Mark Bostridge
'ECSTATIC WALKER'
Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas
By Matthew Hollis (Faber & Faber 389pp £20)
Edward Thomas: Prose Writings, A Selected Edition. Volume I: Autobiographies
Edited by Guy Cuthbertson (Oxford University Press 400pp £85)
 |
Edward Thomas was already thirty-six years old when he started writing poetry at the end of 1914. Prior to this he had scraped a living from ill-paid commissions as a reviewer and as a writer of a wide assortment of prose works. In the decade and a half after he graduated from Oxford in 1900, Thomas produced twenty prose books, editing or writing introductions to twelve more, together with roughly 1,500 signed book reviews and over seventy articles. In The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans, one of the autobiographical works included in Oxford's new edition of his prose writings, Thomas portrays himself as Mr Torrance, 'a doomed hack' who is forced to survive by writing 'hasty compilations, ill-arranged, inaccurate, and incomplete, and swollen to a ridiculous size for the sake of gain'.
Thomas won a reputation as an important critic - Walter de la Mare said that he must have been 'a critic of rhymes in his nursery' - but it came at a massive cost to his mental well-being and self-respect. While still at university Thomas had married Helen Noble, who was pregnant with their son. They had a boy and two girls in all, but their marriage was increasingly overshadowed by Thomas's despair at making a living as a writer, and by his fear that he would never find a literary form that suited him or produce work worthy of his talents. His 'accursed tempers and moodiness' were at times frightening in their ferocity, and utterly bewildering to Helen. In 1908 Thomas considered suicide, striding out of their Hampshire home one day with a revolver in his pocket. In 1912 he was treated by Godwin Baynes, a pioneer of psychoanalysis who later studied under Jung. Baynes achieved some limited success: he encouraged Thomas in a process of self-interrogation, providing a spur for Thomas's experiments in autobiography in which he looked back on his childhood in the still rural, undeveloped areas of south London.
It was at this point in his life that Thomas encountered the American poet Robert Frost, who would perhaps do more than anyone else to persuade him to strike out on a new path. Matthew Hollis's book is the story of the making of Thomas as a poet, and of the friendship between Thomas and Frost which was forged through poetry. Frost, whose North of Boston had just been published, was, like Thomas, seeking a fresh start. Homesick 'in this English mud', Frost discovered in Thomas a man of like mind, possessed of a similar conviction that the poetry for a new age should employ the natural cadences of ordinary speech.
A poet himself, Hollis writes, as one might expect, with great sensitivity and understanding of the creative process that led to Thomas attempting his first poem, 'Up in the Wind', in late 1914. He also describes beautifully, and with a true knowledge of the ground underfoot that can only come from personal experience, the landscapes of Gloucestershire and Herefordshire that provided the backdrop for the long walks shared by Thomas and Frost. As R G Thomas, editor of Thomas's Collected Poems, once said, Edward Thomas was an 'ecstatic walker', and the opening of The Icknield Way, one of Thomas's final prose works before he turned to poetry, reminds us that Thomas's true subject was not the departure nor the arrival, nor the journey itself, but the road, 'the rough, tussocky sheaf of cartways'. According to Guy Cuthbertson's introduction to the Prose Writings, E M Forster may have had Edward Thomas in mind when he portrayed Leonard Bast in Howards End. Like Thomas in his own book The Heart of England, Bast escapes from London at dead of night, walking out into the countryside on its western fringes.
Working to a large extent from primary sources - one major regret for Thomas studies is that there is no single published collection of all his known correspondence - Hollis has recreated a Thomas who is more complex, less easily knowable, and much less homogenised than the character well-known from the memoirs produced as a form of therapy by Helen Thomas after her husband's death, and by Eleanor Farjeon, Thomas's infatuated friend. Indeed one feels the absence of these two women from large portions of Hollis's account, indirect testimony to Thomas's long absences from home for months at a time during these final years.
Hollis's attempts to provide historical context for Thomas's decision to enlist and then volunteer for wartime service in France are occasionally betrayed by factual inaccuracies or misunderstandings. In one significant respect he offers good reason for reconsidering the genesis of Thomas's sequence of love poems in the winter of 1916. Were poems like the untitled 'No one so much as you/Loves this my clay', and 'Celandine', long thought to have been addressed respectively to Helen Thomas and to the poet's mother, in fact a product of Thomas's dalliance with the artist Edna Clarke Hall? Hollis's probing into their relationship is necessarily hedged by doubt and circumstantial evidence, but what he suggests here is intriguing and possesses the ring of plausibility.
It could be argued that Frost's influence over Thomas's gestation as a poet has been overstated. 'All he ever got from me', Frost admitted years afterwards, 'was admiration for the poet in him before he had written a line of poetry.' After all, Frost's advice essentially amounted to no more than what Thomas's other friends had been saying for years. But the enormous strength of Hollis's study is the way in which it portrays the different influences that suddenly converged to produce a great poet. Chief among these, of course, was the war. It's extraordinary to reflect that forty years ago, when Faber's last critical biography of Thomas, by William Cooke, was published, it was still possible to lament the absence of Thomas from anthologies of First World War poetry. As a war poet, Thomas was virtually ignored. Today the situation is reversed. However oblique and subtle it may have appeared to contemporaries, Thomas was writing war poetry before he reached the trenches, born out of his emotional connection with the English landscape and his overwhelming desire to protect it.
By the end of 1916, three months before he embarked for France, Thomas had written sixty-four poems, most of which he deemed worthy of publication. He was killed by the blast of a shell on 9 April 1917, during the first hour of the Arras offensive. He did not live to see his first collection of poetry in print; it was published six months after his death. Since then Edward Thomas's poetry has grown in stature with each succeeding generation. 'His poetry is so very brave - so unconsciously brave', said Frost. 'He didn't think of it for a moment as war poetry, though that is what it is. It ought to be called Roads to France.'
Exclusive from the Literary Review print edition. Subscribe now!
Mark Bostridge's most recent book is Florence Nightingale (Penguin). He is writing a study of England in 1914.