A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  The Perseus subjects were to have similar ‘golden pictures’ between them, and, as the Tate’s three drawings show, acanthus borders which would probably have been undertaken by Morris himself, although they might have had to call in Walter Crane (as they did at the Howards’ house in Palace Green) to help finish the job. The full-scale cartoons in gouache (without borders) are at the Southampton City Art Gallery, which has now, at long last, reopened. ‘These austere images of rock and steel’, as John Christian has called them, ‘might almost be described as pioneer vorticism’, and were in fact much admired by Wyndham Lewis.

  Burne-Jones set himself, with the help of assistants, to do enormous amounts of preliminary work, and yet he was economical, hoarding sketches and using his designs many times. Studies for the tapestry ‘Passing of Venus’ (although the cartoon itself is in a wretched condition) give another insight into his working methods, and are exhibited here for the first time. There are also studies for the Orpheus decorations on the Graham piano which Burne-Jones designed in 1880, taking himself as model for the haggard Pluto. His astoundingly large output of stained glass is represented by eight cartoons, including the St Luke and the Cimmerian Sybil for Jesus College, Cambridge.

  In 1880, he had bought, at Georgie’s insistence, a small, uncomfortable whitewashed house at Rottingdean, the first home they had ever owned, where they hoped to find peace. There was an immediate increase in sea-subjects, among them a number of comic drawings of Prominent Women bathing, not shown here. ‘The Mermaid’ (1882) has a background of Sussex downlands and cornfields; a mermother is giving her howling merbaby its first breath of fresh air. ‘The Magic Circle’ (1882) is a most compelling image of a magician drawing a ring on the sands of one of Burne-Jones’s strangely curving beaches. The woman beside him, characteristically, neither meets his eyes nor takes the least notice of him. An elegant formalized decorative design, ‘The Sun Ripening Corn’, dated c1890, is in gouache and gold wash. Both these last two recall ‘The Flower Book’ on which Burne-Jones worked between 1882 and 1896, largely at Rottingdean. This contained mysterious illustrations on a smaller scale, not of the flowers, but of their names, as though the very heart and soul of the flower lay there. He described it as the most soothing work he ever did.

  Times Literary Supplement, 1993

  * * *

  1Based on a lecture given at the Annual General Meeting of the William Morris Society, at Fulham Library, London, 21 May 1994.

  RHYME AND METRE

  Obstacles

  Edward Thomas: Selected Letters, edited by R. George Thomas

  It would be quite possible to read about Edward Thomas (1878—1917) and wonder how it was that so many people made such allowances for him. A man who had a house built and then refused to live in it, he tormented his wife and children with his restlessness—he calculated that he was never happy for more than a quarter of an hour in the day. Two women, his wife Helen and the good-hearted but overwhelming Eleanor Farjeon, spoiled him as much as they dared. He couldn’t get on with his son and was sometimes ruthless with his friends—‘people soon bore him,’ said Walter de la Mare sadly—although most of them were called on to help him in his struggle with depression. But Edward Thomas was, and is, greatly loved. His scholarly biographer, George Thomas, irritated as he is by what he calls the ‘dithering’ of Edward Thomas’s early life, treats him not only with respect but with love.

  Thomas saw himself with bitter clarity. ‘I suppose one does get help to some extent by being helpless, but when one doesn’t—it’s as if one had no pride at all.’ In October 1907 he wrote: ‘I went out and thought what effects my suicide would have. I don’t think I mind them…W. H. Davies would suffer a little, Helen and the children less in reality than they do now, from my accursed temper and moodiness.’ Even so, it might be true of him, as Ian Hamilton once wrote of Robert Frost, that ‘he knew his own failings, knew what the world would think of him if it found out, and yet believed the world was wrong.’

