Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  Trick and his colleagues failed in their efforts to ban the rally from going ahead in the Plaza cinema, the largest in Wales with 3,500 seats. Surrounded by Blackshirts and swastika regalia, Mosley unleashed a tirade against the Jews and their influence in society. When he said he would take written questions, the first out of the hat came from the Reverend Leon Atkin, who said he had worked for a Jew for a long time and wondered if he should change his employer. Mosley answered affirmatively, adding that he would be certain to find a more reliable Gentile. When Atkin rose to his feet in clerical garb, pandemonium broke out and the meeting had to be abandoned. Dylan claimed to Pamela that he was thrown down the stairs, though there is no corroborating evidence. He added that he had left the Socialist party and joined the Communists, but again this seems to have been in his head. He did however follow up his earlier letter to the Swansea and West Wales Guardian with another which inveighed, even more forthrightly, against ‘the obscene hypocrisy of those war-mongers and slave-drivers who venerate [Christ’s] name and void their contagious rheum upon the first principle of His gospel’.

  He tried to explain his political views to Pamela, but they were incoherent. In the same paragraph he could call for an intellectual, rather than a bloody, revolution, and also say that if constitutional government were unable to achieve this, property should be taken by force. What he really wanted was what he called ‘Functional Anarchy’, but this was an adolescent fantasy of freedom – of playing truant from his schoolmaster father and avoiding any orders. Typically, at the same time as he was indulging this political pipe-dream he was preparing to visit St Helen’s ground to watch Glamorgan play a county cricket match. Throughout his life he loved to sit on the boundary of a cricket ground, drinking and chatting, with the sound of willow against leather in the distance. He even played the odd game himself, bowling thirty-four overs in one game in late July, conceding only sixty runs, and taking three wickets.

  The first thing he did on his return to London in mid-August was accompany Pamela to a Promenade concert – either a very loving gesture or hugely hypocritical, given his roasting of her only a few months earlier for enjoying this musical institution. The focus of their social activity now shifted from the Cock in Clapham to the Six Bells across the river Thames in Chelsea where Dylan could be closer to his new literary friends. Despite his still very limited output, he had been approached by John Lehmann for some contribution for The Year’s Poetry, another anthology, and by Geoffrey Grigson, who asked him (and several other poets) to answer a questionnaire about his writing.

  His replies provided the latest update on his ideas about his craft. He stressed the hard work, both physical and mental: ‘Poetry is the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision that depends, in its intensity, on the labour put into the creation of the poetry.’ His own output was the record of his ‘individual struggle from darkness towards some measure of light’. He reiterated Eliot’s observation about narrative, in the sense of meaning, satisfying one habit of the reader, adding his own gloss: ‘Let the narrative take that one logical habit of the reader along with its movement, and the essence of the poem will do its work on him.’ Asked if he had been influenced by Freud, he answered unconvincingly in the affirmative, for reasons roughly in keeping with his general thesis. Like Freud, he argued, his job as a poet was to expose what was hidden and to make clean. To another question about his politics, he waffled, ‘I take my stand with any revolutionary body that asserts it to be the right of all men to share, equally and impartially, every production of man and from the sources of production at man’s disposal, for only through such an essentially revolutionary body can there be the possibility of a communal art.’

  On the last Sunday of the month, Dylan spent half the day with Pamela before departing on his own to have tea, which seems to have meant a long drinking session, with Grigson at his open house in Hampstead. He did not return until after one o’clock the next morning, which annoyed her. Grigson had a full-time job as literary editor of the Morning Post, the sale of review copies from which helped subsidise his own venture, New Verse. As a result, he had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances whom Dylan enjoyed meeting. Among them were Norman Cameron, who had been at Oxford with Grigson, and T. S. Eliot, though, initially at least, Eliot and Dylan did not hit it off. Dylan complained that Eliot treated him as ‘as if I were “from pit-boy to poet”!’

