Edward Thomas (1) (1878–1917)

This is one of those books where you have to ask yourself what they can have been thinking when they came up with the title. For most of us, a "literary pilgrim" is someone who travels to visit sites associated with favourite books or writers and perhaps records impressions of that experience, whilst "England" is ... England. For Edward Thomas, neither of these things seems to apply: a literary pilgrimage is a journey conducted entirely within a library, following an author through the show more places they experienced in life and looking at the way they wrote about them. And his idea of "England" seems to embrace the whole of the British Isles, although its population density fades very fast as you travel north from London, reviving only slightly around Edinburgh...

Not that any of that matters, really: this is a lively collection of short biographical essays about great writers and the geography that inspired them, with a good deal to enjoy, and some incisive observation, especially in the pieces about writers Thomas sees as under-appreciated heroes from humble backgrounds: Robert Burns, John Clare, George Crabbe, Richard Jefferies, George Borrow and W H Hudson, in particular. (Oddly, he doesn't include his own special protégé, the Welsh tramp-poet W H Davies, who would probably have fitted in very well.) Some of the more big-name writers, like Wordsworth and Tennyson, get a rather less engaged treatment, but Dorothy Wordsworth, although she doesn't get an essay to herself, does pretty well out of both the Wordsworth and Coleridge pieces. (The only woman in the book, apart from Dorothy, is Emily Brontë.)

Edward Thomas is generally remembered nowadays for one poem, "Adlestrop", and for being one of the poets romantically and wastefully killed in the First World War. But he had a long and productive career as an author of literary non-fiction and nature-writing before he turned to poetry. This book, which seems to have been mostly written in 1915 when Thomas was already in the army, was one of his last prose works. show less

This is a collection of mostly short chapters of nature writing. While it rather is nonfiction, it often resembles prose, as the author's style is very dense and rich, full of similes and metaphors, using many adjectives and words that speak to the reader's senses. Thomas observes the tiniest details of nature as well as the whole picture while he walks through the English landscape, through meadows and woods, discovering old farms, ponds and groves. The writing is beautiful and evocative, a show more celebration of nature and the English countryside.
Reading these descriptions was a delight, but it also required a lot of concentration. Therefore, reading one chapter every few days was enough. I presume that otherwise I would have tired of the book a bit.

It makes me sad that Edward Thomas was killed in the First World War. He might have written so much more. He was quite prolific during his life-time, though, and I have an anthology of some of his texts on my shelf to read in the future. show less

I became a little fascinated by Edward Thomas last year when I read the amazing collection of memoirs Under Storms Wing by his widow Helen Thomas. Edward Thomas was a writer, an essayist, and reviewer; who – despite not being obliged to do so as he was in his mid-thirties – joined up when war broke out and was killed in Arras in 1917. He left behind him a wealth of poetry and so is now counted among the number of World War One poets.
This fragment of autobiography which Edward Thomas show more left behind him when he died was not published until 1938 although this edition which includes some pages of Edward Thomas’s 1917 diary from the trenches was published by Faber and Faber in 2008. I was surprised that there are no reviews for it on either goodreads or Librarything – my sister bought me this edition for Christmas so it is still available somewhere – although I get the impression it’s not cheap.
“When I penetrate backward into my childhood I come perhaps sooner than many people to impassable night. A sweet darkness enfolds with a faint blessing my life up to the age of about four. The task of attempting stubbornly to break up that darkness is one I have never proposed to myself, but I have many times gone up to the edge of it, peering, listening, stretching out my hands, and I have heard the voice of one singing as I sat or lay in her arms; and I have become again aware very dimly of being enclosed in rooms that were shadowy, whether by comparison with outer sunlight I know not. The songs, of first of my mother, then of her younger sister, I can hear not only afar off behind the veil but on the side of it also”
In this small volume of memoirs – as the title suggests – Edward Thomas reflects on his childhood – his upbringing in London, his trips to Wiltshire and Wales. In these memoirs we gradually begin to see in the child – the man that he was to become. Edward Thomas was a famous walker, a lover of the countryside and the natural world, and here in the memories of his childhood we see the first stirrings of this great love affair. As a boy he could already out stride the other boys – he was obviously quite proud of this ability. Edward Thomas’s childhood of course was that of a Victorian child, and his was a childhood of board and Grammar schooling and later the strange and new life of a public school. He tells of walking home bowling hoops and spinning tops, the disappointment of Christmas presents and those many transitory friendships of childhood – that remain indistinct in our memoires.
Edward Thomas was a pigeon fancier – he loved his pigeons lying to parents in order to buy a new pigeon shedding tears when a vile man who was selling him pigeons killed one in front of him to torment him. If there was one thing that was going to make me warm to Edward Thomas the boy – it was the thought of him and his pigeons.
“So I used to enjoy going about with Henry to look at the pigeon shops in Wandsworth, Battersea and Clapham, occasionally to visit the back-garden lofts of working men in the same neighbourhoods. He had me in tow and I think I remained for the most part silent in the background unless I had a bird to buy. These long rambles among crowds of working people under the gaslight, in all sorts of weathers, were a great pleasure and were interrupted by a greater one when we stood and looked at pigeons in an atmosphere of shag smoke, grain and birds.”
This is an autobiography cut tragically short – written in the beautifully rendered prose of a poet his affinity with the English countryside is clear - had Edward Thomas been around to complete this work I suspect it would have been a truly joyous thing. As it is – because this is a fragment – a little over 150 pages of autobiography and a further 26 of his war diaries – Edward Thomas remains a little elusive. For me though it is a tantalising elusiveness – although he remains at arms-length I feel as if I began to get to know him a little better – we just got interrupted. Edward Thomas, pigeon fancier, collector of butterflies and birds eggs, walker, soldier and poet – he was known to be a difficult man, a depressive and a loner – overall though – I’m still fascinated. show less

