Edward Thomas and three women, Edna, Eleanor and Helen:Edna Clarke Hall

 

 

Still Life, Basket on Chair

         



A blog-reader commented that I had left hanging a reference to Edna and my discomfort about what I've made of her in the novel.
It's true that the Edna episodes are by far the most speculative, based chiefly on poems of Edward and Edna. Then belatedly my speculations were to some extent confirmed by Matthew Hollis who had access to Edna's journals of the period. But whether she actively tried to seduce Edward - well, I can only say I think it quite likely, and likely that she would not have succeeded. But at present, at least, we don't know.

Edna's Story:

Edna – slender, extraordinarily beautiful, with a mass of chestnut hair and expressive eyes, was so talented an artist that she was accepted at the Slade at fourteen. She didn’t need to attend drawing class – there was nothing she needed to learn – so she developed her own way as a painter, especially as a water-colourist.  

It was William Clarke-Hall, a lawyer friend of her father’s, who had persuaded her parents to send her to the Slade. In her mind Willie was of their generation, twice her age. She was grateful to him but she’d never regarded him as a lover. When he proposed marriage she was too young to know herself, her feelings, and his nature. The marriage was unhappy from the beginning. Edna was nineteen, Willie thirty-two, she was open, honest and forthright with her feelings, he was reserved and formal, but he had been, for a time, overwhelmed by Edna’s beauty.

Edward had been in his last year at Oxford, already a father at twenty-one and married, though not yet living with Helen. A close friend of his, a law student, knew William and liked to talk about legal matters with him. Edward went on these visits, but spent the time talking to Edna. It was ‘them and us’, as Edward said – the lawyers and the artists.

Edna was glad to have someone who understood her, because already her new husband constantly criticised her behaviour and indeed her thoughts; he blamed her for her introspection or what he called self-absorption. Worse, she was young and wild, wanting to sleep out under the stars and climb the high elms around their house. She went out barefoot in simple cotton dresses and Willie said she looked like a gypsy.

Along with her wildness was the problem, for Willie, of the informality and spontaneity of her painting. Her art suffered; she managed to exhibit once in a group with some old Slade friends, but nothing more. All her promise seemed to have disappeared. She found what inspiration she could in Wuthering Heights, identifying herself with Catherine and her yearning for passionate love, something that she felt was cruelly denied her. She’d said a little, even at that early time, to Edward to hint at her unhappiness but she’d restrained herself from too much complaint then. 

After Oxford and a year in London the Thomases’ life took them away into the country, to Kent and Hampshire, and the friendship faded. Fifteen years passed. Edna had two children. Her old teacher from the Slade persuaded her to exhibit in a one-woman show early in 1914, and in the Saturday Review she was described as a sensitive and expressive draughtswoman. Her sense of colour, the reviewer said, was individual and instinctive. 

None of this altered Willie’s attitude towards his wife. 

 

In 1915 Edward's posting at Hare Hall camp, Romford, meant that he was near enough the Clarke- Hall home, Great House, Upminster, to visit and renew the friendship with Edna.

 

What 'happened' then between them we don't know, but Edward's poems of the period tell us that a real woman  or 'Woman' preoccupied his thoughts.
I have a book of Edna's poems kindly sent to me by Alison Thomas, a scientist at Cambridge who, for reasons I've never sought out, knows about Edna and other artists of the period. 'Portraits of Women', Alison Thomas.
The poems - well, I do wonder whether Edward was asked to read them and if so what he would have said. They are almost all full of pain, all about Love, Desire or Death.

The poems were published in 1926 and none are dated.

Edna hated the war and was in effect a pacifist - she painted very little during the war years. Somewhere around 1918 she had a serious mental breakdown. Her therapist persuaded Willie, her husband, to  respect her and her art more.
 She had a studio and gallery in London and continued to paint.

Love said unto my soul.   1930

In 1930 (aged 51) she was drawn by Augustus John.

Her gallery, studio and most of her extant work was destroyed in a bombing raid in WW Two, and she ceased painting. Edna lived till she was a hundred, dying in 1979.

