Dylan’s condition was as much self-inflicted as anything. His return to London had taken its toll, and once again he was suffering from chronic alcohol poisoning. In early April his thriller reviews for the Morning Post (which had kept him solvent in Swansea) suddenly came to a halt. He had hoped to supplement this work by editing a regular book column for the Swansea and West Wales Guardian. In the paper’s pages, he had delivered one of his best summaries of his literary beliefs when he announced grandiloquently that he and his fellow reviewers would share:
a horror of bunkum, of pretence, of pretentiousness, and a knowledge of the havoc that has been wrought by modern ethics of common-sense on the great Blarneys of the past; … a tolerance far from divine for nearly all social and moral behaviours; … [and] the will to call the long-standing bluff of the English gentleman of letters, those arm-chaired adventurers with their arch humour, their quaint apologetic egoism, their eminence socially and academically, each in his own right a gentleman and a gas-bag, who, in the words of Cyril Connolly, have gone down before the modern spirit and divided their mantle between the professor of literature and the Sunday journal buffoon.
But, as tended to happen when he was in an editorial role, this project had failed to develop, despite his writing to publishers to ask for books, using the names of friends as potential contributors. Among these was Rayner Heppenstall, a recent convert to Roman Catholicism, who remembered him, at the end of a drunken evening, not having made arrangements where he was going to stay the night. Dylan went to a telephone box somewhere near the Euston Road, emerging to declare wearily, ‘Oh God, I’m so tired of sleeping with women I don’t even like.’ Dylan was reduced to asking for loans from his new friend Vernon Watkins. Again Cameron came to his rescue and packed him off for a rest cure with his (and Blakeston’s) friend, Wyn Henderson, a large red-headed woman with appetites and energy to match.
Having been declared bankrupt, she had recently decamped to the village of Polgigga close to Land’s End in Cornwall where she hoped to bring stability to her own roller-coaster life by running a bed and breakfast establishment. Born Winifred Lester to unmarried parents in South Africa, where her mother used to sing out of the back of a truck, she was a gifted musician who had once opened for the actress Ellen Terry. Wartime marriage to Kenneth Henderson, a rich English Guards officer, soon ended in divorce, after he decamped to Argentina to look after business interests set up by his uncle, Lord Faringdon. Having trained as a typographer, she was employed by various small publishers, including Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press in Paris, from where she returned to London to work in a similar business with Desmond Harmsworth. She lived next door to Virginia Woolf’s brother Adrian Stephen and his wife Karen in Gordon Square where she also ran a well-attended musical salon. But when Harmsworth merged his business with Francis Meynell of the Nonesuch Press, she found herself out of a job and was soon being sought by her creditors.
A ‘new woman’ of a type Dylan had seldom encountered (her son Nigel talked of her ‘shattering procession of lovers’), she liked to talk about her liberated sex life and prided herself on having been psychoanalysed. Over Easter she took him to hear a performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion which, throwing some light on his interest in the symbol of Christ, he interpreted as a powerful homosexual love story. Dylan tired of her anecdotes of friendship with the pioneering sexologist Havelock Ellis (who usefully had taught her how to pee standing up). But he found her good company when drunk and, although eighteen years her junior, at some stage (the exact dates are uncertain) enjoyed a fleeting affair.
However his heart was never in it, for shortly before departing for Cornwall, he had met Caitlin Macnamara, the girl he was to marry the following year.
TEN
CAITLIN, EMILY AND VERONICA
Caitlin had been brought up by her mother Yvonne to think she would marry a duke. In contrast to Dylan, she did indeed have something aristocratic in her background and attitudes. Her quixotic father Francis Macnamara was a fine leonine specimen of a man but, in socio-political terms, a sad relic of the Protestant Anglo-Irish ascendancy. His own father Henry Valentine Macnamara had been High Sheriff of the beautiful desolate Irish county of Clare, much of which he owned, including the entire village around his mansion, Ennistymon House. After Magdalen College, Oxford, Francis had trained as a barrister in London. In 1907, he married Yvonne, after she had eloped from her disapproving family which mixed similar Anglo-Irish landed stock with a more dominant haut-bourgeois French Quaker strain. His letters were unusual for the time in their forthright avowal of his desire to ‘fuck’ her – a consequence, perhaps, of his friendship with the randy Welsh-born artist Augustus John who enthusiastically welcomed the publication of his book of poems, Marionettes, in 1909. As a result, in the balmy, high Edwardian days before the First World War, he decided to ‘drop out’ and pursue his interests in poetry, philosophy and sailing.
