Odd this day
Today is the 97th anniversary of the late Thomas Hardy’s heart being cut out so it could be buried in Dorset. Unfortunately, it was promptly eaten by a local cat. Or, at least, that’s the legend…
This is one of those stories that’s been much told, and thus has… a few different versions. One of the most succinct comes in Jeremy Beadle’s (not entirely reliable) Today’s The Day! published in 1979. The basics are that Hardy had died two days earlier, and had said he wanted to be buried in the churchyard at Stinsford, which had been the model for ‘Mellstock’ in Under the Greenwood Tree. However,
the nation … wanted to honour him with a burial in Westminster Abbey
…so a compromise was reached: local surgeon Dr Nash-Wortham would hack out the late writer’s cardiac muscle, which would go in the local churchyard, the rest of him would be cremated, and the ashes would be “duly placed with full pomp and ceremony in Poets’ Corner”.
Things, of course, did not go according to plan.
Another version, recounted in the Independent in 1996, is less feline-friendly:
The author of that piece, Andrew Brown, says
The story would no doubt have pleased Hardy, not because he would have approved of it, but because the slaughter of a creature for obeying its nature in order to gratify human sentimentality would have fitted well with the grammar of his heart. It showed humans obeying the dictates of their nature just as surely as the cat obeyed its.
…which may be true. (To me, an ignoramus, it seems unlikely that Thomas ‘barrel of laughs’ Hardy, author of such light comic fiction as The Mayor of Casterbridge (wife-selling, alcoholism, disgrace), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (seduction, murder, execution) and Jude the Obscure (seduction, double child murder, suicide, thwarted ambition, misery, death) would have had sufficient grasp of humour to see the amusing side of a cat eating a human heart, but I suppose he might have used it in another of his HILARIOUS novels. I digress.)
The cat story also appeared in a long and detailed (which sometimes indicates plausibility, but not necessarily) article by one Frank Smyth in the Wessex Journal in 1996. His impeccable source, apparently, was
Betty Allsop during Sunday lunch in Kensington twenty-odd years ago. Betty’s husband, Kenneth Allsop, the writer and broadcaster [had] died at their home in West Milton some months previously, and the story of Hardy’s heart had been one of his last obsessions, though sadly not one strong enough to override the physical pain which led him eventually to suicide.
Christ almighty. Thanks for keeping it light there, Frank. Mind you, you are writing about Hardy, so maybe it’s fitting. Back to the story, though:
The heart was duly removed, wrapped in a tea-towel and placed in a biscuit tin which was lodged in a meat-safe at Max Gate, Hardy’s home, to await the attention of the undertaker. Unfortunately, when the undertaker arrived he found an open biscuit tin, a slightly soiled and tattered tea-towel and a cat that showed visible signs of having recently taken the best part of Mr Hardy unto himself.
According to Ken’s informant, as relayed to me by Betty, the undertaker’s reaction was commendably swift. He grabbed the cat, wrung its neck, wrapped it and the few grisly remains in the tea-towel and put the bundle into the biscuit tin and firmly closed the lid. “Mr ’Ardy”, he said, probably panting slightly from his exertions, “wanted ’is ’eart buried at Stinsford, and buried at Stinsford Mr ’Ardy’s ’eart shall be.” And so it was, layered like those little Russian dolls successively in cat, biscuit tin and polished elm.
Yes, the detail here seems to include an honest yokel with authentic accent, which is making me… sceptical. To bolster his argument, Wright adds that “an odd incident occurred” when Hardy’s mortal remains were being transported away from his house. Funeral director Charles Hannah apparently walked with the hearse for 200 yards, and then got in and it
accelerated rapidly away before the astonished bearers, who had not known of this arrangement, realised what was happening
…and this, apparently, was conclusive proof that they were concealing something. And yes, why would a hearse move slowly until it was out of sight of the grieving widow, and then start driving faster in order to get back to the funeral parlour and put the kettle on…?
Wright has something else to add, though: “two identical small bronze urns had been prepared”, one for the ashes, and one for the heart. But, on 16 January, at the service in Stinsford,
Instead of the urn, a large, polished wooden box, about the size and shape of a biscuit tin, stood before the altar.
Oh, absolutely. There you are, then. Hmmm. Perhaps Mr Wright should have listened more to the first people he asked about the story after he moved to Dorset, who suggested it was variously
Categorical nonsense … absolute rubbish … a load of old cobblers
…because a somewhat more credible article, this time in the Hardy Society Journal (June 2005), says the cat story
has been passed down mainly through an oral tradition
— which is academic-speak for: this is pure balls. The author, Stephen Pastore, even gives his paper the title The Cat and the Canard. (That may not amuse you, but it’s funnier than Jude the Obscure.)
He also includes a picture of the biscuit tin, which is (a) in his collection, not in any churchyard, and (b) decorated with a picture of a kitten.
Now, I suppose we could go all Flaubert’s Parrot on this and ask whether this really is the biscuit tin in question, or whether it’s possible that the cat was taken out of the tin and then put in a wooden box, but we have already been at this a while, have we not? And anyway, it’s been authenticated with a note written by Hardy’s gardener, which reads:
This is the tin used to hold Mr. Hardy’s heart after it was removed from his body while a proper box was made. Mrs Hardy instructed that I burn it. As it was metal, I did not and kept it. She never inquired of it as she was in dismay after Mr. Hardy’s death.
Quite apart from anything else, the tin is too small to cram a cat into, and the detail about the meat safe is also inaccurate, apparently. Basically, too many details in the various versions are too silly and inconsistent for any of them to be credible. We also know cats don’t have opposable thumbs (because the world hasn’t ended), and
[the] lid fits snugly and firmly (far too snugly for even the most ravenous and dextrous feline to open)
Plus, village cats weren’t allowed in the house. The only other likely culprit, Hardy’s own cat Cobweb, outlived her master for some time (i.e. didn’t have her neck wrung during or just after a partial dissection of her erstwhile master).
By far the most likely story is that Hardy’s heart was in the tin temporarily, went in urn and/or box as planned, and ended up in Stinsford churchyard.
Pastore reckons the picture on the biscuit tin is a clue, and that perhaps someone who later heard the container being described conflated some of the details or got them confused.
It would not be much of a stretch for “It was placed in a tin with cats on it” to evolve by telling and re-telling into “It was placed in a tin that the cat got into.”
…to which I would add: especially if a few of those tellings and re-tellings occurred in West Country pubs. Which is a pity, because the legend is marvellous — and (for my money) a great deal more entertaining than Far From the Madding bloody Crowd.
Other literary criticism is available.
