Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  More than ever, Dylan’s cultural role was to act as a gadfly – a point negatively noted in a poem Nigel Heseltine sent Rhys a few days later:

  A young fellow of Swansea called Tummas

  creates a disturbance among us

  with a purgative pill

  he produces at will

  effects that are published by some ass.

  Not that Dylan was particularly concerned with this anguished debate. He was contentedly introducing Caitlin to his parents and friends. Bert Trick recalled meeting the newly married couple in a party with Caitlin’s sister Nicolette and other members of her family who were returning from a holiday in Pembrokeshire. Swansea had a long history of ties with the Basque country and, after the bombing of Guernica in April 1937, had taken in a group of eighty Basque children and installed them in Sketty Hall where Trick was part of the reception committee. Dylan brought his new bride and her relations to see him there. Dylan amused the refugee children by climbing into a tunnel and getting stuck.

  When the young Thomases went to dinner with the Tricks, Bert’s wife Nell pronounced that Caitlin had the most beautiful complexion she had ever seen. Vernon Watkins also was entranced by the woman he dubbed ‘Caitlin ni Houlihan’ after the heroine of W. B. Yeats’s eponymous play. He noted, ‘When she smokes a cigarette she looks very much like Dylan and her remarks are like his but softer, and in a lower key.’ He found Dylan on good form socially, but not looking very well physically, the result, he thought, of having been depressed in Cornwall. Watkins quickly forgot the annoyance he had felt when he opened the first Wales and saw that his poem ‘Grief of the Sea’, which he had given to Dylan as the magazine’s literary advisor, had been inexplicably altered. He went round Swansea bookshops changing it, wherever possible, back to his original. Dylan apologised for his ‘Thowdlerized’ version, explaining it was a private doodle and he had not meant it to reach Rhys, let alone be printed.

  Having grown to know and love a witty drinking man, Caitlin was surprised by her husband’s meekness in the company of his parents. Dylan cut out his usual swear words and addressed D.J. and Florrie conventionally, even reverentially. His mother continued to fuss over him, drawing him a bath every evening. It did not take him long to get annoyed and to go out drinking with his friends. But when he turned up the following morning with a hangover he had regained his placidness. Florrie would say he was ill with the ’flu and give him bowls of hot milk filled with chunks of bread, his preferred cure-all throughout his life.

  Nicolette was also fairly recently married, to a society painter Anthony Devas, by whom she had a year-old daughter Emma. On her visit, she noted, ‘Mr Thomas owned a lot of books and Mrs Thomas was a great chatter-box. It was a cramped menage with Caitlin and Dylan added.’ For this reason her sister and brother-in-law soon moved to the more ample (thirteen-roomed) Macnamara family house in Blashford where they spent much of the next six months. There the newly-weds quickly fell into a routine. The Macnamaras had fashioned a large back room out of the wood shed. Francis Macnamara had supplied a carpet to make it slightly more comfortable, but the general décor and standard of cleanliness were rudimentary. Dylan remarked how nice it was not to be followed around by somebody with a dustpan and brush. (His wide-eyed sister Nancy gushed that it was the most artistic house she had ever seen.)

  He would work for two or three hours each morning before the grandfather clock told him it was 12 o’clock and time for him and Caitlin to take the bus into Ringwood for a drink before lunch at the Old Oak. They returned an hour later, armed with fizzy drinks and bags of sweets about which Nicolette noted Dylan had views as marked as any wine connoisseur. The couple then retired upstairs to bed where, as they munched their way through their sweets, they read to each other, perhaps from one of Dylan’s hoard of comics or one of the many thrillers he found in the library. In the evening they went back to the pub, often accompanied by Caitlin’s sister Brigit or her brother John, if he was home on leave from the navy.

