The Phantom of Thomas Hardy
Page 19
“This is good,” I said. I opened my eyes and studied the items on the cloth. “I can feel things beginning to fall into place.”
“When we decided to go to Dorset, what did you think would happen?”
“That I’d pay my respects and be done with Thomas Hardy.”
“Didn’t happen that way, did it?”
I shook my head. “Clearly, I’m not done with Thomas Hardy. Or, fortunately, with Robert Russell.” I thought about the chaos on my writing desk. “Not even close.”
From outside, we could hear the piercing screech of killdeer from a field just to our south. At this hour, they must be spooked by someone’s off-leash dog. I recognized their trill of terror that meant they were trying to lead intruders from their nesting ground, even though nesting season had passed.
“Do you hear that?” Beverly asked.
“Killdeer.”
“Listen when the killdeer are quiet.”
That’s when I began to hear another, softer sound. A vaguely familiar piping.
“What is that?”
“A flock of juvenile white-crowned sparrows. They’re practicing, trying to master their songs.”
On a bookshelf beside my desk I keep collections of poetry I can’t do without. These books are so essential to me that I have to be able to see and reach them when I sit here. They’re talismans as well as books that I take down and refer to urgently. Of course Thomas Hardy is there, taking up one and three-quarters inches of precious space. Robert Frost is there, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Kinsella, Elizabeth Bishop. But the only other book comparable in size to the Hardy is Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems. That’s why, when I reached for the Hardy without focusing my attention on the shelf, I ended up pulling the Lowell down instead. It was late on a March afternoon, we’d been home from England for nine months, and I could feel throughout my body that the time had come to write this book. Enough work had been read, enough notes taken, alternative titles for my book sorted out. My brain, so easily overwhelmed when there were competing stimuli, or when it was asked to establish structure, organize, think abstractly, felt close to crashing.
I plopped the Lowell book on my desk. It fell open to page 838, where the spine has long been cracked. The poem facing me was titled “Epilogue,” and as I read it I felt certain that Thomas Hardy had intervened once again, ducked aside to make sure I picked up Lowell this time. Smack in the middle of “Epilogue” I came to the line I needed in order to begin: “Why not say what happened?”
Well: Beverly and I walked up South Street in Dorchester, following a tourist map past Trespass Outdoor Clothing, Carphone Warehouse, Top Drawer Cards & Gifts, a shuttered O2 Store.
Acknowledgments
My wife, Beverly Hallberg, lived this book with me. She supported and encouraged me through all four drafts, and has long shown me that to love is to speak the heart.
My daughter, Rebecca Skloot, has enriched my life and spirit from the instant I held her in my arms in the first moments after her birth. Now my colleague and friend too, a guiding spirit and example, she knew what this book needed to be before I did.
My friends Herman Asarnow, Christine Sneed, Ron Slate, and Emma Sweeney read drafts and offered valuable comments.
I found the following biographies most helpful while working on this novel: Claire Tomalin’s Thomas Hardy (2007), Ralph Pite’s Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life (2006), Michael Millgate’s Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited (2004), Martin Seymour-Smith’s Hardy (1994), Robert Gittings’s Young Thomas Hardy (1975) and Thomas Hardy’s Later Years (1978), Timothy O’Sullivan’s Thomas Hardy: An Illustrated Biography (1975), and The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840–1891 and The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892–1928, written by Thomas Hardy but published under Florence Hardy’s name. Emma Hardy’s Recollections (1961), along with Lois Deacon and Terry Coleman’s Providence and Mr. Hardy (1962), were essential background documents to the Hardy story, and Tony Fincham’s Hardy’s Landscape Revisited (2010) and J. B. Bullen’s Thomas Hardy: The World of His Novels (2013) helped shape my appreciation of the Dorset setting.