Well, as I have not read the winner of the Costa prize, Pure, by Andrew Miller I can’t say for sure that All Roads Lead to France, by Matthew Hollis should have won it, but I do know it was in contention.
And so it should have been. It is a lovely book, poetic in the telling, not a wasted word, no hyperbole, no idle conjecture, no amateur psycho-analysis, no hagiography. Rather a sympathetic telling of the known facts and joining together threads from the published work and the life. In short, everything you want in a biography. An exploration of a poet’s life. A short life, ending in the waste land of the Western Front in the First World War.
I was familiar with the outline of Edward Thomas’ life from Michael Schmidt’s magisterial Lives of the Poets, and his The Great Modern Poets. But Matthew Hollis has taken those bare bones and produced a compelling story of the man and his period.
A strange life, married young with a family to support. Burdened by the necessity to provide for them. Choosing to be a writer, rather than the constraints of teaching or public service. So forced (he felt) to churn out all manner of prose, articles, reviews and books to order. Successfully it seems but neither lucrative nor fulfilling. A monster towards his family. His knowledge of poetry was highly regarded, and his poetry reviews influential, and fearless (except for Ezra Pound). But for a long time he was not a poet. His books, biographies and descriptions of English localities, nature writing, were also generally well regarded. So why the discontent? A poor relationship with his father? An unsatisfactory marriage, despite (or because of) his wife’s forbearance about his behavior, including close relationships with other women? Hard to forgive his neglect of his children. He spent long periods away from the family home because he could not bear it.
His big break, if that is what you would call it, came when he met Robert Frost. This friendship between two poets at the outset of their poetic careers is beautifully drawn, showing how important it was to both men and it’s benefits to both. It was Frost who made Thomas a poet. And Thomas who gave Frost’s work the public recognition it deserved. The conversations and correspondence between these two and their approaches to writing poetry, readings of each others work, opinions about their colleagues and the issues of the day, especially the war and their responsibilities in relation to it are central to the story of Thomas’ life. This is a history of the development of modern poetry, the transition from one school of poetry to another. With great descriptions of all the characters and their relationships, including a postscript describing the subsequent histories, in brief, of the major figures. All very illuminating and satisfying.
Although he was a poet who went to war, Thomas was not a war poet. He knew Rupert Brook. No naive, nationalist he, though best remembered for his classic forever England poem; a poet on the cusp of being great before his senseless death. Thomas was in the vicinity of both Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves but there is no evidence they met. The biography skillfully recounts Thomas’ doubt and indecision about the war, his rejection of jingoistic patriotism, prior to his final decision to enlist. All beautifully rendered and appropriately, given the significance of this decision, providing the title for the book.
Links between the life and the poems are also drawn lightly and not overblown. This is a wonderful book, that would be enjoyed both by lovers of poetry and those who are not.
Thomas only started writing poetry when he was thirty six and published fewer than 150 poems. This one shows why he is still remembered.
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom I once loved
Is dying tonight or lying still awake
Solitary listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be for what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Leave a Reply