In the face of Pamela’s objections to the ‘ugliness’ in some of his poems, he defended his ‘physical’ imagery, arguing that the body was a fact of life, as much as death and disease. More fancifully, he claimed the body was like a tree, with roots in the same earth as a tree. In this he was only reiterating John Donne, from whose meditations on having typhus, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, he freely paraphrased a passage, ‘How little of the world is the earth! And yet that is all that man hath or is!’ adding his own gloss: ‘All thoughts and actions emanate from the body’ and have a physical dimension. Thus, ‘every idea, intuitive or intellectual can be imaged and translated in terms of the body, its flesh, skin, blood, sinews, veins, glands, organs, cells, or senses’.
Donne had first used the phrase ‘No man is an island’ in his Devotions. Appropriately, Dylan continued his lecture to Pamela: ‘Through my small, bonebound island I have learnt all I know, experienced all, and sensed all. All I write is inseparable from the island. As much as possible, therefore, I employ the scenery of the island to describe the earthquakes of the heart.’ However Dylan was never too immersed in theorising to see the humour of any situation: in this case, the image of himself – ‘naked-nerved and blood-timid’ – banging on about the brutality and horror of existence. He suggested that this was on a par with the weak Nietzsche praising life’s strength or the complex-ridden D. H. Lawrence emphasising its wholesomeness.
When Pamela trumpeted the virtues of simplicity, he agreed that things should be said as simply as possible. But that did not mean that they had to be simple for the sake of it. Just because he liked Mozart did not mean he should abjure the ‘bewildering obscurity’ of later Scriabin, a favourite of Dan’s. ‘It is the simplicity of the human mind that believes the universal mind to be as simple.’ Sometimes a degree of obscurity was necessary to convey the full extent of something’s beauty which, according to one of his instant definitions, was the ‘sense of unity in diversity’.
The sort of thing she liked was his ‘dream’ poem, ‘The eye of sleep’, written on 5 October, a conventional account of a nocturnal reverie, with wonderful lines, such as:
I fled the earth, and, naked, climbed the weather
But he told her that, only on the most superficial level, could this be described as visionary. He preferred ‘Before I knocked’, from the previous month, which had more of what he considered important in his poetry.
His comments on her poetry – sometimes gentle, sometimes waspish – were revealing about his own efforts. She had a ‘tremendous passion for words’, he granted, and a good grasp of form. Her poems generally tried to create rather than, as was the curse of most modern poets, to record ‘none too clearly’ the chaos of the contemporary world. But he was not afraid to criticise. (‘A physical pacifist and a mental militarist, I can’t resist having a knock,’ he commented.) His main grouse was that she lacked ambition and ‘soul’. Her phrases, such as ‘Mother-of-pearl into pallid primrose’, were ‘too easily pretty’. In another poem her words ‘unquiet mouse’ were meaningless: the adjective (particularly as it was a negative one) failed to add to what was known about the mouse. A proper poetical adjective should either embrace all the associations of the noun it is qualifying (so in the case of a mouse it might incorporate fear, colour and texture) or else it should break down all associations, thus making the mouse something ‘new’.
As for her finished product, he commented on her poem ‘February’ that she should look beyond the mere evidence of her eyes. ‘Unless the spirit illuminates what the eyes have mirrored, then all the paraphernalia of the winter scene is as valueless as an Academy picture of Balmoral Castle.’ Generally speaking, her output showed her to be like the little girl with the curl over her forehead: ‘when you are good, you are very, very good, and when you are bad, you are horrid.’ He urged her to look inside herself for subject matter: ‘There is too much doing in life, and not enough being … Man is preoccupied with action, never believing Blake’s “Thought is Action.” ’ Her problem was misplaced romanticism when she should have been ‘attempting a far higher thing – the creation of a personal poetry, born out of Battersea, Mrs Johnson, and wide and haphazard reading’.
