Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  By then, Dylan had returned to London. He made at once for Pamela’s flat where he pitched up at 11.30 on the evening of 2 January. It was not a happy reconciliation. He was very drunk and she was entertaining another boyfriend. Three nights later, a Saturday, he was back, staying until midnight. Once again, the story was depressingly similar. ‘Very trying time,’ recorded Pamela. ‘Still says he loves me but can’t resist Comrade Bottle. Am just watching and praying. What else can I do?’

  Others close to him were in a similar quandary. His mother and father had become so concerned about his physical and mental well-being in Swansea over Christmas that, within a fortnight of his return to London, they made the 185-mile journey to see him. Dylan spent some time frantically cleaning his dingy room in Redcliffe Street. When he invited D.J. to sit on his camp-bed, the structure collapsed. His parents had to wait for Fred Janes and a friend to finish their tea before having a cup themselves. Florence looked on disapprovingly: ‘If there was one empty, dirty milk bottle, there were twenty,’ she later recalled.

  The Thomases tried to reassure themselves with the knowledge that their son was sharing a flat with the reliable Fred Janes to whom, it seems, they sometimes wrote about their son’s well-being. They also felt they had an ally in Pamela. But when they decided to visit the Hansford Johnsons on this trip, they unwittingly blurted out the – to Pamela – unexpected and unwelcome information that Dylan was to have his twenty-first birthday in October. He had led her to believe that they were exactly the same age.

  Dylan took up where he left off. He still frequented the Parton Bookshop, meeting prominent Communists such as A. L. Morton and Claud Cockburn, editor and foreign editor of the Daily Worker (though the latter was already better known for publishing his own radical newsletter The Week). He made a note of telling Bert Trick he had come across the anti-public school activist Esmond Romilly. And he also mentioned a couple of leftist writers, John Lehmann and John Pudney, whom he described as pseudo-revolutionaries. But they all only helped to convince him of the incompatibility of poetry and politics. The Welsh puritan in him took strongly against their generally privileged backgrounds and their advocacy of ‘what they priggishly call “the class struggle” … They are bogus from skull to navel.’

  During February, further reviews of 18 Poems tumbled out, confirming the value of Dylan’s amateur public relations. These appeared anonymously in New Verse (Grigson’s vehicle), European Quarterly (where the volume was described, probably by Edwin Muir, one of the editors, as ‘one of the most remarkable books of poetry which have appeared for several years’) and The Listener (where assistant literary editor Janet Adam Smith had printed one of his first verses), and under the bylines of Rayner Heppenstall in Adelphi and of Desmond Hawkins in Time and Tide, the latter of whom spoke Dylan’s own language: ‘The Audenesque convention is nearly ended; and I credit Dylan Thomas with being the first considerable poet to break through fashionable limitation and speak an unborrowed language, without excluding anything that has preceded him.’ These last two reviewers, Heppenstall and Hawkins, were the sort of unpretentious literary friends Dylan liked. He had met Heppenstall, a slim young Yorkshireman with a passion for French culture, just before Christmas, when, at Richard Rees’s suggestion, he had knocked at his door in Chelsea and given him a signed copy of 18 Poems. Before long the two men were, in Heppenstall’s words, ‘very thick’. They both enjoyed drinking, though neither had a particularly strong head. Heppenstall’s memoir, Four Absentees, contains several stories of their bibulous exploits – on one occasion, being thrown out of a nightclub called the Blue Mask; on another, getting into a fight somewhere around Parton Street, with the result that Heppenstall, later, like many of Dylan’s friends, a stalwart of the BBC, spent the night in detention at Clerkenwell police station. At Bertorelli’s in Charlotte Street, the two men dined with Richard Rees and a young Etonian with pale blue eyes called Eric Blair, who had written two books under the pseudonym ‘George Orwell’. That evening ended in a basement bar in the King’s Road frequented by young Blackshirts, another with Heppenstall giving Dylan a black eye.

  Hawkins was a daytime drinking companion. Dylan would meet him in the mornings at the Wheatsheaf or one of the pubs around Charlotte Street. At closing time in mid-afternoon, the two men would move on to a more accommodating drinking club. Hawkins was now associated with the quarterly Purpose, of which he became literary editor the following year. Dylan offered to write for it on ‘Poetry, Jacobean and Metaphysical, and music, minus the more intricate technicalities, mysticism (honest), and psychology (abnormal for preference)’. Looking back, Hawkins felt this list represented Dylan’s interests. ‘He had a fund of stories about madness, lunatic asylums and strange symbolic possessions – usually funny stories, not solemn ones. He had a quick, volatile, chuckling relishing sense of humour. He certainly loved the “Gothic”.’

