Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  FIVE

  SORE TRIAL

  Rising seventeen, Dylan looked faintly ridiculous when he arrived for work at the Castle Bailey Street offices of the South Wales Daily Post. Hoping to strike the attitude of a seasoned reporter, he wore a loud check overcoat, perched a green pork pie hat with a peacock feather on his head, and hung a ‘conscious Woodbine’ cigarette from his lip. As often, a tough-boy exterior hid an uncertain inner self.

  The Post was a conventional evening newspaper, with cosy links to municipal movers and shakers (the reason he got a job), and with no propensity to rock the boat politically. It may not have been the house journal of the Conservative Anglo-Welsh gentry, like the Western Mail, published in Cardiff, but as part of Lord Rothermere’s right-wing Northcliffe Press, it had no sympathy for Labour. Rothermere had bought the paper and its stable-mate the Cambria Daily Leader in 1928, merged them a couple of years later, and would change their name to the South Wales Evening Post in April 1932, shortly after Dylan joined.

  The young recruit’s first few weeks were spent in the copy department, learning to read incoming wires and check journalists’ finished articles. After a while he moved to the newsroom where he was not popular, since he had a habit of arriving late and keeping to himself. Colleagues recalled him gazing vacantly out of the window and doodling. More likely, he was putting the finishing touches to a poem. Never having learnt shorthand, he found that, when allowed out of the office, he was assigned the dullest of routine jobs, such as the daily calls to the British Legion or the hospital. Occasionally he might accompany another newsman to the police court or a council meeting. Only if very lucky did he attend an evening dinner or cultural event. Even then, he hardly distinguished himself. Standing in for the elderly chief reporter Bill Hatcher at the annual dinner of the Licensed Victuallers Association, he found the hospitality so generous that he passed out before the President’s speech.

  At least getting out of the office gave him an opportunity to familiarise himself with his home town. His reporter’s rounds took him on a wide circuit from Sketty and the Mumbles on one side of Swansea to Skewen (by the new oil terminal) on the other. His peregrinations took on greater significance when an older reporter Freddie ‘Half-Hook’ Farr befriended him and introduced him to the local low life. As detailed in Dylan’s romanticised story ‘Old Garbo’, first published in 1939, Farr acted as a father figure initiating him in necessary rites of passage. Rotund, wise-cracking, and down at heel, he was the antithesis of the stiff pedagogic D.J. At one stage in ‘Old Garbo’, he makes an irreverent comment to Dylan about their puritanical news editor Edward Job (Old Solomon in the story). Dylan feels a pang of guilt in observing: ‘I wished that I could have answered in such a way as to show for Mr Solomon the disrespect I did not feel. This was a great male moment.’ The last sentence could have come from a twenty-first-century men’s magazine: such bonding was important to Dylan’s progress from immature lad to young adult.

  Farr took Dylan under his wing and taught him the finer points of journalism. As Bill Hatcher’s deputy, he was responsible, every Friday, for passing reporters’ expenses claims. When Dylan failed to show the necessary creativity in massaging his accounts, Farr threw them back, with the cry, ‘You can do better than that, Thomas.’ After he had promised to take Dylan on a pub crawl, the young reporter hung around the office one Saturday, his half-day, pretending to work and hoping Farr would remember. Eventually Farr took pity and, after a ritual insult – ‘Some people are too lazy to take their half-days off’ – invited Dylan to join him at the Lamps at six o’clock.

  Dylan briefly returned home to inform his mother he was taking a long walk and she should not keep his evening meal waiting. He spent the afternoon at the cinema, where he blagged himself a free seat by claiming press accreditation. Making his way through the late Saturday afternoon crowds, he reached the Three Lamps, on Temple Street, more or less opposite the Post’s offices, slightly earlier than Farr. In ‘Old Garbo’ he records how he sat between an alderman and a solicitor in the back bar, half wishing his father could see him there, chatting up a plump middle-aged barmaid. He liked the idea of D.J. being furious at the angle of his cigarette and at ‘the threat of the clutched tankard’ which reflected his growing taste for beer. At the same time he was rather glad D.J. was away visiting his Uncle Arthur.