Although he could be patronising, referring to one of her poems as ‘sweet girlish drivel’, his tone tended to be amusing, rather than didactic, as in the gentle fun he poked at Pamela for her fondness for traditional English expressions of the arts – from the music of the Promenade concerts to the poetry of Kipling, one of his bêtes noires, and Wordsworth (‘a human nannygoat with a pantheistic obsession’). Dylan described Wordsworth as platitudinous and boring, without ‘a spark of mysticism in him’, and wanted him drowned along with Matthew Arnold, another Englishman he detested. Additional hate figures included Sir Edward Elgar, who had ‘inflicted more pedantic wind & blather upon a supine public than any man who has ever lived’, and, less predictably, Geoffrey Grigson, partly because Dylan recoiled from intellectuals who appeared to be smarter than himself (he feared the gaps in his learning), and partly because Grigson’s New Verse promoted what Trick called the ‘public school Pinks’, poets such as Auden and Spender, whose political agenda Dylan was convinced ran counter to the stuff of great poetry.
Despite Dylan’s epistolary lectures, there was no doubt which of the two correspondents was having the greater fun and success. That autumn Dylan thought he might revive the Prose and Verse magazine he had discussed a couple of years earlier with Percy Smart and Trevor Hughes. He intended it to fill a much-needed gap as a forum for Welsh writing in English. However Trick’s support failed to materialise and Dylan went off the idea. He was left knocking on the doors of London editors who could not make up their minds about this unusual prodigy from west of the river Severn. Sir Richard Rees requested more work, though tempered his enthusiasm by saying Dylan’s poems had an ‘insubstantiality, a dreamlike quality’ which disconcerted him and reminded him of automatic writing. He did at least agree to send them to Herbert Read who, in his role as a poet, straddled modernism and surrealism, and who in turn passed them on to his friend, T. S. Eliot. Since Dylan had a high regard for ‘Pope’ Eliot, this was at least encouraging.
Meanwhile Pamela had been making new friends at the ‘creative arts circle’ which Victor Neuburg held at the St John’s Wood house he shared when in London with his exotic sounding mistress, Runia Tharp. This way Pamela met (and sat for) Reuben Mednikoff, an artist of Russian Jewish extraction, later better known for his ‘automatic’ paintings. Another acquaintance was David Gascoyne, a young poet (younger even than Dylan) who had recently burst onto the London scene with his excursions into literary surrealism.
Pamela kept Dylan amused (and a little jealous) with stories about these affected gatherings, presided over by the bird-like ‘Vicky’ in the company of the formidable Mrs Tharp. Born Winifred Simpson, the daughter of a senior police officer in India, she had studied at both Cambridge University, where as a woman had been unable to take a degree, and at the Slade School of Art. At the latter institution, she had left her first husband Leslie Bellin-Carter, art master at Eton and later Wellington, and married Charles Tharp, a fellow student who became a prominent portrait painter. According to Arthur Calder Marshall, she spoke of Shaw, Wells, Havelock Ellis, Freud, Marx and D. H. Lawrence in the same breath. Marriage did not feature in her progressive view of the world, so, when she tired of Tharp, she left her family and turned to Vicky with whom, she told Calder Marshall, she was ‘Trying the Modern Experiment’.
Dylan found Pamela’s descriptions hilarious. He already had a low opinion of the quality of contributions to Poets’ Corner, which he described as the sort of thing to be expected from ‘agèd virgin(s)’. He claimed he had muttered the magic names ‘Runia Tharp’ so often that it was ‘enough to Runia’. Resorting to satire, he warned Pamela of Mrs Murgatroyd Martin who would tell her of Pater and Pankhurst and the joys of morris dancing and poetry teas. As for Gascoyne, he was ‘raving mad’, with ‘
more maggots in his brain’ than Dylan himself.
That did not stop Dylan sending Neuburg another poem, ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’, which was published in the Sunday Referee’s Poets’ Corner on 29 October, a couple of days after his nineteenth birthday. The same issue brought even more exciting news for Pamela. Despite never having written more than thirty proper poems in her life (or so she told Dylan), she won an award for submitting the paper’s best work over the past six months. Her prize was the opportunity to have a book of her poems published under the auspices of the Sunday Referee. Although the project dwindled in concept (a book designated for the Victor Gollancz imprint was later self-published), Pamela was plunged into a round of parties, including one given in her honour by Neuburg and Runia Tharp.
