The Phantom of Thomas Hardy

by Floyd Skloot

The vehicle rose into view. I saw now it was the kind of enormous rig the British call an articulated lorry. Inside the cab sat a figure who initially reminded me of my father. I don’t know why, because he looked nothing like my father—wasn’t round-faced and jut-jawed and bald, didn’t have a cigar jammed between his lips, wasn’t wearing eyeglasses.

  Then he waved, lifting both hands from the steering wheel in a flying gesture I recognized at once. I saw his hair flaring wildly, his shoulders covered in ash. The driver was Robert Russell, ancient-looking and no longer blind. Alive. I turned away and saw that Hardy and the woman were stilled, freeze-framed. They were perfectly balanced in midstride, smiling, but going nowhere. I looked back and saw the lorry also motionless, neither advancing up the incline nor sliding back down, its nose pointed heavenward. Russell beckoned. Though Beverly and I remained where we were, we also were beside him. He leaned out of the window and smiled. On the side of the lorry was a sign bearing the cover image of Russell’s book To Catch an Angel.

  “It’s good to be back in England,” he said. “I didn’t see much of it the last time I was here.”

  “When you and Elizabeth met,” I said.

  “We were happy together for the next fifty-five years.” Russell smiled at us. “Speaking of which: You found out, didn’t you?”

  “I always knew you and Elizabeth were happy together.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” He looked at me and then at Beverly. “The last time we spoke, you asked what I thought Hardy would have made of your happiness together with Beverly. Remember what I said?”

  Of course! He said that Hardy would tell me eventually.

  Russell, leaning back in the driver’s seat that had transformed into his old office chair, followed my thoughts.

  “And he did tell you, didn’t he?”

  “The ponies,” Beverly whispered, waking me from my dream. “I just dreamt about the ponies.”

  “I think I did too.”

  I pulled her even closer to me. I could feel her breath in my ear as she said, “I realized something the moment I woke up: When the ponies came to us at the pond, it was a Visitation, wasn’t it? A real visitation.”

  When I was first engaged with Hardy’s novels in 1968, Russell didn’t want me to read biographical or critical work. A committed advocate of New Criticism, he’d taught me the merit of engaging directly and exclusively with the text, and trained me in close reading. But I cheated a little. I found a used one-volume edition of the self-ghostwritten biography, The Life of Thomas Hardy. Reading around in it, I encountered a scene I’ve never forgotten in which Hardy describes himself as frenzied by creative inspiration. He says he composes sometimes indoors, sometimes out, and on occasion finds himself without a scrap of paper at the very moment that he feels volumes. So he would write on large dead leaves, white chips left by the wood-cutters, or pieces of stone or slate that came to hand.

  It was the fall of 1873 and Hardy was thirty-three. Since Tryphena had moved to London, and Hardy had become engaged to Emma despite her parents’ humiliating rejection of him, he’d written three novels in three years. Now he was writing his fourth, Far from the Madding Crowd, at home in Bockhampton, and getting paid well for its serial publication. The book would even appear in America. Hardy finally knew exactly what he was doing as a fiction writer. He’d listened well to critics of his first books and to friends, had developed his Dorset literary landscape and characters, found his subject in love’s geometry. Working in seclusion from his fiancée in Cornwall and from his London connections, it had all come together for him.

  This elated, fevered writer in the grip of inspiration, this scrawler on dead leaves and wood chips and stone was not the coolly withdrawn, calculating, self-controlled maker of carefully crafted fiction and poetry that the conventional Hardy image had established. I think that reading about Hardy like this, at that time in my life, was when I began to see and love him, when the screen of the books parted and the unguarded man looked out at me with wild ecstatic eyes. Hardy scribbling on a stone is the Hardy I carry in my heart. And he’s the essential Hardy, I feel, very much like the Hardy in love with Tryphena rather than the Hardy withdrawn from Emma or prosy and formal with Florence.

