The background to this shadow play was the forthcoming publication of Dylan’s book, and his shrewd notion that, in order to promote it, he needed to be seen and recognised as a writer of verse. That meant continuing to seek out, drink with, and develop his poet’s persona in the company of his literary peers. Having been spurred by Eliot’s interest, Neuburg arranged for Dylan’s poems to be published by the Parton Press which operated out of the back of a bookshop in Holborn.
Situated on the outer edges of the main publishing area of Bloomsbury, this was a centre for fringe literary activity. Close to where Harold and Hilda Monro’s Poetry Bookshop had once been, two other local bookshops now operated as occasional publishers. One was the Blue Moon Bookshop, in Red Lion Street, between Holborn and Theobald’s Road. It was owned by Charles Lahr, a resolute bearded anarchist of German Jewish origin, whose dabblings in publishing had brought him the friendship of D. H. Lawrence, as well as T. F. Powys and Rhys Davies. Dylan later became firm friends with several Blue Moon writers including Keidrych Rhys, Oswell Blakeston, Ruthven Todd and John Gawsworth.
The other was the Parton Bookshop, run by David Archer, the effete left-leaning scion of a Wiltshire landowner. Situated on the ground floor of number 2 Parton Street, a run-down Georgian alley (since built over by the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre) between Southampton Row and Red Lion Square, this provided a refuge and often a bed for aspiring young writers, such as George Barker, David Gascoyne and Maurice Carpenter. In 1934 it also gave space to Out of Bounds, the revolutionary anti-public school movement headed by Winston Churchill’s shabbily dressed nephew, Esmond Romilly.
Upstairs was the headquarters of the Promethean Society, founded four years earlier following an appeal, headed ‘The Revolt of Youth’, in the magazine Everyman, calling for opponents of ‘the humbug and hypocrisy, the muddle and inertia that everywhere surrounds us today’. Taking their cue from D. H. Lawrence, the Prometheans emphasised sexual as much as political revolution. They published another leftist literary magazine, Twentieth Century, where one of the assistants was Desmond Hawkins, the aspiring poet whom Dylan had met earlier in the year at Janet Adam Smith’s.
The atmosphere in the Parton Bookshop was leisurely, idealistic and camp. The stock was interesting enough to attract regular customers such as Colonel T. E. Lawrence. However the shelves and even the pavement were strewn with copies of the Daily Worker and other left-wing journals. Archer (described by Barker as a cross between Proust’s Robert de Saint-Loup and P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster) was totally unbusinesslike. He frequently shut up shop and walked across the road to Meg’s Café, the social centre for aspiring artists and revolutionaries in the vicinity. His business partner was nominally his friend David Abercrombie, son of the Georgian poet Lascelles Abercrombie. (They had been to Russia together in 1931.) But in 1934 David Abercrombie started lecturing at the London School of Economics. His interest in the shop devolved on his brother Ralph who lived above Meg’s Café with Roger Roughton, a languid teenage writer who later committed suicide in Dublin.
In discussing how Dylan came to be published by this uncommercial outfit, Runia Tharp told a Gothic tale about walking home with Neuburg one foggy evening and seeing an arc of light which drew them to the Parton Bookshop. Asked if Dylan Thomas had ever ventured there, Archer replied, distractedly, ‘It is known to all poets.’ However, ever generous in his literary patronage, he agreed to put up £20 to publish Dylan’s collection, while Mark Goulden, editor of the Sunday Referee, promised a further £30.
Over the summer Dylan had been quietly casting through his four notebooks before deciding on what were now to be eighteen poems for his collection. From this material, mainly from the fourth notebook, he chose (and where necessary improved) twelve poems, plus one earlier one, and he wrote a further five between ‘I dreamed my genesis’ in May and ‘When, like a running grave’ in October. The resulting package remains exciting – a concentrated young man’s attempt to refashion the lyrical, hierophantic traditions of his craft in the contemporary idiom of modern poetry. His Welshness played its part, providing not only a vitality but also an alternative vantage point from which to spy out his assault on the metropolitan cultural redoubt.