Reading this I knew little of Edward Thomas: I vaguely remember we did some of his poems at school – long, long time ago – and vaguely remember liking them, and I think I bought this on the strength of that when it turned up amongst Amazon recommendations and was just pence for a Kindle download

This is a book of prose writings on the countryside.

I didn’t believe in it. It read as if he was casting around for something to write about, decided the countryside might be a good idea, but show more didn’t really have it in his heart, or, at least, not the natural world part of it – which is the larger part of the book.

His descriptive writing was too self-consciously ‘poetic’, too self-consciously whimsical in its imagery and crusted with flowery ornamentation that really wore me down. Over and over I found myself wondering what he thought was the purpose of a particular adjective, metaphor or simile (if he did purpose anything other than ornamentation). ‘Ham-fisted’ came to mind, prose knee-deep in adjectives and with lumbering, awkward similes like wayward giants staggering drunkenly through pensively green fields of contemplative cabbages – oops! Sorry.

He didn’t, even when writing of aspects of the natural world most familiar to me, conjure those little flashes of recognition the best writing does. In fact, I often found myself thinking that such-and-such a tree just doesn’t look like that, or such-and-such a bird doesn’t sound like that, and so on – an effect of the writer stretching too far for original description and falling down.

I found it liberally sprinkled with ‘What the hell is he talking about?’ moments. I don’t mean disagreeing with him, here – I mean literally not being able to work out what he thinks he’s saying. An example, and this is a comparatively short one: I think I would take it somewhat amiss if a wind got uppity and ‘blew softly from over Lethe and breathed upon our eyelids, coming as delicate intercessors between us and life’ – quite apart that winds should leave the more delicate work to breezes, what does it mean? To use a long-winded and tortuous simile of my own, his prose was often like those little paths you find in ornamental woodlands, that wander in and out and up and down without particularly going anywhere, eventually turning back into themselves (on second thoughts, that’s a much more sensible simile that a lot of Thomas’s).

He often mixed chunks of philosophizing into his descriptions. It wasn’t impressive; it was mostly unconvincing and always tedious.

The work improved somewhat in the places where he dealt with country people, as when he wrote about meeting the tramp who claimed to have participated in a murder or the old man with the tragic love story in his past. There was the stamp of truth about these. They read as if they were, at least at base, memories of real-life encounters, told relatively plainly with the literary whimsy kept more or less under control. The book sparked into life in these places. However, the less directly the narrative voice was involved with these characters, the more the annoying whimsy crept back.

However, those high spots only served to more convince me that the broad mass of his verbiage and foliage didn’t stem from genuine involvement and observation.

I got the strong impression that his forte was people and the human condition, and definitely not the natural world. Unfortunately, the larger part of the work was description of the natural world ...

I was determined to finish the book and slogged on and eventually found it developing a sort of gooey, perverse fascination, like having in your fridge one of those sticky, sweet confections that you have to keep nibbling away at just because it’s there, even though you know it’s not good, healthy sustenance. And, of course, there was always the hope of another of those ‘real person’ anecdotes.

By the time I got to the unexpected Arthurian bit at the end, though, I just didn’t have any investment in the book left to me to wonder why it was there or what, in this context, it meant. I was just glad to be through it.

I don’t think I’m ever going to be re-reading this. There are plenty of much better writers on the countryside out there.

In the meantime, I shall drift away like a lonely barn owl fading into a misty distance like a defeated winter sun declining into the ghostly, soft greynesses of the – Stop it! Someone might read this! Just stop it!!! show less