Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  A week later Dylan was back in Cwmdonkin Drive, regaling his local friends with tales of Dali’s lobster telephone and his own plans to write a play for Rupert Doone’s fashionably leftist Group Theatre, where his new girlfriend Caitlin had once danced. He caught up with her again in mid-July in Laugharne, the Carmarthenshire seaside town which he had enjoyed visiting with Glyn Jones a couple of years earlier. Fred Janes was back in Swansea, teaching part-time at the art school, developing his meticulous style of still life painting. Fred had entered a canvas in an exhibition (to be judged by the Pembrokeshire born Augustus John) at the National Eisteddfod in Fishguard. Since Fred intended to borrow his father’s car, Dylan offered to accompany him. As Laugharne was roughly halfway between Swansea and Fishguard, Dylan took the opportunity to invite himself to call on Richard Hughes, the local author whom he had missed on his earlier visit.

  Despite his enthusiasm for Dylan’s early work eighteen months earlier, the bearded seafaring Hughes was not the sort of person Dylan would normally have sought out. He was a rarefied mixture of English elite (having been educated at Charterhouse and Oxford) and deep Welsh roots, with a family tree that stretched back to Beli the Great, a quasi-mythical King of the Britons in the days of Julius Caesar. Dylan had no real desire to see him, but he knew that Augustus John and Caitlin would be staying there en route to Fishguard. Hughes and his wife Frances lived in Castle House, a pink-washed Georgian house adjacent to the ruins of the Norman castle, which they had rented together from a locally established family, the Starkes. They and their two guests were sitting down for lunch when Dylan and Janes arrived and were asked to join them. Caitlin recalled that John was immediately put on edge – not surprisingly, since he must have known Dylan was his young mistress’s lover.

  Frances Hughes saw things differently: ‘I remember Dylan coming into the dining room at Laugharne and thinking this was one of the most vivid and alive young men I’d seen in years.’ With his smallish stature and unkempt appearance, he was hardly attractive, but his latent energy, his ‘brilliant eyes and curly hair’ and his ‘somewhat ethereal’ quality impressed women in Wales as much as in London. Her approval helped smooth over a potentially difficult situation, and in the afternoon everyone, bar the Hugheses, drove westwards to Fishguard. On the way the party stopped at several pubs, John did his judging (he did not like what Janes had to offer), and they returned, repeating their pub crawl along the way. After one stop, Dylan left Janes’s car and climbed with Caitlin into the back seat of John’s black six-cylinder Wolsey, ‘the Bumblebee’.

  In his mirror, John had to endure the sight of his passengers ‘osculating assiduously’. When he reached St Clears, he resolutely failed to turn off the main road for Laugharne but continued another eight miles into Carmarthen. There the drinking continued at the Boar’s Head. John said very little, but Caitlin knew he was furious. When they prepared to leave, she heard a scuffle and, as John jumped into the car and drove off at high speed, she saw Dylan lying on the ground, having emerged the worse from a fight. John had simply refused to transport Dylan back to Laugharne. He wanted Caitlin, and was not prepared to brook any rivals. She finished the night unsatisfactorily, staring at the ceiling, wondering when he would be finished having his way with her.

  The following morning Dylan turned up again and the Hugheses witnessed an entertaining French-style farce as he and John scurried around the battlements, the one emerging for a rhetorical scene with Caitlin as the other exited through a door stage left. Dylan returned by bus and train to Swansea where next morning he wrote a passionate letter to Caitlin in Blashford, reminding her that she had not demurred when he had mentioned marriage. His promising London flirtation had become a full-blown affair. But even he realised nothing would happen for some time, because he lacked money. There was a note of desperation in his confession to Desmond Hawkins that he thought continuously of ‘possessing it in great milky wads to spend on flashy clothes and cunt and gramophone records and white wine and doctors and white wine again and a very vague young Irish woman whom I love in a grand, real way but have to lose because of money money money money.’

  He travelled to London to spend the August bank holiday weekend with Caitlin. John had calmed down enough to agree to draw the frontispiece for a travel book about Wales that Dylan was hoping to tout around London publishers. Dylan had been toying with the idea following the success of J. B. Priestley’s English Journey in 1934 and Edwin Muir’s similar Scottish Journey in 1935. He had no doubt heard about W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice’s on-going expedition to Iceland. He hoped John’s involvement would help him secure a contract.

