Book Review: The Phantom of Thomas Hardy (Floyd Skloot)Reviewed by Michael NorthenAt the very beginning of his most recent book, The Phantom of Thomas Hardy, Floyd Skloot writes "after four memoirs in which I never got to make anything up, writing this fictional memoir was something else entirely, which was the point." Skloot is the author of numerous books of poetry, short stories, and essays, the most well known of which is In the Shadow of Memory. In that collection of essays Skloot recounts the 1988 virus attack on his brain, which left his mind, in the author's words, like Swiss cheese, and describes the process of trying to recover his past through writing about it. Since the writing of In the Shadow of Memory over a decade ago, a number of poets and essayists who have brought a disabilities perspective to their work have turned their attention to writing novels. Because fictional characters with disabilities have for so long been relegated to the sidelines or made into symbols, the most common technique of these writers has been to place a person with a disability in the role of protagonist, demonstrating that a life with a disability can be one that is interesting and worth writing about. It is a natural step, but it also brings with it the inherent problems of working around a narrative arch that ends in cure, overcoming or epiphany. In the Phantom of Thomas Hardy, Skloot has taken a different tack. He has made the ostensible subject of the novel an able-bodied person, but told it through the eyes of someone who lives with disability, endowing it with a true disabilities perspective. It is not a new technique (Benjy Compton in The Sound and the Fury comes to mind), but it is rare that the actual author of the book has a disability himself. It is an opportunity for a novelist to explore what disability can contribute to the process of writing and meaning-making itself. Knowing it unlikely that anyone who picks up the book would not have some passing knowledge of who Thomas Hardy is, Skloot has set up an interesting combination of elements for his story. It combines literary biography, with the supernatural and a hinted at mystery. The book is indeed a mystery, but rather than a whodunit, it seeks something with a much more tenuous answer. The outline of The Phantom of Thomas Hardy is deceptively simple. Skloot and his wife Beverly, are in England on a sort of haj to the sites where Hardy lived or that appear in his writing. At one of the first sites where he stops, Skloot briefly sees a figure that he recognizes from a picture as Hardy and hears a voice saying, "Something I missed." It is the first of several such Visitations. Throughout the remainder of the book, the two travelers move from one literary pilgrimage site to another in an attempt to interpret Hardy's words and uncover just what it was he missed. One of the pleasures of the book, particularly for Hardy aficionados is simply visualizing the course of travel that Skloot and his wife take. The starting point is a bank on 10 South Street in Dorchester where the Mayor of Casterbridge from Hardy's novel is reputed to have lived. From that point Skloot lays out his planned agenda: We planned to go to Hardy's birthplace at Bockhampton next, then over the final two days of our travels we would visit his home at Max Gate, the gravesite at Stinsford Churchyard where his heart is buried, and the landscape of the region he called Wessex. Along the way, those interested in Hardy specifically or even literary jeopardy answers in general will find humorous and informative bits of information such as how Max Gate got its name: He named it Max Gate in tribute to Henry Mack, who'd once managed a toll gate nearby. Mack's Gate became Max Gate, which acknowledged Mack but, by removing the apostrophe, clarified that he was not the owner of the place, a simultaneous and typically Hardyean not to tradition and change in one gesture. No particular knowledge of literature is needed however to have one's interest piqued by the anecdote that despite the story that Hardy's heart was cut from his body and buried at Stintsford Churchyard, his heart was actually eaten by a cat prior to burial and it is the cat that is buried at that site. The factual literary tour is one level of the novel, but there is a second one prompted by the statement Skloot heard during his visitation from Hardy, "something I missed." This statement works on the narrator's mind. Stopping at local shop called Tea for Tess, the couple are told that Hardy supposedly had a love affair with his teenage cousin Tryphenia, only to break it off and say nothing more about her until her death, when he wrote about her in his poems. This sets the fictional Skloot to thinking that despite Hardy's apparent womanizing and his disinterested treatment of the women he married, that what he missed in his life – what he possibly was incapable of – was love. Skloot's efforts to find some kind of evidence for this in the succeeding places that he visits drives the mystery aspect of the novel. As engaging as these two narratives – the literary tour and the attempts to solve the mystery of Hardy's words – are for writers interested in the intersection of disability and literature, perhaps the most compelling aspect of the book is the way Skloot's own disability is incorporated into the tale. While Skloot claims at the outset that the characters in the story are not real people, readers of Skloot's previous work will know immediately that most of what he says about himself is, in fact, autobiographical. From the beginning, the separation of fact from fantasy and just what constitutes fiction is a major theme of the book. Skloot informs the reader at the onset that he has experienced neurological damage, saying "What I am is a man with post-viral encephalopathy, a man with brain lesions. Patchily rewired and glitchy." He frequently experiences what he calls Visitations. These are people, now dead, who appear to him for a few moments, usually uttering an enigmatic sentence and then disappearing. They are not dreams, since he is wide awake with these incidents occur, but he wonders how much of these visitations are real and how much a product of his own mind. The reader will be kept wondering to what extent these experiences belong to Skloot the author and to what extent they belong to Skloot, the novel's protagonist whose encounter with Hardy jump starts book's narrative. For Skloot, the reconstruction of memory is always problematic. It is not just a case of his being unable to recall details or of his saying "fast the smooth" when he meant "pass the butter." It also involves false memories. At times, words that he has written as a piece of fiction subconsciously jump the border and become part of memories of real events. At other times, a phrase that he has read makes an appearance as a real life experience without his knowledge of the source. Working with such gapped memory and speech poses challenges for a writer. Skloot says of his own process: To compose my work I learned to write fragments of thoughts on notepads or Post-its or index cards without worrying about errors and incorrect words, gather them in folders color-coded by topic or character or place, and go back over them later to see how they fit together…in a sense, my writing process embraces the gapped nature of my memory process, leaping spaces that represent all I've lost and establishing fresh patterns within all that remains. It is not the classic portrait of a writer who sets out large blocks of time each day and adds to his manuscript workerly-like. Nor is it the vision of the writer who uncorks his imagination and lets it flow out onto the page. In truth, though, it may be closer to the way that most writers experience composition. It also helps Skloot to understand Hardy better, as he concludes, "This elevated, fevered writer in the grip of inspiration, this scrawler on dead leaves and wood chips and stone was not the coolly withdrawn, calculating, self-controlled maker of carefully crafted fiction and poetry that the conventional Hardy image had established." And somewhat later, adds "It's Hardy's struggle to speak, that matters. To say what he's trying to say. Not the accomplishment, but the struggle." He is speaking not just of Hardy, of course, but of most who write – especially those who have traditionally been marginalized, like people with disabilities. The Phantom of Thomas Hardy appeals on many levels. It is a soft mystery that wanders into the realms of philosophy, science and the occult. It has the detailed feel of a travelogue. And it is a must for literary junkies. Most important of all, though, it adds depth and texture to the evolving field of disabilities fiction. Like most well written books, upon finishing it, the reader will put it down, reflect for a while, then want to begin over, thinking, "Something I missed."
Title: The Phantom of Thomas Hardy
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