The Phantom of Thomas Hardy

by Floyd Skloot

  “Aren’t they beautiful?” Beverly whispered.

  I expected them to stop at the pond’s edge. But they kept walking until they were hock-deep in the water. First the male, then the female lowered their heads and drank.

  No doubt these heath-ponies were part of the same Thomas Hardy Egdon Heath Restoration Project that sponsored the gate in the woods and the clearing of invasive species. But there was no way that, on its own, was an adequate explanation for what just happened. Not for me.

  As we’d eaten and talked about the poem, as the sense grew stronger that we were in a place where Hardy had known love, I was thinking about his experience during that summer of 1867. He’d come home from London sick, almost ravaged by the combination of things he’d gone through. Then he recovered, or was restored, and we were in the epicenter of where that happened. It must have felt miraculous to Hardy, magical and life-changing. All of this resonated for me with my own experience of beginning to heal when Beverly and I got together, when I moved into the woods with her, when love took hold of me. When I was slowly restored to some rickety semblance of mobility, balance, coherence.

  I knew what Hardy had found. All I could do, at that moment, was grieve for what he then lost again. For what he had missed.

  The gray pony climbed out of the pond and shook himself free of water. He raised and lowered his head a couple of times. Then he approached us, moving with slow certainty, until he was right before us. Without giving it another thought, I held out one of our apples and he took it from my hand.

  I’m not sure how long we stayed with the ponies because time disappeared while they were there. They were calm, unhurried, curious. The gray one nudged and nuzzled at my backpack on the ground while the chestnut listened to Beverly’s whispered praises. But then, hearing before we did the distant chatter and squeal of children headed toward the pond, both ponies turned away and ambled into the woods.

  We packed up and followed a trail northeast toward Puddletown. According to our map, several different routes would get us there, but we wanted to stop at Coomb eweleaze along the way. It was a farmer’s unremarkable sheep pasture, and had been that for more than a century, but it might as well have had a round blue plaque nailed to one of its trees saying “This field is reputed to be where the lovers in THOMAS HARDY’S poem IN A EWELEAZE NEAR WEATHERBURY shared love’s fitful ecstasies.”

  It certainly meant more to Hardy than just a place where he and Tryphena would make love. According to poem after poem, Hardy as a child would “lie upon the leaze and watch the sky.” Or he’d pass the hills and see “the leaze smiling on and on”; he’d walk the paths across it and savor “summer’s green wonderwork.” He danced upon it. And then came the months when Tryphena joined him there: “Under boughs of brushwood / Linking tree and tree / In a shade of lushwood, / There caressed we!”

  As Beverly and I crossed a series of stiles and followed the paths, I thought that Hardy had chosen the leaze for his trysts because of its youthful associations with wonder and delight, private joys, ease. He thought it all would never end (Thine for ever!), just as he’d wanted childhood never to end.

  But love with Tryphena didn’t bring him wonder and delight and joy and ease for long. Love never did, with anyone in Hardy’s life. He’d fall in love hard, but wake one morning and realize he no longer thought his beloved was so wonderful. He no longer felt bedazzled by what he’d thought were her charms. “The prize I drew is a blank to me!” Others began to look more stirring.

  After little more than a year, the fire Tryphena kindled in Hardy had dwindled and the living love that lit the spot where they’d been together was dying. “The vows of man and maid are frail as filmy gossamere.” Tryphena was in trouble at Puddletown School, reproved for neglect of duty. She’d been needed more and more at home until her mother died in November 1868, so Tryphena was often absent, distracted. And since she saw as much of Hardy as she could, word got around and the young pupil-teacher’s reputation was compromised. By year’s end, she’d been replaced by another pupil-teacher and had moved on to a small village school at Coryates, not far from Weymouth.

  Hardy missed their routine, missed having her available to listen as he spoke about his novel-in-progress and his plans. But he didn’t miss Tryphena herself, had already felt his interest in her and his desire for her weakening. She was lively enough but she wasn’t worldly enough. At this time, he wrote a poem ominously punning on Tryphena’s surname, Sparks: “From the letters of her name / The radiance has waned away!”

