visited Dylan Thomas’s Boat House home at Laugharne, in southwestern Wales, peered into his writing shed, sat on his terrace, saw the river and harbor below, the green hills, the seabirds, watched a video in his upstairs bedroom. I spent time walking where John Fowles had walked in Lyme Regis, stood on the windy Cobb where the French Lieutenant’s woman stood, and hiked in the Undercliff by the sea where so much had happened in Fowles’s novel. A few years ago, when my daughter was living in Memphis and had just finished writing her book, we drove down to Oxford, Mississippi, and visited William Faulkner’s white clapboard home, Rowan Oak, walking together through a line of cedars toward its shadowy portico. As her own office wall had been, Faulkner’s was covered with notes charting his book’s structure. We leaned side-by-side over the threshold.
As I writer, I’m wary of this curiosity in others. As a father, too, since people assume an artificial intimacy with my daughter based on her work, feeling at liberty to reach out to her because in her book she is so approachable, so warm. But as a reader, I love giving in to it.
Feeling drowsy in the sun’s warmth, gazing out the window toward Hardy’s garden, I thought about things I possessed that might be of interest to people who knew my work. I couldn’t come up with much: This was Floyd’s recliner, where he spent so much time during the first years of his illness. Notice the melted patches where it got too close to the wood-burning stove. And this is the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball hat he used to wear when he wrote in the morning. Later, after his daughter moved to Chicago, he began wearing the Chicago Cubs hat you see on the bookshelf. That photo is Floyd and Beverly on their wedding day. Notice how their round house looks dwarfed by all those second-growth oak?
And what would I want to hide? What was I hiding while writing four memoirs that were intended to let me reassemble myself from fragments of the past, the shards of my story that were left in a shattered memory system? I believed I was on an essential journey of discovery and had to see the fullest truth or else I myself would be transformed into a lie. I was desperate not to hide anything, but can I be sure I succeeded? Am I hiding something now, even something I’m not aware of hiding?
I heard Beverly laugh behind me, and turned to see her standing in the doorway with a cat in her arms. It was Bella, Jason told us, a stalwart mouser named after Arabella Donn in Jude the Obscure. I stood, realizing how close I’d been to falling asleep, and in the comfort of hearing Beverly’s delight mingling with Bella’s, I felt a sense of clarity about what I was doing there.
For decades I’d wanted to pay my respects to Thomas Hardy and, in the process, to Robert Russell. Yet I’d never felt strongly enough about it to make the journey until now. It was Russell’s death, in large part, that had pushed me to do so. Coming here wasn’t prompted by the rereading of Hardy’s books, which I’d completed several years before and without feeling the need to reserve a flight to England, but by the loss of a surrogate father who had brought me to those books. That’s what inspired me to include these three Dorset days in our trip to England. And I’d come, at the end of an extended vacation, with no expectation other than honoring those two men’s places in my life.
But now I found myself compelled—feeling called—to go deeper, to move beyond the boundaries of Thomas Hardy’s work in pursuit of truths that might lay buried within it, if I only knew where to look. I felt Russell’s presence keenly, urging me to continue my work, to speak my heart and to hear what Hardy’s heart might still be trying to say.
“Something I missed.” Hardy, I felt, was open to it. And/or I needed to do it. At least that’s how I was now understanding his Visitation. There was something here I needed to discover. And I believed he wanted me to touch the relics, follow where they led me. I sat back down.
Beverly, Jason, and I were alone in the house. Jason, sanitizing his hands after touching Bella, was explaining to Beverly the sequence of events that had led Hardy to build an addition to Max Gate, creating space both for his final study and for Emma’s attic rooms. The success of his books. The unhappiness with how small his existing study was. The way he felt exposed when anyone came to visit. I knew the story well enough to let the words flow over me. A cloud skimmed past, darkening for just a few seconds the space where I sat, and as bright light returned I remembered the recurring lines from one of Hardy’s eeriest poems: “Who’s in the next room?—who?”
Who was in the next room, I thought, was the person nowhere to be found in this room. The person Hardy tried so hard to eradicate as a presence in his life when he built this space in which to give himself fully to his work. Even in the reconstruction, Emma was nowhere—not even in a photo—and therefore she seemed to be everywhere. Beside, above, beyond.
Images flooded in the dazzling light. Emma when Hardy first met her, composed and looking away in an oval photo that echoed the shape of her face. Emma a year later in a locket miniature, not quite able to smile. Emma two decades later photographed through a pin-hole camera at Weymouth Pier, dressed in black. Emma old, looking down at an open book, the photo mostly hat. This rush of images slowed like a wheel of fortune and stopped at the same frank, brave face I’d remembered earlier, while standing in the Max Gate driveway. Emma with all her defenses down. Emma plain. Emma.
