Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  In December the various tensions at the Davenports’ caused Dylan to beat a retreat from the Malting House and to park himself and his family temporarily with his parents. His personal pain was startlingly evident in ‘On a Wedding Anniversary’ published in January 1941 in Poetry London, the journal edited by Tambimuttu, a rising star of the literary scene. This short poem minced no words about the breakdown of a relationship which had ‘moved for three years in tune’ but ‘Now their love lies a loss.’ Similar suffering was the engine of his ‘Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait’, which describes in dramatic Freudian dream sequence a fisherman at sea in an ocean of desire. After a period of wild sexual activity, the sailor becomes sated and agrees meekly to marriage, an inevitable sacrifice in ‘the furious ox-killing house of love’. When a child is born, he recognises this as another trick played by cruel Time, an unstoppable force whose role is simply to advance one rapidly to death. Recalling his inability to cope with metropolitian stresses a couple of years earlier, he rails against ‘O Rome and Sodom To-morrow and London’.

  At the end he is left standing disconsolately at the door of his house, with the organ of his love onanistically in his hand. Vernon Watkins, who had helped the ballad through many versions, noted that it was ‘so much a visual poem that [Dylan] made a coloured picture for it which he pinned on the wall of his room [at Bishopston], a picture of a woman lying at the bottom of the sea.’

  Having finished The Death of the King’s Canary, his collaboration with Davenport, Dylan was also working on Adventures in the Skin Trade which he now described as a semi-autobiographical novel – ‘a mixture of Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit, Kafka, Beachcomber, and good old 3-adjectives-a-penny belly churning Thomas, the Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive’. But his heart was not in it and he admitted it was badly written, a view readily endorsed by Dent which, amid stern comments about Dylan’s ‘literary irresponsibility’, declined to publish the book.

  By January 1941 Dylan’s situation was again unbearable. He and his wife were living in cramped conditions at his parents’ house. (When the pipes burst, Caitlin spent the whole day mopping up.) They had no money, and Llewelyn had been sent to his Macnamara grandmother. Desperate for funds which might allow them to rent a small cottage somewhere in Wales or in Cornwall, Dylan wrote to the wealthy Lord Howard de Walden, an Augustus John contact (and, in a roundabout way, the source of his name), who had helped him in the past. He also applied to the Royal Literary Fund which granted him £50, though not before Alec Waugh, a half-hearted supporter of his request, had commented to Davenport that Dylan should write more stories and fewer letters. (‘When I want advice from Alec Waugh, I’ll go to his brother,’ commented Dylan, testily.) One writer Dylan approached about his application was Walter de la Mare who generously sent £5 to tide him over. Dylan promised to repay this as soon as the Fund delivered. But by the time this money arrived in February, it was all otherwise accounted for, and Dylan had to write a letter of grovelling apology to de la Mare.

  In the midst of grave problems on both domestic and war fronts, there were still moments of defiant pleasure. Over the festive season he and Caitlin attended a loud party given by students from the Swansea College of Art over a laundry opposite the Slip looking out across Swansea Bay. The Thomases went with the Phillips sisters who, after their house had been bombed, were preparing to decamp to Cardiganshire, their mother’s original home. While guests drank a mixture of rum and milk brewed in the kitchen, Dylan and Vera Phillips sang a strange personal opera in which they made up both the words and the tune. Vera’s sister Evelyn (Titch) recalled how everyone stopped dancing to watch Dylan and Caitlin perform a ‘particularly brilliant’ ballet burlesque in the middle of the room. Caitlin was even more hopelessly drunk than Dylan. In order to sober her up before returning to his parents’ house in Bishopston, Dylan tried to make her vomit by putting a finger down her throat. She bit him hard, causing him to remark, ‘She bites the hand that makes her sick.’

