Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  That guilt was linked to the repressed emotion that often emerged in inappropriate situations and left him in tears. Fusco recalled Dylan picking up a young provincial girl near a railway station. He was weeping when he later told Fusco, ‘Do you know what she said to me when I went to bed with her? She said, in a very north country voice, “I hope you don’t stuff me.” ’ Fusco, always prepared to argue Dylan’s essential innocence, noted he was moved by the girl’s uncertain use of idiom. ‘People who were not articulate hurt him terribly. He suffered for their lack of expression.’ A more down to earth view came from Augustus John who said Dylan ‘robs his £3-in-Post-Office mistresses of their honest earnings, drinks the cash, and leaves the c – t’.

  The tale of his personal deterioration can be told through three London-based weddings. In August 1943 he was happy to act as best man when his friend Vera Phillips married her officer beau, William Killick, at Chelsea registry office. At the same venue the following March he was expected as a witness to Theodora Rosling’s marriage not to Peter Rose Pulham, whom she had dumped because he could not support her, but to Constantine FitzGibbon, the Irish-American literary adventurer who had first met Dylan while at Oxford. FitzGibbon wore the uniform of an American army officer – a new group bringing jollity and liquidity to the London social scene. Dylan missed the ceremony, but this was accepted because his train journey from the south coast had taken him through ‘Bomb Alley’, where most of the destruction of the V-1 and V-2 flying bombs was concentrated. At a reception at the Ritz Hotel, FitzGibbon was approached by a footman who said, ‘There’s a personage in the bar, sir, who says he’s a member of your party.’ FitzGibbon found Dylan, curiously festooned with several scarves. When, on a subsequent pub crawl, the party picked up an old tramp who played the guitar, Dylan complimented the newly married couple on their good fortune, complaining that he had never had troubadors at his wedding.

  In October 1944 he simply failed to turn up as best man when Vernon Watkins was married at the church of St Bartholomew the Great (appropriately on the Smithfield site of a priory founded by Rahere, Henry I’s court jester). Like Dan Jones, Watkins had been seconded to work with the code-breakers at Bletchley where he had fallen in love with a fellow toiler called Gwen Davies. At the Charing Cross Hotel for a pre-wedding lunch, he received a call from Gryphon Films that Dylan was on his way. When his friend did not appear, Vernon, ever ready to make excuses, told his bride-to-be that Dylan had probably gone straight to the church. But when he was not there either, the normally placid Vernon exploded, saying, ‘That’s the end of Dylan as far as I’m concerned.’ Extraordinarily he heard nothing from Dylan for another four weeks. Then he received an envelope from Dylan containing two fawning letters, one apologising for having failed to post the other; and the other claiming that, in a confusion of missed trains, Dylan had forgotten the name of the church where the Watkinses were getting married. Vernon was immediately mollified; his new wife, who had never met Dylan, rather less so.

  By then Dylan had given up Wentworth Studios and moved back to Wales. With Caitlin and his children seldom in London, and his work for Donald Taylor geared increasingly to feature films which did not require him in the office, he decided to make a decisive move from the capital. For a few weeks in July and August he and his family stayed with his parents in Blaencwm. The change suited him well. Before the end of August he was sending Vernon Watkins the texts of three recent poems. He had written the first, ‘Ceremony After a Fire Raid’, earlier in the summer after visiting the bombed city of Coventry while working on the film A City Re-born. It shows his remarkable ability to compose great verse out of and in the middle of the direst situations. Starting from a modernist’s diverse perspective (‘Myselves/the grievers’) and building to an expressionist vision of the apocalypse, he powerfully conveys the sense of a ceremony to the dead, moving, with the help of various liturgical references, from prayer, through sacrament, to thunderous musical acclamation. He had already sent it for publication in the ephemeral magazine Our Time. But Watkins had yet to see it.

  There were two other poems he was still tinkering with at Blaencwm. According to Watkins, he had been talking about ‘Poem in October’ for three years, and possibly longer, for Dylan referred to it as ‘a Laugharne poem: the first place poem I’ve ever written’, though the latter bit was hardly correct. In the same way that he had sat upon some of his early notebook poems, Dylan had put this aside and gone back to it later. He may have thought its rustic imagery did not accord with the harsh realities of the world around the start of the war. But he had sloughed off the more jagged elements of his earlier poetical style, and his return to Wales had enabled him to pick up his neat, personalised description of the changing Carmarthenshire weather patterns and weave it into one of his most memorable verses.