  At the appointed hour, he saw Farr approaching from the High Street, ‘savagely’ ignoring the laces and matches thrust at him by persistent, impoverished street vendors. According to Dylan, Farr ‘knew that the poor and the sick and the ugly, unwanted people were so close around him that, with one look of recognition, one gesture of sympathy, he would be lost among them’. But this was more Dylan’s own reaction than Half-Hook’s. He was learning about Swansea’s social and economic inequalities. And though he felt for those less fortunate than himself, he was still enough of a journalist to want to absorb the local colour.

  The Three Lamps was in a commercialised (and therefore salubrious) ‘down-town’ area, close to the Ben Evans store. It was a regular reporters’ pub, along with the Mackworth and the Bodega (part of the Bassett hotel empire). Sensing Dylan wanted something a bit different, Farr suggested they go to the Strand, the seedy area behind the Castle and the Post’s offices, on the other (eastern) side of the main thoroughfare, which ran down along High, Castle Bailey and Wind Streets. A throw-back to the heyday of the North Dock in the mid-Victorian era, the Strand was the centre of a maze of alleyways and small courts where visiting sailors could find boarding houses, cafés, bars and brothels to suit all tastes. (By Dylan’s time the new Prince of Wales Dock had begun to take pressure off this facility. Later, hastened by the decline in shipping that accompanied the 1930s slump, the North Dock was gradually filled in and cleaned up. Today it is no longer discernible as the foundation of a multi-storey car-park and a super-store.)

  On this occasion Farr took Dylan to the Fishguard on the Strand. He told Dylan about ‘sailors knitting there in the public bar’. But Dylan only came across the keeper of the mortuary underneath the nearby Arches. When he later visited this facility and saw a dead body for the first time, he fainted and had to be revived with three pints of beer. It was rough all right: on another trip to the Arches, he learnt of the brutal murder of a prostitute who had been attacked by a sailor with a broken bottle. At the Fishguard he witnessed the scam perpetrated by a Mrs Prothero, who raised money claiming that her daughter had died in childbirth, spent the proceeds on drink, and later drowned herself when it was discovered that her daughter was still alive. A rather different scene was to be found at the Lord Jersey on Market Street, where Dylan and Farr met an effeminate colleague who enthused about a young man dancing with a handkerchief round his head. Other colourful haunts Dylan visited around the Docks included the rowdy Cornish Mount and Spanish Joe’s, a ‘very rough’ café in the Strand where the Hispanic proprietress had had the end of her nose bitten off. Further afield he frequented an Arab café in Port Tennant Road.

  Although discovering an exciting Apaché world beyond the Uplands, he still had some growing up to do. On his first night out with Freddie Farr, he drank too much, was sick and did not even have the money for the tram fare home. ‘The revolving hill to my father’s house reached to the sky,’ he wrote. ‘Nobody was up. I crept to a wild bed, and the wallpaper lakes converged and sucked me down.’ His bank of experience was expanding, however. The very next day, after the worst effects of his hangover had worn off, he sat down and wrote the first three lines of ‘a poem without hope’ – possibly the notebook poem which refers to ‘head in the oven, no nearer heaven’ and ends:

  Senselessly lifting food to mouth, and food to mouth,

  To keep the senseless being going.

  The detail of ‘Old Garbo’ indicates that Dylan’s pub crawl with Farr took place shortly before Christmas 1931, and this is the only poem in the 1930–2 notebook which fits that chronology.

  Now that he received a weekly wage, Dylan could
afford to drink, and that, as Haydn Taylor recorded in an unpublished memoir, brought problems. Haydn was sitting with Nancy at Cwmdonkin Drive one Saturday night, waiting for the prying Florrie to go to bed, when he suddenly heard a series of confused noises at the front door, followed by the sound of running feet. It was clear Dylan had returned home drunk and was being sick. His parents dealt with the problem and shuffled Dylan off to bed. Nothing further was said about the incident. The two young men remained outwardly friendly, occasionally joining forces to watch Glamorgan play cricket at St Helen’s, and Dylan even felt able to sting Nancy’s ‘steady’ for a loan now and again. However Haydn was certain Dylan disliked him, particularly after the older Thomases began holding up the salesman’s sobriety and hard work as an example to their increasingly wayward son.

