When the war ended Hardy was seventy-eight. He still walked with the vigour of a young man, quickening his pace on an uphill slope, and could bicycle the mile to his brother’s house and back. His days and weeks were run to a pattern: every Monday morning he wound up the three grandfather clocks in the house, one in the hall, one in the drawing room and one in the passage to the kitchen. The Times was still his daily paper, and he breakfasted at eight thirty or nine – accounts differ – drinking tea and sprinkling brown sugar on his bacon. He liked to walk to his front gate after breakfast to see what the weather promised, looking south to the monument to Admiral Hardy on Blackdown in the distance. Punctually at ten he was in his study. It was at the side of the house, with an east-facing window, and it was always dusty because he would not allow the housemaids to touch his papers or books. 1 The walls were a faded pinkish red, and he had hung his violin on the wall and put his cello in the corner, a reminder of how the musical instruments were kept at Bockhampton. 2 Round the fireplace were hung a framed sketch of Thackeray and prints of Tennyson and Meredith, and on his plain writing table was an inkwell given to him by Mrs Henniker and a perpetual calendar fixed on Monday, 7 March, marking his first meeting with Emma. 3 Most of the day was spent at this table, thinking, writing, thinking again. The best of his writing, he said, was done between tea and dinner. His poetry continued the process of mythologizing his life, and although the high sense of excitement and adventure that had driven the ‘Poems of 1912–13’ had dimmed, his imagination was still quick with memories and themes to be taken up.
He liked to work in old clothes, particularly a pair of trousers that went back to the turn of the century and that he mended himself with string. He also kept an ancient shawl, crocheted from fawn or beige wool, to put over his shoulders, and sometimes his head too, against the cold: it could have been his mother’s work, or Emma’s. There was an open fire, laid by the maid but not lit, because he liked to get it going himself. No other heat, since neither gas nor electricity had reached Max Gate, and light was provided by oil lamps. No telephone, although one was installed downstairs in 1920 which he refused to answer. In the same year the house acquired a wireless set, of which Wessex became so passionately fond that Hardy sometimes got up early and went down in his long nightshirt and short dressing gown to turn it on for him. He slept in an unheated bedroom and had his hot water brought up in jugs. Florence would join him for early morning tea at 7.45, coming through the dressing room between their rooms.
Florence dealt with much of his correspondence as well as working on the memoirs, and from 1923 a poetry-loving young woman, May O’Rourke, came for three mornings a week. If there was more to be done than usual, she stayed on for the afternoon, and she observed that, when Hardy was thinking about his work, he ‘would be present at luncheon, but only corporeally’. 4 In good weather he might potter round the garden in the afternoon, seeing Emma out of the corner of his eye. The maid had strict instructions to put out food for the birds she had loved. He might take Wessie for a walk, with his overcoat flapping open, walking stick in hand, with or without Florence. Regular visitors and close friends such as Cockerell were accompanied on walks – to Stinsford Church, to the heath, over the water meadows – and driven further afield. In April 1919 he and Florence drove in Lea’s car with Cockerell through Bridport, stopping to look at the church Hardy had helped Hicks ‘restore’ and enlarge in the 1860s, and on to Seatown for lunch at the Anchor Inn. It stood beside a few cottages in a bay flanked by high cliffs. That afternoon mackerel came into the bay, and to Cockerell’s great joy he was allowed to help haul in the nets. 5 You can see why Hardy liked a man who could turn from running a museum to working with the fishermen and think it a treat.
When they were at home in the afternoon, tea was served by Florence in the drawing room, elegantly, with thin bread and butter and home-made cake on silver cake stands. Hardy would put on more formal clothes if he came down, entering quietly and invariably taking a straight-backed chair. There might be local friends, but increasingly there were visitors from further afield, because Thomas Hardy was now one of the sights of England. Pilgrimages were made to Max Gate, each pilgrim hoping to take away his own little impression or anecdote. It could be trying, but there was also a steady stream of men and women he was pleased to know, and real friendships were formed, remarkably for a man of his age. He especially enjoyed talking about poetry with young writers. One was Siegfried Sassoon, who made his name with fierce poems about the reality of the war, in which he fought in the trenches and against which he protested. In 1917 Sassoon dedicated a volume of verse to Hardy, and they met in November 1918. Sassoon was an attractive figure who had grown up in a privileged world and suffered not only from the war but from knowing himself to be a homosexual, and obliged to hide it. Sassoon thought Hardy would be shocked if he knew, and was probably right. 6 Both the Hardys were charmed by him, and he in turn felt a profound respect for Hardy, seeing in him a wizard who concealed his magic behind a deliberately ordinary appearance and behaviour. There were quarrels, because each enjoyed the other’s attention and praise for his poetry, and sometimes it fell short, but these clouds passed.
