Friday December 15, 2006

Sir, – Robert Alan Frizzell kindly let me see the article printed in last week's TLS when I was in the late stages of preparing my book on Hardy for press. Some time before, he had written to me suggesting that the cause of Emma Hardy's death was not "heart failure and impacted gallstones" but an aortic aneurysm - which I mention in my book, and thank him for. At that stage there was no reference to syphilis. I found his later diagnosis, that both Hardys had the disease, fascinating, but I was and I remain sceptical of his arguments.

Some people thought Emma was mad in her later years, and she was certainly eccentric. Yet she produced her clear and well-written Some Recollections in the last months of her life, and continued to visit friends and organize children's parties -behaviour that would surely have been unthinkable in one suffering from the tertiary stage of syphilis. The fact that there were other members of her family who showed signs of mental instability rather suggests that her eccentricities were part of a family pattern, and Hardy's poem "The Interloper" may be read in this context.

Dr Frizzell is wrong in saying that Emma withdrew all favour from Hardy in 1891. In that year, for instance, she actually offered him a suggestion for Tess, which he incorporated into the novel. They went together to Aldeburgh, and on holiday to Scotland. In letters she was still "My dearest Em". As late as 1896 she taught him to ride a bicycle and they enjoyed bicycle trips together. In the same year they took prolonged holidays together in England and abroad, and while they were in Dover read Arnold's "Dover Beach", Hardy marking the month and their initials.

This hardly suggests a complete withdrawal by Emma. The next year they visited Switzerland and made a bicycle tour to Wells, Longleat and Salisbury together. And while the publication of Jude did upset Emma and cause bitterness between them, as late as 1903 they were both reading Henry James's The Wings of the Dove and discussing the fates of the characters.

I suspect it is impossible to know for certain whether Dr Frizzell's posthumous diagnosis is correct. My feeling, based purely on what I know of the Hardys, is that it is not.

CLAIRE TOMALIN,
c/o David Godwin Associates,
55 Monmouth Street,
London WC2.

Friday December 22, 2006

Sir, – Since Robert Alan Frizzell quotes from my biography of Thomas Hardy in the course of his "Emma Lavinia Hardy: A retrospective diagnosis" (Commentary, December 8), I feel obliged to dissociate myself absolutely from the argument there presented.

Dr Frizzell starts out from his conclusion -a personal second-guessing of a long-ago diagnosis for which no examination records survive -and then works determinedly backwards in an attempt to justify that conclusion. In the process Hardy poems are assigned arbitrary time frames, meanings and subjects, fantastical biographical occasions (e.g. Emma's going to London alone to consult a specialist) are invented, and whatever runs contrary to the central thesis (e.g. Emma's evident eccentricity even at the time of her marriage) is simply ignored. The argument, in short, remains entirely speculative and unsupported, pointing to no conclusion other than that Emma's death at the age of seventy-two could well have had a variety of contributory causes.

MICHAEL MILLGATE,
1 Balmoral Avenue,
Apartment 809,
Toronto.

Sir, – Like other correspondents I'm sceptical about Robert Alan Frizzell's suggestion that Emma Hardy suffered from syphilis. It does not fit with either her symptoms or the story of her married life with Hardy. Tony Fincham, another medical professional, has written an acute analysis of Emma's medical history, concluding that she probably did suffer from an inherited and progressive mental illness (specifically a schizoid personality disorder) and that this was made worse by the painkillers she used, which consisted of alcohol and opium in large doses. Much (though not all) of Emma's odd behaviour derives therefore from accidental drug abuse, rather than madness or disease. Fincham's work will be published in the next number of the Thomas Hardy Journal. I was sorry not to see it while working on my biography.

RALPH PITE,
33 Ashfield Road,
Liverpool.

Sir, - Claire Tomalin suggests (Letters, December 15) that there is now no means of establishing whether my diagnosis of syphilis as the cause of Emma Hardy's death is correct. I suspect that any corroborative evidence that might once have existed was destroyed either in 1912-13, or after Hardy's own death in 1928. But I stand by my view that an understanding of Emma's death can be pieced together from what is known about her last years and days, and from an interpretation of her husband's poetry. In "The Interloper" Hardy seems to see the prospect of her demise as a consummation to be desired. In "A Procession of Dead Days" he looks back, through his grief, at her death, and sees it as in some ways a blessing. (Surely no one will question the autobiographical character of these particular poems.) This is in part what I sought to explain, and if there is a better explanation, I would be very interested to hear it. As for the complexities of the marriage relationship, in which affection might wax and wane, I have myself been married for only forty-one years, so I do not yet feel qualified to comment.