  The third poem ‘Vision and Prayer’ is an extraordinary one-off statement of Dylan’s religious belief. Presented in twelve pictographic stanzas – six shaped like diamonds, six like chalices – this describes how Dylan is unable to ignore the presence of Christ who seems to live so close to him, as if next door. As in Francis Thompson’s ‘The Hound of Heaven’ (one of the few influences Dylan was ever happy to acknowledge), this Christ figure is undeniable. (Dylan also admitted that the image of ‘you/Who is born/In the next room’ came to him after reading an English translation of Rilke, almost certainly the poem ‘Du Nachbar Gott’ from the Stundenbuch.) Dylan has to die, or shed his ego (at the end of the first six verses) and then finds his true personality by losing himself in Christ. There seems to have been no particular incident that sparked this powerful sentiment. Dylan did not have a conversion. He did however retain an indomitable religious passion, that manifested itself from time to time in magical, even holy, statements of belief. Dylan was not one to define such glimpses of ecstatic truth into a prosaic creed: this was a personal, poetic vision. Yet it was an enduring part of his nature, an indefinable spark of divinity that some people, such as Elizabeth Fusco, recognised in the most unlikely areas of his life.

  In early September he moved with his family to New Quay on the west coast of Wales, where Vera Killick (as she now was) was living in Ffynonnfeddyg, a bungalow overlooking Cardigan Bay, not far from her mother. New Quay was a popular destination for people seeking to escape the war. Many ‘Cardis’ who had opened dairies in London at the turn of the century flocked back. They were joined by a motley assortment of crachach (Welsh gentry), artists and simply holiday-makers in a lively seafaring town where many of the menfolk were merchant seamen, working in tankers, bringing precious fuel across the Atlantic to Britain. The damage wrought by the latest generation of V-2 flying bombs in London made it easy for Dylan to decide to rent a spartan bungalow, made of wood, with thin asbestos walls, next door to Vera. It was called Majoda, after the Christian names (Marjorie, John and David) of the three children of the owner. Amenities were basic: no running water, lighting by liquid gas and a paraffin stove. However there was a fine view not only of the terraced town a mile or so to the south, but also of the wide expanse of the Irish Sea, a prospect that had inspired and slightly overwhelmed Dylan on his abortive Welsh trip seven years earlier.

  Dylan quickly settled into the easy pace of Cardiganshire life. Before the end of September he had the measure of the town, where he told Tommy Earp in good-natured verse, ‘no-good is abroad’. On the ‘wild, umbrella’d and french lettered/Beach’ he could hear ‘rise slimy from the Welsh lechered/Caves the cries of the parchs and their flocks.’ And already he was observing the rich cast of characters:

  There slinks a snook in black. I’m thinking it

  Is Mr Jones the Cake, that winking-bit,

  That hymning gooseberry, that Bethel-worm

  At whose ball-prying even death’ll squirm

  And button up.

  The following week Augustus John came to New Quay and helped introduce the Thomases to local notables. Ostensibly he had a commission to paint a neighbour who had been headmistress
of a girls’ grammar school in Wrexham. Staying at the Black Lion pub in town, he visited his friend Lord Howard de Walden who had a comfortable summer house, Plas Llanina, in the woods above. Having already provided Dylan with financial support, Howard de Walden offered him use of the Apple House in his grounds, as a place to work, away from the pressures of family life at his ‘shack at the edge of the cliff where my children hop like fleas in a box’. John also met Alastair Graham, a former lover of Evelyn Waugh, who had settled in New Quay before the war and was trying to lead a respectable life, giving no indication of his scandalous past when he was run out of society following his affair with another aristocratic Welsh patron of the arts, Lord Tredegar (otherwise the poet Evan Morgan). Here Graham was an officer in the Observer Corps, played the oboe, did embroidery, published Twenty Different Ways of Cooking New Quay Mackerel, and used his influence to prevent the closure of the lifeboat station. Although he entertained discreetly, few people in town would realise in 1945 that he was a model for Sebastian Flyte in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

