Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  One encouraging sign was that the younger generation of consciously post-Auden poets regarded him as a mentor. In the autumn of 1941 Routledge published Eight Oxford Poets, an anthology of undergraduate verse. One of the editors was Sidney Keyes, soon to be killed in action. At the age of twenty-one, he affirmed, ‘We have on the whole little sympathy with the Audenian school of poets.’ Since Dylan was clearly in the same camp, he was invited to Oxford in November to address the English Club. Looking smarter than usual in a borrowed dinner jacket, Dylan attracted an eclectic audience, amongst whom was the young Philip Larkin, up at St John’s, who noted appreciatively: ‘Hell of a fine man: little, snubby, hopelessly pissed bloke who made hundreds of cracks and read parodies of everybody in appropriate voices. He remarked, “I’d like to have talked about a book of poems I’ve been given to review, a young poet called Rupert Brooke – it’s surprising how he has been influenced by Stephen Spender …” There was a moment of delighted surprise, then a roar of laughter. Then he read a parody of Spender entitled “The Parachutist” which had people rolling on the floor. He kept this up all night – parodies of everyone bar Lawrence – and finally read two of his own poems, which were very good.’ (Dylan was winning over his student audience with excerpts from The Death of the King’s Canary.) Afterwards he was invited to a party in Christ Church given by Michael Hamburger, a pale dark-haired member of the club who translated Rilke and Hölderlin. He was unaware he had offended some student hearties with obscene comments at the end of his talk until they broke into Hamburger’s rooms, dragged out Dylan, and tried to throw him into the pond in the main college quadrangle.

  Hamburger, later a distinguished poet and translator, struck up a friendship with Dylan, imitating his verse, and seeking out his company in Soho pubs during vacations. Often he was accompanied by his undergraduate friend John Mortimer who had recently lost his virginity to Susan Henderson, daughter of Wyn, who lived in the same Oxfordshire village of Turville Heath. One drunken lunch Dylan, adopting what Mortimer called his ‘breathy, Charles Laughton voice’, announced he was looking for a girl with an aperture as small as a mouse’s earhole and took the two undergraduates to the usually welcoming offices of Horizon. By then Mortimer was too drunk to recall if Dylan was successful in his quest.

  For much of the rest of 1941, the Thomases led an unseemly peripatetic existence. Theodora Rosling compared Dylan to the Master of Hounds in R. S. Surtees’s ‘Handley Cross’:

  He will bring his nightcap with him,

  For where the MFH dines he sleeps,

  And where the MFH sleeps he breakfasts.

  Theodora herself was posing naked for her boyfriend Peter Rose Pulham for a series of tasteful photographs which appeared in the new magazine Lilliput, where the Polish-born Mechtild Nawaisky, a Chelsea drinking friend, was art editor. Through this connection, Dylan was commissioned to write verse captions to accompany a series of photographs, titled ‘A Dream of Winter’, by the celebrated photographer Bill Brandt, which appeared in the magazine in January 1942. A few months earlier Brandt had captured him on camera for a series ‘Poets of Democracy’ in the same magazine. Laurie Lee, part of this group, called it ‘a gallery of hideous morons & gargoyles’, with Dylan looking ‘sick in a pub’.

  With Theodora and Pulham, Dylan went round for dinner at Donald and Melinda Maclean’s flat near Regent’s Park. On the menu were some dried onion flakes which, because of rationing, a friend had thoughtfully sent from the United States. Dylan put his fellow guests off their meal by remarking sweetly that this delicacy looked like old men’s toe-nails.

  When at a loose end, he often accompanied Theodora to the cinema. Although they usually enjoyed horror movies, they both found Fritz Lang’s M stomach-turning, particularly Theodora, who could not help remarking that Peter Lorre, in the lead role of a child murderer, looked uncannily like Dylan. When they went to the French pub for a restorative drink, they were accosted by an oldish man whom Dylan knew and clearly disliked. Wielding a pad of paper, this fellow asked them to make a drawing. When they finished he sent over a piece of paper on which he had sketched exactly the same thing. Already discomfited by the film, Dylan went white and insisted on moving immediately. When Theodora asked why, he said they had just met Aleister Crowley and they needed to get as far away from him as possible.

