Friday 16 October 2015

Frost in the shade

Frost in the shade

Edward Thomas, 1916

Book Details

Jean Moorcroft Wilson

EDWARD THOMAS

From Adlestrop to Arras
496pp. Bloomsbury. £25 (US $42).
978 1 4081 8713 5

Edward Thomas's journey towards poetry

JOHN GREENING

This is the first full biography of Edward Thomas since R. George Thomas's (1985) and, significantly, the first written without the guiding hands of his widow, Helen, and children. The poet's final years have been well documented, not least by Eleanor Farjeon, and they are really the most interesting period of his life. It was not until the start of the First World War that this respected reviewer and writer on travel and nature turned his hand to poetry. He had written about it often enough (in 1917 the TLS considered him "the man with the keys to the Paradise of English Poetry"), but conversations with Robert Frost led him to see what could be chipped from the mass of prose he had written. All this has been gone over many times and it makes a gripping story, as Matthew Hollis's Now All Roads Lead to France (2011) reminded us. A poet himself, Hollis had an instinct for the creative process and for Thomas's importance to today's poets, but he also highlighted less familiar details: the obsessive attachments to younger women, the anxiety to show he was not a coward after failing to help Frost confront a gamekeeper.

Jean Moorcroft Wilson also covers some of this, but she questions familiar assumptions as well: that Thomas was poverty-stricken, that his prose is "hackwork", that he "was a true 'Celt'", that his infatuations were passing fancies and only with women, that he ever really found "serenity and fulfilment" in the army – and that he truly loved his wife. Helen is certainly far less of a presence in this biography, and there is much evidence (some of it new) that her husband fell out of love with her very early on, felt his marriage "encrusting the soul" and was on the point of leaving her as war broke out. Wilson calls it "an unfortunate mismatch of temperaments" and can barely disguise her impatience with Helen, whose memoirs (originally published as fiction) As It Was and World Without End have, she suggests, misled biographers – most strikingly in the case of Thomas's death. It is clear from Wilson's account that his widow either conveniently idealized the way he was killed – on the first day of the battle of Arras, at Easter 1917 – or confused it with an incident the day before, when a blast from a shell knocked him over (which may have been what left the "ripples" in his pocket diary). Helen wrote "there was no wound and his beloved body was not injured". In fact, a letter from his O/C, Major Lushington, to John Moore, "buried for many years in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library", explains that he was "shot clean through the chest by a pip-squeak (a 77 mm shell) the very moment the battle began".

Such "revelations" apart, Wilson's skill lies in synthesizing earlier material, while gently pointing us towards new perspectives or ­quietly suggesting that the evidence does not quite add up. She is very good on the poet's formative years, his relationship with his Swindon grandmother (whose kitchen "could have come straight out of a Welsh village"), his fondness for the countryman "Dad" Uzzell – the model, perhaps, for "Lob" – his increasing coolness towards his actual "Dad" and even his five brothers, about whom he later could not "recall anything distinctly". Noting the "extraordinary writing out of [his eldest brother] Ernest from his childhood", Wilson makes sure we hear stories about their time together – as when a teenage Edward enraged him at bedtime by reciting Keats and Shelley.

The literary tyro knew few girls, but came to meet Helen Noble through her father, a liberated kindred spirit and influential man of letters. Wilson hardly needs to remind us that the encounter was life-changing, that Helen's pregnancy and their hasty clandestine marriage would soon threaten Thomas's Oxford career (he was already suffering from heavy drinking, an addiction to laudanum and a dose of gonorrhoea contracted during celebrations for the Relief of Mafeking). More revealing is her remark that James Ashcroft Noble "did not hesitate to dismiss Edward's attempts at verse as 'a pleasant little twitter'". It would not be poetry that dominated his next decade, but prose, those 1 million words and 1,900 reviews (on average "one review every three days for 14 years") that Thomas is estimated to have written.

If Wilson cannot quite bite her subject "to the core", perhaps no one biographer of Thomas can. The importance of his walking rather eludes her; on the other hand, we do learn that his persistent foot trouble was probably due to the fact that he preferred to walk in cheap football boots. And there are relationships that she covers more fully than anyone else – young Hope Webb, who stirred Thomas to "an extraordinary energy in writing" and is woven secretly into his book The South Country (1906), emerges vividly. Wilson appears to have read an unprecedented amount of the prose and gives us fair warning of The Feminine Influence on the Poets (Thomas called it "a wretched, wretched book"), Windsor Castle, The Isle of Wight, Norse Tales: lukewarm potboilers all. She does her best to interest us in the life of a Grub Street melancholic (although she challenges that characterization), assisted by fascinating photographs of the Thomases' many rented homes and anecdotes about literary friends such as Joseph Conrad, W. H. Davies, W. H. Hudson and Rupert Brooke. Thomas was, she writes, "most relaxed and truly [himself] in male company". But, of course, there is Eleanor Farjeon, "a short, plump, homely woman in glasses", as Wilson describes her, "who fell instantly in love with Edward" and became a "sounding-board" as well as, in effect, a secretary. Some of these friendships turned sour, and Wilson even wonders whether it was the poet Ralph Hodgson snarling at him "You damned pro-German" that finally spurred Thomas to volunteer. He left a message afterwards to "tell Hodgson I've enlisted".

