1978

Myfanwy Thomas (1910–2005) was the youngest child of the poet Edward Thomas and his wife Helen (1877–1967). She made her home with her mother at Eastbury for the last thirteen years of Helen’s life. Both women were devoted to the task of keeping E.T.’s memory and work alive and appreciated, and happily saw his reputation rise in their lifetimes. Carcanet published Helen Thomas’s Time and Again, a collection of memoirs and letters edited by Myfanwy, in 1978. In 1988, the Carcanet publication Under Storm’s Wing brought together all Helen Thomas’s memoirs, extracts from Myfanwy’s, and six letters from Robert Frost to Thomas. In her introduction, Myfanwy notes with pride her father’s name on the 1985 memorial to the poets of the First World War in Westminster Abbey.

FROM MYFANWY THOMAS

Eastbury, Berkshire

7 September 1978


Dear Mr Schmidt,


Thanks so much for your letter of 22 August. I’m so glad The Guardian & Irish Times are noticing the book.1 And a great relief that you are pleased with sales. I do hope the reprint, if any, won’t necessitate the price going up – if it is to be only 500, couldn’t it be paperback and so keep the prices the same?

      And very good news of Edna Longley’s book about E.T.’s criticism.2 I’m so glad it is coming out under your imprint.

      Oh, I mistook something you once said or wrote – I thought you preferred TV to radio & thought you were an old hand at it! Alas, I believe the Sunday Times colour supplement piece may not appear after all. These capricious newspapers – and all the trouble (and anxiety on my part about precious photographs kept for months) that has been taken. I have my photographs back safely, at Stratford last Sunday – brought by a kind friend who has been keeping an eye on them for me – where there was a programme called ‘A Pine in Solitude’ with 4 readers, Julian Glover was E.T. and Jane Lapotaire, Helen.3 There was a bookstall there but unfortunately they’d not managed to get any T & A to show.

      This winter I’m going to try my hand at my childhood, but I don’t really think it will be of enough interest & I don’t approve really of ‘cashing in’. So I shan’t be disappointed if you turn it down. But it will be good exercise & keep the cobwebs away. I shall call it ‘Cherries in my Hat’ – rather typical of me that I longed to have such a trimming and I can hear the charming chumping sound on the straw – but I had to be sure that what I’d been told was true – one by one I squashed them and out came the cotton wool – tears & anguish. I’m afraid my father sized me up very smartly in my poem, ending, ‘Wanting a thousand little things that time, without contentment, brings.’4

      With many good wishes – do many bookshops still have that pernicious ‘sale or return’ condition? I remember from Adelphi days that W.H. Smith used to send back a package of tatty, thumbed copies each quarter.5

Yours,

Myfanwy Thomas


Some time please could I have the TS back as I have no copy. Or isn’t this usual?


FROM MYFANWY THOMAS

Eastbury, Berkshire

26 September 1978


Dear Michael Schmidt,


Thanks so much for your letter and the copy of the very pleasant Listener review. Meantime of course you will have seen the Guardian one – Edward would have been amused at the rather belated award of the M.C.!6 How lucky I have been so far in such appreciative notices. And I suppose it is quite a good thing for them to be spread over some months rather than all appear in a heap.

      Never mind about the photograph date, I don’t suppose it was noticed.7 Several people have in fact written to say what a pity it was that there was no index to the photographs

      I thought the programme ‘No one so much as you’ on Sunday radio was good, though I thought it a pity the gloom and despair was no[t] leavened a bit. I did send the young man a very saucy letter of Mother’s to Edward ‘bending over his

      Borrow’ hoping he would use it, but he didn’t.8

With good wishes,

Myfanwy Thomas


*

Just before I left Oxford, I began work on a B. Litt. on the poetry of Edward Thomas and Robert Frost. A large bequest of Edward Thomas material had been left to the Bodleian Library and had yet to be shelved. It was piled on a wide window-ledge in the reading room and I was given permission to explore it. My love for Thomas’s prose writing and poetry dated from those unsupervised encounters with the whole range of his writings. His reviews and essays were bold and independent-minded (his early response to Pound in particular stood out). Like most busy journalist critics he never found the time to return to enthusiasms once he had taken up lodgings in Grub Street, but his obiter dicta were worth many long, considered academic tomes. My research had intended to compare Frost’s and Thomas’s prosody. I loved Frost and knew many poems by heart but I was coming to love Thomas in a different, a more intimate and personal spirit.

      Myfanwy, the poet’s younger daughter, and I fell into correspondence. She edited a volume of her mother Helen’s writings about Edward. At that time, I was typesetting most of Carcanet’s books on an IBM golfball composing machine. Editing as I typeset, I developed a particular kind of closeness with the writing. Some writers were a joy to set because each sentence was a pleasure in itself and typesetting was a particular form of intensive, respectful reading. Others were irksome because of tonal or stylistic qualities which grated. With some I could intervene silently, as it were, and make small adjustments of a crucial kind – to punctuation, diction and occasionally by way of silent, unsignposted omissions which even the authors seldom noted or complained about.

