Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  It was a measure of Dylan’s perilous position that he concluded this request with a rash promise to give Laughlin the American rights to ‘all my books, past, present and future’. In addition, he offered to dispense with future royalties, in return for immediate money up front. Laughlin sent him $20, with the promise of a further $20 to come. Dylan said this would be enough to get him and Caitlin to Wales, where he hoped to be able to live more cheaply. En route through London Reavey showed them paintings by his friend the Dutch surrealist Geer van Velde who was shortly to exhibit at the Guggenheim Jeune. But the Thomases were too poor to stay and attend Reavey’s party for van Velde and Samuel Beckett. At the end of April they continued to Swansea. After a short period with Dylan’s parents, they found themselves, with Richard Hughes’s help, a small cottage in Laugharne, the village whose natural beauty and charm Dylan had found instantly attractive when he visited with Glyn Jones in 1934.

  Dylan’s return to live in Wales was a turning point. Throughout his life, he was never good at venturing far from the beaten track. This was the emotional price he paid for pushing at the boundaries of imagination and language. He always needed to return to familiar, ordered territory, whether Cwmdonkin Drive after the wild spaces of Gower or Emily Coleman’s flat following the ravages of West Wales. Now he had a gut understanding of his need for the security of his Welsh roots at a time when, professionally, he was starting to venture overseas and, domestically, he was about to embark on having a family. Not that he knew about the latter at the time. But shortly after he and Caitlin had set up in Eros, their appropriately named fisherman’s dwelling in Laugharne, she learnt she was pregnant. Dylan claimed this was a mistake, a line echoed by Caitlin who said it was ‘totally unexpected’.

  They particularly wanted to live somewhere close to water, for Dylan an ever-present symbol of the unrelenting power of nature; for Caitlin, a source of more immediate pleasure for swimming and outdoor frolicking. Eros was a damp dingy two bed-roomed house with no bathroom and an outside lavatory. Its redeeming feature was its long narrow back garden which gave onto the pellucid Taf estuary where local women gathered cockles when the tide was out and the men went out in smacks to fish at night.

  Dylan felt immediately at home, describing Laugharne as ‘a good place’ and ‘a sociable place too, and I like that, with good pubs and little law and no respect’. Nevertheless the Thomases were happier when, after three months, they moved up the hill towards the centre of the town and settled in a larger, still ramshackle house called Sea View (a misnomer, since the water could only be seen from one top-floor window). This was owned by Tudor Williams, a member of the extended family who ran the town in parallel with the established Corporation. On the official level, Laugharne operated through an ancient charter, granted by Edward I to the marcher lord Sir Gwydo de Brione. One of only two in Britain (the other is Malmesbury’s), this charter gave the town a measure of fiercely guarded independence, with its portreeve (or mayor) and medieval panoply of governance that continues into the twenty-first century. On a day to day basis the Williamses ensured the place worked, owning not only the electricity generating station but the main bus company, as well as around fifty houses, many of them acquired from the Corporation on preferential terms.

  One family enterprise was Brown’s Hotel, the most appealing of several pubs in Laugharne. It was acquired for 625 gold sovereigns by Tudor’s mother Esther in 1934, partly because the attached stables provided garaging for the family’s buses. Another son, Ebie Williams, ran the pub with his wife, Ivy, a bright, homely woman not unlike Dylan’s mother. Although there was a Victoria Cross in her husband’s family (won by Esther’s nephew Lance Corporal William Fuller while serving at the battle of Aisne in 1914), Ivy considered herself a cut above the Williamses. During the First World War, her hard-drinking Scottish father Lieutenant Commander Douglas McDermott had travelled every day to Milford Haven where he was officer in charge of the harbour’s boom defences. Seeing Dylan as an educated gentleman, she was happy to trade gossip about the town for snippets of information about literary life. He was delighted to find a bolt-hole at Brown’s. He would go there in the morning, return home for lunch, work in the afternoon and again walk to the pub in the evening, a routine Caitlin was happy to let develop and to participate in when she could.

