In early 1945 Caitlin invited Mary Keene, a friend from London to join her in New Quay. Tall, enigmatic and wiltingly pretty, Mary had overcome an impoverished, abusive East End childhood to sit for artists including the young Lucien Freud, Augustus John and Matthew Smith. Although Ruthven Todd described her as ‘the most beautiful English girl I ever saw’, she had one notable defect: as a girl she had lost her lower leg in a traffic accident and wore a tin prosthetic. By dint of personality, she had moved effortlessly from artist’s model to muse. Still in her early twenties and nominally married to Donald Taylor’s former business partner, Ralph ‘Bunny’ Keene, who gave her financial security, she had been the mistress of (probably) Louis MacNeice and (definitely) Matthew Smith and Henry Yorke, the Etonian businessman who wrote novels as Henry Green. Although a cooler character, she had Caitlin’s untutored intelligence and careless ability to make her presence felt. Having met in artistic circles, the two young women became firm friends, particularly after Mary had a daughter, Alice, in May 1944, just over a year after Aeronwy’s birth.
The worst of the latest wave of bombing was over by early 1945 when Mary Keene decided to take her baby daughter to join her friend in Wales. She asked advice on travel and accommodation in New Quay from Augustus John, who also informed her that when he had last met Dylan he had found him ‘very dignified, articulate, and charming. I could readily have embraced him.’
The next time he wrote in early March, he had changed his tune: ‘Dylan has a split personality of course. He can be unbearable and then something else comes out which one loves’ – an observation which she soon played back to Henry Yorke: ‘Dylan is an extraordinarily abnormal person, is the most uncivilised I’ve known, he never has a hot drink always beer, has the most terrifying speech when annoyed, not terrifying now because one knows it means nothing. I have mingled emotions of hating and liking him.’
Mary must have described to Augustus John an incident in New Quay, probably during a visit to Plas Llanina, because he told her that Lord Howard de Walden was ‘a gentle soul’, adding that Dylan’s ‘class consciousness’ was a ‘perfect disease’: ‘it takes the form of sponging on his “social or financial superiors” and then abusing them – thus is his amour propre preserved whole.’ When she related the same story to Henry Yorke, he was more damning: ‘I’m delighted that Thomas’ cloven hoof is beginning to show and am impatient for you to get impatient over it. It is inverted snobbery at its most odious. Exactly like the Tatler, only the other way round.’
It was not Dylan’s class warfare or even basic insecurity which caused Mary to alter her generally favourable opinion about New Quay, but Vera’s husband, William Killick. After the events of 6 March, Mary described the place as an ‘open air loony bin’. On that day Dylan was playing host to two employees of Gryphon Films, the director John Eldridge and an assistant Fanya Fisher who had come to help him finish a script, probably an abortive project, Suffer Little Children. Around 8.30 p.m. the three of them went for a drink in the Commercial pub. Already in the bar was Killick, an impulsive twenty-eight-year-old Captain in the Royal Engineers, just home after a strenuous period of secondment with the Special Operations Executive in Greece. As with many servicemen who had recently witnessed colleagues being killed, he had difficulty adjusting to the apparent normality of life in Britain. Consequently he objected when his wife’s friend, the best man at his wedding, failed to acknowledge him. Dylan may have been indulging his well-known aversion to soldiers, but more likely he needed to talk to his colleagues. Killick took offence and went to Dylan’s table to make his presence felt. A heated exchange about the war ensued. When Killick remarked on the role of the Jews, Dylan and his friends objected. Fisher, who was Jewish, is reported to have said, ‘You cad.’
Discomfited, Dylan took his party down the road to the Black Lion where Killick followed. This time they had a more amicable conversation, though Killick laboured the point that they did not know what it was like fighting ‘out there’. The mood changed again when, at closing time, Fisher had to squeeze past Killick, and angry words were exchanged. He slapped her, she struck back, and Dylan also traded blows. Only the intervention of Alastair Graham prevented a bloodier brawl. After Eldridge and Fisher went to their rooms upstairs, Graham drove Dylan back to Majoda where they found Caitlin and Mary Keene, in liberated style, entertaining a couple of male friends.