Personal contact was a natural part of his game plan. His circle of London literary friends, which had started with the old-fashioned Middleton Murry, Rees and Orage, and had grown with Neuburg’s idiosyncratic Creative Circle and Grigson’s wide company of contributors to New Verse, now expanded to include a more unorthodox group of working writers. Acquaintances from these often overlapping groups regularly filtered into the West End where they drank with Dylan in the Fitzroy and other public houses around Charlotte Street.
Dylan’s drinking habits in London have become mythologised, though the broad outlines are simple enough. At this stage one would most likely find him in either the rowdy Fitzroy or the quieter, better upholstered Wheatsheaf, two pubs in Fitzrovia, a working-class area, full of European immigrants, on the other (west) side of the Tottenham Court Road from literary Bloomsbury. Closing time in these two establishments was (according to the licensing laws of the borough of Holborn) 10.30 p.m. So when the clocks approached this hour, drinkers often made a dash south to the rougher Marquess of Granby in Rathbone Place or the Highlander in Dean Street which, being under different jurisdictions, were allowed to stay open until eleven.
Not liking the run-down drinking spots around where he lived, Dylan gravitated naturally to the Fitzroy and Wheatsheaf. These two pubs still attracted some older artists, such as Augustus John and Percy Wyndham Lewis, both of whom had once had studios in the area. They also provided starting points for sorties to eating places ranging from Mrs Buhler’s café at the top of Rathbone Place to exotic foreign-owned restaurants such as Schmidt’s and Bertorelli’s, or, if someone else was paying, Rudolf Stulik’s Eiffel Tower, with its first-floor room decorated by Wyndham Lewis.
Two regulars were the ageing good-time girls, the artist Nina Hamnett and ‘artist’s model’ Betty May. Both had written autobiographies detailing their scandal-ridden lives. Hamnett’s was Laughing Torso, the book which had brought Dylan a libel threat at the Evening Post three years earlier. The title came from her nude bust sculpted by her one-time lover Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, about which she told the writer Ruthven Todd, ‘You know me, m’dear – I’m the one in the V&A with me left tit knocked off.’ Like Augustus John, she had been born in Tenby, another English-orientated town on the South Wales coast, and had studied at the Slade. A fine draughtswoman, she now hung around the Fitzroy cadging drinks, often from immature provincial youths told to look her up by fathers who had known her in better days. Her preference was for rougher trade, particularly sailors, ‘because they leave in the morning’. Richard Aldington referred to ‘poor Nina’ as ‘a curious mixture of slut and whore, but a very decent chap’.
The petite Betty May brought to Fitzrovia the panache of Paris where she had danced in a café chansant and lived with the leader of an Apache gang. (Tiger Woman, the title of her autobiography, came from the nickname she gained after fighting off a knife attack from a woman who thought she was this French thug’s rightful girlfriend.) After turning her back on prostitution, she married Raoul Loveday, an Oxford undergraduate who was an acolyte of Aleister Crowley. When they were both visiting Crowley’s abbey in Sicily, Loveday died in mysterious circumstances – she thought because he had been forced to drink the blood of a sacrificed cat. (The story recalls Victor Neuburg who, as part of an occult initiation ritual, had suffered the indignity of being turned into a camel by his homosexual lover, Crowley.) Hamnett had told Loveday’s story in Laughing Torso, which resulted in Crowley unsuccessfully suing her for libel.
Although many years Betty May’s junior, Dylan had hopes of bedding this still attractive woman, boasting to Trick in December that he was going to ghost an article on her behalf for the News of the World, and his payment would not be monetary. Apart from obvious fellow poets of his own age, he also cl
aimed to have met the sculptor Henry Moore (possibly through Vera Phillips who was studying interior design under him at Chelsea Polytechnic), as well as the anti-fascist poet Edwin Muir and his wife Willa, and Wyndham Lewis, who were all part of Grigson’s circle.
