Edward Thomas’s finances

An article by Paul Jarman in this week’s TLS notes the difficulty in getting through the myths to the facts of Edward Thomas’s life.
He discusses Matthew Hillis’s very readable Now All Roads Lead to France and its:

conventionally unpropitious assessment of Thomas’s pre-poetry, bread-and-butter compositions: Thomas despised the substandard wherever he encountered it: in the anointed, in his peers, but most especially he despised it in himself. For when he was not sharpening his mind on the reviewing he did for a living, he was blunting it again through the commissions that were beneath his talents: endless and often aimless prose measured out by the page to fulfil his contractual obligations.

The conventional picture of pre-war Thomas is as an intellectual forced by the market into hack writing, and making a living through commissions undertaken unwillingly.
It’s surprising, therefore, to see the official record of Thomas’s probate in 1917:

A century ago £983 was a considerable amount of money. If this was cash that Thomas had access to while alive, he was far from penurious. Do we need to look for a different explanation for his spending his talents on unpropitious commissions like the life of Marlborough? Maybe Jean Moorcroft Wilson will explain more about this complicated man in her forthcoming biography, which will probably give a fuller account of Thomas’s rather dismal Grub Street years.

300,000 up!

Today this blog received its 300,000th hit.
And there are plenty more posts to come…

Herbert Asquith’s ‘The Volunteer’

This poem is often found in Great War anthologies:

Here lies a clerk who half his life had spent
Toiling at ledgers in a city grey,
Thinking that so his days would drift away
With no lance broken in life’s tournament
Yet ever ‘twixt the books and his bright eyes
The gleaming eagles of the legions came,
And horsemen, charging under phantom skies,
Went thundering past beneath the oriflamme.

And now those waiting dreams are satisfied
From twilight to the halls of dawn he went;
His lance is broken; but he lies content
With that high hour, in which he lived and died.
And falling thus, he wants no recompense,
Who found his battle in the last resort
Nor needs he any hearse to bear him hence,
Who goes to join the men of Agincourt.

The poem was first published in a book of 1915, so you can see why Brian Gardner included it in Up the Line to Death, and why a student-friendly website might describe it as ‘ a recruitment poem, to try and convince men to join up and fight in the First World War.’

Nice trenches

According to the star of tonight’s TV version of Birdsong (Eddie Redmayne, an Old Etonian fashion model and friend of Prince William) the trenches were ‘nice’.
Sebastian Faulks writes interestingly about the book’s origins in the Independent.

Allan Monkhouse’s ‘True Love’

One of the best bits of news I’ve heard recently is that the ever-excellent Orange Tree Theatre will be presenting Allan Monkhouse’s war play The Conquering Hero later this year. (I read this a while ago andwrote about it. It’s a very strong and complex play, and I’m delighted to have a chance to see it on stage.).
This coming event was in my mind when, leafing through a 1919 magazine looking for something else entirely, I came across a review of Monkhouse’s 1919 novel True Love. The review was not entirely positive, but indicated that the book dealt with wartime, and that much of it was set around a newspaper clearly based on the Manchester Guardian. (Monkhouse, of course, worked on the Guardian for many years, as a reviewer of books and plays).
The Bookfinder website found me a reasonably-priced copy, and I’ve been enjoying it – though with some of the same reservations as that 1919 reviewer.
The career of the book’s hero, Geoffrey Arden, is not unlike Monkhouse’s. He works for the great Manchester newspaper as a reviewer, and also writes plays that are performed by the Repertory Theatre. The first section of the book deals largely with the production of his Alice Dean, (which is maybe a bit like Monkhouse’s own Mary Broome).
There is an element of roman à clef to the descriptions of the paper’s personnel.

Prosecuting ‘The Rainbow’

Or ‘… one hand always in the slime.’

While at the National Archives in Kew yesterday, I took a look at the file (HO 45/13944) about the prosecution of D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow in 1915.
I was hoping to find some indication whether Lawrence’s attitude towards the War had been a contributing factor in the decision to prosecute. There were no clues about that, but the contents of the file were still interesting.
The papers at Kew are not about the initial prosecution, but about the need to answer questions posed afterwards by Philip Morrell M.P., in the House of Commons.
Morrell asked why proceedings were undertaken, and claimed that the prosecution was unfair to Lawrence, who was given no chance to defend himself.
He asked whether the Secretary of State was aware:

that no direct evidence was given by the prosecution in support of the charge, but that the counsel employed by the police, who was the only counsel present, confined himself to reading the unfavourable comments of two journalists. who were not called on to give evidence, and had apparently not read the book; and whether he will see that no further proceedings of this kind are taken by the police in respect of any work produced by an author of good standing and reputation, except after due notice being given to him, so that he may have at least as good an opportunity as any other accused man of replying to the charges made against him.

