Thomas Hardy (35 page)

Florence and Katharine were in attendance, but not so Henry, who was in poor health. In fact, Henry was at Stinsford church where, at the same time as the Westminster service, Hardy’s heart (which had been previously removed from his body) was being buried in the tomb of Emma, his first wife. (According to his cousin Teresa, Hardy in life had expressed the wish to be buried at Stinsford, ‘to lie with his own folk in the churchyard’. But it was not to be.)
¹
On the one side of Hardy and Emma’s tomb was that of his sister Mary, and on the other that of his parents, Thomas II and Jemima. Beyond that were buried his grandfather, Thomas I; his grandmother, Mary; his uncle, James, and finally, his aunt, Jane, and cousin, Theresa.

Also simultaneously with the Westminster ceremony, a memorial service to Hardy was held in Dorchester, in the presence of the mayor and corporation and many distinguished dignitaries.

Florence now set about ensuring that the memory of Hardy was preserved for posterity. In February 1928 she told Sir Edmund Gosse that: ‘With regard to the biography of my husband I have for many years been collecting material which has been put somewhat roughly into shape. T.H. allowed me to take a great many extracts from his diaries & notebooks, & supplied all the information that I required.’
²

On 5 March 1928 Florence wrote to T.E.Lawrence, thanking him for his kind letters to her and saying:

besides my loneliness which will never be less, I have to suffer remorse, almost beyond expression, because I know I failed him at every turn. Time will not help me for I know my own nature, and I shall miss him more and more. The thought of years that may have to be lived through without him fills me with terror. There was really nothing in my life except T.H. nor will there ever be.
³

Published by Macmillan in October 1928, nine months after Hardy’s death, the collection of poems entitled
Winter Words
contain yet more thinly disguised sentiments about Emma. In
To Louisa in the Lane
, Hardy declares, ‘Wait, I must, till with flung off flesh I follow you’, but in
Song to Aurore
he issues a caveat:

We’ll not begin again to love

It only leads to pain …

And in
The Destined Pair
he ponders on whether ‘Fate’ would have been ‘kinder … Had he failed to find her’ (had he never met Emma in the first place).

An outsider, who was unfamiliar with the personal circumstances of Hardy’s marriage to Emma, might miss altogether the possible relevance of another poem in his
Winter Words
collection:

Henley Regatta

She looks from the window: still it pours down direly,

And the avenue drips. She cannot go, she fears;

And the Regatta will be spoilt entirely;

And she sheds half-crazed tears.

Regatta Day and rain come on together

Again, years after. Gutters trickle loud;

But Nancy cares not. She knows nought of weather,

Or of the Henley crowd:

She’s a Regatta, quite her own. Inanely

She laughs in the asylum as she floats

Within a water-tub, which she calls ‘Henley’,

Her little paper boats.

Imagine for a moment that Hardy and Emma are in London for the season, and that they have decided to attend the Henley Royal Regatta – traditionally held at Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. It is raining, and Emma (‘Nancy’) therefore declines to go. Years later, at the time when the regatta is being held, Emma behaves childishly and makes some paper boats. By this time she has become so deluded that she believes the Henley Regatta is taking place in her bath, in which she is floating her home-made boats. In other words, she has created her own ‘asylum’.

(Some might argue that this poem applies not to Emma, but to someone else. However, circumstantial evidence makes this an unlikely proposition.)

Following the death of Hardy’s brother, Henry, on 9 December 1928, Gordon Gifford expressed the desire to attend the funeral. Said Florence: ‘
That
will not suit Katie [Hardy’s sister, Katharine], I fear, though a more harmless & well-meaning man [than Gifford] could not exist.’
⁴

On 11 July 1929 Florence wrote to Siegfried Sassoon to say: ‘I do not think I shall take a house in London, or make any change in my life. I feel that I belong to Max Gate where I can visit Stinsford & go to see my husband’s sister [Katharine] every few days.’
⁵

That September Florence paid a visit to St Juliot, ‘to the great pleasure of the solitary little clergyman who lives there’ (the Revd David Rhys Morris). However, despite the ‘atmosphere of romance’, Florence found the experience ‘all very sad’.
⁶

On 10 January 1931 Florence declared: ‘With regard to the letters written by T.H. to E.L.G. – afterwards E.L. H. [Emma] – it was
she
who burnt his letters, & he told me he much regretted that at the time, & since. She asked him for her letters to him which he had carefully preserved, & she burnt those too.’
⁷

Florence continued to live at Max Gate until her death there on 15 October 1937, after a long illness. She is buried in Stinsford churchyard in the tomb of Hardy and his first wife, Emma. In her will she directed that Max Gate and its contents be sold at auction. In the event, Hardy’s sister Katharine purchased the property (even though she continued to live at Talbothays), and when she herself died in October 1940, the property was left to the National Trust. (Hardy’s boyhood home at Higher Bockhampton also now belongs to the National Trust.)