  Slight cracks in his relationship with Pamela were appearing. Despite having been introduced to Hughes (with whom she established a watch committee to prevent their mutual friend from drinking too much), she felt Dylan kept his friends apart. She found it ‘wounding’ if, when they were both strolling down the King’s Road, he saw someone he knew, usually a poet, and, without asking her to join him, crossed the road for a chat. She was probably not fully aware of his worries about money. In Grigson, he thought he had found someone he could tap for occasional loans. This was the gist of a letter he penned to the New Verse editor the day after his ‘tea’ party – the first of many such plaintive requests for money he was to send to various potential patrons over the next two decades.

  This did not mean he had given up on Pamela. Determined that she should meet his family, he invited her, a couple of weekends later, to Laleham, but she found his sister and brother-in-law obsessively conventional. She was happier when, at the end of the following week (Dylan’s fifth in London), he went home to Wales and, since she was due some holiday, she accompanied him, taking her mother as chaperone.

  The Hansford Johnsons stayed at the Mermaid hotel in the Mumbles, from where Pamela and Dylan made sorties into Gower (there are photographs of the young lovers cavorting in Caswell Bay) and to Cwmdonkin Drive for meals with the Thomases. Pamela thought D.J. charming, but, like her mother, found Florrie’s interminable chatter wearying. (On this matter she had been warned by Dylan, but he did add that his mother was at least kind.) Any free moment Pamela worked on a novel, originally called Nursery Rhyme, but at Dylan’s suggestion, renamed, more suggestively, This Bed Thy Centre (from John Donne’s ‘The Sun Rising’). She would probably have been better at home, because it rained a lot and there was nothing relaxing about the combination of her work and Dylan’s moody behaviour. At one stage she collapsed from nervous exhaustion and had to consult a doctor in the Uplands.

  Dylan was now thinking of moving permanently to London. Before leaving, he agreed to accompany Glyn Jones on a pilgrimage to Aberystwyth where they both wanted to see one of their favourite authors, Caradoc Evans, the ‘best hated man in Wales’. Originally from near Llandysul, home of Dylan’s great-uncle, Gwilym Marles, the Welsh-speaking Evans had grown up in Cardiganshire, where he had enraged the locals with his savage satires on chapel and peasant life. His recollections of making his way as a journalist in London, where his literary friends included fellow Welshman Arthur Machen, were particularly useful to Dylan at this stage.

  Evans’s wife, the prolific novelist Oliver Sandys (also known as Countess Barcynska from her first marriage) left a conventional account of Dylan’s visit. Her maid announced the two young men: ‘One of them is a poet, or says he is – hopes he is.’ Dylan unravelled some typewritten notes and began reading his poems in his usual mellifluous voice. But both Dylan and Jones were more interested in talking to Evans about short stories than poetry. They made a tour of local pubs with their idol, ‘drinking to the eternal damnation of the Almighty & the soon-to-be-hoped-for destruction of the tin Bethels’. Back at their hotel Jones told Dylan about Dr William Price, the eccentric Chartist who liked to stand naked on a South Wales hilltop, chanting Druidical rites. In 1883, when in his eighties, Price fathered an illegitimate son called Jesus Christ who died in infancy. Price burnt the infant’s body, leading him to be charged with manslaughter. However he was acquitted, thus legitimising the rite and practice of cremation. Dylan was so fascinated that his cigarette burnt several holes in his sheet. However the details stuck, appearing as
a central motif in his scandalous story ‘The Burning Baby’ which strayed deep into Caradoc Evans territory in its depiction of a preacher indulging in incest with his daughter. Dylan also drew on his Carmarthenshire experience in his detail of the girl’s brother bringing a dead rabbit into his house. Showing how Dylan’s ideas shuffled round his imagination, the story also included a sow-faced woman called Llareggub (again) who sexually initiated the girl’s brother – the first published instance of the name of the town in Under Milk Wood.

