This censoriousness reinforced the town’s ban on Sunday drinking, but Dylan found a way round it. Although four miles from Cwmdonkin Drive, the Mermaid in the Mumbles was nominally a hotel, and the stout, hard-drinking landlady, Miss Spiers, showed scant regard for the letter of the law. Dylan passed many agreeable weekend hours at her bar, consuming, as he put it, ‘too much out of too many bottles’. When once, in a drunken stupor, he slipped and fell, his ankle blew up like a balloon. He stayed overnight at the hotel, and found his parents none too happy when he arrived home for dinner next day.
Dylan was buoyed through these difficult early months of 1933 by two factors. One was his involvement in the Little Theatre. This not only enabled him to get out of the house, but gave him an excuse for drinking. If he stumbled home late at night (or even the next day), he could claim he had been in Mumbles rehearsing. He even had some status, if not exactly clout, in the company. For months he and Eric Hughes, his former colleague at the Post, had been clamouring to put on Peter and Paul by H. F. Rubinstein. Their wishes were finally granted and the play was staged in March. Reviewing it in the Post, J. D. Williams claimed he at last understood why the ‘young Turks’ at the theatre had lobbied for this piece. It was because of the ‘fat parts’ and ‘acting chances it gave them’. The story revolved around two men who were shown from youth to old age – one (Dylan) who led a conventional life, working in his father’s business, while always haunted by the knowledge that he wanted to write; the other (Hughes) who suffered great hardship because of his determination to follow his calling as an author. Williams probably did not realise that these two fictional characters reflected Dylan’s own struggle while at the Post: should he stay unhappily at his job, or should he write and be poor?
In cast photographs of the time, Dylan appeared thin, languid, wide-eyed – the image of an affected thespian. The Little Theatre did at least allow him to lose himself. His colleagues might sniff at his unfashionably rhetorical style. ‘Dylan liked a bit of old ham,’ noted Eileen Davies, who appeared with him in The Beaux’ Stratagem. But they loved his company. She recalled meeting Dylan at Oystermouth station one beautiful summer evening, when the rest of humanity was out enjoying the sun. ‘Oh dear, we’ve got to go in and under-act again,’ he complained. His energy perked up when, after rehearsals, the company decamped to one of two regular pubs, either Fulton’s, popularly known as Cheese’s after the landlord, or, a bit further away, the more plush Mermaid, where the thespian banter flowed with the drinks. As in most social situations, Dylan loved playing word games – partly to ward off boredom and introspection, partly to show off. One evening, complaining of feeling ‘fed up’, he suggested such an exercise. When asked what he had in mind, he said, ‘Well, take any noun describing something on the table. Then let’s find an adjective that is the most opposite. For example, see that jelly. There you are: “static jelly”.’
Once, after a widely reported rabies epidemic, Dylan and his former school-friend Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, recently down from Oxford, used this as a cue for some spontaneous horseplay. They went down on all fours and crawled around the floor of the pub, pretending to be rabid dogs, biting people’s ankles. When Dylan tried this on the actress Ruby Graham, she feigned anger and shooed him out of the door. She was astonished to see him continue across the pavement to a lamp-post. ‘I thought he was going to pee on it,’ she recalled. Instead, he bit on it, leaving him with a broken tooth for the rest of his life. (Afterwards, he used to tell her he remembered her every time he smiled.) As always, Dylan could always appear the life and soul of a party, even when his internal world was in turmoil.
The second stabilising influence for Dylan – and the more important – was his friendship with Bert Trick, whom he described as ‘a communist grocer with a passion for obscurity and the Powys family’. Trick was an unusual character, a self-taught radical with a quasi-religious view of the perfectability of man. The first part of Dylan’s description has often been noted, without much attention being paid to the rest. Works such as The Religion of a Sceptic by John Cowper Powys played an important part in Trick’s intellectual development. Born a bit later, he might have been a sandalled academic. His family, originally from Devon, controlled the meat trade in Neath, six miles east of Swansea. His prosperous middle-class existence was disrupted in 1914 when his depressive father (also called Albert, after Queen Victoria’s Prince Consort) committed suicide. When the family butcher business began to falter in the slump, Bert joined the civil service, but found the salary insufficient to marry on. His solution was to buy a grocery store in Swansea in 1928. However he was never a convincing shopkeeper and his choice of location – Glanbrydan Avenue, a residential street in the Uplands, with little passing trade – was poor. When the economic downturn reached the suburbs, he started attending Labour party meetings and contributing to local papers. With the rise of the Mosleyites, he became increasingly left-wing and saw the world from a Marxist perspective.
