Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  The conversation continued: ‘Oh, we don’t know what is wrong with him.’

  ‘What is the matter?’

  ‘Every time he goes to the lavatory, he screams.’

  Although he could joke about this, Dylan had been through a traumatic period which had taken him to the edge of a nervous breakdown. The strain of making his way in London had been more than he had imagined. He had kept going partly because his mother selflessly sent him an allowance of £1 a week, which she could afford only because she was sharing the rental income from 30 Delhi Street. Even she recognised her son had been ‘ill’ and acknowledged Cameron’s role in looking after him. But she was partly to blame. Her homeliness, making sure that meals were always on the table, had given Dylan little preparation for fending for himself. One reason he had overstayed his welcome at the Taylors was that the woman of the house had been prepared to cook for and look after him like his mother. However he realised he could not live happily again in Swansea. In a letter to Trick from Ireland, he reminisced about the Uplands and the Mumbles, and concluded reasonably enough that he could never feel at home, even when at home. ‘Everywhere I find myself seems to be nothing but a resting place between places that become resting places themselves.’

  In his state of feverish activity, he found some solace in recalling the fantasy world he had once created with Dan Jones. ‘I’m surer of nothing than that that world, Percy’s in Warmley, was, and still is, the only one that has any claims to permanence; I mean that this long out-of-doored world isn’t much good really, that it’s only the setting, is only supposed to be the setting, for a world of our own.’ They had both been happier, he wrote to Jones from Ireland, happier even in their unhappiness, when WARMDANDYLANLEY-MAN inhabited this WARMDANDYLANLEY-WORLD. (He hermetically enclosed their two names within the friendly embrace of Dan’s old house in Swansea.) This imaginative construct also included individuals such as Fred Janes and Tom Warner, together with all the Swansea haunts where they had once gathered. It was a sad exercise in nostalgia, with its longing for a cosy past rather than addressing the problems of the present. Dan Jones called it ‘nothing but a protracted dirge’ but charitably attributed the cause to ‘the uninspiring atmosphere, or rather lack of atmosphere in London: the three of us who have tried or who are trying to live here, Dylan, Fred and I, have decided that the country is the best place for our work … Next year I shall probably be in Vienna, and Fred and Dylan in Swansea writing and painting as hard as they can; they have both given up the idea of living in London.’ (Dan had recently won a coveted Mendelssohn scholarship to study music in the Austrian capital.)

  Dylan was to stay for a while in Swansea, albeit involuntarily, but it would be some time before he would forgo living in London which seemed to offer economic, social and sexual liberation. And he would always retain the fond idea of a happier past which would bear artistic fruit in his poetic renderings of a bucolic Welsh countryside and in his invention of the complete universe in the town of Llareggub.

  While in Swansea in September 1935 Dylan made a valuable new friendship. Despite his Cambridge education, Vernon Watkins had a humble job in the St Helens Road branch of Lloyds Bank. Like other poets, he managed to combine working in an office with a passionate commitment to verse. Although eight years older than Dylan, no-one in Swansea was better equipped, both emotionally and intellectually, to relate to him. The gentle Watkins had been despatched by his well-off, Welsh-speaking parents to English public school at Repton where he had been a contemporary of Christopher Isherwood. At Cambridge he had a dramatic religious awakening, which led him to leave the university and destroy around two thousand poems. On the edge of a nervous breakdown, Watkins returned to his old school and accused the headmaster Dr Geoffrey Fisher (later Archbishop of Canterbury) of being too worldly. By way of emphasis he slapped Fisher on the face and read to him from William Blake’s ‘Prophetic Books’. After regaining his composure, he was later known for his calm, almost ethereal, personality. Even so, enough of his wild nature remained to establish a strong bond with the equally headstrong Dylan.

  Shortly after 18 Poems appeared in the window of Morgan & Higgs’ bookshop in Swansea, Watkins bought a copy and was impressed. A little later, he ran into Dylan’s uncle, the Reverend David Rees, former pastor of Paraclete Congregational church, where his own parents had worshipped, before moving to Pennard in Gower. Rees suggested Watkins might like to talk with Dylan and gave him the address of Cwmdonkin Drive. Dylan was in London when Watkins visited, but Florrie promised her son would get in touch when he returned.

