Willing to Write

Dickens at his Desk

Sometimes ideas that move my thoughts along come totally unexpectedly. I recently read a review of a book on willpower by Baumeister and Tierney and bought it on impulse so I  obviously needed to read it. I expected it to shed some light on personal change of the kind I’d come across in Schwartz and in my reading about ACT. I hadn’t expected it to map onto two  of my other obsessions – the creativity/personal life relationship and religion. I’ll save religion for a later post and focus for now on some interesting insights about creativity that are scattered throughout this gem of a book.

In two previous posts I looked in detail at the relationship between Dickens’s art and his life (Perfecting the Life or Perfecting the Art below). In the end I closed the second post with the following points about two possible kinds of explanation for the dramatic discrepancy in his case.

Maitreyabandhu has a subtle take on this whole issue. He takes up the spiritual thread in a way that complements the psychological explanation (The Farthest Reach: in this Autumn’s Poetry Review pages 68-69):

The main difference between spiritual life and the path of the poet is that the first is a self-conscious mind-training, while the second is more ad hoc – breakthroughs into a new modes of consciousness are accessible to the poet within the work, but they fall away outside it. (This accounts for the famous double life of poets – how they can oscillate between god-like creation and animal-like behaviour.) Imagination’s sudden uplifts are sustained by the laws of kamma-niyama. But as soon as we want something, as soon as the usual ‘me’ takes over – tries to be ‘poetic’ or clever or coarse -we’re back on the stony ground of self. Egoism in poetry, as in any other field of life, is always predictable, doomed to repetition and banality or destined to tedious self-aggrandisement.

Baumeister and Tierney come at it from a different angle in a way that does not contradict his point of view but complements it by explaining the problem at a different level – not necessarily a deeper or a better one, but intriguing nonetheless.

What is the will?

Before I get onto to that perhaps I need to give a brutally brief summary of their key ideas about will. Going into more detail can wait for the later post. So, here’s my version of the bottom line.

Will is in some ways like a muscle. It gets tired with use. The body needs energy in the form of glucose to feed the brain if the will is to keep going.

The link between glucose and self-control appeared in studies of people with hypoglycaemia, the tendency to have low blood sugar. Researchers noted that hypoglycemics were more likely than the average person to have trouble concentrating and controlling their negative emotions when provoked.

(670: the Kindle version I am using stubbornly refuses to give me page numbers rather than these useless co-ordinates. Maybe it’s a test of will: I’ll have another biscuit and press on.)

Taking slow release food fixes the problem. Regular exercise of the will increases its stamina enabling us to self-regulate for longer periods but not indefinitely.

This then raises the question of whether the discrepancy between a lofty art and a debased life could stem from what they term ‘ego depletion.’ ‘Ego’ is used here to mean the faculty of self-regulation. They contend (428):

Restraining sexual impulses takes energy, and so does creative work. If you pour energy into your art, you have less available to restrain your libido.

Ego Depletion & Discipline

They go onto to extend their discussion beyond libido in any sexual sense to impulses, moods and thought patterns of all kinds. They argue that as the will tires we begin to experience our impulses and emotions more strongly just as our ability to contain them begins to weaken. At the crossover point we can no longer withhold our anger or master our depression.

This then begins to sound like a very plausible explanation of Edward Thomas‘s contrasting states of being. The drudgery he endured in writing hack work to feed his family can be seen as seriously depleting  his capacity for self-regulation in precisely this way. He became ungovernably depressed and could not resist acting out his frustration on those closest to him.

Once he began to write poetry those problems became more manageable. So the link between periods of intense creative effort and lapses of self-control in-between is by no means inevitable. Interestingly there are other examples in Baumeister and Tierney’s book of where this simple relationship seems to break down. Take Anthony Trollope for example (1719).

Anthony Trollope

Anthony Trollope believed it unnecessary—and inadvisable—to write for more than three hours a day. He became one of the greatest and most prolific novelists in history while holding a full-time job with the British Post Office. He would rise at five-thirty, fortify himself with coffee, and spend a half hour reading the previous day’s work to get himself in the right voice. Then he would write for two and a half hours, monitoring the time with a watch placed on the table. He forced himself to produce one page of 250 words every quarter hour. Just to be sure, he counted the words. “I have found that the 250 words have been forthcoming as regularly as my watch went,” he reported. At this rate he could produce 2,500 words by breakfast.

What’s more, this combination of a full-time job and a disciplined writing schedule did not seem to create periods of poor self-control (1737):

Trollope was an anomaly—few people can turn out 1,000 good words an hour—and he himself could have been benefited from slowing down occasionally (and cutting some of those 250-word digressions). But he managed to produce masterpieces like Barchester Towers and The Way We Live Now while living a very good life. While other novelists were worrying about money and struggling to turn in chapters overdue at their publishers, Trollope was prospering and remaining ahead of schedule. While one of his novels was being serialized, he usually had at least one other completed novel, often two or three, awaiting publication.