   Thomas's poem, written 4th March 1916

Celandine

Thinking of her had saddened me at first,
Until I saw the sun on the celandines lie
Redoubled, and she stood up like a flame,
A living thing, not what before I nursed,
The shadow I was growing to love almost,
The phantom, not the creature with bright eye
That I had thought never to see, once lost.

She found the celandines of February
Always before us all. Her nature and name
Were like those flowers, and now immediately
For a short swift eternity back she came,
Beautiful, happy, simply as when she wore
Her brightest bloom among the winter hues
Of all the world; and I was happy too,
Seeing the blossoms and the maiden who
Had seen them with me Februarys before,
Bending to them as in and out she trod
And laughed, with locks sweeping the mossy sod.

But this was a dream; the flowers were not true,
Until I stooped to pluck from the grass there
One of five petals and I smelt the juice
Which made me sigh, remembering she was no more,
Gone like a never perfectly recalled air.      

Biographical fiction, HG Wells and David Lodge

Ultimate biog fiction?

HG Wells

Anthony Beevor - an historian's objections to 'faction.'

 David  Lodge recently talked about the 'Year of Henry James' - see last blog- and then more generally about the use of real figures in fiction.
He has a recent novel on HG Wells, 'A Man of Parts' published, which I have just ordered. With that and the Jude Morgan on Shakespeare I'm about to start,  I'm heavily  into biographical fiction.
As the 'Conscious Englishman' is now being printed I'm thinking about reviewers and wondering about David Lodge himself - rather a cheek, but nothing venture...

Anthony Beevor wrote  a Guardian  article - also called  'Author, Author'( 19 February 2011) on  the perils of faction, and Lodge referred to his views.  It's very well worth reading if you are interested in this subject. Beevor  is a historian and his argument is essentially that truth is lost or blurred by these works, even though immaculately researched, like Hilary Mantel's Cromwell.

Mantel says,
'Unlike the historian the novelist doesn't operate through hindsight. She lives inside the consciousness of her characters for whom the future is a blank.'
 Beevor comments that the historian should do both, seeing things as the protagonist did at the time, then analysing.

'But the key fact is that when a novelist uses a major historical character the reader has no idea what he or she has taken from recorded fact  and what has been invented in their re-creation of events.
Restorers of paintings and pottery follow a code of conduct in their work  to distinguish the original material from what they are adding later.'

I believe Lodge added that maybe Beevor wanted  the made-up bits, or else  the 'real' bits,  in bold! (But isn't it rather dated to be adamant that we are sure of 'real'?)

Here Beevor speculates about its popularity:

A blend of fact and fiction has been used in various forms since the dawn of creative writing, starting with sagas and epic poems. Yet the appeal of faction to writers and readers has recently increased in a dramatic way. Is this due to a poverty of imagination, as some critics argue? Is it a marketing-driven phenomenon, perhaps catering to the modern desire in a fast-moving world to learn and to be entertained at the same time? Is it influenced by a curious need for authenticity, even in works of fiction? Is there a prurient compulsion to fill in those gaps in our knowledge about the private lives of great figures, which history has failed to cover? Movies and TV now revel in the speculative biopic.

I think there is some truth  in all those factors if I'm honest - on the first,  like Jean Rhys on writing the Wide Sargasso Sea,  'I cannot invent, but I can imagine.'

Poem of Edward Thomas - because  I feel he is getting lost in  all this

First Known When Lost

I never had noticed it until
'Twas gone,---the narrow copse
Where now the woodman lops
The last of the willows with his bill.

It was not more than a hedge o'ergrown.
One meadow's breadth away
I passed it day by day.
Now the soil is bare as a bone,

And black betwixt two meadows green,
Though fresh-cut faggot ends
Of hazel made some amends
With a gleam as if flowers they had been.

Strange it could have hidden so near!
And now I see as I look
That the small winding brook,
A tributary's tributary rises there.