Charlotte Mew came to their notice through Cockerell. Although Hardy found her shyness difficult, he admired her poetry, invited her to stay, and did what he could to encourage and assist her by getting her a small pension; Florence also corresponded warmly with her. Edmund Blunden, war poet and friend of Sassoon, introduced himself with a volume of his verse and came for weekends. So did Walter de la Mare, who had pleased Hardy first with a review of The Dynasts and then with his mysterious poem ‘The Listeners’. Another friend of Sassoon, Robert Graves, wrote to Hardy on being demobbed: ‘I must confess with shame that I have just read “Jude” for the first time only. What an amazing book!’ 7 He was running a magazine and asked for poems, then brought his young wife Nancy Nicholson – the Nicholsons were friends of Cockerell – in the summer of 1920. Hardy told him he did not like to make more than four drafts of a poem for fear of it losing its freshness: a remarkable confidence, suggesting how well the spinal cords of the poems were laid down in his mind before he wrote anything down. 8
His poetic output remained prodigious. Macmillan published a Collected Poems in 1919, far too soon, because there were three more volumes to come, containing 408 new poems in all. In 1922 Late Lyrics and Earlier was ready, the proofs read by Cockerell. Hardy wrote a prefatory ‘Apology’ in February 1922, in which he expressed his fear that the effect of the war might be to send the world into a new Dark Age. Yet he refused to be labelled as a pessimist. He was an ‘evolutionary meliorist’, he insisted, who believed that the world needed both religion and rationality, and that they might be reconciled and interfused through poetry. His theories are less interesting than his poetry, and Late Lyrics is not read for its ideas. It starts with ‘Weathers’ (‘This is the weather the cuckoo likes’), which might be called an Elizabethan song – four and a half centuries late. ‘The Fallow Deer at the Lonely House’ magically incorporates a visual trick or puzzle:
One without looks in to-night
Through the curtain-chink
From the sheet of glistening white;
One without looks in to-night
As we sit and think
By the fender-brink.
We do not discern those eyes
Watching in the snow;
Lit by lamps of rosy dyes
We do not discern those eyes
Wondering, aglow,
Fourfooted, tiptoe.
The trick is that the person speaking the poem from inside the house cannot see what the reader is allowed to see, the animal outside in the snow, surprised by the light gleaming out. It makes it more mysterious, because nobody knows it is there except the reader, who is not there.
Another short, mysterious poem, ‘Without, Not Within Her’, seems to be about Mrs Henniker and credits her with a sanity that was able to drive out Hardy’s demons:
It was that strange freshness you carried
Into a soul
Whereon no thought of yours tarried
Two moments at all.
And out from his spirit flew death,
And bale, and ban,
Like the corn-chaff under the breath
Of the winnowing-fan. 9
Hardy wrote to Mrs Henniker after the publication of Late Lyrics: ‘I ought to have sent you a copy of the Poems. But I don’t send books to women nowadays – not because I despise the sex, far from it! but because I fear they will not like something or other I have written, and will be in the awkward position of having to pretend they do.’ 10 She came to Dorset at midsummer, and the Hardys drove with her through the Blackmore Vale and to Sherborne. It was their last time together. Nine months later she died, in April 1923, ‘After a friendship of thirty years!’ wrote Hardy, needing to say no more. He had loved her, and she had acted as a muse. Some of his letters she had discreetly destroyed, the remainder she bequeathed, with perfect tact, to Florence, who preserved them and refused to let Hardy destroy or cut them further. They are among his best.
