2.21 Thomas Hardy's Ghost

Looking at Hardy's difficult marriage to Emma Gifford, and how he thought of her more fondly after she had died than he had for many years before.

When Thomas Hardy married Emma Gifford in 1874, they went to Paris on honeymoon. Imagine all the things that a couple of newlyweds could do together in that city of romance at the dawn of la belle époque. Apart from the obvious long hours spent luxuriating in some fabulous hotel with the object of your desires, there could be long walks along the Seine, a visit to the incredibly modern impressionist art exhibition organised by Monet and Degas and featuring work by Cezanne and many others, or more traditional art at the annual Salon exhibition at the Louvre. There could be visits to the theatre, shopping in the centre of European fashion. Lots of exciting and romantic times could be enjoyed together. Alternatively, you could do what Hardy did, and take your bride to visit a mortuary and look at freshly dead corpses together. Emma thought that this was “repulsive.” I wonder if this was the first discordant note in the relationship which proceeded on a downhill trajectory over the subsequent 38 years of their time together?

They had clearly found delight in each other’s company over the four years of their courtship. He found her full of life and attractive with her youthful looks (they were both in their early thirties, but it is possible that she was pretending to be several years younger). She was interested in writing and had literary ambitions of her own, and he was just breaking through as an author, having had Under the Greenwood Tree published anonymously in 1872. She must have been thrilled that the heroine of his 1873 novel A Pair of Blue Eyes was clearly based on her and delighted when it was serialised in a weekly periodical, as was the follow up Far from the Madding Crowd, giving Hardy a steady income from writing and the financial footing to make a go of marriage.

Further successes followed, with the likes of The Return of the Native and The Mayor of Casterbridge sealing his reputation as a successful author. It is entirely possible that Emma helped him with his work, both by providing inspiration and in more practical ways, such as writing out copy, but by the latter half of the 1880s, his writing had taken a sourer tone. In his preface to The Woodlanders he stated that he was concerned with the “question of matrimonial divergence, the immortal puzzle of how a couple are to find a basis for their sexual relationship" and the problems that arise when someone in a marriage “feels some second person to be better suited to his or her tastes than the one whom he has contracted to live". Perhaps it was just a plot line, but it appears that all was not well in the Hardy household.

The couple never had children, and Hardy increasingly wrote about the dissatisfactions of marriage, In Jude the Obscure, Hardy has the hero telling his wife that she is a “phantasmal – bodiless creature, one who has so little animal passion in you that you can act upon reason in the matter when we poor unfortunate wretches of grosser substance can't” He goes on to say that "People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort." Not the kind of writing that a happily married man generally produces.

Emma eventually persuaded Hardy to have rooms built in the attic of the house, so that she could live separately from him. Perhaps she had been outraged by the things that he had written, said and done, or perhaps she had caused him to feel that way by her attitude towards him. She had often suggested that she had married well below her station in life, as her family came from money, (even though her father was an alcoholic who had lost a great deal of his lot). She also possibly felt that his literary successes had put her ambitions in the shade. Or perhaps she had never really recovered from that honeymoon outing to the mortuary. In 1910 she told a friend how much she thought Thomas resembled Doctor Crippen, saying that she wouldn’t be surprised to find herself in the cellar one morning. At this point she was 70 years old. She died two years later, in bed, after a heart failure and impacted gallstones. Hardy was not to blame.

After she died, it seemed that Hardy’s attitude to her completely changed. Perhaps it was the jolt he received when he found a very uncomplimentary document entitled What I think about my Husband amongst her things. He burned it, along with another collection of writing named The Pleasures of Heaven and the Pains of Hell.

Rather than shock him into remorse though, I feel that her death, like all deaths, force us to look at the whole life of the departed, rather than the one that they have aged and grown into. When my Dad died, almost a decade ago now, I stopped seeing him as a reduced figure who struggled with dementia, needed round the clock care, and was often very confused as to who I was. As soon as work begins on a eulogy, as people gather their memories together, a picture builds up of a whole life. It is possible to see the personality more clearly. In the case of my Dad, his final illness had changed how he responded to me and how I responded to him. Perhaps, Hardy, freed of the difficulties of regular interaction with the difficult, prickly, loveless person that Emma had become, could see more clearly who she had been, the character who he had fallen in love with over forty years earlier. Perhaps he could see her descent into a mistrustful, bitter person in the same was as I saw my dad’s final years, as an unfortunate postscript to a fine life. Those who lose loved ones to the fatal consequences of alcoholism or drug abuse see their completed lives in a similar way. They can remember the person they knew before the affliction took hold, without the distraction of having to deal with the addict.