  Tom Herbert, an ambitious Welsh-speaking vet, left an unpublished account of a party at Graham’s house, Plas y Wern. He had come to know Dylan through treating the Thomas dog, no longer the poodle of Bosham, but a black labrador. He was having an affair with Tessa Dean, a bright, hunt-loving member of the fading aristocracy who congregated in Cardigan seeking anonymity. She was the daughter of the theatrical producer and director Basil Dean and grand-daughter of Daisy Warwick, the famous Countess of Warwick who was mistress of King Edward VII when Prince of Wales. Graham’s uncle, Willie Low, had also been part of the Prince’s Marlborough House set. (He had first employed Rosa Lewis, later chatelaine of the Prince’s favourite hotel, the Cavendish. Waugh said Graham was one of two people who taught him all he knew about the Cavendish, which he portrayed as Shepheard’s Hotel in Vile Bodies.) Graham and Evan Morgan had once shocked the guests at one of Tessa Dean’s London parties by coming dressed as women.

  Although his memoir appears to be an amalgamation of recollections at different times and perhaps in different places, Herbert tells of Dylan arriving drunk at Graham’s party, also attended by Augustus John. Dylan attracted an audience with his account of the story of Daniel in the lion’s den. John called to him, ‘All you are is a pot-bellied purveyor of pornographic poetry.’ Dylan replied, ‘And you, Gus, you are a bearded begetter of bastards.’ As the guests later peeled away, Dylan was left helping himself to drinks, and Graham complaining that the poet had never been invited and was always asking for money. When someone suggested he could at least comfort himself with the thought that he was helping genius, Graham replied, ‘Bugger genius. I am the only genius I want to support.’ John certainly attended a party at Plas y Wern, his account of which may explain some of Graham’s antipathy. Complimenting Graham’s hospitality, John said of him, ‘Caitlin wasn’t exactly polite to him as his guest when he gave us a slap-up dinner. She kept calling him a bugger which he disputed.’

  More often the Thomases were down in the town, where they gained a reputation as agreeable eccentrics. Some people did not like their ‘Bohemian’ habits, epitomised by the way Caitlin would leave her two children unattended in the Black Lion while she went boozing elsewhere. But New Quay’s history of ocean sailing had contributed to a legacy of cosmopolitanism and sexual freedom. (Women left at home while their master-mariner husbands were at sea had a habit of taking lovers.)

  Caitlin found her life on the West Wales coast isolated and dull. But, with Vera Killick for company, she was not totally discontented, and Dylan, when not in the Black Lion, was left free to pursue his various professional interests. Still employed by Donald Taylor’s company Gryphon, he had finally got a chance to write a screenplay based on the lives of the nineteenth-century Edinburgh body-snatchers, Burke and Hare. In New Quay he started afresh on an adaptation of Twenty Years A-Growing, Maurice O’Sullivan’s lyrical memoir of childhood on the west coast of Ireland. John Ackerman, who collected and edited Dylan’s filmscripts, describes this as ‘seminal in the evolution of his later narrative, visionary, sea-and bird-haunted pastoralism’.

  Dylan also had plans to work with Philip Lindsay on a film life of Charles Dickens, but the terms were poor and the two men did not see eye to eye. Dylan wanted to use Dickens’s own words, an approach his collaborator thought ‘too intellectual’. Lindsay clearly hoped Dylan would bring some of his populist style to the job, for elsewhere he remarked on Dylan’s penchant for detective fiction. ‘Only once did I catch Dylan reading a good book, and that was Dombey and Son, for he had a natural love for Dickens, one of whose characters he might well have been.’