  Some respite came in early 1942 when John Pudney (never Dylan’s favourite poet, though always a loyal supporter) prevailed on his father-in-law Alan (A. P.) Herbert (another about whom Dylan had been unduly scornful) to allow the needy Thomases to live in one of his two adjacent houses in Hammersmith Terrace, Chiswick. Staying nearby was Cecily Mackworth, a well-born Welsh woman who had befriended Henry Miller while living in France. Forced to flee Paris in 1940, she was working with the Free French in London. Once when she was ill, a friend brought Dylan along to help cheer her up. Dylan sat on the end of her bed and talked seriously about the pain of being in love. Eyeing her sympathetically, he said he hoped she did not have tuberculosis, as he did. They next met at a party at Durham Wharf, the Chiswick house of their mutual friend the painter Julian Trevelyan. This time Dylan was accompanied by Caitlin who took offence when he and Mackworth struck up a quiet but intense conversation. No doubt imagining wrongly that her husband was flirting with a mistress, she came up behind her supposed rival and, without saying a word, stubbed her cigarette down hard on the back of Mackworth’s hand. Then she said, ‘Hullo’ and walked calmly away to talk to someone else. ‘Dylan looked only a little embarrassed and not at all surprised,’ recalled Mackworth.

  Without the distraction of Llewelyn, Caitlin was bearing the brunt of her husband’s errant ways. As she explained to her sister Brigit, Dylan veered between a life of impeccable domesticity and irresponsible abandon. Sometimes he disappeared and she did not see him for several nights. Then he would return home without explanation and everything appeared fine – even if she found his behaviour all very curious.

  One of the perks of Dylan’s job was that he was occasionally able to get out of town. In June he went to the north of England to research a film about the arts. The idea was to show music and theatre continuing to thrive in grimy industrial towns and idyllic country villages. Dylan had a miserable time until, in Bradford, he met Ruth Wynn Owen, a young actress with a touring company, who epitomised the innocence he had once seen and loved in Caitlin. Deeply struck by her, he arranged to meet her again, even trying to reschedule a talk in Cambridge so he could be there when, a short while later, her company played the university town. But he had forgotten that, by then, the undergraduate term had ended. When her production of The Merry Wives of Windsor came to London in August, he was drunk and outrageous on the only occasion they met, and then failed to link up with her a second time. Nevertheless he managed to conduct a discreet and probably chaste romance. Part of her charm was her fey North Welsh mysticism which in later years became more marked as she became one of Britain’s leading ‘white’ witches, heading the Plant y Bran branch of the Wicca, or ancient British religion. Although she had many followers, particularly in the acting profession, she was denounced as a fraud and died in obscurity in 1998.

  In early July Caitlin accompanied her husband on a recce for a film in Scotland. The couple visited David Archer, the gentle rich ingenue who had published Dylan’s first book. He had set up the short-lived but influential South Street Art Centre in Glasgow, which, coincidentally, had attracted several excellent refugee artists, such as the Polish painters Jankel Adler and Josef Herman. With his European touch (he had been a friend of both Klee and Picasso), Adler helped inspire a school of Scottish neo-romantic artists, including Robert MacBryde and his partner Robert Colquhoun (together known as ‘the two Roberts’) who became friends of Dylan after moving to London.

  As Adler was to young Scottish artists, so Dylan became to a rising generation of Scottish poets – an example of a ‘foreign’ (in his case Celtic) writer with a distinct style that steered clear of Anglo-Saxon public-scho
ol orthodoxies. Already Dylan had been courted by Scottish poets such as J. F. Hendry and William Montgomerie linked to the apocalyptic group. Not that he had done much to reciprocate their interest: as he had told another Scots poet, Hamish Henderson, a couple of years earlier, he had little enthusiasm for Scottish or Welsh nationalism and, as for the New Apocalypse, they were ‘beneath contempt’. But he was prepared to help individual poets. Four years younger than Dylan, the tall, energetic Sydney (W. S.) Graham was working in a weapons factory in Greenock while turning out powerful verses which were compared to the Welshman’s. With the South Street Centre already falling apart, Dylan encouraged Graham to pursue his ambition of producing a Scottish number of Life and Letters and promised assistance if he came to London. Even Hugh MacDiarmid, the uncompromising old man of Scottish culture, welcomed Dylan’s visit, falling heavily for Caitlin’s looks (he remembered reading her father’s poetry before the First World War) and arranging a programme for them at the house of the composer, F. G. Scott, who played and sang his settings of MacDiarmid’s lyrics for the Thomases ‘so that they could get the right idea of the sound of the Scots language’.

