I am longing for something to do to prove to myself that I can do — something.
There is a new hitch over the Proverbs. Heinemann’s agreement said payment on publication. I had suggested and now repeat payment on my final revision and completion of the M.S., that is in a few days after getting it back. I do hope this won’t upset everything.
Do you really think Pater good? The only review I have had was a malevolent contemptuous (unreasonable) one in the ‘Saturday’. I am afraid it’s formless and does not admit as it ought to that Pater is good of his kind, and wastes too much time in trying to prove the kind bad.
No. Nothing more from the ‘Times’. But there is a chance of an outdoor book to do — that about the part of Wales I know best — which sounds too good to be possible.
Yours ever
E.T.
Index of Letters
To Robert Frost
at Selsfield House
East Grinstead
17 December 1913
Dear Frost (if you don’t mind),
I shall be glad to see you again and Flint for the first time on Monday next at St George’s at 4. You remember the place in St Martin’s Lane where we first met. Top floor. I think Davies and Hodgson will be there.
Yours sincerely
E Thomas
Index of Letters
To C. F. Cazenove
Selsfield House
East Grinstead
18 December 1913
Dear Cazenove,
If Waugh won’t have any of the 99 things I’ve suggested lately I can hardly add a 100th. I suppose you have put Shelley to him; and Living Poets; and a book on South Wales people and places.
There is a history of the Feeling for Nature in English Life and Literature to be written. Would that tempt him?
Then there is that book on Shakespeare I offered Dent. You remember it? To give a background of the literature, social life and natural life, folk lore, and legend, and mythical natural history, and show how Shakespeare’s pictures of nature and country life sprang from it, with of course his own particular contribution. Also I could do Cobbett as I did Borrow.
What I most like is the Shelley; next the Shakespeare, next the Living Poets: that is of literary books. I should prefer an outdoor book unrelated to writers, and particularly a Welsh one — the Castles of Wales or the Rivers of Wales. Let me do the Heart of Wales, Cader Idris and Plynlimmon and the sources of the rivers, Teify, Towy, Tawe, Wye and Severn.
Yours sincerely
E Thomas
Index of Letters
1914-1915
Index of Letters
To Gwili
At Selsfield House
East Grinstead
Sussex
7 January 1914
My dear Gwili,
I am glad to hear from you especially as you mention a chance of seeing you. You speak of the 24th and 26th. Now when will you be free on those days? I think it quite likely I shall be in London on one or the other. Could you have tea or lunch with me on either day, meeting me at 1 or 4.30 at the entrance to the National Portrait Gallery? If not, tell me when you are free and I will see what I can manage.
I hadn’t heard you were in the States. The idea of going out there with you is attractive but not as lecturer. I wish it were possible, because otherwise I could not afford it. Things go worse and worse. My books are not now even very well reviewed and as usual nobody buys them — except my Celtic Stories which is being adopted by schools in Australia in largish numbers. But it is very little use going over again the latest chapters of my life. Yours, if harder, are not used for afflicting others. But there comes an end with or without a full stop.
I am very glad indeed George is going to Amanford as a headmaster.
We are all pretty well. Father complains a good deal but does as much as usual. Mother does not complain and also does at least as much as usual, but is getting old. My wife is well, the children very well except (at the moment only) the baby, who is now 33.
There is nothing nowadays equal to nutting by the Gwili, but I wish you the best of what there is.
Yours ever
Edward Thomas
Index of Letters
To Robert Frost
at 11, Luxemburg Gardens
Brook Green W.
30 January 1914
My dear Frost,
Many thanks for your poem. I have just finished it and liked it a good deal except the last line. I should like to know why you do not print it as dialogue with the speaker’s names. Is it self denial and a desire to cut off every chance of emphasis even by stage directions etc.?
Are you to be in town next week? I shall be at St George’s on Tuesday at 4. But I might manage tea or lunch some other day if it suits you better — before Friday. I am here for another week or so before going into the country. I don’t quite know where I shall go, but if you happen to know any really cheap lodgings in your part of the country will you tell me?
Yours
Edward Thomas
Index of Letters
To Clifford Bax
Steep Petersfield
19 February 1914
My dear Clifford,
I was so sorry to run away from you in that hurried flustered fashion. What I was fumbling to apologise for was treating you like an inn, in spite of the fact that there is no such inn in the world any more than there is such a landlady as Olga. But at least you had done nothing to make me feel guilty: so as I felt it I think I must have been. Forgive me and believe me nevertheless devotedly Olga’s and yours and do not say anything about this cheque which is meant to pay for my butter and honey and washing for about three complete weeks.
Will you send the parcel that should have come to Steep where I arrive tomorrow.
