The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (38 page)

Children come: a son, Merfyn, then a daughter, Bronwen. Thomas is often away from home in body (on long walking tours, researching books) or in mind (present, but writing). He churns out reviews in their hundreds, as well as book-length histories and biographies written to deadline. The work is hard, a bill-paying hackery that leaves him exhausted and despondent. His changes of mood are weather-like, and at times provoked by the weather. Heavy rain can leave him sluiced clean of depression, or more desperately waterlogged. When the black days arrive he lashes out at Helen, criticizing her plainness of mind or her lack of ambition. ‘
I hate my work
,’ he writes in a letter, ‘I have no vitality, no originality, no love. I do harm.’ Helen waits patiently ‘
to be let into the light again
’, and meets his cruelty with an unquerying acceptance of his right to be cruel.

So he administers self-punishment through hard walking: a way at once to macerate and to forget himself. Sometimes he leaves the house at evening and walks through the night, coming home haggard near dawn. At times he’s settled by this motion; at times only further troubled.

When he’s happy? Oh, then the days are fine. The house is filled with stories and rhymes. He sings while he bathes the children. Once they’re dried and clothed he lets the children perch on his knees, takes his clay pipe from his mouth and any music that is in him comes forth. His voice is deep and his songs are various: Welsh folk songs, racy and ribald songs, rollicking sea shanties. Song is vital to Thomas: he is involved almost from the start in the English folk-song revival led by Cecil Sharp. He publishes
Poems and Songs for the Open Air
, an anthology of walking ballads and airs. Folk songs and footpaths are, to his mind, both major democratic forms: collective in origin but re-inflected by each new singer or walker. Radical, too, in their implicit rebuke to the notion of private property.
He admires ‘Sumer Is Icumen in
’ more than anything by Beethoven. In his poem ‘The Path’ he will write of an old track to school through the woods that ‘
wind[s] like silver
, trickles on’. It is smudged by moss and leaf-fall, but kept open by the feet of children. The path is a riverbed and the children the water, running ‘the current of their feet’ over it.

They leave Kent and move to Hampshire, to the village of Steep. First to Berryfield Cottage, and then to a house called Wick Green, which is reached by an ancient, deeply worn track, thick with rotted leaves. The track winds through beeches and yews to reach the long, low house, which sits several hundred feet up at the plateau edge and looks across to Chanctonbury Ring and the ridge line of the South Downs, seven miles distant. The house has been recently constructed on Morrisian principles. The planks and beams have been taken from local oaks. The nails, hinges and hasps have been forged in the village, the bricks cast nearby. Native stone has been used for the thresholds. When mists fill the valleys, they feel as if they are in a wooden galleon at sea, creaking in the swell.

Yet for all its magic, they can’t fall in love with the house. They have always treated houses as animate, sounding them out for affinities or infirmities of spirit, and have already left one house for its cursedness, another for its tepidity. Thomas tries to settle: he digs a border by the door of his study and plants thyme, rosemary, lavender and old man’s beard. But they soon realize that the hostile newness of Wick Green will make it impossible for them to be happy there, sturdy though it stands, magnificent though its position is. It’s so high up that the wind shrieks in the gable room, the mists isolate it and the cold gnaws hard. Thomas’s depression sharpens. He feels trapped by his work, trapped in his marriage, unhappy in his home. He longs to establish his own route in life.

He reacts to the disappointments of Wick Green by walking. Treading the old paths seems to reduce the complexities of life, as if he has stepped into an archetype or allegory: track, forest, moon, traveller. He wanders far afield, even in heavy rain. Mostly the rain calms him because it deprives him of context. It desirably subtracts some part of him, taking away from him ‘
everything except the power
to walk under the dark trees, to enjoy as humbly as the hissing grass’. Mostly, the ‘
tender loveliness
’ of his favourite landscapes offers compensations for his own lacks. At times, though – at the worst times – nature’s beauty and exuberance feel to him like accusations. ‘
I am not a part of nature
. I am alone. There is nothing else in my world but my dead heart and brain within me and the rain without.’ What he has come to understand, painfully, is that one may too easily take the natural world as companion, friend and salve. Nature can cure but it can also be brutally mute, shocking in its disinterest: the river’s seawards run, the chalk’s whiteness, the hawk’s swivelling stare. But he knows also that the acknowledgement of this refusal of relation might offer its own bracing reward, just as the delusion of response might also serve deep purpose – and that one might not need always to choose the one before the other.

