In her early twenties, this Ann Williams married an Anglican clergyman, the Reverend John Gwyn, but he died within three years. She then took another husband (Robert Williams, almost certainly also a cousin), and they had two children, Doris and William, living together in Llanstephan and later Ferryside. However in August 1917 William was drowned in a bathing accident (on the same day that his grandmother, Amy died). William’s death came a year after that of his half-brother, Edward Gwyn. Ann Williams never recovered and herself died in May 1922.
Dylan would also have known this background because afterwards Doris Williams became a frequent guest at Cwmdonkin Drive where she was close to Nancy Thomas, her junior by four years. She later met an Abergavenny dentist called Randolph Fulleylove who, on the evidence of an undated letter from Dylan to his sister, also befriended the Thomas family. Dylan looked up to him and plied him with wordly questions he could not ask his father. In this letter, Dylan wrote a verse titled ‘Say Good Bye when your chum is married’. He asked Nancy to give it to ‘Rudge’, almost certainly a nickname for Randolph, who wed Doris in 1928, and this was Dylan’s way of celebrating the betrothal.
The following year (1929) Dylan and D.J. visited the newly married couple in Abergavenny. Doris recalled how, on the journey home to Swansea, her husband lost control of his car on the steep road winding down from the Brecon Beacons. When Randolph brought the vehicle to a halt, he was sweating profusely. Dylan, who was sitting in the back seat with his father, was nonplussed: ‘Lovely, Uncle,’ he said. ‘Can we go back and do it again?’ As when hurtling down hills on a bicycle, Dylan enjoyed immediate sensations and had little sense of danger.
This Abergavenny trip probably took place during a period in 1929 when D.J. was sick and unable to attend school. Because of his ill-health, he declined the opportunity to become the Grammar School’s second master when Trevor Owen and his deputy Hock-gate Hockin both retired at the end of the academic year.
His presence at Cwmdonkin Drive led to unexpected tensions with his daughter Nancy who was twenty-two. By then she had been out of school for four years. But apart from working in a shop and helping the Missions to Seamen over Christmas, she had achieved little. Her feline sexiness was appreciated by Dan Jones. But being in the house brought out a neurotic class-conscious side to her personality. Her cousin Doris told how she and Nancy would go into the centre of town and treat themselves to tea at the bustling Kardomah café on Castle Street. There Nancy would say, ‘For God’s sake, Doris, don’t eat more than one little sandwich and one little cake. It isn’t correct.’ But as soon as the girls were back in the Uplands, Nancy would tell her mother they were starving and demand something to eat.
With her training in elocution from Miss James’s nearby academy, she still harboured an ambition to be an actress. An opportunity arose that summer (1929) when, in an effort to reach a wider audience, members of the established Swansea Stage Society set up an offshoot, the Swansea Little Theatre. Taking their cue from the popular Little Theatre movement in the United States, and boosted by the dynamic chairmanship of Councillor Willie Jenkins, the shipping magnate who had once lived opposite the Williams family in Delhi Street, they acquired a lease on a church hall in Southend, Mumbles.
At a promotional garden party given by Alan and Vesta Gill, two prime movers behind the project, Nancy met another theatre enthusiast, Haydn Taylor, an ambitious twenty-three-year-old building materials salesman from Bristol. He had arrived in Swansea three years earlier when offered the whole of Wales to carve out as his territory. He had ridden out some of the worst years of the slump, although his life in Swansea bedsitters had opened his eyes to the distress suffered by even the genteel middle classes of the Uplands – the ‘lace curtains and no breakfast’ crowd, as Dylan dubbed them. Haydn came from a family of work-orientated Nonconformists. When he first left home, he had abandoned a girlfriend called May after his mother suggested that the liaison might be a distraction from his career. However, with a father who played the organ for chapel services, and a brother called Handel who was a professional musician, Haydn was encouraged to sublimate his youthful energies in the arts.