One evening Trick was standing among the biscuit tins, when a slim young man entered his shop, wearing a trilby and an oversized sports jacket. Dylan said he had written some poems and had been advised to show them to Trick by Thomas Taig, a Swansea University English lecturer who in his spare time produced plays for the Little Theatre. Since it was late in the day, the two men agreed to meet for further discussion on another occasion.
A few nights later Dylan called again at Glanbrydan Avenue. After some small talk he pulled out a notebook and started reciting his poems (or ‘pomes’ as he insisted on calling them). He refused to allow Trick to look at them on the page, saying that they needed to be heard: ‘that is the only way to get the music out of the poetry.’ Trick was so impressed that he called in his wife Nell, and they both sat spellbound. Appreciative of this positive response, Dylan invited Trick to Cwmdonkin Drive where he gathered some friends. Trick reciprocated, asking Dylan’s Kardomah crowd to join a group of his own, which included John Jennings, a radical journalist who would become editor of the Swansea and West Wales Guardian, and Leslie Mewis, a would-be writer stuck in a dead-end job at the Fifty Shilling Tailors. For a while they all attended a series of evening discussion meetings covering politics, music and art, usually at the Thomases on Wednesdays and above the shop at the Tricks on Sundays.
The only regular participants at these soirées – the ones who met, even if no-one else turned up – were Dylan and Trick. Despite a sixteen-year age gap, they enjoyed each other’s company. ‘We’d start on modern poetry and end up discussing the dialectics of Karl Marx,’ recalled Trick. ‘It was all terribly exciting and stimulating.’ They also shared a passion for words. In a memoir towards the end of his life, Trick wrote: ‘Many were the times I skipped out of 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, my arms full of books, my head full of stars and feet of feathers. I didn’t walk down the hill to my home, I was levitated. There was no need for strong drink, we were intoxicated with words – ideas and words. The magic of language was ours: the play of words to produce paradox, to twist the tail of a platitude to make an epigram, to change the juxtaposition of words in mundane prose to produce an explosion.’
At just the right time, when he was embarking on his own writing career, Dylan found someone with the patience and good humour to answer his probing youthful questions – Freddie Farr’s more cerebral brother, who would introduce him to the literary and philosophical possibilities of the grown-up world. As an outsider, Leslie Mewis could observe: ‘Dylan had no politics at all, but he appealed to Trick. I remember him saying to Bert, “For God’s sake, Bert, explain that!” As a man Bert was very balanced. You felt in his company you would get down to sincerities rather than polemics.’ With his understanding of Dylan’s ambitions as a writer, Trick took the verbal gymnast of the Warmley era and strengthened his intellectual equipment.
He counselled his young protégé to temper his indiscriminate poet’s passion with reasoning, in the manner of John Donne, a writer they both admired. If Dylan wanted to act like an angr
y young man, he should be angry about something worthwhile. ‘So I began to interest him – I’m quite sure I did – in social justice,’ claimed the grocer. ‘There was no doubt that the whole of Dylan’s life was coloured by his love for his fellow men – particularly if they were disabled or mentally handicapped or despisedly used.’ Despite his special pleading, Trick did help Dylan channel his energies more sympathetically and creatively, giving him what Dylan’s future wife Caitlin recognised as ‘mettle’. Except that Trick saw it in a different, more personal way. He talked of Dylan having a ‘deep compassion’ that at times was ‘Christ-like’. This, in his estimation, was at the heart of the ‘unjudging innocence’ of some of Dylan’s best fictional characters. (He was referring in particular to Dylan’s later work, Under Milk Wood.) That ‘simple innocence’ – found in William Blake and negro spirituals – was ‘the very touchstone of Dylan’. And it came, Trick believed, from a basic spiritual consciousness that saw man as both ‘the creature and creator of his own world’. Dylan understood this basic religious insight and determined to render it in his own modern way.