  During their brief honeymoon in Wales, the Thomases had played croquet and table-tennis (a sport which Caitlin enjoyed so much that Dylan contemplated buying her a table). In Hampshire, they were more sluggish (even though these had hardly been strenuous activities), tending to relax with games of shove-halfpenny and skittles in the Old Oak. Caitlin burnt off excess energy in bouts of dancing and occasionally managed to drag Dylan out for a walk or even a bicycle ride in the country. They also visited nearby beauty spots, such as Durdle Door in Dorset, where he and Caitlin were photographed by Nora Summers, who also captured him in studied, tough-boy pose – hair tousled, lighting a cigarette, wearing cravat and thick woolly cardigan probably knitted by his wife; a poetic, sensual James Dean before his time. Dylan sent a copy of this snap to Vernon Watkins, telling him he could use it to advertise Kensitas cigarettes in his front window. Watkins responded with ‘Portrait of a Friend’, almost a love poem, delicately celebrating the marvel that this vulnerable, impenetrable figure could have such poetic range, covering the holy, the deathly and the earthy.

  Poetry was poorly represented at Blashford, either on the library shelves or in general conversation. For an exchange of ideas about his work, he relied on postal communication with Watkins, whose sensitive judgement he trusted and with whom he swapped suggestions about metre and, in particular, apposite words. One poem he revised many times was ‘I make this in a warring absence’. First mentioned the previous September, it coincided with the occasion Augustus John turned up in Cornwall and revived jealous memories of his affair with Caitlin. This suggests Dylan was more troubled by his wife’s infidelities than seemed apparent. Caitlin certainly saw it this way, out of a sense of self-confidence or even arrogance (as she later put it) which meant she never questioned that Dylan was hers ‘for keeps’.

  The poem tells of his limp and jealous state when his lover’s sexual passion is withdrawn. Only after a process of purgation is he able to forgive and welcome her when she sweetly returns. As he explained to Desmond Hawkins, he sought conflicting images and let them fight until they reached a resolution. He repeated this line to Henry Treece, a poet and critic who approached him in February 1938 hoping to write a book about his verse. Treece advocated the virtues of romantic poetry in an age of high politics and aimed to appropriate the Welshman to his cause. While making his usual self-deprecatory noises, Dylan was happy to find such interest in his work and took the trouble to explain, ‘I make one image – though “make” is not the word: I let, perhaps, an image be “made” emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual & critical forces I possess: let it breed another; let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict.’ Out of his host of warring images, he hoped he achieved ‘that momentary peace which is a poem’.

  Claiming he had no access to a typewriter, Dylan asked Watkins to type up ‘I make this in a warring absence’ (also known as ‘Poem [for Caitlin]’) so he could send it to T. S. Eliot at The Criterion. Watkins was so inspired (Caitlin thought besotted) that he happily complied, not only with copies of Dylan’s own verse but also of poems by himself and others, particularly Yeats, which his young friend wanted to use in his increasingly regular public readings (for example, to students at Goldsmiths’ College, London in January). With nothing much to distract him, Dylan found writing (and particularly rhymes) surprisingly easy, though most of what he sent to Watkins were revisions of earlier work – pieces such as ‘After the Funeral’ (based on the notebook poem he had composed following the death of his Aunt Annie in 1933), ‘How shall my animal’, and (though the dating is more problematic) ‘When all my five and country senses’ whose title and general sentiment suggests his general contentment and provides a foretaste of rural themes to come.

  ‘I make this in a warring absence’ appeared not in The Criterion but in Twentieth Century Verse, a new small poetry magazine edited by Juli
an Symons, which aimed to be a more accessible alternative to Grigson’s New Verse. Its appearance reflected subtle changes in the London intellectual climate. In the art world, for example, the down-to-earth Euston Road school of painting was emerging after the excesses of surrealism.

  With his poetry flowing, Dylan’s main concern was his stories and, in particular, the collection he had put together with a view to publication. This had been retrieved by Higham from Faber (where it had been sent by Curtis Brown) and returned to Dylan, minus ‘The Orchards’ which was used not only in The Criterion but also in two Faber anthologies of short stories. At the time Dylan was still supposed to be working on his book on Wales, but made no further progress – one of several incidents that led to an early, if short-lived souring of his relations with Higham. With minimal income coming to Blashford, he became increasingly desperate for money and in December, without consulting Higham, made a deal directly with George Reavey’s new Europa Press to publish his collection of short stories under the title The Burning Baby. The book was supposed to come out in both popular and limited editions. For the latter Dylan supplied a list of around thirty potential subscribers, including his apparently richer friends such as Vernon Watkins, Emily Coleman and Augustus John, as well as less obvious figures including the travel writer Robert Byron, the academic Lord David Cecil, Alan and Margaret Taylor with whom he had stayed outside Manchester in 1935, and Constantine FitzGibbon, an Irish-American undergraduate at Exeter College, Oxford.