  Despite Farr’s paternal influence, it was soon evident that Dylan was not cut out to be a professional journalist. One of his editors, J. D. Williams, described the boy’s time on the paper as ‘entertaining, but a sore trial to the chief reporter’. The feeling was mutual, as Dylan came to dread being woken from his reveries by the sound of the telephone or the sub-editors’ door swinging open. Within six months of joining the Post, he had decided that, despite his efforts to take on the correct attitude, reporting was not for him. In February 1932, he told Trevor Hughes portentously, ‘I am at the most transitional period now. Whatever talents I possess may suddenly diminish or may suddenly increase.’ The journalistic lifestyle meant he was drinking excessively. ‘It’s odd,’ he continued to Hughes, who had moved to the outskirts of London, ‘but between all these’ (his working schedule of ‘concerts, deaths, meetings & dinners’) ‘I manage to become drunk at least four nights of the week. Muse or Mermaid? That’s the transition I spoke about.’ In other words, should he devote his energies to writing poetry or to dissipation at the Mermaid, a favourite pub in the Mumbles? The paper did not come into the equation. And he posed his rhetorical question again, answering it in a typical throwaway manner: ‘M or M? I’d prefer M any day, so that clears the air a lot.’

  The Mermaid was where members of the Little Theatre liked to relax after performances. In a snub to his editors, Dylan had joined them at the start of the year, after hearing they needed male leads for a revival of Hay Fever, Noel Coward’s comedy about a quarrelsome theatrical family. In February Dylan played the part of the artist Simon Bliss, whose emotional outbursts were uncannily similar to his own (a point which Nancy, who was also in the cast, with Haydn Taylor, no doubt impressed on the producer). His lively interpretation of the ‘bright young things’ of the period contributed to what the Post described as ‘two hours of almost continual chuckling’.

  A couple of months later, Dylan was back on stage, playing Count Bellair in George Farquhar’s eighteenth-century comedy, The Beaux’ Stratagem. In the intervening period, Dylan added no poems to his notebook (the young journalist was too occupied with acting, if not with reporting), and then, as Professor Ralph Maud has remarked, came ‘a remarkable blossoming’. The first signs of this flowering are found in the last few poems of his 1930–2 notebook, covering the period April to July 1932 when he was still at the Post. A journalist’s descriptive power combines with a new technical and rhythmical assurance in poems such as ‘The hunchback in the park’, written in May, an earlier, slighter version of his later published poem of the same name. Its wistful romanticism is reflected in ‘Being but men’, which weighs up the relative merits of childhood and adulthood (opting, unsurprisingly, for the innocence and sense of wonder of the former). There is another journalistic touch in his reference to the new Cefn Coed asylum on the hill in ‘Upon your held-out hand’, where he also feels that he cannot yet articulate clearly his frustration at words’ failure either to describe the wonder of the universe or to stave off the inevitability of death.

  Dylan’s newspaper apprenticeship was saved from total disaster by the astuteness of J. D. Williams, a stalwart supporter of the Little Theatre whose other great passion was bounding up mountains in North Wales. Williams edited the Post’s weekend paper, the Herald of Wales, which took more features than its news-dominated evening sister. Williams had noted Dylan’s talent in his role as Cromwell in the school play in Llewellyn Hall where ‘he stood out shoulder high above the rest of the cast: not alone because his part called for it, but because of a certain distinction of voice and bearing.’

  Offered the opportunity to write for the Herald of Wales (which meant extra money), Dylan gave full vent to his opinions in a six-part series on ‘The Poets of Swansea’ which ran between January and June 1932. He focused on writers who had made their names in Swansea from the widely known Walter Savage Landor (an adopted Englishman) to the more parochial S. C. Gamwell (which he managed to render as Camwell), a resolute high Victorian in the age of Oscar Wilde, and E. Howard Harris, whom he dubbed ‘the first poet of Gower’ for artistic vision, but cliché-ridden, derivative and bathetic in execution. This article drew an angry response from fifty-six-year-old Harris who did not take kindly to this treatment from a teenager. It was no coincidence that Harris was a schoolmaster. In accusing him of having ‘great difficulty in expressing his thoughts in any but other people’s words’, Dylan was commenting partly on D.J. and partly on his own need to find a distinctive poetic voice.

