Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  Dylan also kept up his regular exchange of ideas and poems with Vernon Watkins. His bitter lines beginning ‘Friend by enemy I call you out’ harped on his unhappy experiences in London:

  My friends were enemies on stilts

  With their heads in a cunning cloud.

  Happier in mood was another poem for Caitlin, ‘Unluckily for a death’, which described his wife in mystical, life-enhancing terms, referring positively to his willingness to subjugate his ego to hers. Soon Dylan was promising Higham a further selection of poetry and verse similar to The Map of Love. But work in progress did not pay his bills. Encouraged by John Davenport, he adopted an idea of Henry Miller to ask a dozen friends, ranging from the inevitable Norman Cameron to Peggy Guggenheim, to contribute five shillings a week to his Thomas Flotation Ltd. ‘As I can’t make money by what I write, I think I should concentrate … on getting my living-money from people and not from poems.’ When this notion came to nothing, Dylan was reduced to pleading with Higham to negotiate advances on his two proposed books from Dent. His publisher proved surprisingly accommodating, offering an immediate £30 to cover his debts, as well as a retainer of £8 per month.

  Meanwhile the spectre of war was concentrating minds on the fringes of Britain where, consciously or unconsciously, nationalists saw coming hostilities as an opportunity to advance their cause. On the literary front, the magazine Wales had, after an initial salvo, faltered and Keidrych Rhys had temporarily given up day-to-day editorship to Nigel Heseltine, a move that did not inspire Dylan who had already accused Rhys of printing lightweight reactionary material. ‘Why not an article on Firbank, too?’ he asked cattily after one effort, going on to lecture Rhys for letting ‘the possibility of a possibly great magazine almost slip away’. Dylan’s passion about this venture was genuine; in correspondence with Watkins, he even entertained ideas of taking over the editorship. Unrealistic at the best of times, these became more so after a new Anglo-Welsh journal appeared in February 1939. Edited by Gwyn Jones, a lecturer at Aberystwyth University, The Welsh Review had none of its rival’s avant-garde aspirations, but covered a wider literary and political canvas.

  While Wales staggered on, Rhys and Dylan retreated to their fall-back position of editing an anthology of Anglo-Welsh writing. As a taster, they (or rather, Rhys, on their behalf) pitched a series on Anglo-Welsh poets to the BBC in Cardiff. Simultaneously Dylan liaised with the Swansea Little Theatre producer, Thomas Taig to compile a programme of Anglo-Welsh verse to run alongside Vernon Watkins’s masque The Influences at the Mercury Theatre in London. Once again, both projects indicated Dylan’s commitment to the idea of Anglo-Welsh writing, if not to the practical task of propagating it in a regular journal. (His journalistic abilities had peaked at school.)

  Recalling his poor track record in these matters, someone at the BBC demanded, ‘We must have this man’s script before he appears in the studios.’ However neither broadcast nor masque took place owing to events beyond Dylan’s control. His book The Map of Love (now comprising sixteen poems and seven stories) was published by Dent on 24 August, but the timing could not have been worse. Immediate reaction was mixed: James Agate’s devastating attack on his wordiness in the Daily Express was matched by positive reviews by Desmond Hawkins in the Spectator and, particularly, Herbert Read who wrote in Seven: ‘It is mainly a poetry of the elemental physical experience: birth, copulation, death … A unique book … It contains the most absolute poetry that has been written in our time, and one can only pray that this poet will not be forced in any way to surrender the subtle course of his genius.’

  Not that it mattered what anyone said: the book’s reception was completely overwhelmed by the hubbub leading to the Second World War. The previous day had seen the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact, with attendant shattering of illusions among Dylan’s leftist friends. This paved the way for Germany’s threatened take-over of the Polish city of Gdansk (or Danzig), and, given Britain’s treaty obligations, the inevitability of conflict. On the 25th, a Friday, Dylan admitted to Watkins he was having difficulty thinking about the masque programme because, even from Laugharne, the prospect of war filled him with ‘such horror & terror & lassitude’. However he could still comment cheekily on Laugharne’s position as an English enclave within Wales, describing it as ‘a little Danzig’.