  Before Christmas he and Caitlin went to London to pick up the first £15 tranche of his much needed advance. Reports filtered back to Carmarthen that Dylan was seen in the Café Royal after the pubs closed, causing Keidrych Rhys to observe: ‘He should do some real work before Bloomsbury drop him.’ The Thomases stayed with Reavey’s friend Anna Wickham, a rugged Australian-born poet whose house in Hampstead was a haven for impoverished writers and artists. A notice in her hall invited: ‘Saddle your Pegasus here. Creative Minds Respected. Meals at all Times.’ With no mind to conventional domesticity, she wore football stockings and slept with a stinking chamber pot under her bed. She also had a fierce temper, so it was no surprise when the Thomases soon fell out with her and were expelled into a cold snowy evening. While still persona grata, Dylan met one of her visitors, Lawrence Durrell, who caught his ear by talking about Henry Miller, author of the banned novel The Tropic of Cancer which he much admired. Durrell and Miller were trying to turn The Booster, the ponderous official publication of the American Country Club in Paris, into a lively literary magazine. Dylan offered them his Caitlin poem, ‘I make this in a warring absence’, which appeared in the magazine in April 1938, along with three poems by Antonia White, two of which dealt with her damaging affairs with both Nigel and Ian Henderson, Wyn’s sons who were hardly out of their teens. (Wyn would push them on her friends, but Nigel, in particular, was sexually ambivalent and liked to reminisce about being groped by Dylan.) Soon afterwards the magazine antagonised the club grandees by printing an obscene story about an eskimo and moved, under the name Delta, to the more liberal atmosphere of London.

  In January the Thomases were back in London, having hitched a lift to town from Augustus John. One pressing reason was to pick up the remaining £5 of the advance for The Burning Baby. Reavey was reluctant to pay, but recognised his friend’s need. The cheque was cashed on 25 January by Nigel Henderson, an indication that Dylan had attended the opening the previous day of Guggenheim Jeune, the London branch of Peggy Guggenheim’s avant-garde Paris gallery, which was run by her ‘Leporello’, Nigel’s mother Wyn. The opening show quickly gave way to exhibitions of Kandinsky and of contemporary sculpture. The latter caused a sensation when, on the advice of James Bolivar Manson, director of the Tate Gallery, British customs refused to allow sculptures by Brancusi, Arp, Alexander Calder and others into the country. In March, Wyn Henderson organised a petition signed by a number of artists including Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland.

  A month later another gallery opened next door to the Guggenheim Jeune in Cork Street. It was the London Gallery, financed by Roland Penrose and dedicated to surrealism. Penrose asked Dylan for a contribution for his related magazine the London Bulletin, edited by the Belgian surrealist Edouard Mesens and Humphrey Jennings (both, together with Samuel Beckett at this time, lovers of Peggy Guggenheim). Dylan replied enthusiastically, though his sotto voce request for payment may have put Penrose off since nothing of his appeared in the Bulletin. Clearly, however, through his connections with Reavey, the Hendersons and others, Dylan was now considered a fixture on the avant-garde London art scene, which received a further boost with the exhibition of modern German art, held at the New Burlington Galleries in the summer in direct defiance of the Nazis’ growing attacks on ‘degenerate art’.

