My mother made the introduction. A standard black London cab deposited us at Freddie’s flat in Mayfair. Having since read his autobiography, I know now that the flat was a duplex at 2 Whitehorse Street. I remember a messy room with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and papers strewn about. Freddie, who seemed very buoyant and animated, spoke to me in a direct and friendly manner. I didn’t mind when my mother left me with him and he and I then went out from the flat to catch a London double-decker bus—we sat on the top level—to get to the bookstore, which must have been Blackwell’s in the Strand. I embraced the adventure—so welcome an alternative to all that riding in limousines and taxis with my mother. Inside the store Freddie stood with me against a long shelf of books, jiggling the watch chain attached to the vest of his dark three-piece suit (I would come to know this as his habitual attire) and discussing our choices for the purchase in his fast-talking, somewhat staccato way. I can’t remember how he conducted the process of elimination—surely he must have asked questions about books I had read and liked. At that point I had no experience of Hardy. I left the store with a hard-backed copy of Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
The book had a royal blue binding, and I kept it long after it had somehow got waterlogged and warped, even though I had no idea Freddie was my father. I read it back in California, lying with it on my bed in the still, heavy air of late summer. My material inheritance from my father is so slight, and I have so few memories of him, even though we did spend time together, that it seems like the preserving of a precious relic to be able to evoke, over fifty years later, that book’s blue binding as well as the typeface of the letters and the map of Wessex, which I have since learned was Hardy’s own sketch, that served as frontispiece, showing all the towns and valleys and rivers of an apocryphal southwest English universe. On that map I could trace Tess’s sorrowful history in terms of its place markers: the Vale of Blackmore, where as a maiden of sixteen she misses dancing with passerby Angel Clare; Trantridge, where she goes to claim kin with her seeming d’Urbervilles relations and whistles to Mrs. d’Urberville’s parakeets; the Chase forest, where, sleeping, she is raped by the roué Alec d’Urberville; Talbothays Dairy in the Valley of the Froms, where she reencounters Angel and they fall in love in the dreamlike fertile landscape; the desolate Chawk Newton, where, abandoned by Angel, she works digging turnips; the fashionable seaside resort of Sandborne, where Alec, to whom she has again succumbed, though only in body, has taken her and where she murders him; and, finally, to primordial Stonehenge, where at the end of the few idyllic days with Angel—at least Tess and the reader are given these—she is apprehended.
Meanwhile, Freddie Ayer wrote me letters in his minuscule script, and I took this as a matter of course. We were both intellectuals, he a famous philosopher and I an eleven-year-old straight-A student. Yet intellect now fails me, or at least fails to suffice, as I wonder about Freddie’s selection of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. What might my father have been thinking in handing a child of my age, who was, furthermore, his secret daughter, this story of seduction, betrayal, and illegitimate birth? A friend has suggested the motive of linking me more closely to England, since the novel is so deeply rooted in English soil. The theory seems plausible, yet I hesitate to embrace it. Freddie, for all his lucidity as a logician, remains opaque to me. I want his selection to have had meaning for him, but perhaps it didn’t.
As for what Tess has meant to me, of all Hardy’s novels it’s the one I am today at once most moved by and find almost unbearable to reread. Tess is not an orphan, but in a sense she is orphaned by the universe. Any place or person to belong to, any happiness, and, ultimately, life are taken from her. She is doomed, moreover, from the moment we first see her at the country dance, the only girl with a pink, not a white ribbon in her hair, a sign of her lush, innocent sexuality, a portent of the red blood later to be spilled. Or perhaps she is doomed even before that, from the opening pages when feckless John Durbeyfield learns of his ancestry. His is a family in decline. Rural England is in decline. God is dead or doubtful, and nothing has yet replaced belief —it is in this novel, not Jude the Obscure, that Hardy coins the phrase the “ache of modernism,” using it to describe the unsettling effects of Tess’s standard sixth-form education. But beyond modernism—Hardy tends to have multiple causes of misery—the universe is inexorable. “We live on a blighted planet,” Tess tells her little brother Abraham. Tess will be hounded like the murdered pheasants she sleeps next to in the fields, on her way to join her friend Marian at Chalk Newton. Of course, the family horse dies and she has to claim kin with the false Stokes-d’Urbervilles. Of course, Alec traps her and rapes her while she’s sleeping. Inexorably, the note she writes for Angel gets hidden under the carpet, and then Angel lacks sufficient freedom from convention to pardon her “transgression.” And of course, the farmer she works for at Chalk Newton is the very man who has a grudge against her, whom Angel has fought with. And when she leaves her dirty boots by the roadside as