Half the ‘new’ poems in Late Lyrics were in fact old ones. He went back to 1867 for ‘A Young Man’s Exhortation’, with its Yeatsian conclusion about ‘the passing preciousness of dreams’. 11 Something like twenty-five are concerned with Emma, moving backwards and forwards in time. ‘On a Discovered Curl of Hair’ recalls how she gave him the curl before they were married, ‘to abate the misery of absentness’, and muses sadly on how it has kept its ‘bright brown’ through the years that turned the hair on her head grey. In ‘Penance’ he takes responsibility for his failings, answering his own questions about his past refusal to listen to Emma playing at her keyboard, and finds the grisly image for remorse quoted earlier, ‘the chill old keys, / Like a skull’s brown teeth / Loose in their sheath’. 12
The collection ends with a poem of general contrition in which Hardy sits by the fire and listens to his own voice accusing him of arrogance and failure to love, using the language of the Bible:
‘You slighted her that endureth all,’
Said my own voice talking to me;
‘Vaunteth not, trusteth hopefully;
That suffereth long and is kind withal,’
Said my own voice talking to me.
‘You taught not that which you set about,’
Said my own voice talking to me;
‘That the greatest of things is Charity…’
– And the sticks burnt low, and the fire went out,
And my voice ceased talking to me.
His relationship with the Christian faith was a puzzle, but what poet can resist the words of the King James Bible? Florence gives a good example of his tipping further to the ‘churchy, conservative’ side as he aged in a letter to Cockerell:
We had another tea-party, of a kind you would not appreciate. The Rector of West Stafford and his wife, the Vicar of Stinsford and his wife, an elderly and religious peer, Lord Ellenborough, and our neighbours at Syward Lodge – all good Conservatives and staunch Anglicans. T.H. declares that he understands that type of person better than any other, and he prefers to know the rather narrow, churchy, conservative country person to the brilliant young writer who is always popping in and out of the divorce court. An interesting statement from the author of ‘Jude’. 13
He enjoyed his old man’s privilege of making contradictory pronouncements and showing a different face to different people. If he went to church, he explained that it was not ‘because he believed in it, which he did not, but because it was good for the people to get clean and come together once a week – like discipline in the army’. 14 And, while he listened to Florence read him Jane Austen and compared himself happily to Mr Woodhouse in the winter of 1919, in 1920 he was poring over the most modern of poets, Ezra Pound, and corresponding with him. E. M. Forster found him ‘a very vain, conventional, uninteresting old gentleman… but perhaps at 82 one rots a little. His great pride is that the county families ask him to tea.’ 15 Yet a young postman who delivered mail to Max Gate in the 1920s and told Hardy he liked reading was invited in to borrow two books, and when he brought them back Hardy made time to sit down and talk about them with him, and lent him another two. 16 He told Florence he had seen a ghost in Stinsford churchyard on Christmas Eve 1919, as he put holly on his father’s grave; they exchanged words about it being a green Christmas; he followed it into the church and found no one there. He bought himself Einstein’s Relativity: The Special and General Theory. A Popular Exposition in the 1920s, read and pondered over it, and took it to confirm what he believed, ‘that neither chance nor purpose governs the universe, but necessity’. Einstein and the Universe by Charles Nordmann, published in 1922, was listed among other books he meant to acquire. In June 1923, thinking about Relativity again, he wrote in his notebook, ‘Relativity. That things and events always were, are, and will be (e.g. E.M.F. etc. are living still in the past).’ 17 And, in spite of his liking for the narrow, churchy and conservative, in 1924 he publicly attacked the Dean of Westminster for refusing to allow a memorial to Byron in Poets’ Corner. ‘Whatever Byron’s bad qualities he was a poet, and a hater of cant.’ 18
Florence did a good deed in 1919, when there was news that the detested Lilian Gifford was in a London County Council mental hospital in Essex. Rather than triumphing over this evidence of more madness in the Gifford family, she made the journey to visit her, discussed her case with the doctors and decided she should be rescued. Hardy was talked out of any idea that they should have Lilian at Max Gate, and Florence helped to make other arrangements for her. These inevitably included more financial help from him, which he was happy to give and could easily afford. Money meant little to him: he spent a mere £600 a year out of an income of over £2,000. He was silently accumulating a fortune. The only extravagances of his life had been taking Emma on holiday abroad and renting smart London houses for the Season in the 1890s. Florence would have liked him to spend more freely, and in Dorchester he had the reputation of being mean. It had not helped that, sitting on the bench during the war, he had imposed fines on local tradesmen for profiteering. Florence complained in 1918, ‘I shall soon be unable to enter a shop in Dorchester. The last was our own grocer!’ 19
