Mad About Shakespeare

6. The Understanding Spirit

Shakespeare didn’t work on me alone. He had many able assistants on hand. One of my favourite Falstaff lines was I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men. I was beginning to see that this was true of Falstaff’s creator: he was not only educating me in himself, but he was the cause that other writers were educating me too. His influence seemed to be everywhere. The school’s bespoke A-Level Literature syllabus demanded that we should not be narrowly English, so we were introduced to the plays of Ibsen and Chekhov. When John Gabriel Borkman went out half deranged into the snowstorm, he seemed to be another King Lear; and when in Three Sisters the scheming Natasha crossed the stage carrying a candle to exit left without saying anything, she was another Lady Macbeth. Chekhov’s kindly fools, meanwhile, were reincarnations of Shakespeare’s sad clowns.

Then there were Shakespeare-loving poets discovered outside of class. Shortly before I met my first love, a girl called Sarah Jane, my friend Karim introduced me to the voice of Edward Thomas. This was his gentle way of suggesting that the best poetry – or at least the right poetry for the present – was a lot quieter, more conversational and matter-of-fact, than the pseudo-Romantic effusions of my own that I had shown him. Thomas made me see that what a writer really needs is an eye for things that most of us fail to notice, and maybe an acceptance that there is more grace to be found in the little things of the earth than in the showy gestures of rose bouquets and love songs:

Tall nettles cover up, as they have done

These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough

Long worn out, and the roller made of stone:

Only the elm butt tops the nettles now.

This corner of the farmyard I like most:

As well as any bloom upon a flower

I like the dust on the nettles, never lost

Except to prove the sweetness of a shower.

But then Karim lent me the memoir written by Edward Thomas’s wife. This was fatal: my relationship with Sarah Jane would founder because I put on too much pressure. Because I tried to replicate a romance that had played out in the long, hot summers before the end of the world that came with what would be named the Great War.

Helen Noble was shy, bookish, rather gawky, but with a deep reserve of passion waiting to be unlocked. The daughter of a literary man, she is living in a little villa in suburban London in the closing years of the Victorian age. An equally shy boy, an Oxford undergraduate with literary aspirations of his own, comes visiting. He has a most striking face, recalling a portrait of Shelley in its sensitive, melancholy beauty. He writes essays about nature, clouds, sky, trees, landscapes. They walk on the common and he brings her birds’ nests and wild flowers. His jacket has deep pockets, from which he pulls volumes of Keats and Shelley, Shakespeare and Donne. She says goodbye and moves to Broadstairs to take a job as a nanny. Broadstairs, where we spent every summer holiday under the cry of seagulls, our lungs filled with the same salt air that Helen felt on her face when she slipped out of the house and ran along the beach reciting aloud Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ or ‘Adonais’.

They become lovers, they marry while he is still a student. He struggles to earn a living as a freelance writer. An endless grind of reviews and hackwork, of rented homes and sleepless nights with crying babies. For a time, they find happiness at a farmhouse in the village of Weald, just outside Sevenoaks:

A large square farmhouse standing away from the road in the midst of its own fields. Oast houses, cow sheds, stables, hayricks and a huge barn were grouped about it on two sides. On the other side was a large garden and orchard, and in the front was a little garden opening into a field in which stood great oak trees, and in whose coppice-like hedges sang innumerable nightingales.

On a still summer afternoon like the ones captured in ‘Tall Nettles’ and Thomas’s best-known poem, ‘Adlestrop’, Karim and I went to find it. It was exactly as she described it, save that a barking dog and a surly farmhand chased us off. I vowed to return at night in the hope of hearing a nightingale, but never did.

Edward Thomas suffered from severe depression. He grew more and more difficult to live with. Harsher and harsher with Helen. Just before the outbreak of the Great War, he forged a close friendship with the American poet Robert Frost, who encouraged him to turn away from prose and become a poet himself. Now he found a voice for his dark thoughts. Poetry allowed him to write about depression more honestly than any previous poet – save Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, though they habitually wrote at a slant, not with Thomas’s quiet directness:

so that if I feared the solitude

Far more I feared all company: too sharp, too rude,

Had been the wisest or the dearest human voice.

What I desired I knew not, but whate’er my choice

Vain it must be, I knew.

Yet he also found that grace in simple, natural things: those lightly dusted nettles, a willow, blackberries in the hedgerows, a fallow doe moving silently across the snow, Shakespeare’s image of icicles hanging by a wall.