The Force of Habit

They come to an interesting conclusion (2377):

The clear implication was that the best advice for young writers and aspiring professors is: Write every day. Use your self-control to form a daily habit, and you’ll produce more with less effort in the long run.

They speak of how making an activity a habit reduces the amount of will power needed to sustain it (3824):

. . . . a lasting technique for conserving willpower [is] a habit.

That would seem to be a trick that works for some even when the tasks undertaken are massive. However, following the example of Trollope is a huge ask well beyond the capacity of most of us. All is not lost, though, for those of us who aspire to write a bit (3806).

Fortunately, there is another strategy for ordinary mortals, courtesy of Raymond Chandler, who was bewildered by writers who could churn out prose every day.

His solution is a somewhat surprising one:

Chandler had his own system for turning out The Big Sleep and other classic detective stories. “Me, I wait for inspiration,” he said, but he did it methodically every morning. He believed that a professional writer needed to set aside at least four hours a day for his job: “He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it, he shouldn’t try. He can look out of the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor, but he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks.”

They give this Raymond Chandler principle another name (3811-13):

This Nothing Alternative is a marvelously simple tool against procrastination for just about any kind of task. . . . . .  you can still benefit by setting aside time to do one and only one thing.

I’ve heard this called ‘time banding’ and it works well for me. I label a span of time my ‘blogging time’ for example and refuse to do anything else for that hour or so. Blog posts get written. Only you can judge whether they’re worth reading. They’re certainly worth writing in that I dig deeper into the books I’ve read and the experiences I’ve had and mine more gold from them that way. Chandler, it seems, summarised the idea in terms of writing by saying (3815):

“Write or nothing. It’s the same principle as keeping order in a school. If you make the pupils behave, they will learn something just to keep from being bored. I find it works. Two very simple rules, a. you don’t have to write. b. you can’t do anything else. The rest comes of itself.”

I think I’ll go now and lock myself in an empty garret for the next few hours with only a pen and paper for company. War and Peace here I come.

Related articles

• The Situation of Willpower
• Reason.tv: John Tierney – Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength
• Perfecting the Art or Perfecting the Life
• Mind over Matter (discusses Schwartz)
• Willing Change (four posts that deal with ACT)
• Hollis’s Edward Thomas (three posts on the poet’s last years)

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Hollis’s Edward Thomas (3/3): going to war

Without nostalgia who could love England?
Without a sentimental attachment to tolerance
Who could delight in this cramped corner country . . . ?

(From  ’England’ – page 44 in Poems 1955-2005 by Anne Stevenson)

Edward Thomas

Matthew Hollis‘s excellent biography traces Edward Thomas’s progress from the depressing hack work he despised to the writing of what is now universally recognised as accomplished poetry of a very high order. The previous two posts looked at Hollis’s account of the critical period in Thomas’s life that marked this transition, one which was remarkably rapid when it came. Hollis shows how the depression soured his relations with his family. I was intrigued by the implications of all this for our understanding of the complex relationship between creativity, compassion and mental health. It would not due justice to the true complexity of the picture if we ignored Thomas’s decision to enlist and join the troops in the trenches of the First World War.

The White Feather Syndrome?

It would be easy to suppose that the suicidal impulses that had scarred his life up to this point were now taking a slightly different form and that he was choosing death in battle in preference to ‘self-slaughter.’ When you look at a detailed account such as Hollis’s the evidence simply does not stack up that way. Yes, his desire for death might have made enlisting seem an attractive option at times, but it clearly was not enough in itself to tip him over the edge into the army. He dithered for a long time and other factors had to come into play before he ended up at the front line.

One of the first things to consider is the incident with the gamekeeper and his shotgun. I don’t want to spoil a good story so I won’t go into detail for the sake of those who might end up reading Hollis’s book. All I’ll say here is that Thomas felt he had left his most valued friend, Robert Frost, in the lurch in a dangerous situation. He was convinced he had been a coward (page 181):

. . . . for Edward Thomas, the encounter would leave him haunted. He would relive the moment again and again. In his verse and in his letters to Frost ‑ in the week when he left for France, even in the week of his death ‑ Thomas felt hunted by the fear and cowardice he had experienced in that stand‑off with the gamekeeper. He felt mocked by events and probably by the most important friend of his life, and he vowed that he would never again let himself be faced down. When the call came again he would hold his nerve and face the gunmen.

‘That’s why he went to war,’ said Frost.

It occurs to me that he would have felt that he had let down not only his friend and himself but that he had betrayed poetry as well, something that Frost would have represented to him in its most congenial form.

Why, though, would he feel mocked by someone whom he valued so much and who, we know, valued and respected him in return?