Now may the gods and goddesses and fauns and nymphs and fairies and domestic servants and managers of theatres bless you and Olga continually and so bless
Yours ever
Edward Thomas
Index of Letters
To Robert Frost
Steep
Petersfield
19 February 1914
My dear Frost,
It could not be done. And I have accumulated a press of little things to be done before I begin and am flustered in the extreme. When I am next up in London I will let you know and we must have lunch together somewhere quiet, though I will look at my map and consider the roads between us. But first I must see if I really can write something. I wish you were nearer so that we could see one another easily and our children.
Yours ever
Edward Thomas
Index of Letters
To Eleanor Farjeon
Steep
March 1914
My dear Eleanor,
We are all sorry you will not be here on Friday and Saturday and twice sorry because you will not be able to do anything you want to except within a 3 mile radius. But as you say and as we say you must make up with an extra week end. Also I hope you will get to Wisbech all right. Should you still be in London and we have more than the inevitable night in town on our way to Wales I will let you know. Meanwhile we are most busy, gardening, writing, typewriting for me from morning till 1 a in and on the whole it suits me, the I feel thin at times. The ground is almost just right and I have got all the roots in, and peas and beans (a first sowing). Now for the potatoes and artichokes.
Maitland disappeared the first fine day. He is a bit of a superman, I fancy, or else he was very well indeed.
I have looked through the typescript now, and it is very good (your part I mean). I almost wish you were wrong oftener than just to put Moonshers for Moonrakers: it would have suggested you enjoyed yourself between whiles. Of course I did laugh and I do not pretend not to, do I? I depict not what I was but what I see when I look back. I don’t think I could do what I was.
There’s a tune a lady has sent me for ‘O’er the moor among the heather’ and I wanted to hear from you what it sounds like.
Now I
must try to clean my hands and have tea and get up to the study again and write about Meredith’s Homes and Haunts. Work does not come tumbling in, not by any means. In fact if I were not so busy I should be seeing reasons for being pretty sick.
Goodbye and I hope you will get well and tell us so. This is the third blessed day and you ought to be out at any rate. All send our love to you.
Yours ever
Edward Thomas
Index of Letters
To Gwili
Steep
Petersfield
8 April 1914
My dear Gwili,
We will come to Tirydail on Tuesday evening, and hope to find lodgings ready for us. Will you please be kind enough to order brown bread to be got for us, and also some bananas and dates if possible. But only I shall want supper when we arrive. I hope you can manage to join us on an excursion to Careg Cennen on Wednesday morning. I expect to meet Thomas Seccombe there, and I am sure you will like to meet him. If you write again please address me at 13 Rusham Road Balham London SW as we shall be there on Monday.
I am sorry to be fussy but will you ask our landlady at Amanford to bake some slices of brown bread very hard in the oven? I detest baker’s bread soft or even toasted. We should like also some very fat bacon for breakfast, the fattest in the land.
Yours ever
Edward Thomas
Index of Letters
To Robert Frost
Steep
19 May 1914
My dear Frost,
I wish I could write a letter. But every day I write a short Welsh sketch and a review and read a bit and weed a bit and every evening type something, not to speak of touching the fiction still sporadically. And then there is the weather to enjoy or (here comes the laugh) to imagine how it should be enjoyed. Today I was out from 12 till sunset bicycling to the pine country by Ascot and back. But it all fleets and one cannot lock up at evening the cake one ate during the day. There must be a world where that is done. I hope you and I will meet in it. I hardly expect it of New Hampshire more than of Old. — I was glad Hudson turned out as I hoped he would. I understand those 3 approaches. If only you were to be in town and he too and he well and not afflicted by his sick wife and age coming on I would take you to see him. He is, if anything, more than his books. Don’t get at me about my T.P. article, which wasn’t all that even I could do, but a series of extracts from an essay I shan’t do. You could do one now. And you really should start doing a book on speech and literature, or you will find me mistaking your ideas for mine and doing it myself. You can’t prevent me from making use of them: I do so daily and want to begin over again with them and wring all the necks of my rhetoric — the geese. However, my Pater would show you I had got on to the scent already.
Your second note pleased me. I shall perhaps come soon. My wife and I are to have a week or so very probably early in July. We have to get in several calls. If we can we will come to Ledington. I assume there would be room (for 2 whole days).
Did Davies appear? He had left town when I was there last. — I go up next about June 5.
Bronwen is suffering from flat feet and a stoop. She enjoys the new school and the gymnastics. But we miss her. She won’t be home till August. Now about August, could we all get into the Chandler’s for a month and would they have us and at what price? The only difficulty would be a room for me to work in. For work I must. Will you consider? We shall try to let this cottage.
I don’t hear when your book is coming. I tried to get T.P. to let me write on it but they won’t.
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’. In any case I must have my ‘writer’s melancholy’ though I can quite agree with you that I might spare some of it to the deficient. On the other hand even with registered post, telegraph &c and all modern conveniences I doubt if I could transmit it.
