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Dylan Thomas: A New Life

Page 22

by Andrew Lycett


  His empathy with fellow human beings was obvious, even if sometimes sentimental. ‘He used to be horribly upset by any sort of suffering,’ such as the sight of a waiter limping or news of an unmarried girl who was pregnant. Fusco did also witness another, more hurtful, side to his character. When she showed affection towards a baby with a scar, he laughed and said, ‘Serves it right.’ He made great play of accosting women in bars and trying to seduce them. To the amusement of male hangers-on, he would offer his stud services in a flurry of four-letter words. He took particular pleasure in abusing English women.

  Inevitably this behaviour incited physical reaction from husbands and boyfriends, and Fusco found it curious that this peaceful man could sometimes provoke such violence. She ascribed it to a quality of saintliness in Dylan. This may sound a paradox, but she was by no means the only person to remark on his fall-guy innocence – a trait noted by Bert Trick as the secret of not only his character but his creative output. At the same time, Fusco noted ‘he was obsessed by death and creation’ – the subjects of most of his jokes. Indeed the first joke he told her was about coprophilia, a word he had to explain to her. But she found him extraordinarily vivid and learnt more with him about life, people and art than with anyone. ‘He educated me into the Bohemian idiom.’

  Meanwhile, at Veronica’s, Dylan had been trying to write up his account of his Welsh journey, but had made little progress, Despite his colourful social life and romps with his landlady-cum-lover, he thought incessantly about Caitlin, building her up as a symbol of youth and innocence. (He still was not aware that she was slightly older than he.) He fantasised about the two of them operating a close conspiracy, ‘a sort of mad bewilderment and astonishment oblivious to the Nasties and Meanies’, and based on a shared innocence that ‘goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don’t know anything at all, and our inner secret is that we don’t care that we don’t.’

  She also had been thinking and, having reacquainted herself with Celtic culture, could imagine many less satisfying roles than playing the wild Irish muse to a penniless poet. She agreed to accompany Dylan to a cottage rented by Veronica’s husband, Jake, in Lamorna Cove, Cornwall, close to where he had stayed the previous year. On 9 June Caitlin’s father, Francis, married for the third time to Iris O’Callaghan, a tempestuous young Irishwoman who had been at finishing school with another of his daughters, Nicolette, in Paris. It cannot have been entirely coincidence that on the following day Dylan in Cornwall composed a careful letter to his own parents. He apologised for not being in touch for two months; his behaviour was ‘careless, callous and quite unreasonable’. The reason, he explained, along with a routine request for clean clothes, was that he was finalising plans to marry Caitlin the following week in Penzance registry office. He said he intended to come to Swansea when the ceremony was over. He was going to continue his perambulation of Wales, while Caitlin returned to Blashford until they had enough money to live together.

  Events moved more slowly than he wished. His parents became alarmed and put their son-in-law Haydn Taylor to tracking Dylan down. Taylor telephoned Yvonne Macnamara, advising her not to let her daughter marry this man. At some stage Dylan and Caitlin were in London, where they bumped into Emily Holmes Coleman drinking with Mervyn Peake in the Wheatsheaf. Coleman noted how, even though the wedding had yet to take place, Caitlin showed off her ring with childish glee. The American claimed she took Dylan outside and told him not to dare let his fiancée down.

  This visit probably allowed Augustus John to complete his portrait of a radiant, strong-featured Caitlin and to work on his study of Dylan which was to be the frontispiece to the Wales book. The painter had written to her in Cornwall: ‘I spent some time combing the London pubs in hopes of finding you & getting you back for a bit to finish that pink picture which I rather bank on. If I came down soon would you come back with me do you think? I could do Dylan’s drawing at the same time … I hope you haven’t caught any more diseases from Dylan, or others. Keep the fun clean also your quim my little seraph … P.S. I take it you are not spliced yet.’