The story behind this added to my understanding of the hidden depths in one of the most famous of Frost’s poems – The Road Not Taken. I have known for a very long time that the simplistic reading of the poem that, for example, inspired the title for Scott Peck‘s well-known book on psychotherapy, The Road Less Travelled, completely fails to understand the tricks and twists of this subtle poem. Hollis gives a penetrating account of the in and outs of that for those who want to know more.

What I had failed to understand was that the trigger for Frost’s poem was at least in part Thomas’s state of chronic indecision. He couldn’t make his mind up which way to go, which path to take in his own life. Frost sent the poem to Thomas: they were both in the habit of sending each other drafts of poems. The Road Not Taken did not go down well (page 235):

Amused at Thomas’s inability to satisfy himself, Frost chided him, ‘No matter which road you take, you’ll always sigh, and wish you’d taken another.’ But to Thomas, it was not the least bit funny. It pricked at his confidence, at his sense of fraudulence, reminding him he was neither a true writer nor a true naturalist, cowardly in his lack of direction. And now the one man who understood his indecisiveness most astutely was mocking him for it. Thomas took the ‘tease’ badly. He felt the poem to be a rebuke for his own inability to choose between the pursuit of poetry and a career in prose – worse, at his indecisive attitude toward the war, so often expressed to Frost.

Thomas’s position is interesting. As far as his poetry, or perhaps anything else important was concerned, he did not believe choice was possible (ibid.):

He did not believe in self-determination, or that the spirit could triumph over adversity; some things seemed unavoidable, inevitable. Had he chosen poetry he could not be a poet: as he had written in ‘Words’, it had in some sense to choose him. (page 235)

Hollis feels that this goes part of the way to explaining his inability to understand Frost’s teasingly ambiguous poem (page 236):

It seems curious that Edward Thomas, the man who had understood Frost’s writing better than anyone, could not see the poem for what it was. . . . . . And he determinedly assured Frost that he had ‘got the idea’, when plainly he had not.

A simpler way of putting it would be that he lacked a sense of humour, perhaps most especially about himself. The self-mocking Englishman he was not. Perhaps his abrasive self-criticism made him too raw inside for anything like that. Maybe the same thing that was at the root of his depression was also at the heart of his reaction to this poem. He was stung by it and it may have moved him nearer to the front line.

Eleanor Farjeon

A ‘Calling?

In earlier posts I have described his becoming a poet as a ‘calling’, a ‘vocation’ and a ‘metier.’ The first two words may not be too wide of the mark (ibid):

A strange but revealing exchange had occurred [between him and Frost] in which Thomas had exposed something deep within his poetry and his character. And what he had exposed was this: that choice was not, counter to his reading of Frost, an act of free will. Instead, some choices are prescribed, compelled, ingrained in circumstance or personality; some characters are ‘called’.

Is it fair to describe his decision to enlist as of the same kind? I don’t really feel comfortable with that though it is what Hollis’s account seems to be saying (page 237):

Now, finally, he knew what he had to do. Thomas was passed fit, and the same week, he sat down to lunch with his confidante, Eleanor Farjeon, and informed her that he had enlisted in the Artists Rifles, and that he was glad; he did not know why, but he was glad. Only days before it seemed certain that he would emigrate to America to join Frost, as the two men had planned. And yet suddenly, everything was different. Eleanor would later describe how, in volunteering, the ‘self‑torment had gone out of him’. And Helen: ‘I had known that the struggle going on in his spirit would end like this.’

Enlisting then did seem to dissolve or resolve his chronic state of tension, a tension deeply connected with his depression but not reducible to it. That is still not to say that it was a calming sublimation of his death wish or a ‘calling’. It would be equally if not more plausible to argue that enlisting proved him to be a man of courage, someone of some value: this would have assuaged the torment of his self-doubt and his corrosive self-criticism. It’s also worth remembering as well that enlisting provided him with an income that released him from the necessity of hack work and freed more of his time and his head space for writing poetry.

To see it this way is to focus on the way it provided an escape from his toxic internal dynamics. It doesn’t seem as though that was the whole story though. It is possible he was striving towards something positive rather than simply escaping from the grip of his demons (pages 237-38):

‘The best way out is always through,’ Frost had written in North of Boston, and now Thomas echoed his friend’s words as he explained his enlistment: ‘It is not my idea of pleasure,’ he admitted, ‘but I do want to go right through.’

His long-time confidante and friend, a lady who loved him dearly and knew him well, gives us an illuminating account (page 287):

Memorial Stone

[Eleanor Farjeon] pressed him on precisely why he chose to enlist. Thomas was said to pause, bend down to scoop a handful of soil from around his shoe, and say, ‘Literally, for this.’

Was It All for Love?