  This may be why Far from the Madding Crowd is his novel that captivates me the most. It doesn’t move me like Two on a Tower does, or impress me with its gravity like The Mayor of Casterbridge, or horrify me like Jude the Obscure. But it enthralls me. It’s funny, romantic, tragic, full of credible life and dramatic scenes. The flawed characters and their great passions hold my unwavering attention. I look for passages that feel as though they’d been written on leaves in Hardy’s sudden delirium. “The sky was clear—remarkably clear—and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse.” As I read the novel, I remain aware that Far from the Madding Crowd was the book that changed Hardy’s life. For one thing, its financial success enabled Hardy finally to marry Emma, or rather removed his last honorable excuse for delay. It brought him into the mainstream of literary life, particularly London literary life, and provided an opportunity to meet fascinating men and women unlike those he’d known in Dorset or Cornwall or even in his previous times in London. Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf ’s father, became Hardy’s magazine publisher, advisor, and confidante. Edmund Gosse, the poet, critic, and author of the classic autobiography Father and Son, became a close lifelong friend.

  The success of Far from the Madding Crowd also introduced Hardy to Helen Paterson, who would illustrate the published novel and, during a few crucial months shortly before his marriage, steal Hardy’s heart. Helen was young, twenty-five, charming and attractive, an artist, and she was receptive to Hardy’s interest in providing her with sketches of Dorset or of farm implements and structures to assist in her work. They dined together, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone, and he kept coming up with suggestions for further meetings. She should see how a piper stood when he played at a sheep-shearing supper, or how the authentic supper table was laid and what a smock frock or sheepcrook looked like. What kind of birds would fly by. The howling dog, the snowball, gaiters, Sergeant Troy’s sword. When Helen married the poet William Allingham in the summer, Hardy was bereft. Though he was set to marry Emma the next month, he thought with regret—well into old age—that Helen was the woman he should have married “but for a stupid blunder of God Almighty and the bitter workings of the tide of chance.”

  In this frame of mind, and after a four-year engagement, Thomas Hardy and Emma Gifford were wed. If Hardy ever wrote or spoke about the wedding itself, nothing of it survived. Emma recalled that the day they were married was “a perfect September day—the 17th, 1874—not brilliant sunshine, but wearing a soft, sunny luminousness; just as it should be.”

  I read that brief description and mourn for them both. The moment seems full of decline: summer about to become fall, the brilliant sunshine and bright hopes of a time more full of light and dreams have peaked. And this duller light seems just as it should be.

  So, any Hardy sightings today?” Anthony and Nan were in the dining room when we arrived, just as they’d been yesterday.

  “Oh please, Anthony,” Nan said. She stood and turned toward us, raising her eyebrows in apology. “Tea for you both this afternoon? I picked up some gluten-free soy milk this morning.”

  “That sounds perfect,” Beverly told her.

  We sat across from Anthony and before I could stop myself I said, “More than a sighting.” Then I described what had happened in the Nut Walk at Max Gate. When I was done, I felt equally relieved and embarrassed. Well, we’d make a good story at the next meeting of the Dorset B&B Association, if there was such a thing.

  “Would you tell me again what Hardy said?” Anthony’s expression seemed like a mix of confusion and concern.

  “Nothing is as you wish it.”

  “I see.”

  Nan returned with our tea. As she served us, Anthony kept adjusting the positi
on of his cup and saucer, folding and refolding his napkin, frowning.

  “Does Hardy’s statement mean anything to you?” I asked him.

  “Let me ask if you’ve read The Mayor of Casterbridge.”

  “Three times. Though not for a while. Plus we saw a made-for-TV version eight or nine years ago. Ciarán Hinds played the Mayor.”

  “Yes. Of course. And if I remember correctly, you felt Hardy first touch and talk to you outside the Mayor’s house?”

  “Right. Yesterday morning, roughly the same hour as when he showed up today.”

  “I don’t know quite what to make of this, you see. But ‘nothing is as you wish it’ is a direct quote from The Mayor of Casterbridge. My son has that very sentence hanging on a bulletin board in his office. Along with other cheerful and self-encouraging messages.”

  “That’s . . . I . . . You’re sure?”

