This would explain the curious item in the Evening Post’s diary column in early July, almost certainly penned by Charles Fisher, who was as natural a reporter as Dylan was not. This noted that Dylan had tried his hand at journalism, but now ‘his aspirations are for another branch of the craft of writing’. It added intriguingly that he had completed a novel which was under consideration by publishers and that the previous week one of his poems had been read over the wireless. The novel must have been the one he mentioned to Hughes at the start of the year. No other details are known, certainly no manuscript has been found, though Haydn Taylor did claim that, as a conciliatory gesture towards his feckless brother-in-law, he once sent some of Dylan’s writings to the publisher Allen Lane, a friend from his Bristol days. Lane, who was to found Penguin Books three years later, was running the Bodley Head. He seems to have rejected what he read of Dylan, and nothing more was heard of it. Dylan returned to the drawing board with his ‘novel’. The wireless broadcast – the first of many – did take place, however. On 28 June, Dylan’s poem ‘The Romantic Isle’ was read out on the BBC National service, having been selected from entries to a BBC poetry competition. Unfortunately this too does not survive – either in the BBC archives or in Dylan’s own papers.
One warm mid-July evening Dylan was sighted at a Little Theatre performance of Sophocles’s Electra, given in the grounds of the Sketty mansion of Major and Mrs Bertie Perkins. He had gone to support Dan Jones who had composed special music for harp and drums. When Eileen Davies in the lead role saw him lurking in the background, smoking a cigarette, she feared a snide review. However the piece he submitted to the Herald of Wales was a poem which used the circumstances of the Greek tragedy being played in an open air garden to explore a favourite theme of nature’s indifference to suffering. ‘A pigeon calls and women talk of death’ ran the last line. But Dylan was going through the motions: his pondering on the pros and cons of going to London was apparent in his poem a few days later:
Shall I run to the ships,
With the wind in my hair,
Or stay to the day I die,
And welcome no sailor?
He was plagued by an old dilemma: unless he took a chance, he might be destined to a life of quiet sterility at home.
Within a couple of weeks he had taken the plunge and left for London, clutching a sheaf of typed poems. The capital’s literary world was taking a collective breath after the perturbations of the post-war decade. Modernism was still in the air, but its excesses had been tamed. The pretensions of the Bloomsbury group had been pricked by Wyndham Lewis and the South African-born poet Roy Campbell. Surrealism remained a minority calling. The emerging movement was more concerned with social realities, but the verse of W. H. Auden and his fellow public-school Marxists had yet to find a wide audience. There were still plenty of literary publications and, as always, they were keen to find new voices. A Welshman who mixed modernism and lyricism and had a musical way with words fitted the bill. But none of the existing schools particularly attracted Dylan who had his own subject-matter and his own style, and was unlikely to change them.
Eight years later Dylan wrote a colourful fictional account of his leaving home in January (the month was wrong) 1933. In Adventures in the Skin Trade his alter ego rose early to deface the school essays his father was marking and to smash his mother’s crockery. In London he fell naturally into a world of cafés inhabited by tarts, bed-sitters and sleazy clubs. Dylan’s sense of anger at the restrictions of Cwmdonkin Drive was realistic enough. But his progress in the capital was rather more conventional. In real life, he stayed first with Trevor Hughes in Rayners Lane, from where he and his host made at least one sortie to the Fitzroy Tavern, well-known drinking spot for Bohemians such as the litigious Nina Hamnett. He also visited Nancy and Haydn on their houseboat, where, so the story goes, he had to be pulled out of the Thames with a boat-hook one night after returning home drunk. During the daytime, he peddled his wares, but without much success. One literary figure he did meet was John Middleton Murry, former editor of The Adelphi. This was probably Trick’s suggestion since Middleton Murry, friend and biographer of D. H. Lawrence, was a mystical Marxist of the type he favoured. He had visited Swansea in May when he lectured the Workers’ Educational Association on ‘Marxist Socialism and British Conditions’. His most recent work had been an article on William Blake, an author whom Trick encouraged Dylan to take seriously. As Dylan had told Hughes, Murry ‘is interested in the symbols of the world, in the mystery and meaning of the world, in the fundamentals of the soul.’