This does root his action literally in the same soil as his poetry. Love was pushing him to action perhaps, not only the desire to escape. Perhaps there was something of a calling in it after all. I’m not sure. Are we back to a form of compassion again at least, that widening of the moral imagination that takes us out of ourselves into a concern for others? If so, this would link his impulse to poetry with an expansion of his moral compass which would in turn account for why the combination of becoming a poet and deciding to fight for the land he loved empowered him to show far more tenderness to his family in his last days with them.

He was anything but a gung-ho patriot and there is much in Hollis’s account that shows how much he despised the kind of patriotism that led to an unthinking hatred of all things and all people German. His patriotism sounds not a million miles away from the kind of which the Bahá’í Faith speaks:

Unbridled nationalism, as distinguished from a sane and legitimate patriotism, must give way to a wider loyalty, to the love of humanity as a whole. Bahá’u’lláh’s statement is: “The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.” The concept of world citizenship is a direct result of the contraction of the world into a single neighbourhood through scientific advances and of the indisputable interdependence of nations. Love of all the world’s peoples does not exclude love of one’s country.

(Promise of World Peace: page 8)

Enlisting and poetry did not co-exist completely comfortably in his new life however (page 299):

Thomas had written the poem he would place first in his collection, and yet in composing he did his best to conceal that it was a poem at all. The verses were scribbled down amid the arithmetic calculations that Thomas was making about the trajectory of shells, disguising it as prose with a code to distinguish the line breaks. ‘You see I have written it with only capitals to mark the lines,’ he told Eleanor, ‘because people are all around me and I don’t want them to know.’ As she observed, the paper bore testament to how hard self‑consciousness died in Thomas: he did not mind poets knowing he was a soldier, but he would not allow soldiers to learn he was a poet.

Anyone who still is tempted to see enlistment as an expression of his death wish needs to consider two things. The first is his mood and way of thinking almost at the very end (page 326):

Occasionally he saw children in the devastated villages ‘too poor or too helpless’ to leave, he told his friend, ‘but I probably am not going to describe any more except to make a living’. It was a telling comment for Thomas to make. In January he had written something tiny but of equal importance to Helen: ‘Please put these letters in my drawer.’ It seemed he intended to use his letters and his diary to write about the war after his return; his enlistment was something he intended to survive and the re‑emergence of his gloom expressed not a death wish but a growing recognition that he might not live.”

The second is that he never, as far as I can discern from all the accounts I have read, sought to put himself recklessly in danger. He may, it is true, have been using the situation rather as a former patient of mine used danger, both in his time in the army and by risk taking in civvie street later, as a test of whether or not he deserved to live. I doubt that because there is no evidence to support it.

Instead I see a man who had found his voice in becoming a poet and his self-respect in becoming a soldier. It is a tragedy that he did not survive the war so that we could see the fruits of that double victory. We should be glad that he has left us a small volume of deeply engaging poetry as his lasting legacy.

Related articles

• Poem for National Poetry Day
• Edward Thomas biography All Roads Lead To France: extract
• Matthew Hollis: Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas
• Edna Clarke Hall: capturing the moment
• Expanding the Moral Imagination
• Practising Compassion

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Hollis’s Edward Thomas (2/3): becoming a poet

[Poets] provide the images by which man moves into the future. (From Poetry and the Arts in Rebuilding Society by Duane L. Herrman – page 185 in The Creative Circle edited by Michael Fitzgerald)

In the previous post, drawing on Matthew Hollis‘s absorbing account of Thomas’s last years, we looked at the blind wall Edward felt he was staring at in the dead end his life had become: hack work undertaken with gritted teeth between bouts of depression to support a family he could hardly bear to be with. Hollis goes on to look at the dramatic changes that took place in the less than a handful of years that remained to him. The story that unfolds has intriguing implications for me about the complex relationship between creativity, compassion and mental health and what better place to start my exploration than with the nature of poetry and the importance of friendship.

The nature of poetry and his relationship with Frost

When Frost came to England he was virtually unknown though he had been writing poetry for years. America didn’t seem interested so he came to England. It took some time for the two men to meet up but when they did one of the things that drew them powerfully to each other was a shared sense of what poetry is about: for both men the essence of a poem was in its music (page 73):

So when, in Frost’s favourite example, we hear voices behind a closed door we can broadly make out sense even if the words themselves are not clear.  We can detect anger, affection, happiness and so forth because the cadence gives us a kind of sonic blueprint for the meaning and carries a communicative charge all of its own, This is the basis of ‘the sound of sense’ and its importance to poetry lies in the understanding that a line of verse can communicate tonally as well as through the literal definition of words. Patterns of sound and rhythm establish a tone or mood that the poem must work towards – or against – but to which it must never be indifferent.

It is important to understand that this did not mean the kind of hypnotic music of a Swinburne lyric:

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down’s edge between wind-ward and lee,
Wall’d round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.

(From A Forsaken Garden)

Frost was after something altogether different. He related to (page 75) ‘Carlyle’s instruction to poets from 1840: ‘See deep enough, and you see musically.’