Oxford caught up with Cambridge in 1920 when he was given an honorary D. Litt. there, and later an honorary fellowship at Queen’s College. In the same year he made his last trip to London to attend the wedding of Harold Macmillan to Lady Dorothy Cavendish, and was asked to be one of the witnesses. The bridegroom, grandson of a founder of the publishing firm, was about to leave it for a career in politics, and in the 1950s he became a liberal Conservative Prime Minister, which might have won Hardy’s approval. In June his eightieth birthday brought telegrams from the King, the Prime Minister and the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, and he wrote some ‘Birthday Notes’, expressing the view that civilization might be at risk: ‘it makes one feel he would rather be old than young.’ Yet his best friends now were younger ones, not only Cockerell and Sassoon but T. E. Lawrence, who asked Graves for an introduction and called on Hardy from his nearby cottage at Clouds Hill in 1923. Lawrence, archaeologist and writer, soldier and strategist, statesman and spokesman for the Arabs in their fight against the Turks, was a legendary figure before he was thirty, achieving fame and power and then fleeing from both, changing his name and enlisting as a common soldier. What he was seeking has never been entirely clear, but appears to have been some sort of moral cleansing. He was drawn at once to Hardy’s ‘dignity and ripeness’ and to the simplicity of life at Max Gate; and both the Hardys responded to his friendliness and good humour, and read his book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom with admiration. He took to coming over on alternate Sundays, and, since he and Cockerell were already friends, they formed a congenial circle when he was also visiting.
In 1923 Hardy finished The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall, a short and violent verse drama about the last hours of Tristan and Iseult, culminating in two murders and the suicide of Queen Iseult, who stabs her husband and jumps from the castle parapet into the sea below. Hardy said he had tried to avoid ‘turning the rude personages of, say, the fifth century into respectable Victorians’, but much of the language is archaic, and even the usually admiring Cockerell commented on ‘a good many inversions and old words which may make it difficult to follow when acted’. 20 It is heavy going, and the most curious feature is the speech given to the second Iseult, which Hardy based closely on the words of Elfride, his heroine of A Pair of Blue Eyes, as she begs for forgiveness; whether this was writer’s thrift or had some private significance is impossible to tell. He had planned the play in 1870, seeing Emma as Queen Iseult, and started it in 1916 when he visited Tintagel with Florence, then set it aside again, perhaps thinking a drama of marital jealousy inappropriate. It is the only work to which he put a dedication: to Emma, her sister Helen and brother-in-law Cadell Holder, with Florence’s name tactfully added to the list. It was published and acted in Dorchester that winter, and soon afterwards the composer Rutland Boughton asked if he might make it into an opera. Boughton had achieved a wild success with his musical drama The Immortal Hour, opened at the first Glastonbury Festival in 1914, and his intention at Glastonbury was to bring art to ordinary people. He was a serious communist and did his best to establish a commune in Somerset. He found Hardy modest and generous, and Hardy took to him, listened to his communist ideas with interest, ‘though he could not share them,’ and went to Glastonbury to hear the musical version. It was no more successful than the commune, although Broughton’s music still has admirers. 21 But it shows Hardy’s continuing interest in the theatre and belief that it mattered to try to reach a wide audience. In March 1925 he put his signature to an appeal for funds to rebuild the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford after a fire: Shakespeare, and a country theatre, were both good causes to him. 22
In July 1923 the Prince of Wales was due to make a short tour of Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire, to meet tenants on his estates, and also to show himself to the people of Bath and Dorchester. Lord Shaftesbury persuaded him to open a Drill Hall for the Dorset Territorials in Dorchester, and someone had the bright idea that the visit might be more entertaining if he combined it with lunch at Thomas Hardy’s house. The Prince had never read a line of his work, but he was made aware that he was a very old and famous Dorset writer, and that some of his books were in the royal collection. Florence was thrown into panic by the idea of having to entertain the Prince and his considerable retinue, but Hardy, she noticed with surprise, was pleased. 23