  Elsewhere Dylan continued to work for the BBC. He had found an enthusiastic supporter in Aneirin Talfan Davies, a producer in the Welsh service, who lobbied his superiors in London to allow Dylan to broadcast his impressions of New Quay. After G. R. Barnes, the Corporation’s head of talks, grudgingly gave his consent, Dylan recorded ‘Quite Early One Morning’ in December. This was another dry run for Under Milk Wood, from its repetition of the phrase ‘The town was not yet awake’, through its evocation of the dreams of tidy Miss Hughes or seafaring Captain Evans, and its introduction of Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, who demands ‘And before you let the sun in, mind he wipes his shoes’, to its coy reference to Phoebe – in real life, Phoebe Evans, a New Quay cleaner who, like the memorable sweet-singing Polly Garter she became in Under Milk Wood, could not stop having babies with different partners. Even so, Barnes was unimpressed, complaining Dylan failed to do ‘justice to his script until he came to the excellent character speech of the last page’. He felt Dylan ‘was wrong to use that breathless poetic voice for the words don’t seem to us to carry it’ and the wit would have been ‘better appreciated if it had been read caustically, or, at least, drily’. The talk had to wait until the following August before it was broadcast. But Dylan’s style of delivery was being seen as a feature, as he began to be recognised as a performer as much as a poet.

  His ability to knock off brisk poetic travelogues gained him a commission to write captions to another Bill Brandt photo-essay in Lilliput, this time about Chelsea. David Gottlieb at the publisher Peter Lunn was impressed enough to ask him to pen a similar short text to an illustrated book about London entitled Twelve Hours on the Streets. Dylan drew up a grandiloquent proposal, incorporating elements of Dickens – ‘not the great thoroughfares, described, written, painted a thousand times, but the side streets, the back streets, the smaller worlds of life and death’ – with homages to Edgar Allen Poe and German expressionist film, not forgetting the documentaries he had been working on. (Dylan’s proposal ended fawningly: ‘The streets one would like to see in the future. This section which is really a discussion of town planning schemes as they exist now in this country would make the book have, I think, a positive and creative end.’) Dylan turned to his office colleague John Banting to do the drawings. When Banting demurred, saying this was not his sort of thing, Dylan ‘at once reassured me that I would be free to use my own kind of Surrealism. “Fitzroy Street could be paved with tits and the houses built of bottoms.” I was on.’

  Although paid a £50 advance (part of which he may have picked up in London on the day of Vernon Watkins’s wedding, causing him to embark on a pub crawl and forget his other commitments), Dylan failed to make any progress on this commission in New Quay. Dylan made a series of excuses about illness and family problems, but, despite Banting giving way to John Piper as the designated artist, nothing emerged. Eventually, two years later, Gottlieb was forced to sue for the return of the advance.

  This abortive project was the latest example of Dylan funding his drinking habit by deceitfully doing a deal behind his agent’s back. At the start of the war, he had caused confusion by selling the rights to his first book 18 Poems to Reginald Caton, a miser whose hoarding of paper allowed his Fortune Press to bring out books when few other publishers were able. Caton, whose more lucrative sideline was sado-masochist hom
osexual erotica, put out a series of ‘first editions’ which confuse the unwary collector. Since a range of projects was put at risk, J. M. Dent paid Caton £150 in 1948 to retrieve the 18 Poems copyright.

  By the time Dylan got to New Quay, his publisher was preparing a further collection of his work called Deaths and Entrances. Dylan was thankful for the prospect of another £50 advance. He did not want exactly the same book (essentially all his poems since The Map of Love) published in the United States, as some of the contents had already been printed there in a thin 1943 volume, New Poems. New Directions had put this out in response to the interest in The World I Breathe, his comprehensive collection of poems and prose in 1939. Although only 700 copies were printed, The World I Breathe was generally positively reviewed by poets such as Robert Lowell, Conrad Aiken, John Berryman and Dunstan Thompson. Several of Dylan’s poems had subsequently found United States markets, ‘Into Her Lying Down Head’ being published in Vice Versa, a short-lived journal edited by the religious-minded Thompson who, to Dylan’s delight, had turned up in London as part of the American military invasion. Oscar Williams, a New York poet and literary entrepreneur, had begun to collect Dylan in his regular anthologies (which became better known than his own verse) and to correspond with him, making a pitch to place his poems in US magazines – a role Dylan was happy to encourage because it brought much needed extra cash, even if again it cut across the responsibilities of his accredited New York agent, Ann Watkins.

  As a result of this activity, the consensus emerged that New Directions should put out a cheaper selection of Dylan’s poetry and prose, with an introduction by John L. Sweeney, a Harvard academic who had been associated with transition, the house magazine of experimental writers in Paris a generation earlier. (This was to be Selected Writings of Dylan Thomas, published in 1946.)