Literary biography is supposed to be dead. Time was when ‘big literary biographies were the goal of every serious editor,’ Faber’s Neil Belton recalls. ‘The bigger they were the better, and they often came in many volumes,’ he says. But these monumental works ‘cost publishers a fortune’, and literary historians were forced to lower their horizons.
But Belton has published a book that defies the trend: Matthew Hollis’s All Roads lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas. The book was shortlisted for this year’s Costa Award, having received so much critical and popular acclaim. Radio 4 — the route to commercial success — featured it as one of their books of the week last autumn, and the commentator Robert McCrum named it the ‘outstanding book on the [Costa] list’.
Hollis is a poet by trade, but his flair for dramatic atmosphere is worthy of a playwright. He enlivens one of literary London’s forgotten eras, and the result is gripping. John Self of the
Asylum books blog puts it well:
‘The names are coming thick now: Frost, Pound, Eliot, Brooke, Yeats too. Hollis’s biography quickens an entire lost world, and is a rounded recreation of the sort of literary life which
has always seemed just out of arm’s — or time’s — reach.’
Thomas spent most of his career merely observing this effervescence. He reviewed books — a staggering number of books, more than 1,500 in just a few years — to scrape a living with his
young wife and children. He was a respected critic: Walter de la Mare praised his honesty in a trade that, even then, was riven with deference and apathy. But he was left stymied by the work and
the pressures of subsistence.
Thomas’s poverty deepened and his mind darkened, but he was rescued by the friendship of Robert Frost. This ran from 1914 until his death as a casualty of the Battle of Arras in April 1917.
Hollis revives their close affinity. They were well suited, united in disappointment: Frost had fled bad reviews in America, while Thomas was still unsure of his voice. And, crucially, they shared
beliefs about the function of poetry. In the words of the critic Hugh Cecil:
‘Frost’s conviction was that poetry must communicate by intonation and rhythm as well as through the literal definition of words, cadence being fundamental to human speech. These views
were close to those Thomas had already struggled to express in his own criticism.’
Frost is a ubiquitous presence in Hollis’ account. He imbued Thomas, the jobbing scribbler, with the courage to write poetry; and the influence of his convictions about poetry is plain for
the ear to hear. In Thomas’s ‘Lob’ (above), the colloquial intonation and rhythms capture the patterns of
speech to evoke rural England, of which he’d written so passionately in earlier prose works such as The South Country.
Thomas’ legacy survived the modernist onslaught and continues to echo in lyrical poetry today. The parochial voices in Simon Armitage’s The Not Dead, for instance, speak in a manner reminiscent of Thomas’s Jacks, Buttons, Bottlefords and Walkers; listen to the audio in this video compared to this one to catch the similarities.
Thomas (and Armitage) is not to everyone’s taste: the sassy protagonist in J.M Coetzee’s fictionalised autobiography Youth remarks, ‘What happened to the ambitions of poets here in Britain? Have they not digested the news that Edward Thomas and his world are gone for ever?’ The counter argument is that their world is not quite gone; common speech and Hollis’s superlative literary biography have preserved it.
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