Dylan Thomas: A New Life
Page 25
Another visitor was Henry Treece, who was hard at work on his critical study. In response to letters and to ongoing chapters he was sent, Dylan took pains to avoid being typecast. Distancing himself from Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden and Cecil Day-Lewis was not too difficult. He scornfully referred to this quartet of politically engaged poets (dubbed ‘Macspaunday’ by his later friend Roy Campbell) as the ‘Brotherhood of Man – love thy neighbour and, if possible, covet his arse’. They were ‘a disappointing school-society, and I cannot accept Auden as head prefect’. However he denied Treece’s assertion that he lacked social awareness, pointing to images he had drawn from the cinema and other mass media, though admitting he thought a squirrel stumbling was of at least equal importance as Hitler’s invasions, the Ashes and a host of contemporary goings-on.
Asked about Hopkins’s influence on his poetry, Dylan again claimed to have read him only lackadaisically and never to have studied him. He argued that, rhythmically at least, Swinburne had been a greater influence and noted that ‘the people to be found in those early poems were the Elizabethans and George Peele, Webster and, later, Beddoes, some Clare (his hard, country sonnets), Lawrence (animal poems, and the verse extracts from The Plumed Serpent), a bit of Tennyson, some very bad Flecker and, of course, a lot of bits from whatever fashionable poetry – Imagists, Sitwells – I’d been reading lately.’ The surrealists might have featured in this list of fleeting influences, but Dylan dismissed them as ‘a highbrow parlour game’. He said he could not read French, so had only encountered the original surrealists in weak translations by David Gascoyne. He denied any knowledge of the middle ages, pleaded his education had been poor, and asserted he never read anything but in Modern English.
Nevertheless he was keen to refute any suggestion, as made in a review by Spender, that ‘Thomas’s poetry is turned on like a tap; it is just poetic stuff with no beginning or end, shape, or intelligent and intelligible control’. The exact opposite was true, he said: ‘Much of the obscurity is due to rigorous compression; the last thing they do is to flow; they are much rather hewn.’ And he came up with a classic statement of his professional purpose: ‘I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, downthrow & upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression.’
Despite Dylan’s tendency to contradict Treece’s views, the two men maintained a healthy mutual respect, which survived his dogged interpreter’s coming to Laugharne in August. However they fell out towards the end of the year when Dylan refused to sign a manifesto promoting the Apocalypse Movement. This was an attempt by Treece and others to establish a group of mainly Celtic poets on a wildly romantic, neo-surrealist platform designed to take the place of the tired politicised values of metropolitan Macspaunday. The group’s theoretical output was not unattractive (and in keeping with the sense of doom felt as a result of political developments at the time), but its practice was often a parody of Dylan at his most bombastic. Not opposed to being cast as a romantic, and even willing to contribute to Seven, the main magazine of the new faction, he reserved his right to stay clear of any such labelling.
Dylan hardly left Laugharne during the summer and autumn. He made only occasional sorties to Swansea, once to see a Noel Coward play (at the invitation of Watkins’s mother) and again to catch up with Bert Trick whose sense of community service had led him to join the Civil Defence. (This was in August and no doubt influenced Dylan’s outrage at the time of writing ‘A Saint about to fall’.) In October the BBC sent Dylan his third-class rail fare to travel to Manchester to take part in a discussion on ‘The Modern Muse’ with various poets, including all the members of the dread Macspaunday. ‘What a mincing lot we were!’ Dylan gleefully told John Davenport, a robust, well-connected critic from the gifted Cambridge generation of the late 1920s, who had recently returned from a spell as a Hollywood screenwriter. Back in the BBC fold, he fired off a letter to the Corporation’s Welsh regional director T. Rowland Hughes in Cardiff suggesting a programme of his readings of Welsh poets in English. Hughes was more interested in knowing if Dylan would compose a long dramatic programme in verse. Dylan demurred, saying he wrote too slowly and ‘the result, dramatically, is too often like a man shouting under the sea’. But another seed of his later work, Under Milk Wood, had been sown.