They met in
March 1870. Hardy had expected someone else to receive him at the rectory door. He’d taken four different trains since leaving Bockhampton by morning starlight, then ridden sixteen jouncing miles in a horse-drawn cart, reaching the tiny village of St. Juliot just before seven o’clock with Jupiter visible in the sky. He’d never been to Cornwall. He was cold in the wild coastal wind, had been cold for hours. He’d had little to eat, and spent those hours scribbling notes and drafting a poem on paper he stuffed into his pocket.
The dilapidated church with its cracked tower loomed on the hilltop beside the rectory. Its shadow fell across the pathway leading to the front door. Hardy rang the bell, then rubbed his hands together and blew on them for warmth. Ushered inside, he found neither the rector, whose church Hardy had come all that way to restore, nor the rector’s wife waiting for him. Instead, the wife’s younger sister, Emma Gifford, was there, dressed in deep dark brown, adorned with masses of corn-colored curls, pale, blue-eyed, and looking uncomfortable in her role as welcomer to a home that wasn’t hers. But her appearance spoke to him of grace and gentility, and Emma’s gaze was animated, lively with interest as it took in Hardy’s yellowish beard, his shabby greatcoat, the bit of blue paper sticking out of his pocket.
She told him her brother-in-law, the reverend Caddell Holder, had been laid up with gout, and her sister Helen was upstairs with him. They would go to meet the Holders as soon as Hardy was ready, then would dine. The table was laid. Emma could see that Hardy was exhausted by his tedious and complicated day’s travel. It had been, she thought, “a sort of cross-jump journey like a chess-knight’s move.” Strangers seldom came to the small, remote village, and she’d been wondering what this architect fellow would be like. She was glad he was there at last, eager—as were most people in the village—for him to arrive so work could finally begin on restoring their long-neglected church.
Emma had expected someone else, too. Or someone different. Despite any local admiration, she’d vowed to keep herself free until the one intended for her arrived. As soon as she saw Hardy, though, she felt sure that she knew him. He was familiar, like someone she’d seen in a dream, and his soft voice with its slight West Country accent charmed her. At first, she took him to be much older than he was. Maybe it was the darkness, or his businesslike appearance, because later, in daylight, he seemed younger. They were, in fact, nearly the same age, both on the verge of thirty and born within five months of each other.
Emma was the daughter of a long-retired solicitor with a gentleman’s airs, a serious drinking problem, and few resources. He’d rented accommodations near the Bodmin moors and sent his daughters out to be governesses or ladies’ companions. When Helen married Reverend Holder, thirty-five years her senior, she’d brought Emma along. The sisters didn’t like each other much, but Emma helped with parish and household duties as the Holders tried hard to find her a husband.
In the days that followed, Emma accompanied Hardy in his preparations for work on the church. She sketched and observed as he made drawings, took measurements, and examined the five church bells inverted and lined up on the transept floor, the carved bench-ends rotting, the ivy-draped old timbers dense with bats and birds, assessing what could be salvaged from the building. She went along on his visits to slate quarries at Tintagel and Penpethy to examine alternative roofing material. Hardy extended his stay. They spent time alone exploring the coast, the fishing port at Boscastle, “the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea at Beeny Cliff.” Emma, who walked with a limp because of a childhood hip dislocation, was a deft horsewoman, riding Fanny over the landscape as Hardy walked beside her. The bottom of her long riding skirt was flung over her left arm, felt hat turned up at the sides, and she was at ease on her horse, showing the young architect choughs and puffins soaring through ocean spray, the gorged and drenched black cliffs, seeping sunsets, the coast’s power to stir heart and soul. They picnicked, and Hardy sketched Emma on her knees—hair loose, curves carefully delineated—reaching into a river for a glass tumbler she’d lost as she rinsed it. There was evening music in the garden and the rectory, where Emma played piano and sang. They read together and spoke of books. She wrote that “scarcely any author and his wife could have had a much more romantic meeting.” And Hardy wrote of these days with anguish (“much of my life claims the spot as its key”) and adoration (“woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me”) after Emma’s death forty-two years later, the details etched in memory. “Was there ever a time of such quality, since or before?”
For the next four years, Hardy returned two or three times a year to what he called this Region of Dream and Mystery. They returned to Tintagel, the village and castle so closely linked to the legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and drove a cart to Trebarwith Strand to watch donkeys getting seaweed for local farmers. There were dawdling excursions to the rock-bound cove at Strangles beach, and to visit a neighboring clergyman.
