The poet who died in battle, at war with himself

Edward Thomas was killed at Arras in 1917, but had long been suicidal and disillusioned with his writing, says Richard Fitzpatrick

THE poet Edward Thomas, whom Ted Hughes called “the father of us all,” died on the first day of World War 1’s Arras offensive in 1917.

His was a peculiar death. Having survived the day’s battle, he filled his clay pipe for a smoke. A mortar shell flew past, so close to his ear that the blast stopped his heart.

The poet and editor Matthew Hollis, who speaks at next week’s Kinsale Arts Festival, has written a biography of Thomas, which has won a Costa Book Award, among other accolades. The book hangs on the last few years of Thomas’s life. He was late to poetry — his first poem wasn’t drafted until Nov 1914 — a tardiness that may have contributed to the depression that had haunted him before he was a student at Oxford University.

His workload as a pen for hire, in part borne from the need to support a wife and three children, left him exhausted and disillusioned. He was nothing more than, in his own words, “a hack writer” — a reviewer, a gatherer of Norse tales, a biographer (he wrote a book on the Duke of Marlborough in 10 weeks). He complained to his friend, poet Robert Frost, that he was shattered from burning his “candle at three ends”. “I don’t think writing poetry or going to war cleared him of his depression,” says Hollis. “How could it? It was a chronic condition throughout his life. On a number of occasions, he had contemplated or even attempted suicide. It’s unlikely that poems are going to lift that veil overnight. What, certainly, the poetry did do was give him a form of expression that he finally thought was worthy of his talents. I think this is one of the things that plagued him through his life.

“He was pretty much the leading critic of his day. He was totally unintimidated — he would take Yeats to task for sloppy punctuation. At the time, Yeats was the prevailing spirit. He was fearless. What he was doing as a critic was honing his art, which he would then go on to apply in his poetry, which was absolutely brilliant. But the melancholy was no doubt exacerbated by his working conditions. There’s even a suggestion that it might have been there in his mother’s life too.”

His wife Helen bore the brunt of his blues. Poignant passages of Hollis’s remarkably evocative biography deal with her treatment. The Thomases married in Jun 1899, a union they kept secret from their parents, because Thomas was still an undergraduate and Helen was pregnant.

While Thomas struggled with depression and doubt, Helen’s fussing and pretence that everything was OK, a natural outpouring for a sprite, bohemian woman, infuriated him. If she waited up for him with supper, he’d berate her for doing so. “Your sympathy and your love are both hateful to me,” he said. Her selfless love only made the self-loathing at his cowardice, at his inability to end his own life, stronger.

In the winter of 1908, for example, he left their house with a gun in hand, intent on killing himself; his wife watched him leave the house but was powerless to stop him. He climbed a hill nearby and found sanctuary in a wooded copse of beech trees. He heard a walker. Pointing the gun at his chest, he fluttered his finger over the trigger but hadn’t the strength of will to pull it. He returned to his house. “Shall I make the tea?” said Helen, as he took off his boots. “Please,” he replied.

Hollis brings the pre-war London literary scene vividly to life. It orbited around a poetry bookshop that opened in Jan 1913 on a seedy street in the Bloomsbury neighbourhood.

Yeats, as Hollis writes, towered over his cohorts, who included some fascinating American interlopers — TS Eliot, Frost and the precocious, mesmerising Ezra Pound, who arrived in London with £3 in his pocket, but had four volumes of poetry published by 27 years of age.

Thomas once challenged a literary rival to a duel, and on another occasion threw Frost over his head in a London restaurant, at lunch-time, with a judo manoeuvre. “Wasn’t ready for him at all,” said Frost.

There was no need for Thomas to enlist — he was 39 years of age when he died, with a family, and intellectually disgusted by the jingoism and anti-German sentiment that pervaded Britain. He oscillated between emigrating to America and heading to war.

“Helen points out that I could try America,” Thomas wrote to Frost, “and then enlist if it failed, but not the other way around.”

* Matthew Hollis appears at the Kinsale Arts Festival, The Pop Up Playhouse, Kinsale, Cork, 6pm, Saturday, Jul 14. Further information, visit: www.kinsaleartsfestival.com