She sought the ever helpful Cockerell’s advice and dashed to town to meet him. His diary for Wednesday, 11 July, describes how he met her at the New Century Club in Hay Hill, finding her in a state of agitation about the visit of the Prince, who would be coming with Lord Shaftesbury, equerries and chauffeurs, all needing to be fed. Cockerell cheered her up with tea and ice cream at Gunter’s, helped her choose some glassware for her lunch table and introduced her to the worldly wife of a friend, who gave good advice about dealing with the Prince – ‘much on the lines of my own’, he noted with satisfaction. He then saw her to Liverpool Street on her way to her mother in Enfield for the night. 24
The Prince’s visit was scheduled for 20 July. Hardy offered his sister Kate the chance of being installed in ‘the bedroom behind the jessamine – you would then see him come, and go: we could probably send you up a snack.’ She refused, but Henry put up a Union Jack on a flagpole at Talbothays, and neighbours rallied round to lend anything needed at Max Gate. 25 Someone had the sense to lock up Wessie. A police cordon was set up round the house. It was a day of scorching heat. Hardy drove to the Drill Hall and was introduced to the Prince on the platform; then they drove together through Dorchester in an open car, to cheers and photographers. The Prince was taken up to a bedroom with his valet, his secretary waiting on the landing, Florence hovering downstairs. By her account a balled-up waistcoat flew out of the bedroom at the secretary, and the Prince came down to lunch under the trees in the garden, very sensibly minus his waistcoat.
A retinue of thirteen, mostly Duchy officials, had to be fed in the house, not counting the chauffeurs, while the grandees, who included Lord Shaftesbury and the gallant Admiral Sir Lionel Halsey, now an equerry to the Prince, ate in the shade of the trees. The Prince did not pretend to have read anything by his host, whereas Hardy knew that the Prince, as Duke of Cornwall, owned most of the land round Dorchester. It was after all from his grandfather that he had purchased the plot on which Max Gate was built, and only a month before Florence had applied to the Duchy to buy a further half acre, saying she wanted to build a cottage for her gardener on it. 26 So the conversation is likely to have turned on rural matters, rather than on literature, and indeed one of the maids believed that ‘Mr Hardy spoke to the prince about a piece of land we called The Paddock, that he would like to have it for a kitchen garden… and Mr Hardy had the extra ground’ – although it is highly unlikely that the Prince had anything to do with the negotiations over the land, which were in any case already proceeding smoothly. 27 Florence managed the arrangements for the lunch party well and hit exactly the right note with her principal guest. ‘I didn’t fuss around him, and I think he was grateful. He made himself very much at home… He grew rather gay and jocular during lunch… I had been told he ate nothing. He made an excellent lunch, and asked for a second helping of ham, and finished up with a glass of 40 year old sherry and one of the cigars.’ When it was time for official photographs, she tried to avoid being included, but he insisted on her being in all of them: ‘ “Oh yes, you must be photographed too. Come along.” So I did.’ And with her big white hat and dark eyes she looks charming.
The Prince departed to visit his farm tenants around Dorchester, the police left, Wessex was let out, and ordinary life resumed. The next day the Hardys had themselves driven to Portland Bill to visit a new friend, Marie Stopes, who had settled in a lighthouse tower there. She found him boyish and twinkling, ready to talk indiscreetly of the lunch party, and eager to climb to the top of her tower and out on to the roof to see the circular view. Everyone found their own version of Hardy. To Lawrence he seemed ‘so pale, so quiet, so refined into an essence’. 28 Yet Florence told Marie Stopes later that he was ‘far more nervous and highly strung than appears to anyone outside the household’, and her account of how difficult he could be when she planned to be away for two days in London suggests he could panic and bully. 29 He announced that he felt ill just as she was about to leave. ‘He began to put his papers in order and told me he was doing it lest he should die suddenly… By this time I began to think it would be wrong to leave him and so I… cancelled all my engagements… whereupon he suddenly became quite well,’ she told Cockerell, adding forgivingly, ‘Perhaps it is that the prospect of being left really does alarm him and make him feel ill.’ 30
