Letter from Edward Thomas to the poet Gordon Bottomley. Sent from Swansea. Archival ref: 424/1/1/1/10/120
Swansea
14.xi.08

My dear Gordon, thank you for the Bibliography.
It was noble of you to discover those
omissions & inconsistencies. I should never have
done so. It is this lack of attention that
makes my prose the dull, long pendant
stuff it has now become - still it is
more read than the airs & graces of Horace.-
I envy your letters & translations from Sturge
Moore. I hear he is doing a book on Flaubert.
By the way 'Melusine' by George Ernle is
a lovely narrative poem lately published.
Fancy Binzon troubling to republish
'London Visions' (which are better than
my prose but very like it in observation,
feeling lack of unifying impulse &
of style).
Muirhead Bone offers to let me
reproduce some of his Sussex drawings for
my 'South Country' - & Dent hesitates
& says my work is best without illustrations.
I wonder what you'll think of 'The South
Country' with 2 or 3 women in it & long
studies of men & (of course) the Suburbs
& also London & the unemployed. Why
won't some one pay me 3 times as much so
that I may write ⅓ as much? I know so
well when I am writing much but I have to
leave it in with the (several) things which
are pretty well done.
I shall see 'Mariamne' soon. The
authors keep their secret will & so do you.
Swansea is a magnificent place,
huge almost entirely new thrown together
anyhow but amongst mountains,
some green some copper-poisoned brown,
& at the edge of the sea. It is quite big &
labryinthine & yet easily seen by the eye,
as well as the mind, as a whole. It
has a centre of large gaudy electric lighted
shops & then a ruined castle &
then filthy or brand new warrens up
& down, always in sight of the mountains.
But I have a headache from the
bad air, the bad light of this room & a slight
continual fret of loneliness (being with nice kind
people whom I don't really know & who don't
know me, in an almost intolerable house -
but with a nice brassy kitchen , innumerable
jugs & 2 clocks ticking like little birds
together). So I won't write anymore.
Nor will I, intentionally, die just yet, as
I want to see my Castle among the sandhills
tomorrow & my lake among the mountains
soon after. I return to town in a week.
This was a suddenly arranged expedition
& it was only when I had settled it that
I thought I could perhaps have gone to Gordon's.
Forgive me & perhaps I couldn't have gone
either.

Yours ever
Edward Thomas