[But w]hat made Frost’s approach different was that he believed that it was the rhythms of speech – as opposed to music or traditional metre – that should guide our ear when employing the sound of sense. It was a view  entirely counter to the times in England – counter to the ornate Victorians and the minimalist Imagists, counter also to the musical Georgians – and was born out of a trenchant belief that ‘words exist in the mouth, not in books’.

(ibid)

Robert Hayden

There was also something else that Frost valued (page 77), something akin to what Robert Hayden quoted as Auden’s version of it, that poetry is about ‘solving for the unknown’:

‘No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.’ [Frost] said that be never started a poem whose ending he already knew, for to have done so would, he believed, deny a fundamental purpose in poetry: that writing is an act of discovery. ‘I write to find out what I didn’t know I knew.’ Other times he phrased the idea slightly differently, but always the same basic premise: surprise leading to discovery. It was a thrilling and courageous approach to poetry . . .

Thomas was already convinced of most of this even before meeting Frost and before the countless hours they spent together debating the matter (page 84):

[Gibson’s] failure to deliver memorable speech in writing, his failure to fix an irresistible rhythm, his inability, to communicate tonally, was to Thomas an unconscionable breach of his promise as a poet: without cadence, a poem could only act upon the intellect and could therefore only ever be partially successful. Gibson was an example of the noble failure that Thomas perceived in his own prose and would seek to rectify when given his chance in verse.

Those familiar with this blog will readily recognise a theme close to my heart here. In the modern world, as Iain McGilchrist so convincingly describes it, we have sold our souls to the left hemisphere’s addiction to prose, which simplifies reality while making it seem reassuringly predictable. Thomas is having none of that when, as now, he is approaching his epiphany. He has been forced for too long already to be an unwilling dealer in prose, at great cost to his sanity and his family. He has been very close to suicide at least once. The force of economic necessity had played a powerful part in preventing his realising that he was really a gifted poet. He was soon to express in action his sense of what poetry could do to make his priceless but till then ineffable experience of the world more fully accessible in words.

His becoming a poet and the effect on his depression

The effect of Thomas’s recognition of his calling cannot be overestimated (pages 181-182):

A moment of gigantic personal significance was underway. It had been surfacing before he met Frost, but it had taken the year’s friendship for it to boil over. It would lift his spirits, deepen his tolerance, satisfy his life-long need to find self-worth. Never again would his chronic depression overwhelm him so utterly, never again would he think of himself as a mere hack. Not a different man, said Eleanor [Farjeon], but the same man in another key.

Edward Thomas was about to become a poet.

This calls into question any simplistic idea that his depression was the source of his creativity. It seems more likely that it was the result of ‘foiled creative fire.’ It also dents the notion two previous posts were exploring that being a great artist might in our culture inevitably entail high levels of self-centredness and low levels of compassion. Clearly this was not the case once Thomas found his true metier.

His realisation of this reality was not plain sailing though it was unbelievably rapid by any customary standards. Hollis shows us how important Frost was in kick-starting this process (page 190):

The draft [of 'November'] had included phrasings that seemed either too precious or too trivial to the American, and Thomas was grateful for the ‘kick’ [from Frost] to set him straight. ‘The foot’s seal and the wing’s light word’, Thomas had written frothily until Frost advised against it, and helped him settle upon a phrasing that was altogether sturdier.

The lesson he had learned concerned more than the correction of that particular phrase: it showed that he had grasped an important principle behind the change (ibid.):

‘I am glad that you spotted “wing’s light word”,’ wrote Thomas appreciatively. ‘I knew it was wrong and also that many would like it.’ Knowing that many would like it and yet that it was wrong: in only his second poem, Thomas had tackled a challenge that all poets must address some time in their development ‑ namely, that popularity may need to be conceded for the sake of a better poem. It can take years for a young poet to learn the importance of that sacrifice, but it had taken Thomas just two poems in two days.

Is that fast, or what? He didn’t rest on those laurels for long though. Almost  immediately he made giant strides towards finding his own voice (page 191):

‘What did the thrushes know?’ . . . . There, in those five words, is a phrasing that is already and entirely Thomas’s own. The questioning, doubtful tone, the restless enquiry, the fallibility of a poet’s voice: these were already instinctively, distinctively, the voice of Edward Thomas.

And by the time he was writing ‘Old Man’ we hear  that (page 194), ‘It had taken a mere four poems for Thomas to find his voice.’

Even his tendency towards corrosive self-criticism was coming more under his control by the end (page 231):

‘I can’t help it,’ had been Thomas’s response, ‘but I can help personally-conducted tours to the recesses.’ It was a new realisation from Thomas: that he might now be able to control his descent into the worst areas of his depression.