The genius of Thomas Hardy is multi-faceted; each facet reflecting his brilliance as a diamond reflects the light. His literary and classical allusions are drawn from his immense mental ‘data-base’ of knowledge, laid down in his mind after years of sustained and devoted study. Stories collected by him on his journey through life, from personal observation, newspaper articles and conversations with others – whether amusing or macabre – were stored away, to be woven (sometimes years later) into the tapestry of his novels, and retold with all the rustic wit and wisdom of the true countryman. His prose is exquisite. His empathy with underprivileged people is universally recognised, and millions identify with the struggles of the characters in his novels.

During the lifetime of Thomas Hardy, publisher Vere H. Collins was one of the very few people to suspect, and have the fact confirmed by Hardy himself, that some of Hardy’s writings – notably his poem
The Interloper
– contained coded messages which revealed insights into his personal life. Nevertheless, neither Collins nor those who have studied the life of Hardy since his death have realised the full extent to which this is true.

The challenge has been to discover the hidden meanings contained in the works of this shy and secretive man. One may imagine him sitting in his study at Max Gate after the great schism when he decided to live a separate life from Emma, albeit under the same roof. By now, all his romantic dreams have been irrevocably shattered, and he is experiencing all the symptoms of a bereaved person: denial, numbness and unreality, followed by extreme sadness, anxiety and loneliness.
¹

However, because of his shyness he tends to keep his thoughts to himself, rather than to confide in others. But he must have some outlet for his emotions, so he chooses to express himself in the best way that he knows – on paper, where he simply cannot resist alluding to his increasingly problematical relationship with Emma. This is a catharsis for him. And not only that, it provides him with a motivation to portray scenes in which his characters experience and wrestle with the same problems as he does.

Hardy’s writings reveal the immense torment and grief which attends one whose life is a living hell, on account of the fact that his spouse is mentally deranged. And this, of course, explains why his latter novels and poems are so sad and introspective, while his early writings are full of joy, humour and romance.

In his writings, Hardy reveals how Emma’s delusions manifested themselves. They also reveal how he himself was largely in denial about Emma (although he did go so far as to admit that she suffered from delusions); he preferred stubbornly to cling to the original image which he had formed in his mind of her, instead of recognising the reality of the situation. Hardy’s works show that he wrestled with his problems in vain, and failed to find an answer as to why Emma, this beautiful woman whom he once adored, failed to reciprocate his feelings, and, in particular, why she refused to consummate the sexual side of their relationship (even though, at least in the early years of their marriage, she was prepared to be a friend to him).

After a bereavement, the surviving partner may, as Hardy did after Emma’s death, experience ‘overwhelming waves of yearning for the dead person [and] feel guilt that they failed to do enough for the deceased’ during his or her lifetime. Finally, however, these symptoms subside, and he or she is able to recall ‘the good times shared with the deceased in the past’.
²
Not so for Hardy, for even after Emma’s death in November 1912, his grief continued unabated. Although Emma now rested in peace in Stinsford churchyard, for him there would be no closure. He became obsessed with his late wife; she occupied almost his every wakeful moment, and anguished, grief-stricken poems about her – in one disguise or another – continued to issue forth from him for another eighteen years; right up until the time of his own death in January 1928.

In the face of Emma’s increasing mental dysfunction, Hardy displayed loyalty and forbearance, steadfastness and stoicism, to an almost superhuman degree, and it is truly amazing that he remained on cordial terms with his wife for as long as he did. But suppose for a moment that he had married a jovial, loving, caring, well-adjusted and outward-looking person. Would a contented Hardy have been equally inspired to produce works as profound as
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
,
Jude the Obscure
,
The Dynasts
, and a host of love poems? Probably not, for it is likely that his particular brand of creative genius had, of necessity, to be born out of pain. Therefore, perhaps posterity has something to thank Emma for after all. (In this, Hardy was not alone, for the same might be said of John Keats, Charlotte Brontë and her sisters, Charles Dickens, Edward Thomas and the Great War poets, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, to name but a few. It may also be said of painters, such as Vincent van Gogh and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and of musicians such as Ludwig van Beethoven, Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Frédéric Chopin.)

In 1994, in an editorial in the
American Journal of Psychiatry
, American psychiatrist Joseph J. Schildkraut, and his colleagues, attempted to shed more light on the relationship between mood (or what psychiatrists call ‘affect’) and creativity.
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In their study of a small cohort (fifteen in all) of mid-twentieth-century painters of the New York School, they noted that: ‘Over 50% of the 15 artists in this group had had some form of psychopathology, predominantly mood disorders and preoccupation with death.’ And they concluded with these words: