Tag: Edward Thomas

‘Face to face with nature’: Richard Jefferies

p757.jpg
(Richard Jefferies/Edward Thomas, © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS via Times Literary Supplement)

(‘By standing face to face with nature, and not from books, I have convinced myself that there is no design and no evolution. What there is, what was the cause, how and why, is not yet known; certainly it was neither of these.’—The Story of My Heart)

Noticing that it is Richard Jefferies’ birthday (1848-1887), I was reminded of an essay I wrote for an intellectual history module, on the utopian ideas of Jefferies, William Morris and Samuel Butler, the specific books mentioned being Morris’s News From Nowhere, Butler’s Erewhon and After London by Jefferies. I must have been, certainly became, extraordinarily enthusiastic about it because I consumed an absurd amount of reading matter, given the significance of the essay in the context of the whole course: and the bulk of that extra reading was of Jefferies.

He published around twenty books in his lifetime—he died at the age of thirty-eight, so living no longer than Guillaume Apollinaire, Felix Mendelssohn, George Gershwin or Federico García Lorca. He wrote a great deal about rural life, the changing countryside and farming practices: The Amateur Poacher, The Gamekeeper at Home, Hodge and His Masters; also novels, the children’s classic, Bevis: The Story of a Boy, and a remarkable autobiographical work, The Story of My Heart, perhaps the most marked example of Jefferies’ mystical or pantheistic strain

‘How strange that condition of mind’, he wrote there, ‘which cannot accept anything but the earth, the sea, the tangible universe!’ And, ‘There is an immense ocean over which the mind can sail, upon which the vessel of thought has not yet been launched.’ Asserting that, ‘Now, today, as I write, I stand in exactly the same position as the Caveman. Written tradition, systems of culture, modes of thought, have for me no existence’, he would repeat that ‘the divine beauty of flesh is life itself to me’.[1]

Coate-Farm

(Coate Farm: https://richardjefferies.wordpress.com/ )

In 1909, Edward Thomas published his biography of Jefferies, mentioning in his preface that he had known Jefferies’ part of Wiltshire (he was born at Coate Farm, near Swindon) for twenty years, ‘and I hope that I have got most of what the country people had to tell about him and his family.’ It’s a thorough, informed and sympathetic portrait. Thomas remarks that ‘Jefferies’ thinking was symptomatic of the age rather than original; it is stimulating because it is personal.’[2] It’s certainly that.

In an 1877 essay (in which I see he mentions ‘Fung-shuy’ – Feng Shui), Jefferies writes: ‘Wherever you can find a single blade of grass, however small, there you stand face to face with the mystery of life, and all the possibilities of existence.’ And, ‘If you should chance to find a blade of grass withering in a rocky place, carry it a little water for the sake of the thoughts that spring from it.’ And in a period when many people were still coming to terms with the evolutionary ideas of Darwin and others: ‘I think that bees, birds and animals would change their apparently immutable habits without hesitation if they found an advantage in doing so.’[3]

In his first chapter, ‘The Country of Richard Jefferies’, Thomas remarks that the Wiltshire and Berkshire Canal which, roughly speaking, was Jefferies’ northern boundary, ‘has now relapsed into barbarism; its stiffened and weedy waters are stirred only by the moorhen, who walks more than she swims across them’ (Richard Jefferies 2). The first part of Jefferies’ After London or Wild England is entitled ‘The Relapse into Barbarism’ and opens with a statement of oral tradition: ‘The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike.’ A little later, the narrator remarks: ‘Now the mark of a noble is that he can read and write.’ There is a brief ‘Appendix’, ‘The Great Snow’, the headnote describing it as ‘An alternative catastrophe, probably written before 1875’. This edition has an introduction by John Fowles, whose The French Lieutenant’s Woman, published a decade earlier, offered multiple alternative endings. Fowles writes of the several strangenesses of Jefferies’ novel: ‘And strangest of all is the fact that it should be the supposedly “sensitive” nature writer, author in 1883 of a passionate explosion, The Story of My Heart, against machine thinking and machine society, who two years later portrays the miseries of a future world bereft of higher knowledge and technology.’[4]

William_Henry_Hudson

(W. H. Hudson)

Edward Thomas’s biography of Jefferies was dedicated to W. H. Hudson. They had met in 1906 and when Thomas began work on the book in the following year, he asked Hudson to accept the dedication. Towards the end of his life, Hudson would remark that in Thomas ‘he had seen the son he wanted’. There were other curious connections. On 2 November 1900, ‘by a happy chance’, Hudson had lodged in the house at Hurstbourne Tarrant where William Cobbett had begun to write his Rural Rides – on 2 November 1821. In March 1921, when Hudson’s wife Emily died, she was buried in Broadwater cemetery at Worthing, where Richard Jefferies lies.[5]

In 1909, in the course of an appreciation of Hudson, Ford Madox Ford quoted from ‘Thistle-Down’, the opening chapter of Nature in Downland, ‘the first passage of Mr Hudson’s work that we ever read’, Ford noted.[6] He would recur to it several times in his later writings.

