Matthew Hollis - Now All Roads Lead to France

Matthew Hollis, Now All Roads Lead to France, The Last Years of Edward Thomas (Faber)

Sometimes you don't realize what you were missing until you've got it. Edward Thomas seemed fairly well served by commentaries and memoirs and so I wasn't really aware of the lack of a real biography. Eleanor Farjeon's book that covers the last four years, when looked at again, is really annotated letters from Thomas to her and there wasn't a biography by anybody that wasn't either friend or family.

Although, inevitably, Matthew Hollis's title tells us to expect the story of his last years, Thomas's early life is recounted in sufficient detail to make it a complete story. It is consummately well done, filling in with descriptions of other poets, the political situation that brings about the war and flashbacks to Thomas's family both seamlessly and right on time.

Although not advertised quite so clearly in the poems, Thomas was melancholic even beyond his contemporary in poetry, Hardy, and one of his greatest successors, Larkin. Dark moods and difficult relationships meant he rarely felt fulfilled or happy. His wife, Helen, would appear to have borne much of this in devout and long-suffering fashion. Thomas was by no means at home all the time and was not always an easy companion when he was. And she has first Eleanor Farjeon's and then the considerably more dangerous Edna Clarke Hall's rival charms to apparently contend with.

Thomas was a successful reviewer and a professional prose writer before meeting Robert Frost who was responsible for encouraging him to write poems. Hollis gives us a useful and comprehensive account of the Dymock Poets, the largely Georgian community that Frost was associated with. But the main significance of Thomas and his friendship with Frost was how they were both arriving at an idea of poetry that was between the haughty doctrine of Ezra Pound and the antiquated Georgian insistence on sentiment and traditional forms. It was speech rhythms and 'the sound of sense' that Frost was intent upon using and it was a very similar to what Thomas had been thinking and writing for some time, for example in relation to Robert Burns,

'It is as near to the music as nonsense could be, and yet it is perfect sense'.

Thomas's example, and when he begins to write poems he does so prolifically, has come to influence the next generations more than could have been imagined with Larkin, Andrew Motion and Glyn Maxwell to name only the few at the head of a long list of those openly acknowledging a debt to his understated, plain but lyrical style.

While Rupert Brooke is among the first to enlist for the war and one of the first of the poets to die, others follow but Thomas is uncertain. He is not nationalistic but also appreciates the necessity of defending the countryside he has such an understanding of.

Thomas's experience of the war was very different from that of the other soldier poets. Where Sassoon, Graves and others had rushed to enlist and then recoiled at the horror of their experience of the conflict. Thomas's war seemed to be running in reverse. ..the longer the war went on the more committed he appeared.

Hollis does well in not dwelling at all on the poignancy of Thomas's death, with his doubts about the war in the first place, his apparently lucky run of just missing shells and the end of the war being only so few days away. The books dispels some of the assumptions that might make Thomas such a popular figure. Not completely the saintly nature lover and sensitive soul of the poems and prose books, he was clearly difficult. And neither just someone who turned to poetry a few years before he was killed but a well-connected literary man from Oxford University. His legacy is perhaps now even more important than the poems he wrote but, in navigating a way between Pound and the Georgian anthologies, he remains central to English poetry in the twentieth century with an influence that is not abating yet.

Matthew Hollis has done a wonderful job in providing exactly the book that was required. Immaculately conceived with a well-judged balance of material from friends, family, the literary world and history, it is both sensibly and sympathetically written. The reader is left with nothing more they could have wished for from it.