Back in Wales, he was having trouble sleeping. One night, he walked what he claimed were three miles (more like one mile) from Blaencwm into Llanstephan to buy some cigarettes. The combination of insomnia and the countryside had a strange effect. Looking up at the vast starry sky, he felt, ‘It was as if the night were crying, crying out the terrible explanation of itself. On all sides of me, under my feet, above my head, the symbols moved, all waiting in vain to be translated. The trees that night were like prophets’ fingers.’ Although out of love with this part of Carmarthenshire, he still found it stimulating enough to want to convey its elemental qualities in a series of short stories, one of which, ‘Uncommon Genesis’ (later known as ‘The Mouse and the Woman’), he was trying to finish in November.
Home in Cwmdonkin Drive, his wakefulness did at least allow him to turn over passages of poetry in his mind. Sometimes he would lie in a bath, smoking a Woodbine, and chanting aloud every poem that interested him. ‘The neighbours must know your poems by heart,’ he told Pamela; ‘they certainly know my own, and bound to be acquainted with many passages of Macbeth, Death’s Jester, and the Prophetic Books. I often think that baths were built for drowsy poets to lie in and there intone aloud amid the steam and boiling ripples.’ (Death’s Jester was actually Death’s Jest-Book, the Elizabethan-style play written in the nineteenth century by Thomas Beddoes, whom Dylan referred to as ‘my great Beddoes’.)
After a hot summer, the weather had turned very cold and, when he worked, he huddled round a stove in his back upstairs room, where the wall was hung with his occasional dabblings in paint. These showed pictorial evidence of his current obsessions – a large religio-surrealist pastel which he described as the ‘Two Brothers of Death’ – a syphilitic Christ and green-bearded Moses, both the colour of figs and both perched on a horizontal ladder of moons.
If he had nothing else to do, he would escape to the mists and heather of Gower, which he told Pamela, while promising to take her there one day, was ‘as beautiful as anywhere’. Sometimes he walked beyond Newton to Caswell where the Tricks had their bungalow or he went on to Kittle where the beer and sandwiches in the Beaufort Arms were a draw. Near to this pub was an old limestone quarry whose deathly connotations loom in his poem ‘See, says the lime, my wicked milks/I put round ribs that packed their heart’ and in his famous ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ with it bleak lines
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.
At other times he took the bus to Rhossili, the furthest point on the peninsula. The four mile arc of the bay – the ‘wildest, bleakest, barrennest’ bay he knew – always appealed to him. In his lugubrious state he would make for the Worm, a desolate headland set a little off the shore. He liked the way the grass on the rock made a special sucking noise under his feet and gave off an odour like ‘rabbits’ fur after rain’ – ‘the most grisly smell in the world’. On this ‘very promontory of depression’, with seagulls swirling overhead and rats scurrying around him, he would read and write, imagining himself in a scene from Edgar Allen Poe. Once while reading, he fell asleep and the tide came in, trapping him from the shore. He was forced to stay on the Worm from dusk to midnight, with the rats increasingly menacing. After the water receded, he had an eighteen-mile walk home – an experience similar to that he recorded in ‘Who Do You Wish Was With Us?’ (In the story, his companion Raymond Price was based on Trevor Hughes, whose mourning for his dead brother provided the context for the question in the title.)
By contrast with Gower, Swansea was ‘a dingy hell, and my mother a vulgar humbug’, Dylan told Pamela. His father’s illness did not help: D.J. was at home, apparently cured (though he did need further treatment), but ‘exceedingly despondent’. Dylan’s spirits were kept up by further commitment for the Little Theatre, a production of Rodney Ackland’s Strange Orchestra, and rehearsals for William Congreve’s Way of the World, which was being taken on a tour of nearby mining villages. Dylan complained about being cast in the effeminate role of Sir Wilfull Witwoud in the latter, an observation which led him to fulminate against the increasing openness of homosexuals. Having recently seen a girlish boy cavorting with a drunken black man, he claimed that this was the only vice that revolted him; even incest was preferable. His attitudes reflected a Welsh provincial upbringing, perhaps even alluding unconsciously to an incestuous dimension to his relationship with Nancy. When he left for London, he became more relaxed about homosexuals, who featured among his drinking companions, though he never entirely gave up his prejudice.
