Letter from Edward Thomas to the poet Gordon Bottomley. No address. Archival ref: 424/1/1/1/10/155
23 ii 11.
My dear Gordon,
How are you? I wish it were you that were writing this windy night and that I should be having a letter from you by Sunday’s post. It would be a better letter. I confess I am only writing after my wrist failed me at copying a paper lately written on an old hunting song. I am laughing. “ Maeterlinck“ somehow - I know how - got finished last month. Proofs will soon be coming. Can you look at them? I am correcting proofs of another collection like “Rest and Unrest”. Then I have three books in hand. One on the Icknield Way (running S.W. across England from near Norwich to nobody knows where). One, a short one on Lafcadio Hearn. A third a collection of Celtic Tales rewritten (more or less) for schools and to be published by the Oxford Press. Can you advise me where to go for Highland heroic tales? All this does not mean wealth, but

in each case poorer pay than for reviewing. Reviewing is failing me a little, tho I now do some for the Nation. I am sick of it and do not do my best I fear.
Guthrie maybe going to illustrate my “ Icknield Way”. I saw him for an hour in London lately and he promises to come here now that he has a sister in law housekeeping for him. He looks better than he was and talks cheerfully. He is again planning a magazine- Have you seen “The Open Window “ at all ? They might like a poem of yours I should think. I hope you are working again now and want to know what at. I must come to you to sit and talk now that I am an increasingly bad letter writer. I don’t know quite yet when it can be. If I could fly it should be now, especially as I am capable of little else. I am at the end of a second week of extraordinary weakness, unable to work in the garden or to walk, and considerably dejected therefore, but not quite so

frantic as I should have been a few years ago in such a case. I am older, several years older than the Eagle Cock. I shan’t see 50 again by the look of it. I creep and slink about the earth doing small immediate things - forcing myself to work just to prove I like. Since Christmas I (and the rest of us) have been a strict vegetarian, but I am not a new man yet. Perhaps I am in the pay of labour. One such job lately has been working with Garnett at a petition to get W H Davies a pension. We have got a strange list and Gosse’s help in considerable hope. I forget if you saw “Farewell to Poetry”. He is now getting ready a new book with some very good things in it. I now see a chance of his graving. I feared he knew all he ever would know. He has done some wonderful but unpublishable prose sketches of women.
Rausume has been appearing and disappearing. He has been hobnobbing
with Paul Fort in Paris, letting remarks about the later Wilde and supporting his vitality as beer and hard boiled eggs. He also will have to think about vegetarianism one of these days. With his wife’s help he has a pretty good time, I fancy. They may be coming here again to like if his people will buy the home. The landlord won’t let it to them as they used to bathe in champagne and never wiped up what they spilt. Heigh Ho the Holly !
Have you any sprigs of rosemary to pass ? So far we have only snowdrops in bloom- the garden (illegible)but the day helps first the back and then the heart.
Helen and I send our love to you and Emily and all.
Yours ever
Edward Thomas