  In this short selection of Edward Thomas’s letters, George Thomas has aimed, he says, at reflecting the entire writing life while using, as much as possible, unpublished material. To do this he has examined, or re-examined, nearly three thousand autograph letters—including the new acquisitions of the National Library of Wales, in Aberystwyth—of which 126 are included in this collection. The book is meant, I think, not so much to illustrate his 1985 biography but rather as a possible first introduction to Edward Thomas. For this reason George Thomas includes a note (although a late one) written to Dad Uzzell, the Wiltshire gamekeeper, poacher, and Salvation Army convert who taught the very young Edward Thomas about ‘twig, leaf, flint, thorn, straw, feather,’ how to read the weather, skin moles, and so forth. After this he has to show, and does show, the teenager eagerly approaching a distinguished man of letters, James Ashcroft Noble (‘my note-book would show you that I am not wasting my time out doors the least’); his dissipations at Oxford; the complexity, beauty, and bloody-mindedness of his love for Helen Noble; the disheartening untidiness of life in a cottage with three children; the wearisome search for work and commissions for ‘open-air’ books, for which his enthusiasms often faded some way before the last chapter. This was an excellent time for open-air and open-road literature of all kinds: in the summer of 1907 Elizabeth von Arnim took a large party, including E. M. Forster, through Sussex by caravan, while the Neo-Pagans were camping out in the New Forest. Even so, with the rent of his cottage ‘a quarterly worry,’ Edward Thomas had to make ends meet with the reviewing he hated. It became an effort for him, by 1911, not to look on a new book as an enemy.

  Sympathetic understanding kept him in more or less perilous balance, and nearly three-quarters of the letters here are to friends. George Thomas says that ‘each was chosen for particular needs.’ Harry Hooton, who was something in the City and married to an old school friend of Helen’s, was consulted about the difficulties of the marriage. Walter de la Mare, Edward Garnett and the dramatist Gordon Bottomley were ready to give literary advice and criticism and to send ‘suggestions, warnings etc as they came to mind.’ ‘Perhaps I am not quite just to myself,’ Thomas wrote to Bottomley in December of 1909, ‘in finding myself very much on an ordinary everyday level except when in a mood of exaltation usually connected with nature and solitude. By comparison with others that I know—like de la Mare—I seem essentially like other men in the train and I should like not to be.’

  No way seemed open, however, and Thomas was on the verge of having to write a tourist’s guidebook to Hampshire and Wiltshire. Meanwhile he gave generously, as well as took. It’s a pity it wasn’t possible to include any letters to W. H. Davies; there is nothing, therefore, to show his generosity in encouraging Davies to write and in getting him a grant for a decent wooden leg. Thomas believed, and told Helen more than once, that his own nature was incompatible with love, and that he was never quite at ease in the company of two or more people. But his salvation, he said as early as 1906, would depend on the one right person.

  In 1913 Robert Frost arrived with his family from New Hampshire, unsuccessful as a farmer and not well known as a poet. George Thomas includes some of the first notes between them (‘My dear Frost—I wish you were nearer so that we could see one another easily with our children’), and after that, Frost said, ‘1914 was our year. I never had, I never shall have, such a year of friendship.’ Thomas took his family to stay near Ledington, on the Gloucester-Herefordshire border, two fields away from the Frosts. The meadows were full of windfalls from the old cider-apple trees, and at every gate and stile they paused and talked ‘of flowers, childhood, Shakespeare, women, England, the war, or looked at a far horizon, which some gap or dip occasionally disclosed.’ Possibly they also talked about alienation, loneliness, self-disgust, and self-forgiveness, since both of them were something other, or more, than the bird-and-weather writers their readers knew. In May 1914 Thomas tells Frost that he ought to get started on a book about speech and literature, ‘or y
ou will find me mistaking your ideas for mine and doing it myself.’ He has been reading Frost’s North of Boston, abstemiously, only one poem an evening, and now, halfway through the letter, he asks: ‘I wonder whether you can imagine me taking to verse. If you can I might get over the feeling that it is impossible—which at once obliges your good nature to say “I can.”’