  Dylan’s journey to Aberystwyth in October was the furthest he had ventured into rural Wales. Having enjoyed the experience, he wanted to repeat it, and the following year accepted a commission (which he did not fulfil) to write a travel book about his country. Contrary to popular misconception, Wales remained a focus for his literary endeavours. Still toying with his novel about the Jarvis valley, Dylan was influenced, so Glyn Jones recalled, by Caradoc Evans, T. F. Powys and Thomas Hardy and wanted to make South Wales like Hardy’s Wessex.

  Dylan’s Celtic heritage is less obvious in his poetry. In May he had told a prospective editor that his poem ‘I dreamed my genesis’ was based on Welsh rhythms. But critics who argue Dylan’s familiarity with Welsh prosodic devices such as the cynghanedd, with its strict syllable count and internal rhythms, are often disappointed. Dylan was promiscuous in his borrowings, and his use of Welsh metres were often mediated through English writers such as Gerard Manley Hopkins and Wilfred Owen. His attitude to Welsh (and Irish) verse is better described in one of the reviewing jobs he was beginning to pick up in London. He argued in Adelphi in September that ‘the true future of English poetry, poetry that can be pronounced and read aloud, that comes to life out of the red heart through the brain, lies in the Celtic countries’, with their tradition of ballads and folk-songs, and their intellectual and artistic traditions unburdened by the dictates of a numb university-educated elite. In other words, English verse needed an injection of Celtic energy.

  However Dylan needed to earn a living and, as an English-speaker, that meant working in London, even if he intended to draw on his Celtic background. He was ambitious, as Glyn Jones realised on an early visit to Cwmdonkin Drive. Dylan had just returned from London and was telling his mother about eminent literary figures he had met – Eliot and so on. When she reminded him he had also encountered the humorist and later MP, A. P. Herbert, he spat out dismissively, ‘Oh, he’s nobody’ – a curious comment, since Dylan enjoyed most people’s company, but it was indicative of his desire to ingratiate himself with certain sections of the establishment.

  That did not mean he had to be fawning. Reviewing in New Verse in December, he tore into Stephen Spender’s extended epic ‘Vienna’, repeating his nostrums about poetry having to come before politics or any such other consideration, and suggesting that his fellow poet, who had encouraged him personally, had failed to make either good verse or good propaganda. Dylan called ‘Vienna’ ‘a bad poem; the images are unoriginal singly, and ambiguous, often meaningless, collectively,’ though he never made it clear if he understood much about the event Spender was writing about – the bloody Dolfuss putsch in Vienna which left hundreds of workers dead. Bert Trick claimed that, in the same issue of New Verse, Dylan’s ‘My world is pyramid’ contained his real attitude to events in Austria, particularly the stanza:

  My world is cypress, and an English valley.

  I piece my flesh that rattled on the yards

  Red in an Austrian volley.

  I hear, through dead men’s drums, the riddled lads,

  Strewing their bowels from a hill of bones,

  Cry Eloi to the guns.

  (This was the final version of the poem containing Trick’s daughter’s comment: ‘What colour is glory?’) The grocer may well have been right, and Dylan was giving an object lesson in the reality he had tried to convey to Glyn Jones earlier in the year: ‘And as for the Workers! People have been trying to write to them for years. And they still don’t give a damn. The trouble is that in attempting to write for the workers one generally writes down. The thing to do is to bring the workers up to what one is writing.’