  Dylan’s interest in music had been stimulated by Dan Jones over the years and revived more recently by Pamela Hansford Johnson taking him to the proms. In a letter to Pamela he described listening to Monteverdi’s Ballet of the Ungrateful Ladies as ‘very happy music’. He also loved Alban Berg’s then little-known opera Wozzeck, which put a suitably avant-garde gloss on his respect for the common man. Although often teasing Dylan about his precious ‘Kensington’ manner of speaking (the direct result, he realised, of his friend’s upwardly mobile Swansea background with its elocution lessons), Hawkins loved the Welshman’s uninhibited use of words and the theatricality of their delivery. (‘Words to him were like flags and banners, to be seized and waved in tumultuous signallings.’) The two men agreed to collaborate on a satirical thriller about the murder of a fictional Poet Laureate, whom they dubbed ‘the King’s Canary’. As summer drew on, he and Hawkins enjoyed devising spoof names for a cast of thinly disguised literary figures whom they both knew.

  Thrillers became a regular topic of discussion after Dylan began reviewing them for the Morning Post where Geoffrey Grigson, keen to help, realised the young man could at least earn extra money by selling any books he had finished to a dealer in the Strand. Grigson also saw that Dylan lacked either the confidence or the will to storm what he called modernism’s ‘Inner Command’, meaning Eliot and Wyndham Lewis. This was indeed a problem for Dylan. He did not lack ambition but, afraid of being shown up intellectually, he tended to steer clear of the elder statesmen of his profession. He genuinely preferred to operate independently of all ‘Commands’.

  This was clear in his choice of another friend. Through Grigson he had met Norman Cameron, a tall, shambling Oxford graduate of Scottish origin who also ploughed his own furrow. Cameron had been one of the few poets able to work with Robert Graves and his tempestuous mistress Laura Riding. Supported by private means, he lived with them in Majorca, where they encouraged him to marry one of their ‘tribe’, a German girl called Elfrieda Faust. In 1933 he returned with her to London but, rather than join the gaggle of hollow-cheeked young men trying to survive through occasional poems and reviews, he found work (and a comfortable existence) as a copywriter with the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson.

  In many ways Cameron was very different from Dylan. His verse, which had been published by Auden and Day Lewis in their edition of Oxford Poetry in 1927, was lean, sometimes witty, but often surprisingly emotional. It owed something to Graves but was individual enough to be seriously compared to the Movement of the 1950s, which emphatically turned its back on the supposed romanticism of Dylan and his fellows over the previous decade. With his tailored suits, Cameron’s personal style was also a long way from Dylan, who still sported the fancy dress of a Bohemian poet.

  Dylan was unconcerned by these differences. He was happy to find someone unstuffy, whose professional opinion he respected. The poet John Pudney (who married A. P. Herbert’s daughter Crystal and probably introduced an ungrateful Dylan to his humorist father-in-law) recognised what was going on: ‘Dylan suddenly appeared chez Norman, playing the enfant terrible to
Norman’s nanny.’ These unlikely confrères struck up a bantering relationship. Dylan called Cameron ‘Norman the Nagger’, a comment on their personal dynamics, or, simply, ‘Normal’ which, as Grigson noted, was like calling the largest man in an RAF unit ‘Tiny’. (The nickname came after Elfrieda revealed that, the first time they made love, her husband had turned over and said, ‘Thank you.’) To Cameron, Dylan was ‘Ditch’, as if it described the place he had crawled out from.

  The Camerons lived in a large loft-like flat in British Grove, Hammersmith, where there was always room for Dylan to spend the night after he and Norman had started an evening’s drinking at Hennekey’s, close to the latter’s workplace in the Aldwych. Cameron’s biographer Warren Hope records that Cameron initially thought that Dylan had been influenced stylistically by the American Hart Crane, another heavy drinker who had committed suicide in 1932. But Dylan said he had never heard of the poet.