  In choosing poets who all wrote in English, Dylan showed his cultural limitations, for he ignored a host of local Welsh-language bards and hymnists, including his neighbour William Crwys Williams and the nationalist Saunders Lewis, a lecturer at the University College of Swansea. But this might have undermined his argument, that reflected his perhaps barely acknowledged self-interest, that Swansea poets needed to see more of the world. ‘In calling Landor one town’s poet,’ he wrote, ‘you call him a local poet. Landor is national, international; he should never be localised.’ Even Howard Harris won praise for wanting to ‘extend the Celtic message to the widespread English-speaking peoples’.

  After a year in Lord Rothermere’s employment, Dylan perked up when an old school-friend Charles Fisher joined the paper. The two had appeared together in school plays: with his good looks, Fisher often performing the female parts such as Dylan’s (or his character Roberts’s) wife in Strife. The son of the paper’s head printer, Fisher wrote poetry and ostentatiously enjoyed country pursuits such as riding (sometimes appearing at work in britches) and fishing (he wrote an angling column under the name ‘Blue Dun’). On Saturday nights he donned top hat and tails and attended society dances at the new Brangwyn (Town) Hall – one of middle-class Swansea’s ways of keeping up its spirits during an economic depression.

  Dylan often met Fisher at the Kardomah café, opposite the newspaper in Castle Street. Converted from the Congregational chapel where D.J. and Florrie had married in 1903, this establishment was conveniently split into a downstairs section, where middle-aged matrons came for morning coffee, and a more secluded upstairs area where the town’s younger set disported themselves. Now at Swansea university, Dan Jones brought along some of his expanded Warmley circle, including Tom Warner, an Oxfordshire vicar’s son who lived with two maiden aunts in the Uplands and studied the French horn, Mabley Owen, a teacher with a dry sense of humour and a fondness for drink, Thornley Jones, a composer and Fred Janes, a meticulous painter who had just won a scholarship to the Royal Academy Schools in London largely on the basis of his study of a fellow student at the Swansea School of Art, Dylan’s old friend Mervyn Levy. Occasionally they were also joined by Titch Phillips and her lively younger sister Vera. At the weekends they ventured further afield to the Langland Bay Hotel on the edge of Gower.

  These bright young things were witty, artistic and, like their Brideshead contemporaries, self-consciously affected. Charles Fisher admitted that one of their literary heroes, Sir Thomas Browne, epitomised English letters at their most mannered. He wondered why Dylan always ordered his beer with the words ‘Beer, I may?’, until he realised his friend was referring obliquely to James Joyce’s character L
eopold Bloom and his talismanic potato. One of the many word jokes which had them in stitches ran:

  ‘Knock, knock?’

  ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Sir Sacheverell.’

  ‘Sir Sacheverell who?’

  ‘Sir Sacheverell people.’

  This group was to become known as the ‘Kardomah boys’. Together with others who joined later, such as the poets Vernon Watkins and John Prichard, they have been portrayed as the vanguard of a 1930s Swansea cultural renaissance. This is to pitch their influence too high: Fred Janes doubted if they ever all sat in the same room. But, as individuals, they were highly talented and demonstrated Swansea’s eagerness to absorb and contribute to the best of the wider world.

  In ‘Return Journey’ Dylan records three lists of topics they discussed: ‘Einstein and Epstein, Stravinsky and Greta Garbo, death and religion, Picasso and girls …’ Each time he finishes with ‘and girls’, a subject much on his mind. Although now close to the Phillips sisters, whose mother’s house in Bryn-y-mor Crescent was as welcoming as Warmley, he had no regular woman in his life. He fantasised about a girl called Edith who worked at the Post. His friend Dilys Rowe, a contributor to the Post, recalled to Colin Edwards how Dylan took out a girl who worked at Woolworth’s. She found this shocking for a Grammar School boy – an interesting insight into Swansea’s rigid class distinctions.