  At the weekend his father travelled across from Llanstephan with Dylan’s Aunt Polly. With his experience of the Great War, D.J. was keen to ensure that the young Thomases were well provisioned. While Polly Williams searched the Laugharne sands for snails, D.J. helped his son construct bookshelves in Sea View, contributing a large dictionary as the physical and intellectual basis of his son’s library. By Tuesday, Britain had mobilised and prospects were considerably more dangerous. Thanking his father for the dictionary, Dylan wrote: ‘If I could pray, I’d pray for peace. I’m not a man of action; & the brutal activities of war appal me – as they do every decent-thinking person.’ Locally, the war atmosphere had become ‘thick and smelling’: while children danced in the streets, mobilised soldiers sang 1914–18 marching songs in the pubs, and wives and mothers wept around Laugharne’s dilapidated war memorial. At least the Thomases were yet to be affected personally and Dylan did his best to allay his parents’ concerns: ‘Our own position is, so far, quite comfortable.’

  The town was gearing up as a military transit centre. Before long any spare room, at Brown’s Hotel or elsewhere, was commandeered by soldiers on their way to serve abroad. The small army firing range at Pendine became a large weapons research establishment, after absorbing a similar facility from Essex. New people came to South Wales; new relationships were formed. On the way from Swansea to see Dylan on Sunday 3 September, Vernon Watkins and Thomas Taig heard Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announce Britain’s official declaration of war. Laugharne was in total confusion, and Brown’s bar bedlam. Watkins noted that two military policemen who had come in pursuit of deserters ended up drinking with those they were supposed to arrest.

  As evidence of intent to stay, the Thomases acquired a cat, unimaginatively called Pussy. Dylan found Dent’s monthly allowance covered their basic expenses, and even paid for his Players’ Weights. Caitlin coped as best she could as a novice mother without help, though there were alarming stories of her dropping Llewelyn on the stone floor. One visitor recalled her shaking a frying pan over the brick oven in the living room while tending her young son on his chamber-pot. Her most striking dish was a large stew (described by the charitable as pot au feu), consisting of whatever she had to hand, usually cockles, but, on one occasion, an entire rabbit, including the skin. Her domestic forte was needlework, a matter of pride to Dylan who liked showing off to friends a shirt or sweater made by his resourceful wife. Even so, in October he had to borrow a suit from the ever-supportive Watkins so he could fulfil his duties as best man at Keidrych Rhys’s wedding in Llanstephan to Lynette Roberts, a highly strung poet of Welsh-Argentine extraction.

  Dylan’s personal contribution to the smooth running of Sea View was minimal. When Watkins offered to clear the table, he was told (by Dylan) that this was women’s work and that the two of them had business with their poems. Watkins recalled his host requesting, in a soft, wheedling voice, ‘Ca-at. Can I have a plum?’ When met with silence, Dylan asked again, ‘Ca-at. Can I have a plum – a very little one?’ Whereupon she picked up a bag and threw at him every piece of fruit it contained. Dylan waited with eyes closed until the hail of plums had finished. ‘Right,’ he then said. ‘Now we can get on with our poems.’

  Once, when Caitlin was incapacitated with a poisoned finger, he offered to bring her a cup of tea. He came back with a curious greasy concoction, explaining he could not find a top for the pot, so had covered it with half a pound of cheese. Asked to get his wife some water, he rushed to attend to the task, but came back empty-handed. When admonished, he said, ‘Well, I did hurry to get it, you can’t expect everything.’

  Dylan soon gained a local reputation for
drinking, brawling and not paying his bills. However he was protected by Ivy Williams (to whom he had surreptitiously lent a copy of Henry Miller’s banned Tropic of Cancer, one of his favoured genre of ‘good fucking books’) and, more generally, by the often superstitious townspeople’s recognition that he had some God-given role in their community as a poet. When, having imbibed too much, he knocked someone down outside the pub, the policeman agreed that the victim had had it coming to him.

  With its history and traditions, Laugharne was also broad-minded enough to recognise Dylan’s sweeter, more innocent side. His politeness to old people was noted. It did not matter if they were illiterate cockle-pickers or genteel, often Anglicised middle classes – the type who attended St Martin’s church: Dylan always had a cheerful word for them: Among the latter category was the Starke family, long established in Laugharne but originally from Devon. Mrs Janet Starke, a widow, owned the Castle and leased it to Richard Hughes. When the Thomases were invited to dinner with her mother, a Mrs David, at Minerva, a large Georgian house in the High Street, they were joined by a raw young curate. After the meal, Dylan was asked to read and unfurled some crumpled pages of a story remembered as ‘to do with Daniel in the lion’s den’ – probably the suggestive ‘Prologue to an Adventure’. As he launched into it, the curate began to fidget and finally could take it no longer. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs David,’ he announced. ‘I’ve got to go.’

  For regular moral support, Caitlin looked to Richard Hughes’s eccentric, aristocratic wife, Frances, who had studied at the Chelsea School of Art. Since Hughes was away much of the autumn, writing at his house in North Wales, Frances, pregnant with her third child, often invited the Thomases to meals at Castle House, where they drank good whisky and gorged themselves on rich, extravagant fare such as goose. As local chatelaine, she felt duty bound to sponsor a Christmas entertainment in aid of the Red Cross. Drawing on his Little Theatre background, Dylan offered to put on a short play as part of an overall programme of music, acting and dancing (including a lively rendition of tap by Caitlin). In early December, he was still seeking his former mentor Thomas Taig’s advice on possible plays. The upshot was that, just before Christmas, he appeared as the poor tanner in his own production of an amateur dramatic society staple, Ernest Goodwin’s one-act farce The Devil Among the Skins. As post-production celebrations stretched into the night, Dylan started talking about a play about Laugharne, with the local people playing themselves. While Hughes was sceptical they would do this, Dylan was more confident: ‘They’re so convinced that they’re absolutely sane normal people. I think they’d be delighted to prove this on stage.’ Under Milk Wood was coming more firmly into focus.

  Dylan’s suggestion was stimulated by his efforts over the autumn to complete his stories recalling his earlier years in Swansea and Carmarthenshire. He cavalierly described tales such as ‘Extraordinary Little Cough’ (published in Life and Letters in September) and ‘Just Like Little Dogs’ (in Wales in October) as ‘vulgar’ and as ‘pot-boilers’. Life in the Llanstephan peninsula was that much easier to recall because it was so close. Often he would ask Jack Roberts, whose family ran the ferry, to take him to visit relations on the other side of the estuary where, he told Richard Hughes, so many people were mentally unbalanced that a bus made weekly trips to the asylum. When Hughes asked if they were ‘wild mad or just melancholy’, Dylan replied, ‘Just more or less sad; everything anyone said of them they think is true’ – another pointer to the play he was germinating.

  His autobiographical stories were delivered to Dent before Christmas under the ‘flippant’ mock-Joycean title Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (devised by Hughes, or so he claimed, and favoured by Dent for its commercial potential). At much the same time New Directions put out The World I Breathe in a handsome edition Dylan much admired.

  Apart from finishing his book, his main concern over the latter part of 1939 had been what to do during the war. For the time being, conscription applied only to men younger than himself. But he realised that sooner or later he would be called up. Claiming ‘all I want is time to write poems’, and adamant he did not want to fight, he pulled what limited strings he could to secure an agreeable pen-pushing job, perhaps in a government department. He wrote to Sir Edward Marsh, the Georgian poet turned civil servant who was a friend of Richard Hughes, asking for preferment in the Ministry of Information. He tried the same approach with Humbert Wolfe, another bumbling poet in Whitehall, and was amused to receive back a wrongly directed letter indicating Desmond Hawkins had done exactly the same. He also began to look for openings in the film business.

  When these approaches drew a blank, he enquired about becoming a conscientious objector. After contacting the Welsh branch of the Peace Pledge Union, he attended an objectors’ tribunal in Carmarthen, but was discouraged by the proceedings. The only way to ensure exemption from military service, he surmised, was to plead religious conviction, but he felt unable to take this hypocritical approach. Seeking advice from Bert Trick, ‘as one Daddy to another’, he painted a rosy picture of his baby son, bursting with energy, with ‘the familiar Thomas puffed innocence about him’. But Dylan himself admitted to being confused: there was nothing he could contribute to the war with a bayonet, and even the government’s incessant propaganda about the evils of Hitlerism only encouraged ‘the rebellious pacifism of anti-social softies like myself’. Perhaps a nobler course now was ‘for some life to go on, strenuously & patiently, outside the dictated hates & pettinesses of War’.

  As usual, Trick proved a sympathetic listener, accepting that Dylan was ‘completely outraged’ by the prospect of war. ‘The very thought that millions would lose their lives, that homes would be shattered, and all the ugliness and horrors and hatreds that war meant, was abhorrent to Dylan.’ Trick was later at pains to disabuse an interviewer of any notion of cowardice. Dylan would have been ‘prepared to die for something in which he profoundly believed. But war to him was a senseless brutal return to the savagery of the jungle.’

  Increasingly conscious of his weight (he described himself to Trick as ‘like a walrus’ and wondered to Desmond Hawkins if he should declare himself a neutral state or join up as a tank), Dylan circulated some fellow writers, including Rayner Heppenstall, with the idea of compiling a joint article entitled ‘Objection to War’. Heppenstall mimicked an earlier stance of Dylan and was dismissive of such communal efforts. Naughtily, he wondered if a writer eager for experience should not join up for that very reason – a suggestion scornfully dismissed by Dylan who said no-one could write if he was killed. As for Heppenstall’s objection to working in the civil service, Dylan replied: ‘Is it any worse to receive a good salary for muddling information, censoring news, licking official stamps, etc. than it is to kill or be killed for a shilling, or less, a day?’

  When no satisfactory answers were forthcoming, no anti-war article was written, and no job offers appeared in the post, Dylan took these reverses badly. Asked by Watkins what he might like for Christmas, he replied morosely, ‘I want a war-escaper – a sort of ladder, I think, attached to a balloon – or a portable ivory tower or a new plush womb to escape back into.’ Although he settled for a copy of The New Yorker annual, his reaction to the war had become something of a personal crusade, as if battling to find a position which would atone for his father’s disappointments a quarter of a century earlier.

  Forced again to seek temporary refuge from creditors, he transported his family to Blashford where, as the 1940s were ushered in, his own black mood was not assuaged by news that only 280 copies of The Map of Love had been sold. While publicly adopting a philosophical stance and attributing this poor performance to the war, he must have felt it as another assault on his peace of mind by the forces of darkness. He could only urge Higham to capitalise on his United States publication and sell his latest stories to high-paying magazines in New York.

  Passing through London at the end of December, he met Heppenstall who noted his friend’s unaccustomed glo
om, the physical manifestations of which were all too clear in his growing weight and the cast in his eyes. Dylan ‘seemed a prey to some large resentment’. On the one hand, his stand against the war had come to nothing; on the other, he was experiencing the loss not merely of innocence but also of the comforting sense that anything was possible if he approached it with his usual swagger – the unusually personal subject of his fine poem, ‘Once below a time’, written at Blashford.

  This was complemented that spring by a satirical poem, ‘The Countryman’s Return’, in which Dylan poked fun at himself as a suburban ‘singing Walt’, adrift in ‘low-falutin’ London’, before making his way back uncertainly to a more regular rural existence. Uncertain what to make of it, he sent it to Watkins for perusal. By the time he had touched on its protagonist’s ‘delusions of all embracing humanitarianism’, he rather liked it. With obvious references to cinematic technique, the poem attempted to portray elements of London low life such as:

  girls from good homes

  Studying the testicle

  In communal crab flats

  With the Sunflowers laid on.

  In documentary style, it highlights:

  All the hypnotised city’s

  Insidious procession

  Hawking for money and pity

  and tells how ‘that sin-embracing dripper of fun’ (or Dylan himself) has to sweep away this false glamour ‘like a cream cloud’. With nods to Eliot’s Prufrock, it offers documentary detail about Dylan’s periods adrift in the capital’s underworld. It seems to relate back to his few nerve-shattering days in London a year or so earlier. It also points forward to the sequel to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. He described what was to be called Adventures in the Skin Trade to Laughlin in April as ‘a proper city book, and far free-er in style than the slight, “artful” other stories.’