Henry Major Tomlinson.

H. M. Tomlinson by Richard Murry 1927 (c) National Portrait Gallery, London

If you were to take a look at a picture of Henry Tomlinson and guess his profession, you might imagine he was a low-level civil servant, an office worker of some sort, perhaps a school teacher, or librarian, or clerk – and it was as a shipping clerk that Tomlinson began his working life, at the age of twelve or thirteen, and remained a shipping clerk until the age of thirty-one. It certainly isn’t the face of an adventurer. It doesn’t have the determination of purpose, the sternness of countenance, of a Percy Fawcett or Sir Richard Burton. It is not the weather-beaten old pirate’s mug of Blaise Cendrars. Nor does it have the mischievous twinkle of Tomlinson’s friend and contemporary, Norman Douglas. It is the face of a quiet man, a thoughtful man who might be found behind a desk in an obscure corner somewhere. It is the ordinary face of an ordinary man, the sort of man you might see in so many black and white photographs of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s wearing a long mac and a soft hat – a face lost in the London crowd. And yet, in those same decades, Tomlinson was one of the most popular and respected of English authors, although not by everyone.

Tomlinson was born in London in 1873 and died there in 1958. He had gone to work at such an early age following the death of his father, who had worked at East India docks, and the need to supplement the family income. He was, in all respects, a Londoner, proud of his city and of his country, but more than capable of casting a cold eye on that which he loved. He grew up in Poplar, a district in London’s East End which sits on the Thames and culminates at the eastern and north-eastern side of the Isles of Dogs. The Thames was to play a major part in Tomlinson’s life and his work, a great deal of which concerns the river and those who worked and lived on it.

In London River (1921), Tomlinson recollects the Thames as though in a dream, wandering through time and space as his inclination and imagination dictates in the manner of a river in its later stretches, in no hurry to reach the sea. He recalls standing by the dockside as a boy-messenger for the shipping company which employed him. Looking over a clipper bound for the Brazils he spots the black-bearded Captain watching him. ‘What are you waiting for?’ shouts the Captain. ‘Come aboard!’ For a moment, Tomlinson hesitates on the brink… ‘Come aboard!’ To Brazil. But like the responsible young man he is, he remembers the package under his arm and the official errand he is on and he goes about his business. But ever-after he wonders… what might have been?

It wasn’t until 1911 that Tomlinson finally made it to Brazil. After years of submitting articles to newspapers he was hired by The Morning Leader in 1904 to cover shipping and seafaring stories. It was on assignment for the Leader that he travelled on the first English vessel to journey up the Amazon River, a distance of 2,000 miles. Curiously enough, for a man so closely associated with the sea, it was Tomlinson’s first Ocean voyage - he was thirty-eight years old - and the result was his first book, The Sea and the Jungle (1912). And if Tomlinson is remembered at all today it is generally for this work which is regarded as one of the greats of travel literature.

When the First World War began in 1914 Tomlinson became a correspondent for the Daily News which had merged with the Morning Leader in 1912. Tomlinson’s reports from the front were frank in their depiction of the carnage of the war and after being deemed too ‘humanitarian’ he was eventually recalled. Tomlinson was from then on outspoken in his contempt for the waste and destruction of war, which became either the main or peripheral topic in more than a few of his books.

Following the war, Tomlinson published a number of collections of essays: Old Junk (1918); London River (1921); Waiting for Daylight (1922); Tidemarks (1924); Gifts of Fortune (1926); Under the Red Ensign (1926); until, in 1927, he published his first novel, Gallions Reach. He was fifty-three years old.  In 1928 Tomlinson produced his second novel, Out of Soundings. Both novels were moderately popular with the public but critics found fault with plot and character while praising the expository passages. It was, though, the extensive use of such passages which were felt to undermine the quality of the books as novels. The form of the novel, especially the popular novel as conceived in the 1920s, would seem to serve as a constraint to Tomlinson. He is at his best, like a number of the authors I intend to include in this blog, when he is allowed to wander as his heart dictates, to digress and speculate, and not to be tied to the artificial contrivances of plot and character. Tomlinson may have realised this and, in responding to critics of Norman Douglas, he may also have been responding to his own critics.

In 1931 Tomlinson wrote a monograph on Douglas.  He begins by commenting on critics who find it ‘useful to disintegrate literature into varieties, just as distinctions are made in poultry’. It is worthwhile to quote him at length, bearing in mind how apt his comments are to his own circumstances as well as Douglas’s.

                'Though it is true a novel may be a form of poetry, and both verse and fiction may be... indirect ways to autobiography, yet clearly if literature were allowed to remain as simple as that it would be very confusing for everybody. Not many critics and not all professors of literature would know how to pick it up… and as illiterate readers and helpless students would be without skilled direction, no signpost anywhere, they might by chance take a book, and not give a thought to its class, never bother whether it was this or that, but just drift into an adventure of the mind.

                'So one author will have to be an essayist... and another a critic, and another must be classed a writer of travel-books; others will be novelists… the works of those various writers are segregated in the library, tribes divided by yet inexorable barriers, and readers who enjoy the liveliness of characters in fiction are thus kept from wasting their time… D.H. Lawrence, known as a novelist, in consequence receives a wide and fixed attention, an attention both serious and fervid… On the other hand, Norman Douglas, who has given us some of the best narrative prose we have had this century, has had scant consideration…

                'When we have decided that an object is a thing in itself we must name it. The name, unluckily, dismisses it; our curiosity goes from it; it is then lost in our incorrigible mental sloth. It is a travel book… we can pass on…

'Douglas is even worse. He has no label... He wrote books of travel, and essays, was a critic, and then a novelist… When it is settled that an author writes travel-books, it is not fair, either, that he should upset us with so many contradictions. It serves him right if he is ignored, when he gives us so much trouble.

In answering for Douglas, Tomlinson answers for himself. His works are an adventure of the mind, resistant to classification, unwilling to be pinned down for easier dissection, upsetting the critics with their contradictions. It is a manner and a methodology of writing which the authors I hope to discuss in this blog seem to have in common. The blurb of Sean Hayden’s book ends with a conclusion which might be applicable to all of them; ‘The result is unclassifiable; not exactly a novel, not exactly a memoir, not exactly philosophy, not exactly history. More a cocktail of everything – a memoir without memoirs, a novel without being a narrative, a history without being historical, a philosophy without being a system, poetry without verse.

As though to underline the point, I have found Hayden’s book placed in such diverse sections of various bookshops as Fiction, History, Philosophy, Anthropology and Sociology. No one, it seems, is able to agree on what type of book it is, and Hayden’s book deliberately offers no clue to the cataloguer by being labelled Fiction on the cover. Perhaps all unclassifiable books should merely be labelled, as Tomlinson suggests - An Adventure of the Mind.

Tomlinson was not without his admirers. In 1921, Christopher Morley wrote of his delight in coming across Old Junk, submitting himself ‘to the moving music and magic of that prose, so simple and yet so subtle in its flavour… How direct and satisfying a passage to the mind Mr. Tomlinson’s paragraphs have. How they build and cumulate, how the sentences shift, turn and move in delicate loops and ridges under the blowing wind of thought, like the sand of the dunes that he describes in one essay. And through it all, as intangible but as real and beautifying as moonlight, there is the pervading brightness of a particular way of looking at the world, something for which we have no catchword, the illumination of a spirit at once humorous, melancholy, shrewd, lovely and humane. Somehow, when one is caught in the web of that exquisite, considered prose, the awkward symbols of speech seem transparent; we come close to a man’s mind.’

To be continued…