  Ivy Williams quickly became Dylan’s best friend in town. She cashed his cheques and allowed his credit to pile up when he could not pay. Though dismissive of ‘jive-man’ Richard Hughes’s work as whimsical, Dylan nevertheless relied on the author of High Wind in Jamaica for intellectual stimulation, particularly in his first months in Laugharne. Not for the last time, he and Caitlin took advantage of someone trying to help. During the summer, as she began to swell with her child, they often relaxed in the grounds of Hughes’s uninhabited Castle, where Dylan found he could work in a gazebo high in the battlements overlooking the estuary. One day they saw the nautical-looking owner disappear into the bowels of the Castle and emerge with a bottle of wine. Having established this was where he kept his wine cellar, they regularly raided it (a practice they justified to themselves because they felt Hughes, though rich, was unnecessarily mean: he would produce his wine at meals but not offer it to them). Their thieving practices had to be curtailed after Dylan was surprised in the gazebo by Hughes. He was reading and sipping a glass from some carefully laid down vintage. He hurriedly hid the bottle under his bottom from where, to his horror, it began to drip.

  In the gazebo, with its view of the sea and the sounds of the town in the background, he began to experiment with a new type of writing. He had become bogged down with surreal mythical stories of the sort George Reavey was still trying to publish in The Burning Baby. While at Blashford he had produced a more realistic story, ‘A Visit to Grandpa’s’, which, while not based directly on his personal experience, recreated the sights, sounds and way of life of the rural Carmarthenshire he had known since boyhood. He had sent this to New English Weekly where his friend Desmond Hawkins, now literary editor, published it in March 1938. Writing to Hawkins at that time, in a letter illustrated by pornographic sketches from a larger ‘utterly filthy’ work, he claimed to have more or less discounted his ‘Europa mistake’ and, although he did not think the new style any better, he was hoping to write many more stories ‘like that one you liked about Grandpa, stories of Swansea and me’. Over the summer he followed this up with two more stories in the same genre, ‘One Warm Saturday’ and ‘The Peaches’ – the basis of the collection to be known as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.

  Although he wrote another piece in the earlier style, ‘An Adventure from a Work in Progress’, he was making a break with what he termed ‘free fantasy’. Caitlin had her phrase for it: ‘surrealism and pornography’, a genre she found muddled and did not like, any more than his ‘complicated’ poems. Ironically a similarly revisionist attitude was being bandied around by some of his fellow contributors to Wales where, despite evidence of Dylan’s fecklessness, Keidrych Rhys was still struggling to produce a magazine. Rhys had printed Dylan’s mythopoeic story ‘The Map of Love’ in his third (October 1937) issue, along with his simple, effective poem ‘We lying by Seasand’. The story, however, was not so successful: ‘very Lawrence in style’, Rhys told Glyn Jones, ‘ “strange continents” etc … Dylan’s self-criticism is going to pot I feel.’ In March, having received Dylan’s ‘In the Direction of the Beginning’, described as a ‘fragment of a work in progress’, he added ‘Dylan’s aren’t so much stories as exotic rhapsodies – music inspired by Tom Warner – shallow spirituality perhaps, and rather ruthless.’

  Nigel Heseltine, never a fan, took much the same line, describing this piece as ‘not up to standard. I have enjoyed his stories in the past. This fragment which he is confident enough to put in as if we hung on his every word no matter how scribbled, proves that he is not yet a great enough artist to throw off fragments even if Joyce does.’ Heseltine, just back from a visit to the Balkans which ha
d turned him against nationalism, thought David Jones’s recently published poetry and prose epic In Parenthesis superior – the ‘first truly Welsh Anglo-Welsh product’ to set alongside Joyce’s quintessentially Anglo-Irish Ulysses.

  Based on the experiences of its author, an Englishman of Welsh origin, In Parenthesis was a heavily annotated paean to the timeless qualities of the British fighting man, drawing on British literature stretching back through Shakespeare and Malory to The Mabinogion and Y Gododdin. Only through its highlighting of Welsh epic poems much earlier than anything in English can it be described in Heseltine’s terms. But the great debate on what comprised Anglo-Welsh writing had been joined. The nationalist leader Saunders Lewis made his position clear in an address titled ‘Is there an Anglo-Welsh Literature?’ to the Urdd Graddedigion Prifysgol Cymru Cangen Caerdydd the following December. Referring to the opening sentence of Dylan’s ‘Prologue to an Adventure’ which had appeared in Wales, he said this (like most of the author’s work) stood in the mainstream of the English literary tradition with its deliberate echo of Bunyan. ‘Mr Dylan Thomas is obviously an equipped writer, but there is nothing hyphenated about him. He belongs to the English.’