The young Macnamaras had four children – John, Nicolette, Brigit and, in December 1913, Caitlin, generally considered the prettiest of the girls. Before long, however, the would-be Bohemian Francis turned his back on marriage and children, leaving Caitlin in particular feeling resentful. He had long professed his Irish nationalist sympathies, provoking a split with his father, known as Henry Vee, who was a British loyalist. Feeling unable to support the Great War against Germany, Francis returned to Ireland where, in the wake of Synge, he conducted quasi-ethnographic research into the Celtic customs of the Aran Islanders, off the coast of County Clare, close to his own seat of Doolin House on the Atlantic Ocean. He avoided the fate of his father who was wounded in the arm and face while gamely resisting an Irish Republican ambush in 1919. Within three years Henry Vee was forcibly asked to leave his land. He finished his days in London on a dwindling income, his tenants having long asserted their rights to his property.
In his role as literary Bohemian, Francis translated Balzac’s pioneering sex treatise, Physiology of Marriage, put out by the Casanova Press in 1924. While occupying himself in a series of affairs, he encouraged his wife and children to live near and in effect become an appendage of his friend Augustus John’s extensive, gypsy-like family in Alderney Manor in Dorset. For a while he stayed in the vicinity trying to earn a living as a guru-like teacher (of John’s son Romilly, among others) and editor of the respectable Wessex Review. But his philandering took him elsewhere, encouraging Yvonne to turn her back on heterosexual relationships and engage in an affair with a neighbour, Nora Summers, a brooding painter and later photographer who had known John’s circle while studying at the Slade School of Art with her husband Gerald, who came from a rich family of steel manufacturers in North Wales. Caitlin and her sisters came to resent the woman who distracted their mother from caring for them. By the mid-1920s they were living in genteel poverty in a rambling former pub, New Inn House, at Blashford, near Ringwood, in Hampshire, roughly halfway between the Summerses (in Ferndown) and the Johns who in 1927 moved to Fryern Court, near Fordingbridge.
With few obvious parental constraints, the Macnamara children enjoyed a carefree upbringing. With the younger Johns, they romped around the countryside on the edge of the New Forest. When money became tight, they were sent briefly to stay with their Majolier grandmother in Provence, where the fiery Caitlin railed against French middle-class restrictions. Encouraged by Nora Summers, one of their ‘two mummies’, Brigit and, in particular, Nicolette were encouraged to paint. Caitlin threw her energies into riding and dancing, for which she shared a passion with Vivien John, Augustus’s youngest daughter. (They were effectively cousins because in 1927 Francis Macnamara had married Edie McNeill, the small dark sister of Dorelia (‘Dodo’) McNeill, Augustus’s long-term mistress, and mother of his four later children.)
With her bright blue eyes and tangle of golden hair, Caitlin was an attractive uninhibited creature. In her memoir Two Flamboyant Fathers, her sister Nicolette portrayed her, with a touch of jealousy, as someone who from the age of twelve was a ‘honey
pot for men’, thoroughly enjoying the power this gave her. According to this version, Caitlin ‘unfairly romped through adolescence with a perfect nubile figure, a joy to men and a pleasure to herself. She always seemed to get away with murder.’ But it was not quite that easy. The other side of Caitlin was the stroppy country girl, with a propensity to puppy fat. Her first boyfriend, in her mid-teens, was Caspar, one of the good-looking John sons, who had embarked on a naval career. But when, staying at Fryern, Caitlin dolled herself in a frilly nightgown and crept into the future Admiral of the Fleet’s bed, he did not want to know, thus adding to her feeling of rejection.