During the Kent and Hampshire years, when Thomas is not walking he is reading about walking. Coleridge and Hazlitt, the nonconformists: path-following as dissent. Bunyan and the Puritan tradition: path-following as obedience. Cervantes and the picaresque, Malory and medieval chivalry, the
Mabinogion
and Wales and Giraldus Cambrensis. Cervantes, he notes approvingly, had ‘
the sense of roads
’. Malory’s
Le
Morte d’Arthur
‘would have less vitality in its marvel if it were not for the roads’. He enjoys the story of Sir Launcelot, riding ‘throughout marches and many wild ways’. Even Shakespeare he finds to be a path-writer who in
Cymbeline
‘gives a grand impression of wide tracts of country traversed by roads of great purpose and destiny’. He absorbs the nineteenth-century romance of the open road in Stevenson’s
Songs of Travel
, Borrow’s Romany fantasias, the
Rural Rides
of William Cobbett (whose sentences suggest to him the walking swing of an arm or leg) and the work of Richard Jefferies – above all Jefferies, Thomas’s hero, whose style ‘
grew
’ to his use ‘like the handle of a walking stick’; steadying and companionable, the stick taking the hand’s mould. Yet Thomas stays sceptical about how one might, in a Rousseauian reverie, mistake walking for a ‘
primitive act
, “natural to man” ’, and in this way feel falsely restored to ‘a pristine majesty’.

Paths and tracks criss-cross his own work, figuratively and structurally. He writes of winding roads and he writes in winding syntax. He learns these reflexive habits from Hazlitt, who embeds walking as prosody to the depth of grammar. From Hazlitt, too, he learns the epistemological power of the proposition that is made and then part retracted. Again and again in Thomas’s imagination, text and landscape overlap: ‘
The prettiest things
on ground are the paths / With morning and evening hobnails dinted, / With foot and wing-tip over-printed / Or separately charactered.’ The paths are sentences, the shod feet of the travellers the scratch of the pen nib or the press of the type. He understands that reading and walking expire into one another, that we carry within ourselves evolving maps of the world which are, as Wordsworth put it, ‘
[o]f texture midway between life and books
’.

Thomas starts to think, too, about thinking, and the ways in which the physical world might incite in us those kinds of knowledge that exceed cognition. In letters to his friend Gordon Bottomley he describes going beachcombing on the Suffolk coast and finding ‘
champagne corks
, sailors’ hats, Antwerp beer bottles, fish boxes, oranges, lemons, onions, banana stems, waterworn timber and the most exquisite flat & round pebbles, black, white, dove grey, veined, wheat coloured’. ‘
Not one [pebble]
but makes me think or rather draws out a part of me beyond my thinking,’ he writes to Bottomley. His observation of the difference between being made to think, and being drawn out beyond one’s thinking, is tellingly precise; it records the transition from a perception exercised by the self upon the stones to the perception exercised upon the self by the stones.

Nature and landscape frequently have this effect on him: trees, birds, rocks and paths cease to be merely objects of contemplation, and instead become actively and convivially present, enabling understanding that would be possible nowhere else, under no other circumstances. ‘
Something they knew
– I also, while they sang,’ he will write of song thrushes in an early poem titled ‘March’. He senses that the light-fall, surfaces, slopes and sounds of a landscape are all somehow involved in accessing what he calls the ‘
keyless chamber[s] of the brain
’; that the instinct and the body (the felt smoothness of pebbles, the seen grain of light) must know in ways that the conscious mind cannot. Weather, in particular, is ‘
integral
’ to his thinking, as Eleanor Farjeon notices: ‘Other people talk about the weather, Edward lived it.’ Like Nan Shepherd thirty years later, he recognizes that weather is something we think
in
– ‘
the wind, the rain
, the streaming road, and the vigorous limbs and glowing brain and what they created … We and the storm were one’ – and that we would be better, perhaps, speaking not of states of mind, but rather of atmospheres of mind or meteorologies of mind.