      What struck me about Time and Again was the fact that Helen had great difficulty in ending a narrative, an account and sometimes a sentence. Things were strung together by ‘and’ and ‘and’ or flowed in a single, uninterruptable key. I imagine this was possibly an extension of her speaking style, and that she found it hard to make space for her interlocutor. One of the reasons Edward was so taciturn and often depressed may have been the absence of repose and the impossibility of dialogue at home. When he became friendly with Eleanor Farjeon, one of her attractive qualities was an ability to listen; another was the tact to be silent when silence was required. Typesetting Edward Thomas’s own prose was another matter altogether: the lucidity, economy, freshness and transparency of his language were always inspiriting.

      I find the end of Helen’s essay on Robert Frost deeply sad. Shortly before the war Thomas began to write verses, ‘But there was no enthusiastic reviewer to praise his poems. No publisher would take them and only a few of his intimate friends thought well of them. He never saw a poem of his in print under his own name, just two or three under the pseudonym “Edward Eastaway” which he himself had, with a wry smile, included in anthologies he was commissioned to edit.’

NOTES

  1. Myfanwy Thomas wrote to MNS on 20 September 1977 with a couple of suggested titles for Helen’s memoir: ‘All This Thusness (a great expression of hers)’ and ‘For ever & ever’. Writing again on 27 September, when the title had been agreed, she remarked:
    I’m glad you like TIME & AGAIN – it was one of Mother’s many expressions – she used many of her north country ones. I did think of ‘Think me on’ which as you probably know is N.C. for ‘Remind me’. But it doesn’t go so well & these old Southerners would be baulked.
  2. A language not to be betrayed: selected prose of Edward Thomas, edited by Edna Longley, was published by Carcanet in 1981.
  3. ‘A Pine In Solitude: A Portrait of Edward Thomas (1878– 1917)’, devised by Anne Harvey, with Jane Lapotaire, Julian Glover and Benjamin Whitrow, and Anne Harvey, was part of the 1978 Stratford-upon-Avon Poetry Festival. The title is taken from Thomas’s poem ‘No one so much as you’.
  4. Myfanwy tells the story of the disappointing artificial cherries on p.40 of her own memoir One of These Fine Days, published by Carcanet in 1982. ‘My’ poem is ‘What shall I give’, written by Edward Thomas in 1916, which ends: ‘But leave her Steep and her own world / And her spectacled self with hair uncurled, / Wanting a thousand little things / That time without contentment brings.’
  5. The Adelphi was a literary journal, founded by John Middleton Murry, published between 1923 and 1955. In 1948-9 it was briefly edited by the novelist Henry Williamson, to whom Myfanwy was secretary.
  6. Edward Thomas was killed in the Battle of Arras, shortly after arriving in France as a second lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery. He did not receive the Military Cross.
  7. There was a section of photographs at the end of Time & Again, and Myfanwy had pointed out that one was wrongly dated. There was a list of photographs at the beginning of the book, which was not noted on the contents page, thus easily missed.
  8. Edward Thomas’s George Borrow: the man and his books was published by Chapman and Hall in 1912.

THE YEAR IN BOOKS


      George Chapman, Selected Poems, edited by Eirian Wain

      Donald Davie, The Poet in the Imaginary Museum: essays of two decades, edited by Barry Alpert

      Roy Fisher, The Thing About Joe Sullivan: poems 1971-1975

      Michael Hamburger (ed), German Poetry 1910–1975

      John Heath-Stubbs, The Watchman’s Flute

      Brian Hepworth (ed), The Rise of Romanticism: essential texts

      Jeremy Hooker, Solent Shore

      Helder Macedo and E.M. de Melo e Castro (eds and trs), Contemporary Portuguese Poetry: an anthology in English

      Christopher Middleton, Bolshevism in Art and Other Expository Writings

      Paul Mills, Third Person

      Eugenio Montale, Selected Letters of Eugenio Montale, translated by

      G. Singh

      Andrew Motion, The Pleasure Steamers

      Valentine Penrose, Poems and Narrations, translated by R. Edwards

      I.A. Richards, New and Selected Poems

      Edgell Rickword, Literature in Society: Essays and Opinions II,

      1938–1978, edited by Alan Young

      Robert B. Shaw, Comforting the Wilderness

      C.H. Sisson, The Avoidance of Literature: collected essays, edited by Michael Schmidt

      Helen Thomas, Time and Again: memoirs and letters of Helen Thomas, edited by Myfanwy Thomas

      Michael Vince, The Orchard Wall

      Jeffrey Wainwright, Heart’s Desire

      Yvor Winters, The Collected Poems of Yvor Winters, introduction by

      Donald Davie