At the Gills’ party, he noticed Nancy, with her brown curly hair and large brown eyes, and ended up driving her home, rather than his original date. As a friendship grew in the weeks of intense preparation before the theatre’s first production in November, he was invited back to Cwmdonkin Drive. On an early visit D.J.’s railwayman brother, Uncle Arthur, was also there from Port Talbot. At lunch, the talk turned to the new theatre, with an actor called Bennett singled out for particular praise. Haydn agreed, adding it was a shame about this player’s facial twitch which not even his make-up could hide. For good measure, he gave an impression, and when his audience (the four Thomases and Arthur) did not react, he repeated it. It was only when he looked at Uncle Arthur, sitting on his side of the table, that he understood the reason for his cool reception: D.J.’s brother had a chronic tic, much worse than the man he was trying to portray.
Before long Nancy had a regular suitor. Haydn would court her in the parlour at Cwmdonkin Drive next to the kitchen. However their privacy was limited because the upper panel of the door was made of coloured glass and, at intervals, Florrie would peer in. Haydn had no doubt: ‘Her interest was that of the Peeping Jane – she had a nasty mind – rather than the guardian of her daughter’s virtue.’
Catching the theatre bug, Dylan penned ‘Desert Idyll’, a short sketch satirising the vogue for Rudolph Valentino-type matinée idols. This appeared in the December 1929 issue of the school magazine, which, along with the stage, was the main outlet for his energies during his last couple of years in education. He was no longer interested in any classroom subject, except English, and exam failures ruled out going on to university. If his fellow pupils remembered his acting, he himself gained most satisfaction from his journalism. Having been a sub-editor in the summer of 1929, he became joint editor that December. For the three issues in his last academic year (1930–1) he was sole editor.
He used the magazine to explore the more public aspects of the crucial debates going on in his head and in conversation with Dan Jones. His article on ‘Modern Poetry’ in December 1929 highlighted the unsettled ground on which poets were having to build after the ravages of the war. He traced the development of modernity which he argued was about freedom in content and form. He saw its origins in Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet whose sprung rhythms were often later said to have influenced his own metrical experiments. This new approach began to flower in writers such as Robert Bridges, Walter de la Mare and Sacheverell Sitwell, all of whose styles are discernible in Dylan’s early work. Licence extended to tackling new subject matter (he quoted Eliot’s ‘cigarettes in corridors, and cocktail smells in bars’), examining twilight states of consciousness (Yeats) and adopting exotic imagery, though he claimed to find the unsentimental hardness of the Imagists, associated with Richard Aldington, too flashy – ‘the rush of coloured words producing a kaleidoscopic effect that cannot stimulate or satisfy the imagination’. (Ironically, he was soon criticised for such verbal pyrotechnics.) Dylan argued that such innovations could not take root in mainstream culture, however, without some major historical or intellectual justification. And this, he felt, had happened with the Great War, which had changed the course of English poetry, allowing practitioners such as D. H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound to build anew.
He was also thinking about other media, particularly film, where, as he wrote in the school magazine in July 1930, he recognised that the recent introduction of sound had created similar flux and opportunity. His favourite films were still the Westerns he watched in the Uplands flea-pit. From an artistic point of view, he noted that D. W. Griffith’s silent movie The Birth of a Nation was ‘easily superior’ to anything else before the war. But the standard of ‘talkies’ had so far been poor. Directors did not seem to understand they were dealing with ‘something new’ (i.e. sound) ‘which cannot be tackled by any old met
hods but which requires a special way of approach’. An innovative D. W. Griffith for the age of talking films was required.
A third approach to modern art came from the pen of Dan Jones who wrote for the magazine on ‘Tendencies of Modern Music’. In this field, he argued, modernism had built on the attempt by composers such as Debussy to portray nature more precisely. However he had reservations about the dissonance of certain works and, while he referred jokingly to a futurist ballet involving six brass plates, sixteen mechanical pianos, six leaden plates and sixteen electric bells (shades of the Warmley repertoire), he expressed doubt whether ‘any but musical instruments will take part in the real music of the future’.
The common theme to all three articles was Dylan’s interest in a synthesis of the arts. This was the most fruitful period of musical collaborations between him and Dan, including the carols at Christmas 1929. In his own writing he would be recognised for exploring how the sound and even shape of words could contribute to a poem’s effect, helping attain the quality Dryden described as ‘articulate music’. Cinematic references abound in Dylan’s verse, and he later enjoyed a subsidiary career penning film scripts. In his more cerebral way, Dan played an important supporting role, implicit in his university thesis on the relationship between Elizabethan poetry and contemporary music.