  Dylan duly telephoned and the two men arranged to meet at Watkins’s parents’ house where, after a walk along Dylan’s beloved Gower cliffs, Watkins read his new acquaintance some recent poems. The following week Watkins went to Cwmdonkin Drive where Dylan returned the compliment, declaiming ‘Ears in the turrets hear’, earlier rejected from 18 Poems as ‘terribly weak’ but now sounding crisper, and ‘Should lanterns shine’, a mature meditation on the confusing nature of time, interwoven with insights into the powerful, even destructive, properties of light, thus giving the poem a contemporary feel, playing on the idea of relativity.

  The sequel to 18 Poems had been on Dylan’s mind for the best part of a year. Even when mired in London pub life, he had still found time to write verse. And, remarkably, his bluff seventeenth-century metaphysics had given way to a more compassionate view of nature which attained its highest manifestation, a state of grace akin to the innocence of childhood, in Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. Quite how a non-practising Christian of his temperament arrived at this theological position is difficult to fathom. It owed much to his conversations with Bert Trick and his view of Jesus Christ as a ‘social revolutionary’.

  This was the theme behind something else he read to Watkins – seven out of the ten sonnets in his ‘Altarwise by owl-light’ sequence. Although Dylan later dismissed them as ‘the writings of a boily boy in love with shapes and shadows on his pillow’, these verses punningly detailed his own spiritual odyssey in idioms both Christian and pagan that reminded commentators of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The sacred nature of the exercise was evident in the words ‘altarwise’ and ‘tree’ that begin and end the sonnets. Dylan was expressing his autochthonous sense of religion, an elemental force summoned more in the bardic utterances of his Celtic forefathers than in the Calvinistic prescriptions of his uncle’s church.

  He also had his poet’s reasons for arriving at his position. He recognised his poetry sometimes teetered on the edge of self-parody. As he later admitted, he had made a conscious attempt to ‘get away from those rhythmic and thematic dead ends, that physical blank wall, those wombs, and full-stop worms’. Now, in the middle of reading to Watkins in his parents’ house in Cwmdonkin Drive, he stopped for a moment, on reaching the last line of the seventh sonnet, ‘On rose and icicle the ringing handprint’, and looked up. The lamp behind his head made a halo of his golden hair. With Dylan’s words hanging in the air, it was a moment Watkins never forgot. ‘I was aware that I was in the presence of a poet of extraordinary genius,’ he later recalled.

  After finishing, Dylan asked if his visitor used a dictionary. When Watkins conceded that he occasionally did, Dylan looked unimpressed and said he meant a real dictionary. He pulled from his shelf a brown paper folder – a rhyming dictionary which he had compiled himself and called his Doomsday Book. Around him were strewn pieces of cardboard box covered in his tiny, backward-slanting, childlike hand. These were his stories, from which he read Watkins ‘The Orchards’ (with its reference to Llareggub) and two others. He explained how he liked to see a story take shape and how a friendly draper gave his mother boxes which he cut up, wrote on and hung around his room – another example of his visual approach to his craft.

  Settling down to a prolonged stay in Swansea, Dylan introduced Watkins to his friends. With Dan out of town, his Warmley group at last began to take on a new lease of life as the more eclectic Kardomah crowd. Dan l
ooked on paternally from afar, indulging his own form of nostalgia. When, following his show at the Everyman in Hampstead, Fred Janes sold two paintings to the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery and his study of Dylan was shown in Cardiff, Dan could not help remarking, ‘As Kneller was to the Kit-Kat Club, so Fred may be to the W.S. [Warmley School]!’ Even he admitted he missed ‘the artistic stimulation of the “united” school very greatly’. Without Dan, Dylan saw more of Tom Warner who had suffered a nervous breakdown the previous year. On Mondays, they regularly visited the cinema, after which Tom took Dylan back for supper with his aunt. When she served a boiled egg, Tom was astounded to see Dylan had no idea what to do and she had to cut off its top.

  Slowly Dylan’s psychological and physical health improved. In October Tom wrote to Dan, ‘Dylan is still here, and never a day passes without some little plan; maybe a coffie [sic] in the Kardomah, or again a visit to some picture-palace, anon the evening meeting, which beggars description, but always the gay laughter, the merry quip, the Warmley pun, the mutually seen cameos of the streets, that woman’s nose, or the wooden leg of this man; the smile of the girl in the cash desk, the uncertain gate when approached by that certain gait, all those things called life.’

