Tim Bannerman's Theatre Chronicles – Part 13: 1984 – The Other
“The forest ended. Glad I was
To feel the light, and hear the hum
Of bees, and smell the drying grass
And the sweet mint, because I had come
To an end of forest, and because
Here was both road and inn, the sum
Of what’s not forest. But ‘twas here
They asked me if I did not pass
Yesterday this way. “Not you? Queer.”
“Who then? And slept here?” I felt fear.”
From “The Other” by Edward Thomas
The first verse of an early, perhaps not the best known, Edward Thomas’ poem; like him, I have always been intrigued by the notion of the doppelgänger – the “double-goer” or “double-walker” in English. It talks of the strange, often uncomfortable sense that, somewhere in this life, there is someone identical to you. Your missing twin, your alter ego, the image in the mirror come to life, some form of Philip Pullman “daemon” even, who may not always be your best friend.
This poem, “The Other”, first read by me in 1984, reminded me of a long walk I did once aged 22 over three weeks from April into May in 1975, from Dorset up through England into Wales, back to where I had begun a different kind of consciousness between the age of 8-13 in my boarding school up in North Wales near Colwyn Bay. I had just returned from four months in East Africa and yearned to immerse myself in the damp, sweet green of an Anglo-Welsh Spring.
Early in my walk I was taken for the Devil, towards the end for Jesus. In the first instance, a young woman in a Gloucestershire commune read my Tarot and saw clearly, so she told me, the Devil on my shoulder, turning a playfully seductive opportunity into something rather darker and definitely putting an end to any seduction that evening. In the second, I asked for a glass of water at a lonely cottage in the Welsh mountains on a steaming hot May morning. The quiet, shy, middle-aged woman who opened the door asked me in and, having given me a glass of water, went out and came back in with a bowl of water. Despite my protests, she proceeded to wash my feet with what I can only describe as reverence.
These two experiences shocked me in both extremes at the time and yet they lent a meaning to my walk that otherwise it would not have had. It was as if these polar facets of my psyche had emerged as opposing “others”, both of which revealed something to me about the purpose of my quest which I had seen as a kind of pilgrimage back to a time of perceived loss, when protected childhood innocence gave way to a tougher, less forgiving adolescence.
I’ve wondered often how I might have reacted had it been the other way round. What if my journey had reinforced a fall from grace from that first bite of the apple of adulthood, rather than, as I was hoping, given me a cathartic release from the dream-haunting loss of innocence of that time? Either way, my walk highlighted the recognition of certain “others” in a form of a quasi-religious tension within oneself that I remember exploring, precociously, with my friend “Turkey” in the hollow fallen oak at school – aspects of our “Id”, as Sigmund Freud might argue, that our “Ego” mostly manages to contain within a livable reality between the instinctual Id and the persuaded “Super-ego” of one’s evolved character. Not that we would have used those terms then. But sometimes it happens that the Ego fails to contain these opposites, resulting in the kind of mental confusion that, at worst, can become pathological, a form of what society has historically deemed as madness, such as schizophrenia and multiple personality disorders, requiring serious treatment and a profound level of care if the person concerned is not to come to harm, or even harm others.
For all my tricky times with my own mental health at various stages in my life, I have been generally considered a cheerful kind of chap. Unlike me, Thomas was unlucky to suffer from what was often a crippling depression. This affliction caused him immense pain throughout his war-shortened, adult life. It was also an essential part of his genius, however hard it made it for him to live with himself or be lived with. His wife, Helen, recalls in her biography of him after his death, “World Without End”, how, in one bleak, despairing moment after shouting at one of their young children, he took the revolver he kept in a drawer and “with dull eyes and ashen cheeks strode out of the house up the bare hill… I thought, perhaps I shall never see him again”. Then back he came, chastened and exhausted, to the ever unconditional love Helen offered him. It would not be long, though, before his demons drove him back inevitably into the despair with which few could help him.
Two people could, and did, help him in his troubles. One was the writer and poet, Eleanour Farjeon, the “other woman” in his life with whom he had, as far as we know, an entirely platonic yet profoundly loving relationship. She offered him something Helen could not – a love free of the constant guilt he felt with Helen, partly for her very forgivingness for his rages and frustration with himself, all too often cruelly released on her and the children. With Eleanour, he was able to range freely in an intellectual exchange, enriched by their mutual love of words in poetry and literature, and in nature itself. Helen recognised this and, with an astonishing lack of jealousy or resentment at having to share his life with Eleanour, welcomed her as part of their world, both at home and elsewhere.
