Where Have You Been? Read Online Free Page B

of a “cricket week”). In fact, if one imagines, in one of P. G. Wodehouse’s “Psmith” novels, a meeting in a London chophouse or a country pile—say, Blandings in Shropshire—and a fast friendship being formed between Psmith’s likable friend Mike Jackson and—not Psmith but instead Ralston McTodd, “the powerful young singer of Saskatoon”—I don’t think the story of Frost and Thomas is altogether unlike a serious version of that. Even when they were living in adjacent cottages, in Ledington and Ryton, Thomas didn’t know that particular bit of country (not far from the imaginary Blandings); there was a local hill from which he could see Wales, but basically he was no more “at home” there than the American visitor.
    Nor could either man draw on the authority of years, family, accomplishments. True, they both had families—Frost with his four children, Thomas his three—but to some extent, both were on the run from them. They were in settled, or serious years, mid- to late thirties—Frost the older by four years, and seeming older than that, I would guess, by virtue of being American and having traveled, of having grown up half-orphaned, of having come into money from his grandfather—but basically neither had very much to show for his time on earth, and both were well aware of the fact. If anything, Thomas, who was a hugely prolific and hardworking literary journalist with a string of books to his name, should have had the upper hand on an erstwhile farmer and occasional teacher, an idle and irascible man who had published hardly anything—only he saw in his own extensive production chiefly grounds for shame. (In fact, he was a wonderful writer of prose: the original texts have long since disappeared from sale, and even selections like Roland Gant’s Edward Thomas on the Countryside and Edna Longley’s A Language Not to Be Betrayed are not easy to find, but they are all worth the trouble: marvelously alert and rapturous prose.) Both Frost and Thomas had the discontents and aspirations of much younger men, though both, evidently, had seen and experienced far more of life. This strange mixing of ages characterized them, separately and together. On the one hand, the immoderateness and capacity and ebullience of youth, and youth’s faith in friendship’s great exchange, and on the other, the urgency and narrowing purpose of midlife, what the Germans call Torschlusspanik (fear of the gate closing). It was one of the conditions of their friendship, the inability of either man to “be his age.” They were unfinished, unappreciated, adrift, and thrown together.
    Their time, their era, too, left them alone. The whole beginning of the twentieth century was in a somewhat similar muddle to themselves, a sort of soft interregnum. It was old and young, and it didn’t have long to go. Historians don’t know quite what to do with it; often, they simply add those fourteen years to the nineteenth century, as if that was where they really belonged. The great reputations—James, Hardy, Yeats—had all been founded in the Victorian age. When Frost’s favorite living poet died in 1909, it was George Meredith. The reputations of the 1900s and 1910s, of the Edwardians and Georgians (those characters listed in the “Biographical Table” at the back—I would almost call it a glossary!) have disappeared more thoroughly than those of any other decade. No one now reads those poets Edward Thomas spent a great part of his lifetime sifting in the Daily Chronicle . And against that, the Modern had pushed its foot in the door. “On or about December 1910,” as Virginia Woolf would have us believe, “human character changed.” Lawrence is a dangerous presence, Pound is at home in London—“sometimes,” as he wrote on his visiting card to a predictably nettled and crestfallen Frost—and