At one stage Dylan spent so much time at Glanbrydan Avenue that his mother, feeling rejected, asked Nell how she made her jellies and blancmanges, her son’s favourite foods. Despite Dylan’s sweet tooth, the secret was not in the food, but, as at Warmley, in the ambience. At the Tricks, no subject was off limits. When Nell recalled how, as a girl, she used lie down at night and feel her head getting bigger and turning to rubber, Dylan said he had experienced exactly the same sensation. ‘Then we went on to talk about dreams. He said that whenever he had a dream he was always flying in the air – over a mountain, over the trees.’ On another occasion Nell let slip that her young daughter Pamela had enquired out of the blue: ‘What colour is glory?’ Dylan was delighted with the phrase and incorporated it into his poem ‘Why east wind chills’, originally from July 1933, which addressed a topic occupying him at the time – the impossibility of reaching eternal truths about the world.
The conversation was by no means all high-minded. Having discovered a mutual love of the cinema, Dylan kept the Tricks amused with impersonations of stars such as Edward G. Robinson and Harpo Marx, his favourite Marx Brother. He was possessive about his idols: the only time Trick remembered Dylan losing his temper was when a female visitor had the temerity to suggest Greta Garbo could not act.
Exactly when Dylan first met Trick is not clear. In his authorised biography, Constantine FitzGibbon gave the date as 1933. However Trick said that Dylan was still a cub reporter, and elsewhere stated that his visitor was seventeen, at one stage placing this encounter specifically in spring 1932. This is possible: Taig was one of the producers of The Beaux’ Stratagem in April 1932. Dylan would have known that Taig was the author of Rhythm and Metre, a manual on writing poetry, published in 1929, and sought his advice. As Maud noted, Dylan’s poetical flowering in his notebooks commenced around this time.
What is certain is that Dylan’s relationship with Trick took off in early 1933 after he had quit the Post. Some early poems in his third notebook, started on 1 February, still reflect his teething problems as he readjusted to a poet’s life. Gradually, however, his subject-matter became clearer and more confident, as he moved from the passing of the seasons (dismissed in February as ‘nothing more/Than hot and cold markings from one to four’) to the fleetingness of existence – a concern brought home to him partly by his aunt’s death, and partly by his almost wishful belief that, now he was a poet, he was doomed to die young and was indeed already wasting away with tuberculosis. Several recollections note this obsession at the time: ‘He would tell Nell that he wouldn’t live till 40,’ said Trick, who charitably used this as an excuse for Dylan’s reluctance to tackle political subjects. Dylan had his own poetical agenda which he needed to complete before he ‘burnt out’.
In March there was a brief hiatus in his output as he concentrated on his theatrical role in Peter and Paul. Then he returned to his task. Seeking to make that connection between his outer and inner worlds, he contrasted the wonder of light in the universe with his own fear of the dark. There were precocious poems about man’s megalomania (‘men want the stars to hang on cherry trees’) and his own continuing distaste for the mechanistic couplings of sexual love.
In April his interests came together in a powerful early version of ‘And death shall have no dominion’ which arose out of a friendly competition with Trick to write a poem on immortality. Dylan used rhyme, a form of versification he had recently eschewed, and pointed to texts ranging from John Donne to the Bible.
Trick was so impressed that he suggested Dylan try another London outlet, one that reflected the grocer’s own interests. This was the New English Weekly, a recently established vehicle for the quirky mystical leftist views of A. R. Orage, former editor of New Age, which had published Shaw, Wells and Yeats a generation earlier. Dylan received an enthusiastic letter from Orage, accepting his poem and asking for more. But even though this was his first publication in a London periodical, Dylan was muted in celebration because he was not paid.
