Thomas Hardy
Page 41
Church-timbers crack, and witches ride abroad.
There is the poem about Moule’s burial place, ‘Before My Friend Arrived’. 3 There are again many Emma poems, including the ultra-romantic ‘She Opened the Door’, dated 1913. ‘Days to Recollect’ has the memorable image of the ‘Winged thistle-seeds’ rising in the air as her petticoat brushes them, the second image being the day of her death, when she ‘lay by the window whence you had gazed / So many times when blamed or praised, / Morning or noon, through years and years’. ‘Midnight on Beechen’ goes back to their Bath holiday before they were married. ‘The Frozen Greenhouse’ is a memory of St Juliot, and ‘Once at Swan-age’ is self-explanatory: ‘And there we two stood, hands clasped; / I and she!’ It is not all romance: he includes ‘A Second Attempt’, about his failure to revive his love for her in 1900. 4 As you read, you see that his memories of her are his own story too, which he continually unfolds and turns about like a much consulted map, alighting on familiar and half-forgotten spots which suddenly become vivid to him.
In December 1924, during the time when Tess was playing and Florence suffering, Hardy wrote to Canon Cowley, rector of Stinsford, formally establishing his allegiance to his local church and his wish to be buried in its churchyard: ‘Regard me as a Parishioner certainly. I hope to be still more one when I am in a supine position some day.’ 5 On Boxing Day there was a letter to Benson in Cambridge: ‘We have been as cheerful as may be this Christmas.’ 6 Sixmonths later Benson died, and it happened by chance that Hardy’s connection with Cambridge University was celebrated the next day, 18 June, when a group of undergraduates came to Max Gate to sing in his honour a programme of Purcell, Arne, Gibbons, Mozart and Haydn. Cockerell had organized and come with them for the occasion, and Lawrence came over to hear them. 7 Soon after this the University of Bristol sent a deputation to award him an honorary doctorate; it was his fifth. Oxford undergraduates, the Balliol Players, came several times to entertain him with Greek plays on the lawn, in 1924, 1926 and 1927. Hardy was always interested to hear what plans the young men had for their lives, how they hoped to succeed in the future and what new paths they might follow. His own notebook and other people’s letters and memories reveal a steady stream of visitors coming to Max Gate. He kept faithfully in touch with Dorothy Allhusen, whom he had known since she was a small child and he became ‘Uncle Tom’ when he visited her mother Mary Jeune in Harley Street. When Dorothy was widowed, and two of her children died, she turned to him for comfort, and he gave it.
In the autumn of 1925 two letters came from children of his cousin Emma Sparks, whom he had visited in Somerset in 1861, before she emigrated to Australia in the 1870s. The first was from a daughter in Brisbane, ‘M. M. Allen’, who had read about the visit of the Prince of Wales and described herself as one of a family of teachers. Then her elder brother, James Sparks Cary, living in New South Wales, wrote, ‘Dear Cousin, My beloved Mother was Emma Sparks of Piddletown I think they changed it to Puddle… My grandmother’s name was Maria Hand before marriage and grandfather’s name James Sparks. Mother’s sisters were named Rebecca, Martha and Tryfina and brothers James and Nathaniel. She often spoke of you as Tom, and that you were in London, and also of her Aunt Hardy.’ He said he had been born and bred in the village of Faulkland in Somerset and just remembered being taken to Bockhampton as a five-year-old, and meeting Harry and Kate but not Tom, who was away. After this the family set off for Queensland to join Aunt Martha Duffield. ‘She is dead and gone now poor soul. She said she knew you well. Her husband was a real nice man… but he’s gone now.’ He explained in a PS that he was sixty-four, childless and ‘I only had a village education.’ 8 Whatever memories of the past these letters stirred in Hardy, there is no sign that he reacted or replied to them, and perhaps he had left that part of the past too far behind to be able to revisit it.