  But the war was relentless. In late February Swansea suffered its worst air raids ever. Two hundred and thirty people were killed during a three-night blitz in which the area around the High Street was devastated. The following morning Bert Trick went to the offices of the air-raid service (of which he was a warden) on the corner of Union and Oxford Streets. The building had been destroyed and, as he contemplated a surreal scene of smouldering masonry and serpentine fire hoses, Dylan and Caitlin walked round the corner. ‘There had been a pub on the corner,’ recalled Trick. ‘It was a blackened mound. Dylan said, “Our Swansea has died,” and by God he was right. The pubs and familiar places we knew had gone for all time.’

  With Swansea seemingly as dangerous as London, Dylan wrote again to Edith Sitwell’s friend Sir Kenneth Clark about the possibility of a job in the film industry. He suggested he would be more useful writing films than working in a munitions factory, adding for emphasis, ‘I’m not, by the way, thinking of film-work because I imagine it to be easier than other jobs.’ A few days later he rather back-tracked when, echoing his alter ego Owen Tudor in a letter to Clement Davenport, he indulged a fantasy about employment in a munitions factory: clocking in, socialising in the canteen, turning and hammering all day – all ‘to help to kill another stranger; deary me, I’d rather be a poet anyday and live on guile and beer.’

  His still basically iconoclastic attitude to the world was clear in a telegram he wrote to his old friend Len Lye. With the vision of an experimental artist, Lye had composed a political-cultural manifesto for the post-war world. Anticipating the hippy movement by a quarter of a century, this was based around the slogan Individual Happiness Now (IHN). Dylan could only signal his enthusiastic approval, sending (with the painter and designer John Tunnard) a cable which read: ‘Hurrah for IHN’. Although aware that this might have been written after a session in a pub, Lye was delighted at such an unsolicited testimonial, describing it to Robert Graves as ‘the right kind of lift’.

  Despite his immediate woes, Dylan maintained his regular poetic output. Horizon had taken ‘Deaths and Entrances’ in January. ‘Love in the Asylum’, published in Tambimuttu’s Poetry (London) in May–June was a light, ironic yet passionate appreciation of Caitlin’s role as a turbulent muse who stimulates his imagination – the woman he could not live with, nor live without. A less jaundiced view of sexual relations came in ‘On the marriage of a virgin’, originally written around the time of his sister Nancy’s wedding in 1933, and one of two poems (the other was ‘The hunchback in the park’) which he now radically revised from his notebook versions eight and nine years earlier. Both were printed in Life and Letters Today, as was his latest angry report from the battlefront, the sonnet ‘Among those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred’.

  The Swansea of Dylan’s adolescence may have died, and now he moved to draw a line under another relic from times gone by. For over three years he had fielded requests from the State University of New York at Buffalo for manuscripts to form the basis of a poetry collection at its new Lockwood Memorial Library. In June Dylan agreed to sell the university five of the notebooks in which he had methodically written his poems during his teenage years (four containing poetry, one short stories). The London bookseller Bertram Rota was paid just over $140 (or £35) as agent on the deal. Dylan clearly received significantly less. He had sold the cream of his creative work for the equivalent of around £1,200 in 2003. Dylan was twenty-six at that time. Although his biographer Constantine FitzGibbon drew over-fanciful parallels with John Keats, who died in his twenty-sixth year, Dylan was indeed sloughing off a youthful skin. A period of intense poetic activity had drawn to an end. Dylan had already written more than eighty per cent of his published verse. Now, signalling a different sort of creative potential, he was free to join the commercial world of film.

  THIRTEEN

  HACK WORK

  Two additional factors speeded Dylan’s return to London in the summer of 1941. One was the death of his Aunt Dosie in Carmarthenshire
in April. Unlike with Aunt Annie eight years earlier, this did not lead directly to Dylan writing a poem. More prosaically, it allowed his parents to cut their Swansea ties and move permanently to Blaencwm. Since Dosie’s husband, the pious Reverend Crap, David Rees, had died two years earlier, Florrie had often been in Llanstephan looking after her older sister. After Dosie’s passing, she and D.J. took the opportunity to give up living in Bishopston, sell Cwmdonkin Drive (a transaction completed in April 1943) and move permanently to Llanstephan where they had the upper of the two cottages and Aunt Polly and Uncle Bob the lower.