She spent two predictably miserable years at a second-rate boarding school in Bournemouth where the headmistress called her ‘my little New Forest pony’. While still there, she and her friend Vivien John ran away to become dancers in London. Vivien had arranged an audition with her father’s friend, the theatrical impresario C. B. Cochran, known for his troupe of high-kicking girls. Despite an impressive display of tap dancing and girlish gymnastics, Caitlin was apprehended and sent back to school. But she had made enough of a statement for her mother to allow her to return to the capital the following year to attend the Dillon School of Dancing, off Shaftesbury Avenue.
Despite several boyfriends, her sexual confidence was not improved when a Colombian painter she met through her sister Nicolette, now a student at the Slade, committed suicide after, but not necessarily because of, expressing his undying love for her. Her virginity was disposed of by Augustus John. She later claimed that the ‘old goat’ had pounced when she was posing for him in his studio in Mallord Street, Chelsea. That did not stop her going back the next day, and the same thing happening again. In her version, this rape by her father’s friend put her off sex. But others suggest she was coquettish and perfectly capable of seducing the priapic artist. That was the background to the recollection of another young artist bowled over by her striking looks. Rupert Shephard painted her several times, but ‘all too often, a large car, driven at some danger to others, would scream into the back yard [at Blashford] and Augustus would step out … All activities stopped – the old stag had arrived to round up and take away his young doe.’
Around 1933 Caitlin temporarily set aside her stage ambitions and went to stay with her father in Ireland. If Francis Macnamara hoped for rapprochement, he was to be disappointed. In his grand town house in Dublin, she found his egotistical bluster and intellectual posturings more off-putting than ever. He accused her of being ‘surly’ and was not content, or so she said, until she burst into tears and tore from the room. With little money to hand, she much preferred the life in County Clare where, now that the ‘Troubles’ had abated, her father was thinking of turning the family’s Ennistymon House into a hotel. With the daughter of one of her father’s friends, she explored the dark smoky recesses of Irish peasant cottages, drank whiskey and danced with great exuberance at ceilidhs.
In Dublin she met an Austrian woman, Vera Gribben, who claimed to have studied with Isadora Duncan, California-born pioneer of free-flowing modern dance. Under her tutelage, Caitlin took to Duncan’s sinuous movement and philosophy of self-expression. On her return to England, she was photographed by Nora Summers in various tripping poses, occasionally wearing an ill-shapen diaphanous garment, at other times – her mother’s lover’s speciality over the years – next to nothing.
She and Vera Gribben began to perform their fashionable mode of dance at select gatherings in London. A couple of years earlier Caitlin had wanted to go to Paris to join the Folies Bergères, but had been forbidden until she was twenty-one. Having attained her majority, she flew at Mrs Gribben’s suggestion that they might both spend some time there on the first stage of a terpsichorean tour of Europe. Once in the French capital, not a great deal was heard of her dancing, though she did attend a school run by Isadora Duncan’s brother. She had a relationship with an older Polish Jewish artist called Segal. She had only recently returned to London and was drinking in the Wheatsheaf with Augustus John (clearly more a sugar daddy with whom she slept than the rapist she later portrayed) when she bumped into Dylan.
Dating this encounter exactly is difficult. Caitlin has put it specifically at 12 April 1936 but there is no evidence for this. By then Dylan was down in Cornwall. He is likely to have met Caitlin during his few days in London prior to this trip. He described them to Vernon Watkins as living up to the conventions of his ‘Life No 13: promiscuity, booze, coloured shirts, too much talk, too little work’. But this period appears to have been a drunken, masculine affair, with Dylan catching up with his literary friends. He would have had no time for the other part of the myth of this first meeting: that within minutes, they were in bed together at the Eiffel Tower where they took pleasure in charging the room to Augustus John – something she would have been able to get away with because the proprietor Rudolf Stulik had often seen her there with the painter.