Finding his level in this world, while waiting expectantly for his book, proved distracting for Dylan. He was forced to adapt his pose slightly: no longer was he the leading light in a small group of provincial aesthetes; posing as Keats or Wilde was hardly original in London. Dylan found that one way of keeping his new friends amused was playing the professional Welshman. He joked to Grigson how in Carmarthenshire he had lived on carrots, and then adding that this was not quite true: he had had onions as well. But he found Londoners generally had little interest in Wales. To them it was an industrial wasteland, or else, as he once said to Pamela, ‘I, to you, move in a fabulous, Celtic land, surrounded by castles, tall black hats, the ghosts of accents, and eternal Eisteddfodau.’ So he learnt to grab his audiences’ attention with different ruses. His powers of mimicry allowed him to conduct elaborate conversations in the guise of characters such as an Indian intellectual or an Austrian professor. His regional accents were so true that he once convinced a visitor from Yorkshire that they had lived in the same road in Bradford. But these thespian tricks complemented his greatest social asset which was his ability to spin out a tale. He did not go in for side-splitting punch-lines, but his skill in adopting the tones and sending up the attitudes of the motley characters in his elaborate shaggy-dog stories kept everyone riveted. His warm, often inspired, generally theatrical delivery was the most obvious aspect of his Welshness.
Gradually Grigson noticed Dylan becoming more confident as his persona evolved from literary fop to Toughish Boy or the Boy with a Load of Beer. In those first few weeks in his new digs, he appeared to do little writing, telling Trick that it was impossible to concentrate or even find anywhere to work in his cramped living space, where any piece of paper was immediately liable to be covered in egg and mashed potato. One solution, he admitted, might be for someone to do the washing up. At least he earned a small amount of money from reviewing for Bookmen and New Verse. And that small income enabled him to buy the necessary rounds and keep up his job of self-promotion in the Fitzroy.
It was a lifestyle he enjoyed. On 20 December he went round to Pamela’s, presumably to give her a copy of his book which had been published two days earlier in an edition of 500, though only half that number were bound and finished (the remainder had to wait until 1936). But he did not make himself welcome. His behaviour was so obnoxiously self-centred that her diary mentioned nothing of his triumph, only: ‘Shopping in morning. Dylan came round in afternoon and boasted of all his rather revolting Bloomsbury fun and games.’
A couple of days later Dylan returned home for Christmas, without saying goodbye to her. In Swansea he parked with Tom Warner fifty copies of 18 Poems, which, from time to time, he would ask him to send out to designated recipients. On new year’s eve Pamela thought he was being romantic when the telephone rang and she heard some Dylan-like noises, before being cut off. She later learnt that this had not been Dylan, but someone else playing a cruel joke. Nevertheless she had begun to rumble Dylan’s way of promoting himself. At the end of her diary she scribbled a ‘Song for DT’, which included the damning verses:
Princess, as you can see, my aim
Has been to lift myself to fame
No more I’ll need to toil and moil
For I’ve been thrown out of the Café Royal …
I never trouble now to write,
For I have set the town alight.
And who would waste the midnight oil
When they’ve been thrown out of the Café Royal.
NINE
THE BLINDEST BIT
One of Dylan’s last acts of self-advertisement before leaving for Swansea was to send an inscribed copy of 18 Poems to the well connected but as yet unfulfilled critic and editor, Cyril Connolly. The gesture was an instant success: as soon as he read the first line of the book – ‘I see the boys of summer in their ruin’ – Connolly was ‘completely ensnared …: it was so utterly unlike the hearty hopeful group therapy to which I had grown accustomed & I made haste to meet its engaging author.’ On his return to London, this new young literary sensation from Wales was invited to visit Connolly and his American wife Jean, who together took him for drinks with their friends, the novelist Anthony Powell and his wife Lady Violet at their flat in Great Ormond Street. These two Old Etonian writers were not Dylan’s usual Fitzrovia cronies; they belonged to a more moneyed literary-cum-social set. The Welshman made enough of an impression to be asked back to a formal dinner with the Connollys.
On this next occasion, things turned out differently for Dylan. He must have had wind of who was coming and taken fright. The other guests were the Powells, up-and-coming Roman Catholic novelist Evelyn Waugh, travel writer Robert Byron, Bloomsbury acoloyte and Sunday Times columnist Desmond MacCarthy and several ‘ladies representing fashion rather than literature’. Dylan was never averse to advancing his interests but he did not like the sense of being paraded. As when he failed to turn up to meet the municipal worthy at Trick’s house, he proved markedly reluctant to make his way to the Connollys’ flat above a shop in the King’s Road at the accepted time. He spent the early part of the evening in a nearby bar. By the time his friend Norman Cameron had plucked him from there and parked him at the Connollys’ door, Dylan was not only drunk but late.