  Though he took the occasional temporary assignment from an architect in Weymouth, and so could visit her in her new location, Hardy wasn’t sorry that Tryphena couldn’t risk being seen with him about town except in the most public of settings. They sat by the shore at a discreet distance from each other, maintaining strict decorum as they talked and as he walked her back to her rooms. They no longer snuck away, even when they were both at home in Bockhampton and Puddletown.

  Hardy found that he liked being free again, meeting women in Weymouth for boating excursions or at dances. He began his romance with the pretty maid, Cassie Pole, back near Bockhampton. Sometimes, though, as when he went rowing alone or with friends in Weymouth, he would lament what he’d lost: she of a bygone vow. Hardy seemed to wallow in woefulness, using the loss of love—as he’d used the finding of love—to inspire poetry. It was love, not Tryphena, that he missed.

  He and Tryphena didn’t officially end things then, but about a year after her mother’s death Tryphena was accepted by Stockwell Normal College in south London. Her plans were back on track. She began the two-year teacher training program there in January 1870. Hardy traveled to Cornwall three months later and met Emma.

  At Coomb eweleaze there were utility poles and a new blue barn in the distance, the sound of a large tractor and a barking brindled boxer that didn’t appreciate our wandering into the field. But it was still possible to imagine how this spot looked to Hardy when he brought Tryphena to it. Hedged, with heath rising at one end, woods at another, and a flat area where the dances must have taken place, as in The Return of the Native. No one in sight or likely to appear without warning, only the occasional cackling crow or cooing wood pigeon, the bleating sheep, but no human voice other than Tryphena’s and his own.

  The poems Hardy wrote about Tryphena only began to appear in his books long after their affair ended. She’d married a pub owner named Charles Gale and moved with him to Topsham, in Devon, shortly before Hardy married Emma, and even though Tryphena was his cousin, they’d lost contact. News of her death in 1890, when she was thirty-nine and Hardy fifty, jarred him and triggered the writing of his final novel and several poems—a response he was to have again more than twenty-two years later, and to a much greater extent, when Emma died.

  Tryphena, still young, appeared in his mind as she was “when her dreams were upbrimming with light.” He made a pilgrimage to Coomb eweleaze and wrote a poem imagining a conversation in which she convinced him not to commit suicide lest no one be left alive to remember her. Once again, the actual Tryphena, the actual woman with her surviving husband and four children, had no present reality for him. He possessed no letters of hers, no keepsake, “no mark of her.” She was a “phantom” retained in his mind, and now that she was gone from the world he gave this phantom final definition as his Lost Prize.

  Beverly and I sat under one of the trees. As we talked about all this, I couldn’t shake the image of Hardy, for days after hearing the news of Tryphena’s death in early March, going into his Max Gate study and sitting at his desk, pen in hand, motionless as he considered what it meant to him. Yes, there were other women he’d fallen for. But as the rhymes gathered momentum in his brain (“lost prize” and “her eyes,” “last days” and “sweet ways”), as the scaffolding of form began to assemble, as the usual process of control exerted itself, Hardy made himself see beyond all that. Losing Tryphena when they were young, a loss echoed and made utterly final now as he passed fif
ty, was the Great Loss, though it was a loss he had brought about and for which he was responsible. His other lost loves—his other losses of interest in his loves—were merely undulating waves emanating from this central loss. Aftershocks. In giving up on Tryphena, he had given up on the kind of love he most wanted to have, one whose power and reality endured.

  He’d punished himself for that ever since. He’d pursued women who, by loving him, by accepting him as worthy of them, had thereby demonstrated their foolishness and unworthiness. In the harshest judgment of all, he’d married a woman he knew he could never love as he’d loved Tryphena. A woman for whom his love was already dampened. It was a specific Dantean torment that he believed, somewhere deep in his soul, he deserved.