  He began to write poetry in December 1914, and all his poems were written by December 1916. Credit for this is usually given to Frost, certainly by Thomas himself, although Frost declared that ‘all he ever got was an admiration for the poet in him before he had written a line.’ Certainly they were agreed at once on the relationship between traditional metre and the tones and half tones of the spoken voice, a kind of counterpoint. But Frost’s practical advice to his friend in 1914 was to look at certain passages in his latest book, The Pursuit of Spring, and to write them again in verse form, but with exactly the same cadence. It seems unusual advice, not quite using words ‘as poets do,’ and Thomas sometimes tried it the other way round, turning poems back into prose, though he did describe this as ‘unprofitable.’ The mystery of his transformation remains, although George Thomas himself doesn’t hold with the idea of a significant division in Edward Thomas’s inner life. Despite his ‘immense prose output and the later flowering of his verse,’ he says, ‘the name and nature of poetry was his dominant lifelong concern.’

  His poetry is a question of fine apprehensions, ‘intuition on the edge of consciousness,’ Leavis wrote, ‘which would disappear if looked at directly.’ He is listening, ‘lying in wait for what I should, yet never can, remember’; he cannot bite the day to the core. Now that the war has begun ‘to turn young men to dung,’ he sees himself as a ‘half-ruined house’:

  I am something like that,

  Not one pane to reflect the sun,

  For the schoolboys to throw at—

  They have broken every one.

  In 1915 he had been considering whether he should follow the Frosts to America. He was thirty-seven. In July he resolved his own perplexities and enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles (later he transferred to the Artillery because they allowed a better pension to widows). He expected his friends to forget him, knowing that his appearance was completely changed by his first army ‘shortcut,’ when he lost his longish hair, described as dull gold. ‘Nobody recognises me now,’ he wrote to Frost in May 1916, ‘Sturge Moore, B. Marsh and R. C. Trevelyan stood a yard off and I didn’t trouble to awake them to stupid recognition.’ But Helen divined that what she called (in her memoir As It Was) ‘his old periods of dark agony’ had gone forever. Among the memoirs included at the end of this book is one written by an old friend, R. A. Scott-James, who was at training camp with Thomas and found him ‘scarcely recognisable for the same man.’ As a sergeant instructor, it turned out that he was not only a good soldier but a good teacher of soldiers, and surely no siege battery can ever have had an observation officer better suited to his job. Thomas himself put this another way, writing to his parents: ‘I have done all the things so far asked of me, without making any mess.’

  His last letters are to Helen. ‘Still not a thrush—but many blackbirds,’ he wrote to her, a few days before the battle of Arras.

  My dear, you must not ask me to say much more. I know that you must say much more because you feel much. But I, you see, must not feel anything. I am just as it were tunnelling underground and something in my subconsciousness directs me not to think of the sun. At the end of the tunnel there is the sun.

  The first publisher of Edward Thomas’s poetry was James Guthrie of the Pear Tree Press, who in 1916 published six poems under Thomas’s pen name, Edward Eastaway. Otherwise Thomas was not fortunate. An introduction to Edward Marsh was a failure, and Marsh did not include him in any of the five volumes of Georgian Poetry. Harold Monro of the Poetry Bookshop, a friend, also rejected Edward Eastaway. ‘Many thanks for saying it,’ Thomas wrote to him. ‘I am sorry because I feel utterly sure they are me. I expect obstacles and I get them.’ Professor Thomas might perhaps have explained that the enemy was not Monro himself so much as his highly-strung partner, Alida Klementaski. She associated Thomas with Frost, whom she detested. ‘I could have pulled that Frost man down the stairs by his coat when he said he was going up to see you,’ she told Monro. In this way Monro, a deeply harassed man who missed many opportunities, missed one of the greatest of all.

  London Review of Books, 1996

  The Poetry Bookshop

  The Poetry Bookshop, both as a shop and as a publishing venture, existed from December 1912 to 1935—I should like to say ‘flourished,’ but it hardly did that. It was never quite out of financial difficulties, and more than once close to bankruptcy. Yet it was considered a success by everyone who knew it, and remembered with affection. It had one object and one only, to bring readers and poetry together. It has to be judged, therefore, I suppose, by how close they seem together now.

