Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  To contemplate these matters Dylan returned in late January to Swansea, where he also had another task. His father had finally retired in December and Dylan had to help his parents rent out Cwmdonkin Drive (it was not sold until 1943) and move into a smaller house close to the sea in Bishopston, one of the first villages leading out of Swansea into Gower. However this process was delayed by his mother’s neuralgia, which confined her to bed unable to move the muscles in her face.

  In between the two stages of this moving operation, Dylan dashed to Cambridge to fulfil a commitment to Wyn Lewis, a young undergraduate friend of Vernon Watkins, to give two talks to the Nashe Society in St John’s College. He had not intended to take Coleman, but for some reason she accompanied him, perhaps as a result of some deal after he had written a review of her friend Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood for Light and Dark, a short-lived Oxford periodical, where he described it as ‘one of the three great prose books ever written by a woman’. (One of the others was almost certainly Wuthering Heights, whose author, Emily Brontë, he described as ‘the only woman I’ve ever loved’.)

  On Saturday 13 February he attended a formal Cambridge cocktail party, where he drank sherry and then whisky to steel himself, before falling asleep and then rousing himself to read a long (nearly two hours) paper on ‘Modern Poetry et cetera’. Amidst ‘brilliant, bitter, and sometimes bawdy invective’ he elaborated on his distaste for the school of Auden and Spender and the ‘inevitable compromises and vulgarisation attending works of propaganda’. He refused to answer questions, but ended by reading not only an Auden ballad but one of his favourite poems at the time, ‘Captain Carpenter’ by John Crowe Ransom. He may well have been alerted to its simple religious symbolism by Ransom’s fellow American Coleman who was to follow her friend Antonia White into the Catholic church in 1942.

  The following night he gave a more informal though animated reading of three short stories and part of his ‘Altarwise by owl-light’ sonnet sequence. During his visit he attended a lively party in his honour at the house of Gordon Fraser, a hospitable Cambridge bookseller. Fraser’s wife Katherine had befriended a forlorn fellow Illinois graduate student, John Berryman. Dylan took to the hard-living Yeats-loving Berryman, a depressed version of himself, who was to become one of America’s leading poets before committing suicide in 1972.

  On the train to Cambridge Coleman taxed Dylan on the meaning of one of his sonnets. Despite his explanation, she felt it did not convey what he wanted it to say. ‘It was clear to me then that he was sincere, and that some block in him (evident enough what it was) prevented his communicating in a way to be comprehended.’ This block which she identified as his inability to handle reality was apparent in one incident at Cambridge. Professor E. M. W. Tillyard, a world authority on Shakespeare, came to meet Dylan (probably at the Saturday night party) but found him in one of his drunken poses – down on the floor, playing bears. In some embarrassment, Coleman tried to engage the eminent scholar in a discussion on Milton but found him ‘naturally upset’. The following day Dylan knocked out a sad note to an unidentified correspondent. He was eating prairie oysters in Fraser’s bookshop, waiting for the pubs to open, with the ‘filthiest feeling in the world’. As a consequence, he apologised for not calling ‘to do a Richards with you’, suggesting he was going to participate in a repeat of an exercise pioneered by the former Cambridge (now Harvard) don I. A. Richards, who had given his students unidentified poems by famous writers and asked for comments.

  Dylan’s warm reception in Cambridge confirmed that, with the publication of his second book and following the controversy in the pages of the Sunday Times, he was – for a poet, at least – famous. At Edith Sitwell’s suggestion, he followed her lead in appointing David Higham as his literary agent. Higham, a courteous, effective, old-school operator of Jewish origin and military background, had recently left Curtis Brown to set up his own company with two colleagues, Nancy Pearn and Laurence Pollinger. He was to become skilled in bailing Dylan out of difficult situations. Almost immediately he had to deal with his old agency which he discovered was touting around Dylan’s book of short stories. Dylan apologised, saying he was a business dunce and explaining, unconvincingly, that he had been approached personally by the eponymous head, Spencer Curtis Brown. So Higham initially had to ensure he had exclusive representation.