On 11 November he managed to sleep for the first time in a month. Since it was Armistice Day, he sounded off to Pamela about the Great War and the iniquity of the ‘legion of old buffers’ and of the armaments industry behind it. Using his favoured terminology of the moment, he ranted, ‘What was Christ in us was stuck with a bayonet to the sky, and what was Judas we sheltered, rewarding, at the end, with thirty hanks of flesh. Civilisation is a murderer.’ Donning a politicised hat he normally eschewed, he claimed that Revolution was the only solution to an outgrown and decaying system. ‘The day will come when the old Dis-Order changeth,’ he promised. Despite his attacks on capitalism, however, his rhetoric would not have gone down well in Marxist circles, for it was dominated by a fuzzy anarchistic individualism that maintained, ‘Everything is wrong that forbids the freedom of the individual.’ And included among his list of ‘committees of prohibitors’ were governments, newspapers, churches (‘because they standardize our gods’) and even poets when they look at the past rather than ‘the huge, electric promise of the future’.
This harangue reflected part of his complex Trick-influenced view of the world. Dylan viscerally loathed any bullying force that snuffed out God-given sparks of goodness, light and individuality. But occasionally he indulged in Welsh hwyl. In this case, his real feelings were masked by the provincial boy waving evidence of his political virility before his London girlfriend.
By the year’s end a meeting with Pamela was imminent. Dylan told her there was nothing – not even ‘the personal delivery of Miss Garbo in a tin box’ – he would have liked better than to spend the holiday season with her. But his father remained unwell, and was due back at the London hospital in early January. So Dylan was condemned to Christmas with his family, a group supplemented by Nancy, Haydn and Uncle Arthur. It was not a prospect that filled him with pleasure. ‘Great fun will be had by all,’ he told Pamela. ‘Will it, hell! We’ll eat too much, I suppose, read the newspapers, sleep, and crack nuts. There will be no Yuletide festivity about it.’ It was very different from the warm, busy image summoned by his later, sentimentalised story ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’.
His bleak mood was reflected in a short poem, ‘This bread I break’ that he wrote on Christmas Eve. This was one of his verses about transformation – about man turning the oat and the grape into bread and wine. But a twist of perspective changed these staples into the flesh and blood of Christ, a reading that became clearer in a draft which had the last line as ‘God’s bread you break, you drain His cup’, and in a title Dylan gave this draft, ‘Breakfast before execution’.
Despite th
e cold gloomy weather, the festivities passed agreeably enough. After lunch, washed down with cheap port, Dylan settled down in mellow mood to read the book he had been given by one of his uncles, a complete volume of William Blake, including his letters. He received several other good presents, including a cigarette case from Haydn, a smart black hat from his mother (who had tired of his increasingly floppy trilby), and a number of additional books, including the Koran from Tom Warner and an anthology of Recent Poetry 1923–1933 (containing contributions from both Pamela and David Gascoyne) from Bert Trick.
Indicative of his personal inclinations at the time, Dylan gave himself a couple of pamphlets by James Joyce. Disappointingly, Pamela’s present was fifty Player’s cigarettes (which did not go far – he was a forty a day man), but this was her thoughtful response to his complaints about having to roll his own with Sailors’ Plug Tobacco. His gift to her was a volume of poems by Robert Graves, one of the ‘heroes’ of his Grammar School magazine article on ‘Modern Poetry’ who had ‘built towers of beauty upon the ashes of their lives’. At some stage (the date is unclear), he even wrote to Graves. Dylan’s original letter is lost, but Graves, no great enthusiast for Thomas’s subsequent output, recalled much later, ‘I wrote back that they were irreproachable, but that he would eventually learn to dislike them … Even experts would have been deceived by the virtuosity of Dylan Thomas’s conventional, and wholly artificial, early poems.’
Dylan Thomas: A New Life Page 13