Publishing my Edward Thomas

A weekend in Wales, Thomas on Shelley.

During a 'last of the year' camping weekend we stayed in Radnorshire and visited a place I hadn't heard of - the Elan Valley. The valley had been flooded and dammed since the mid - nineteenth century. I was surprised to find a statue of Shelley at the Visitors ' Centre. He stayed with a cousin in the valley while he was young and pursuing Harriet his first wife.











When I looked up  Shelley in Thomas's 'A Literary Pilgrim' I found he did of course know about this.
He was an admirer of Shelley, especially perhaps when he was  young, and in the novel I used a phrase in a letter he wrote to Edna Clarke-Hall when he was twenty-one. That letter is unpublished and I was given permission by the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, to quote from it. Sixteen years after the letter was written, he and Edna are looking at it together:
                                                                        *

But let me read this elegant epistle. ‘The approach of our next pilgrimage to Thames Ditton.’ Rather pretentious–that was my style then, I suppose.’

‘Read on.’

'My wife has indeed become one of your admirers tho I will swear I have not done you justice in my descriptions, and she would relish a visit from you as much as the return of the swallows.’

‘Mmmh. I never did visit.’

‘No – but that was because of the dreadful flat, as it says. It is a trifle exaggerated –this ‘misty hollow, this dismal street.’   Good Lord! I suppose after Oxford and Lincoln quad it was outrageously grim. Helen, though, was quite content – she had Merfyn. But it was almost too much for me.’

‘It sounds as though it were. And then you go on with these trees that never existed.’

‘What a lot of nonsense I wrote– 'living in the shade of imaginary poplars indeed.’

‘I wonder what you meant.’

‘Oh I know well enough – I was disheartened, frightened even. I lived in a kind of mystic rural fantasy at that time, desperately wanting to make a living writing and to live in the country – it was what I needed.’

‘Edward, why do you think you wrote to me then?’

‘Well - because - I suppose once I’d left Oxford and not seeing Edmund who'd introduced us, I was afraid it would be all too easy to lose touch with you. And those visits to you – they were a kind of lifeline thrown to me among my troubles. And I needed one to be thrown to Atheldene Road – I really did.’

He read on, smiling.

‘Oh look at this. "Of course I live – if living it may be called– by my writing, ‘literature’ we call it in Fleet St - a litter of pigs – he made an awful litter."  Ha ha – an attempt at humour.’

‘I thought it was quite amusing', Edna said. ‘And then you lecture me about keeping up my Shelley, but you needn’t have worried – I loved Shelley and I still do.’

‘Good. Oh back to the poverty line – bone soup.'

‘I felt for Helen when I read that. Were you really so poor?’

‘We certainly were.’

‘Read the rest. It’s the part I like best.’

"I am selfish enough to wish I could ask you to come and see" – it’s crossed out – "see my wife and me."

‘You wrote “See me” first, look.’

‘True. This description of the flat – why did I think you would be interested?’

‘Read it out. I love it – I can picture it exactly.’

He began to read as though it were a salesroom catalogue.

 

"1) a study with walls of French grey, ‘softer than sleep’

(2) some copies of pictures by Leonardo, Andrea del Canto, Rossetti and Burne Jones, and a dear old photo of Tintern that was the last thing I looked at when I  went to bed at 6  and lived in short frocks.

(3) between 900 & 1000 books

(4) a green armchair from Wm. Morris, 2 or 3 others, all so comfortable that in them I can laugh at poverty even on an empty stomach

 (5) a drinking cup (an unconventional ‘christening’ cup for our baby, Philip Merfyn) inscribed with mottoes by all my friends

(6) a blazing fire (7) me."

His voice changed as he read the last lines.

 

"Will you write to me?

Ever sincerely yours

Edward Thomas. "

 

Yes, I remember it all. What I was feeling as I wrote – I had to laugh at myself, make myself amusing to you. It did me good to write that letter, as if I were watching from outside, and could laugh at my predicament. Yet showing you that I did need to see you still. I was absolutely longing for my friends.’

‘And you did visit me for a time. Then you stopped.’

‘I know.’

                                                                      *    *   *

(Most annoyingly I haven't actually cited the Shelley line and being conscientious I haven't retained it anywhere as I was told not to. I wonder whether Edward had hopes of improving Edna's poetry, if she had already begun trying to write at that time. The phrase, 'Don't give up the day job' inevitably comes to mind! I might post about them soon.)
  
From Literary Pilgrim in England(sic) he describes Shelley, aged 18, being in Wales but so agitated by love and romantic composition that he could not appreciate the scenery sufficiently.  He'd been expelled from Oxford for atheism and lost his fiancée for the same reason- but he was in love with another anyway:

'In July and August 1810 he was in Radnorshire, at his cousin Thomas Grove's house, Cwm Elann near Rhyader. ... Wales he found 'excessively grand', the scenery 'highly romantic'  but he did not much regard the woods, the cloudy mountains, the waterfalls.... He wrote that he was  'not wholly uninfluenced by their magic' in his lonely walks, but he longed for a thunderstorm.'


However, the Powys digital history project gives a slightly warmer picture -

The future poet, who was yet to produce any notable literary work, then went to London, where he met another Harriet, Harriet Westbrook, the daughter of an inn-keeper. In July 1811, when Shelley was almost 19, he was invited by his uncle to stay at Cwm Elan. He chose to walk to mid-Wales all the way from the family estate in Sussex. Whilst in Wales he was greatly impressed by the wild and romantic surroundings, as shown in his surviving letters of the time: "Rocks piled on each other to tremendous heights, rivers formed into cataracts by their projections, and valleys clothed with woods, present an  appearance of enchantment." "This country is highly romantic; here are rocks of uncommon height and picturesque waterfalls. I am more astonished at the grandeur of the scenery than I expected." "...I am not wholly uninfluenced by its magic on my lonely walks."      Shelley married Harriet after eloping and they sought to live in a manor house at Nantgwllt, also in the Elan Valley, and also like the cousin's house, now under water. It re-emerged when waters were low in the '30's and again in 1947, only a heap of rubble.

Pictures from Radnorshire Museum , Llandridnod Wells.