  Dylan had already begun to ask Higham about American publishers when he revealed his idea for a book about Wales, which he said was not intended to be a nationalist tirade or a naturalist’s ramble but ‘an intimate chronicle’ of a personal journey by foot, bus and train. He intended to visit writers and painters he knew such as Richard Hughes and Caradoc Evans, and he still hoped having a frontispiece portrait by Augustus John would make it an attractive package for a publisher.

  In London, en route from Cambridge back to Wales, Dylan and Coleman decided, rather than go to her flat, they would spend a night in a dank hotel, where he upset her with his bluff exclamation, at the mention of Caitlin, ‘Oh, I’ve never told you anything about that. That is between us.’ In Gower, he helped install his parents in their new house, with its garage and lawn much more of a suburban villa than Cwmdonkin Drive. From there on a balmy Easter Monday he wrote blithely to Coleman, making no reference to any misunderstanding. Instead he enthused about a sweater Caitlin had knitted him, while telling Coleman, ‘I miss you deeply, and want to come back to London soon; I remember everything, and it’s all good to remember. You are very, very near to me.’

  Describing the Welsh bank holiday (in a way which fore-shadowed his later story ‘Holiday Memory’), he told Coleman he particularly liked such crowded days because – confirming something Trick liked to say – that was when he could observe humanity in all its tragic, comic, democratic variety, adding revealingly, if hardly correctly, ‘It is only among poor failures that I find the people I like best.’ He clearly liked this line for he elaborated on it to George Barker a few days later. For some reason the two young poets had never been introduced (though they had attended a party at David Archer’s). Tentatively, Barker had made contact via Coleman with the idea of starting a poetic dialogue. Dylan readily agreed, claiming: ‘All my friends are failures, I think the glories of the world are mingy, and the people I know and like best – hack Fleet streeters, assistant assistant film-producers, professional drunks, strays and outlaws, who are always, & always will be, just about to write their autobiographies – are too big to want them or get them.’ Barker wrote ‘Epistle to D. T.’ which was printed in the May issue of New Verse, but from Dylan nothing more was heard.

  One reason was that it was time for his long-discussed journey through Wales. On 6 April, his first day out, he made slow progress, travelling by meandering, stopping train, as far as Machynlleth, one of the centres of Welsh language activism in Montgomeryshire, though, so far as Dylan was concerned in a telegram to Coleman, it was ‘Gods knows where’. En route, he had spent part of the afternoon in a wet and windy Aberystwyth where, chastened by the force and unpredictability of the sea, which had fascinated him since his Swansea youth, he proceeded to Machynlleth, from where he set out walking late that same evening. It was madness, something quickly brought home to him by his hostile environment.

  ‘I was not the only one abroad that foal of a night,’ he wrote in an unpublished fragment based on his journal. ‘An hour after closing time, a white queen rat, big as a Persian cat, ran by the hedgeside; she was not followed by her common rats, as the queen rat is in all stories; there was no need to climb a tree, or throw my safe stone. She ran on into the darkness, There were vampires in all the hedges, pale girls & clergymen’s wives – small respectable women, with set red smiles & long eye-teeth; the fiend who follows a lonely man should catch him up. It was a bad beginning.’

  Within a very short time he had had enough. He may, as he had said in his bank holiday letter, have wanted to get back to Coleman. Or he may have got wind that Caitlin was due from Ireland. Either was good enough reason to han
g up his hiking boots. Since Caitlin was not in London, he immediately sought the comforts of his American girlfriend, planting himself in Coleman’s flat and declaring with the conviction of a small boy returned from a perilous adventure, ‘Safe, at last.’ They were together in the crowded Fitzroy when, as Coleman recorded, ‘all of a sudden a blonde childish head with a pretty pink face appeared through the mass, put out a hand & took Dylan’s; & he with a smile of delight went right out with this girl.’ From this woman’s hair and general demeanour, Coleman thought she must be a pub whore, and sat back, waiting for him to return. But Dylan never came back. Coleman was so upset when Dylan did not contact her over the next three days that she went looking for him with a friend, Phyllis Jones. Jones found Dylan and his blonde girl in a pub near Charing Cross. He introduced his companion as Caitlin, back from Ireland, and stated he was going to marry her.

