Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  In July Dick Wyndham’s fun-loving twenty-one-year-old daughter Joan came to London, looking for respite from the tedium of institutional life in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. She had recently met Julian Maclaren-Ross, a tall, loquacious man with crinkly dark hair and literary aspirations, who was in the process of being invalided out of the army on psychiatric grounds. He had invited her and her friend Zoe Hicks, a fellow WAAF officer and daughter of Augustus John, to join him on a trip to the capital. They quickly ditched him and went to the Wheatsheaf where Dylan, apparently unaware of any connection, eased himself beside her and introduced himself: ‘I’m Dylan Thomas and I’m fucking skint. Be nice to me, Waafie, and buy me another Special Ale.’ His friend Ruthven Todd soon informed them that the drink was running out (a common wartime occurrence) and they had better go elsewhere. On a subsequent pub crawl, Joan quickly twigged that Dylan’s acquaintances were split broadly into two camps – those who lionised him, and those who regarded him as a drunken bore and took steps to avoid him. In a taxi back to Todd’s flat behind the British Museum, she was alarmed to be smothered in wet, beery kisses by Dylan. Since by then, the bombs had begun to fall, they both had to stay at Todd’s. Given the spare room, Joan was just dozing off when she heard someone fumbling with the lock and chanting, ‘I want to fuck you! I want to fuck you!’ She managed to bolt the door and prevent Dylan’s entry.

  Next morning, they both went out for breakfast. Dylan told Joan about his baby daughter and she politely tried to engage him in conversation about poetry, saying that, although she liked his work, there were a lot of lines she did not understand. Dylan told her not to worry: his verse was ‘like a walled city with many gates, it doesn’t really matter which door you go in by – in fact it doesn’t matter a tinker’s toss if you don’t go in at all.’ He added disingenuously that poetry was not the most important thing in life: ‘Frankly, I’d much rather lie in a hot bath sucking boiled sweets and reading Agatha Christie.’ She concluded that Dylan was much nicer in the mornings than in the evenings.

  The following month Dylan found himself sharing the lift at Strand’s offices with Joan’s dandyish friend Maclaren-Ross who, it turned out, had been hired as the third member of the company’s scriptwriting team with Dylan and Philip Lindsay, the youngest, sleepy-looking member of a formidable Australian literary family. In camel-coloured overcoat, cream silk shirt and peach-coloured tie, sporting dark glasses and carrying a silver-topped cane, Maclaren-Ross became enough of a Soho personality to be immortalised in print as X. Trapnel in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. Joan said he looked ‘a real toff if a little frayed at the edges’. To Anthony Burgess, he was ‘an Oscar Wilde with less talent but no homosexuality’. An alternative view was that he was a tedious solipsist.

  Maclaren-Ross’s Memoirs of the Forties provide a snap-shot of Dylan in the office – with his bow tie and collar pinched too tight, looking like a provincial young farmer up in town for the day. Taylor put them both to work on a Dad’s Army-type film about the Home Guard which was never finished. Smoking incessantly, Dylan wrote in a soft 2B pencil, which he also used to make funny, frequently obscene, drawings on his blotter. The two men quickly adopted a routine which involved generous periods of recuperation in the Wheatsheaf and Highlander. However Maclaren-Ross’s monologues could be overbearing, and Dylan was often happy to escape from his company into the Horseshoe. As their mutual friend the New Zealander Dan Davin noted, they were wary of one another, since they both needed audiences: to see them holding court was like watching rival condottieri.

  Apart from drinking, they shared a passion for art-house cinema classics. They dreamt of producing a film called The Whispering Gallery or The Distorting Mirror in the style of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Dylan suggested a plot vaguely reminiscent of The Death of the King’s Canary, involving fairgrounds and stately homes. When they were unable to decide whether the villain should be male or female, Dylan suggested the character should be both – or should have a sex change halfway through. (His fascination with hermaphroditism may have come from his father-in-law Francis Macnamara who had retired to his sick bed, convinced he was both male and female.)