  Before leaving Swansea, he agreed to address a genteel literary club, known as the John O’London’s Society, after the weekly magazine of that name. The society was run by a Mrs Bates from a room over her husband’s ironmongery shop near Singleton Park. When a member, Leslie Mewis, told Mrs Bates he had met Dylan Thomas at Trick’s, she insisted that the young poet, who was beginning to make a name for himself, should address the members. Against the advice of Trick, who sensed disaster, an invitation was despatched, and Dylan offered to talk on ‘Obscenity in English Literature’. According to Mewis, Dylan initially kept to his thesis, arguing that the most obscene aspect of English literature was its triviality. But he got carried away by the prospect of shocking his mainly female audience (Dylan described them as middle-aged virgins), and launched into a tirade of filth and bad taste. In Dylan’s account, having been introduced as a ‘Young Revolutionary’ he preached the Communist gospel of free love, ending his talk with the rallying cry, ‘Let Copulation Thrive.’ Mewis recalled that, as a bemused audience drifted away, Dylan could be heard swearing profusely.

  Dylan enjoyed shocking in the manner of his new friend Caradoc Evans. ‘The more I see of Wales,’ he told Pamela, ‘the more I think it’s a land entirely peopled by perverts. I don’t exclude myself, who obtain a high & soulful pleasure from telling women, old enough to be my mother, why they dream of two-headed warthogs in a field of semen.’

  Poet, revolutionary or buffoon: there was no doubt what was the most important to Dylan. The final spur to his moving to London was his dissatisfaction with the way Neuburg was dealing with his collection of poems. As with Pamela’s book, trade publishers had been mooted but failed to materialise. Dylan managed to retrieve his selection of twenty poems and send them to Eliot at Faber & Faber. Eliot’s secretary sent an express letter to Cwmdonkin Drive, asking Dylan to do nothing until the great man had made up his mind. But Eliot delayed just long enough to allow Neuburg to find the resources and a publisher to bring out the book, as originally intended, under the auspices of the Sunday Referee.

  Dylan had found someone to live with in London – Fred Janes, a mercurial occasional member of the Kardomah crowd who, having discovered abstract art in Cork Street galleries, had dropped out of his old-fashioned course at the Royal Academy Schools and was hoping to launch his professional career. Another Swansea painter, Dylan’s childhood friend Mervyn Levy, was at the more adventurous Royal College of Art. He lived at the top of a student hostel in 5 Redcliffe Street, where the lower reaches of Chelsea merge into Fulham. Dylan and Janes managed to rent one room, with a bathroom, on the floor beneath him.

  In early November Janes’s greengrocer father drove the two young men to the capital. Weighed down with an oversize suitcase, Dylan wore his trademark pork-pie hat and a vast check overcoat that blew like a marquee over his slight frame. From somewhere he and Janes acquired a couple of camp-beds, a table and a gas oven. By chance, only the previous week, the Hansford Johnsons had moved across the river from Clapham to a new flat in Chelsea. Since some of their furniture was in storage, Dylan asked Pamela if there was anything he could borrow. Still enraptured by ‘darling Dylan’, she provided an iron bedstead (which saw service as a wardrobe – tipped up, with a curtain covering its outward-facing castors), a few chairs (one of which became Janes’s easel) and a dozen yellow dusters. Having helped the two Welshmen settle into this seedy room on 13 November, she was upset not to hear from Dylan for four days. He then sent ‘an entirely fogged note’ which convinced her he was no longer interested in their relationship. Janes and Trevor Hughes tried to reassure her that this was not so and that Dylan was ill. She went round to Redcliffe Street again, and found Dylan indeed in bed, and very bad-tempered. He had been drinking heavily (though this might not have been immediately obvious to Pamela): he admitted to Glyn Jones the following month that alcohol had
become ‘a little too close and heavy a friend for some time now’ and, as a result, he had not been eating much.

  He made life difficult for Pamela over the following month. The day after her visit, he had recovered enough to tell her that the reason for his lack of communication was that he wanted to marry her and was arranging to do so in three weeks. She was completing the final stages of her novel (fast work: she had only started in September). He offered to take it away to read, but did not return it, so she had to send her mother round to retrieve her text, which he despatched the following day, without a note. Only after she had handed her book in to her agent did he write – to say that drink had won, which, as she confided to her diary ‘upset me plenty but surprised me little’.