  Nominally Dylan was still living in Redcliffe Street, but he was seldom there. Janes recalled him as ‘tremendously restless, coming and going at all times, now a furious burst of work, often sitting up in bed with his hat and coat on to keep warm’. Levy also remembered Dylan sitting in bed in the mornings, eating apples, drinking beer and reading thrillers. Since the place was teeming with mice, he and Dylan would indulge in elaborate fantasies such as speculating how many of these rodents would be required to pull the London to Glasgow express. Janes found time to paint a fine portrait of Dylan, capturing his wide-eyed charm, crinkly golden hair and boyish good looks. (This was exhibited at the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead in August.) But Dylan never considered Redcliffe Street as his base and more often was to be found at the Camerons.

  There his general health began to cause concern, particularly as Dylan was never reticent about his professed tuberculosis or how his doctor had given him only so long to live. In April Cameron suggested that Dylan might like to get out of London and visit his friend, Alan (A. J. P.) Taylor, a history lecturer at Manchester University. Taylor, scion of a Lancashire cotton merchant, had known Cameron as an undergraduate at Oriel College, Oxford. In Vienna in 1930, he met Margaret Adams, the artistic convent-educated daughter of a chief inspector of mines in India, and married her the following year. The young couple set up home in Didsbury, on the edge of the Pennines, five miles south of Manchester, where their social circle included an assortment of academics and writers, some, like Malcolm Muggeridge, associated with the local newspaper, the Manchester Guardian.

  Cameron convinced the sceptical, often curmudgeonly Taylor that Dylan would be an entertaining guest. Initially the two men took to each other, staying up late, laughing and reading Rabelais aloud. Then Dylan’s drinking habits became excessive, even for Taylor, who kept a beer barrel in his house. Dylan consumed between fifteen and twenty pints each day, and Taylor was forced to ration this intake. The historian probably sensed another problem: his attractive and emotional wife Margaret had developed a tendresse for the young poet. As a result of her attention, which probably reminded him of his mother, Dylan stayed much longer than expected. Despite his lack of enthusiasm for aspects of the Taylors’ life, such as long walks in the Derbyshire peaks, he remained with them for nearly a month until mid-May. When he eventually left, he found he had lost the return half of his railway ticket and asked Alan Taylor if he could borrow £2 to buy another. His host told him bluntly, ‘I lend once and, unless repaid, once only.’ By then he would have done anything to speed the departure of the sponging Welshman. He never expected to see his money again, and he never did. Not that he cared, for he hoped he had experienced the last of Dylan.

  The young poet was in not much better shape when he returned to London. The tenancy at Redcliffe Street had ended, and Janes and Levy moved round the corner to share a flat in Coleherne Road with another artist, William Scott, later well known for his abstract paintings. They witnessed Dylan’s social life becoming ever more bizarre. After periods of absence, he would often return to the house with a new friend, such as a down-and-out he had met on the Embankment. Mosley’s Fascist party was at its height, which made life difficult for Levy, who not only looked very Jewish but tended to dress as a prototype punk, with trousers slashed to the knee and with one side of his face shaven, the other not. On more than one occasion, Levy was confronted by right-wing thugs in his neighbourhood. But this brought out the best in Dylan who, despite his personal excess, showed the innate compassion that Trick admired and often muddled with political commitment. After a huge Moseleyite rally at Olympia on 7 June led to violent running battles, Dylan found a battered Communist hiding from Fascist gangs. He turned out to be an American boxer down on his luck. Dylan invited him back to stay with the ‘gang’.

  Still in peripatetic mood, on 20 June Dylan went to visit Dan Jones and his family, now living in Harrow, north-west of London. Dan was pursuing his music studies in the capital, while still nominally enrolled at Swansea University College completing his MA thesis on the links between the Elizabethan lyric and contemporary music. As a result the two friends often seemed to miss each other, one being in Swansea, while the other was in London, or vice versa. Dan saw more of Fred Janes who kept him apprised of Dylan’s relationship with Pamela. In Swansea a few months earlier Dan had stayed briefly with the Thomases while simultaneously conducting steamy affairs with two women. On that trip he had also met Thomas Taig, the English lecturer connected to the Little Theatre, who remarked on Dylan’s poor understanding of rhythm – at least, as an actor. He linked this to Dylan’s lack of control over his muscles.

  So Dylan’s visit to the Joneses was a return match. However he did not endear himself to his old friend by failing to turn up at a rendezvous. He had got drunk, picked up a girl – ‘a Jewess with thighs like boiled string’ – and woke up with a fearful hangover. It was, he was forced to admit, ‘the same old story’.