I stated in my article (Commentary, December 8) that Emma may well have had incipient General Paralysis of the Insane, in addition to Tabes Dorsalis and syphilitic aortitis, and I entirely agree that there was nothing in Michael Millgate's biography of Hardy nor in any other I have read to indicate dementia or paralysis during her later years -eccentricity, certainly, delusions, probably. I propose that the more dramatic aspects of GPI were expected subsequently, had she been spared in 1912, and that Hardy had been apprised of this and envisaged for her a fate worse than death. Certainly, it is every way likely that venereologists and neurologists would have had in those times a much better feel for this disease than their current equivalents, simply because it was much commoner then, and they would have been alert to the nuances of a shift from one phase of it to another.

Tertiary syphilis is rarely seen in Britain today. Of course, medical opinions - such as those Thomas Stuttaford expressed in last Friday's Times (December 15) -may also differ as to the cause of Emma's symptoms and eventual death. I am surprised that Dr Stuttaford (who I assume is referring to my article, though he does not mention it) is "even sorrier . . . " that I have advanced the idea of syphilis. This implies that he imputes a stigma to a diagnosis, or even a suggestion, of an STD. My own attitude to these conditions, and to other "social" diseases like alcoholism or drug addiction, is "There but for the grace of God . . . ". He says that Emma suffered abdominal pain in her final illness. The biographical sources (Michael Millgate, Martin Seymour Smith, Ralph Pite and Claire Tomalin) all describe back pain, pointing to a retroperitoneal problem. The level of the back pain is not given -it could have been dorsal, indicating a thoracic aneurysm, as her angina also pointed up. Only Thomas Hardy himself makes mention of "indigestion" and, as I explained in my article, I do not necessarily consider him to be a reliable source in this context. Dr Stuttaford mentions the "golden rule" of venereology, but does not advise me how I might get access to Emma's serology, which I am sure would have been performed at the time. And he has offered me a professional insult, by implying that I suggested that Emma was taking an opiate for relief of the pain of Charcot's Joint, which both he and I and any attentive medical student know to be painless. My suggestion was that she took it for relief from the lightning pains of Tabes Dorsalis, which I do not doubt he would think appropriate therapy at that time. Finally, he mentions certain aspects of tertiary syphilis (penetrating ulcers etc) which Emma did not have. I think that what she did have is quite enough to arouse the suspicions of any working doctor to a possible diagnosis of specific disease.

ROBERT ALAN FRIZZELL,
Garden House,
West Road,
Ovingham,
Prudhoe,
Northumberland.

Friday January 05, 2007

Sir, – I write as a former Chairman of the Thomas Hardy Society, and I am, by chance, a retired medical practitioner. I had never heard a whisper of the rumour that Hardy had infected his first wife with syphilis before reading the many conjectures in the TLS (December 8, 2006) under the name of Robert Alan Frizzell.

Emma Hardy was known to be emotionally unstable, and she and her husband were not the close, loving companions of their "happiest days" thirty-five years before, in Sturminster Newton, when Hardy wrote The Return of the Native. But to accuse Hardy of having syphilis, and passing it to Emma, is outrageous. There is no evidence to support it. Hardy lived to be eighty-seven, and his second wife was healthy. Hardy "had a weakness for pretty young women". So do most men. I have seen no evidence that Hardy misbehaved with any of them.

You would expect me, with my credentials, to be upset at Dr Frizzell's assertions, based on wild speculations. I will not be the only one.

GEOFFREY TAPPER,
The Mount,
Salisbury Road,
Shaftesbury.

Friday January 12, 2007

Sir, -There is one point which has been surprisingly overlooked in the case against Robert Alan Frizzell's argument that Emma Hardy died from the syphilis which she had acquired from her husband (Commentary, December 8, 2006). Fifteen months after Emma's death in 1912, Hardy married Florence Emily Dugdale. Despite his age he was seventy-three at the time of his second marriage -he appears to have enjoyed sexual relations with his second wife, at least in the early years of their marriage and possibly into extreme old age. So much one might deduce from Florence's remark, in a letter of 1923 to Marie Stopes, that Hardy had said "that he would have welcomed a child when we married first, ten years ago", from her receiving advice from Stopes about some sort of contraceptive device, an alkaline douche, and from Hardy's own reported boast to Edmund Blunden that he had remained capable of sexual intercourse to the age of eighty-four (Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy, ed. Millgate, pp203-04; Millgate, Thomas Hardy, pp354, 496). Michael Millgate has expressed scepticism about some of this evidence, but taken together it surely points to a normal sexual relationship between husband and wife, if only perhaps an intermittent one.