The upshot is that that in the space of two short years Thomas had become a major poet as well as a kinder man. After his death (page 331):

[a] review in the Times Literary Supplement had singled out his contribution. ‘He is a real poet, with the truth in him.’ A second, in the New Statesman, claimed to know (but did not reveal) the author’s true identity: ‘His poems are better than his prose, good though some of this has been.’

In the next and final post we will have to deal with the implications of another process unfolding at the same time as this one: how Edward Thomas became a soldier and met his death. Was it that underneath it all he still wished to die, and rather than take his own life he enlisted? I think we will find it is all a bit more complicated than that. It is not easy though to be sure that it is the poetry alone that eased his depression.

Related articles

• Matthew Hollis: Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas
• Edward Thomas biography All Roads Lead To France: extract
• Poem for National Poetry Day
• The Master & His Emissary  (a review of McGilchrist’s book)

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Hollis’s Edward Thomas (1/3): drudgery, depression and duty

The danger threatening modern man is that instead of being a complete person at any given moment, he will be split into unrelated fragments . . .

(From The Artist as Citizen Thomas Lysaght – page 143 in The Creative Circle edited by Michael Fitzergerald)

I have just finished reading Matthew Hollis’s absorbing account of the last years of Edward Thomas’s life. I was particularly struck by certain parts of the arc of his life’s trajectory at that period. When the book begins we are watching a man fighting with himself and with his perceived lot in life. He is seemingly trapped in a dead end – no sign of any exit short of death, in fact. We watch his emerging realisation that he is a poet, an epiphany facilitated by his warm friendship with Robert Frost. The ice bound wilderness of his previous inner existence melts into a creative springtime. At the same time as he begins to move towards and get to grips with his true vocation, he is debating whether to enlist in the so-called Great War. Hollis’s description of these various stages in the unfolding drama is compassionate and gripping, even when, as I did, you know the bare bones of the story already.

I hope I won’t be spoiling anyone’s enjoyment of this wonderful book if I look at these three stages of Thomas’s life in more detail using Hollis’s account as a springboard. I’ll be focusing on some of their implications for my obsessions with character, creativity, compassion and mental health. I can’t cram it all into one post so I’ve split this set of reflections into three.

His hack work and the maintenance of his depression

Much of Edward Thomas’s bitterness in the opening years of this account stems from his having to slave away at what he experienced as hack work in order to feed his family. He had married young and had his wife and three children to provide for.

To see this as alone responsible for his depression would be to simplify things rather, in that the depression predated his hack work and also his marriage as an undergraduate (page 20):

Thomas had been plagued by depression from before his university days at Oxford. There, he fought to shake it out of himself. He tried drink and opium, took up rowing and rowdiness, but could not hold the bleak moods back. When the dark thoughts overran him, he told himself that he valued life too much to take it away or that he was too sedentary to go through with ending it; but in recent years he had become harder to console. In advertising his sorrows, as he put it, he had punished his family, decimated his friends and broken down his self-respect. ‘Things have been very wrong,’ he told his old friend Jesse Berridge in February 1913. ‘Health is now definitely bad – not mere depression – and I don’t know how it will develop. . . .’

It may have had its roots in his problematic relationship with his father: to describe this relationship Andrew Motion uses the word ‘tyrannise’ in his account of Thomas’s poetry. Thomas at least once came terrifyingly close to suicide but was unable to carry through his plan (ibid).

He hated [his wife Helen's] fussing and her pretence that all was well, but the loathing he felt toward his own cowardice was stronger. Unable to do what he believed he should and put an end to his suffering, he was left to berate himself bitterly: ‘I’m the man who always comes home to his supper.’

Some of the prose work he did contained clues to his future greatness as a poet. He was a discerning and courageous critic of the work of other poets. He also wrote with deep feeling and great skill of the English countryside and those who lived close to it. He was completely blind to the potential planted in what to him seemed such unpromising soil.

The impact of his depression on his family

He comes across from all accounts as a fundamentally decent man whose dark moods poisoned his relationships with others, and there is no real hint of a constructive link between his depression and his creativity. He was completely trapped in a demoralising vicious circle (page 17):

The relentless, ungratifying work left him exhausted and bitter, while the din of family life served only to worsen his mood. In poor spirits he treated his family cruelly, scolding the children and reprimanding his wife, and the more he did so, the worse his spirits became.

He recognised how much his wife and children suffered from his moods but seemed powerless to protect them from himself if he stayed (page 19):

. . . . the family had joined Edward for Christmas, cared for by Helen, the woman he had married thirteen years ago, who loved him with a passion that he could no longer return.

And he also seemed powerless to leave them for good and set them free from him on a permanent basis either, not that they would have welcomed that idea at all (page 27):

‘What I really ought to do is live alone,’ he told Jesse Berridge. ‘But I can’t find the courage to do the many things necessary for taking that step. It is really the kind Helen and the children who make life almost impossible.’ Somehow they adapted to the outbursts and the absences.