Around forty minutes later, they were all enjoying a late nightcap when, suddenly, without warning, they heard bullets being fired close at hand. Killick had returned from the Black Lion, with the incident playing on his mind. At Ffynonnfeddyg, he had pulled out one of his two machine guns, walked to Majoda next door, and started firing into the air above the bungalow. As all the adults inside ducked (the two baby girls were asleep in the bedroom), he dispatched a further four to eight shots into the building. When he finally stopped, he was found to be holding a grenade. The fact that this had no detonator went some way to supporting his subsequent plea that he had wanted to give Dylan a taste of front-line action. He may also have suspected, or simply heard, a local rumour that his wife was having an affair with Dylan. (Vera Killick never really denied this, telling her family shortly before her death that she retained one great secret. But if she did have an affair with Dylan, it is more likely to have been in Swansea or in London before her marriage.) He was definitely incensed that Vera had been using part of his soldier’s pay to support the Thomases’ Bohemian lifestyle. The appearance of two additional film-makers from the flesh-pots of London unhinged him.
Mary was furious that the subsequent police investigation forced her to stay on in what had become a nightmare town. She objected when the local constabulary refused to take down what she said verbatim and insisted – ‘as if one were visited by the Gestapo’ – on writing ‘I came in accompanied by Mrs Thomas’ when she said ‘I came in with Mrs Thomas’. Despite such delays, the case came quickly to court on 21 June 1945, after the Special Operations Executive claimed Killick was needed back on duty. An SOE officer, Lt Col. David Talbot-Rice, travelled to Lampeter Assizes to appear in Killick’s defence. By then tempers had abated, and even Dylan and Caitlin were unwilling to say much against him. Following Killick’s acquittal, Henry Yorke commented to Mary: ‘I’m sorry Dylan was no good and that you weren’t allowed your say. Well done for speaking up though … My God, Killick has got away with something, hasn’t he?’
Extraordinarily, only a week before the shooting, Dylan had written in a glum letter to Vernon Watkins: ‘The ordinary moments of walking up village streets, opening doors or letters, speaking good-days to friends or strangers, looking out of windows, making telephone calls, are so inexplicably (to me) dangerous that I am trembling all over before I get out of bed in the mornings to meet them.’ In his next letter at the end of March, Dylan detailed the incident, adding his friend must have thought he was exaggerating about his ‘daily terrors’. Now he was as ‘frightened as though I had used the Sten gun myself’.
Dylan’s problems were as usual exacerbated by worries about money and about his parents. His mother came to New Quay to look after the children during the preliminary trial hearings, leaving his father at Blaen Cwm, ‘awfully ill’ with suspected heart disease, and even more glum than usual. Even so, Dylan was able to send Watkins four poems in the wake of the shooting. He had been working on them at Majoda, chipping away, Watkins observed, like an old carpenter. Writing was indeed more laboured, Dylan admitted, but at least it was more meaningful. ‘Less passes Uncle Head’s blue-haired pencil,’ he told Watkins, ‘that George Q. Heart doesn’t care about’, and the result ‘if only to you and me, is worth all the discarded shocks, the reluctantly-shelved grand moony images, cut-&-come-again cardpack of references.’
‘A Winter’s Tale’ is a measured version of ‘The Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait’: using the seasons as a metaphor for the power of sexual love, without the frantic thrashings of the earlier poem. Dylan’s distance from London had encouraged a more
relaxed way of observing his environment. His recent experience in film also helped: this poem includes several imprecations to listen and to look, as if screenplay notes to cameramen and directors. Even Dylan’s references to death have a mellowness removed from the harsh realities of the Metaphysical poets he once valued. One line, anticipating the inescapable life and death process in ‘Fern Hill’ and the authorial tone of Under Milk Wood, runs: ‘Time sings through the intricately dead snow drop. Listen.’
In ‘This Side of Truth’, this quietism took on a different, Calvinistic form, an acceptance that life was both uncaring and predestined:
And all your deeds and words,
Each truth, each lie,
Die in unjudging love.