As the work progressed, so did their relationship with each other and with the landscape beyond her home at St. Juliot, pronounced St. Jilt by locals. They corresponded between visits. Emma said she found Hardy a perfectly new subject of study and delight, was charmed with the quickness of his speech and mind. Both wrote of their deepening interest. Emma began to copy out Hardy’s manuscripts for him as the early novels took shape. She encouraged and seemed to understand his work, his desire to become a writer and quit architecture.
There’s a story that Emma had many suitors among the men of North Cornwall. There’s also a story that her family made up the story about all the suitors in North Cornwall so Hardy would feel pressured to propose to Emma. And there’s a story that when he proposed, Emma’s parents rejected him. This last story seems certainly true, as Hardy never spoke to them again. Resolute, he worked hard at his trades, both architecture and writing, until he could afford marriage.
Whether they were lovers or not over the four years until their marriage, I feel certain—as I do about little else when it comes to Hardy and love—that he was in love with Emma in their early courtship years. Or, more accurately, that he understood what he felt as being in love. He wrote: “I came back from these first times together with magic in my eyes!”
Beverly sat at the table in Emma’s attic, her hand resting on an antique sewing machine. A slip of daylight through the dormer window warmed her face and saturated her creamy handwoven scarf. The table also held a wicker basket of fabric and a stray, feathery strip of cloth. Folded over a wooden rack, a white quilt seemed to glow at the edge of the light. But beyond it, and throughout the rest of the room, a gloomy duskiness prevailed.
There was a framed etching on the floor, leaning against the wall near the fireplace. Beside a single candlestick on the mantle, a hasty watercolor sketch awaited hanging. The bare wooden floor was stained where a rug had once lain. The effort at refurnishing seemed thwarted, as if Emma’s spirit remained in place and forbid the room to resemble anything other than a cell, with nothing in it truly hers, a space to endure rather than thrive.
But Emma had willingly—eagerly—moved herself up there in 1899, writing to a friend, “I sleep in an Attic! My boudoir is my sweet refuge and solace—not a sound scarcely penetrates hither. I see the sun, & stars & moon rise & the birds come to my bird table when a hurricane has not sent them flying.”
It was a place of retreat for Emma. Hardy worked below her in the study, and she felt free of him at last. She could read and paint, sew, could talk to her cats if she wanted to without Hardy’s sour disapproval. Being up there only made explicit what had been implicit in recent years: trapped together at Max Gate, they barely spoke, barely had anything like an intimate life together. They could go out, travel together, attend plays—they could do the husband-and-wife thing in public—but they couldn’t be at home with each other.
How had the Hardys come from the romance and the magic of their early days to this in their twenty-five years of married life? His reserve had become complete withdr
awal, his restraint impassivity. Her vitality had become rage, her expressiveness self-torment. By the time she moved to the attic, Emma was referring to Hardy in her writings as The W.M., for The Wicked Man. We know this because a manuscript Emma had written, Some Recollections, was found after her death. Hardy had included eighteen of its pages in his self-ghostwritten biography, where I encountered her descriptions of their courtship. That was material of which Hardy clearly approved. But he’d also failed to print fifty-six other pages, which surfaced in 1961, revealing the depths of Emma’s loathing: “I can scarcely think that love proper, and enduring, is in the nature of men.”
Standing there in the attic, I understood that it was impossible not to ask if their love was ever real romance and magic rather than literary romance and magic. Whether it was all about their fantasies and imaginings, with little actuality to their connection. Things dreamt, of comelier hue than things beholden!
While I believe this couple at thirty was primed to fall in love, was swept away by the fairy-tale elements of the setting, I also believe in Hardy’s line, his sense that love when it struck like that was a kind of joyous spell, a benevolent sorcery. I believe in his ardor, as well as his compulsion to write of it. Both real.
But I can’t help wondering if the charm began to weaken well before they came near the separation enacted here. Well before the construction of Max Gate, never a home built to please or accommodate Emma, who didn’t want to live in Dorset, let alone in a house like this. I was thinking particularly of the four years after their initial meetings and before their marriage. When Hardy was perhaps being manipulated—and requiring manipulation—to propose. Could it be that there were factors other than finances inhibiting him? I remembered what Sharon Taylor had intimated about Tryphena.
“It’s good that Emma had a place of her own,” Beverly said. “But it seems like a very interior space. Compare it to his, looking out into the garden. He’s awash in light, he’s free to move all over the house, and she’s up here, battling the dark and straining for a glimpse of a bird.”
