Letter from Edward Thomas to the poet Gordon Bottomley. Sent from Minsmere, Dunwich, Suffolk. Archival ref: 424/1/1/1/10/100
Minismere,
in Dunwich,
Suffolk.
15 i 08
My dear Gordon
Forgive me for not writing before. You will when you know I have been writing hard at Jefferies all day and every day since the 5th, so hard that with the large incidental quotations and letters and (not get copied out) I must have some fully 40000 words, and the book need only be 80,000 (but will probably be 100,000). Also now I have made myself nervy with it all. I came here straight from a specialist who messed me about, commanded abstinence from alcohol, and sugar and almost abstinence from tobacco, and gave me a wonderfully compounded medicine (bismuth, bromide etc) and small green tabloids - a specialist in neurasthenia. Then I got here with bad toothache and acquired a stiff neck and was tired with travel. But the medicine and the air and the lively company of the Aldis family who live in the other coastguards cottage next door son made me rotund in spirit if still lean in body and I settled down to work in the midst of a patchwork of notes, references or without much ceremony and lo ! got into the thing fast. The first chapter at present is a long too poetical (where it isn’t too dull) chapter on Jefferies Wiltshire. Then genealogical stuff and ancestors. Then the farmhouse and parents and childhood. Then the big boy and country journalist writing
about stories and very competent journalistic articles on agriculture etc.
There are prodigiously dull blocks in the thing, because you see nobody has done the thing completely or attempted it, and the scale asked made completeness necessary. So I give the main points and even tho 2nd rate stuff A lot of the earlier work and even up to his 32nd year (review at 38) is just competent vivid fluent (for the period uncommonly good and well informed) and straight from the soil criticism of the position of farmers and labourers when labourers began to form unions and demand higher wages. Better journalism couldn’t be and it is usually fair minded and illuminating, but as it isn’t first rate tho being either cyclopedic or entirely fresh and important, or of an artistic completeness, I have announced that it does not concern me in my book Except as it shows the growth of his mind. Is this right, should you think? I simply ignore Besant, tho my chances of controverting him with security, of pointing out his indolence his incompetence his incompleteness and his inaccuracy are many; not to speak of his pervasive vulgarity
Alas ! it is impossible to knead all this together with something satisfying in every post. And

even when I get to the good books I shall have to quote a lot. I have got something I like in but I shall have to prune away a few scores of charming metaphors I foresee. I wish you had some of his books and could send me your views now, then so that I might step mine up. It is a big thing to do in solitude and the mind can’t always glance about but is fond of sliding into a groove.
Nietzsche will have to come in bits. “The Genealogy of Morals” is a very great book. But I kick at his too completely separate aristocratic view.
Oh Dunwich is beautiful. I am in a heaving moor and heather and close gorse and ending in a sandy cliff about 80 feet perpendicular and the black peat strewn fine sand below. On the edge of this 1 1/2 miles away is the ruined church that has half fallen over already. Four arches and a broken tower, pale and airy. Just beyond that the higher moor dips to quite flat moist with its gentlest risen inland with manes of trees compact and dark and a perfect huge curve of foaming coast up to the red light at Southwold northward. In the other direction, just behind us, the moor dips to more marshes with black cattle (illegible) and far off under white sun, and three faint windmills that work a sluice and then trees - inland more gentle rises
with pines. No hills (unless you lie down in a dip by the moor and fancy the moorland and parts and a Welsh “black mountain” ? I get my firewood, kindling and logs, from the beach, where we pick up champagne corks, sailors nuts, Antwerp beer bottles, fish boxes, oranges, lemons, onions, bananas and stems, water worn timber and the most exquisite flat and round pebbles, black, white, dove grey, veined, wheat coloured. Why does nature make these beautiful things so carelessly and then one wonders whether all beautiful things are not of this careless inevitableness and yet long as might not too and then one has to earn one’s living. May that funny spirit bless Gunnar for you. Tell me how it goes.
I will try to remember Mr Murdoch.
Accept this hurry and good intention. It is late and I am tired and bad in the back.
Yours and Emily’s ever
Edward Thomas