  In the context of Wales, the project was topical. A phenomenon of the past decade had been the emergence of the Welsh Nationalist party, Plaid Cymru, which, although as yet small and electorally insignificant, threatened to fill the political gap left vacant, particularly in rural Welsh-speaking areas, by the decline of the Liberal party. (The former Liberal leader David Lloyd George had denounced it at the Eisteddfod attended by Dylan and his well-tanked party in Fishguard.) Led by Saunders Lewis, a powerful writer who lectured at University College, Swansea, Plaid Cymru had grown, alongside other Welsh cultural organisations, as Welsh intellectuals contemplated the long-term consequences of the emigration and economic devastation which accompanied the continuing slump. In 1936 a fund to help the unemployed was launched by Lewis in Dowlais, in the Merthyr valley, where in November that year the beleaguered King Edward VIII visited the derelict iron and steel works and declared ‘something must be done’. Partly to distance itself from Anglo-Saxon cultural hegemony and partly reflecting the views of Lewis, a Roman Catholic convert, and other similarly inclined leaders, the party adopted an Idealist form of nationalism which, drawing on the ideas of French Catholics, such as Maurice Barrés and Charles Maurras, saw Wales as part of a greater Christian Europe.

  Plaid’s right-wing tendencies, which were reflected in its close alliance with the quasi-Fascist Action Française, helped explain its lack of electoral success. However in May 1935 it was handed a propaganda opportunity when the Baldwin government announced it intended to build an RAF bombing school at Penyberth, near Pwllheli, in the Lleyn peninsula in Caernarfonshire. Plaid attacked this on the ground that it was an assault on Welsh rural values. Its opposition became more virulent in September 1936 when Lewis and two other Plaid leaders, the Reverend Lewis Valentine and D. J. Williams, participated in an arson attack on the partially built school. They were arrested and, when the case was transferred to the Old Bailey in London where the ‘Penyberth three’ refused to give evidence in English and were sentenced to nine months imprisonment, the party gained its first martyrs and was rewarded with an upsurge in support.

  As this political confrontation was brewing, Keidrych Rhys, a young Welsh journalist in London, hatched plans to launch a new leftist review which, while sympathetic to nationalist aspirations, would showcase the extraordinary range of Welsh writing in English. Born William Ronald Rees Jones in 1915, Rhys was the unlikely product of a Welsh public school (Llandovery College), who spoke with a fruity cut-glass accent and wore the immaculate tweed suits of a country gentleman. His initial approach to Dylan was a suggestion that they should collaborate on an anthology of Anglo-Welsh writing – something Dylan had long wanted to do himself.

  Although this idea fell through, Dylan realised that there was copy to be written about his country. The main event of the summer had been the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July, which introduced some hard reality into the wacky world of the surrealists. In keeping with his claim that surrealism was not a retreat from but a principled assault on reality, David Gascoyne travelled to Spain where he was joined in the struggle against Franco by others among Dylan’s acquaintances, such as Roland Penrose and Stephen Spender. On a different front, Gascoyne was discussing another unlikely offshoot from surrealism with two brilliant Cambridge graduates, Charles Madge, a poet working on the Daily Mirror, and Humphrey Jennings, who had ma
de documentary films with Len Lye. Together they were developing the idea of Mass Observation, a meticulous record of the everyday experience of ordinary Britons, though they came to it not as sociologists but as avant-garde poets, who regarded their documentation as a collage which would provide a snap-shot of the national unconscious. In the autumn the Jarrow march served to emphasise another more political aspect of social reality, and again the importance of looking to one’s community.

  Dylan received encouragement in writing about Wales from the poet and critic William Empson, who in between teaching posts in the Far East and having just published his Poems, was often in the Fitzroy where he recalled meeting Dylan, scrounging for money and talking about going to work as a checker-in at a Welsh mine or as a grocer. Often the strength of Dylan’s views about his home country have been ignored. But Empson noted revealingly:

  What with the Welsh nationalism, the vague and balanced but strong political interests of this man, the taste for violence in his writing, and the way he was already obviously exhausting his vein of poetry about events which involved the universe but happened under his skin, it seemed to me that being a checker-in was just what he wanted; and I shouted at him for some time, against two talkers I should otherwise have been eager to hear, to tell him that he was wasting his opportunities as a Welshman and ought to make full use of a country in which he could nip across the classes.