  His other companions did what they could to help re-write the script. Grigson, who had moved into a new flat in Keats Grove, Hampstead, found Dylan examining himself in an agitated manner after developing a rash all over his body. Dylan was packed off to an Irish doctor in Bloomsbury who told him he had nothing to worry about; all he needed was to take more rest and drink less alcohol. In order to facilitate this, Grigson – at Cameron’s urging – agreed to take Dylan with him on holiday to a remote spot near Adara in County Donegal in the Irish Republic, where they stayed in a small cottage, once a donkey-shed, made habitable a few years earlier by Rockwell Kent, the American artist who loved wilderness. Although mid-summer, it rained continuously and they had to build turf fires. Drinking less frenetically, eating nutritious local food (including fish which Grigson taught him to catch) and keeping regular hours, Dylan began to relax. He grew a beard and took long walks on the cliffs overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, where he and Grigson sang ‘The Ram of Derbyshire’ to the gannets, puffins and black seals on the rocks below. They frightened themselves when they shouted ‘We are the Dead’ to the surrounding mountains, and the words echoed back to them, three-fold.

  Grigson was never sure if Dylan fully appreciated their rural setting. He felt Dylan enjoyed it, and was even encouraged to write, but somehow failed to engage on a deeper level. Dylan confirmed as much in a letter to Trick: ‘I find I can’t see a landscape; scenery is just scenery to me.’ With a sneer at the locals’ religiosity, he referred passionlessly to this ‘wild, unlettered and unfrenchlettered country, too far from Andara, a village you can’t be too far from’. But encouraged by an offer from Richard Church at J. M. Dent to publish his next book of verse, he did complete some work, ranging from a vampire tale which managed to spook him out further on dark, rainy nights, through his picaresque novel (which developed into ‘Prologue to an Adventure’), to approximately six poems, the most ambitious of which was ‘I, in my intricate image’. These he sent to John Lehmann, editor of the anthology The Year’s Poetry, asking ominously if he might have payment in advance to cover his local debts and enable him to return to England. L
ehmann generously advanced a sum from his personal pocket.

  However even this failed to meet Dylan’s requirements. Grigson had only been able to spend a fortnight in Ireland, so he had left Dylan on his own in the cottage, supplied with money to cover the rent and other necessities. The nearest porter bar was at Glendrumatie, ten miles away. Poteen, the local illicit brew which had become his tipple, was cheap. So what Dylan found to spend his money on is unclear. Nevertheless by the time he came to leave at the end of August, he was penniless, and was forced to depart without notifying or paying Dan Ward, the farmer who owned the place.

  Details of the next two weeks in London are sketchy. Grigson was furious, and temporarily put an end to his helpful practice of giving Dylan thrillers to review for the Morning Post – though Dylan’s failure to deliver copy may also have contributed. Having paid off the debt to the Irish farmer, Cameron joined Grigson in reading Dylan the riot act: ‘we had a blistery scene with Dylan, who on such occasions always sucked and pouted and acted the injured Suckling,’ recalled Grigson. Temporarily denied admittance to Cameron’s flat, Dylan responded by going on ‘the blindest blind in the world’. He did not know the day, the week ‘or anything’, he told Desmond Hawkins. One consequence of his bender was that he managed to lose his few possessions, including his papers, amongst which were notes for his fictional collaboration with Hawkins.

  At one stage he visited Pamela who noticed he was shaking, probably from the effects of alcoholic poisoning. This did not stop him taking her on a crawl of Chelsea pubs including the Cadogan where they happened to see what she described as his ‘prossy Miriam (or Shirley)’, possibly the Jewish girl he picked up earlier in the summer. His sexual profligacy during this period of drunken confusion led him, almost inevitably, to pick up a dose of gonorrhoea. (Whether the woman responsible was Miriam, Shirley or the one he blamed, an improbable sounding ‘chorus girl with glasses’ called Fluffy, is unclear.) This time there was no friendly Irish doctor to placate him. Antibiotics were not yet available, and the only cure was regular washing out of the urethra. Dylan was forced to retire to Swansea to recuperate, both mentally and physically. From there he sent a desperate note to Grigson, who had backtracked slightly, begging him to continue sending thrillers to review and, ‘for the love of the great grey cunt of the world’, not to reveal any details of his state, except to Norman Cameron, because otherwise his own ‘lecherous chances’ might be ruined. Later Dylan liked to tell how, when in Swansea, he heard his mother talking to a neighbour, who asked, ‘And how is your boy, Mrs Thomas?’