He immediately made his mark, but not as expected. There was a hush in the noisy room when Dylan drawled in answer to his host’s enquiry as to what he wanted to drink, ‘Anything that goes down my throat.’ He joined conversation with the elderly Desmond MacCarthy about Swinburne, but did not seem to know that the latter’s novel Lesbia Brandon dealt with flagellation. Connolly recalled MacCarthy ‘revert[ing] to the schoolboy language which cuts through age and class’ and saying, ‘ “Yes, he likes swishing.” After a long silence, a wide-eyed Dylan replied, “Did you say swishing? Jesus Christ.” ’
Geoffrey Grigson gave a second-hand version of this encounter suggesting MacCarthy felt affronted. But this reflected his own later antipathy towards Dylan. Waugh was not aware of any rudeness; only that MacCarthy had been slightly embarrassed as he ‘did not like talking smut to a man of a different age & class’. According to Connolly, it was Waugh who was discomfited, the novelist having to leave early because he saw so much of his own youthful behaviour and appearance in the Welshman. (And it is true that Dylan, when he filled out some fifteen years later, was to look very similar to both Waugh and Connolly.) Dylan must have felt uncomfortable too, because he did not mention this dinner, even dismissively, in any letter. He seems to have accepted it as part of the learning process of making one’s way in the capital. He never liked formal grand gatherings, but this one alerted him to the wide, perhaps irreconcilable gulf between Swansea suburbia and London society. From then on his relations with Connolly and company tended to be restricted to professional matters, though he did join Connolly and David Gascoyne on a day trip to Selsey where they had some sport pelting pebbles at bottles placed in the sand to represent such respected literary figures as John Lehmann, Michael Roberts, Edith Sitwell and Virginia Woolf.
The year 1935 had started promisingly for Dylan in Swansea with his old editor J. D. Williams using his regular diary column in the South Wales Evening Post to puff his first book. Unable to resist an avuncular swipe against modernist poets, Williams admitted his recent faux pas in describing Dylan (apparently to his face) as one of the T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Auden school. Confident of his own status, Dylan had retorted, ‘Eliot! Pound! Auden! They are back numbers in the poetical world.’ This was a robust comment to set beside his riposte in an interview, obviously given when still in London and published in the Sunday Referee under the headline ‘Our Literary “Gangsters”: Young Poet Attacks Modern Writers’: ‘Most writers today move about in gangs. They haven
’t the strength to stand and fight as individuals. But even as “gangsters” their machine guns are full, not of bullets, but of dried peas.’ By being himself, Dylan was positioning himself as the angry young man avant le mot of English letters.
Publication of 18 Poems stimulated a modest debate in the Swansea Guardian, albeit one conducted largely by his friends. Bert Trick downplayed the importance of his young protégé’s politics: ‘one knows instinctively his politics are correct, but they hover like a faint perfume above the lines of his poetry.’ John Jennings praised Dylan’s use of words and their ability to touch the subconscious: Dylan’s method was ‘to get hold of one of the violin strings of a man’s inward being and twang it till it hurts.’ However Trevor Hughes, writing from Harrow, felt it was too early to make extravagant comparisons with the great poets. His carping attitude – the result, it soon became clear, of professional and sexual jealousy – sparked a quick rebuttal from Trick who claimed it was perfectly reasonable to talk about Dylan’s descent from Webster, Beddoes and Blake. Dylan, he said extravagantly, had ‘snatched today from the procession of time, and made it eternal’.
Meanwhile J. D. Williams chipped in with another diary column item in his paper, this time about the admiration for Dylan felt by the sea-loving novelist Richard Hughes, who had recently moved to Laugharne. On 12 January the Post’s more literary stable-mate, the Herald of Wales, printed one of the first reviews of 18 Poems – an encomium by Spencer Vaughan-Thomas, whose brother Wynford had acted with Dylan at the Little Theatre.
Dylan Thomas: A New Life Page 16