I am pleased with myself for hitting on ‘Mowing’ and ‘The Tuft of Flowers’. For I forgot the names of those you meant me particularly to read, these I suppose being amongst them. You see that conceit consorts with writer’s melancholy.
I go on writing something every day. Sometimes brief unstrained impressions of things lately seen, like a drover with 6 newly shorn sheep in a line across a cool woody road on market morning and me looking back to envy him and him looking back at me for some reason which I can’t speculate on. Is this North of Bostonism?
Goodbye and I hope you are all well. Mervyn has been writing to Lesley I see. I hope he will go North of Boston before it is too late — North of Boston and West of Me.
Yours ever
Edward Thomas.
Index of Letters
To Robert Frost
Steep
6 June 1914
My dear Frost,
Let Lesley keep it certainly. That is all there is to say really. I am so plagued with work, burning my candle at 3 ends. Every night late I read one of your poems. I enjoy them but if I did what I liked I wouldn’t read them now. It is not fair at all. I just see how they could be enjoyed — which reminds me that I did enjoy ‘The Generations of Men’. Now for the same reason I can’t come next week, not till about the 25th when we will both come. I have curtailed everything: am only just going up to Bottomley’s to keep my promise and to work. So I shall be here until the 16th I expect. — Yes I quite see about using the ‘naked tones’, not the mere words, of certain profoundly characteristic instinctive rhythms. And No, you don’t bore me. Only I feel a fraud in that I have unconsciously rather imitated your interest in the matter. — I didn’t see the Times notice, and am sorry for one thing to hear of it, because it shows the book is out, and yet I have not got it from anywhere. I kept badgering Adcock for it. De la Mare might have done it in the Times — unless it was done in the columns where books are acknowledged.
By the way unless the letter was sent to her in London Bronwen hasn’t had a letter from Ledington.
I have dropped that fiction, so that’s two truncated M.S.S. in a year. I should feel vain at doing unprofitable things if I hadn’t added up my earnings the other night. Something has got to happen. I keep saying, Why worry about a process that may terminate a kind of life which I keep saying, couldn’t be worse?
I will let you know later what day exactly we shall come. Oh, and £3.3s is satisfactory. I will not say We shall come but I feel sure we shall.
Yours ever
E.T.
Index of Letters
To C. F. Cazenove
Steep
Petersfield
28 July 1914
Dear Cazenove,
I didn’t mean to neglect your kind letter but to see you last week. But I could not manage it and the book has kept me up to the neck ever since. I don’t think there is anything I can say. I believe you are right. Only the kind of work I have had to do has paralysed me for original work except in short bursts, supposing I ever could have done more. Perhaps you can do something with the collection of sketches. Call it ‘Thick and Clear’, perhaps.
I hope to send in the M.S. of Homes and Haunts early next week. Then my family and I are all going for the rest of August (from the 6th) to c/o Mr Chandler
Ledington
nr Ledbury Herefordshire where I shall be glad of any news and a cheque from Methuen. The book will be difficult to estimate but will run to over 80,000.
Y — ours sincerely
Edward Thomas
Index of Letters
To Eleanor Farjeon
c/o Mrs Chandler
Ledington
Ledbury
14 August 1914
My dear Eleanor,
Thank you for your two letters and a postscript. At anyrate the p s was deserved. But talk is worse for letters than writing is. It is bad for writing too. At least its immediate effect is bad on mine. And talk and strolling and odd games of cricket fill most days; or I might have written — you know if I
should. Things are quietly disturbing away here where there are few papers, those late. Mr Chandler is a soldier of “ who saw 21 years’ service and has this morning been sent for to Hereford. It may be that Frost and I will do some of the work he will leave behind. But if not, other things have postponed our Welsh trip. We can’t go now in any case till after Baba’s birthday. And Abercrombie is to join us. It might be Tuesday. That would perhaps mean not returning till the 22nd. Would you like to know definitely, or would you come in any case on the 20th.? We are doing rather moderately here. The boys are bored. Peter is here — he helps to raise the standard of what boys may do, I suppose. Bronwen is alright. Baby is, too, the she had a very bad fall from a swing a few days ago and I thought she was going to lose a birthday. Helen is not up to very much, and I don’t help. One thing and another leaves me very irritable indeed. The quarters are too close. I want to get away to Wales and should like a full week, but travelling has new inconveniences and things cost more than ever here, so I don’t know what they’ll be at inns. I haven’t thought of serving my country, or of putting one leg round my neck and singing those songs that Clifford and Olga Bax and Bertie and Joan Farjeon like so much, but don’t say so. I did think of turning plain reporter and giving unvarnished reports of country conversations about the war. But Frost discourages. In any case varnish is the thing. Do you read Harold Begbie for example? But this sounds as if I imagined myself a James Thomson or Richard Middleton who was going to die unrecognised and got some consolation from the imagining.
Complete Poetical Works of Edward Thomas Page 40