The other person was the American poet, Robert Frost. He was the first person to recognise that Thomas was a poet, before Thomas, himself, was aware of it. They had met in London in October 1913, when Frost and his family had moved to London for the period just before and after the war had started, at St. George’s Café in St. Martin’s Lane where Thomas “held court” in a circle of friends, mostly writers, every Tuesday afternoon. They immediately hit it off and it wasn’t long before Frost joined Thomas and friends in their small community at Dymock in Gloucestershire, the heart of Marcher cider country within sight of May Hill.
Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is one of the most well-known, best-loved American poems of all time. It was inspired by the walks he took with Edward Thomas when he lived among the apple orchards and wild daffodils in the Dymock woods for a short time just before the outbreak of the First World War.
So often on their walks together, Thomas would sigh in frustration, saying they should have taken a different direction, an alternative path, that might have offered a better view or revealed a special plant. In fond remembrance of these walks, Frost wrote “The Road Not Taken” and sent it to his friend Edward more as a tease than for the deeper interpretation given to the poem in later years.
As someone not unknown for similar sighs of frustration in quest of elusive orchids and the like, maybe this is one reason why I can relate so closely to Frost’s poem and, by extension, to Thomas’s “The Other”, whose first verse I quote above. Interestingly, “The Other” was written in 1914, a year or more before “The Road Not Taken”, and it might be not too far a stretch to think that Frost’s closing lines:
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
- refer in some way to his friendship with Thomas, separated now by the Atlantic Ocean and the war.
Thomas signed up to fight in 1915 after a long and difficult dilemma about which diverging road to take – to fight or not to fight. Fatally, he chose the road more travelled by. They were never to meet again as Thomas was killed, so the legend has it, in the vacuum of a passing shell while up in his look-out on the Western Front at Arras in 1917. His body, Helen was told, had not a mark upon it.
Thomas’s “The Other” is, for me, a more searching and revealing look into the soul of the narrator than Frost’s poem. His fascination with this “Other” seems to have haunted him always. These “Others” included his part imaginary, part lost “before the cuckoos of that poet’s Spring were silent” childhood friend: “Philip…the child whom I used to know better than I have known anyone else” until “a slow process of evanishment”. And then we come across him in his thinly disguised nom-de plumes such as “Walking Tom”, “Arthur Froxfield” and “Edward Eastaway”, under which name he published his first volume of poems, as well as his encounters with alter egos in several of his early writings, including his preoccupation with “the other man” in his travelogue, “In Pursuit of Spring”. This book, first published in April 1914, tracks his cycling journey in the Spring of 1913, from London to the Quantock Hills in West Somerset, passing through my then home town of Alton, in Hampshire.
As a family man, he procured a meagre income to put food in their mouths by his writing for a genre of pastoral travelogues that was fashionable at the time. This included books like “The Icknield Way”, on which I also lived some 10 years on in 1994, “The South Country”, “The Heart of England”, “Cloud Castle” and many more, so many of which I devoured over the course of the busy year back in 1984. But meeting the demands of his publisher, who commissioned work paid by the page, drove him nearly to distraction, even despair in the case of how to fill 300 pages for “In Pursuit of Spring”.
Yet it was these very travelogues or “Country Books” that Thomas wrote to pay the bills, that drew the attention of Frost to the voice of the poet within. Frost urged Thomas to write with the same “cadences”, as he called them that he saw and heard in his prose. On that basis, it seems to me that, of the two poems, “The Other” is less successful in achieving a form of “writing how one speaks” – their declared shared aim in their poetry – than “The Road Less Taken”. The inversions of such as “Glad I was…” and archaic “ere I alight…’twas here…’Twixt earth and sky…” and so on, strike me as more poetical than everyday speech.
Despite Thomas’s profound joy in the natural world outside – the flowers, trees, birds, the sky, the weather (he loved rain) and the earth itself (for which he said, scooping up a handful, he made his choice to fight in the war: “literally for this”) – it turned all too often to ash.
He hated being forced to plunder the stories and observations that filled his notebooks, of passing characters, clay pipes, pubs, poets and old roads as well as nature, as so many “undigested …interstices”, as he called them, at the cost of the “great effects of Nature”. But these words Thomas puts not in his own mouth, but in that of the person he calls “The Other Man”, at the beginning of his journey to the Quantocks in “The Pursuit of Spring”..