  While Durrell introduced him to expatriate circles in Paris, Dylan’s name was also beginning to be known in the United States. The previous year he had received an enquiry from the State University of New York at Buffalo which wanted to acquire manuscripts and other papers for a new poetry library. In February 1938 he was contacted by James (known as Jay) Laughlin IV, wealthy Harvard-educated heir to a Pittsburgh steel dynasty, who had turned his back on industry and ploughed his money into New Directions, a publishing company specialising in avant-garde literature, mainly poetry. Starting with anthologies before turning to books, he had quickly attracted some of the most exciting modern writers. Dylan quoted approvingly a list which included works by Jean Cocteau, Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein and William Soroyan. (He could have added to it, among others, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Laughlin’s old Harvard tutor Delmore Schwarz.) Alerted originally by Edith Sitwell and more recently by the American poet Charles Henri Ford (an interesting pair since Sitwell was livid with Ford for replacing her in the affections of the emigré Russian artist Pavel Tchelitchew), Laughlin told Higham’s New York associates, the Ann Watkins agency: ‘I have been watching [Dylan’s] work for three years now and it seems to me that he is full of beans.’

  Since Dylan’s relations with Higham had broken down, he was approached directly by Laughlin. He replied enthusiastically, suggesting that New Directions might like to publish an American edition of The Burning Baby, which was in production with Reavey’s Europa Press. Laughlin agreed to take 500 sheets, though Reavey grumbled that the figure was too low. However in February the Europa Press ran into difficulties when its printer, William Brendon in Plymouth, refused to set Dylan’s stories on the grounds that they were obscene.

  Probably at Durrell’s suggestion, Dylan was offered an alternative outlet for this book by the Obelisk Press, a Paris publisher specialising in pornography. But, as he told Bob Rees, an old schoolfriend who was teaching in London, he refused, not for moral reasons but because the money was so paltry. Rees had approached him, on behalf of a fellow schoolmaster, for some background information on Dylan’s poetry. As often happened in such cases, Dylan replied courteously, saying that he had never read Gerard Manley Hopkins with any thoroughness, though his influence might have intruded ‘when my “work” was fluid enough (perhaps I mean watery enough) to find room for any number of foreign bodies, some of which still unfortunately remain, occupying too much space’. He confirmed that he did not know ‘any Welsh poetry at all’ and added, in a significant unpublished statement of his poetic ends:

  I think I am always attracted to the idea of extremely concentrated poetry; I never could like the poetry that allowed itself great breathing spaces, tediums and flatnesses, between essential passages; I want, and wanted, every line to be the essence of the poem, even the flourishes, the exxagerations [sic]. This, naturally, I never could achieve, but it still remains an ideal for me. (I believe that, despite his own verse which is all a marking-time, Poe wanted the same.) I never could reconcile myself to reading six weak lines, lines of mechanical verse or, worse still, of poetical mechanics, in order to get to the strong (qualified) poetry of the seventh. My determination to avoid this had led to the mixe
d monotony of many of my own poems.

  Although he occasionally managed to get up to London, Dylan was not happy about his situation. Living with the Macnamaras was a stop-gap: he did not mind their generally matriarchal society (that was familiar from Wales). But he found that even their unconventional menage had its rules, often related to gradations of class, in ways unknown to a boy from the curtain-twitching Swansea suburbs. Nicolette told a story about how, when Dylan invited a friend to Blashford, he sought to reassure her mother, ‘He’s all right. He goes to cocktail parties.’ For all her broad-mindedness and an affection for Dylan which had her mothering him with bowls of his bread and milk when he was feeling ‘seedy’, Yvonne could never banish her prejudice that he was not quite good enough for her daughter.

  His state of mind was not improved by lack of finance. Although Yvonne helped him out with small gifts of money, he was already complaining to Durrell in January, ‘We are stages beyond poverty.’ The following month he was seriously homesick: ‘Swansea is still the best place,’ he wrote to Charles Fisher. ‘Tell Fred [Janes] he’s right,’ referring to his painter friend’s decision to return and make his base in his home town. Dylan even looked forward to living in neat domesticity in a Dan Jones-inspired Percy Villa in Swansea. By March he had almost had enough. ‘I’m leaving here next week for nowhere,’ he indicated to Keidrych Rhys. ‘I want to be in Wales, but it offers me nothing at all; I’m facing starvation, which is a pity.’ He hung on a little longer, enough time to plead with Laughlin for funds. ‘We are completely penniless. I do not mean that we just live poorly; I mean that we go without food, without proper clothes, have shelter on charity, and very very soon will not have even that shelter. I have now less than a shilling; there is no more to come; we have nothing to sell, nothing to fall back on.’