It was love of the English land and landscape that made him join up. When asked what he was fighting for, reported Eleanor Farjeon, a young woman with whom he had a (probably platonic) affair, he answered, ‘Literally, for this,’ crumbling a pinch of earth between his fingers. He enlisted in a regiment called the Artists Rifles. Only now, as I piece together my memories of falling in love with Shakespeare and with Edward Thomas, does the synchronicity reveal itself: the place where he went to enlist and to train was The Place, Duke’s Road, Camden, the old drill hall where I saw Buzz Goodbody’s Lear, the words ‘Middlesex Artists R. V.’ still carved above the door. Artists R. V. meant not artists’ rendezvous but Artists Rifles Volunteers.

Immediately after passing my driving test, I borrowed the family Mini and headed over to the home of my friend Chris, filled with a mixture of exhilarated freedom and the apprehension of being alone at the wheel for the first time. We talked about books, as we had often done at school. But this was also the first time I saw his room. It was lined with books from floor to ceiling. Always impressionable, I decided on the spot that I must build a library of my own. Chris told me that the best place to start hunting for good-value second-hand copies of the classics was Hall’s Bookshop in the Pantiles at Tunbridge Wells.

The shop soon became a favourite haunt, where I picked up foxed Everyman editions and faded Penguins for next to nothing. I made a particular search for books by Edward Thomas. I wanted to know if all that prose he churned out in order to make a living in the Edwardian years really was mere hackwork, as he claimed. The first volume of his that I found had the unpromising title Feminine Influence on the Poets. Interested in feminine influence on anything, I bought it, even though, being a first edition, it cost a little more than I could properly afford. Though the style was of its time, I didn’t think it was hackwork at all. The first chapter was called ‘The Inspiration of Poetry’. It began with a quotation from Shakespeare bringing together the very things that interested me about Edward Thomas: love, poetry and depression: ‘By Heaven,’ says Biron in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, ‘I do love; and it hath taught me to rhyme and to be melancholy.’

Before long, though, Thomas was writing not about feminine influence on poets but women as poets. Anne Killigrew, Katharine Phillips, Aphra Behn: it was curious that Edward Thomas, a man, had unearthed these intriguing seventeenth-century poets, whereas Helen Gardner, the female Oxford don who edited the Penguin anthology of The Metaphysical Poets, fielded an all-male line-up.

The book really took flight in a chapter called ‘Women, Nature and Poetry’. Here Thomas turned to Shakespeare’s sonnets and argued that, paradoxically, love-poetry seems so often to have little to do with love. There are, he says, matters in the presence of which even Shakespeare himself is silent:

The love-poem is not for the beloved, for it is not worthy, as it is the least thing that is given to her, and none knows this better than she unless it be the lover. It is written in solitude, is spent in silence and the night like a sigh with an unknown object. It may open with desire of woman, but it ends with unexpected consolation or with another desire not of woman. Love-poetry, like all other lyric poetry, is in a sense unintentionally overheard, and only by accident and in part understood, since it is written not for any one, far less for the public, but for the understanding spirit that is in the air round about or in the sky or somewhere.

I only half understood the thought, but it seemed to me profound and true. The true purpose of poetry was not to get a girl into bed, but to connect with the mysterious understanding spirit towards which all creative artists are forever reaching. Call it imagination, or the motion and the spirit that impels all things, or the soul of the world. Even call it God. Whatever it is, it is always lost, just beyond reach. We imagine we touched it in childhood and that we will recover it in the moment of creation or the act of love, but somehow it always vanishes. Maybe this accounts for the old saying, post coitum omne animal triste est.

Thomas went on to suggest that the most unanswerable testimony to his theory was the later poetry of the nineteenth-century agricultural labourer John Clare. I learned of how Clare spent the last twenty years of his life in a lunatic asylum where he wrote poetry, at once ethereal and earthly, about his lost childhood sweetheart Mary Joyce, making her at one with the past, with his own childhood, and with the meadows and woods that had been his domain:

Come with thy maiden eye, lay silks and satins by;

Come in thy russet or grey cotton gown;

Come to the meads, dear, where flags, sedge, and reeds appear,

Rustling to soft winds and bowing low down.

Was it, I wondered, because Edward Thomas had endured depression, and John Clare madness, that they had come to the understanding that loss is the mother of beauty?