There is no doubt that he wanted her to be there all the time, but, looking at the fourteen years they spent together as man and wife, you notice how silent he was about her, while she experienced and presented her life as a series of discontents and dramas. One long-running drama revolved around her health. In 1915 she was in a London nursing home having surgery on her nose for ‘nasal catarrh’. A year later her friendly specialist told her she was severely run down – she suffered from depression and sleeplessness – and needed a three-week holiday, but, because it was wartime and Hardy was opposed to holidays, nothing happened. In 1917 she was persuaded to have a series of expensive ‘inoculations’ which even her sister Eva, a nurse, thought useless. Florence grumbled, ‘Were I a Gifford of course all this would be paid for me,’ but Hardy let her pay for herself. 31 She had frequent X-rays and many discussions with her doctors about operations that might become necessary. In 1919 she was seeing a London surgeon about a ‘displaced toe’. 32 In 1921 she told Cockerell she suffered from ‘almost intolerable pains’ as long as she was at Max Gate, which cleared up as soon as she got away. 33 In 1923 a swollen gland appeared in her neck which her surgeon was in two minds about. She consulted E. M. Forster, who recommended another specialist early in 1924, and he advised her against surgical intervention, as it was in any case getting smaller. 34 Hardy was fearful of her undergoing surgery, but she made up her mind to have it removed in any case, and alarmed Cockerell greatly by describing the swelling to him as a tumour. She was booked into a nursing home in Fitzroy Square on 30 September, and he was in London on the 29th to see her before the operation, and travelled up again from Cambridge on the next day. He made two visits on 1 October, writing to Hardy after each, and returned to the nursing home on the 2nd, 3rd, 6th and 7th. 35 She had other visitors, among them Sassoon, bearing a bunch of violets, Charlotte Mew and Virginia Woolf – something of a salon assembled around her bed. 36 But the most devoted and attentive was Cockerell. Florence now began to call him Sydney and confided to him ‘how she dreaded the winter in Max Gate, its dismalness, and how she hated most of the furniture there’. 37 Afterwards she told him that ‘the days in the nursing home remain as a happy memory.’ 38 Her symptoms look more like an expression of her need to get away from Max Gate and a yearning for attention, sympathy and warmth than like anything clinically serious. You can feel sorry for her and at the same time believe Hardy was right to be sceptical about the various treatments she sought. The last operation at least roused him to arrange the luxury of a car to fetch her home from London, and to send his brother to escort her. He wrote a poem about his wait for her arrival – ‘Nobody Comes’. Too late, too little, poetically, to please Florence, and more about his anxiety than about her:
A car comes up, with lamps full-glare,
That flash upon a tree:
It has nothing to do with me,
And whangs along in a world of its own,
Leaving a blacker air;
And mute by the gate I stand again alone,
And nobody pulls up there. 39
There were lesser dramas over bringing modern technology to Max Gate. Hardy was happy to go on living with hip baths in the bedrooms, oil lamps and candles to light the house and no main drainage, and Florence had to fight to have a bathroom and hot water installed in 1920, and in the same year the telephone (Dorchester 43) and wireless. She was right to do this, of course, and guests and maids must have been as pleased with the improvements as she was, but the master was too old to change his ways, and for him water was still carried up and down stairs. It was habit, but it was also a way of remaining true to the early experience that was so important to him.
The clash of past and present and Florence’s sensitivity sometimes made her feel she was a usurper in the house. She told Sassoon that she disliked being called Mrs Hardy because she felt the name belonged to ‘someone else, whom I knew for several years, and I am oppressed by the thought that I am living in her house, using her things – and, worst of all, have even stolen her name.’ 40 It is a pathetic confession.
Her feeling herself a usurper may have been what made her fearful of being usurped in turn. Otherwise it is hard to explain her behaviour over Gertrude Bugler. This was the biggest drama of her marriage, centred round a Dorset girl who took part in productions put on by the amateur players active in Dorchester from 1908 specializing in adaptations of Hardy’s novels. In 1913, when Gertrude was sixteen, she played Marty in a production of The Woodlanders, and in 1918 she, her parents and her sister Eileen were all in a revival of The Mellstock Quire. Hardy lent his father’s working smocks to the boys in the Mellstock cast and also addressed the company about the origins of the story. 41 For him these were delightful occasions in which he saw his novels brought to life. Two years later Gertrude was Eustacia in The Return of the Native, and she also appeared at Max Gate at Christmas with a group of Mummers. Gertrude was a beauty, dark, lush, gentle, large-eyed, and a naturally talented actress. Florence joked to Cockerell, ‘T H has lost his heart to [Gertrude] entirely, but as she is soon getting married I don’t let that cast me down too much.’ 42 And indeed in 1921 she married her cousin, Captain Ernest Bugler, MC, a war hero and a farmer, and they settled in Beaminster and began a family. Perhaps this too aroused Florence’s jealousy: here was a girl whose beauty appealed to Hardy, and who was now married to a young husband and expecting a baby – whereas Florence’s beauty had departed, her husband was old, and she had no children.