  The other development was that the worst of German bombing of London appeared to be over. (The blitz is officially said to have ended in May.) Although demonstrably a city still at war, with sandbags shoring up vital buildings, and egg powder and Spam the staples in every kitchen cupboard, the capital began to return to some semblance of normality – one sign of which was the reopening of the Gargoyle Club in Meard Street, Soho, in June. Originally founded in 1925 with a dual role as a nightclub and a meeting place for avant-garde artists, the Gargoyle had, by the start of the war, become an after-hours watering hole for the rich. In December 1940 its well-heeled owner David Tennant, son of Lord Glenconner, closed it down, partly because of the bombs and partly because, with internment, it was impossible to find experienced Italian waiters. When, six months later, he opened its doors again, he was determined to return to the club’s original raison d’être and to admit a wider clientele, from writers and artists, to officers of the various émigré forces such as the Free French who had brought a degree of sophistication to the beleaguered capital.

  Tennant was only reflecting a general spirit of camaraderie. For two years social divisions and sexual inhibitions had broken down as the pubs of central London had drawn in the itinerant bands of war, whether East European refugees, Commonwealth soldiers en route to some distant battlefront, vital workers from the Celtic fringes, or East Enders simply seeking a break from the domestic front line. A gallows intensity inevitably hung over proceedings, and this was found also in literature and the arts, which were both flourishing. Paper might be rationed and the number of books printed down, but sales were up, as any printed work was immediately devoured by an eager public. (Another wartime paradox was that, despite the flourishing of pub culture, people spent more time than usual quietly at home.) Reading was a way of passing the hours, obtaining information and also, particularly in the charged atmosphere of the moment, exploring eternal verities. This was good for poetry, where the political concerns of the 1930s had given way to the neo-romanticism of the apocalyptical school that had tried to claim Dylan. Edith Sitwell did her bit, springing into verse for the first time in a decade to give the horrors of war a Christianised context in her poem ‘Still falls the rain’. Magazines of the Auden decade such as New Verse and Twentieth Century Verse folded and were replaced by Tambimuttu’s Poetry (London) and Charles Wrey Gardiner’s Poetry Quarterly. A wartime phenomenon was the anthology: from May 1940 the government banned the publication of new magazines, but could not prevent entrepreneurial publishers who used their often hoarded supplies of poor paper to put out collections of verse and short stories that they called books. Where magazines flourished, they were pocketsized and comprehensive, in the style of John Lehmann’s New Writing, Cyril Connolly’s Horizon and periodicals for the fighting man such as Lilliput which printed pictures of semi-naked girls.

  All of this was good news for Dylan. During the summer he, Caitlin and baby Llewelyn had been staying with Frances Hughes in the house attached to Laugharne Castle. (Frances enjoyed the company as her husband was away, working for the Admiralty in Bath.) Confident at last that the bombing in the capital had really abated, Dylan decided to return there in August. Caitlin opted to accompany him, fearing that if she did not make the effort, he would be drawn inextricably back to pubs and their easy women. Reluctantly, or so she claimed, she was forced to leave two-and-a-half-year-old Llewelyn with her mother in Blashford, where he remained for much of the rest of the war. (En route, as she recounted in harrowing detail to Frances Hughes, she managed to lose the unfortunate child on the train between Cardiff and Bristol.)

  This time Dylan was ready and willing to take up Donald Taylor’s offer of a job with Strand Films. The spectacled, dark-haired Taylor was a leading light in Britain’s documentary film movement which had grown up over the previous decade and been further boosted by government propaganda commissions during the war. Taylor had started making films in the 1930s in partnership with Ralph ‘Bunny’ Keene, a sharp-featured jack of all trades who was originally an art dealer. Together they worked closely with Paul Rotha, a director who was also a leading theoretician of their trade. Taylor’s wife Marion (herself a film-maker) was the sister of John Grierson, the acknowledged pioneer of British documentaries, with his work for the Empire Marketing Board, the General Post Office film unit and, before the war, the oil industry. By 1941 the market had grown so substantially that Keene opted to leave Strand and set up his own company, Greenpark. Through friendship with documentary-makers such as Len Lye and Humphrey Jennings, as well as his own love of the screen, Dylan was well acquainted with this branch of film. His own poetry used cinematic references, and he almost certainly knew W. H. Auden’s clattering verse commentary on the Night Train for the GPO film unit.

