Into a Maelstrom of Fire on Having a Feeling for Thomas Hardy

Dr. Robert Russell's high-pitched voice tells me the same thing it told me thirty-eight years ago: "Thomas Hardy is not a good writer." Knowing what comes next, I nod, though he can't see me. "But he is a great writer."

I have Dr. Russell on speakerphone so I can keep both hands free to take notes, and I feel myself transformed back into the college senior listening to his mentor. I smell his pipe. I observe the ashes that fleck his clothing, the papers scattered around his desk, the long keys and bars of his Braille typewriter. His hair flares wildly on the sides where it's white and rises to a neat black mound on top, like Egdon Heath in winter. Brows twitch, smile widens, hands settle after brief flight. Then he rocks back in his chair and folds his hands behind his head, elbows jutting and fluttering. Only his closed eyes seem still.

"It's Hardy's struggle to speak, that's what matters. To say what he's trying to say. Not the accomplishment, but the struggle."

As our conversation proceeds, I find it more and more difficult to call him Bob. We'd settled that matter a decade ago, during one of my return visits to the Franklin and Marshall College campus in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to deliver a reading. It's been Floyd and Bob ever since, but we're talking about Hardy now, and even as I sit in my room 2,350 miles away from him, in the fall of 2006, it feels very much like the fall of 1968.

That was when I began my senior honors project on the novels of Hardy, under Dr. Russell's supervision. Since my freshman year I had worked as his reader, assigned to him as part of my financial-aid package. I read student papers aloud as well as personal correspondence, memos, magazine articles. I dictated passages from poems or articles as he typed them in Braille, pacing my words to match his strokes. In 1967 I read from the galleys of his own novel, An Act of Loving, and passages from The Man in the Glass Booth, a novel by his wife's brother, the actor Robert Shaw, which would soon open as a play on Broadway. I also read books onto tape for him, in those days before audio books were widely available, differentiating voices for The Sound and the Fury, losing my way in the dreamland of Steppenwolf. A specialist in Victorian literature, Dr. Russell assigned me to record all seventy-four pages of Robert Browning's poems from the Major Authors edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, a task that took four weeks to get right. He then assigned me the hundred pages of Tennyson, and I imagine even now that I'm still recording them. I spent so much time in the English department's offices, being in close contact with him daily, that it wasn't surprising I became an English major. When I took Major British Writers or Introduction to Drama from him while also working for him, we were sometimes together six hours a day.

As my junior year was ending, he said that during the summer I should think about a topic for my senior honors project. He'd be happy to supervise me. I wanted to work with him as well, though that narrowed my options primarily to Victorian writers. So in the fall of 1968, having done little more about the matter than glance through an anthology of Victorian literature, I sat in his office just before classes began and said what I thought he wanted to hear: "Browning," thinking Oh no, not ten months of Browning! Dr. Russell's brows twitched, a language I knew how to read, so I said, "or maybe Arnold." He rocked back and flapped his wings. "Not Tennyson," I said.

"How about Thomas Hardy?"

I'd studied a few of Hardy's gloomy poems in Dr. Russell's class and seen the...