He was in any case withdrawing from the world. He knew it had changed and must change more, but he was too old to be involved or stirred by the changes. He turned his back on politics, public events and foreign affairs, almost as though the war had burnt out any further interest in them. To a local visitor who noticed a photograph of Lloyd George in the house, signed and with a tribute to Hardy, he said he credited Lloyd George with much of the country’s success in the Great War, adding quickly, ‘I never talk politics.’ 9 Not a word came from him when Emma’s cause triumphed in 1918 and women were given the vote. 10 We know from Florence that he voted for the Conservatives in the local elections of 1922 because there was no Liberal candidate and he would not support Labour. (She took her own stance, and when she was made a JP she amazed the chairman of the Dorchester magistrates by declaring herself ‘Labour’. 11) Hardy had nothing at all to say about the general elections, the fall of Lloyd George, the formation of the first Labour government in 1924 or the next election that brought back the Conservatives, which figures in his letters only as a possible problem in the setting up of the Dorchester Players’ production of Tess. The economic collapse of Germany in 1923 goes without comment, and the rise of Mussolini in Italy, and the formation of the USSR. In 1926 he refused to let Sassoon have a manuscript poem to auction to help the miners in their six-month strike, Florence explaining that ‘he will not do anything to give the impression that he approves of the strike. He thinks the miners are misled.’ 12
In July 1926 the daughter of his old editor Leslie Stephen invited herself to tea with her husband, Leonard Woolf. They came from London by train, taking the train back again after tea, and Virginia wrote a long account of the afternoon in her diary. After some preliminary talk with Florence about her dog, ‘who is evidently the real centre of her thoughts’, Hardy came in, ‘dressed in rough grey with a striped tie’, and sat on a three-cornered chair. ‘He was extremely affable and aware of his duties. He did not let the talk stop or disdain making talk. He talked of father – said he had seen me, or it might have been my sister but he thought was me, in my cradle.’ She tried to get him to talk about his novels, but he would not. He told her a friend had begged him not to give up poetry, and he had replied, ‘I’m afraid poetry is giving up me.’ She went on, ‘The truth is he is a very kind man, and sees anyone who wants to see him. He has 16 people for the day sometimes… Do you think one can’t write poetry if one sees people? I asked. “One might be able to – I dont see why not. Its a question of physical strength” said Hardy. But clearly he preferred solitude himself. Always however he said something sensible and sincere.’
‘I forgot to say that he offered L. whisky and water, wh. struck me that he was competent as a host, and in every way. / So we got up and signed Mrs H’s visitors books; and Hardy took my L[ife’s] Little Ironies off, and trotted back with it signed, and Woolf spelt Wolff, wh. I daresay had given him some anxiety.’ This made it clear that Hardy had read nothing of hers although she had published several novels, most recently Mrs Dalloway; and also that she was not vain enough to mind. ‘But he no longer reads novels. / The whole thing – literature, novels &c – all seemed to him an amusement, far away, too, scarcely to be taken seriously. Yet he had sympathy and pity for those still engaged in it.’
‘What impressed me was his freedom, ease and vitality. He seemed very “Great Victorian” doing the whole thing with a sweep of his hand (they are ordinary smallish, curled up hands) and setting no great stock by literature but immensely interested in facts; incidents; and somehow, one could imagine, naturally swept off into imagining and creating without a thought of its being difficult or remarkable; becoming obsessed; and living in imagination.’ 13
The Woolfs departed, Leonard taking with him an admiration for Hardy about which he wrote eighteen months later. He saw him as a novelist at the end of a great line stretching back to Fielding, ‘in the full English tradition, solid works built about a story, in which, on the face of it, character, humour, description of scenery, criticism of life, philosophy, all have their place, but to which they are accessory’: a tradition now ended, so that the novels wer
e undervalued. He conceded that Hardy did not ‘write well’ and that only when you finished one and looked back on it as a whole did you see that it was ‘a great novel and a great work of art’. He went on to say something of the man:
This impression of simplicity and of something which is almost the opposite of simplicity was the strongest impression which I got from Hardy personally. At first sight, and when he began to talk to you, you might have thought that he was merely one of many men born in English villages. But he is one of the few people who have left upon me the personal impression of greatness. I saw him last spring [in fact July] in the house which he had built for himself at Dorchester, and which, with its sombre growth of trees, seemed to have been created by him as if it were one of his poems translated into brick, furniture and vegetation. He talked about his poems, and London as he had known it in his youth, and about his dog ‘Wessex’, all with great charm and extraordinary simplicity. He was a human being, not ‘the great man’. 14