  There’s a strange sketch Hardy drew for Wessex Poems, the book he published in 1898 that contained the poems about Tryphena. This sketch clearly demonstrates that he held himself accountable for losing his love all those years before. It captures Coomb eweleaze with its sheep, group of trees, hedge, stile. But suspended in the foreground, dominating everything, is a pair of large black-framed spectacles through which some of the landscape, particularly the trees, is visible. The remainder of the landscape can be seen above, below, and to the sides of the spectacle’s frames. Critics suggest the sketch shows Hardy simultaneously viewing past and present through these lenses: the part seen through spectacles represents the aging man’s perspective looking back at the past and the part outside the spectacles represents the way things look now. But Hardy has placed the spectacles with the temple pieces turned away from the viewer. The eweleaze is looking at him; he’s not looking at it. In fact, he’s refusing to see it as it is now, has removed his glasses to ensure that he isn’t distracted, and opened himself to its scrutiny. To its judgment. The image insists that the past, and this place, and particularly the trees that create the most concealed spot in the leaze, have him in sharp view. Hardy, on his pilgrimage here after Tryphena’s death, gazed at the place where his love and loss were greatest and found it looking back at him, watching him, seeing him clearly. Not letting him escape. It feels as though, when he put his spectacles back on, they held the leaze’s vision of his guilt.

  In July, four months after her death, Hardy knew the poems he’d written about Tryphena weren’t enough to ease what he felt. He needed to go to her.

  There was only one person he trusted enough to share the journey. Despite the heat, he convinced his brother Henry to accompany him by bicycle.

  The trip from Dorchester to Topsham was more than sixty miles but they were used to long rides and could stay overnight at Lyme Regis if they felt tired. As it turned out, there was no need for that. They reached Topsham in late morning and purchased a small wreath.

  At the cemetery Hardy stood beside his brother in silence, unable to pray, unwilling to recite a poem. There was welcome shade from a pair of old ash trees. He placed the wreath on Tryphena’s still fresh-looking grave. Then he stood back and stared. Henry mumbled a few words about the Sparks family but stopped when he noticed Hardy moving away from him in order to avoid hearing what was being said.

  Henry looked over at his brother and, seeing Hardy’s features distorted as though melting, seeing him reach into his pocket for a handkerchief, decided to walk around the cemetery for a while and then wait by their bicycles.

  “Home?” Henry asked when Hardy finally joined him.

  Hardy had been thinking about just that question. Because as he stood by Tryphena’s grave, as he tried to imagine going on after having witnessed its raw thereness, he realized he needed to visit Charles Gale too. Needed to see him and, even more urgently, needed to see Tryphena’s children. See what they looked like, confront their living presence in the world. It would be necessary if he were ever to get his thoughts and feelings back under control. And to do that, he knew, he would have to write about them all. So it was essential to see them.

  The brothers rode in silence to the Gales’ home. Hardy knocked on the door. It was answered by Tryphena’s eleven-year-old daughter, Nellie, who led them to the parlor and went to seek her father.

  Gale was cutting bread and butter in the pantry and refused to join them. He told her to entertain them herself.

  So Nellie served the bread and butter with slices of ham, kept their teacups full, and spoke with the Hardy brothers. She knew who Thomas Hardy was, had even read Far from the Madding Crowd. She felt something familiar in his presence, felt a tie, and so did the men. Her mother’s cousins, and so her own.

  In some respects, that told Hardy most of what he needed to know. He hadn’t seen Tryphena in nearly twenty years, but he felt like he was with her again. He rose to go, tugging on his cap.

  Outside, Henry said she looked so much like her mother. He bent to kiss her good-bye. Hardy said nothing. As they got on their bicycles, Charles Gale appeared in the courtyard, caught Hardy’s eye, and nodded.

  The sun was still bright. Hardy felt certain they could get home before dark.