The main thing holding Dylan back from going anywhere was lack of money. In August he approached the Royal Literary Fund for a grant. Despite the formidable backing of T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, Charles Williams and Walter de la Mare among others, and despite quoted earnings of less than £30 over the previous year, he was turned down, leading him to enquire if he was too young: ‘Must you be a Georgian writer of belle-lettres, suffering in Surrey? … Thirty pounds would settle everything.’
The combination of his poverty and the chaotic state of his business affairs led him to swallow his pride and seek to return to the David Higham fold. He made little apology for not having answered the agency’s letters over the previous months. Higham welcomed him back as if nothing had happened and immediately set about regularising his dealings with Reavey and Laughlin. The former he brusquely informed that his client was withdrawing his book, The Burning Baby, because the Europa Press had failed to publish it within the time stipulated in the contract. Since Reavey had made no progress, he had little option but to return the manuscript, with a plea that he might be repaid some of the £20 advance if the stories were printed elsewhere. Laughlin put up more resistance to Higham, claiming he had now advanced Dylan $60 (a figure initially denied by the recipient, but later accepted) and demanding that Dylan commit all his future books to him in America. ‘I will not spend a lot of time and money developing a young fellow, only to have him swiped by somebody,’ he told Higham’s New York associates Ann Watkins. ‘Thomas has promised me the books and has taken money in return for the promise. Accordingly he must keep his word. There is no question of that.’ On this Higham had to give way.
The London agent then reacquainted Dylan with Richard Church at the publisher, J. M. Dent. There was little love lost there: Dylan considered Church ‘a cliché-ridden humbug and pie-fingering hack’, particularly for telling him that a genuine artist spurned financial gain. It did not help that Dylan had unilaterally abandoned the Welsh travel book he was doing for Dent. But Church was astute enough to see that Dylan was a rising star who would bring kudos to a stuffy company. He sent thirty shillings to bring Dylan to London to see him shortly before Christmas. Despite his disdain for Auden, Dylan was not averse to telling Higham that he had met the poet in Manchester and that Auden had suggested that the Hogarth Press (with which he was associated) might be interested in his new book and would pay an advance of £50. Now Higham was able to use this as a bargaining ploy with Church who agreed to abandon the travel volume and publish a new book, comprising fifteen poems and five stories, provisionally titled In the Direction of the Beginning.
By then Dylan and Caitlin had moved to Blashford to await the birth of their child in the bosom of the Macnamara family. In London he ran into Wyn Henderson and also met James Meary Tambimuttu, a wild English-speaking Tamil who was talking of starting a poetry magazine, one of several ventures looking to take on New Verse’s mantle as arbiter of poetry’s development. But behind the tinkling of glasses in the Fitzroy, he could hear another more disturbing sound – the crescendo of chatter about the forthcoming war. In December a national register of war volunteers had been started. As Auden and Isherwood prepared to travel to a new life in the United States, Dylan realised he would need to decide what action he would take in the event of hostilities.
Drawn one way back to his past and another towards his future, Dylan returned to his pregnant wife in a poor way, partly because he had indulged too much, and partly because, as he explained to Watkins, he had had something of an epiphany: ‘It really is an insane city, & filled me with terror. Every pavement drills through your soles to your scalp, and
out pops a lamp-post covered with hair. I’m not going to London again for years; its intelligentsia is so hurried in the head that nothing stays there; its glamour smells of goat; there’s no difference between good & bad.’
Despite the bitter cold, Christmas in the English countryside was tolerable. He might jokingly complain that all he did was ‘sit and hate my mother-in-law’. But he was able to sit back and listen to Arthur Askey on the wireless, read a copy of the banned Black Book given him by its author Durrell, and play charades and seasonal games from a Compendium, a present from Watkins. There was promising news on the book and other negotiations from David Higham, and Dylan had learnt he had been awarded the Blumenthal Prize for Poetry (worth $100 or £20) in America, He was even treated to a Christmas stocking, stuffed with sweets, cigars, a mouth-organ and some cherry brandy.
