Thompson, Lewis, 1909-1949

An English poet who traveled to India as a young man and remained there until his death.

Lewis Levien Thompson was born on January 13, 1909 in Fulham, England. He spent his childhood in north London with two younger sisters. He received a good conventional education in private schools, and though he did not excel in academic areas, he was a good singer and accomplished pianist. His happiest memories of childhood were the times the family spent on long summer holidays in West Molesey, Surrey at The Priory, their quiet summer home. In early adolesence, Lewis became friends with a Buddhist and began to read the scriptures of the East. This new interest began to distance him from his family so much so that in his teens he lived on his own in London with a small legacy from a relative. He did not go to the university but educated himself in the classics, including the translations of Chinese, Japanese, and Indian classics. He also read extensively in anthropology and psychoanalysis. In his adolescence, Lewis underwent the first severe crisis of his life, the turning point on which his whole future life revolved. He discovered Rimbaud at the age of 21, and finally he, like Rimbaud, rejected literature. He realized the truth in Rimbaud's remarks of a wish to possess the truth in one soul and body and the impossiblity of this wish. Rimbaud saw the only solution for the poet of integrity was to abandon all attempts as a poet. Thompson too experienced the anguish of a young artist who is certain that "the truth cannot be told" and that in his writing he wrote only half of the truth which is an untruth. On recognizing this, Thompson destroyed the manuscript he had worked on for five years. In the future, he would write only as a form of spiritual excercise.

Thompson believed that in the West all was distorted and fragmentary, while in the East he could find what was clear, classical, and complete. He wished to travel to the East and was given money for the fare to Ceylon by Sir Arnold Wilson, a Persian explorer, who took pity on Thompson. He departed from England on July 26, 1932 and lived in India for the remaining seventeen years of his life. While in India, he wandered the country living off of what others would give him in the form of food and lodging. During this time, he carried all his possessions with him in one trunk, including all his papers. (This explains why some of the paper is in such a deteriorated state.) Thompson was not interested in finding a guru in the beginning, but in 1936 he developed a relationship of affection, intensity, and frankness with a man Thompson called Jnani, or Man of Knowledge. Their relationship ended in 1943 when Jnani withdrew from the unconventional and untraditional relationship which he and Thompson had established. In 1943, Thompson found employment in the Rajghat School in Benares as the writer-in-residence and librarian. He remained there for four years. When the job at Rajghat ended, Thompson drew a small stipend from G. D. Birla, the industrialist and a friend of Gandhi.

In his last years, Thompson wrestled with declining health, a problem he had throughout his adult life. His end came when he returned to Benares in the lethal heat. He was found wandering by the river in a daze with the effects of sunstroke. He went to bed with a high fever and died alone in his room on June 23, 1949. He was cremated and his ashes spread over the Ganges River. After his death, Thompson's poetry was sent to Edith Sitwell by Deben Bhattacharya. Sitwell saw the poetry as the work of a genius and published some of it in an anthology she compiled.

Biography taken in part from Mirror to the Light by Richard Lannoy.