Inevitably, all roads lead to Frost. Wilson raises the stakes by claiming it was "a literary friendship rivalled only by that of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Rimbaud and Verlaine, or [somewhat bathetically] Owen and Sassoon". Yet she has a point, and the myth hardens when we hear what a "miracle of chance" their meeting, in London in 1913, was. She detects similarities between the poets: both were physically attractive, had married early, were prone to depression and had experienced "a repeated sense of defeat". But she understands the differences, the rivalries, adding: "However threatened [Frost] may have felt by Thomas's extraordinarily accomplished start in verse, he rejoiced in it and offered expert, detailed advice at every stage".

Frost was almost forty, Thomas four years younger. The American poet, who settled in England in 1912, had barely been noticed when Thomas hailed the originality of North of Boston (1914), his second volume of poems, calling it "revolutionary". They spent much time walking in Gloucestershire; this was above all a friendship hammered out in the forge, to the ringing of Frost's "sentence sound", "the sound of sense", although Wilson believes that this was "only a timely expression of a position [Thomas] had also been working towards". She even quotes a fragment of verse dated a month before Frost appeared on the scene (this was first aired in the TLS, August 8, 2012) and is convinced that the American was influenced by his English friend in more than just subject matter ("The Road Not Taken" was famously inspired by Thomas's indecisiveness), that there are elements of Frost's poetic style that can be traced back to Thomas.

Wilson has wisely allowed room for substantial discussions of the earliest poems, exploring how they derived from Thomas's prose, and for descriptions of what was going on while they were written – the poet's moods as well as local or wider political events. Nor does she let us think it was overnight success for "Edward Eastaway", as he initially signed himself: "Every one of the poems sent out between March and June [1915] was returned". Unsurprisingly, the biographer of Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg and Charles Hamilton Sorley is authoritative on these war years, and she manages to tease out new threads: Thomas's "indulgent time" during August 1914, for example, when he makes no mention of the war, but attends the races and plans a holiday: "While Germany swept rapidly through Belgium into France in the opening days of the war, they might be sitting in Little Iddens trying to remember the words of 'Mr John Blunt' or 'Au Jardin de Mon Père'".

Vital commissions such as that for A Literary Pilgrim in England were beginning to dry up ("Who will want the thing now?") even as Thomas talked poetry with Frost and Farjeon: "Did anyone ever begin at 36 in the shade?". There is a valuable account of Thomas's vacillation before enlisting, including the research he did to "establish how the 'man in the street' was reacting to the war" for an article, "Tipperary"; and some illuminating quotations from his Life of Marlborough (written at a time of Zeppelin raids and submarine attacks) show how even in the Duke's day "Mons was besieged again and again", and how they "mined and countermined, and blew men into the air or were blown up, by hundreds at a time". But the most potent image is of "Edward Eastaway" with a bad ankle, sitting in a deckchair composing "Adlestrop" as the war entered a new year.

Wilson's account of Edward Thomas in the army is a forthright one. She does not think that he was courting death by joining up, but believes he did want to prove himself. She dismisses speculation that he might have taught Wilfred Owen map-reading. She emphasizes his initial stand-offishness with fellow recruits and concludes "the army had increased rather than diminished his class-consciousness". She draws our attention to Paul Nash's observation that far from appearing liberated, Thomas seemed "oppressed by some load of sadness and pessimism". Most intriguingly, she addresses the case of Edna Clarke Hall, whom he met just before going to France, and who is not mentioned by R. George Thomas. Wilson is understandably sceptical that Helen was really, as she claimed, "glad" to know how much Edward was enjoying his "little times" with Edna, who was "as beautiful as Helen felt sure she herself was not".

While the close reading of the poetry here does not displace Thomas's wisest commentators (Edna Longley, John Lucas, Stan Smith), and Jean Moorcroft Wilson makes no mention of more controversial critics (Craig Raine), the most useful passages in these final chapters remain those where she sets a poem against the circumstances of its composition: how, for example, Thomas's imminent departure seems to be in the very "whisper" of "Aspens" and the elegiac tone of "The Brook". A little more acknowledgement of the "Edward Thomas effect", the literary lattermath, would have been welcome. There were, after all, both immediate influences (on Edmund Blunden, who was so thrilled to think he might have found the author's own copy of his book about Keats down the side of a bunk in a stand-to billet) and later ones – in works by, among others, Andrew Motion and Glyn Maxwell – together with at least three anthologies paying homage.


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