THE WIFE OF A GENIUS

Southland Times, Issue 23380, 11 December 1937, Page 14

THE WIFE OF A GENIUS

Recollections Of Mrs Thomas Hardy

Few wives of great men are remembered by the public after the death of their husbands. It is one of the ironies of life that the wife of a genius shall pass upon some metaphorical funeral pyre with the genius she married, writes Newman Flower in The Sunday Times. Not in every case. Literature is marked with rare and great exceptions. But it is so easy to forget that the woman a genius marries knows more about him and maybe helped him far more than all the world is aware. Florence Hardy, who died recently, was one of those women. I knew her from the time she became Thomas Hardy’s second wife. In the years that followed, until his death in 1928, I realized, from close contact with the twain, what she did for him. I can say at once that she put years on to his ageing life. But for her much of his later poetical work would never have been written. He would have laid down his pen too soon. It has been said that Hardy married his secretary. She was not his secretary. She was the friend of his first wife, and used to go to Max Gate, Dorchester, to stay with them on occasion. Hardy was not a man of method or habit in regard to his papers. She put his papers in order as a friend; no more. In his working life he was disciplined. He told me a few weeks before his death that he always went to his desk every morning and stayed there. “I may not write a word for a fortnight,” he said, “but it is discipline. On one of those mornings of discipline the mood comes—and I write.” THE PRISONER OF MAX GATE When his first wife died suddenly he was alone in the house, save for his servants. He lived so much within himself that he did not know how to grasp the situation of tragedy that had arisen. His wife was dead in the house. He telegraphed for Florence Dugdale. She came, made all the arrangements for the funeral, and went away again. After the funeral Hardy was alone in the house hidden beyond that strong belt of trees which he had planted as saplings around Max Gate, so that they might grow and make seclusion for him. Now they had shut him in to entire loneliness. He was a prisoner in a prison of his own making. Strange people walked up those tree-covered paths, knocked at the door, tried to get into the house, tore pieces from the bushes as souvenirs. His life became a plague, and the loneliness hideous upon his mind. He wrote to Florence Dugdale, and ultimately married her. She changed his life rapidly. She took the solitude out of it. She put order into his affairs. She kept these marauders from the front door. She watched him like some guarded flame. On one ,of Hardy’s last birthdays I spent the day with him. We had to sit

in a side room because of the strangers at the door. There was no end to these people. The penalty of fame is hideous. I recall that on this particular day, whilst she was getting rid of some intruder in the hall, Hardy said to me:— '“I remember a visiting-card being brought in to me, marked ‘Herbert Spencer.’ Well, I thought it odd that he should be in the neighbourhood, so I had him shown into the drawing-room. I went into the room. It was not Herbert Spencer. I held out the card. ‘Oh! said the visitor, ‘it was a card I picked up somewhere!’ ” ANTICIPATING A BIRTHDAY That was a trick of one of the mob. Florence Hardy spent a good deal of her time coping with visitors who were trying tricks to gain admission whilst he sat in the silence of that first floor study working on a poem. Hardy fell out of his chair in the late autumn of 1927 after some talkative people had sat with him for two hours. He was helped to bed and never got out of it. He seemed to become better. Florence Hardy wrote to me that he was so much better that he wanted me to know that he was inviting me now to his dinner party on his ninetieth birthday—because he knew he was going to live to ninety. She was watching him all the time.

Every change in him she put into her letters. And neither the Press, nor she, nor I knew that he was dying. For years past I had sent Hardy his Christmas dinner—either a turkey or a goose reared in my orchard. She wrote to me two days before Christmas that he had so improved that he had had two full helpings of turkey. In spite of this diversion he appeared to be slowly mending. But five days later the change came. She wrote again and told me that all she had fought for had failed. . . He died on January 11. Florence Hardy was not a Dorset woman, but she knew Dorset as a native. She was acquainted with each village and hamlet. She knew every scene in the Wessex novels; and she beat me, once and often, in her knowledge of Dorset, which is my birth country. She loved everything that belonged to her husband’s life, and carried on the county association’s after he had gone beyond them. She was shy and, like her husband, hated the limelight. “NO HOLE IN THE NET” One last recollection of her. The day before the Coronation I went into a London nursing home with a view to an operation. A few hours later the post brought me a letter from her, forwarded from my country address. She reminded me that each year I had sent ;

a wreath for Hardy’s grave (where his heart lies at Stinsford, Dorset) on his birthday—June 2. But I must waive it this year, she said, because she was going into a London nursing home (where I was already installed) for a big operation. I replied that I was in the home waiting for her. She came in. I met her in her room. She said: “I don’t need an operation.” I said: “Florence, it’s just like the dentist’s waiting-room. We’ve lost our toothache when we get there. And we’ve both got to see it through now.” I went to the table and found a hole in the net that seemed to have surrounded me. I got off. A cruple of days later I told her. “Good luck for you,” she said. “But there is going to be no hole in the net for me.” x There wasn’t. She had Man’s Curse. I went back later and saw her. She said: “Barrie came in to see me an hour ago. He looks frightfully ill.” (He died two days later). She paused for a while. Then she smiled with all the courage of life on her face. “I know everything,” she said. “And I’m going back to Dorset. I shall have some lovely weeks in Dorset. . . Dorset is wonderful in June.” How often had I heard T.H. say that. She went back to Dorset for the last peace of a Dorset summer.