In the summer of 1922 Gertrude was pregnant. A production of Desperate Remedies was planned for the winter, and under the circumstances it would not be possible for her to appear in it. Hardy had told her to come over to Max Gate whenever she liked, but when she called and asked for him she was coldly received and sent away by Florence, who followed this up with an incredible letter of reproach, suggesting she had no manners and telling her that a lady did not call on a gentleman: ‘As you must know this is a most extraordinary thing to do. In the first place, all invitations to Max Gate naturally come from me… and again it is not usual in our station of life for any lady to call upon a gentleman. It is simply “not done”.’ Florence had either forgotten or perhaps remembered all too clearly her own first approach to Hardy.
A letter to Cockerell telling him about the production of Desperate Remedies shows the tone she took about her imagined rival: ‘Poor Gertrude Bugler seems to have suffered agonies at being cut out by a rival leading lady… and the tragic climaxis that she had a still-born son on the day of performance. What a gossip I am.’ 43 Happily Gertrude gave birth the next year to a healthy daughter, and in 1924 she appeared on stage in Dorchester again, this time as Tess. It was Hardy’s own adaptation, and he involved himself in the production. He found Gertrude intelligent, and seeing and hearing her in the part of his favourite heroine moved him deeply – enough perhaps for her to become his ‘well-beloved’, according to his own theories. 44 He was eighty-four, she was married and the mother of a small baby, and the love was all in his mind, but Florence reacted with jealous fury. She wrote to Cockerell to tell him that Gertrude ‘twitters affectedly in the tragic parts’ and that ‘she’s so satisfied with her performance that I’m afraid she is not going to be the gigantic success that is anticipated.’ 45 Cockerell saw the performance quite otherwise when he attended it in November. He praised the reserve, pathos and charm of Mrs Bugler’s performance as Tess, saying she took the part to the life, so much so that you could overlook the bad acting of the men playing Clare and Alec. 46 He enjoyed the matinée so much that he returned for the evening performance.
Bugler’s performance was generally agreed to be outstanding. J. M. Barrie wrote that she had delighted him ‘beyond most actresses’. A theatre manager was now eager to take her to London in a production of Tess. As this was being set up, in January 1925, Cockerell returned to Max Gate to find Florence hysterical, convinced that Hardy was so besotted with Gertrude that everyone in Dorchester was laughing about it. There was some gossip, but Cockerell urged her to see the situation as a comedy, given Hardy’s age. She said she was trying to, but that he spoke roughly to her and showed her that she was in the way. She may have remembered how she had once heard him speak to Emma. In spite of this she, Hardy and Cockerell went for a stroll together with Wessie after lunch and, according to the diarist, had a very agreeable talk. During the rest of the day he saw no sign of any trouble or quarrel. But in the morning Florence again sought him out alone, told him she had spent the night thinking she was going mad and begged him to stay, since the theatre manager and Mrs Bugler were coming over to discuss the plans for Tess being played at the Haymarket in April. He complied and wrote of Gertrude afterwards that he could not see her as presenting much danger to anyone.