  On 13 April David Gascoyne ran into Dylan and his fiancée in Piccadilly, where they were on their way to a cinema to see the horror film The Golem. He accompanied them part of the way, but, en route, Dylan got some dust in his eye and had to divert to a chemist for an eye-bath – an ungainly sight, Gascoyne noted, along with his impressions of a muted Caitlin, whom he described astutely as having ‘a hard innocence, obtuse, hermetic, and a concealed but very precise knowledge of how to deal with anyone she might want to deal with’.

  Three days later, Dylan had recovered enough to meet Berryman, the young American from Cambridge, who was in London to meet his hero, W. B. Yeats, at the Athenæum. According to Berryman, Dylan heaped scorn on Yeats, as well as his usual bêtes noires such as Auden, and tried to get him drunk at lunch-time prior to his important engagement. Around this time Coleman saw Dylan again for the first time since the Fitzroy. Caitlin was temporarily back in Blashford, and he was looking doleful. Coleman asked him to choose between her and Caitlin, but he would not. Back at her flat, she made him sleep alone, which infuriated him. Next day she told him never to come back. With Nigel Henderson, his friend Wyn’s artist son in the room, Dylan sat slumped in the sofa, not saying a word.

  It is not difficult to guess what happened afterwards. The following week he was due to make his first important broadcast, reading his and other people’s poems, in ‘Life and the Modern Poet’, a fifteen-minute programme for the BBC for which he was being paid an inclusive fee of four guineas. On the day of the broadcast Bert Trick met D. J. Thomas on a bus in Swansea. The recently retired schoolmaster proudly told him to listen to the wireless that evening, though he also added, ‘Do not be disappointed if the announcer says that Dylan Thomas has been indisposed and he has to play Debussy.’ And so it almost came to pass. Having received a second £25 tranche of his advance for his account of his Welsh journey, Dylan completely forgot he was supposed to record his contribution for the newly established Welsh region in Swansea. A couple of hours before he was on air, he was dragged from a London pub by John Pudney and taken to Broadcasting House, where a land-link with Swansea was hastily rigged. No-one who listened was any the wiser as to the background. However Dylan’s behaviour and, even worse, his failure to provide a script afterwards, caused over the next couple of months a flurry of unanswered letters to him and of related bureaucratic memos within the BBC, including one to the Welsh Programme Director: ‘A nice mess-up all round.’ He was not invited back for eighteen months.

  Clearly his no-show was the result of an extended period of over-indulgence following his dumping by Coleman and subsequent reunion with Caitlin. He ended in a nursing home with bronchitis and laryngitis, while Caitlin returned again to Blashford where he wrote longingly, telling her that being away from her was ‘absolutely a physical removal … If I lost a hand when you weren’t with me, when you came back it would grow again, stronger & longer than ever. That’s my cock words again, though all it means is true as heaven.’

  He could not, to put it crudely, keep his cock away. Needing somewhere to stay, he was taken in by Veronica Sibthorp, a rich partially crippled artist whom he had met in Cornwall the previous year. While he continued to tell everyone about Caitlin, he seems to have been happy (possibly as a quid pro quo for somewhere to stay) to sleep with Veronica, though the exact timing of their sexual affair is uncertain. She lived in Great Ormond Street, opposite the nurses’ home where Ruthven Todd used to say that the spectacle of the girls dressing and undressing was better than anything he later saw in Jersey City. Estranged from Jake Sibthorp, a rich printer who drove a Bentley, she was an excellent cook, who possessed an unusual luxury, a refrigerator. Her flat provided a civilised alternative venue to Norman Cameron’s for raucous parties and inventive word games. She would park her gammy leg, dubbed ‘Gilbert’, on a stool and, if she needed to move around her kitchen, she would hop. Calling Dylan ‘the Angelic Pig’ (a friendlier alternative to Cameron’s ‘the Ugly Suckling’), she used to bathe him daily (perhaps to alleviate his spots).