  “It’s quite a memorable scene in the novel. Susan Henchard is dying and reveals a few secrets to her daughter while concealing others. Very Hardy, that. Conceal under the guise of a massive reveal. Susan’s scheme to find Elizabeth-Jane a good husband has failed. She wishes she could be around to see things work out, but she’s learned that in life nothing is as you wish it.”

  Nan got up and walked to the bookcase against the dining room’s far wall. She brought back a copy of The Mayor of Casterbridge and handed it to Anthony. As he leafed through the pages, he said, “In the end, ironically enough, Elizabeth-Jane does marry well. The very man her mother schemed for. She also finds out the truth of her parentage, which ends in reconciliation with her real father.”

  “So everything was as wished for,” Beverly said.

  “Much of it was, yes. For some of the ladies in the story, anyway. The Mayor himself, no. Dies in proper Hardy manner: broken, alone, dishonored by his own basest instincts.”

  “I don’t know what to think,” I said.

  “Here it is,” Anthony muttered, handing over the book. “Underlined in #2 pencil, no doubt by my son. Page 111.”

  I didn’t need to read it. In fact, I could hardly focus on the words before me, which I would never forget. But which, apparently, I had already not forgotten even though I hadn’t remembered them. But won’t forget again:

  “I wish it could have been in my time! But there—nothing is as you wish it.”

  All of us have experienced moments when memory is inaccessible. When the effort to remember isn’t enough to produce the memory being sought. You enter a room and can’t recall what you’re there for. You can’t find the car keys in the green ceramic dish by the front door where you always leave them, so you search and search the house, then in frustration thrust your hands in your pockets and there are the keys. A friend’s name, the country where they had that tsunami, the stadium where the Dodgers played, your daughter’s new phone number. It’s on the tip of your tongue, you think, all you need is a moment and it’ll come to you. That adjective you know isn’t “affordable” but sounds like “affordable” and means how delightful and lovable and charming your wife looks: You look so affordable, dear, when you mean to say she looks, um, looks, looks: Adorable! Wide receivers forget routes they’ve practiced over and over; actors forget lines they know cold.

  We all have also experienced the moment when a remark someone makes, or an image seen, a scent, a sound triggers memory. Your brother sings a phrase from “Party Doll,” Buddy Knox’s big hit song that topped the charts for a week in March 1957, when you were almost ten, and suddenly it’s all there right before your eyes: the room you shared with him, the beds side-by-side with a single-drawer walnut table between them, your posters of the planets and the dinosaurs and the flags of the nations, your red toy chest and his puny scarred desk next to the window that opened onto a view of sooty brick. All of that was lost in memory, was stranded in some isolated cranny of cellular material waiting to be sparked.

  It’s rarer to find yourself quoting lines without recognizing them as such, without knowing you were remembering them. Without an inkling, even after you hear them. My mind knew the lines from this novel I’d read three times, and knew they were associated with Thomas Hardy. But I didn’t. And realizing that this is what must have happened made me feel a kind of alienation from myself, a lack of integration with my own mind that I’ve felt often in the years since the viral attack on my brain. It’s much less common now, after two dozen years, because I’m more adept at being brain damaged. I’ve learned to manage my symptoms, and to live with them when they can’t be managed, and not be stymied. I’ve learned how to embed important memories, or at least to give them the best chance of being retained. To accommodate the essentially fragmented way my memory now works. But every once in a while, something like this happens, or like my false memory of my father’s romance, and I’m reminded of how deceptive the command of memory can be. Reminded of the peculiarities of my neurological workings and their phenomena, their electrical disturbances.

  I’m frequently in the process of discovering what I already know. Of suddenly remembering what I’ve lost but have not forgotten and could not—cannot—have retrieved by will. Like all of us, even those who don’t know it’s true, my life is an ongoing mystery to me. Oh, maybe more of a mystery because the clues are so easily missed or lost. But that’s only a matter of degree, isn’t it? Sometimes the most fruitful way for me to discover what’s hidden in my life is to look away, look at other people’s lives without intending to explore my own. To make room for discovery. And, it would seem, for Visitations.