  But this interlude only confused Caitlin further. As she told Brigit, she felt she was wasting away in London and dreamt of a healthy, outdoor life in Scotland. Somewhere she had heard that the left-wing writer Naomi Mitchison had gathered a group of artists and writers on her family farm near Campbeltown on the Mull of Kintyre, and Caitlin wondered if she might join them.

  In the middle of this mayhem, Caitlin discovered she was pregnant. Instead of returning to Scotland, her temporary solution was to escape to the west coast of Wales and join Dylan’s old friends, the Phillips family who, after leaving Swansea, had taken a large house called Gelli at Talsarn in the Aeron valley, not far from the busy fishing port of New Quay. Caitlin probably decided this while she and Dylan were staying at Vera Phillips’s flat in Old Church Street, Chelsea. Vera had lived a semi-Bohemian existence in London since the mid-1930s, initially studying interior design, occasionally working in the theatre, sometimes supporting herself as a waitress at the Chelsea Pensioner, a café partly owned by a friend, Elizabeth Taylor, whose husband was an artist. Since 1940 she had been romantically involved with William Killick, an Old Harrovian officer in the Royal Engineers, whom she had met at the bar of the Antelope near Sloane Square. But since he had been called up, she was free to join her family in Wales, and Caitlin went with her.

  Staying on at Old Church Street, Dylan realised his recent behaviour had been appalling and went through what was to be a frequent ritual of apology, as he begged to be allowed to join his pregnant wife. He convinced Donald Taylor that he could do some useful research on the Welsh strand of the ‘Pattern of Britain’. Although he was only at Gelli for just over a week, he again enjoyed being away from the capital. With access to fresh milk, cheese and eggs, he felt his health improving. And as he plaintively wrote to Tommy Earp, a much older crony of Augustus John, with whom he used to drink in the afternoons at the Horseshoe Club in Wardour Street, he did not feel the pressures of London: he was under no obligation to admire the trees and ‘the country’s the one place you haven’t got to go out in, thank Pan’.

  In early September he was back in the capital, again looking for somewhere to live. Remembering that Dan Jones had once inhabited the grandly named Wentworth Studios (in fact, a row of run-down shacks) off Manresa Road, round the comer from Peter Rose Pulham and Theodora Rosling, he checked out the place and found it empty. With Theodora’s help, he secured the tenancy on a dilapidated square room, which stank of cat’s pee. It had an ancient bathroom and a skylight that leaked when it rained. Visitors marvelled how, when Caitlin came back, she managed to turn this tip into a liveable space, initially using Dan’s books as tables, and adorning the walls with Dylan’s passe-partouted drawings and any other reproductions she could find.

  Although Dylan and Caitlin both continued to move around, Wentworth Studios provided a base for the next couple of years. (There is a Bill Brandt photograph of them there the following year, looking almost proprietorial – having secured the use of a handsome circular Victorian table – but also ineffably sad.) When Dylan had money, he would take his wife to the Pheasantry, a nightclub in the King’s Road, where Caitlin’s high spirits bubbled out. Wearing a pink skirt, she once tried to teach Dylan (in her mother’s cast-off sweater) the basics of dancing. Realising she was wasting her time, she twirled around the room, lifting her skirt to enthusiastic shouts of ‘Olé’ from Augustus John – ‘a free floor show’.

  Various tensions of the period boiled up one evening after Dylan met Caitlin’s brother John Macnamara in the Markham Arms and was invited back to dinner at the Devases. When John began talking about his wartime experiences with the Commandos (he had participated in the Dieppe raid in August 1942), Dylan took him to task for boasting of murdering Germans. An angry John countered that his brother-in-law was quite happy to have his dirty work done for him, whereupon the two men squared up for a fight. For a while tempers abated, but then Dylan started up again in his wheedling way, accusing John of being a Nazi and enjoying the war. This was too much for everyone, particularly Henriette, John’s French wife, who demanded that Dylan leave the house.