  The journey to London (as well as drinking both there and in Cornwall) ate into what little money Dylan and Caitlin had. They spent the £3 they had carefully hidden to pay for their wedding licence. But eventually, after two postponements, love triumphed. D.J. resigned himself to the fact that ‘the young irresponsibles are bent on their supreme act of folly’ and sent them a welcome gift of £5. Even so, Wyn Henderson, who had opened a guest-house with the painter Max Chapman in Mousehole, a few miles round the coast from Lamorna, had to take in the couple and then arrange and finally pay for their low-key wedding in Penzance registry office on 11 July. With Dylan in his regular garb of corduroy trousers, tweed jacket, check shirt and no tie, and Caitlin wearing a simple blue cotton dress, the couple exchanged two cheap Cornish silver rings which he had bought in Penzance without telling her – a romantic touch she liked. The ceremony had taken place, Dylan delightedly told Vernon Watkins, ‘with no money, no prospect of money, no attendant friends or relatives, and in complete happiness’.

  ELEVEN

  MARRIAGE PANGS

  At some stage in their marriage Dylan and Caitlin played the truth game, filling out a form titled ‘Qualities: The New Confessions Book’ which appeared in The Weekend Book, a popular annual for the more literate of the pre-television age, comprising humour, poetry and short stories. It is impossible to say when they did this, though it was probably earlier rather than later in their liaison. Since the book was published by the Nonesuch Press which Wyn Henderson had worked for, the Thomases may well have found it on her shelves and submitted themselves to its silent self-analysis while down in Cornwall.

  The book requires its readers to assess themselves and others on fourteen personality traits, giving marks out of twenty. Caitlin thought Dylan was strong on sensibility (a maximum 20), moral sense (19) and sincerity (18); less so on will power (7), discretion (3) and humility (0). He was appreciative of her sincerity (18), sensibility (18) beauty, taste and sensuousness (all 17), but not of her humility (4), tact (4) and discretion (2). Turning their gazes on themselves, Caitlin felt she had sincerity (20), sensibility (19) will power and humility (both 18), but little sense of humour (6), moral sense (5), tolerance (3), discretion (1) or tact (0). Dylan was proud of his sincerity, sensuousness and sensibility (all 18), but admitted he had ground to make up on taste and tact (both 8), discretion (5) and humility (2).

  In sum they both saw themselves as full of sincerity and sensibility, while low on tact and discretion. Ironically, these latter qualities were quickly required when the newly married couple had to withstand Wyn Henderson’s excited pleas to join them in a threesome while they were making love. (Caitlin was apparently agreeable, but Dylan would not have it.) They soon vacated her guest-house, the Lobster Pot, and moved into Max Chapman’s small studio overlooking the harbour in the seaside village of Newlyn, halfway between Mousehole and Penzance. The view was pleasant enough, the air invigorating and gulls flew in for breakfast, even if the overall quality of the environment left something to be desired, with the smell from the fish-market directly in front, the dust from the coal-yard below, and the ubiquitous fleas and other insects from the municipal dump behind. Furnishings included an ancient primus stove, but neither of them could cook. As if Dylan did not already know it, his new wife was quite capable of drinking, however. He joked that they ate in the morning, as they were both too unsteady in the evening to open the tins they had bought.

  As the Spanish Civil War entered a more bloody phase, Dylan and Caitlin were surrounded by second-rate artists and writers, some left over from an Edwardian high age, others simply trying to escape if not blot out the grim realities of the late 1930s. They met Dod Procter, the celebrated expressionist painter who was the grande dame of the Newlyn art scene. In her mid-forties, she fancied Dylan – or so he thought – which may explain why when, on preparing for an excursion, she asked for time to ‘
powder her nose’, Caitlin piped up brusquely, ‘Why don’t you put it in a bag?’ One evening Mulk Raj Anand, an Indian novelist feted by the Bloomsbury group, made them a fiery curry. As Dylan told the story, another guest looked at her plate where she saw a curious rubbery thing like a discarded French letter. Out of curiosity, she picked it up and found it was the entire skin from her tongue. In the vicinity was Dylan’s friend, Rayner Heppenstall, also newly married and in a religious phase. He recalled Dylan walking in a bright sunny field above Newlyn, drinking from a bottle of lethal ‘champagne tonic wine’, and talking animatedly. Suddenly he stopped and said, ‘Somebody’s boring me. I think it’s me.’