Hardy expressed his revised thoughts about Emma in a series of poems written in the months after her death. In On Beeny Cliff he remembers her as she was when they first met, a beautiful, vibrant young woman with long golden tresses of hair which fluttered behind her head as she rode on horseback along the clifftops at Beeny on the North coast of Cornwall.

On Beeny Cliff - by Thomas Hardy

O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea,
And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free —
The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me.

The pale mews plained below us, and the waves seemed far away
In a nether sky, engrossed in saying their ceaseless babbling say,
As we laughed light-heartedly aloft on that clear-sunned March day.

A little cloud then cloaked us, and there flew an irised rain,
And the Atlantic dyed its levels with a dull misfeatured stain,
And then the sun burst out again, and purples prinked the main.

— Still in all its chasmal beauty bulks old Beeny to the sky,
And shall she and I not go there once again now March is nigh,
And the sweet things said in that March say anew there by and by?

Nay. Though still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore,
The woman now is — elsewhere — whom the ambling pony bore,
And nor knows nor cares for Beeny, and will see it nevermore.

A second piece from the same cycle has him remembering a time when he and Emma had climbed up to the site of Bottreaux Castle, a few miles from Beeney Cliffs, near the village of Bocastle, known in Cornish as Castle Boterel.

At Castle Boterel - by Thomas Hardy

As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,
And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette,
I look behind at the fading byway,
And see on its slope, now glistening wet,
Distinctly yet

Myself and a girlish form benighted
In dry March weather. We climb the road
Beside a chaise. We had just alighted
To ease the sturdy pony's load
When he sighed and slowed.

What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of
Matters not much, nor to what it led, -
Something that life will not be balked of
Without rude reason till hope is dead,
And feeling fled.

It filled but a minute. But was there ever
A time of such quality, since or before,
In that hill's story? To one mind never,
Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore,
By thousands more.

Primaeval rocks form the road's steep border,
And much have they faced there, first and last,
Of the transitory in Earth's long order;
But what they record in colour and cast
Is - that we two passed.

And to me, though Time's unflinching rigour,
In mindless rote, has ruled from sight
The substance now, one phantom figure
Remains on the slope, as when that night
Saw us alight.

I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,
I look back at it amid the rain
For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,
And I shall traverse old love's domain
Never again.

In both of these poems, Hardy is looking back as an old man, almost putting himself in the picture, as an observer, seeing times of intimacy between himself and Emma before the tensions and jealousies came between them. It is almost as though he is standing outside of time as he looks back and distinctly sees his old self with her. The geographical sites he portrays are timeless with their primaeval rocks and chasmal beauty, and within that timelessness, he can somehow exist along with those figures from the past, although she is now elsewhere and cannot share the experience with him.

My poetic response to these poems, was another one prompted by Ian Parks at a Read To Write session, shortly after we had read them as a group. He suggested that we write a poem entitled Ghost, and I was taken with the idea of the young Emma being somehow aware of the spectral figure of the elderly Thomas Hardy observing her with his younger self from his vantage point outside of time.

Ghost

"O my love! My poet love! I saw you there" she said
"Watching me upon my horse, a riding the cliff's head
The wild wind tugging at my auburn tresses as I sped
But who was the old fellow standing stiffly at your side
With his white moustache and balding head? O pray tell me! She cried"
"There was no old man with me as I watched you" I replied

That evening as we embraced on the path up castle hill
I felt her start, her body froze, she was suddenly still
"There is that old man again, he looks so pale and ill"
I turned to look, saw just the hillside sloping to the coast
A distant church, a winding road, a pointing white signpost
She shivered, though the air was warm. As if she'd seen a ghost.