Dylan and Murry met at the Chelsea flat of Sir Richard Rees, a flamboyant Eton and Cambridge-educated baronet and former diplomat, who had taken over editing the Adelphi in 1931. Dylan left some poems with Rees who was impressed and published ‘No man who believes, when a star falls shot’ in his next (September) issue.
A couple of other rendez-vous were more nebulous. Dylan may have met A. L. Orage, editor of the New English Weekly, which had published his first poem in London in May. There is a story that Orage asked him bluntly if he were a virgin. Dylan may also have encountered the bibulous Malcolm Lowry who was recently down from Cambridge and had published his first novel, Ultramarine. But none of these figures was likely to do much to further his career. Dylan returned to Wales little clearer about his ultimate literary direction. That is the implication of the wry epigram in his latest and final notebook, started on 23 August: ‘To others caught/Between black and white.’ And he might equally have written – between Muse and Mermaid, life and art (opposites he told Hughes he had difficulty reconciling), or even London and Swansea.
SEVEN
EPISTOLARY ENCOUNTERS
Dan Jones came to Dylan’s rescue when he returned from a short summer holiday in Sussex, telling of his attendance at a literary tea party in Steyning hosted by Victor Neuburg, an eccentric middle-aged poet enjoying a new lease of life as editor of the Poets’ Corner section of a maverick London newspaper, the Sunday Referee. An 1890s aesthete manqué, Neuburg had first published poems as a Cambridge undergraduate in the early years of the century. His career plummeted after he fell under the malign influence of the occultist Aleister Crowley who, in the guise of exploring mysteries, adopted him as his homosexual slave. After a girlfriend committed suicide (with Crowley heavily implicated), the mild-mannered Neuburg suffered a breakdown and retired to Steyning where he set up the unsuccessful Vine Press (named after his cottage) and played host to free-thinking leftist friends.
‘Vicky’ or ‘Vickybird’, as he was known, spoke in an affected manner, coining his own neologisms, such as ‘ostrobogulous’, meaning anything interesting with a slightly risqué connotation (the word is attributed to him in the Oxford English Dictionary). He had a habit of using abbreviations: TAP meant Take a Pew and when he raised a glass, MEGH, Most Extraordinary Good Health. He also inspired great affection. Ted Hayter-Preston, literary editor of the Sunday Referee, had been his sergeant during Vicky’s ill-starred period of active service in France during the First World War. When he heard about Vicky’s hand-to-mouth existence in Sussex, he prevailed on his editor Mark Goulden to find his old friend a job. So was born Poets’ Corner in April 1933.
When Dan mentioned his tea-time meeting, and the literary company at Neuburg’s, Dylan made a mental note of a potential outlet and sent the editor of Poets’ Corner his pensive poem ‘That Sanity be kept’, which notes, behind the smiles of the people in the park, the ‘grief’ and ‘vague bewilderment/At things not turning right’. Dylan was delighted when his lilting, quasi-romantic offering was published in the Sunday Referee on 3 September, and even more so when his success was followed by a fan letter from another poet who had featured in the same slot – a young woman called Pamela Hansford Johnson.
A couple of years older than Dylan (and half a foot shorter than his five foot six inches), she had sultry, dark-haired good looks. Brought up in the Gold Coast, she lived with her widowed mother in Clapham, travelled ea
ch day to an unsatisfactory job in a bank, and dreamed of being a writer. Dan had noticed her, looking bored, at Neuburg’s, but they did not hit it off, and he later told Dylan that she had a nice body but poor brain. However she did not lack for male attention, given the number of references to ‘osculatory adventures’ she recorded gleefully in her diary. One admirer remembers her as being fascinated with sex. Not many girls of her age owned The Sexual Theories of the Marquis de Sade. But when another suitor became too amorous she was still primly self-conscious enough to write, ‘What are our boys coming to?’