Dylan’s contributions to the magazine in his last couple of years at school included ‘Brember’, a horror story with a musical sub-theme, and ‘The Sincerest Form of Flattery’, a witty concoction of parodies on topics from Osbert Sitwell to modern realistic drama. His poetry was limited to polished adolescent conceits, such as ‘Armistice Day’, which reprised his interest in the war, and ‘In Borrowed Plumes’, two further skits on the theme of Little Miss Muffett as written by Ella Wheeler Wilcox and W. B. Yeats. While amusing and technically proficient, this material was largely derivative, composed for a formal external audience.
His more personal and experimental efforts were confined to his notebooks. These showed a new resolve from the beginning of 1930. The previous year had been problematic, with D.J. absent from school, with important changes in his wider family living arrangements after Aunt Ann left Fernhill and Aunt Polly and Uncle Bob moved to Blaencwm, and with Nancy embarking on her first love affair. These events unsettled Dylan, contributing to his disaffection with his academic studies. They threw him back on himself, helping to heighten his poetic awareness, to the extent that in January 1930 he and Dan discussed forming a group of poetry lovers who would pay a fee of five shillings a year and be affiliated to the Poetry Society in London.
Material evidence of his poetic industry comes in his first notebook, sub-titled ‘Mainly Free Verse Poems’, covering the period 27 April to 9 December 1930. This shows he was still under the influence of the Imagists, but trying to extend his range with the more varied palette of modernists such as T. S. Eliot whose interest in other cultures is apparent in the first poem ‘Osiris, Come to Isis’. Inspired by their range, Dylan begins to explore deeper realities of the universe in verses about light, time, nature and freedom. He hits on a personal theme, the relationship between his body and the external world.
He even attempts some tortured adolescent love poems. At one stage, as reflected in ‘Osiris, Come to Isis’, he worries that sex makes a mockery of true love. In May he cannot cope with an imaginary girlfriend’s animal passion:
I want something more of you,
Something sexless and unmechanical:
… Let me dispense with the animal:
The animal is not enough.
A week later he is more relaxed:
And so the new love came at length
Healing and giving strength …
Tempting though it is to link these poems to ‘Titch’ Phillips, he seems not to have met her until his holiday in Gower later in the summer. As the year progresses, his concerns do not abate. He wants to be free but:
When I allow myself to fly,
There is no sense of being free …
By November, the time of his poem ‘Written in a classroom’, he begins to understand the root of the problem. As his teacher drones on, leaving ‘no tail/Of reason’, he realises that:
Shaft of winter morning light
Is realler than your faces, boys.
The problem with love is that reason intrudes. He is left to contemplate his fantasies ‘upon the island of my palm’. As the last poem in the notebook, beginning ‘How shall the animal’ (later revised for his 1940 collection The Map of Love) makes clear, this is a burden. Whenever he chases his flights of imagination, he is brought back to earth by the forces of language and logic, his ‘bantering Philistine’.
This sort of subject matter continued into his second notebook, covering the years 1930 to 1932. He was going through a period of typical teenage angst, as is evident from the letter he wrote from school to Percy Smart, his former co-editor on the magazine, but by December 1930 working for Barclays Bank: ‘Even that third-former, who is running along the corridor now, has probably an inherent cancer, or a mind full of lechery. The child grows from the cradle, soaked in a morbidity and restlessness he cannot understand, does a little painful loving, fails to make money, builds his life on sand, and is struck down before he can accomplish anything. Is it worth me lifting up my pen to write? Is anything worth anything?’
That did not stop him trying. The next time he wrote to Smart, the end of his school career was fast approaching. With his father’s curious connivance, he had long since given up any pretence of regularly attending classes. Dan Jones, who had become a prefect, noted a transitional period when no-one was quite certain if Dylan was a pupil or not. Those absences allowed Dylan to concentrate on more congenial pastimes such as debating, acting and editing the magazine. Now, in the midst of these, he proposed setting up a new quarterly literary journal called Prose and Verse. It would be original, highbrow and funded by subscription. He ran through some of the contributions already on file, among them a poem by Dan, a short story (‘v.g.’) by ‘Titch’ Phillips, and a mixture of his own poems, stories and essays, including a piece on aesthetes which anticipated his arguments on decadence and youth, presented to the debating society in March.
