Delicate Piano

FRANCIS THOMPSON & WILFRID MEYNELL (212 pp.)--Viola Meynell--Dutton ($4.50).

In the London winter of 1887, a grubby manuscript fell into the mailbox of the monthly Merry England. Editor Wilfrid Meynell promptly pigeonholed it and did not look at it for six months. By then the author, a certain Francis Joseph Thompson, had disappeared. Letters addressed to him went unanswered. At last Meynell resorted to the oldest author-tracing trick of the trade: he printed one of the submitted poems, The Passion of Mary, and found his poet.

So began an editor-writer relationship which lasted until Poet Thompson's death almost 20 years later. It is the theme of this double memoir by Meynell's daughter Viola, who draws two clear, contrasting portraits of two utterly different characters. Based largely on her father's private papers, her book provides not only a sheaf of new Thompson letters but also evidence that without steady, warmhearted Editor Meynell, Thompson, the poet, might never have existed.

A Wreck of 29. Francis Thompson was the son of a North-country doctor who did his best to give his boy a good start. But his son was one of those people who are too timid to say yes or no in any decision, who allow others to decide for them --and then surreptitiously slide out from under the decision. Dr. Thompson believed that his son was a happy medical student--until he found that Student Thompson never went near the lecture halls if he could help it. Not until a few years later did father Thompson discover that his son was a poet, and cry in anguish: "If the lad had but told me!"

Meantime, Francis Thompson made his home in the streets of London. He picked up an odd penny here & there by holding horses and unloading baggage from cabs. When Editor Meynell found him, he was a wreck of 29, his health half ruined by exposure and laudanum. Thompson, like Meynell, was a Roman Catholic, and it was to a Sussex priory that Meynell first sent him, hoping at least to save his life.

Meynell got more than he bargained for. Tormented by the struggle to break the opium habit, Thompson distracted himself by writing poems, essays and book reviews. He soon became well enough to return to London, where, in 1893, Meynell arranged publication of his first volume, Poems. But those who imagined that he would now become a reformed "success" were sadly mistaken. Thompson went on writing to the day of his death--and spent most of the proceeds on laudanum.

The Hound of Heaven. Much of his day he spent, half-comatose, in bed. When he went out of the house "a stranger figure . . . was not to be seen in London. Gentle in looks, half wild in externals, his face worn by pain and the fierce reactions of laudanum, his hair and straggling beard neglected, he had yet a distinction and aloofness." On the hottest day he wore a huge brown cape and a "disastrous hat"; round his shoulders was slung a fishing creel, in which he placed the books he was given to review. The total effect was that of "some weird pedlar or packman."

And yet Francis Thompson could be the author of one of the few unmistakably great odes in the English language, The Hound of Heaven, in which Thompson himself is the pursued and Christ the pursuer, in which the life-worn fugitive turns in ineffective flight to friendship, children, nature before he surrenders to the Hound of Heaven:

I fled Him, down the nights and down

the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind; and in the mist of

tears

I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

Up vistaed hopes I sped; And shot, precipitated, Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed

fears,

From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.

But with unhurrying chase, And unperturbed pace,

Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, They beat--and a Voice beat More instant than the Feet--'All things betray thee, who betrayest Me' . . .

A Degree of Agony. Unlike most Englishmen, Francis Thompson had not the least desire to travel, and never so much as crossed the Channel. If he ever felt sexual desire, it was lost in his belief that "all human love ... is a symbol of divine love," and should be treated accordingly. Not all the women he met understood this --particularly the mothers of unmarried daughters. Author Meynell prints the unconsciously funny letter of one anxious mother who feared that her daughter might succumb to Poet Thompson. "It is not in her nature to love you; but I see no reason why some other good woman should not."

When Thompson died at 48 (in 1907, of tuberculosis), his sole belongings were "a few old pipes and old pens lying in a tin lid" and a nondescript collection of clippings from the Daily Mail (e.g., "Mikado Airs on Japanese Warship--Amusing Scenes"; "The Milk Peril, What Hinders Reform"). But by then, thanks in good part to Editor Meynell (who lived on until 1948), he stood second only to William Butler Yeats as the foremost lyricist of his day.

It is hard not to see Thompson's life as a romantic symbol of poetic suffering and despair, but he himself believed that poets suffer less than other men. "The delicate nature," he wrote, "stops at a certain degree of agony, as the delicate piano at a certain strength of touch."

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