Has anyone noticed that on copying from Oxford's digital 1st WW site the enjambents are lost? It's like one of those exercises in a poetry writing class where you have to guess where they should be. I quite enjoy putting it right really, and am almost tempted to try it without checking Edna Longley - but no, the capital letters give it away.

'First Known When Lost' is the title of a rather wonderful blog, by the way.

'Faction'? No,  Biographical Fiction.

 

 

The two novels that gave me the idea of writing a novel about Edward Thomas's last years were  these:

 

 

 

David Lodge, in his 'The Year of Henry James', wrote about the 'co-incidence  waiting to happen' - that he and Colm Toibin were writing their novels at the same time. (The same thing has happened to some extent now with Edward Thomas of course, but not, I hope, in fiction.)

 

Lodge puts forward his thoughts about the James coincidence in 'The Year..' but more interesting to me is his discussion about the current  popularity of biographical novels, especially as applied to the lives of writers:

 

'It could be taken as a symptom of a declining faith or loss of confidence in the power of purely fictional narrative in a culture where we are bombarded from every direction with formal narrative  in the form of 'news'. It could be regarded as a characteristic form of post-modernism - incorporating the art of the past in its own processes through reinterpretation and stylistic pastiche. It could be seen as a sign of decadence and exhaustion in contemporary writing, or as a positive and ingenious way of coping with the 'anxiety of influence.'

After commenting  that the same has happened in drama he goes on:

 

'In short, the  biographical-novel-about-a-writer has acquired a new status  and a prominence as a subgenre of literary fiction.'

 

That was published in 2006, when I was just getting under way myself. His sections on acknowledging sources, the 'voice' and on seamlessly joining facts and fiction are good and I will look at them in the next blog.

 

Since then there have been many many more - notably for me 'Arthur and George' by Julian Barnes. I had an opportunity to talk to him and rather wasted it by chatting to him about settings - it is Staffordshire based and one scene is set in the building which was an annexe to my (and Carol Anne Duffy's)old  school.  He did tell me that the genesis of the idea -  the Dreyfus case - came to him on a visit to Germany.

 

 

There is a 'novel'- not well received, about Frost too. This is the blurb:
'Through the revelatory voice of fiction, Brian Hall gives us an artist toughened by tragedy, whose intimacy with death gave life to his poetry-for him, the preeminent symbol of man's form-giving power. This is the exquisitely rendered portrait of one man's rages, guilt, generosity, and defiant persistence-as much a fictional masterwork as it is a meditation on greatness.'

Show More

Show Less

---

Recent additions to the genre, if it is one.



'The Great Lover', Jill Dawson's 2009 novel about Rupert Brooke in Grantchester - very speculative, entertaining.



Another - my former tutor on Oxford's creative writing Diploma course, novelist Clare Morgan, who has  Nietzsche,Virginia Woolf, and some modern characters woven together in her gripping, 'A Book for All and None.'

Then there is  Jude Morgan who is prolific in this field  - the Byron trilogy, the Brontes - A Taste of Sorrow - I've read the Byrons and learned a lot, but have yet to read the Brontes. And now - what courage! Shakespeare! Surely that is the ultimate challenge.

The Secret Life of William Shakespeare.

'In this confident and accomplished fictional rendering of Shakespeare's life, Morgan makes a virtue of how little we know for certain about the playright. Not only does the paucity of fact open up spaces in which the novelist can operate with greater freedom, but Morgan has turned our lack of knowledge into a quality of unknowableness in his protagonist .'   (Jane Housham) That sounds excellent.

Life After Death

Andrew Motion on Keats, 'The Invention of Dr Cake' and on Edward Thomas in the collection 'Interrupted lives'  - made up a post-mortem future for them so is in a sense pure fiction. Reading the Edward Thomas is a very disorientating business, all well known facts and then suddenly:

'At 7.36 a shell landed nearby, just as he was standing to fill his clay pipe. The blast poured over him, sqeezing his heart and wrinkling the diary - and a letter from Helen - that he had tucked into his pocket before he started out. As he staggered backwards a piece of shrapnel skimmed towards him. missing his chest but lacerating his left arm between the wrist and elbow. He collapsed into the shell-hole unconscious. Stretcher-bearers found him that evening.'
 