  “There’s a little more to tell you,” I said, and explained about the ponies at Rushy Pond.

  “Our heath-croppers,” Nan said. “Lovely animals. Four of them there, I believe. Dartmoor ponies, they are. Reintroduced last year, keep the scrub from growing back after the rangers removed it all.”

  “But you saw more in them than that,” Anthony whispered, “as I believe you’re saying. As I saw Sir Francis Drake and company in the waves of the South Atlantic.”

  “I thought of your experience as we were walking back through the woods,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Something else just occurred to me,” Anthony said. “Both of Hardy’s statements to you sound quite alike, don’t they? ‘Something I missed’ and ‘Nothing is as you wish it.’ That miss and wish, or rather missed and wish it.”

  “They sound like the wind,” Nan said, looking down into her cup. “The hissing sound that makes us use words like ‘whish’ or ‘swish’ or ‘whisper’ to describe it.”

  I thought about the two times Hardy had spoken to me. Both were accompanied by a surge of wind. On South Street before the Mayor’s house in Dorchester I had thought at first the voice was actually the wind in my ear. At Max Gate, an odd breeze at the mouth of the Nut Walk was strong enough to make my eyes water and it intensified just as Hardy spoke. Had that been all it was? A trick of the mind, an electrical firing among damaged neurons that was brought on by shifting, whishing, whispering wind?

  All that was clear to me was that I needed a break, some serious free time before the play tonight. Both of us did. Since we’d already had our long walk for the day and had napped, we decided to spend an hour relaxing in our room.

  Beverly ran a bath and I sat in the easy chair by our bed catching up on e-mail and news from the Internet. Bill Clinton had appeared on a New York stage with President Obama yesterday, raising campaign money and showing solidarity. The last transit of Venus in the twenty-first century would occur tonight, Scotland beat Australia in rugby, Kenny G. turned fifty-six. A Thanksgiving service was held at St. Paul’s Cathedral for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee followed by lunch in Westminster Hall and a formal carriage procession to Buckingham Palace. Our house sitter texted us a photo of our cat Max lying on his back in a streak of sunlight and told us he was looking forward to seeing us soon.

  I closed the laptop and gazed out the window. Tired but not drowsy, trying to clear my mind, I listened to the occasional lapping of bathwater that
told me Beverly had lain back and was getting comfortable. Within that sound I became aware of another sound, a soft scratching like tree branches just barely in contact with a window.

  No, it was like the sound of a pen moving across paper. Moving quickly, then more steadily, then not at all. Now quickly again. There was faint murmuring too, a voice that wasn’t Beverly’s. I was in the bedroom at the B&B, but I was also not. I was in Max Gate. In Hardy’s final study, the one he used during the last thirty years of his working life. I recognized the layout, the fireplace with its familiar tiles and array of pictures above the mantel, small rectangular rug, wicker trash basket, packed bookshelves, and the table in the middle of the room piled with still more books. A fiddle leaned against the corner of one bookcase and a cello was balanced against a wall.

  And Thomas Hardy sat writing at the large desk by the window. The glow from his lamp sharpened the scene. Though it was late afternoon and warm, he wore a dress shirt with a high stand collar and black cravat, a dark coat and vest.

  Papers sprawled across the desk’s surface, some facing sideways, some upside down, many dense with crossed-out passages and marginal additions. Some were yellowed, some curled like leaves and showing script on both sides of the page. None of the pages looked as though they’d been typed. Hardy normally was a contained writer, his manuscripts—even their cross-outs—tidy as an architect’s drawing. I knew that he preferred to write amid neatness and order, in space as well dressed as he was, always controlled, steady. Something else was happening here.

  I was directly behind Hardy as he scrawled. This was the first time I’d ever had a Visitation in which I did the Visiting. In which I left my home setting. How long would it last? I tried to steady my breathing, slow my racing heartbeat. I didn’t know if Hardy knew I was there, but I didn’t believe so and didn’t want to interrupt him. I felt the need to go slow, to notice everything I could. To remember. Because, I understood, this would be my last Visitation with Hardy. This was it, this was my chance to find out what I needed to know.