An engaging mixture of blue-stocking and flapper, Pamela was the sort of bright, well-read girlfriend Dylan might have scripted for himself in his fantasy life. Although her late father had been an austere colonial civil servant, her maternal grandfather had moved in racy theatrical circles as treasurer to Sir Henry Irving. Since her father’s death, her mother had been forced to take in lodgers. But Pamela wanted to make more of her life than waste away in an office. The two young poets fell into an intense flirtatious correspondence, exchanging photographs and poems, as well as personal detail and criticism of each other’s work. Dylan introduced himself as ‘a thin, curly person, smoking too (many) cigarettes, with a crocked lung, and writing his vague verses in the back room of a provincial villa’. He explained how, ‘for some mad reason’, his name was derived from the Mabinogion and was pronounced to rhyme with ‘Chillun’.
When he wrote a second time, he was down in Carmarthenshire, because the previous month his father had discovered, during a routine visit to the dentist, that a lesion at the base of his mouth was cancerous. D.J. had been quickly admitted to University College Hospital, London, where Haydn Taylor, the only relation with a car, drove him to start treatment with radium needles on 10 September. At such times, the extended Welsh family rallied round. To relieve his mother, Dylan reluctantly agreed to go to Blaencwm where his Uncle David Rees and Aunt Theodosia had retired to one of the cottages. He took his father’s illness badly, as is clear from his observation ‘Flesh is suffered, is laid low’ in his poem ‘Take the needles and the knives’. The cancer also reminded him of his concerns about his own body. He claimed in the autumn that his self-diagnosis of tuberculosis had been confirmed by a local doctor and that he had been given four years to live. The truth is more likely to have been that, given his history of asthma and lung trouble, he was advised to cut down on drinking and smoking. But tuberculosis remained a potent killer. Middleton Murry had lost two wives to it. With romantic connotations of ‘consumption’, the poet’s disease, it was adopted by a lugubrious Dylan as a device to win sympathy and enhance his artist’s mystique. If nothing else, the idea of having, as he put it to Pamela, 1340 days and nights to live was a spur to getting work done.
Dylan made a second trip to Carmarthenshire over his birthday in October. He no longer felt much affinity for the drab countryside, with its ‘thin, purposeless rain, hiding the long miles of desolate fields and scattered farmhouses’. With the weather and snaring of rabbits the only topics of conversation, he too felt trapped. The bus from Swansea had taken him through some of the dingiest industrial towns in the area, where he had observed groups of coal-miners, ‘diseased in mind and body as only the Welsh can be’, standing outside the Welfare Hall. Their women were ‘all breast and bottom’, their houses ‘jerry-built huts’ for them to breed and eat in. With no Trick on hand to steel his political will, he could only rant to Pamela that all Wales was like this: ‘It is impossible for me to tell you how much I want to get out of it all, out of narrowness and dirtiness, out of the eternal ugliness of the Welsh people, and all that belongs to them’ and, significant additions to his list, ‘out of the pettiness of a mother I don’t care for and the giggling batch of relatives’. He finished this tirade with a cry, which even he admitted sounded melodramatic: ‘I’m sick, and this bloody country’s killing me.’ No wonder he was excited by the prospect of London where professional adulation might be accompanied by touching scenes of domestic bliss, such as Pamela demonstrating to him ‘the poetry of cooking’.
Despite low spirits, he remained both prolific and creative. In August he had composed a manifestly political poem as a homage to Bert Trick, to whom it was dedicated. ‘The hand that signed the paper felled a city’ showed Dylan had not completely ignored Hitler’s accession to the Chancellorship of Germany in February and that country’s quick descent into dictatorship. It was his personal protest against the arbitrariness of brute power. But he had no desire to emulate the social realism of the Audens and Spenders of his generation. His calling, poetry, was about higher things than politics, he maintained.
His reading matter at Blaencwm reflected his interests: an anthology of poetry from Jonson to Dryden provided a literary overview of a seventeenth century every bit as ideologically split as the twentieth; a volume of John Donne’s prose took him to the heart of the fleshy, cadaverous English metaphysicals, while Bernard Hart’s pre-war textbook, The Psychology of Insanity, introduced Dylan to the workings of the mind (as it had the Imagists a decade or so earlier when Ben Hecht called it a ‘blueprint of modern thinking’).