The cost of keeping the family together was cruelly high (page 28):

The absences were crippling to Helen. She was warm and impulsive, a product of her father’s free‑thinking influence, but her untidy spontaneity made her a hopeless housekeeper and a poor cook to Edward’s irritation. . . . . It was her bohemianism that allowed her to ‘manage’ his disappearances emotionally but it was these same unconventional attitudes that left her isolated and wounded when he left.

There is an interesting clue we are given late in the book to what might have been going on within him at this time and beyond (page 230):

He longed for someone to break through the edifice that he had put around himself, an edifice designed, he said, to protect his humility.

The chances of finding anyone in England at the time with the necessary expertise was remote in the extreme (page 29):

Psychology in England was in its primitive stages before the war, with psychosomatic disorders little understood.

Hollis seems to feel with Thomas that the depression which dogged him was positively related to his creativity (ibid):

Thomas himself was not uncritical of his own condition, nor was he unappreciative of the energies that it produced within him. Aware that the depression was also a source of creativity, he had in the past been ambivalent about attempts to purge it. ‘I wonder whether for a person like myself whose most intense moments were those of depression a cure that destroys the depression may not destroy the intensity,’ he wrote in 1908, adding, – a desperate remedy?’

Robert Frost

His later history, which I will be dealing with in the other two posts on this subject, calls this view into question. An easing of his depression did not seem to diminish the strength of his experiences or his capacity to translate them into words – but more of that later.

He did feel at one point ‘in 1912 [that] he had finally met an individual [Godwyn Baynes, later a follower of Jung] who could help with a subtler understanding of his suffering.’ Initially Thomas was Baynes’s only ‘client.’ His optimism was relatively short lived and the gains temporary. As Baynes widened his clientele Thomas’s belief in him shrank.

As we will see, his decision to enlist and his realisation that he was writing real poetry eventually combined to decrease his susceptibility to depression. This had a significant positive effect on his relationship with his family (page 308):

. . . then he sympathised with [Helen's] visit to town to have a bad tooth taken out. ‘I hope you don’t dislike the dentist who took it away.’ It was a care and kindness that Thomas would show more of in the weeks ahead.

Not that the weeks ahead were without intensely painful moments as the time for his final departure to the front drew closer (page 310):

. . . . to ease the tension [he] took out his prismatic compass and showed her how to take a bearing from it; when she cried he closed the casing and put the instrument away. Helen could no longer rein back her desperation and felt engulfed by an uncontrollable grief of a kind that would plague her in the years ahead. She would recount his tenderness in that moment. She wrote of his gentle ability to soothe and steady her, to give her both the emotional and the physical reassurance for which she so longed. He read to her and carried her to the bedroom in his greatcoat. ‘Helen, Helen, Helen,’ he had said, ‘Remember that, whatever happens, all is well between us for ever and ever.’ When the morning came, she stood at the gate and watched him disappear into the mist and snow. Edward for his part recorded nothing of the details, only this entry in his diary: ‘Said goodbye to Helen, Mervyn and Baba.’

Such intense tenderness would have been impossible to him before he became a poet and a soldier. But consideration of those developments will have to wait until next time.

Related articles

• Poem for National Poetry Day (This is a poem to his wife Helen written shortly before he left for France.)
• Edward Thomas biography All Roads Lead To France: extract
• Matthew Hollis: Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas

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Edna Clarke Hall: capturing the moment

Edna Clarke Hall

I wanted to create a feeling of a calling, the kind that whispers to us when we least expect it. The kind of calling that moves us past what we know to places where the unknown provokes us to wonder…and discover new knowledge about ourselves and the world.

(Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox reflecting on one of her paintings)

Coincidences stick like burrs to the intricately-woven cloth of the mind. At the same time as I got the heads up about Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox’s website of delicate yet powerful artwork interwoven with thoughtful reflections, I also stumbled on another accomplished artist of another generation of whom I had never heard – Edna Clarke Hall. I spotted a haunting photograph of her in Hollis’ moving account of Edward Thomas‘ last years (more of that in later posts for sure) and tracked down some websites with samples of her swiftly executed images that capture in expressive lines and mood-saturated colours the essence of the passing moment. Though their occasional absence of faces is somewhat disconcerting, they have hooked my imagination, rather as Kathryn’s reflective artwork has, and I keep going back to them. I felt they were worth mentioning in case others were similarly ignorant of Clarke Hall’s existence until now.