  Dylan’s twenty-first birthday passed uneventfully, if agreeably, after a generous gift of money from his sister and brother-in-law allowed him to kit himself out in a new suit, grey hat and sundry other items of clothing appropriate for an aspiring literary gentleman. With Watkins’s help, Dylan foraged through his notebooks again, revised some poems, and prepared them for Richard Church, the poetry editor at the established firm J. M. Dent, which he hoped would take on his next book. But Church, who had been alerted to Dylan’s talent by the sons of his friend Lascelles Abercrombie, was conservative in taste and his initial response was cool. He felt Dylan’s verse was unnecessarily obscure and, worse, infected with surrealism – a charge Dylan countered robustly, if slightly misleadingly, saying that, until recently, he had never heard of surrealism, he had not read any French poetry since failing to translate Victor Hugo at school, and his knowledge of modern verse in general was regrettably poor.

  Watkins felt Church had a point. He encouraged Dylan to leave out two of his intended poems, the sparse ‘Now say nay’, and showy ‘How Soon the Servant Sun’, arguing that reviewers would latch onto them to damn the entire collection. But Dylan was unconcerned: ‘Oh, give them a bone.’ He himself was more worried about ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’, the poem he had written in competition with Bert Trick in 1933. But after reading it aloud many times, a diagnostic technique he favoured, he relented, and the poem was to become one of the general public’s favourites.

  By the end of the year, Dylan was passably fit and ready to contemplate his next move. A vague plan to share a flat with Rayner Heppenstall having fallen through, he idly contemplated following Roy Campbell and, more recently, Laurie Lee, another graduate of the Sunday Referee, and going to Spain. But he realised he would be lost without either money or command of the language. So he returned to London where, making no attempt to find permanent lodgings, he centred himself on Norman Cameron’s flat in Hammersmith. There he renewed his association with Ruthven Todd, a pasty-faced young Scottish writer in glasses, with a remote family connection to Cameron.

  Todd had first met Dylan at the end of 1934, when Geoffrey Grigson had entertained them both in a café in Mitre Court, close to his office in Fleet Street. He had returned to his home town of Edinburgh where, for a short while, he was assistant editor on Scottish Bookman. In this capacity he sought a contribution from Dylan, who stipulated a fee of £2 for his poem ‘Do you not father me’.

  Back again in London and temporarily supporting himself with a job in an art gallery, Todd witnessed Dylan resume his barefaced, if good-natured practice of sponging off Cameron – something noted also by Pamela Hansford Johnson who used Cameron as a model for Clement Maclaren in her 1968 novel The Survival of the Fittest. In the garden of the Six Bells, a Dylan-like character suggests a trip to the Fitzroy, saying that Clement is rich and will pay.

  But Dylan was such good fun, it did not usually matter. His aura of charm, openness and vulnerability tended to work to his advantage. Sitting in a pub, he often started quietly. When the alcohol took effect, he sprang to life and could be side-splittingly funny. He was seldom malicious: for all his self-centredness, perhaps because of it, he retained a fund of sympathy for less fortunate individuals. He saw himself in them: he was the common man. Even the surly Grigson could, in charitable mood, write of him, ‘When he disappeared, it was a relief; when he reappeared, a pleasure.’ And this was the basic sentiment of Cameron’s subsequent, slightly sour poem ‘The Dirty Little Accuser’ which started:

  Who invited him in? What was he doing here?

  That insolent little ruffian, that crapulous lout?

  When he quitted a sofa, he left behind him a smear.

  My wife says he even tried to paw her about.

  Late at night, Cameron’s guests amused themselves with games of verbal wit. Even when flooded with alcohol, Dylan’s brain could toss off bits of verse, often parodies or obscene limericks such as:

  Now Joe was a kind of a bloke

  Who looked for his bit of a poke

  And when he found Mary

  Had been fucked by a fairy

  He didn’t think much of the joke.