His left arm amputated he is invalided home and has a 'honeymoon' period with a very happy Helen, but .... well, it's interesting to read, along with Marlowe's, Shelley's, Katherine Mansfield's, Plath's and Angela Carter's resurrections.


What does this all amount to? My feeling is that some readers, me for one, love these things and others, perhaps more scrupulous and scholarly types, loathe them. I rarely get through  a great bumper biography I've bought or borrowed - there have been exceptions, George Eliot's notably - but I learn plenty and sometimes retain more deeply from novels.

Edward Thomas wasn't a fiction reviewer - why is that? - but he had read everything that mattered, and of course he tried his own, the odd 'Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans', a 'faction' indeed as it is based on his own Welsh family in London.  Guy Cuthbertson (OUP) will elucidate it I know and I'll try it again.

 No poem as this is all prose so:
From The Childhood of Edward Thomas - his unfinished autobiography:
So I used to enjoy going about with Henry to look at the pigeon shops in Wandsworth, Battersea and Clapham, occasionally to visit the back-garden lofts of working men in the same neighbourhoods. He had me in tow and I think I remained for the most part silent in the background unless I had a bird to buy. These long rambles among crowds of working people under the gaslight, in all sorts of weathers, were a great pleasure and were interrupted by a greater one when we stood and looked at pigeons in an atmosphere of shag smoke, grain and birds. At one time I paid a good many visits to the lofts of a tradesman in our neighbourhood, a tall gross pale-faced man with a truculent geniality. He was said to ill-treat the small wife who did most of the shop work and to be going under an assumed name for some bad reason. John would never have endured him: if he had to deal with men below him he preferred gamekeepers and such like who had to be tipped and knew their place. But the man kept scores of long-distance homing pigeons. Their high circlings visible from our back garden, and their rushing lower flight between the chimney-pots, were sublime to me. It was a great day therefore when I went round to him to get the pair of young black chequers which I had been awaiting for many days. I was to have them, so I understood, for two-and-six the pair. When I already had them in my hands I learnt that they were two-and-six each. This was beyond my means, nor did I want to have one of them at such a price. So he took them back into his hands at the door. Then while I was still lingering he put the head of one bird in his mouth, as I imagined in fun, or to slip a grain into its beak. His teeth closed on the slender neck tighter and tighter, the wings flapped and quivered, and when he opened his jaws the bird was dead. I was speechless, on the edge of tears. He looked down at me with a half-pitying grin, remarking that I was "still soft-hearted". My tenderness turned to hatred for the man, yet I could not speak. I dared not show my feeling. With only a meek resentfulness I even accepted his gift of the surviving bird. It became the prize of my pigeon house, always distinguished as "the young homer". The man I never did more than nod to again. 

Sunday Times Cover, 11th November '12

I mentioned this excellent article by AA Gill last year.
 

That 'quiet voice of England' headline upset at least one person: an anonymous reader of my publisher Frank's blog, justthoughtsandstuff: -

'I, too, read the article on Thomas in the Times and was irritated (but not surprised given Gill's historic hostility towards the Welsh)by its title ('The Quiet Voice of England')and not even a passing acknowledgement of his Welsh roots (both his parents were Welsh)of which he was very proud, to the extent that he gave all his children Welsh names (Merfyn, Myfanwy and Bronwen), and note, his son's name spelt the Welsh way, with an 'f' rather than a 'v'. And now here's this book, 'A Conscious Englishman.'
If, by this, certain English people are trying to stake an exclusive claim on Edward Thomas as being one of their own, then it is a deception that does not bear scrutiny.' There is no doubt that he loved England, but he is more fairly described as an Anglo-Welsh poet.'

 

 Thomas's parents were born and brought up in Wales, moving as young adults to London where their six sons were born. Edward had Welsh grandparents living in Swindon whom he often visited, and a cousin in the country near Swansea. He was proud of his Welsh roots.  I wasn't aware that AA Gill had also added Wales to his long  list of dislikes - but what can you expect?