He is slowly working out a model of thought – no, more than thought, of
self
– not as something rooted in place and growing steadily over time, but as a shifting set of properties variously supplemented and depleted by our passage through the world. Landscape and nature are not there simply to be gazed at; no, they press hard upon and into our bodies and minds, complexly affect our moods, our sensibilities. They riddle us in two ways – both perplexing and perforating us. Thomas knows this to be true because he has felt it on foot, with his feet, and Farjeon again, keenly, senses this: ‘
he walked
with
himself
, with his eyes and his ears and his nostrils, and his long legs and his big hands.’

The challenge, of course, is how to record such experience – apprehended, but by definition unsayable – in language, using the ‘
muddy untruthful reflection of words
’. Poetry is the form of utterance that can come closest; this he knows as a reader. But he has never written poetry, and has little reason to think he can.

Over the course of 1913, though, Thomas becomes friends with the American poet Robert Frost. They walk together in the fields and woods near Dymock in Gloucestershire, where Frost is living with his wife and where a group of poets has taken to gathering in order to wander, think and drink. Frost and Thomas tramp almost anywhere they wish ‘
on wavering footpaths through the fields
’, sometimes twenty-five miles in a day, discussing poetry, natural history and the coming war. Frost coins a new word for what he and Thomas do: ‘talks-walking’.

It is Frost who encourages Thomas to make the move from prose into poetry. He is, Frost tells him, a poet behind the disguise of prose. It’s Frost who takes lines from one of Thomas’s travelogues and rearranges them as verse, so that Thomas can see what he’s been doing all along without knowing it. Frost ‘
produced
… the enharmonic change,’ Farjeon writes beautifully, ‘that made [Thomas] not a different man, but the same man in another key.’ Thus retuned, and with such encouragement, his poems start coming – tentatively, experimentally – his first finished on 3 December 1914.

War has been declared, though. The country has changed: disorganized trains, crowds at the stations, reservists being seen off by flag-waving friends. Thomas is sceptical of cheap nationalism, scornful of pompous martialism. But he is also anxious to fight: to prove his bravery, to defend a landscape he loves, to find the purpose that his life has been so unhappily lacking. Less than a year into the war, he finds himself at a crossroads. Frost and his family have already sailed for America; Frost is encouraging Thomas to emigrate to New England and find work there as a writer and a poet. Frost will help him make his way; they will be safe from the war at that distance. Helen is pleading with him to stay in Hampshire. But the army needs men, and Thomas has felt himself ‘
slowly growing into a conscious Englishman
’. There’s no obligation on him to enlist. At thirty-six he’s old enough to sit the war out. He’s married with children; it remains wholly honourable for family men not to fight. ‘
He could have been safe
, if he had chosen to be,’ Farjeon will later write.

It’s the greatest decision of his life, and he imagines it as a separation of ways. He spends hours poring over his ‘
moral map
’, ‘thinking out’ his motives, when he ‘ought to be reading or enjoying the interlacing flight of 3 kestrels’. On 7 December he begins a poem called ‘The Signpost’: a figure hesitates at a junction, unable to choose one or other of the paths. ‘
I read the sign. Which way shall I go?
’ Now, if only he could take one path and then retrace his steps and take the other …

In June 1915 Frost sends Thomas a draft of a poem he has written called ‘The Road Not Taken’. It was inspired, obliquely, by the memory of walking with Thomas in the Dymock fields: Thomas’s eagerness, his wish to walk every path and his frustration at crossroads, have been transformed by Frost into a finely balanced metaphysical parable. ‘
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
,’ begins the poem:

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;