  Typically Dylan dismissed Empson’s suggestion, but kept to his own idea of a travel book about Wales, though he took his time to get round to writing it. In September he claimed Dent had taken him by surprise when it published his Twenty-Five Poems. The critical response was generally more equivocal than for 18 Poems. Even his friend Desmond Hawkins said in the Spectator that he had been less successful than before in ‘subduing his material to a communicable form’. However, despite his having missed a rendezvous with her, Edith Sitwell’s enthusiasm was undimmed. She arranged to review the book for the Sunday Times and pestered the literary editor Cyril Lakin when her notice did not appear at the expected time. Lakin had somehow failed to take up her imperious request to review 18 Poems a year earlier. But this time the Sunday Times did deliver, and her notice on 15 November was followed by an avalanche of letters. Twenty of them were printed over the following two months, providing a forum on the pros and cons of modern poetry and a high-brow alternative to the gloom of Jarrow and Edward VIII’s abdication in December. This level of interest was reflected in the sales of Twenty-Five Poems which raced through its first impression of 750 copies and had three more impressions, making it one of the more successful poetry books of the 1930s.

  Convinced she was responsible for the popularity of her protégé, Sitwell sought to promote him further. She asked Richard Jennings, a compliant acolyte at the Daily Mirror, to find him a job. But even Jennings could see the drawbacks. He was already working in the office with Charles Madge who had been recommended by T. S. Eliot, and he feared Dylan would fight not only with Madge but the rest of the staff. ‘I would do, or attempt, anything for you,’ he told Sitwell, ‘so must, I suppose, try again. But is there nobody else? Won’t T. S. E[liot] help him on the Criterion or wherever?’ So the intrepid lady turned to Kenneth Clark: ‘Have you seen young Dylan Thomas’ Twenty-Five Poems? He is the boy I told you about when I sat next to you at dinner at Sybil Colefax’s. The poems are very obscure, and very strange, but singularly beautiful, and I think it is certain that he is going to be a great poet.’

  By the start of 1937 Dylan was beginning to find a wider audience. As the Sunday Times debate suggested, the public was bored with modernist experimentation and happy to make acquaintance with, as Grigson sourly put it, ‘a Young Poet untainted with Eliot or with Auden etc. (or with the Left), whose poems, though a bit unintelligible, sounded at least familiar in an old grandiloquent way’.

  Professional recognition was no help in his blossoming relationship with Caitlin. That was undergoing an unexpected hiatus after she contacted gonorrhoea from another man and retired to Ireland to recuperate. As her confidant, she turned to Rupert Shephard, her sister Nicolette’s friend from the Slade who had been so smitten with Caitlin’s looks at Blashford four years earlier that he insisted on painting her. They had kept in touch, usually when she wanted something, such as a person to store her French lover Segal’s paintings which she had hoped to sell in London. He was quite happy to act as an amiable lapdog, even if it meant receiving Caitlin’s confidences about her future with Dylan. She told him that she was smitten, though ‘for internal doctoral reasons’, she needed to cool the relationship and go to Ireland.

  Over the next four months there was little holding back Dylan, buoyed as he was with his taste of success. In the Six Bells shortly after Christmas Oswell Blakeston introduced him to Emily Holmes Coleman, an eccentric, impulsive American writer whose one autobiographical novel, The Shutter of Snow, published in 1930, had dealt with her breakdown and incarceration in an asylum following the birth of her son six years earlier. For much of the previous decade she had lived in Paris where, in between writing for transition, she had been secretary to both the international anarchist Emma Goldman and the flighty heiress (and later art collector) Peggy Guggenheim. Through the latter she had met Djuna Barnes, for whose experimental novel Nightwood she had originally come to London to find a publisher. This book was good enough to interest T. S. Eliot who had put it out under the Faber imprint earlier in 1936 – albeit with an ambiguous introduction, distancing himself from the lesbian content, and saying it would ‘appeal primarily to readers of poetry’ (amongst whom Dylan was a great enthusiast of the work).