Dylan asked Smart to place a notice about the venture in the local paper, the South Wales Daily Post. But by June he had only twelve out of the two hundred subscribers he needed to start the publication. He may have had ideas about contents and even promotion, but he lacked basic business nous: when his new headmaster John Grey Morgan gave him ten shillings towards the venture (significantly more than the standard subscription of two shillings) Dylan promptly went out and got drunk.
One reason for his resort to alcoholic release was continuing domestic pressure. His father was still regularly absent from school; Smart believed because of ‘shingles’, though more likely from a form of depression. The previous August Nancy had noted, ‘I have realized how terribly worried Daddy is and how sad he is.’ Dylan would have sympathised with her complaint to Haydn: ‘I used to be always happy,’ she informed Haydn. At Blaencwm the following June she repeated the same story: ‘Daddy is not any better and has been home from school all week.’
Having produced the July or summer edition of the school magazine, Dylan was left feeling wistful. He admitted to Smart he would have liked to stay on and produce another issue which, he said with no false modesty, would be remarkable, because he was learning on the job all the time. He added that his father had impressed on him the importance of experience – an unusual acknowledgement of his father’s guidance. Now, through regular practice and revision, Dylan was seeking to bring this quality of experience to his poetry.
A more immediate concern was how he was to earn his living after finishing school. Since there was no question of Dylan accompanying Dan Jones to university, D.J. asked a neighbour, Herbert Bassett, the brother of the former mayor, to enquire of Malcolm Smith, the managing editor of the Daily Post, if he could find his son employment on the paper.
Jobs being at a premium in those economically depressed times, Dylan seems to have been offered some brief ‘work experience’ at the Post in July, perhaps even before the school term had formally ended. His friend Wynford Vaughan-Thomas told of accompanying Dylan on his first assignment, an interview with music hall star Nellie Wallace.
In the meantime Percy Smart had managed to place a brief notice in the paper about his friend’s proposed new literary journal. In response Dylan received a letter from Trevor Hughes, a wiry Great Western Railway clerk with literary ambitions, whose accompanying story so impressed Dylan that he was invited to Cwmdonkin Drive. Hughes was greeted by ‘a rather short, slightly built, almost girlish figure, with a fine head, light brown curls, and the eyes and ears of a poet’. Neither of them was aware at the time of a previous connection: Hughes was the former Grammar School pupil who had chanced upon the Thomas family in a Llandrindod Wells boarding house a dozen years earlier. Initially the focus of attention was on Nancy who had just bought a gramophone record of Paul Robeson singing a negro spiritual.
With this song in the background, the two youths settled on a sofa to discuss poetry, a topic, Hughes noted, that came as naturally to Dylan as football or films to another teenager. Reminded of Shelley, he had to make an effort to remember his host was so young: ‘[Dylan] showed the insight of a man in whom reading had become experience … He had no small talk … There was nothing spurious about him. He lived for poetry, which is the very act of loving. He loved, and marvelled at, every living thing. He loved words and the music of words.’ When Dylan began reading his poems, he looked intently at Hughes, watching for any reaction. He was at a stage of rejecting his early, immature poems, and if Hughes showed any sign of distaste, Dylan made a mental note to bin what he had written. ‘Sometimes, when he had read a poem, no word passed between us,’ wrote Hughes. ‘He would just look up at me, and, satisfied, start reading the next poem. And if, while he was reading, he found that a poem was unfinished, he would lie down, boylike, on the carpet, and finish it. Most of us must be moved by extraneous things, but it seemed, even at that time, that his apprehension was direct. His power was in and about him, and was always accessible to him. And to be with him was to be within the atmosphere of that power.’ Here was a poet in direct communication with his muse. But before he could devote himself to his life’s work he had to discover another aspect of the writer’s craft – in a newspaper office.
Dylan Thomas: A New Life Page 8