Letter from Edward Thomas to the poet Gordon Bottomley. Sent from Berryfield Cottage, Ashford, Petersfield, Hampshire. Archival ref: 424/1/1/1/10/123
Ashford
15. iii.09

My dear Gordon, I was afraid you were not well as you were
silent rather longer than usual & am sorry to know I was right.
But I think perhaps you are feeling not uneasy as you are
making big & charming plans for Spring. Don't worry another
second about the 'South Country'. Dent wants to delay. He says the
season is very bad for his trade; but I think the fact is he wants to
organise & advertise a series in which my book shall appear. When
I have very little else to tell you about myself. There is nearly ¼ of the
year gone & I seem to have been sitting close up to the fire all the time
writing all sorts of thing which you shall see some day only I don't like to trouble
you with M. S. & the transcript is being thrust upon editors. I have
done a great deal at first under a real impulse but latterly ( the long frost
having quite undermined me) by force of daily custom as much as anything. I can do almost anything if once I can start
doing it everyday at a certain hour. And as reviewing has been scarce
I have had few interruptions I feel sure it is better work or in
a better direction than all but the best of the old but it is even
less profitable & quite impossible to palm off on a publisher as
part of a guinea guide book - a difficulty will soon arise unless
Jefferies' brings one offer of work - which it has failed to do
except from the editor of a new magazine who asked me for a
short 'semi-poetical' article on 'why I love [illegible' out of
door life' ! I don't live an out of door life & can't be semi-
poetical to order so I asked a prohibitive price & so got out of it.
Meantime I get articles returned on every hand. 'The New Age'
printed a thing last week. Did you see it? But it was written
a year ago nearly. - Evidently I am developed into a worse kind
of bore at any rate - Put it down to the big fires which I have
to sit close up to in this weather.

I am very glad "Gunnar' is soon coming. If I were
sending out review copies I should not go beyond Times, Chronicle,
Nation, Bookman &, perhaps English Review ( tho they review very little).
I don't know if I can decently review a book dedicated to me but
I will do it indecently, if not.
The English Review may perhaps help me if it lives.
I wish I could talk to you about Edward Garnett. (I
shall doubtless; & by the way it never likely I shall be walking
out of Yorkshire in the Lake county in June thereabouts, &
if so I should like to stay a day or two with you, if you are
at home & free). Certainly his talk is far better than his writings.
I hardly know a poorer writer of any ability at all. I don't know
which Tingener preface you mean bt there again I should like to
talk about naturalism - writing would weary me - I've had a
day of it & woodchopping & reading to children ( who have chickenpox;
Helen being away) & walking etc. I don't know anybody who
seems to see literature & life as a whole so well as he, judging
from his talk. But nevertheless I think that my respect
for his opinion of my own words is horribly exaggerated by feeling
that he was at one time reluctant to like it &
even perhaps antipaethtic to me & it; so that I have something
to break down before teaching & to succeed in that would always please my vanity. He is like the one sinner who repenteth.
The man who readily sympathizes with my work & says he likes it
I am with consistent [illegible] to respect, on the other
hand.
There's a grand fire now & my legs are burning.
Tell me why you frown on the later Symons? I

suppose you detect in his broadening out also & thinning
down. But I should have said that, allowing talk to
count, he has had a superior living as a critic combining
criticism & scholarship. I don't think he had any
originality, but then that is true in his other work too. But
I thought a few of the later poems far good as anything he
had done before, tho not better than (of their kind)
the earliest. I imagine he could never be what I should call
quite sincere, that is why he had not style; but in the later
attitude all the flimsy avoidable insincerity had gone. But
I don't possess 'London nights' & I am writing in the strength of
perhaps very wrong early impressions.
Then we kiss again with tears over Poe. Hawthorne I
have little of. I have read some very indifferent creepy stuff
of his that didn't produce a creep.
Arthur Ransome is married, I hear, & is coming to try
to live for the summer near here. I met his lady. She
belongs to the higher orders & no connection of hers has ever been
in trade. She paints herself. She has many rings. But she is
pretty & spirited & clever &
clever enough to do her own hair. Unfortunately I never
venture to touch the higher orders in my sketches....
It is 10. I must read about the Zeus of the
insular Celts. Zeus haven't got to - please when you are well
write again a long letter. I can't. You can . Also you have,
at least perhaps you have, more time. Please do.
Yours ever
Edward Thomas