Helen Thomas seems to have thought so:

I could not be borne high upon the crest of ecstasy and joy unless I also knew the dreadful depths of the trough of the great waves of life. I could not be irradiated by such love without being swept by the shadow of despair … as I grew up I learned that life is richer and fuller and finer the more you can understand, not only in your brain and intellect but in your very being, that you must accept it all; without bitterness the agony, without complacency the joy.

She learned it the hardest way. Edward Thomas returned for leave just after Christmas 1916, before being posted to the Western Front. By this time, they were living in the village of High Beech in the Epping Forest, a stone’s throw from the site of the private lunatic asylum where John Clare had first been confined. Helen’s account of their last night is the most moving passage of her memoir World Without End:

I sit and stare stupidly at his luggage by the walls, and his roll of bedding, kit-bag, and suitcase. He takes out his prismatic compass and explains it to me, but I cannot see, and when a tear drops on it he just shuts it up and puts it away. Then he says, as he takes a book out of his pocket, ‘You see, your Shakespeare’s Sonnets is already where it will always be. Shall I read you some?’ He reads one or two to me. His face is grey and his mouth trembles, but his voice is quiet and steady. And soon I slip to the floor and sit between his knees, and while he reads his hand falls over my shoulder and I hold it with mine.

‘Shall I undress you by this lovely fire and carry you upstairs in my khaki overcoat?’ So he undoes my things, and I slip out of them; then he takes the pins out of my hair, and we laugh at ourselves for behaving as we often do, like young lovers.

They draw closer to the fire and he picks up another book, a volume from his miniature set of Shakespeare’s plays. He tilts it to catch the light of the fire and he puts his other hand over her naked breast and she puts her hand over his. He reads from the closing scenes of Antony and Cleopatra, until she can bear it no longer because for them the words are so full of poignancy.

My body is torn with terrible sobs. I am engulfed in this despair like a drowning man by the sea. My mind is incapable of thought. Only now and then, as they say drowning people do, I have visions of things that have been – the room where my son was born; a day, years after, when we were walking together before breakfast with hands full of bluebells; and in the kitchen of our honeymoon cottage … So we lay, all night, sometimes talking of our love and all that had been, and of the children, and what had been amiss and what right. We knew the best was that there had never been untruth between us. We knew all of each other, and it was right. So talking and crying and loving in each other’s arms we fell asleep as the cold reflected light of the snow crept through the frost-covered windows.

Morning comes, and in the last minutes all that she can say is Beloved, I love you, and he says, remember that, whatever happens, all is well between us for ever and ever. Then he says goodbye to their three children and he walks away. A thick mist hangs over the valley as he disappears into the grey with a shout of ‘Coo-ee!’ She marks the day of his departure, 11 January 1917, in the copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets that she has given him, inscribing it ‘To Edward from Helen’. It is strange that she does not add the words ‘with love’.

All roads now lead to France, he had written in one of his poems. He kept the sonnets in his breast pocket, close to his heart. He also had with him his full set of Shakespeare’s plays in a nine-volume miniature edition of 1825, each book no larger than the palm of a hand. At night in the dugout, he read, keeping notes in his pocket diary. He was now in the artillery, as my father would be in the next war.

February 13. Evening censoring letters and reading Sonnets; others writing – when I began to talk to Rubin, the Captain said ‘You get on with your Sonnets’ and then all was silent. Awful fug.

April 3. Snow just frozen … A fine day, filling sandbags. MACBETH.

April 5. A dull morning turns misty with rain. Some 4.2s coming over at 10 … Sun and wind drying the mud. Firing all day, practising barrage etc. Beautiful pale hazy moonlight and the sag and flap of air. Letters to Mother and Helen. HAMLET.

On Easter Day, he was lucky. A 5.9 shell fell a few feet from him as he stood at a Forward Observation Post. A piece of dust scratched his neck, but the shell did not explode. It was a rare dud. His pocket diary and a photograph of Helen that he was carrying seem to have been creased by the force of air when the shell landed.

Early the next morning, a small 77-millimetre shell known as a pip-squeak pierced him clean through the heart. His effects were returned to Helen, among them his volumes of Shakespeare. They are now in the library of Cardiff University. The page is turned down at a battle scene in Henry VI Part 3. It still bears the mud of Flanders, staining the text just below the very line that had come to mind when I read the letter written by the mother of Lance-Bombardier Fisher in the next war: Say how he died, for I will hear it all.

Edward Thomas’s pocket Shakespeare, returned to Helen after he was killed in Flanders fields