His aversion to London did not prevent him returning over the new year to see Lawrence Durrell who was now publishing Delta (the new name for Booster) there rather than in Paris. He tried to invite Durrell to Hampshire, telling him, ‘I’ve got the willies of London & it makes me ill as hell.’ But this could not be arranged, and Dylan cadged a lift to the capital, probably with Augustus John. Durrell was staying with Henry Miller in a flat lent them by Hugo Guyler, Anais Nin’s rich husband. Miller had expressly said he wanted to meet Dylan. But on the evening they arranged, Dylan did not appear. They had given him up, when he telephoned from a nearby pub. He was not drunk but, upon questioning, admitted he was afraid at the prospect of meeting Miller, one of his literary heroes. Durrell went to the pub, had a drink with him, and brought him back to the flat where Dylan was immediately at ease, joking and declaiming. He described Miller to Watkins as ‘a dear, mad, mild man, bald and fifty, with great enthusiasms for commonplaces’. But London remained a ‘nightmare’ and again he returned a ‘wreck’.
Caitlin meanwhile had been getting mellower and more rounded. At the end of January, she was taken into the Cornelia Hospital in Poole where, after protracted and painful labour, she gave birth to a son, Llewelyn Edouard, on the 30th. Dylan did not witness the arrival of the ‘Mongolian monkey’, his term for the bad-tempered blue-eyed baby, who weighed just over six pounds. Caitlin thought he was cavorting with a girlfriend, a leggy black dancer from the Dollin school whom she called Joey the Ravisher. More likely he was in the back room at Blashford polishing his poem ‘Because the pleasure bird whistles’. The mellifluous title sounded up-beat, but the content was full of dark and perhaps drug-induced imaginings about the co-existence of pleasure and pain. Drawing on his painful experiences in London, it also conveyed, with heavy shift of editorial emphasis, his anxiety about his failure to confront problems encountered in the past.
This poem, with its mixture of Bunyanesque and Biblical allusions, was used as a grace, or brief prayer, at the start of The Map of Love, the revised name of the book under discussion with Church at Dent’s. It complements the shorter ‘Once it was the colour of saying’, written slightly earlier, over Christmas. There, in lines redolent of Cwmdonkin Drive, Dylan made a more explicit statement that his artistic direction was changing, in line with his overall life: The gist was that his recollections of his childhood had once come in bright higgledy-piggledy confusion. But:
Now my saying shall be my undoing,
And every stone I wind off like a reel.
Or, being interpreted, he intended taking a more methodical approach to deciphering his past, and he was worried that this would not only be personally challenging, but also possibly too mechanical, like the unwinding of a reel, with its dual sense of both fishing and films.
Just before Christmas he told Watkins, ‘Last year at this time Caitlin and I were doing an act in a garret. This time we’re just as poor, or poorer, but the ravens – soft, white, silly ravens – will feed us.’ With his mock invocation to the providential birds of the Old Testament, this oddly religious man who lived outside any formal creed was abandoning himself to his fates, as he faced the last few months of peace before the Second World War, carrying for the first time the responsibilities of fatherhood.
TWELVE
SKIRTING THE WAR
Dylan was, by his own admission, drunk for two weeks after the birth of his son. In true country gentry style, Yvonne Macnamara had re-engaged her trusted family nanny to look after her first grandson. New Inn House was dominated by women at the best of times; now it was also regimented. Dylan showed no particular interest in the mewling baby; Caitlin claimed he never wanted to hold or even look at Llewelyn. She on the other hand was besotted, and Dylan found himself taking second place in his wife’s affections. A more mature man could handle this, but Dylan resented the rivalry. Caitlin feigned lack of concern: she had come to recognise Dylan’s needy infantile behaviour, and later bitterly recalled how he had always been like a child to her, even in bed, an exceptionally gifted child.
