‘Whate’er my choice / Vain it must be, I knew’, says ‘Melancholy’, ‘yet
naught did my despair / But sweeten the strange sweetness’. But place-
lessness is not merely an exterior analogue of his emotions. It is intimately
bound up with the economic circumstances of Thomas’s writing on the
country, and its permanent sense of not really belonging there. Although
he lived mainly in rural Kent and Hampshire, Thomas could never afford
to be very far from a railway-station, because London was where his
employers and his literary friends were, not to mention his readership.
‘The villa men and ladies were the first “lovers of Nature,” the first to talk
and write of the country’, he wrote ruefully, ‘for the villa residents and the
more numerous others living “in London and on London” who would be
or will be villa residents, all our country literature is written’. Love of the
country is a uniquely suburban thing, indulged in by those whose real
desire is to remain in the suburbs. Their love of the country is for their
own sake, for what it brings them in ‘rest, relief, stimulation, a kind of
religion, poetry, cash’.^51 These attacks on the motivation of his readership
apply equally to Thomas himself, for writing the books he did fed the
market in country literature and, equally, helped him rest, write and feed
his family. It is the predominantly town-based middle classes whose
‘widespread craving for anything that will vividly contrast with the life
of this class’ means they admire ‘peasants... children, saints, savages,
vagabonds, criminals, flowers, nature’.^52 Hence when Thomas asserts that
‘the freedom and simplicity connected by them [the suburbanites] with
some forms of country life foster that cultivation of the instinctive and
primitive, which is the fine flower of a self-conscious civilisation turning
in disgust upon itself ’, such disgust is precisely being turned upon his
own prose writing.^53 London begins by being what Thomas must escape
from, but turns out to have scripted the escape all along. This problem is
shown particularly well in the contrary attitudes within one of the many
Thomas-doubles who appear in his prose, the suburban clerk inThe South
Country,who works in the City during the winter, and harvests in the
country in the summer. The clerk’s conversion to rurality is occasioned by
a mystical experience of utter negativity, a ‘yawning pit’ opening up
beneath him. So horrified is he by this total lack of connection between
his suburban life and anything outside him, ‘unlike the mystic’s trances
feeling out with infinite soul to earth and stars and sea,’ that he moves to
the country to work as a labourer for the summers and experience a unity
of being and surroundings. Yet this new life does not connect him either,
for the country people do not trust him, as he admits: ‘I realise I belong to
the suburbs still... a muddy confused hesitating mass.’^54
Edward Thomas in ecstasy 91