 

Frank replied sympathetically being half -Welsh, but pointing out that the 'Conscious Englishman' comment was Thomas's own, referring to his having patriotic thoughts in 1915. He added that Thomas's pride in his Welsh roots is made clear in my novel

 

 I commented, rather defensively now I think:

 

'I am slowly growing into a conscious Englishman,' was a significant statement in his growing belief that he had to 'do something' about Britain at war. He called himself an 'accidental Cockney', was described by a very close friend as 'A Londoner with a covering of Oxford', and the truth is that English language and literature, writers and preoccupations filled his thinking constantly. His prose 'Beautiful Wales' is lovely, but  I find only two poems relate in any way to Wales - Mountain Chapel and Helen of the Roads - a pity. His poems and 90% of his prose are specifically placed in southern England, no doubt reflecting demand for the prose and daily influence for the poems. So in a way Gill is right.
 But do read Thomas. He saw 'lovers of the Celt' as poseurs:

'Their aim and ideal is to go about the world in a state of self-satisfied dejection, interrupted, and perhaps sustained, by days when they consume strange mixed liquors to the tune of all the fine old songs which are fashionable...I cannot avoid the opinion that to boast of the Celtic spirit is to confess you have it not.'

 Ouch! You can always rely on Thomas for honesty.

 

Of course 'I am slowly growing into...' does imply that he was not a conscious Englishman beforehand. He is using England to mean Britain as he disliked that term and thought it meant nothing: people only relate to their own 'holes and corners.' It's annoying for 'the rest'  but I think it was even more prevalent then than now, when we are a bit more attuned to separate identities.

 

 

 

 

 I missed a line from my quote out of Beautiful Wales:

 

'If you can discover a possible Celtic great-great-grandmother, you are at once among the chosen.'

 

By this I  feel sure Thomas is satirising the 'lovers of the Celt', the pretentious aesthetes in contrast to  real Welsh people - and that he, being always wary of sham emotions, was cautious about how much he could claim to be Welsh or part Welsh himself. In his Preface he writes :

 

'I have....to confess, chiefly for the benefit of the solemn reviewer, that I know nothing of the Welsh language.'

 

There are puzzles about Thomas and Wales - he omits Wales entirely from his 'A Literary Pilgrim in England' - known by him as 'Omes and 'Aunts - which includes a chapter on Scotland!

 

It would be good to have comments on why this might be, especially from Wales - my guess is that it relates to the suppression of Welsh culture by the establishment and education at the time, so that there was little demand for prose? But that's an uneducated guess.

 

On reflection Frank's anonymous reader does have a valid point and the English should recognise Thomas as an Anglo-Welsh poet.

It is odd that Gillian Clarke, - isn 't she still the National Poet of Wales? -  writing on Thomas in Branchlines doesn't mention his Welsh roots either.

Follow-up;
A friend commented that WH Davies  and Thomas had a close friendship.
Phil Carradice in the BBC Wales blog confirms my sense of what Thomas meant by 'English' and 'Englishman' inhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/waleshistory/2012/03/edward_thomas_welsh_poet_english_traditions.html

 It does seem extraordinary to younger people  but I can date the time when 'British' began to be properly used to around 1980 - it was rarely heard before then.

But there is Words, written on May Hill where he could look towards Wales, just before he enlisted.

 

WORDS

UT of us all

That make rhymes,

Will you choose

Sometimes--

As the winds use

A crack in the wall

Or a drain,

Their joy or their pain

To whistle through--

Choose me,

You English words?                                                                                       

I know you:

You are light as dreams,

Tough as oak,

Precious as gold,

As poppies and corn,

Or an old cloak;

Sweet as our birds

to the ear,

As the burnet rose

In the heat

Of Midsummer:

Strange as the races

Of dead and unborn:

Strange and sweet

Equally,

And familiar,

To the eye,

As the dearest faces

That a man knows,

And as lost homes are:

But though older far

Than oldest yew,--

As our hills are, old,--

Worn new

Again and again:

Young as our streams

After rain:

And as dear

As the earth which you prove

That we love.