  Beverly and I passed a bottle of water back and forth as we watched a cloud’s reflection drift over the leaze. We were both tired, a little drowsy. I felt ready to get home to Portland, though I also felt there was more to be done in Dorset, that Hardy and I hadn’t quite finished our current business.

  “When I think about Hardy marrying Emma,” I said, “I can’t help thinking about my father.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, my father let the love of his life go too. Then he married a woman he didn’t love and knew would make him miserable.” The story felt so immediate to me that I began telling it in the present tense. “He accompanies his friend Simon, who’s a heavyweight prize fighter, to serve as cornerman at a bout in New Jersey. That’s when he meets a gentile woman who’s the sister of Si’s opponent. Her name, if I remember right, is Sally O’Day. She’s in her brother’s corner and my father can’t take his eyes off her, forgets to give Si water between rounds, forgets to towel him off and tend his cuts. After the fight, he talks with Sally. My father’s so in love he drives all the way from Brooklyn to Rahway to see this woman a couple times a week even though he has to be back in Brooklyn to open his chicken market before dawn. He proposes to her and brings her home to meet his deeply observant parents, my grandfather at the dinner table in his yarmulke, my grandmother saying the Sabbath prayers. Later, they tell him if he marries this Shiksa, they’ll disown him. They’ll sell the building where he rents his market space. And he caves. Let’s the love of his life go.” I was nearly breathless by then, and Beverly reached out to take both of my hands in hers. “And a year later he marries a woman who disdains him and his family and his work, a woman impossible for him to love.”

  We sat there listening to the dog in the distance. A plume of exhaust rose from the tractor at the far edge of the field and a few seconds later we heard the belch of its engine.

  “But that story,” Beverly said gently. “It’s fiction. You made it up twenty years ago.”

  I turned to look at her. “I made it up?”

  “When you were writing The Open Door.”

  When she said that, the memory flooded back. Shortly after I moved to the woods and we married, I’d begun working on a memoir about living with brain damage. Part of it, seeking to establish continuity with the person I’d been before getting sick, explored what I recalled or could research about my childhood. But I felt stymied by a few central questions: How did my parents meet and why did these two people, who hated each other so violently that their mutual rage turned on their two sons, marry? And stay married? At the time I was doing this, my mother was suffering from dementia and my father’s siblings were either very aged or dead. There was no one to answer my questions and nothing I was able to discover beyond my aunt Evelyn’s comment: “He married your mother on the rebound.” I felt stuck in the memoir, where I wouldn’t allow myself to include anything that wasn’t verifiable and true but where I needed to understand the forces at work. So I decided to set aside my memoir
and write a novel that addressed my questions. I needed to make up a story that felt true to what I knew about my parents. Like an actor imagining a backstory for his character that informs what he shows on stage, but is never revealed, my fiction would permit me to return to my memoir without including the story of their courtship. I would know what I needed to know in order to continue.

  Apparently, over the subsequent two decades, I’d internalized the fictional story. I’d given readings that included the lost-love part of my novel, been interviewed about it, and memory had consolidated the narrative as true. I believed that my father, after failing to stand up for his love, had married my mother in the wake of losing Sally O’Day. It was an act of self-punishment similar to the one Thomas Hardy had performed, and having read so much by and about Hardy over the years, I must have unconsciously had his sad story in mind when I wrote The Open Door.

  We snuggled together on the blanket and were tired enough to fall asleep right away. We couldn’t have moved if we’d wanted to.

  Thomas Hardy walked along a narrow curvy road I hadn’t noticed bisecting the leaze. He wore a gray crown-shaped straw hat glinting with sunlight, and his jacket, pants, and shoes were all gray. A woman walked beside him, draped in reddish brown. Though stocky, she seemed insubstantial, not as fully materialized as the garments she wore. The couple came toward us but overhanging trees screened their view.

  Then I heard an engine shift gears. A large vehicle, perhaps a tractor or combine harvester, was approaching but couldn’t be seen because of a deep dip in the road. Hardy and his companion were oblivious. I tried to signal him about the danger ahead, but was immobilized where I lay.