  The Bookshop was the idea of one man, Harold Monro, who was born in 1879. His family were Scottish in origin, and before his father there were three generations of doctors. The Monros owned a private lunatic asylum, and there would have been money enough for Harold to live his life in modest comfort without making much effort. He had begun, in fact, as a drifter, expelled from school, tormented by his ambitions as a poet, and, after seven miserable years of marriage, separated from his wife. ‘She for whom I had built such cloud-capped summits of ideals,’ he noted, ‘cares for nothing better than to play tennis and reads novels the whole week.’ Here was the source of anguish, for Monro was deeply affected—though his wife evidently was not—by the mind-climate of the new century with its expectation of joy and freedom, expressed through Fabianism and Utopianism, through Tolstoyan settlements, garden cities and vegetarianism tea-rooms, through Shelley’s Spirit of Delight and the Spirit of Ecstasy and the new Rolls-Royce. In 1908 he had tried to fit himself to join the Samurai, a movement that aimed, through clean living and spiritual training, to evolve a higher human type. There is a feeling here of sincerity pushing itself too hard, and at an early stage Monro began to drink, to struggle against drink, and to be haunted by his dreams. These were often nightmares of locked doors, or of grotesque chases and falls, or, once, of Christ begging him not to drink, but ‘because Christ meekly implored, I drank it down.’ But Monro had good friends, and it was his English friends in Florence, where he often stayed, who told him he ought to go back to London and concentrate his scattered efforts on ‘doing something about poetry.’

  Why should this be necessary? Certainly, at the beginning of the twentieth century, English people still read poetry. They read Kipling, Masefield and Yeats, they took anthologies on walking tours through Scotland and Switzerland, and in particular they read The Golden Treasury. My own aunt and uncle, when they were engaged to be married in 1911, corresponded by postcard, giving a reference to The Golden Treasury. But rebellious elements were at work—the Imagists, the Vorticists, the Futurists, the new Georgians. Ezra Pound had arrived in London to call everyone to order. Edward Thomas believed that the trouble was too much poetry. Anyone with £5 to spare, he said, could get a book of verse printed, and ‘reviewers and booksellers have not been able to keep their heads above the stream.’ To Monro, poetry was a constant and necessary element in the life of man, particularly industrial man. It had to be restored to its right place.

  Monro came back to London in the autumn of 1911. His happiest relationship was always teacher to pupil, and he brought with him a young man, half Italian, half English, Arundel del Re. ‘His weakness and paleness did not impress us,’ Virginia Woolf wrote of him in 1919, ‘but then, perhaps weakness and paleness are the necessary qualities.’ Del Re, on this first visit, was ‘thrilled by everything,’ even ‘the long terraces of tall, grimy-looking, flat-faced houses peering down on the street.’ In one of these flat-faced houses, 35 Devonshire Street, Monro established his office.

  Devonshire Street (now Boswell Street) was in Bloomsbury, �
��which at that time,’ del Re remembered, ‘had not yet become the favourite haunt of the younger highbrows.’ It was an unsavoury place, full of cats and dustbins, and the ground-floor workshops made it noisy. At No. 35 there was only one cold-water tap for the whole building. But it was near the British Museum and the Central School of Arts and Crafts, and it was cheap. Monro had the habit, as he noted himself, of taking on responsibility for other young lives, and if you do that you must be careful with your money.

  Needing advice, although he did not always take it, Monro turned to his friends, and in particular to two of them, Arthur Romney Green and Frank Flint. Romney Green has been described as a ‘craftsman, woodworker, boat builder, sailor, mathematician, social reformer, friend and lover,’ but referred to himself as a small workingmaster. Carpenters and poets, in his opinion, faced the same problems, and he held that any man left with a chisel and a straight piece of wood will want to round it off—what was more, when he ran workshops, during bad times, for the unemployed, he proved that he was right. Extravagant and cranky though he was, Monro knew him for his good angel. Frank Flint was Monro’s invaluable expert on French literature. His childhood was spent in London’s old East End, one of a family that flitted from one home to another when the rent was due, and even before he left school at the age of thirteen he was working as a soap-boy in a barber’s shop. In 1909, having made his landlady’s daughter pregnant, Flint married her, but he managed, during intervals of his work as a clerk in the Civil Service, to learn nine—some say ten—languages. After bringing out his three small volumes of poetry—two of them published by Monro—he became cautious of expressing his emotions. But he was one of the few who attended Monro’s funeral, and with the coffin, he said, disappeared ‘the largest and best part of my life.’