Make me content

With some sweetness

From Wales,

Whose nightingales

Have no wings,--

From Wiltshire and Kent

And Herefordshire,

And the villages there,--

From the names, and the things

No less.

Let me sometimes dance

With you,

Or climb,

Or stand perchance

In ecstasy,

Fixed and free

In a rhyme,

As poets do.

 

Maybe that partly answers the question? 

 

 Edward Thomas and The Thames at Oxford

(NB Matthew Hollis this afternoon on Now All Roads Lead to France.)
 

It was the 50th Anniversary of the building of Donnington Bridge last year and we went along to the celebrations.. In Thomas 's time there was a ferry across the river, and in the thirties a footbridge only.

Edward Thomas was quite a keen rower and this stretch, between Folly Bridge and Iffley Lock, must have been where he rowed.  He appreciated the college barges, beautiful things, of which there is only one left I believe, moored very near Donnington Bridge and now someone's home (open during Artsweeks.)

'The River Isis

On the right is the gold-and-white barge of Magdalen College undergoing repair. The masts and barges of other Colleges line the side of the river, and Folly Bridge closes the prospect.'

Oxford, 1903

I walk from Donnington to Iffley most days even though sadly without our beloved Greg who died in January. Now we have our mad mini-lurcher, Monty.

Today I paid another visit to the bull's head sculpted by Charles Wheeler, R A in 1923, and set in the lovely old bridge before Iffley Lock. as a 'starting ring.' Not many people walking the riverside path know it's there, but those tying up their boats for the Head of The River start must know it well.  The bull of course is for Ox-ford.

Charles Wheeler was only in his early twenties when he sculpted this, but already R.A. He became its first sculptor President   - that was in 1956 when he was very Establishment - Royalty, the Bank of England.

We were watching an Arts programme recently when he was mentioned as having banned from the Royal Academy the abstract artist  John Hoyland (at least we're pretty sure it was him - please correct me if I'm wrong.

 Edward Thomas, from 'Oxford' on the culture of rowing in Oxford which does not seem to have changed a bit except - thank God - there are WOMEN.

'It is a finer lesson in eloquence to listen to the coaches shouting reprimand and advice, in sentences one or two words long, to a panting crew. One can see the secret of English success in the meek reception which a number of hard-working, conscientious, abraded men give to the abuse of an idler on the bank. On the afternoon of the races all is changed. The man who yesterday shouted "Potato sacks" or "Pleasure Boat!" now screams "Well rowed all!" Before and behind him flows all of the University that can run a mile.'The faces of all are expressive in every inch; all restraint of habit or decorum is gone for the time being. The racing boats make hardly a sound, and for the most part the rowers hear not a sound from the bank, only the click  of their own rowlocks.'

POEM

Here is a much lazier boat, and an unusually contented  poet. He associated rivers and lakes with psychic harmony and relaxation, and it seems a pity that he did not often have the chance to take a boat out.

. 'The morning was already hot... At the river I took a dinghy and sculled for nearly two hours... Hardly a though or memory stirred itself. Nevertheless I was conscious of that blest lucidity, that physical well-being of the brain, "like the head of  a mountain in blue air and sunshine", which is so rarely  achieved except in youth.'

' There is nothing like the solitude of a solitary lake in early morning, when one is in deep still water.'

July

Naught moves but clouds, and in the glassy lake
Their doubles and the shadow of my boat.
The boat itself stirs only when I break
This drowse of heat and solitude afloat
To prove if what I see be bird or mote,
Or learn if yet the shore woods be awake.

Long hours since dawn grew, - spread, - and passed on high
And deep below, - I have watched the cool reeds hung
Over images more cool in imaged sky:
Nothing there was worth thinking of for long;
All that the ring-doves say, far leaves among,
Brims my mind with content thus still to lie.