  With several friends risking their lives in Spain, Dylan felt pangs of acute existential anxiety that he should be doing something. Acting out of character, he took daily trips out to sea with the Newlyn fishermen. He probably thought his young wife would enjoy seeing him in this masculine role, that it would remind her of her father’s love of the sea. He even talked of sailing round Land’s End to Swansea, but this was a pipe-dream.

  Certainly Swansea and its environs promised to be more lively when he and Caitlin went there to stay with his parents in late August 1937. After a false start the previous year Keidrych Rhys had managed to get his review, called simply Wales, off the ground. The first issue had appeared in June, billed as ‘an independent pamphlet of creative work by the younger progressive Welsh writers’. It came with a bald manifesto which emphasised the feeling among English-speaking writers and artists in Wales that they had something special to offer both their own nation and a wider Britain. That feeling might be presented in an over-rhetorical, even paranoid way, but it reflected an idea that became clearer with the emergence of English literature in the Indian sub-continent, Africa and the Caribbean – that minority Anglophone status in a larger culture allows unique insights and (in the vocabulary of academic theorists) a ‘liminal’ voice that can enhance both the art and experience of people on both sides of the equation.

  Taking its tone from ideas on culture elaborated by Scottish nationalists such as Hugh MacDiarmid, the Wales manifesto derided England’s contribution to British culture, claiming there was ‘no such thing as “English” culture; a few individuals may be highly cultured, but the people as a whole are crass.’ Welsh literature, on the other hand, was ‘carried on, not by a clique of moneyed dilletantes [sic], but by the small shopkeepers, the blacksmiths, the non-conformist ministers, by the miners, quarrymen, and the railwaymen. The Kelt’s heritage is clear as sunlight, yet the burden of English literature had also fallen upon him. The greatest of present-day poets are Kelts.’

  After their earlier failure to collaborate even on an anthology, Rhys felt notably cool towards Dylan. A dispute over a girl had further fuelled his antipathy: in an incident in a London pub, Dylan had displayed a feudal droit du seigneur towards the womenfolk of the small Anglo-Welsh literary community. Relating this to Glyn Jones, whom he was also trying to recruit, Rhys likened Dylan to Dafydd ap Gwilym, the great skirt-chasing anti-clerical Welsh poet of the fourteenth century, who ‘mustn’t miss his ten beauties a day, not even if it means taking my girl friend, a little slut who I was happy to lose, though Dylan didn’t go up in my estimation, there [being] some old puritan spirit left. Dylan’s only affinity with the Gogynfeirdd [medieval court poets] is his vanity and use of I – I, Dylan, the poet and fucker … He could never become a truly representative Welsh poet. Can a poetic person with his sensitiveness ignore the industrial mess where he lives? Or am I being unduly cynical and catty?’ And just to make sure his attitude to Dylan was not misunderstood, he added, damningly, ‘[He] reminds me of these fake nostalgic bourgeois reincarnations of boyhood of some compatriots, who’ve never really lived intensely or felt. A teashop gossip – a beauty at remove.’

  Jones admitted that Dylan could be very annoying, though he had great affection for him. ‘I’ve told him how absurd all this drinking and so on is, suicidal for a man like him, but it makes no difference of course. It’s a tremendous pity he kids himself so much. His work suffers I think – his “Life and Letters” story is piffling. You see, he hasn’t the energy or determination to acquire any background, so he is reduced to spinning fantasies out of his navel. And soon his navel won’t have another fantasy left.’ (The story, ‘A Prospect of the Sea’, was about a boy’s sexual initiation in an idyllic West Wales where, though ‘he did not believe in God … God had made this summer full of blue winds and heat and pigeons in the house wood.’ Still in Dylan’s mythopoeic style, it anticipated the rural romanticism and religious agnosticism of his later poems.)

  Despite such caveats about his political commitment, his lifestyle and his imaginative range (specifically in his stories), Dylan was the leading (in the sense of the most widely recognised) young Anglo-Welsh writer of the mid-1930s. He was a catch who had to be included in any review of the type Rhys envisaged. When Rhys raised this subject again in early 1937, Dylan still wanted the magazine to be ‘very experimental and not left’. But then he relented and, taking an opportunity to cadge some money off the slightly wealthier Rhys, offered to act as literary advisor to the venture. He provided one particularly good contact in Vernon Watkins, whom Rhys visited in Swansea in April.