Drink was one way of signalling and at the same time coping with his dependency. It had its side effects: with the additional intake of regular meals at Blashford, he put on over two stone during the first few months of 1939, as his weight barrelled up to twelve and a half stone. He thought he looked like a ‘small square giant’. No longer was he the stick insect of the Little Theatre stage or even the narrow-faced Renaissance courtier of Augustus John’s portrait in the autumn (the artist’s second and well-known attempt to capture his likeness, having been dissatisfied with the first). Now his looks fell the wrong side of a thin line between l’homme moyen sensuel of Nora Summers’s photographs the previous year and chubby libertine.
He was not totally idle. He managed a sonorous poem about his son’s birth ‘If my head hurt a hair’s foot’, a dialogue between the ‘bunched monkey’ embryo and his mother. He hoped it would fit into his forthcoming book for Dent, for which he was sorting out a running order and, in particular, trying to find the right balance between verse and prose. The fastidious Church was not happy with his story ‘A Prospect of the Sea’, which he felt had ‘moments of sensuality without purpose’, a curious description, Dylan felt, for his references to fish. But both sides were keen to finalise a deal. Dent played their part by writing off any money given him for his abandoned Wales book, and offering an unprecedented £70 in advance for this new one (to be called The Map of Love), even if not all was immediately available and £20 needed to be returned to George Reavey to ensure he would never have claim to any rights in The Burning Baby.
Dylan welcomed whatever sum he received because he had been afraid that he would not be able to return to Laugharne where he still owed rent on Sea View. Having sorted this matter out, he thoughtfully wrote to Frances Hughes asking her to ensure that the house was properly aired for his family’s return in late March. Stopping in Bishopston for a day to show off his son to his parents, he took time out to see Bert Trick who later recalled Dylan’s outrage at hearing the news of the fall of Madrid to Franco’s forces (on 28 March) and also confirmed the young man’s deep concerns about how to respond to the coming war.
First engagement in Laugharne was Llewelyn’s christening in the parish church, St Martin’s, a High Gothic Anglican establishment which had attracted Samuel Taylor Coleridge at the start of the nineteenth century. The ceremony was surprising since the baby’s parents had shown little enthusiasm for formal worship. It was enlivened by the presence of Augustus John as godfather. Unable to follow the service, he chimed in with the words ‘I desire it’ when he saw fit. He also provided additional furniture (unwanted after his father’s death) for the house, adding to items that had already come from Blashford. The other godfather, Vernon Watkins, was unable to attend (bank clerks do not enjoy the leisure time of artists). However he sent a wireless set to enliven the Sea View atmosphere, a present particularly welcomed by Caitlin who used to tune in to the commercial station, Radio Luxembourg, and dance round the house to its music.
Within an alarmingly short period (before the end of April), Dylan was again without money and forced to pawn one of Llewelyn�
��s christening gifts, almost certainly the silver spoon and fork from Vernon Watkins. By mid-May he was worrying that debts to local tradesmen would land him in court. Off his own bat, he rifled through his bottom drawer and discovered two old tales, ‘The True Story’ and ‘The Vest’, written in his abandoned mystical-poetical style. Such was his need that he sent them to his rich Irish-American friend, Constantine FitzGibbon, who had graduated from Oxford and started a new avant-garde literary magazine Yellowjacket. Even Dylan admitted they were ‘very paltry’, but he needed the guinea each one earned. Higham meanwhile did his best to obtain any money owed Dylan, ranging from anthologies to an HMV recording of ‘And death shall have no dominion’. He finalised details of Dylan’s contract with his American publisher New Directions, which had abandoned plans for a book of poems in favour of a mixture of prose and verse, similar to Dent’s, but more comprehensive, incorporating forty poems and eleven stories from earlier books and articles. Entitled The World I Breathe, it was scheduled for publication by the end of the year.
Higham was cheered by Dylan’s promise that his exertions in the Castle gazebo were progressing and his new style of more realistic stories about his childhood and immediate Welsh environment were developing into his ‘sort of provincial autobiography’ for Dent. Surprisingly it was Church who had first suggested three years beforehand that his young protégé might write a story about his ‘earlier world’. This was Church’s way of weaning Dylan off his often unreadable essays in literary surrealism.