  To an extent Dylan was fooling around: this was an infantile annoying version of his drunken banter. But there was a more serious side to his behaviour. Because of his non-combatant status, and his history of troubled attitudes to war, stretching back to childhood, he had problems relating to soldiers. He ‘would walk up to the tallest man in uniform in the pub and insult him, his country and the war so grossly that almost inevitably a fight developed’. By any standards, his comments were insensitive during a war.

  In early March 1943 Caitlin went into St Mary Abbot’s Hospital to give birth to a baby girl, who bawled like her brother at that age and looked a prettier version of her father, with curly golden hair and blue eyes. As with Llewelyn’s birth, Dylan was nowhere to be found. Nicolette had to haul him out of the Anglesea pub, but Caitlin was again convinced he had been with another woman. This was clear, she claimed, when she returned to Wentworth Studios and found it in greater disarray than usual: their matrimonial bed showed signs of recent love-making and there was no cot for the infant. Shortly afterwards Theodora Rosling was standing outside the Sunlight Laundry in the King’s Road when Dylan approached. He told her about the baby, who was called Aeronwy (regularly abbreviated to Aeron, after the river beside which she was supposed to have been conceived, though this was nonsense as Caitlin was already pregnant before going to Wales the previous summer). When he added plaintively that his daughter had nowhere to sleep, Theodora emptied her laundry basket and gave it to him.

  Before the end of the month Dylan had escaped to Tickerage Mill, the Sussex house of Dick Wyndham, a hard-drinking artist and adventurer who had recently been invalided out of the army after a nervous breakdown. Wyndham was unwittingly at the centre of various of Dylan’s circles. A witty, aristocratic habitué of the Gargoyle, his pre-war travels and painting in the Sudan have been seen as a model for Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Brideshead Revisited. He had connections in films, being a close friend of Donald Taylor’s former partner ‘Bunny’ Keene who, in his previous incarnation as director of Tooth’s Gallery, had promoted Wyndham’s early artistic career. He was also a cousin of David Tennant, who encouraged Dylan to follow in the tradition of poets such as Dafydd ap Gwilym at the Welsh courts in the middle ages and to become a sort of licensed troubadour to the well-heeled Gargoyle crowd. Usually his drink bills were tactfully forgotten, though once or twice he (and his wife) overdid it, as Sacheverell Sitwell told his sister Edith. Having had his card marked by Ivan Moffat, Sitwell found Dylan ‘an utterly impossible but quite fascinating person’. Caitlin was simply formidable: ‘dressed like the trainer in a boxing ring with about seven jerseys one over the other, and … trained to knock [Dylan] out when he comes home’. Sitwell told how Caitlin had gone berse
rk in a nightclub and broken the arm of the recently married Virginia Gilliatt, a cousin of the Sitwells.

  Seeking to go one better than his wife, Dylan had raced into the Gargoyle one night, spinning down the stairs so fast that Moffat had likened his figure to a series of circles, as in a comic drawing.

  Once on the dancing floor (he was poetically dressed in tweeds, with curls of hair like Bacchus, shoes, but no socks), he ripped off both shoes and danced barefoot, for a while, in a sinister but distracted fashion. Then his purpose became evident. He moved up to the table where David Tennant was sitting, drinking a valuable bottle of claret, poured it into his own shoe and drank it, finished the bottle, and then with an extraordinary gliding movement, like a sea serpent, traversed the entire floor to the far end of the room, and landed on the divan nestling his head against the thighs of Harold Nicolson, whom he hates. After that there was general furore, and a sort of pêle mêle struggle, of which the results were long in doubt, owing to the extraordinary bravery and resources of Mrs Dylan T. Eventually, much to the regret of many persons, they were ejected.

  It shows infallible taste and instinct, doesn’t it?

  For a while the couple were banned from the establishment. But two months later, Tennant and his wife Virginia invited them both down to East Knoyle, their house in Wiltshire, where Dylan and his host sat up late into the night declaiming Milton and Shakespeare.