  Dylan recognised this criticism and, although he claimed he did not understand ‘this racial talk’, he was concerned, if not embarrassed. Having set aside his travel book about his homeland, he adopted a different approach. Spurred by his London friends’ experience with Mass Observation, which had produced an ‘Oxford Collective Poem’, he suggested that Wales devote an issue to a mass-poem comprising verse reports by the magazine’s contributors on their areas.

  Although nothing came of this, the combined effects of hostility from his countrymen and more personal criticism from Caitlin were encouraging Dylan to reassess his approach to his craft. From around this time, he began to write more simply and realistically, particularly about Wales, and his change of tack was also apparent in his poetry. There were sound financial reasons for this: his old high literary style was not making him any money (and this must have affected his wife’s attitude as well). His bank balance was not helped by problems related to Reavey’s editions of The Burning Baby and to his own budding relationship with the American publisher, Jay Laughlin.

  Through the summer he continued to chivvy Reavey about his book of stories which failed to appear, as had been announced, in May. When, for want of other information, he tentatively suggested ‘Prologue to an Adventure’ might be causing the printer offence (which would have been odd since it had already been published in Wales), he offered one of his ‘new’ realistic tales, ‘A Visit to Grandpa’s’, as an alternative. He also hinted that Durrell and Miller, his friends in Paris, might be prepared to publish the book. To complicate matters, Augustus John had completed his portrait for the frontispiece but was not satisfied with it. In addition, David Archer’s Parton Bookshop, or rather the Fortune Press which had taken on its publishing interests, was offering Reavey its remaining stock of Dylan’s 18 Poems, together with the copyright (which it did not possess).

  At least Dylan had been encouraged by his correspondence with Laughlin, who mixed flattery, commercial sense and informed literary gossip. ‘How much younger are you than Auden?’ the preppie publisher wrote from Rapallo where he was visiting Ezra Pound, another of his authors. ‘It will help if I can bill you as “the most important English poet of the generation following Auden” or some such crap. America, having decided that Auden is a poet, which I doubt, now has English poetry … and will with reluctance realize that there is anybody else.’ However, he cleverly tried to tie Dylan to his publishing house, noting that Ann Watkins, Higham’s associates in New York, had been reminding him that the Welsh author was their property. Dylan himself was adamant that he had only signed up with Higham for Twenty-Five Poems, that his royalties through them were ‘minimal’, and he did not need an agent. Laughlin did nothing to disabuse him of this view: ‘What they (i.e. Ann Watkins) want is to collect commissions on what I pay you. Naturally I am not anxious to do this.’ He hoped he would be able to ‘politely tell them to go to hell’. However he was not amused to find that, contrary to Dylan’s desperate promise in March, Reavey, rather than he, held the rights to the American publication of The Burning Baby.

  Tackled on this last point by Laughlin, who thought the wool was being pulled over his eyes, Dylan claimed ignorance, adding that Reavey had simply taken advantage of his vagueness and stupidity. When Laughlin sought to clarify his position with regard to the rights of Twenty-Five Poems, Dylan admitted that David Higham probably had those, though he stressed the agent had only acted for him over that one book and the royalties had been minimal, around ten shillings a quarter. ‘I don’t require any more the services of an agent,’ proclaimed Dylan, just as Laughlin was drawing up a contract giving him a 15 per cent commission for his exclusive right to place Dylan’s stories and poems in America.

  When Laughlin informed Ann Watkins of this, making clear that he also considered any payments he had already made to Dylan as advances on future royalties, the agency came back with ‘queries galore’. Apparently winning his covert battle to usurp Higham’s influence, Laughlin kept at his publisher’s business of raising Dylan’s profile in the United States. He had plans to print three poems and two stories in his 1938 anthology New Directions in Poetry and Prose. Provided Dylan worked through him, Laughlin intended to push his work in American magazines such as Poetry (Chicago) and Partisan Review where Dylan already had contacts. He was also approaching the radio networks. ‘The propaganda is underway,’ he assured Dylan in June. ‘Squibs have appeared in the newspapers to the effect that the best young English poet is soon to be published in America etc.’ As he explained to Ann Watkins, amid claims that Higham had been abandoned because he ‘virtually stole’ from Dylan, ‘My plan for Thomas is to spend about six months placing his poems in American magazines and spreading publicity for him. Then when he is “ripe” I’ll bring out a book of about forty poems, followed by the stories the following year.’