We meet him first, this “Other Man” when Thomas joins a small group sheltering from a downpour in the doorway of a “bird-shop” as he is leaving Wandsworth on his bicycle, heading West. It is not, he says, “a cheerful or a pretty place” and contains the “bosoms ruffled and bloody” of creatures who should have been flying freely on the hills and in the woods beyond.
One of the sheltering group, another cyclist to be re-encountered several times along the way, goes into the shop and emerges with “something fluttering in a paper bag such as would hold a penn’orth of sweets”. Remounted on their bicycles, with Thomas following, this person to become known as “The Other Man”: “…apparently unable to bear the fluttering in the paper bag any longer; he got down and, with an awkward air, as if he knew how many great men had done it before, released the flutterer. A dingy cock chaffinch flew off among the lilacs of a garden, saying “Chink”. The deliverer was up and away again.”
This is, surely, a personal reference, which allows him to comment ironically on his own behaviour by transposing it into this Other’s actions, as it does in several other aspects, including, in later comments, his attraction to a fair face and seductive figure. This last is brought to mind in the poem when it is insinuated that, in the pursuit from one pub to another, The Other Man takes Thomas’s passing attractions to another level, to the extent that:
“One girl’s caution made me sore,
Too indignant even to greet
That other had we chanced to meet.”
– in other words, to a level that Thomas would not countenance even if what he might have seen as his weaker, aka more “sinful”, side might have been tempted by “ … a new desire, to kiss/ Desire’s self beyond control,/ Desire of desire.”, in similar circumstances.
The poem continues to the point when Thomas finds himself, eventually, in the same pub as “The Other” and, although not face to face, is called out and directly challenged for the “sin” of following him. It is this pursuit, though, that helps Thomas understand: it is his very compulsion to follow this loud, rapacious boor of an Other that is his destiny.
“And now I dare not follow after
Too close. I try to keep in sight,
Dreading his frown and worse his laughter.
I steal out of the wood to light;
I see the swift shoot from the rafter
By the inn door: ere I alight
I wait and hear the starlings wheeze
And nibble like ducks: I wait his flight.
He goes: I follow: no release
Until he ceases. Then I also shall cease.”
This closing verse discloses, I believe, our common, universal fate. We are all condemned within the conflict between our warring other selves, from which there can be no ultimate peace until we cease. And with the looming threat of what became the First World or Great War in the year he wrote “The Other”, one can contrive to see how this internal conflict could be extended between nations.
Is it not a terrible irony to find yourself in mortal combat with your fellow human being, your mirror image in so many ways, with whom you might well enjoy good company in a pub or engage in impassioned political debate, both driven by the desire for communion in shared humanity as opposed to conflict? And now, here you are, compelled to kill, or be killed, by this very same son of Adam, this descendant from our common African root, our kin, our brother. Why? For no other reason than a madness invoked by an assumption of devilry in your chosen foe and, by the same token, a god-given virtue to your own cause, painted in this oh-so-Orwellian “1984” fashion by the controlling powers of each side.
But it is also here, within this very same conflict, that there is a treasure to be found, like a Christmas Truce: a secret, fragile, evanescent resolution to one’s inner agonies, perhaps, however temporary. For there, at its epicentre, at its innermost heart, lies a coming-together of earth and sky in the stillness of solitude; no more so for Thomas than when “the wind had fallen with the night” where:
“Had there been ever any feud
‘Twixt earth and sky, a mighty will
Closed it: the crocketed dark trees,
A dark house, dark impossible
Cloud-towers, one star, one lamp, one peace
Held on an everlasting lease.
And all was earth’s, or all was sky’s;
No difference endured between
The two. A dog barked on a hidden rise;
A marshbird whistled high unseen;
The latest waking blackbird’s cries
Perished upon the silence keen.
The last light filled a narrow firth
Among the clouds. I stood serene,
And with a solemn quiet mirth,
An old inhabitant of earth.”
So why this poetic interlude in the busy year of 1984?
Because my idea to turn Thomas’s poem “The Other” into a piece of theatre became an obsession into which I poured a growing fascination for and love of Thomas’s work and life. Because I felt myself, in some ways, the “Other” to Thomas’s narrator-self, quite often to be found “amid a tap-room’s din”, while also knowing in solitude, “with a solemn quiet mirth”, the sense of being “an old inhabitant of earth”.
Yet my proposal of 7th June 1984 fell on deaf ears.
Edward Thomas - a photo from Tim’s battered 1979 paperback copy of Thomas's Collected Poems