More likely, Dylan met Caitlin briefly at the Wheatsheaf prior to going to Cornwall. He was pleasurably struck, but made no known reference to her during his month away. His wooing and bedding of her probably took place when he returned from the west country in mid-May. While staying with Wyn, he had polished up some poems for his next book, including the final sonnets of ‘Altarwise by owl-light’, which first saw print in July in Roger Roughton’s small circulation Contemporary Prose and Poetry (the outlet too for several stories including his long gestated ‘The Burning Baby’).
The enigmatic Roughton was one of the group behind the International Surrealist Exhibition in June. The main instigator was the artist Roland Penrose, together with the young surrealist poet David Gascoyne. Penrose had been introduced to Gascoyne in Paris the previous year by their mutual friend, one of the fathers of French surrealism, the poet Paul Eluard, whose first wife, a Russian woman nicknamed Gala, had left him for the Spanish painter Salvador Dali. Gascoyne, who as a boy of seventeen had enthusiastically reviewed modernist exhibitions at the Mayor Gallery for Orage’s New English Weekly, was in the French capital to write his Short History of Surrealism. He and Penrose conceived a plan to bring an exhibition of European surrealist artists to London where the local inhabitants, in Penrose’s words, needed to be freed ‘from the constipation of logic which conventional public school mentality had brought upon them’. Having enlisted the help of Herbert Read, the all-purpose art critic and historian, they appointed Eluard and his fellow surrealist André Breton to select what works should be brought to London.
A girl in a mask of red roses stood outside when Breton opened the show at the New Burlington Galleries on 11 June. He and others had chosen nearly four hundred paintings, sculptures and art objects to represent the surrealist spirit, including works by Picasso, Miró, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Henry Moore. Dali, another exhibitor, wore a diving suit as he gave a graphic talk on his love life with Gala. Dylan’s contribution is unclear: the critic John Davenport remembered him shepherding Augustus John round the exhibition (a surrealistic touch in itself); according to Gascoyne, he ‘came in and tied a mouse to an exhibit’; while another story had him approaching participants with a cup of boiled string and asking in a loud voice if they wanted it weak or strong (although this last sighting sounds similar to an item on show, Meret Oppenheim’s fetishistic ‘Object’ – a cup, saucer and spoon covered in gazelle fur). If not a surrealist in practice (he was too much of a traditional lyricist), Dylan supported Gascoyne’s premise that ‘man’s imagination should be free, but everywhere is in chains’, and he enjoyed the controversy surrounding the event, which was denounced by the Daily Mail as responsible for ‘decadence and unhealthiness of mind and body, the unleashing of low and abnormal instincts, a total lack of reason and balance, a distasteful revelation of subconscious thoughts and desires’.
The organisers included not only Roughton and Gascoyne but a couple of new friends, the engraver Bill (S. W.) Hayter and, in particular, George Reavey, Hayter’s some-time flatmate and collaborator in Paris and
now a fellow author with Dylan at Dent. Small and entrepreneurial, Reavey had been brought up in Russia, the son of an Armagh linen manufacturer who made his fortune by building mills. He was part of the Cambridge University generation of the late 1920s which produced challenging poets and artists of the calibre of Malcolm Lowry, Kathleen Raine, Charles Madge, Humphrey Jennings, Julian Trevelyan, John Davenport, James Reeves, William Empson, Michael Redgrave and Jacob Bronowski (later better known as a scientific populariser). After graduating, Reavey decamped to Paris where he immersed himself in the avant-garde culture of the early 1930s, writing his own poetry, translating Russian literature, and setting up his own Europa Press, which published the first book of poems by the Irish writer Samuel Beckett. In 1936 he returned to London to set up an offshoot of the Europa Press in Red Lion Square, where one of his first projects was a translation (by Beckett and others) of Paul Eluard’s poem under the title ‘Thorns of Thunder’. His contacts made him the ideal choice to arrange an adjunct to the main surrealism exhibition, a poetry evening in the New Burlington Galleries on 26 June where Dylan proudly followed the main speaker Eluard in reading some of his own poems.
Dylan Thomas: A New Life Page 19