  Dylan and Maclaren-Ross also wanted to write a complete screenplay, including such details as instructions to cameramen, instead of the prosaic treatments they usually did. Taylor who was also tiring of documentaries and harboured an ambition to make feature films, encouraged them, even suggesting a version of Dylan’s semi-autobiographical Adventures in the Skin Trade which had been turned down by Dent early in the war. For a while Dylan carried a copy of this work which he lent to Tambimuttu who claimed he might be able to get him a publisher’s advance on it. When Tambimuttu temporarily lost it, Dylan was furious, the only time Maclaren-Ross ever saw him angry.

  An unpublished script survives for what appears to be a radio play about the dangers of talking too much during the war. In his own hand, Dylan contrasts the great conversationalists of the past, neatly parodying the witty circumlocutions of Wilde and Beardsley and the epigrammatic style of Samuel Johnson speaking to Mrs Thrale, with the vapid effusions of modern novelists, bright young things, blimpish military men and ordinary people, whose speculations about the progress of the war might, it is suggested, prove useful to the enemy.

  Although his more creative ideas had to be put in abeyance, Dylan, in mid-1943, was enjoying his most prolific period as a scriptwriter. His short stay in Cardiganshire the previous summer contributed to Wales – Green Mountain, Black Mountain, the documentary in the ‘Pattern of Britain’ series, on which he is credited as both producer and scriptwriter. Appealing to different ideas of Welshness – the industry of the coal-mines, the agricultural richness of the hillsides and the timeless community of the chapel – the film summons a sense of nationhood that supersedes any distant Anglo-Welsh squabbling and joins in ‘terrible near war … against the men who would murder man’. Until recently, Dylan would have cringed at his portrayal of the beneficent influence of the chapel, whose slate roofs are linked cinematically to mines lying under grey mountains, and thus to the essence of Welshness. But this was wartime, this was propaganda, and the underlying message was that there had been enough suffering in the valleys.

  Remember the procession of the old-young men

  From dole queue to corner and back again …

  Remember the procession of the old-young men.

  It shall never happen again.

  At first even this rousing script was deemed too controversial: the British Council argued that its hint of unemployment would prevent its being shown abroad, while the Ministry of Information’s Welsh Office in Cardiff wondered if Dylan was the right person to write it because, as an inhabitant of London, he was not even a ‘real’ Welshman. Such was the knee-jerk censorship of a nation at arms. But there was ample scope for extra work in the wartime propaganda machine. Now he was based in London, Dylan was more easily accessible to read poems and write literary-related talks for the BBC on a freelance basis. In January 1943 he recorded a programme for the Corporation’s Welsh service on ‘Reminiscences of Childhood’, looking back at his early days in the ‘ugly, lovely town’ of Swansea. He also began doing work for George Orwell in the Indian section.

  Even so, political sensitivities intruded, as when the BBC cancelled at short notice a broadcast, in which Dylan had a role, of In Parenthesis, the epic prose-poem about the First World War written by another great Anglo-Welsh writer David Jones. The poem wrapped up Welsh nationalism in the greater good of Britain in a more telling way than Dylan’s efforts for the screen. However, in drawing on the sixth-century Welsh poet Aneirin’s Y Gododdin, which told how a Welsh raid into Saxon Britain left all but one person dead, it raised not only thorny issues of nationalism, but also quasi-pacifist notions of the brutality of war.

  The regulators also got at Is your Ernie really necessary?, a short satirical feature film Dylan made under Strand’s aegis with Oswald Mitchell, a well-known director and ha
lf-brother of his old Swansea artist friend, Denis Mitchell (himself soon to forge a new career as assistant to the sculptor Barbara Hepworth in Cornwall). Poking fun at the government’s slogan ‘Is your journey really necessary?’, the film starred Hay Petrie in several roles, including a full chorus line, who was edited and reproduced twelve times to look like a chorus line. But this inventive touch was too much for documentary veteran Arthur Elton, film supervisor at the Ministry of Information, who banned it.

  All the while Dylan continued to contribute to Strand’s stock films on subjects ranging from the global reach of war (Battle for Freedom) to the development of antibiotic drugs (Conquest of a Germ). Later he wrote about the rebuilding of the bombed city of Coventry (A City Re-born) sprinkling his commentary with post-Beveridge promises of new hospitals, schools, suburbs and roads. He even incorporated progressive thinking about future transport needs, adding that the roads would be built ‘round the city of course; you can’t have great big lorries roaring through the centre’. Unsuitably, perhaps, he also tackled the psychological readjustments which families would need to make when their loved ones returned from fighting abroad (A Soldier Comes Home).