  Rhys had moved to a farm in Carmarthen and was taking seriously his role as god-father of modern Anglo-Welsh letters. He sought a middle way between authoritarian nationalism and the cultural colonialism favoured by institutions such as the BBC and, in particular, the Western Mail, the Cardiff based paper which looked down on Welsh literary aspirations with all the enthusiasm of a suburban English drawing room. He could call on a large and varied pool of talent from the established Caradoc Evans to Goronwy Rees, the brilliant young assistant editor of the Spectator, who promised a short story. And, as always, there was ‘verse by gently nurtured County Sandhurst gentlemen, sadly reminiscent of Evan Morgan’s youthful outpourings’.

  In Swansea Rhys also met Charles Fisher, Fred Janes and Tom Warner, who accompanied him in a party of ‘ten of Dylan’s boys and girls’ to a protest meeting against the detention of Saunders Lewis. According to Rhys, they all clapped at his command, and then repaired to the Grand Hotel where the main topic of discussion was their worries about Dylan. Their eager response to Wales indicated the extent to which this small group of educated, not very political, friends was looking for direction on how to express their Welshness without disowning their English-style upbringing – an issue which was always rather more difficult to resolve in Swansea’s hybrid culture. But the problem with this crowd was that they looked to Dylan for intellectual leadership and were lost without him, a point recognised by Rhys: ‘they all try and write like Dylan and talk about him every minute. Imitate his slobbery slop. They too have a particular form of oblique humour, which I wasn’t used to.’

  Dylan’s story ‘Prologue to an Adventure’ graced the front cover of the first issue, published in June. ‘Confident, ear-catching and barely comprehensible’, this was a curious relic from a couple of years earlier when he had been trying to marry his prose and verse styles. He had worked on it while in Ireland, from where he had explained it to Bert Trick as a reverse Pilgrim’s Progress – the tale of Anti-Christian’s (or Daniel Dom’s) travels from the City of Zion to the City of Destruction. One reader wrote in appreciatively that it was ‘a marvellous blend of Dali and St John the Divine’.

  But such an esoteric mix was never going to win Dylan a large readership. As with his travel book on Wales, he seemed to be marching alone into a weird and inhospitable landscape without getting anywhere. This was the gist of Nigel Heseltine’s review of Twenty-Five Poems in the second issue of Wales in August. While applauding the book’s ambition, Heseltine, the prickly Eton-educated son of the Edwardian musician Philip Heseltine (better known by his schizoid alter ego Peter Warlock), felt the material was ‘often raw and unshaped’, and couched in ‘typically Sitwellian image-confusion’. As he told Rhys in accepting the commission:
‘The main obstacle to [Dylan’s] fulfilment is the man himself. I have a feeling that at present he is a vehicle not a creator. I have seldom had the impression of anything so spineless as Dylan half-tight. He should never get tight, it shows him up too much.’

  Rhys bumped into Dylan back in Swansea on 6 September and found him unchanged. ‘I’m afraid he’ll always remain an emotional brainless creature, nice, of course.’ The next day Dylan sent a short encomium on Auden to Grigson for inclusion in a special double issue of New Verse. This could be read as either an endorsement of Rhys’s view or a subtle presentation of Dylan’s differences with Auden – that he ‘admire[d] intensely the mature, religious, and logical fighter, but deprecate[d] the boy bushranger’. This phrase has been much debated: it suggests Dylan approved of Auden’s propensity for radical cultural change (along the lines he himself had noted in his poem ‘I see the boys of summer’), while disapproving of the way his political tub-thumping got in the way of his poetry. But Rhys was more of a follower of Auden. ‘The only thing a young Welsh writer should do is revolutionary writing, without heeding criticism,’ he wrote to Glyn Jones, in a curious manner for an editor of an intellectual review. ‘It’s the only thing – delivering a message in this wobbly world before it’s sunk. “Good writing” seems so silly in war fascism unemployment.’

 

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