  Coleman, whose stream of consciousness style was one of Barnes’s influences, had stayed on in London, living in Oakley Street, off the King’s Road in Chelsea, where she was trying to make sense of her complicated love life. Dubbed ‘Little Annie Oakley’ by Eliot, she had conducted a long unsatisfactory affair with a brilliant civil servant called Peter Hoare. When she weaned herself off that, she conceived a grand passion for the young poet George Barker, but that was complicated by his bisexuality, a problem which also prevented her proceeding with her friendship with David Gascoyne. In her search for sexual satisfaction she had alighted on Humphrey Jennings, the handsome young poet and film-maker who flitted between Cambridge literary cronies, Cameron’s advertising world and surrealism. But he was too caught up in a Byronic vision of himself, driving her to the verge of suicide.

  So the fresh-faced full-lipped Coleman was immediately ‘delighted’ to meet Dylan – ‘a round-eyed animal, with a chuckling guttural laugh, and a rosy personality’. He looked at her and pronounced, approvingly, ‘Not a hard line in her face!’ On the ensuing pub crawl, a Welshman called Richard Hughes tried to bed her (not the author in Laugharne but a sculptor who later changed his name to Huws). But she was more interested in Dylan who ‘opened [her] heart’ by ‘raving’ about the work of another friend, the troubled author Antonia White, whose own novel, Frost in May, an intensely personal account of convent life, had been published in 1933. Dylan said he wanted to meet her, which surprised White when she learnt this the following day.

  Although Norman Cameron warned Coleman about Dylan’s history of sexual disease (there was a suggestion he had picked up another dose of gonorrhoea from a prostitute around the time of the surrealist exhibition), she and the young poet (sixteen years her junior) were soon conducting a passionate affair ‘in pubs and clubs and cinemas and beds’. Through Peggy Guggenheim, the news quickly reached Paris from where Djuna Barnes took Coleman to task on 10 January 1937 for failing to write: ‘Your new love affair must be “hurried” to account for it! I asked Peggy about you and she said it was someone called Dillon Thomas, or Thomas Dillon. She could not remember which – I wonder can it be the one who was Edna Millay’s sweetie, and who helped her with what are said to be the worst translations of Baudelaire in existence? I suppose not.’

  Having once been hospitalised for apparent mental illness, Coleman was fascinate
d by William Blake – a point of contact with Dylan who had some astute comments on her friends who teetered on the edge of insanity. After meeting Antonia White, he felt that, having once been mad, she could never quite recover the peace of mind she craved. ‘She wants to be tame again, but she’s been let loose once.’ As for Gascoyne, he had knocked on the doors of madness, but had held back and never allowed himself to enter. ‘A poetical surrealist in a looney-bin is a literary freak, but a surrealist who hangs around outside, pimping through the bars at the looney-logical activities of the inmates, can always be a man-of-letters and an acknowledged authority on the dark bits of the brain.’ Despite occasional aberrations resulting from drink, Dylan’s own adolescent psychoses had abated. Apart from some virulent spots, he was in better shape physically and mentally than for a long time.

  Although sleeping with Coleman and saying he loved her, Dylan readily discussed his engrossing relationship with Caitlin. He spoke of marrying his ‘Ireland’, but wondered if she had the psychological resilience for the emotional ups and downs of living with a poet, though he was cheered to an extent by the knowledge that she was not squeamish about physical pain. He recalled Caitlin’s imperviousness when she boiled a live lobster, driving others, including Dylan, from the kitchen because they could not bear to hear its screams.

  For a while Coleman genuinely thought he was divided between her and Caitlin. ‘He said he was. But no doubt he did not find me as congenial as she; though I followed him from pub to pub, I simply detested the life. And those “clubs”! … They were (some of them) the saddest places I have ever been in. I wasn’t bored with Dylan but I hated his kind of life. I enjoyed him alone, but he could not stand not drinking … I just wasn’t crazy-bohemian enough for him. Caitlin was.’ She recalled how Dylan used to say admiringly of Caitlin, ‘She’s really crackers!’ – though Coleman shrewdly suspected that being resolutely Bohemian required a rigid frame of reference that is ultimately conventional. (Coleman could be equally unconventional: once, in Hennekey’s with Dylan and Cameron, she refused to allow the barman to close because, she said, two of Britain’s greatest living poets were there and wanted to continue drinking.)