Charles, James, 1851-1906; Sussex Downs

(James Charles, Sussex Downs: The Council House, Chichester)

‘When, lying on my back, I gazed up into the blue sky, the air as far as I could see was still peopled with the flying down; and beyond all that was visible to the naked eye, far from the earth still more down was revealed by my glasses—innumerable, faintly seen silvery stars moving athwart the immeasurable blue expanse of heaven.’

A little later in that chapter, Hudson writes of Jefferies, of how, although he was so closely associated with Wiltshire, ‘the Sussex coast country where he found a home powerfully attracted and held him’. He added: ‘Jefferies was much in my mind just now because by chance I happen to be writing this introductory chapter in the last house he inhabited, and where he died, in the small village of Goring, between the sea and the West Sussex Downs.’[7]

‘By chance’. Wonderful. I must reread, at least, After London.

 
Notes

[1] Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart (1883; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1922), 46, 54, 56, 88, 89.

[2] Edward Thomas, Richard Jefferies (1909; London: Faber and Faber, 1978), ix, 294.

[3] Richard Jefferies, ‘Village Hunting’ and ‘Butterfly Corner’, 1887, collected in Landscape and Labour, edited by John Pearson (Bradford-on-Avon: Moonraker Press, 1979), 47, 53.

[4] Richard Jefferies, After London or Wild England (1885; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 1, 32, 243, vii.

[5] Ruth Tomalin, W. H. Hudson: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 182, 179, 230.

[6] Ford Madox Ford, ‘The Work of W. H. Hudson’, English Review, II, i (April 1909), 160.

[7] W. H. Hudson, Nature in Downland (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1900), 14, 16.

Remembering ‘Adlestrop’

Adlestrop-station

(Via http://www.urban75.org/blog)

On 24 June 1914, a train drew up at a country station on the main Great Western Railway line which ran from London to Oxford, Worcester and Malvern (the station finally closed in 1966, a victim of the Beeching report, more suitably termed ‘the Beeching axe’, which brought about the closure of a great many railways and the loss of local services on a huge scale). Among the passengers were Edward Thomas and his wife Helen, on their way to visit Robert Frost and his wife Elinor in Ledbury.

Thomas wrote in his field notebook for that day: ‘Then we stopped at Adlestrop, through the willows could be heard a chain of blackbirds songs at 12.45 and one thrush and no man seen, only a hiss of engine letting off steam.’

When the poem was written around six months later, he commented in a later notebook: ‘Train stopping outside station at Adlestrop June 1914.’[1] A memory refreshed.

Yes. I remember Adlestrop –
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.[2]

Four stanzas; four lines in each, rhyming abcb. This must be one of the most familiar poems in English, certainly among British readers. Voted number twenty in one survey I saw, it emerged as joint third in the most-requested poems on Radio 4’s Poetry Please programme over some thirty-five years, beside Dylan Thomas’s ‘Fern Hill’ and behind Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet, ‘How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways’.

The first stanza of ‘Adlestrop’ strikes me as a delicious example of lines that you’ve looked at a dozen times and never really seen. It begins with ‘Yes.’ A question has been asked but it’s one we don’t hear. Does the poet interrogate himself or is it an unseen and unidentified interlocutor or is the reader the implied questioner? And then: the speaker remembers Adlestrop but not, apparently, the place; only the name. He remembers, in fact, the sign, ‘Adlestrop’ because the express train drew up there ‘unwontedly’. That last word was, in an earlier draft, ‘unexpectedly’; at another stage, ‘Against the custom’ or ‘against its custom’.[3] William Cooke links the close of the poem with a passage in a prose work by Thomas, Beautiful Wales, published ten years earlier.[4] Jean Moorcroft Wilson sees the ‘germ’ of the poem in the first chapter of The Heart of England (1906).[5] Thomas ‘conflated details from different stops’.[6] Does it matter? Frankly, no. The abiding mystery is: how does it work? This short, apparently simple poem, composed of unremarkable language, no striking rhymes, that clings to the memory like a burr. How is it done? It’s a question asked, of course, of all effective art. One item of interest is precisely that ‘unwontedly’: ‘exactly the word he wanted’, Matthew Hollis remarks.[7] Yes. I had thought, vaguely, that it meant ‘unwillingly’, against one’s instincts or inclinations but ‘unwonted’ means only unaccustomed or unusual. The train drawing up there ‘unwontedly’ was something distinctive, marking the occasion out. He ‘emphasizes the unusual nature of the stop, which in turn creates a slight sense of unease.’[8]

edward thomas 1913_14_small

(Thomas in 1913-1914, via Edward Thomas Fellowship:
http://www.edward-thomas-fellowship.org.uk/home.html)

