This book does not belong to the genre that I normally read, in fact I didn't even know who Edward Thomas was. I bought this book for two reasons: it was in the discount bin in the bookstore, heavily discounted, secondly the artillery pieces on the cover of book misled me somewhat into thinking that this book would be skewed towards WWI action. It was left on my bookshelf for more than a year since I bought it and I only picked it up to read because this is the centennial year of the start of WWI.Let me first get my complaints out of the way.
For a book centred on Edward Thomas, he only got the first passing mention on page 14 and it was not only until Page 16 when the story started to centre on him; this is not a book written straight to the point. Worse, a book so-titled made no mention of WWI until pg 142, almost halfway through, after which it meandered through other issues before reaching the last quarter when Thomas finally enlisted in the army. This book could have taken a number of other titles, "Edward Thomas and his Friend Robert Frost" would be a much less romantic but nevertheless more accurate one.
But there is much to like about this book. First of all, the writing. The first dozen pages started with the opening of the Poetry Bookshop in London and detoured to a description of the poetry scene in London through the different reigns. But what writing! One is left to wonder if Mr Hollis' knowledge of the poetry genre meant an active interest in poets and poetry, and the lyrical tone has found its way into his prose. (I found later that Hollis is indeed a poet himself.) Take this graphical depiction of the poets' quirks in the public reading of their works for example:
Yeats recited to a sell-out audience, Wilfrid Gibson performed in a droning monotone; W. H. Davies suffered nerves (cured when he was encouraged to think of the whisky afterwards), Sturge Moore forgot his lines; Ford Madox Hueffer read hurriedly, Rupert Brooked inaudibly, and Ralph Hodgson, who could not tolerate so much as a mention of his own work, simply refused to read at all, while simply no one could silence the actorly John Drinkwater.There are many more examples of beautiful, lyrical writing that is unfamiliar to me. But reading this book through the usual lenses with which I used to read my other books, I got a little impatient wondering when all roads were going to lead to France. A big part of the book was on Thomas's unhappy family life, a not-so-successful career, his friendship with Frost, and then his struggle whether or not to enlist and to become a poet. In the end, France occupied but some 20 pages of the book, but lest I forget, this book is not about France, but all roads leading to France. And all that happened to him, as carefully developed by the author were roads leading to France, and tortuous as they were to Thomas, they were beautiful to the reader.
I would like to briefly talk about Frost's poem, The Road Not Taken. Personally, I hated this poem, unfairly, of course, as I hardly knew anything about it. But those last two lines, "I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference." are quoted to death by anyone who wanted to show that they had the courage to take a 'less traveled path' that it irritates me no end. I once came across a newspaper article where the journalist quoted this to show that she had taken the "path less traveled" by being a - journalist.
However, after one had been educated by the author on the context under which this poem was written, Frost's own mischievous caution to his audience, Thomas's strong reaction to it, and most of all the author's own perceptive questions about the poem (pg 234), one can't help but fall in love with it. Perhaps feeling a little snobbery too (now that I know it better than that journalist). But the rejoinder that came on page 261 in the form of Thomas's Road was equally powerful, especially when the author broke up the poem, starting with "Now all roads lead to France". Yes, now all roads lead to France, in Thomas's own words, he would be going to France.
In the epilogue, the author went back to describing those who in Thomas's circle and what happened to them during and after the war, much like how he described them at the beginning of the book in the Poetry Bookshop. Before that, he touched ever so softly on Thomas's own death when it came, never over-playing it, and one is left to feel sad, yet happy that "[h]e fell without a mark on his body."
A poet who joined the army to fight a war, these are two ideas that I can never associate together. Yet in Thomas's case, and indeed those around him, this almost seemed like the only right thing to do. How did they, and in particular, Thomas come to this? It took another poet to tell us the story of this poet.
(Find this book at Goodreads)