Indeed there was no harm in Gertrude Bugler, who was naturally proud to have the approval and affection of a celebrated writer. Neither Cockerell nor Hardy knew the full extent of Florence’s rage and bad behaviour. In February she sent a telegram to Gertrude to say she was coming to see her and arrived on her doorstep ‘terribly upset and agitated, and said at once that her husband must not know of her visit to me. Then I listened with incredulous amazement to what she had to say.’ She begged Gertrude to withdraw from the play, telling her that if she went to London Hardy would follow her there and that it would be bad for his health and lead to damaging publicity; and that he had been writing poems to her in which he spoke of running away with her – poems Florence had destroyed. Gertrude was taken aback by all this; she was also aware of her own husband’s lack of enthusiasm about her going to London and anxious herself about the effect on their child. She therefore agreed to give up the part. ‘So I wrote to Thomas Hardy and to Frederick Harrison to that effect. I never saw Hardy again.’ 47
Not satisfied with stopping Gertrude’s chance of becoming a professional actress, Florence determined to bring an end to the amateur dramatics in Dorchester: ‘if I can manage it the Hardy plays will stop now. I cannot go through another experience like that, and it would be bad for him also.’ 48 She succeeded, and prevented Gertrude even from reciting one of Hardy’s poems at a dinner for Dorsetmen; and she continued to complain about Hardy’s infatuation. 49 Even after his death, in 1929, she explained her absence from the first night of a London production of Tess in which Bugler was to appear briefly by saying she thought ‘my husband’s heart was weakened by excitements connected with the production here in Dorset, & had it not been for that I think he might have been alive now.’ 50 The suggestion is absurd and acts as a reminder of Florence’s long-established habit of inventing stories to produce the effect she wanted. We shall never know whether she also invented the poems she said Hardy had written about Gertrude, but to have invented them would be easier to forgive than to have destroyed them.
Hardy himself remained silent and calm. He had given Gertrude inscribed copies of The Return of the Native and Tess, and written her a few simple letters signed ‘Sincerely yours’ and ‘Your affectionate friend’. When she wrote to tell him she was giving up the London production, he answered, ‘Although you fancy otherwise, I do not believe that any London actress will represent Tess so nearly as I imagined her as you did.’ 51 Gertrude saw that Florence was driven by jealousy, and she remembered Hardy with affection. His last words to her, she said, were spoken when he saw her off as she left Max Gate in January 1923: ‘If anyone asks you if you knew Thomas Hardy, say, “Yes, he was my friend.” ’ 52
To arouse an emotional storm between two women at the age of eighty-three is not given to many men. If Hardy was in any sense in love with Gertrude, it was because she embodied his most intimately imagined heroine, ‘My Tess’, so well. 53 If Florence could have understood that it was the dream of Tess he loved, she might have been more understanding. And he was wholly bound to Florence as his wife, depending on her for her affection and care in seeing to his needs and comfort.
He was pleased to find one of his own theories of love taken up by Marcel Proust, who believed that the lover creates an image of the beloved in his mind that may bear little resemblance to the real person. ‘It appears that The Theory exhibited in “The Well-Beloved” in 1892 has since been developed by Proust still further,’ he wrote in his notebook, followed by a quotation from À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs :
Peu de personnes comprennent le caractère purement subjective du phénomène qu’est l’amour, et la sorte de création que c’est d’une personne supplémentaire, distincte de celle qui porte le même nom dans le monde, et dont la plupart deséléments sont tirés de nous-même… Le désir s’élève, se satisfait, disparait – et c’est tout. Ainsi, la jeune fille qu’on épouse n’est pas celle dont on est tombé amoureux. 54 (Few people understand the subjective nature of love and the way it creates another being, different from the actual person bearing the same name, and endowed with characteristics for the most part imagined by the lover… Desire arises, satisfies itself and disappears – that’s all there is to it. So the young woman you marry is not the person you fell in love with.)
Hardy already understood this perfectly and had demonstrated its truth many times, in telling the story of Clym and Eustacia, of Bathsheba and Troy, and of Angel and Tess.
In the autumn of 1923 he sat for Augustus John. The portrait in oils and the preparatory sketch are both exceptionally fine, showing a man who has come to terms with old age, his face carved, seamed and furrowed by a long, reflective life. Two comments are attributed to Hardy, the earlier a jocular, ‘Well, if I look like that the sooner I am under the ground the better.’ The second, made several years later, has him saying, ‘I don’t know whether that is how I look or not – but that is how I feel. ’ 55 Within weeks of its being finished, Cockerell noted in his diary, ‘Having heard from Augustus John that he would take £500 for his portrait of Hardy I went up to London by the 1 pm to see him and secured it, though I may have to raise the money.’ 56 Cockerell never failed to raise the money when he was determined on a purchase, and the portrait was soon displayed among the treasures of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.