I noted earlier that the poem begins with ‘Yes’. But, in fact, like Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’ or several poems by Marianne Moore, it begins quite definitely with the title. ‘Adlestrop’. The name occurs three times: title, opening line and eighth line (‘Adlestrop – only the name’). Thomas ‘wrings from the name “Adlestrop”, by suspending it at the line-end, a series of unspoken associations with ideal rural communities.’ But ‘when he returns halfway through the poem to repeat that “What I saw / Was Adlestrop – only the name”, it is a signal for those associations to accelerate away from his reach.’[9] Ideal rural communities? Another critic suggests that, in the poem, ‘a scene glimpsed in a brief moment from a stationary train seems to open upon an ever-widening prospect of England’s central counties. These are common sights of the English countryside, but the moment is visionary’. It is, he adds, ‘an ideal England mirrored in the stillness and solitude of the poet’s mind’.[10] Elsewhere, it’s described as ‘the definitive English idyll.’[11]

Only a poem of permanent interest and value could, I suppose, generate such a wealth of interpretation and exegesis. The apparent simplicity is, of course, central to the challenge that so many readers find there. But one thing that strikes me and that seems often to be  absent from discussions of the poem is that, while, in June 1914, this country was not at war with Germany, in January 1915 it was. Thomas enlisted in July 1915, after an intense struggle, influenced to some extent by Robert Frost’s poem, ‘The Road Not Taken’, itself prompted in part by Frost’s experience of Thomas’s indecisiveness.[12] And if ‘Adlestrop’ was ‘an idyll’ or concerned to present ‘an ideal England’, it was in direct and active response to the forces that threatened it. Asked what it was that he was fighting for, Thomas famously ‘picked up a pinch of earth and answered: “Literally, for this”’.[13]

Farjeon

(Eleanor Farjeon)

So Ford Madox Ford’s persona, the poet Gringoire, voices similar concerns in No Enemy: ‘“I wonder,” Gringoire asked again that evening, “if other people had, like myself, that feeling that what one feared for was the land – not the people but the menaced earth with its familiar aspect.”’[14] In her notes to another Thomas poem, ‘The Manor Farm’, Edna Longley quotes Thomas’s essay ‘England’: ‘I believe . . . that all ideas of England are developed, spun out, from such a centre into something large or infinite, solid or aëry . . . that England is a system of vast circumferences circling round the minute neighbouring points of home’.[15] This is a conviction—a crucial one—that crops up in many literary contexts: that the national or universal, the abstract, the grandiose, must begin from the local, the concrete, the known.

That fifth line, ‘The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat’, may conjure memories of the climactic scene of the film of The Railway Children, whereby Jenny Agutter reduced grown men to tears, but given our wealth of retrospective images, I think also of battlefields wreathed in smoke or mist, poor visibility, an image real enough but itself a metaphor for the blindness or at least uncertain vision of those directing, prosecuting and suffering the Great War.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round hum, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

(Yes. I remember ‘Adlestrop’.)

 

References

[1] Edward Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems, edited by Edna Longley (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2008), 176.

[2] Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems, 51. This was one of sixteen poems that Thomas wrote between 4 January and 23 January 1915: Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Edward Thomas: From Adlestrop to Arras (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 310.

[3] See Longley, The Annotated Collected Poems, 177, on ‘unwontedly’.

[4] William Cooke, Edward Thomas: A Critical Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 1970), 121-122.

[5] Wilson, Edward Thomas: From Adlestrop to Arras, 151.

[6] The Annotated Collected Poems, 176.

[7] Matthew Hollis, Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas (London: Faber, 2012), 204.

[8] Wilson, Edward Thomas: From Adlestrop to Arras, 314.

[9] Andrew Motion, The Poetry of Edward Thomas (London: The Hogarth Press, 1991), 4.

[10] Michael Kirkham, The Imagination of Edward Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 116.

[11] Stan Smith, Edward Thomas (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), 11.

[12] Hollis, Now All Roads Lead to France, 232-236.

[13] Eleanor Farjeon, Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997), 154.

[14] Ford, No Enemy: A Tale of Reconstruction (1929; edited by Paul Skinner, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2002), 26.

[15] The Annotated Collected Poems, 165: the essay is in The Last Sheaf (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928).