Edward Thomas by Jean Moorcroft Wilson

Author:Jean Moorcroft Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408187159
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-12-19T00:00:00+00:00

17

‘THE ONLY BROTHER I EVER HAD’ (6 OCTOBER 1913–MARCH 1914)

We were greater friends than almost any two ever were practising the same art [. . .] He gave me standing as a poet – he more than anyone else [. . .] I dragged him out from under the heap of his own work in prose he was buried alive under.

– Robert Frost to Grace Walcott Hazard Conkling, 28 June 1921

When Thomas met Robert Frost in the smoking-room of St George’s restaurant, St Martin’s Lane, on 6 October 1913, it was the start of a literary friendship rivalled only by that of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Rimbaud and Verlaine, or Owen and Sassoon. For Frost and Thomas’s interaction was to have equally significant consequences in both personal and literary terms.

The meeting itself was a miracle of chance. It might so easily have been a repeat of an earlier occasion – the launch of Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop on 8 January 1913 – when Frost and Thomas had been in the same room, already knowing a number of the same people, but had failed to meet. Similarly, if Thomas had kept his appointment with Eleanor Farjeon on 6 October, he might not have been introduced to Frost, either at all, or in time to gain the benefit he did from that friendship. Or if he had committed suicide the day before, as he had intended after one of his ‘private hell[s] of depression’, prevented only by de la Mare’s persuasion – though he still had ‘the saviour’ [a gun?] in his pocket on 6 October.1

Instead, prompted perhaps by curiosity, or simply trust in the man who had arranged the meeting, Ralph Hodgson, he wrote to Eleanor on 5 October asking her to forgive him if he failed to turn up the following day: ‘I have an appointment of uncertain time with an American just before and may not be able to come’.2 When he and Eleanor did eventually meet, she remembered, he did not name the American.3

Yet Frost was to become, in Eleanor’s words, ‘the greatest friend’ of Thomas’s life4 and their rapport at his first encounter was instant. For Frost it was as though they were (to quote his later poem on the subject, ‘Iris by Night’) ‘elected friends’. So strong was his sense of affinity that he claimed Thomas as ‘the only brother I ever had’.5 Though Thomas was less forthcoming than the exuberant American, he would write his own poem about their intercourse, especially on the long walks they would take together the following summer:

The sun used to shine while we two walked

Slowly together, paused and started

Again, and sometimes mused, sometimes talked

As either pleased, and cheerfully parted

Each night. We never disagreed

Which gate to rest on. The to be

And the late past we gave small heed . . . 6

Apart from some superficial similarities – of age (they were both in their thirties, Frost, at 39, the older by four years), of appearance (both were physically attractive, Thomas strikingly so)

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.