  They used to meet Todd in the Swan pub, where others in their circle included William Empson and Bob Pocock, a former policeman beginning a broadcasting career. On one occasion Dylan managed to stab himself in the eye, eating a plate of meat-balls. Another time he and Todd talked their way into the Café Royal where a man bought them a Pimms No. 1 and extolled the financial rewards of writing pornography. Dylan thought he could do the same and knocked out a ten-page story overnight. But when he re-read it, he thought it was so bad that he tore it up. He reserved his licentiousness for rhymes made up for his friends, along the lines of:

  The last time I slept with the Queen,

  I repeatedly muttered ‘Ich Dien’,

  She called me a shite

  And said, ‘Put out the light.

  A Queen should be served but not seen.’

  Veronica kept an album of Dylan’s occasional verses and drawings from this period which is now in the National Library of Wales. Apart from two more serious items – Dylan’s short introduction to his Welsh trip and the draft of an interesting though later abandoned poem, based on hunting images, starting ‘For as long as forever is’, which he read to Vernon Watkins around this time – this portfolio describes a relationship that was childish and bawdy. The influence of the recent surrealist exhibition is evident in several cartoons in Dylan’s hand, including one captioned ‘Egocentric, egocock’, and another with Veronica’s caption ‘Child surprised by size of cock’. A self-portrait by Dylan carries his legend: ‘I’m young but I can learn’, while his caricature of Caitlin has the words: ‘Augustus’ model (she hopes)’. There are three delightful sketches titled ‘Lazy’, including ‘Welsh lazy’ with an annotation by Dylan:

  Oh oh there’s lazy I

  am

  Damn

  It all I am, aye

  Hermaphroditism is a theme in several drawings, but the essentially sexual nature of Dylan’s liaison with Veronica was evident from a doodle depicting a bee and someone in bed. With the rubric ‘Bear in bed’, it carries Dylan’s two-line ‘Poem to Veronica’:

  Wherever there’s honey there’s bees & bears there

  And I’m a bad bee & you’re a good bear.

  And if that was not clear enough, he also wrote:

  I love my love with an A because she Answers

  Both my hands, while both her Breasts are dancers.

  I love my love with a B because she beats

  All others at Lighthousing up her teats.

  In ‘Shouldn’t’, one of several crisp short stanzas, Dylan took a more humorous attitude to death than usually found in his poetry:

  All I know about death

  Can be said in one breath:

  It’s tall and it’s short

  And it shouldn’t ought.

  His salacious schoolboy humour is most apparent in another poem:

  Up in the belfry sexton stands

  Pulling pud with grimy hands.

  Parson in vestry upward yells

  ‘Stop pulling pud, pull fucking bells.’

  Groaning at the thought of working
>
  Sexton goes on pulling gherkin.

  Pausing not to say his prayers

  Parson stamps up belfry stairs,

  Just when reaches peak so high

  Stops a packet in the eye;

  Sexton, having shot his spray,

  Buttons up and puts away,

  Turning round to parson yells

  ‘Now perhaps I’ll pull fucking bells.’

  Moral

  The moral of this story’s plain

  And should be taught in schools again

  Never mix up work with play

  Pull pud by night & bells by day.

  Dylan was in London for the Coronation of King George VI on 12 May. Elizabeth Fusco, a Scottish dancer turned actress, watched the procession with him from the Trafalgar Square offices of the Courier, a literary magazine written almost entirely by Gerald Kersh, an author of novels and short stories much valued by Dylan. Except that Dylan refused to look at the ceremony and sat with his back to the window. ‘He didn’t like the pomp,’ recalled Fusco, while expressing surprise because he normally enjoyed ‘colour and gaiety and brass bands’. Fusco had recently arrived in London from Glasgow and was working in films as Elizabeth Ruby. Dylan rescued her from a sophisticated movie set she disliked. She was impressed by his hands and particularly by his voice: not so much his accent – ‘he could have been Hungarian’ – but his ‘wonderful tones’. What she described as a ‘romance’ rather than affair ensued as they explored London on foot, visiting pubs and restaurants, talking a lot, perhaps ending in an all-night café by the Thames, where she retained an image of him, lonely and sad, reflected in the river. The Coronation hardly featured as a topic of conversation among their Bohemian acquaintances. More important was the war in Spain and the rise of Nazism in Germany. But though Dylan was aware of developments, he did not want to think about them – probably, Fusco thought, because it hurt too much.