Edward Thomas, circa 1912. Photograph: EO Hoppe |
My hero:
Edward Thomas by David Constantine
'Thomas has been a kind and implacable friend to me'
Saturday 4 December 2010
I
Like other Romantics, Thomas got his poems most characteristically by walking. He was a man who walked away solitary into the wind and the rain when anxiety and the black melancholy were upon him; or who might tramp by your side, mile after mile, companionable, and never say a word; or be with you, as he was with Robert Frost, talking, listening, pausing at a gate, a gap, a stile, and so in the rhythm of a long walk and in the attentive to and fro of a conversation you would come nearer and nearer, both of you, to some important understanding.
At the heart of writing, it is always a matter of truth or lies, and anyone in that vocation wants companions, living and dead, who, when you glance their way inquiringly, will warn you by a look if you are edging away from the truth into the many ways of telling lies. Thomas has been one such kind and implacable friend to me. Having his own true tone of voice, he acts like a tuning fork in the ceaseless effort to hit and hold your own.
The dead move and change as the living do. You may think you know them through and through but then, after a lapse of time (in which you have aged), they startle you again. Just the other day, out of context, on a card, not in a book, these lines filled me with a new rush of gratitude: "A house that shall love me as I love it, / Well-hedged, and honoured by a few ash trees / That linnets, greenfinches, and goldfinches / Shall often visit and make love in and flit . . ."
THE GUARDIAN2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm
2010
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey
022 My hero / John Keats by Helen Dunmore
023 My hero / Edith Wharton by Lionel Shriver
024 My hero / Elizabeth Barrett Browing by Sara Paretsky
025 My hero / Nelson Mandela by Gordon Brown
026 My hero / Billy Wilder by David Nicholls
027 My hero / Samuel Beckett by Nick Clegg
028 My hero / Margaret Atwood by Caroline Lucas
029 My hero / Colette by Helen Simpson
030 My hero / Cyd Charisse by Tony Parsons
031 My hero / Nicolai Medtner by Philip Pullman
032 My hero / Jean Genet by Ahdaf Soueif
033 My hero / Jeri Johnson by Kate Moss
034 My hero / John Maynard Keynes by Joan Bakewell
035 My hero / Patti Smith by Joseph O'Connor
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner
041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson
051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal
2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill
2012
146 My hero / Roald Dahl by Michael Rosen
156 My hero / Barack Obama by Lorrie Moore
176 My hero / Mae West by Kathy Lette
181 My hero / Lydia Davis by Ali Smith
184 My hero / Louise Bourgeois by Tracey Emin
185 My hero / Albert Camus by David Constantine
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer
2015
280 My hero / George Weindelfel by Antonia Fraser
281 My hero / Dmitri Shostakovich by Julian Barnes
282 My hero / Charlotte Brontë by Tracy Chevalier
283 My hero / Margaret Foster by Valerie Grove
284 My hero / David Cesarini by David Herman
285 My hero / Umberto Eco by Jonathan Coe
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