Such works provided stimulus for Dylan’s output over the autumn. ‘Light breaks where no sun shines’ showed his determination to portray the development of human form and consciousness at all stages from conception to death – and to do so in as individual and as poetic a manner as possible. A couple of months earlier, he had written a similar, if more ambitious, poem which described in its opening lines the very first moments of a Christ figure’s incarnation:
Before I knocked and flesh let enter
With liquid hands tapped on the womb
Delighted with the result, Dylan sent it to Pamela, though his ambivalence about his subject-matter is still clear from his mischievous lines scribbled opposite this poem in his notebook:
If God is praised in poem one
Show no surprise when in the next
I worship wood or sun or none:
I’m hundred-heavened rainbow sexed and countless
He looked again at the growing foetus in ‘From love’s first fever’, adding a sequel which explored another Thomas theme, the formative power of language:
I learnt man’s tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts
Into the stony idiom of the brain …
I learnt the verbs of will, and had my secret;
The code of night tapped on my tongue;
What had been one was many sounding minded.
This poem, with its lines:
The nervous hand rehearsing on the thigh
Acts with a woman
suggested (as did ‘My hero bares his nerves along my wrist’ the previous month) that Dylan used masturbation both as a physical release and as a means of getting to understand his body. His frustration at finding no other outlet for his sexual drive intensified his late teenager’s sense of the physicality not only of life but also of looming death – as he was determined to show, in homage to his favourite metaphysical poets. ‘Here lie the beasts of man’, written in Llangain in October was one of several stabs at writing in the style of John Donne about a dead body lying in the earth: ‘And silently I milk the buried flowers.’ His best portrayal of that physicality was ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ with its dark lines, marrying Gothic and metaphysical, and ending:
And I am dumb to tell the timeless sun
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crookèd worm.
One of the work-sheets for this poem suggests that, despite his Anglophone upbringing, Dylan did know, and use, some Welsh. Underneath the line ‘How time has ticked a heaven round the stars’, he has written ‘am/sêr np 339 round stars’. This shows Dylan playing with puns in Welsh. ‘Amser’ is the Welsh word for ‘time’. It comprises two other Welsh words, ‘am’ meaning ‘round’ and ‘sêr’ or ‘stars’. The ob
scure ‘np 339’ refers to page 339 of the two-volume 1925 edition of Spurrell’s Welsh–English Dictionary, which gives the definition ‘sêr np stars’, ‘np’ being an abbreviation for ‘noun plural’.
Such poems provided the backdrop to Dylan’s exchange of ideas with Pamela over the autumn. His love of words spilled out: whatever language they came from, they were the centrepiece of his trade. There was only ever one word to use in any given context, he told Pamela uncompromisingly. When he wanted to, he could work extremely hard: in his search for the mot juste, he made long lists of words and rhymes, from which he would choose for his poems, often re-writing his entire text several times to accommodate his changes. As a result he only completed two lines of verse an hour. A throwback to his schooldays, he seemed to understand things better if he saw them in front of him in black and white. Later, as a performer, not only would he copy out the text of poems he intended to read (so that he could fully understand the author’s intentions), but he would make dozens of fair copies of his own work. (Harvard University has 166 worksheets showing the progress of his much later ‘Prologue’.) At this stage, his favourite word was ‘drome’ (it ‘nearly opens the doors of heaven for me’), while a range of homophones – bone, dome, doom, province, dwell, prove, dolomite – also excited him. ‘God moves in a long “o”,’ he commented.
Attention to detail did not mean stinting on creativity, he argued. Part of a poet’s job was to take well-worn words and give them new life. A political agenda prevented this because it called for a premeditated opinion. For Dylan, poetry only brooked one limitation – form. It was vital that ‘form should never be superimposed; the structure should rise out of the words and the expression of them. I do not want to express only what other people have felt; I want to rip something away and show what they have never seen.’ (He could have been quoting directly from the famous Imagist manifesto of 1915, written by Amy Lowell and Richard Aldington.) Rhythm was also one of his craftsman’s tools – as essential to poetry as to music. However rhyme as such was not so important. It was an area where he liked to experiment, noting his use of consonantal and half-rhymes in his poem ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’.
Dylan Thomas: A New Life Page 12