Lincoln College Archive
Two exciting items I found in the archive:
Thomas's own copy of the poems of Shelley.
 With a century-old willow-leaf book-mark
Inside the fly-leaves, back and front, he had copied out several poems, Ode to the West Wind being the first. It is always
a learning experience, isn't it, to copy a poem. You participate in its writing to some extent, in a way you don't get from reading. (It's said it is almost never done without an error, punctuation usually - I bet Thomas did manage.)
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 That letter is unpublished and I was given permission by the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, to quote from it.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...............'
(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.)
Edna Clarke-Hall is surely the shadow behind the other exciting find from the Lincoln Archive. It's not really a find of course - it's a well-known letter, a vital one. But I had no idea that it was there rather than in the main archive of letters from Edward to Helen Thomas, in Cardiff.
I know you can't read it. It's taken me some time to track down the lines I knew, cited and known well for many years. Edna Longley just took them from George Thomas's notes in his Collected Poems, and I eventually found them. He doesn't mention the source, surprisingly. I do wonder whether Edna, and Jean Moorcroft-Wilson the biographer, know that the letter is in Lincoln.
The letter explains aspects of the poem, Roads, which is on the rear. Then it refers, surely , to his recent poems, Celandine and The Clouds that are so Light, and other similar love poems.
'Fancy your thinking I might have someone in view in those verses.....Fancy your being pleased at the idea. Well, perhaps you wouldn't be if there really were someone, in which case I would hardly write verses, I think.' ...
'Oh, you needn't think of another lady. There would have to be 2 to make a love affair and I am only one. Nobody but you would ever be likely to respond as I wished. I don't like to think anybody but I could respond to you. If you turned to anybody else I should come to an end immediately.'
'Come to an end immediately... surely those who portray Helen as simply a burden to Thomas, and one he would willingly shed if he could, need to reflect on those words.
I am intrigued that Helen kept this letter back when she donated the Edward-Helen correspondence to Cardiff University. I assume it only came to Lincoln when Myfanwy gave the items to Stephen Gill for Lincoln, thirty years or so ago. It is deeply personal and sexual, surely , in the phrase 'respond to.' And reassuring at a profound level.
None the less I took it to be a letter written in part to disguise the attraction between Edward Thomas and Edna Clarke -Hall from Helen, or to firm up within himself his determination to resist her seductions, or at least to stop them going too far.
I made use of the letter in my novel. It's in the sections of Helen's 'voice.'
I
became convinced that Edward was in love with another woman. Those poems –
about celandines, about the touch of rain. I wasn’t that woman. I always
thought that Edward would find a woman cleverer and prettier than me and I
would have to make myself accept it, rather than lose him entirely.
One miserable rainy day, not long after
our dear old Rags died, I looked around the room – dirty windows, breakfast
dishes not done. I knew that a pile of washing lay muddily on the wash-house
floor and the stupid copper’s fire was out. I thought suddenly that I was no
better than Elinor Frost and I understood how Elinor must have felt, her
indifference to it all, having no energy or interest in it. What was the point,
anyway, of gleaming windows and tidy children, of meals that took half a day to
prepare and were quickly eaten and forgotten? What did it matter? What good had
it done me, all my efforts, when it hadn’t kept Edward’s love for me safe?
And that was the day Edward chose to
arrive in the evening without warning, expecting, of course, that I would be
overjoyed to see him. His face was glowing from the exhilaration of walking in
the rain, hurrying up Bell Hill from the station. But my face, my dress, my
hair – all unprepared, dirty, soured with self-pity and fear.
I
flustered around trying to put the house straight and of course his mood
changed then because his surprise was spoiled. He said he wished he hadn’t
troubled to come and I said I wished he hadn’t. Then I broke down crying and I
told him that most of my wretchedness was because of my jealous thoughts.
‘Fancy you thinking those poems were
about a love affair. It takes two to make a love affair and as you know I am
incapable of it.’
‘But Edward, the verses speak of
memories, real things that happened.’
‘That’s how poets work, Helen. An
incident, any little thing, even a thought, you build on that.’
‘I wouldn’t blame you.’
‘Look, I’ve only ever responded to you,
Helen. You know that the one thing I can claim is that I’ve never deceived you.
I haven’t loved as you would want me to, it isn’t my way, you know that. But
there is no affair.’
I cried with relief, because I knew he
was speaking the truth.
‘And if you were to respond to some
other man I don’t know what I’d do. So let’s have no more of this nonsense.
Come out and look at the moon with me – the rain’s stopped, I think.’
We went out into the garden; yes, the
sky had cleared and the rain stopped. I put my arms round him, but he was still
annoyed.
* * *
Poem:
On the reverse of the letter is 'Roads.'
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