Sketch for Catherine & Heathcliff

I could not find on the web the portrait in Matthew Hollis’s book that captures her sadness but the one at the top of this post conveys the beauty that seems to have drawn Thomas towards her in the months before he left England for the front in the First World War never to come back. Her constant return to images of Heathcliff and Catherine from Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights was presumably driven by this sadness which predated but was intensified by his loss. Hollis describes her situation with great sympathy (op. cit.: page 254):

Edna Clarke Hall had exhibited her watercolours annually with Vanessa Bell’s Friday Club since 1910; in April 1914 a successful solo exhibition at the Chenil Gallery in Chelsea showed fifty-six works and grossed £147 in sales. Shortly after, she temporarily set aside her paints to spend the next two years on verse. Her life in Essex was lonely. William Clarke Hall was a barrister and campaigner for children’s rights who spent lengthy weeks in his chambers at Gray’s Inn, leaving his wife feeling isolated in their country house. The couple had two boys of their own, but Edna could not forgive her husband’s decision to apply his energies to the children of his charitv work, some of whom were foundlings, abandoned by prostitutes. William would return at the weekends with an orphan in tow, sometimes leaving Edna to care for the child when he returned to London the next week. For Edna, the longing and the hurt was intense. ‘Why does a man engrose [sic] his mind in this cause of prostitutes leaving his wife sick to the heart in loneliness,’ she wrote in her journal.

Clearly there was more than a touch of Mrs Jellyby in her husband, William.  Not surprisingly she was as drawn to Thomas as he to her (op.cit. page 257):

Thomas’s gentle understanding of Edna’s domestic plight, and their rangy, artistic conversations and shared interests, were a lifeline to Edna that winter of 1915.

It was hard though to define exactly what she represented to him and Hollis struggles to pin it down (pages 277-278):

The relative absence of Edna’s name in Thomas’s correspondence is no surprise, especially when he was writing letters from camp that might very well have been prone to gossip or censorship. For Thomas a private allure would have been enough: a companion, a muse, a subject of desire. He once wrote that the goal of love was not the possession of another person but the stimulation of desire for things both known and unknown: ‘It is a desire of impossible things which the poet alternately assuages and rouses again by poetry.’

He claimed to be incapable of love. His leaving affected her badly (page 294):

Thomas’s departure would be a hard blow for Edna, who would sink into a terrible depression in the years to come. In Edward she had found a relationship of a kind that she believed she could never have with her husband: one that was careful, artistic and loving.

Her son, Dennis, in the kitchen

When I come to explore Edward Thomas’ life and poetry I will inevitably be coming back to the question of whether depression and creativity are in any way related. What has to be said here is that Edna Clarke Hall is one of the few women whose creativity was not completely stifled by the sexual inequality of her times and for whom the consequent depression did not extinguish her gift completely but rather fed it perhaps. That there are other such significant exceptions such as Jane Austen, the Brontes and Christina Rossetti should not blind us to the prevalent pattern. Until it changes universally humanity will not rise to its full potential:

. . . . the principle of religion has been revealed by Bahá’u’lláh that woman must be given the privilege of equal education with man and full right to his prerogatives. That is to say, there must be no difference in the education of male and female in order that womankind may develop equal capacity and importance with man in the social and economic equation. Then the world will attain unity and harmony. In past ages humanity has been defective and inefficient because it has been incomplete. War and its ravages have blighted the world; the education of woman will be a mighty step toward its abolition and ending, for she will use her whole influence against war.

(The Promulgation of Universal Peace:Talks Delivered by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá during His Visit to the US and Canada in 1912, page 108).

The life of Aung San Suu Kyi provides a good example of how that can work.

Related articles

• The Lady: a film about heroism
• Review of Portraits of Women

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Poem for National Poetry Day

Edward Thomas is less well known than Wilfred Owen but no less a poet. He also died in the war. Starting out in the ranks, Thomas was commissioned in 1916, and killed by a shell blast at Arras on April 9th, 1917. Although he survived the actual battle, he was killed by the concussive blast wave of one of the last shells fired as he stood to light his pipe. Thomas was survived by his wife, Helen, his son Merfyn and his two daughters Bronwen and Myfanwy. Below is a moving poem written to his wife. I couldn’t think of a better to way to celebrate National Poetry Day than pay tribute to this courageous and compassionate man.

AND YOU, HELEN

And you, Helen, what should I give you?
So many things I would give you
Had I an infinite great store
Offered me and I stood before
To choose. I would give you youth,
All kinds of loveliness and truth,
A clear eye as good as mine,
Lands, waters, flowers, wine,
As many children as your heart
Might wish for, a far better art
Than mine can be, all you have lost
Upon the travelling waters tossed,
Or given to me. If I could choose
Freely in that great treasure-house
Anything from any shelf,
I would give you back yourself,
And power to discriminate
What you want and want it not too late,
Many fair days free from care
And heart to enjoy both foul and fair,
And myself, too, if I could find
Where it lay hidden and it proved kind.

Related articles

• Edward Thomas: Selected Poems, Edited by Matthew Hollis
• Why Poetry Matters to Me
• Poetry – the last thing on our minds
• The Compass of Compassion

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