Matthew Hollis’s unconventional biography about the war poet Edward Thomas beat Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens biography to the 2012 Costa Biography Award. Gaby Wood compares two very different portraits.
Edward Thomas
Perhaps the most interesting story to emerge from last night’s announcement of the Costa Prize category winners falls in the realm of biography. The shortlist, which included memoirs and travelogues and covered a striking range of subjects, indicated how broad the judges considered the term ‘biography’ to be. Yet within that, a very obvious contender for the final award was Claire Tomalin’s Dickens: A Life.
That Matthew Hollis’s Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas was given the biography prize instead will doubtless set people talking, but it is no diminishment of Tomalin’s achievement either to praise Hollis’s excellent book or to compare the intriguingly opposed biographical propositions Dickens and Thomas present.
Charles Dickens, who is unlikely to be given short shrift this year (the bicentenary of his birth falls on February 7), was many men – journalist, novelist, actor, campaigner, father of ten – with many moods. Famous in his lifetime and exceptionally rich (Tomalin estimates that his second American tour, undertaken three years before his death, earned him the equivalent of £1.4 million in today’s money), he was memorialised and mythologised virtually before his body was cold. Over the following 142 years, so many writers have attempted to describe and diagnose his person that offering any account of him is, in the memorable phrase of one of his latest biographers, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, “like trying to cut up a blue whale with a penknife”. Though Tomalin’s Life is a brick of a book, the surprise is not its sturdiness but its relative concision: she has arrived at a cradle-to-grace offering that takes up a mere 400 pages.
The story of Edward Thomas, on the other hand, edges towards the posthumous. The poet whose influence extended so far that Ted Hughes referred to him as “the father of us all” did not write any poetry until five years before his death on the first day of the Battle of Arras in 1917. What’s more, the man he was before that was constantly under threat from his own mind. And so while Hollis offers us only a slice of a life, it is in a sense the entire life of the man he came to be – the full biography of a five year-old grown man, reborn.
Thomas was an influential literary critic, who struggled to keep up with the amount of hack work (as he called it) he was required to do. He wanted to kill himself, kept in his pocket something he described as his “Saviour” (whether it was a gun or poison is not known), and wrote of his self-disgust at not being able to go through with it. Then he met someone who changed his life: Robert Frost.
Full story at The Telegraph.
Full story at The Telegraph.