  Cameron had been working on a campaign for Horlicks, which suggested that a regular glass of malted milk could ward off the pangs of ‘Night Starvation’. Dylan seized on this slogan, devising an alternative panacea called Night Custard. The assembled party hooted as they imagined ever more fanciful ingredients, such as fluff from under beds, and uses for the product, from hair cream to vaginal jelly.

  As an advertising man, Cameron had several visually creative friends. Len Lye, another former associate of Robert Graves, lived round the corner from British Grove with his wife Jane. He was a jazz-loving artist-cum-film-maker whose experimental abstract work had brought him into contact with similarly ambitious, multi-media British painters, including Ben Nicholson, Julian Trevelyan and Humphrey Jennings. His animations for John Grierson at the GPO Film Unit led him, for all his New Zealand nationality, to be dubbed the ‘English Disney’. As a result of his innovative techniques of painting directly onto film, he was hired to do special effects on Alfred Hitchcock’s 1936 movie Secret Agent.

  Oswell Blakeston was a witty homosexual painter who lived with Max Chapman in a run-down house in St John’s Wood. Born Henry Hasslacher into an Austrian wine-importing family, his first name was derived from the dandyish, discreetly gay Osbert Sitwell, while his surname was based on his mother’s. Dylan struck up an immediate rapport, indulging in long-running fantasies in which Blakeston took on the role of Dearest Mouse or Darling Slime. Sitwell could not have done them a better favour when he wrote his satirical ballad ‘National Rat Week’, attacking the hangers-on who ditched King Edward VIII after his abdication in December 1936. Dylan enjoyed peppering his letters to Blakeston with references to rats: ‘it’ll be Rat Week always,’ he pronounced. Both Blakeston and Chapman later claimed to have had affairs with him. Given Dylan’s puritanical Welsh aversion to what he called ‘the only vice that revolts me’, this seems unlikely. However, Dylan was never dogmatic about his masculine sexual identity. ‘Sex – male, I think,’ he described himself to Pamela, and he often indulged in hermaphrodite imaginings. It is possible that, after a drunken evening, he and Blakeston did find themselves in bed, and he only took evasive action when, as Ruthven Todd has noted, his companion brought out the Vaseline.

  He could now rely on his friends and contacts to publish most of his output. At Cameron’s suggestion, he ventured further afield and sent his poem ‘Hold hard these ancient minutes’ to Caravel, a publication in Majorca. A story, ‘The Phosphorescent Nephew’ was despatched to an unspecified publication in America, since when it has never been heard of. Negotiations continued with Church at Dent about th
e composition of his next book. Various titles were discussed and rejected – Twenty-Three Poems, Poems in Sequence and Poems in Progress. Dylan preferred a simple numerical indicator, but admitted at one stage he could no longer remember how many pieces he had submitted.

  As 18 Poems went into a second issue in February 1936, he found a new patron in the quaint reactionary modernist, Edith Sitwell. She had taken against his first published work in 1934, telling the academic and poet John Sparrow that Dylan ‘ought to be dashed off to a psycho-analyst immediately before worse befalls’. But she had changed her mind and printed a fulsome, if belated, review of 18 Poems in the London Mercury. She subsequently invited him to a party, telling a friend Robert Herring, editor of Life and Letters Today, ‘I want to ask him some questions and give him some advice.’ Such occasions usually scared Dylan, but he also knew Herring who had recently published a fragment of his ‘Altarwise by owl-light’ sequence – a compromise after a typical Dylan cock-up in which the editor found that the poem Dylan had sent him for publication, ‘A grief ago’, had already been printed elsewhere. ‘She isn’t very frightening, is she?’ Dylan asked Herring about their bird-like hostess. ‘I saw a photograph of her once, in medieval costume.’ Even when Dylan inexplicably failed to keep a subsequent date, Sitwell was undaunted: he ‘stands a chance of becoming a great poet, if only he gets rid of his complexes’, she told her friend Christabel, Lady Aberconway. Another welcome supporter was T. S. Eliot whom Dylan hoped to interest in a book of his short stories. Over lunch Eliot expressed concern for Dylan’s professed ‘rheumatism’; he spent the meal describing his own symptoms and recommending cures. Although no contract with Faber was forthcoming, Dylan described Eliot as ‘charming, a great man, I think, utterly unaffected’.