In this portrait and the comments that precede it, Thomas anticipates
Raymond Williams’s famous criticism of Georgian ruralism as writing
which rhapsodises about the countryside precisely because it does not
belong to it, which ignores the specific conditions of history and labour
that make the landscape and turns it instead into a pastoral ideal. For
Williams, writers like Thomas began with ‘real respect’, but their preju-
dices led them on to ‘a specific conjunction of the homely and colloquial
with a kind of weak-willed fantasy’.^55 Thomas was aware of this fantasy and
berated himself for participating in its circulation, but at the same time the
double is a warning to himself of the opposite fantasy of leaving the
suburbs socially, mentally and economically.
Moreover, being weak-willed and impractical was of some importance
to Thomas’s own poetics of nature, delighted by the ecstatic, mystical
sense of oneness with his surroundings he found in Richard Jefferies’sThe
Story of my Heart.InThe Country, Thomas quoted William James
approvingly on the idle hours Jefferies spent communing with nature:
‘It is necessary to become worthless as a practical being, if one is to hope
to attain to any breadth of insight into the impersonal world of worths as
such, to have any perception of life’s meaning’.^56 In the essay from which
this is taken, James goes on to say that
only your mystic, your dreamer, your insolvent tramp or loafer can afford
so sympathetic an occupation, an occupation which will change the
usual standards of human value in the twinkling of an eye, giving to foolishness
a place ahead of power, and laying low in a minute the distinctions which it takes
a hard-working conventional man a lifetime to build up.^57
It is this association of the useless vision with the mystical one that
makes Thomas’s countryside difficult to recuperate for any theory that
places an ultimate value on labour, and harder to merge with his mystical
poetic. For his great criticism of modern literature was precisely that its
writing was too laboured, especially the country writers and Georgian
poets who worked so hard to be simple. As a socialist, he certainly did
not think history and work irrelevant, and once recommended that all
school children should be taught history, geography and economics not
from books but by walking in their local areas and understanding the
forces that shaped their particular landscape. But Thomas’s personal
geography celebrates the out of place and useless because they are the
counterparts of ecstasy, and the suburban and the mystical coalesce in
the twin uses of the word ‘superfluous’. When hisSouth Countryclerk
remarks that ‘he is one of the helpless, superfluous ones of the earth’ ( 75 ),
92 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism