The Thomases stayed in Blashford for the first three months of 1940. This was longer than expected, partly for financial reasons, partly out of fear of the perishing cold at Sea View and partly because, at Augustus John’s suggestion, Dylan had written for a job to Sir Kenneth Clark, Director of the Film Division at the Ministry of Information. He wanted to be reasonably close to London (or at least closer than Laugharne) if he were called for an interview. Time was pressing, since men of his age were scheduled for military call-up in April.
Clark, who had heard about Dylan from Edith Sitwell three years earlier in 1937, had nothing to offer. So Dylan asked the well-connected Herbert Read to remind Clark. He had already thanked Read effusively for his review of The Map of Love. Now he claimed that conscription would hinder his writing. ‘I refuse to fight, but I’m willing to do some kind of work, any kind of work of which I’m capable.’ After he contacted Clark again, emphasising his pressing need and his wish at least to find a non-combatant job in the army – ‘my great horror’s killing’ – Clark’s wife Jane recommended him for a position in her friend Captain Victor Cazalet’s battery. Cazalet was a music-loving former MP and friend of Winston Churchill who had managed to set up his own unit of anti-aircraft gunners, largely as a bolt-hole for writers and artists who he knew would not be able to stomach military life.
At the end of March Dylan and his family returned disconsolately to Laugharne where they were joined by Caitlin’s artist friend Rupert Shephard, accompanied by his South African wife Lorna Wilmot who, pointedly unlike Dylan, had found a niche in the film industry. Although they stayed in Brown’s, the Shephards spent much of their free time at Sea View. It was not always a relaxing experience. Wilmot frequently clashed with Caitlin, whom she found ‘as wild and unscrupulous’ as Dylan. The Thomases took their visitors to Llanstephan to meet the Rhyses – both Ernest Rhys, a veteran Dent editor who regaled them with stories of Whitman and Swinburne, and Keidrych Rhys and his new wife whom Wilmot identified as ‘Welsh mystic patriots’. Shephard was struck by Caitlin’s enduring beauty, though Dylan’s Falstaffian girth was not so appealing. He painted them both, his study of Dylan stressing a different side to his sitter’s personality than the wide-eyed visionary of Augustus John’s recent portrait. Shephard showed an unusually subdued Dylan, sitting and working amid the domesticity of Sea View.
Dylan’s moderation reflected his worries about his military status. As legally required, he registered for military service on 6 April, still hoping to join Cazalet’s anti-aircraft battery. His friends were receiving their marching orders: Watkins to the Royal Air Force, Dan Jones to the government cipher centre at Bletchley Park, and Charles Fisher to the army. Dylan at least enjoyed the way Fisher communicated this news – in a clerihew:
The poet Charles Fisher
Will be compelled to join the militia
With a lot of other pricks
On June sixth.
But that did not ease his own problems, among which money was again pressing. Publication of Portrait of an Artist as a Young Dog in early April gave him an excuse to travel to London to make further enquiries about his candidacy for Cazalet’s battery. But his main reason was to ask his richer friends and admirers for financial help. Wilmot, who was remaining in Wales, offered him the use of her flat in Crawford Street, on the Portman estate north of Oxford Street. From there, he telephoned Henry Moore who, with Stephen Spender, Henry Read and Peter Watson, wealthy proprietor of the newly established literary journal Horizon, agreed to put their names to a letter which went to a dozen or so potential subscribers asking for at least £70 which would enable Dylan to pay his immediate debts. While Cecil Day Lewis, Bryan Guinness, Lord Esher and others responded with cash, raising a total of £126. 12s. od, H. G. Wells meanly declined, claiming that he had many dependents and had never read Dylan.
Having unfettered exclusive access to a handsome mansion block property went to Dylan’s head. Unhinged by drink and depression, he invited two low-life friends to join him. The upshot was that several of Wilmot’s prized possessions, including silver, furs, a gramophone and a typewriter, went missing. When she returned home, she was incensed to find not only had these items disappeared, but also her flat was strewn with half-eaten meals, and with love letters belonging to one of Dylan’s friends, a Fitzroy denizen known as Mab Farrogate, and the clothing and make-up of another, the cross-dressing Brian Dean Paul.
Over the previous three years there had been strong indications that Dylan had been taking drugs. His paranoia following his trip to London in December 1938 strongly suggests a reaction to a bad drug experience. His association with ‘Napper’ Dean Paul confirms his close involvement with London’s prevalent drug subculture. ‘Napper’, the generally disliked son of an ineffective Irish baronet and grandson of the famous nineteenth-century Polish violinist Henryk Wieniawski, openly took cocaine and, rather more furtively, heroin. His promiscuous sister Brenda, another junkie, was more popular, having made a career as mistress to a variety of men about town, from David Tennant, the owner of the Gargoyle Club, to Peter Quennell, the author. The onset of the war had only accentuated the (to Dylan) alluring social fluidity of an amoral world where aristocrats and influential men of letters mixed with drug addicts and bums.
At 3.30 on the morning following Wilmot’s return, Dylan turned up drunk at the flat but, unable to handle any confrontation, promptly bolted. An hour later Dean Paul arrived and did the same. After recovering some of her goods from a pawnbroker, Wilmot found a woman in the Fitzroy wearing her University of Cape Town scarf. She wrote angrily to Dylan in Wales, threatening police intervention. He cabled immediately, begging her to ‘call off the hounds’ and promising to restore all. On his return to London, he said his friends had let him down. ‘You do believe me, don’t you?’ he pleaded implausibly. ‘My honour is about the only thing we have got left now, Lorna. It’s pretty valuable to me.’
He had only gone back to Wales because his army medical was scheduled in Llandeilo, east of Carmarthen, at the end of April. With his secondment to Victor Cazalet’s battery still unconfirmed, he decided the best condition in which to approach this examination was very drunk. When he entered the clinic, he could hardly stand. His lungs, not to mention his liver, were in such a damaged state that the doctor had little hesitation in giving him C3 status. This meant that, while he was technically capable of serving in the army, his health was so poor that he would be one of the very last people to be called up.
Still creditors pressed for payment. Until funds arrived from his benefactors, he and his family were forced to ‘sneak away’ from Laugharne and spend most of May with his parents in Bishopston. There he saw a lot of Watkins, his companion for renewed exploration of Gower. One day he was again nearly caught by the tide on the Worm, off Rhossili. Watkins remained his usual supportive self, conscientiously sending Dylan a pound he had earned for some short poems he had written for his godson Llewelyn. Dylan used the money to make payments on a bed he had bought on hire purchase from a Swansea store.
Watkins liked a poem his friend had written at Blashford earlier in the year. ‘There was a saviour’ captured Dylan’s unease at the start of the war, contrasting the sense of false comfort experienced under a Fascist dictatorship with the satisfaction of the complexity of Christ’s universe. With Miltonic cadences and exciting rhythms, it is on one level the first of his sonorous war poems, on another a paean to God’s creation. Over the early summer Dylan worked on ‘Into her lying down head’, the latest in his series about his relationship with Caitlin. Dealing with jealousy, innocence and reconciliation, it recalls ‘I make this in a warring absence’ but in a more amusingly detached manner.
At the beginning of June Dylan received the proceeds of his London friends’ appeal and for a few weeks returned to Laugharne where he was able to lash out on a new coat of distemper for his house. But once again his financial security did not last. In late July, with the phoney war ended, the Battle of Britain lighting up
the skies over southern England, and bombs starting to fall in Swansea, he closed up Sea View and took Caitlin and Llewelyn to stay in the Malting House, John Davenport’s eighteenth-century mansion on the High Street in Marshfield, on the edge of the Cotswolds between Chippenham and Bath.
Portly, bucolic yet lithe, like a light-heavyweight past his prime, Davenport was a complex character, whose loud actress mother, Muriel George, was the antithesis of his own gentlemanly ideal. Destined never to write anything substantial on his own account, he was however successful as a critic, and his theatrical connections had done him well: after making his mark as a poet (and boxing blue) at Cambridge, he had married Clement, a beautiful painter from New England who was great-niece of the actor Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson. His mother had then found him lucrative employment as a scriptwriter for MGM in Hollywood. The combination of his transatlantic earnings and an inheritance of his wife’s enabled him to acquire his elegant house and furnish it with modern paintings by artists such as Picasso and Tanguy. A grand piano took pride of place in a long upstairs drawing room. This became a refuge for artists still unclear about their roles in the war.
Others in this cultured, often neurotic menage included the composers Lennox Berkeley and Arnold Cooke, the music critic William Glock and the writer Antonia White who was on the verge of returning to the Roman Catholic church. When not amusing himself playing piano duets with Glock, Davenport became the latest person to work on Dylan’s long-gestated spoof thriller about the murder of the poet laureate. Now that Fisher had been called up, the talented Davenport proved an ideal partner for The Death of the King’s Canary. The two writers had fun devising thinly disguised portraits of prominent literary figures and composing pastiche poems to go with them. Among those caricatured were Vicky Neuburg (as the murdered poet laureate Hilary Byrd), T. S. Eliot (J. L. Atkins), W. H. Auden (Wyndham Nils Snowden), Cyril Connolly (Basil Minto), George Barker (Albert Ponting), Augustus John (Hercules Jones), the Sitwells (the Laceys) and Dylan and Davenport themselves (Owen Tudor and Tom Agard). Owen Tudor promises, when rich, to give up writing and ‘just be absolutely disgusting’. Suggestive of Dylan’s narcotic dabblings, he smokes marijuana and asks, ‘Do they make you … full of fun? I mean, do they make you want to do things? … Larks.’
The two friends shared composition of the main prose storyline, though, contrary to expectation, Davenport wrote most of the verse parodies. Two definite exceptions were ‘Parachutist’ and ‘Request to Leda’, based on Spender and Empson, which Dylan later sent to Horizon. Strangely, his mildly homo-erotic Spender spoof was set up for printing and then pulled – Cyril Connolly, the editor, claimed through lack of space. Instead the inferior Empson villanelle was retained and, on the page opposite, surely as a joke, Connolly published ‘The Dirty Little Accuser’, Norman Cameron’s exasperated recollection of Dylan.
In August Dylan went to London hoping to find a job somewhere in the BBC’s expanded wartime service. The blitz had yet to reach London, but already Dylan was alarmed by the evidence of the air battle being fought over southern England for the future of Britain. When he met Pamela Hansford Johnson, now married to an Australian journalist Gordon Stewart, he paranoidly inscribed a photo from six years earlier: ‘August 12 1940. Dylan-shooting begins.’
Back in Marshfield, his collaboration with Davenport helped take his mind off the war. But too often for his liking, he heard German bombers droning overhead at night, en route to drop their loads on Bristol. Then, as Caitlin recalled, he would hide his head under the sheets in their exposed top-floor bedroom and he would whimper. To Watkins he confessed he was having ‘burning birdman’ dreams, including one in which airmen were fried in a huge pan. Another fearful fantasy was ‘greyclothed, grey-faced, blackarmletted troops marching, one morning, without a sound up a village street … That’s what Goebbels has done for me.’ News of intensified bombing raids on Swansea only added to his unease. The Germans had identified the town’s port and nearby oil installations as crucial targets. Their attacks crept closer to home in early August when Titch and Vera’s family, the Phillipses, were forced to vacate their house in Bryn-y-Mor Crescent after the Girls’ High School was also destroyed. On 1 September came the biggest raid yet, when thirty-three people were killed and over a hundred injured.
There were additional unsettling forces at work. Caitlin had loyally supported Dylan in his feud with Lorna Wilmot, firing off a telegram inveighing against the South African’s bourgeois attitude to her London flat. But, after three years of marriage, Dylan’s wife was tiring of her subsidiary role as poet’s muse and nappy-washer. At Marshfield she practised her dancing in a local Roman Catholic chapel, but lacked creative outlet for her talents both as a stage performer and as an occasional versifier in her own right. She resented being left often penniless on her own with Llewelyn while Dylan made regular restorative trips to London, particularly as she was convinced, correctly, that he used these occasions for dalliances with other women.
To preserve her amour propre, she developed a tendresse for another Marshfield inhabitant, the fair-haired Glock (who was also romantically involved with Clement Davenport whom he was later to marry). Caitlin arranged to consummate what she described as her first serious affair since marrying Dylan in a hotel in Cardiff. As an alibi she told Dylan she was visiting his parents in Bishopston. But the canny Florrie Thomas worked out that her daughter-in-law had spent one unaccounted night en route, and the story emerged. Caitlin’s hotel rendezvous with Glock turned out to be a limp farce, but Dylan was furious, especially when the liaison carried on for a while. His fights with his wife grew more bitter; on one occasion he threw a knife at her, and for a long time refused to come near her. Llewelyn picked up on the bad blood and, according to the testimony of Antonia White’s younger daughter, Lyndall, he wet his bed continuously. Extraordinarily White herself saw the Thomases as pillars of sanity in this frenetic war-traumatised community: ‘when I tell you I clung to them,’ she told Emily Coleman, ‘… you will get an idea of what it was like!’