Though Hardy lacked something in the way of human kindness in his later years, it is impossible to believe that he would have risked infecting his second wife with syphilis if, as Dr Frizzell asserts, he was aware that he had so dealt with his first wife and had been stricken with guilt and remorse as a consequence.

JOHN MADDICOTT,
9 Spindlers,
Kidlington,
Oxford.

Friday January 19, 2007

Sir, - While I remain unconvinced by Robert Alan Frizzell's argument that Thomas and Emma Hardy were syphilitic and that Emma died from the disease (Commentary, December 8, 2006), the idea cannot be completely dismissed. In the standard contemporary medical textbook, The Principles and Practice of Medicine, Sir William Osler remarked that there were "probably more families with a syphilitic member than a consumptive". It was clearly an endemic disease by any measurement. Lord Randolph Churchill was an almost certain carrier; Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker may have died with it.

Wasserman's test for positively determining the presence of syphilis was not introduced until 1906; Ehrlich's arsenical Salvarsan treatment was not released to the English public until 1910, only two years before Emma Hardy's death. If Thomas Hardy had been a carrier himself, he could have been completely cured before his marriage to Florence Dugdale in February 1914. Hardy's hypochondria in his later life, despite his generally excellent health, can provide no evidence for or against Frizzell's theories.

In the absence of concrete medical evidence, we will never know if the Hardys were syphilitic carriers. However, the medical motifs Dr Frizzell detects in Hardy's poetry, though perhaps unlikely, cannot be dismissed out of hand.

HENRY MERRITT,
19 Thomas Hardy Drive,
Shaftesbury.

Sir, -I note John Maddicott's concerns about the risks of Thomas Hardy infecting Florence, his second wife, with syphilis, assuming my theory to hold water (Letters, January 12). It was not overlooked by me, and the answer is there, in the text of my original piece, but I am sorry if the point was not made sufficiently clear. There would in fact have been no risk to her, even had Hardy at the time of his second marriage been unlucky enough to have fallen into the category (say, 40 per cent) of those infected earlier whose disease would later recur, which I propose he did not. "And the blows were three / That time ensured / On her, which she dumbly endured; / And one on me . . .". Had he contracted the primary disease in 1891, even if it progressed to the secondary stage some weeks later, it would have ceased to be infectious at the end of the secondary stage, only two or three months after he had first met it. Even if he had suffered infectious relapses, as 20 per cent of sufferers did, for up to four years, he could not have passed it on after c1895, and his doctor would have known that, and informed him of it.

As I intimated in my article, Thomas Hardy would, if I am right, have spent the rest of his days worrying whether he might fall victim to tertiary disease, and no doctor could have given him absolute reassurance that this would not happen; but even had this occurred it would not have been in general terms communicable, and the risk of passing it on to his second wife infinitesimally small.

ROBERT ALAN FRIZZELL,
Garden House,
West Road,
Ovingham,
Prudhoe,
Northumberland.

Friday January 26, 2007

Sir, - Emma Hardy's illness -if illness it was, and not a drift into ever greater awkwardness and disagreeableness of personality -was not syphilis (see Letters, most recently, January 19). The psychic effects of late syphilis befall a sufferer with devastating abruptness, ripening to deadsome fruition over the course of a few days. There is nothing left of the man or woman, as we knew them. Prompt, indeed immediate treatment "can make the difference between the Chairman's return to work as Chairman, or as a tea-boy" (Dr James Flucker, my former Chief at the Charing Cross Hospital, who had seen and treated thousands of such patients, and partaken in the therapeutic transition from the barbarity of mercury to today's penicillin).

Decapitation of personality and decimation of reason by late syphilis may be preceded by a spell of hyper-lucid, febrile creative activity. Nietzsche wrote his Will to Power in (even for him) the briefest of spans, before his famous embrace of a horse in the street, heralding his admission into an asylum.

Syphilis today presents an easy therapeutic challenge: a course of pills or injections, lasting at most three weeks. My father, an experienced physician who trained in France in the 1930s, was wont to say that if a medical student had thoroughly mastered the two capital infections he'd (professionally) encounter, syphilis and TB, he was unlikely to fail his Final Examinations.

GEORGES S. KAYE,
2 Pennant Mews,
London W8.