  Taylor must have wondered where Dylan had been over the past year, for he did not hire him immediately. When Dylan wrote to Vernon Watkins from Horizon’s offices on 28 August, four weeks after arriving in London, he was still looking for a film job, though he claimed to have been offered work on several scripts. Taylor later said that Dylan was recommended to him by Ivan Moffat, another of his scriptwriters. Moffat was the witty talented son of sybaritic American artist Curtis Moffat and of socialite Iris Tree, whose father was the actor-producer Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. With these credentials, he was an ideal front-man for the Gargoyle Club, whose owner David Tennant charged him with bringing in new, livelier members after the establishment reopened in June. One person he commandeered was Dylan who took readily to the louche atmosphere of the club. Dylan had probably met Moffat through his one-time benefactor Peter Watson, Horizon’s financial backer and Gargoyle habitué, or through Augustus John, a friend of Ivan’s father Curtis, who, the painter pointedly noted in his autobiography, had introduced him to hashish. Either of them might have seen Dylan mooching about and urged Moffat to find him a job.

  Indisputably, before long, Dylan was perched at a desk in Strand’s ‘ringing, clinging’ offices, initially in Upper St Martin’s Lane and then, as the workload increased, in Golden Square, in the film-making heart of Soho. He was paid £10 a week, or around £350 a week at 2003 prices, for contributing his share of ideas, scripts and voice-overs to the output of Britain’s leading documentary production company which, under contract mainly to the Ministry of Information, put out seventy-five films, ranging from five-minute shorts to substantial features, in 1942 alone. As little more than a propaganda arm of the government, Strand’s role was to pump out basic information, raise morale and, increasingly, prepare Britain’s war-weary population for a brighter future. Two of Dylan’s early efforts in the summer of 1942 show how easily he took to wielding his pen in this manner: Balloon Site 568 is an eight-minute recruitment vehicle for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), while New Towns for Old uses dialogue in similar fashion to treat of plans for post-war reconstruction, with ‘new schools, new hospitals, new roads, new life’, adding a populist note with the rallying cry: ‘You’re the only folk that can make these plans come true.’

  Dylan might have known how to paint a bright future in the movies but, closer to home, in the summer of 1941, he still had as much difficulty as ever supporting himself and his family. Occasionally he and Caitlin were able to stay with her sister Nicolette in Markham Square, Chelsea. But the differences in way of life between the Devases and the Thomases were vast – a point brought home to Nicolette during air-raids when,
while most others tried to disguise their fear, Dylan covered himself in an eiderdown and lay, moaning and cursing in a corner of the room, in a manner that made everyone else more frightened. Since Nicolette was pregnant with her second child – a son called Esmond, who was born in November – Dylan and Caitlin soon moved to the seedy Mars Hotel, above a restaurant in Frith Street, near his place of work in Soho. From there he complained to Watkins of sitting in his room, thinking darkly about those who could afford to go out to eat.

  The alternative, as always, was the pub, but here the ambience and even the venue was changing. Dylan still made his way north of Oxford Street to the shambling, old-fashioned Fitzroy and Wheatsheaf. Increasingly, however, he was drawn to the more functional film-makers’ hostelry, the Highlander in Dean Street, or to the actors’ haunt, the Salisbury in St Martin’s Lane. He also frequented two drinking spots which epitomised London’s shifting population – the York Minster at the southern end of Dean Street, known as the French pub since becoming the bar of choice for all who had crossed the Channel with General de Gaulle after the fall of France, and the unambiguously named Swiss pub on Old Compton Street. If he needed food, there was always the Café An’ in St Giles Passage off the Tottenham Court Road, the second part of whose name alluded to its additional attractions, such as girls. But wherever Dylan went, however much he earned, he never had money to spare.