[The real problem was that Lawrence's publishers, Methuen, had caved in immediately there was a whiff of danger; they pleaded guilty and withdrew the book, leaving Lawrence isolated and his reputation badly damaged.]

August 1914

Here’s a paragraph from Allan Monkhouse’s 1919 novel, True Love (about which I shall write more later):

He encountered queues of men at the recruiting offices waiting their turn to enlist. One day he walked along a line, and, regarded critically, it didn’t seem that the might of Germany had much to fear from these. They looked strangely small and shabby ; they joked a little sometimes, they lounged, they spat; some looked sullen, and some appeared to be gazing at an object infinitely far away; many had the Briton’s air of consciously making a fool of himself. He came to the end of the line and started, for there was the little man of the German restaurant. He looked defiant and apologetic too. He grinned faintly and said : “Ad to do it.” And Geoffrey felt then that there had never been anything like this in the world before, that nothing had ever mattered so much, that to falter now would be baseness and misery. As he paused there, the little man looked at him inquiringly and muttered again : ” Ad to.” Geoffrey shook hands with him and hurried away.

He saw Lindsay that night and told him that he wanted to go.

But it’s just a children’s book…

A couple of correspondents recently have criticised me for taking Michael Morpurgo’s Private Peaceful seriously. ‘It’s just a children’s book,’ they argue. ‘So you can’t expect literary sophistication or historical accuracy.’
Others have taken a similar line about Carol Ann Duffy’s Christmas Truce poem, whose target market is also apparently children (though there was no indication of this when it was printed in The Guardian).
Should there be separate rules for adult fiction and children’s books? Well, up to a point; only a twerp would criticise The Wind in the Willows for inaccurately claiming that toads drive motor cars. Equally, one wouldn’t want to spoil a child’s pleasure in Treasure Island by suggesting that most eighteenth-century pirates were less interesting than Long John Silver or Ben Gunn. Children’s literature is a genre with its own standards, and any reader should expect it to communicate through vivid characters, a clear narrative and (often) strong simple emotions.
My problem with Private Peaceful is that it simplifies human nature, and the simplifications of history are a symptom of this. Morpurgo divides his characters into good and bad. From what I remember of the novel, nobody crosses the line. There is no Long John Silver figure, attractively bad, to pose dilemmas of divided loyalties. There is not even a Mr Toad – on the same side as the heroes, but enjoyably deplorable. No. The Peacefuls are all simply good and their enemies are all simply bad. The Colonel and Hanley are ludicrously one-dimensional bullies; life in this novel is often horrible, but it is never morally complex, because it never suggests that people are complicated.

Wishing you a merry Christmas

…and a peaceful New Year.

John Glubb’s ‘Into Battle’

Not everyone was pleased when the Armistice ended hostilities on 11th November, 1918. John Glubb, a young officer in the Royal Engineers, wrote in his diary:

Alas, the war is over, at the time when it was beginning to be exciting and enjoyable, after all these years.

Glubb was annoyed that the recent months of moving warfare had not allowed him as many opportunities as it might have done. Only a few days earlier, he had written:

We shall accompany the advance guard, of course, and it should be quite exciting, if only we can overtake Bre’er Boche. I always have looked forward to a chance to bring my pontoons into action and slap down a bridge under enemy fire!

When Glubb published his wartime diaries in 1978 he not only chose ‘Into Battle’ as his title, but printed as his epigraph all of Julian Grenfell’s paean to the thrill of warfare (‘And he is dead who will not fight;/ And who dies fighting has increase.’). Few prose accounts of the war are so true to the spirit of Grenfell’s poem.
In a preface, Glubb explains how he came across ‘a bundle of old exercise books, full of faded writing in pencil’ – his diaries from sixty years before:

At a time when survivors who actually fought in the war are becoming fewer and when the war itself is often misrepresented to support modern political propaganda, it seemed to me that these artless pages, written day-by-day in trenches and bivouacs, might not be entirely lacking in interest.