  Laughlin even arranged for Emma Swan, one of the richer American poets he published, to send Dylan a regular financial subvention. He had been hoping to travel to Laugharne to stay with the Thomases at the end of his European trip in the early summer, but never managed it. There was no shortage of visitors to Sea View, however. Blustering through in August, Augustus John took a liking to the ‘stage house, with a certain air of mystery about it’, and used it as a base from which to settle affairs relating to his father’s death in Tenby four months earlier. He disrupted Dylan’s routine for four days, reporting back to his consort Dorelia, ‘[The Thomases] live in frightful squalor and hideousness.’ From London came Norman Cameron, and Mervyn Levy, hitch-hiking on his way to Ireland; from Blashford Yvonne Macnamara and her ‘neuter’ friend Nora Summers who photographed the young marrieds drinking in Brown’s Hotel; and, from Swansea, Vernon Watkins and Charles Fisher, who had taken over from Hawkins as Dylan’s collaborator on the literary thriller Death of the King’s Canary. Fisher happened to be there during Augustus John’s visit when he found Dylan already drunk in the afternoon. After a hard session at Brown’s in the early evening, Dylan returned to the house for supper and then had to retire, saying he was unable to speak. John and Fisher sent out for a bottle of whisky, and continued to talk ‘about Paris, about art, about everything in the world’.

  While Fisher had a car, Watkins used to travel the forty-four miles from Pennard by bus or by bicycle (his chosen method of transport on his return from a visit to Yeats in Ireland). He often brought provisions such as ham and tinned fruit from the market in Carmarthen. At one stage he noted that Dylan had given up smoking in the house and taken to a pipe which he shared with his wife. In September he arrived in his friend Wyn Lewis’s car which everyone, including Dylan, took turns to drive on the nearby Pendine flats, where fourteen years earlier Malcolm Campbell had clocked 146 miles per hour in breaking the world land speed record. With the throttle fully extende
d, Dylan managed 10 mph before grinding to a halt in the sand. When Dylan called on his parents a few days later, Watkins was there, clutching a volume of Lorca, which the two men read avidly.

  Dylan savoured these meetings with Watkins. Unlike his often strained performances for noisome London poets, he could act naturally with his Swansea friend, who instinctively understood the subtle balance he was trying to strike in his work between Welsh cultural and English literary influences, and between the outside world and own personal development. He sent Watkins his beautiful poem of welcome to his unborn child, initially called ‘In September’ because, he said enigmatically, ‘it was a terrible war month’. He was referring with disgust to the Munich pact signed on 29 September and the attendant mobilisation of the British fleet, issuing of gas-masks and stepping up of air-raid precautions.

  Not that his position on the treaty which led to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia was particularly sophisticated. As a pacifist he had no wish to fight against Germany, yet his gut reaction was to oppose this cowardly capitulation. Despite this fearful background (reflected in phrases such as ‘agony has another mouth to feed’); he described it as an optimistic poem, with rhythmical effects that excited him. He gladly accepted Watkins’s alternative title ‘Poem in the Ninth Month’, which gave a connotation of near-culmination of pregnancy. However it became known by its first line, ‘A Saint about to fall’ – a simple expression of its central image of an angelic child leaving an apocalyptic Miltonic heaven.

  This poem provides an early evocation of the Laugharne landscape with its ‘squawking shores’. Similarly his ‘Twenty-four years’ was the first of three main poems reflecting on the state of his life around the time of his October birthday. Significantly, birthdays meant little to him on a day to day basis, but anniversaries more generally acted as inherent reminders of the immutable workings of the cosmos. As ‘A Saint about to fall’ reflects the potency of an innocent child in a crazy world, so this short poem reprises a favoured theme of the absurdity of life in the midst of mortality. In it, Dylan is ‘Dressed to die, the sensual strut begun’. Resurrecting a line from a discarded poem penned at Veronica Sibthorp’s two years earlier, he intoned, ‘I advance for as long as forever is.’