  Understanding that Dylan’s creative juices were hardly stimulated by this fare, Donald Taylor gave him licence to come up with innovative scripts for two much praised documentaries. In These are the Men, released in March 1943, Hitler and various German leaders bear witness to their evil fascistic pasts in extravagant rants dubbed over clips from Leni Riefenstahl’s record of the 1934 Nazi party congress at Nuremberg. Edgar Anstey, another veteran of early documentaries, adjudged in the Spectator that the film ‘combines political passion and technical ingenuity in the most pitiless condemnation of individual Nazi leaders that has yet appeared in the cinema’.

  More ambitious, Our Country, in April 1944, provides lyrical filmic accompaniment to the poems Dylan was then starting to write about the war. Framed by the device of a journey by a merchant seaman home on leave, it ranges urgently over Britain, using poetic imagery and metres to evoke a sense of rus in urbe, with the fauna and flora of the countryside starting to regenerate a nation long at war. It anticipates themes in Dylan’s later output, such as the restorative powers of nature, and more general techniques, including his celluloid-inspired facility to create simple verbal pictures and tell an unfolding story. Our Country’s opening phrase – ‘To begin with the city’ – is close to Under Milk Wood’s ‘To begin at the beginning.’

  Denied a screenplay, Dylan was seeking a creative meeting between poetry and cinema. He did not want this script to appear verbatim in the programme for the premiere (particularly after it had been cut) because ‘the words were written to be spoken & heard, & not to be read’. He had insisted, from an early age, on the importance of the sound of his verse, and there was no reason to stop now. Dylan’s experimental approach did not please all the critics, but Taylor thought it worth promoting and booked the Empire Theatre, Leicester Square, for the premiere. The Spectator reviewer was again complimentary, describing Our Country as ‘the most exciting and provocative film … for many a long day’.

  Dylan himself needed convincing because, all too often, he disliked what he was doing, describing it as ‘hack work’. ‘I hate films,’ he told his wife. ‘There is nothing but glibly naïve insincerity.’ The fact that she tended to agree – indeed that she felt he was prostituting his talents – did not help matters. His sense of frustration only fuelled his anger, which he sought to assuage by increasing his input of alcohol during the latter two years of the war.

  FOURTEEN

  ATTEMPTED MURDER

  From late 1943 Caitlin began to spend less time in the unhealthy environment of Wentworth Studios. While she was there, Aeronwy had to sleep with an open umbrella over her pram to prevent rain falling on her from the skylight, and even then the baby caught pneumonia. For a while, when heavy bombing resumed in early 1944, the family found refuge in a house in Bosham, on the Sussex coast, where they acquired a poodle puppy called Dombey but found themselves, unwittingly, in the middle of noisy preparations for D-Day. With V-1 and then V-2 pilotless bombs falling in London from the summer, the Thomases also stayed in Buckinghamshire with Donald Taylor who had set up a new company, Gryphon, to make feature films.

  In between Caitlin escaped with Aeronwy to Wales (where she could take her pick between staying in Laugharne, Blaen Cwm and Talsarn) or to her mother’s in Hampshire. Stuck in London, ostensibly for reasons of work, Dylan was on his own at Wentworth Studios with the freedom and funds to indulge his tendency to dissipation. He could now roam freely in an arc between the pubs and clubs of Chelsea and those of Soho and Fitzrovia. His after-hours companions included artists such as the stroppy flamboyant gays, ‘the two Roberts’ Colquhoun and MacBryde, who led the Scottish migration to London after the closure of David Archer’s South Street Art Centre. They drank in Soho, but shared a tenement in Bedford Gardens off Kensington Church Street with Jankel Adler who, between draughts of his favourite tipple, Armagnac, found Dylan strangely sympathetic to his Hassidic-inspired stories of Jewish suffering. Other tenants in the same building included another neo-Romantic painter, the ‘horse-faced and Byronic’ John Minton, who was a member of the china manufacturing family, and the assistant editor of Lilliput, Kaye Webb, who had recently commissioned the first St Trinian’s cartoon from artist Ronald Searle who would become her husband.