Dylan failed to convince anyone at the BBC to give him a full-time job. He told Vernon Watkins that a putative opening, though well paid, would have meant writing tedious news summaries for the Empire Service, thus more or less admitting he did not want to be tied down in this way. Yet he realised he needed the money, and his desultory requests for indentured employment at the BBC were to become a regular theme over the next dozen years as if, in addition, someone, possibly D.J. or Florrie, though more likely his own atavistic idea of what might please them, pricked his conscience from time to time and reminded him of his obligation to provide for his family.
His parents were clearly keen for him to be seen to be doing useful war service. A few months earlier Florrie had optimistically told her daughter Nancy that Dylan had joined up. But this was wishful thinking, and in the meantime Mrs Thomas had had to come to terms with the break-up of Nancy’s marriage. Unlike Dylan, Nancy had done the patriotic thing, signing up to the ATS as a driver. (Caitlin’s sister Brigit also joined the same service in France, later becoming a member of a vital barge transportation crew.) Nancy’s duties took her from home and introduced her to officers’ messes, while her husband Haydn wrestled with a new job as manager of a brick factory near Redhill and with the ongoing problem of his wayward brother Handel, a Fascist sympathiser under regular police surveillance. The sexual temptations proved too much for Nancy who in 1940 decided to leave Haydn and join an officer with the Indian Army in Poona. Although the Thomas family had weathered extra-marital relationships, this was its first divorce – a shocking departure for the Uplands.
On another foray in early September, Dylan was terrified to find himself in London on the weekend the blitz started. He had gone to see Donald Taylor, boss of Strand Films, leader in the thriving market making documentaries for the government. Either Davenport or Cyril Connolly had given him the address of Peter Rose Pulham, a painter turned fashion photographer, as a possible place to stay. W
hen Dylan turned up at Pulham’s flat in Chelsea and asked in his plummy Welsh voice, ‘Is this Mr Pulham’s residence?’, Pulham’s girl friend, an aspiring actress called Theodora Rosling, thought he must be a debt collector. Having established his bona fides, Dylan joined a small party which included the young diplomat, Donald Maclean. In the early evening they all repaired to a local pub, but were prevented from returning home because of the ferocity of the first major German bombing raid on London which left much of the East End in flames.
Assigned to Pulham’s sitting room sofa, Dylan hardly slept either that or the following (Sunday) night, when the bombing was repeated. On the Monday he met Taylor in a pub in St Martin’s Lane (probably the Salisbury which was favoured by artists and film-makers). The interview seems to have gone well, but Dylan loathed the destruction around him (and feared more to come). He beat a hasty retreat to the Davenports’ in Gloucestershire where he worked on his ‘poem about invasion’. He had mentioned this to Watkins earlier in the summer, but his London experience inspired him to complete ‘Deaths and Entrances’, into which he poured all his concerns about the threat around him. Taking up well exercised themes of birth and death, it was the first of several deeply felt poems in which he engaged with war.
The blitz put a temporary halt to discussion about employment in the film industry. Dylan had to be content with resuming his freelance activity at the BBC, which did at least allow him occasional trips to London, as much to escape from Caitlin and the fouled atmosphere at Marshfield as to keep up with his drinking companions. John Royston Morley, a producer and former literary crony, hired him to write a feature on the nineteenth-century Brazilian army commander, the Duque de Caixas, even lending him books which he later had to request back. This was followed by programmes on Christopher Columbus and on the Czech legion in Russia in the 1914–18 war. The Christopher Columbus script was a confused mish-mash and was not used, though someone in the copyright department took the trouble to plead with the Corporation’s accountants to pay Dylan: ‘He came in to see me today (12 December), in an exceedingly nervous state, having been bombed.’ As for the Czech legion commission, Dylan used it to hone his skills at writing for different voices, boasting to John Davenport that it called for five different announcers. At least he was getting practice for employment as a film scriptwriter.
Dylan Thomas: A New Life Page 27