Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas, Matthew Hollis, Faber and Faber, Pp 389, £ 20.00
Manju Gupta
POET Edward Thomas is described by most poets, past and present, as “the father of us all” and not merely as a pastoral poet of place because of the terms he used like ‘willow-herb’ and ‘meadowsweet’ and ‘haycocks dry’. His prime themes were disconnection, discrepancy and unsettledness.
This biography by Hollis follows the old principle of beginning his book with Thomas nearing his end, that is, with Thomas entering a Poetry Bookshop to inaugurate it while waiting for the arrival of his three children and wife Helen – the woman he had married 13 years ago and who loved him with a passion that he could no longer return. This was the year 1939 by which time he had produced 20 prose books, printed over 70 articles in periodicals and more than 1,500 signed book reviews, apart from three biographies and others. For this and some more, Thomas expected to earn up to 250 pounds a year – a salary which was a little more than that of a schoolmaster.
Hollis describes Thomas as a striking man, six foot tall and loose-limbed yet vigorous. His expression was grave and distant. It is said that melancholy was permanently stamped upon him. He had been plagued by depression from before his university days at Oxford. He tried even drink and opium to drown his depression but could not hold the bleak moods back. Once he told his friend Jesse Barridge that in advertising his sorrows, he had punished his family, decimated his friend and broken down his self-respect.
Towards his wife Helen he was cruel as she was subjected to his “hard silences, harsh words, quiet fury, despair.” As a result she became an expert in identifying his moods from his demeanour. He would provoke his children and then depart on seeing them cry. He would mostly leave Helen frightened that he might not return and afraid of his mood when he did. He even made a futile attempt at taking his life in 1908 and was diagnosed as suffering from neurasthenia. Walking and Nature offered him temporary consolation but it was when he met Robert Frost in 1913, that Thomas found some happiness and who said of Thomas that his friend seemed certain never to write poetry and very likely to commit suicide. The friendship between them and Thomas’s decision to fight in the battle of Arras in France are at the heart of this book. The two became so close that they began considering moving together to America as France could not bounce Thomas out of his self-pity.
Much of this time was spent in “talks-walking” (Frost’s verb) in Gloucestershire.
At this period the First World War broke out and it “saved Thomas before it killed him.” It gave him purpose and it gave him poetry. He wrote in 1014 his first poem and under Frost’s counsel he wrote “life-time poetry” in a little more than two years. He was then commissioned as a second lieutenant in the artillery battalion and ceased writing poetry as he had to embark to France.
In this way Hollis relates season by season the last four ears of Thomas’s life before the protagonist died on the Arras battlefield in 1917. The previous day, a dead shell had delivered him a lucky escape, but the next day, in a successful Allied assault, Thomas landed into a dugout to fill his pipe when “a shell passed so close to him that the blast of air stopped his heart!” He fell without a mark on his body, thus bringing to end his depression and fulfilling his desire to die.
(Faber and Faber, Bloomsbury House, 74-77 Great Russell Street, London-WC1B 4DA)