  At work Dylan’s preferred drinking companion was not the verbose Maclaren-Ross but the more congenial Philip Lindsay who was also an historical novelist. Gerald Kersh recalled these two on ‘a bender’: ‘An account of this alone would make The Lost Weekend sound like Southey’s Life of Nelson. Dylan got his penis stuck in a two ounce honey pot. Why he put it there I don’t know. On the same occasion he pushed a shirt button up his nose and couldn’t get it out either.’ Kersh also remembered being out with Dylan and Augustus John. Dylan ‘made up a poem about the smell of his wife’s drawers, and Augustus let loose a reminiscence … about how he wore, for months on end, the bloomers of a girl he loved, which were caulked at every seam.’

  Drink often rendered Dylan oblivious to his surroundings, even to the bombs that usually scared him. Elizabeth Fusco, who had re-emerged on the Soho scene after a broken marriage, recalled him ‘skipping’ down Tottenham Court Road, ignoring the doodle bugs. John Banting, an artist attached to Donald Taylor’s production company, recalled ‘one Hogarthian night when Oxford Street was a sheet of ice. Dylan, a stray sailor and myself all bravely (and beerily) crossed it. Both of them performed a sort of “cake-walk” or “knees-up” before they fell. I laughed so much that surprisingly I did not. In a side street we stood in a solemn row spouting vomit and piss. And went on to yet another pub.’

  Alcohol also brought out Dylan’s emotional side. Fusco witnessed him breaking down and saying a prayer, after a mutual friend, following close behind them, was killed by a bomb on the short walk from the French to the Swiss pub. Fusco was struck by the decline in Dylan’s health since first meeting him half a dozen years earlier. Once when he visited her flat in Charlotte Street, he kept her awake all night with his vomiting. She was afraid that the mucous he coughed up indicated something worse than the effects of drink – perhaps an ulcer. ‘It was dreadful. He really suffered all night long. And he was resigned.’ To Philip Lindsay’s leftist brother Jack, Dylan acknowledged, with some of the misplaced romanticism he used to speak of his tuberculosis, that he had cirrhosis of the liver. His condition was not helped by the fact that often, the more he drank, the soberer he seemed. Jack Lindsay recalled Dylan’s first visit to hospital for treatment around this time. Dylan had also been to a psychiatric unit, seeking a cure for alcoholism, but had not met a sympathetic response.

  Dylan’s resignation about his physical condition, linked to the wartime prevalence of death, seemed to heighten his libido. Lindsay himself witnessed its consequences, according to his brother Philip, who recalled that Dylan ‘fucked Jack’s previous gi
rl, then used her to look after the baby while he and his wife went to the pub or the pictures’. Jack saw a direct correlation between Dylan’s fear of death – the theme of his adolescent poems – and his need for physical release. (He also noted Dylan’s fascination with pornography, particularly a periodical dealing with rubber fetishism.)

  One night Dylan would be seen with Pamela Glendower, whose Welsh connections stimulated fond memories; the next with Netta Macnab, former wife of Richard Aldington, one of his Imagist heroes; yet another with Joan Graham Murray, who dabbled in the occult and boasted she slept with Dylan when she had jaundice. Her unpopular artist husband, James ‘the Shit’ Graham Murray, introduced Ann Meo to Dylan in the Gateway Club in Bramerton Street, Chelsea. Meo, a painter’s daughter who later worked at the BBC, had noticed the poet in the Eight Bells, quarrelling with Caitlin. She admits she succumbed to Dylan’s sexual pestering, but found him a disappointing lover. Not that she had any illusions: ‘He was completely promiscuous. I don’t know why he did it. It was simply something he had to do.’

  His priapism extended to his place of work. For a brief period he was entrusted with watching for fires on the roof above Strand’s offices. Accused of taking a girl up there, wrapped in a sleeping bag, he replied, blandly, ‘Then she must have been a very little girl.’ Dylan did not allow his wife to behave in a similar way, of course. He was fiercely protective and jealous about her. When Philip Lindsay briefly came to live with the Thomases in Wentworth Studios, Dylan refused to allow him to sleep there on the nights he went out fire watching. Their colleague Maclaren-Ross recalled Dylan talking bawdily about sex in general, but never about a woman in particular. The reason became clear when he asked a girl who had slept with Dylan what it was like. She said it was not bad: the problem was his guilt the following morning.