That autumn Hardy made what turned out to be his last visit to his birthplace, now standing empty, and looked at the trees and the fencing, anxious to have the garden tidy and the house better secluded. 15 Florence thought he was disappointed not to get the Nobel Prize when it went to Shaw in November: ‘Between ourselves the award of the Nobel prize to GBS was rather a blow to him I thought. He had not counted on it exactly, but had always had the feeling that he had been passed over for some unjust reason.’ 16 In the same month Lawrence was posted to India and came to say his farewell. It was a raw afternoon. Hardy came out to see him off on his motor-bike and hurried back into the house for a shawl against the cold, and while he was gone Lawrence quickly rode off to spare him the chill. This upset Hardy – missing the last word with his friend – and both men knew they were unlikely to meet again. Hardy refused an invitation to a dinner in London with the explanation, ‘I am getting more and more like a vegetable that will not bear transplanting.’ 17
Two days after Christmas, Wessex had to be put to sleep, for which purpose a doctor was called in rather than a vet. There was much sorrow over this. Florence confided in Cockerell, telling him how ‘ thousands (actually thousands) of afternoons and evenings I would have been alone but for him, and had always him to speak to.’ 18 Hardy told the Granville-Barkers, ‘Our devoted (and masterful) dog Wessex died on the 27th, and last night had his bed outside the house under the trees for the first time for 13 years.’ 19 Death, as he saw it, was moving your bed from inside the house to outside. Bertie Stephens the gardener, who had mixed feelings about Wessex, buried him, and a gravestone was put up, inscribed ‘Faithful, Unflinching’. 20 Florence bought a cat to cheer Hardy, but it was not the same.
The new year brought him a £5,000 royalty cheque from Macmillan. Cockerell gallantly came down for Florence’s birthday in January. Hardy kept working. In June he told Cockerell he had got up in the night to see an eclipse. Gosse visited him in the same month and wondered at his being ‘without a deficiency of sight, hearing, mind or conversation. Very tiny and fragile, but full of spirit and a gaiety.’ 21 When Florence, thinking him gloomy on his eighty-seventh birthday, tried to cheer him by talking about the various festivities she planned for his ninetieth, ‘with a flash of gaiety he replied that he intended to spend that day in bed.’ 22 In August his fellow poet John Squire brought over a friendly singer, John Goss, for an afternoon of folk songs. The three of them gathered round Emma’s old piano. Hardy joined in the refrains and beat time in the air with his hand, now laughing with pleasure and now with tears in his eyes as certain favourites came up; and he rooted out old music books with the Victorian ballads he associated with his mother and Emma. Squire marvelled at ‘the unexhausted old man’ and his fresh responses, and we are reminded of how as a child he danced ecstatically to his father’s playing, and some tunes brought tears to his eyes. 23
There was a trip to Bath and a drive to Puddletown with Gustav Holst, who came seeking permission to dedicate his tone poem Egdon Heath to Hardy. 24 But the small notebook in which he jotted down such visits and trips had its last entry on 19 September. Among a list of things to be done at the other end of the notebook was ‘Get Mr Lamb, or other, to make sketch from photo of Emma, to match Strang’s of F. (for N.P.G.)’ – Lamb being the artist Henry Lamb and the NPG the National Portrait Gallery. 25 He wanted his portrait to hang between his wives just as he personally wanted to lie between them in Stinsford churchyard.
At the beginning of November he and Florence visited the Stinsford graves and went to Talbothays together. It was the last such trip. The end of the month was the time to wear a black hat and carry a black walking stick that had belonged to Emma when he went out of doors, to mark his mourning at the fifteenth anniversary of her death and the twelfth of Mary’s. He planned to publish Winter Words on his eighty-eighth birthday, in June 1928, and he was working on it in his study until 10 December 1927. There are some quirky, vivid poems scattered through its pages. ‘The Lodging-House Fuchsias’ describes the landlady who lets her fuchsias grow and spread gloriously over the front path until they have to be cut back to let her coffin pass. ‘A Countenance’ is about an attractive woman whose laugh was ‘not in the middle of her mouth quite’. ‘Proud Songsters’ is about the life-cycle of the garden birds, and how they sing ‘As if all Time were theirs’. ‘So Various’ describes a man made up of contradictions, highly strung but also stiff and cold; a faithful lover but fickle too; pleased with his own cleverness but easily put down; always sad but cheerful company; cool to friends yet eager to please – all of course versions of himself. In ‘Lying Awake’ he visualizes the world outside from his bed:
You, Meadow, are white with your counterpane cover of dew,
I see it as if I were there;
You, Churchyard, are lightening faint from the shade of the yew,
The names creeping out everywhere.