A feature of Dylan’s work was its religious input, often presented from an unorthodox Christian perspective. Under Trick’s influence, Dylan began to see Jesus Christ as an archetypal figure of compassion, who had tried, as he was doing, to reconcile the worlds of the flesh and the spirit. As he moved through his nineteenth year, Dylan had never been more spiritually curious. Traditional he was not: his quest arose from a literary fascination with death, inspired by the works of Donne and Thomas Lovell Beddoes, whose imagery suffused his poems. His heaven was a Buddhist-style nirvana – ‘a state of being unbounded by traitor senses’ – and his hell the church’s personification of religion, ‘the fallacy of fancies/That gave god whiskers to his navel/A tail and two horns to the devil’. His views were made clear in his vitriolic ‘Matthias spat upon the lord’ which closed this third notebook in August. This was an attack on conventional religion as peddled by ‘The Reverend Crap, a pious fraud’. And to make sure no-one was unaware of his target, he wrote ‘Rev David Rees’ in the margin beside the poem. This – and not his recent fulsome notice in the Post – showed his real attitude to his uncle’s Bible-thumping.
As he explored the universe, he was inspired by its infinite possibilities:
A football has its moon and sun,
A single syllable its many words
His main complaint, as is clear from his remarkable ‘We have the fairy tales by heart’, was that human beings had lost their capacity for mystery and wonder. But even in a world where
We have by heart the children’s stories
Have blown sky high the nursery of fairies
there was no escaping the inevitability of death.
As his spiritual horizons expanded, so did his geographical, a yearning expressed in ‘I have longed to move away’ in March. By the time he wrote ‘The first ten years in school and park’ in late April he seemed confident he had overcome the worst of his personal demons and even went so far as to express satisfaction that he had found a balance between the opposing mechanistic and natural worlds. He drew on Dan’s musical experimentation in his observations on harmony. But when he claimed, ‘Now I’ve sterner stuff inside’, he was referring to the intellectual ballast Bert Trick had given his life.
More tangibly, the atmosphere at Cwmdonkin Drive changed after Nancy’s marriage in May. (The catalyst for this event seems to have been the death of Aunt Annie in February. Within days of her death the Thomases were able to increase their mortgage by £150, thus easing their immediate financial difficulties and allowing them to host their daughter’s wedding.) She and Haydn moved to the English home counties, where they lived in the Betjemanesque Wisteria Cottage at Laleham, near Chertsey in Surrey, and where, because they were keen sailors, they also rented a houseboat called Fairyland which they kept nearby on the River Thames. With his parents’ house strangely quiet, Dylan often went to the Tricks’ weekend bungalow at Caswell
Bay on Gower. As summer drew on, he would read them stories in the making. More than thirty years later Trick recalled how Dylan span an engaging fantasy about the inhabitants of a typical South Wales village called Llareggub. When Trick expressed surprise at the Welsh name, which was an unusual departure for Dylan, the young man gave a naughty smile and urged him to say it backwards.
Rather than anticipating Under Milk Wood, Trick may well have mis-remembered ‘The Orchards’, a typical short story from his young friend’s pen at this time. Although there were exceptions, Dylan’s tales weaved myth and dream with more tangible themes of paganism and religious fanaticism he had witnessed in Carmarthenshire (fictionalised as the Jarvis hills and valley). Paradoxically, even when dealing with madness – as, for example, in ‘The Mouse and the Woman’ – they are full of surprisingly domesticated detail, as if emphasising the tension in Dylan’s mind between the worlds of suburbia and the imagination. ‘The Orchards’ was more autobiographical than most in its portrayal of ‘Marlais, the poet’ who leaves his ‘top-storey room in the house on a slope over the black-housed town’ for a dream-like flight over valleys and ‘water-dipping hills’, to a place of a hundred orchards where a fair girl makes him tea and, taking a phrase from Florrie Thomas, ‘cut the bread so thin she could see London through the white pieces’. The academic James A. Davies is correct to see this as a statement of Dylan’s general inability to escape his Uplands background: ‘as always in Thomas’s life, despite his journey and changed, disreputable appearance, in his end is his beginning.’ In his narration, Dylan described ‘The Orchards’ as ‘more terrible than the stories of the reverend madmen in the Black Book of Llareggub’. This was probably the reference Trick recalled, and it suggests that, even at this stage, Dylan was planning a series of such tales, perhaps leading to a novel.
Dylan Thomas: A New Life Page 11