On 11 December, Hardy went to his study as usual, sat at his writing table and found he could not work. He said it was the first time that such a thing had happened to him, and took to his bed. Florence called Dr Mann, a new local man, who diagnosed a weakness of the heart: this she told Gosse in a letter on the 15th. Hardy was still coming downstairs for a few hours each day, and he asked her to send off a poem he had prepared to The Times. He had begun it in 1905 and finished it in 1926, he said, and in it he imagined the figures of the gods as they appear in the Elgin Marbles, grumbling at being kept in a sunless room by the Christians who had ended their reign. It was called ‘Christmas in the Elgin Room’, and he was pleased when it appeared on Christmas Eve.
On Christmas Day he pencilled a line to Gosse, joking about his relief at not having to eat the traditional pudding. On the same day Florence wrote to Cockerell saying he had been in bed for three weeks – in fact, it was two – and now lacked the strength even to pencil a line, that he could not follow her reading aloud and did not want to talk to anyone. ‘I asked the doctor what really was the matter, and he said “Old age”.’ 26 This was the last day he came downstairs. Sir Henry Head, an eminent medical man who lived near by, kept an eye on things with Dr Mann.
Now Hardy lay in bed, without visitors but talking to Florence and still thinking clearly and deciding what he wanted her to read to him. On Boxing Day he asked for the Gospel account of the birth of Christ and the massacre of the innocents, and also the entries in the Encyclopaedia Biblica, remarking when she had finished that there was not a grain of evidence that the Gospel was true. Outside there was snow on the ground. He was growing weaker, although on 30 December he enjoyed pheasant and champagne for lunch. But when Florence opened the window of the dressing room towards midnight on the last night of the year to let him hear the bells, he took no notice. Her sister Eva arrived to help. On 4 January he was better, and another doctor called in from Bournemouth said his arteries were like those of a man of sixty. On the 6th the digitalis for his heart was stopped, and he ate and slept better, but on the 8th he had fluid in his lungs, and the next mor
ning Florence summoned Cockerell by telegram. She warned him that Hardy must not know of his presence at Max Gate.
Cockerell travelled all day and arrived at tea-time.
TH had had disturbing symptoms yesterday and they thought he was soon to die, but today they have abated and Dr Mann, whom I saw after his evening visit, declared that he had good hope of his recovery. My chief fear is that Florence will break down as she is too unselfish to conserve her strength – although I went to the King’s Arms [the Dorchester hotel] as I found that I could not be helpful in the house.
At the King’s Arms Cockerell talked on the telephone at length to a man at The Times about the reporting of Hardy’s expected death and arrangements to be made. At Max Gate the next day he was told that Hardy had suffered a disturbed night but was a little better in the morning, and had even written a cheque for his subscription to the Society of Authors. It was the last he wrote. Barrie made a flying visit in the afternoon and urged Cockerell to stay on in Dorset as the two men walked together to the station. Some years later Barrie told Florence that during the walk to the station Cockerell urged him to agree to the idea that Hardy should be buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey rather than at Stinsford, as he requested in his will. 27
Neither Cockerell nor Barrie was allowed to see Hardy. That evening Hardy asked Florence to read him ‘Rabbi ben Ezra’, Browning’s poem in which he gives a voice to the twelfth-century scholar poet: ‘Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be, / The last of life, for which the first was made.’ He listened intently to the whole of it and had a better night. In the morning of 11 January, Cockerell arrived to find a much more cheerful atmosphere in the house and a belief that Hardy was doing better. He was weak, but he had eaten his breakfast with pleasure. 28