He had written these verses ‘for Llewelyn’, after his son had fallen and split his tongue in February. (They came with a companion poem ‘The Conversation of Prayers’.) As during most of the war, Llewelyn stayed with his grandmother in Ringwood where, it was hoped, the regular routine would suit his sensitive nature. According to Caitlin, expressing a guilt they both must have felt, Dylan was disappointed their son was not a more natural lad, a kicker of balls. Llewelyn was just six and, as ‘This Side of Truth’ suggests, too young to understand the relativism of a world where good and bad are ‘two ways/Of moving about your death’. Dylan was not the first poet to see the indifferent universe in this way – Shakespeare anticipated him by over four centuries. But the critic Ralph Maud is right to suggest that Dylan gave this philosophy a modern existentialist perspective.
Dylan was pushed in this philosophical direction by his reaction to the horrors of war. ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’, the other poem he sent Watkins at this stage, was the latest of his magnificent war verses. He conveyed his disgust at the manner of this young girl’s death (in an air-raid) by affirming, in a hymnic voice that took off from the swirling organ sound of ‘Ceremony After a Fire Raid’, that he would not trivialise her passing with the usual sort of personalised elegy. But after the Christian sentiment of some of his poetry, such as ‘Vision and Prayer’, this was avowedly unreligious. Following up on his existentialism, he refused to accept the possibility of a second life or death (as suggested in the Book of Revelation). Simply: ‘After the first death, there is no other.’
The Christ figure beckoning from the other room in ‘Vision and Prayer’ had dissolved. Or possibly the earlier poem was Dylan’s last desperate attempt to give representation (both verbally and graphically) to his religious feelings. But the atrocities of the final year of the war had undermined this. It was not just the bombing raids on Britain. It was also knowledge of the conditions in Nazi concentration camps, which featured in a gruesome waxwork exhibition in London from 1944. Then in April 1945 came film from the newly liberated Belsen and Buchenwald camps. ‘Crowds queued for hours,’ wrote Philip Ziegler in London at War, ‘watched in shocked silence, left without applauding or even passing casual remarks.’ Finally in August came news of the first atomic bomb – an appalling event for someone with Dylan’s sensibilities. Throughout the year, his letters are peppered with barbed references to Belsen, bombs and atoms which mask his terror at what these meant. ‘Behind me, two months when there was nothing in my head but a little Nagasaki, all low and hot,’ he wrote to Oscar Williams.
It is impossible to say how much the Majoda shooting acted, as has been suggested, as a catalyst to such feelings. It did put an abrupt end to his and Caitlin’s affair with New Quay. During his trips to London in the summer, she felt isolated and depressed. As she chronicled in letters to Mary Keene, who was back in the capital enduring her own private hell of a divorce from Bunny Keene, she fell off her bicycle, grazing her hands, knee and face. She blamed her accident on a mixture of alcohol, the sun and steep country roads. Although Mary tried to help by sending small sums of money and a wheelbarrow as a present for Aeronwy, Caitlin missed her friend’s company (and that of her small daughter Alice). She felt herself trapped among people with whom she had little in common, while her own children were all too demanding – a complaint that was to become familiar. She feared her sensations of weakness and dizziness might indicate another pregnancy and, when that did not seem to happen, she worried that she had lost her Dutch cap.
From Mervyn Peake’s flat, off the King’s Road in London, Dylan made noises about his efforts to find a new flat, even enthusing about the possibility of a house in the unlikely venue of Bovingdon in Hertfordshire. Dylan removed some pressure from Peake, who was putting the finishing touches to his novel Titus Groan, by taking his young son Sebastian to see the Disney cartoon Dumbo. Sebastian was surprised because Dylan had previously refused to take him to the cinema. He did not know that this was exactly their guest’s type of comfort movie. In this infantile state, Dylan simultaneously wooed and tried to placate his wife with expansive statements of his love.
My dear my dear my dear Caitlin my love I love; even writing, from a universe and a star and ten thousand miles away, the name, your name, CAITLIN, just makes me love you, not more, because that is impossible, darling, I have always loved you since I first saw you looking silly and golden and much too good forever for me, in that nasty place in worse-than-Belsen London, no, not more, but deeper, oh my sweetheart I love you and love me dear Cat because we are the same, we are the same, we are the one thing, the constant thing, oh dear, dear Cat … You are the most beautiful girl that has ever lived, and it is worth dying to have kissed you.
But Caitlin was beginning seriously to resent her situation. The best Dylan could offer was a further stay with his parents in Blaencwm in late July. While he was in London on VJ (Victory in Japan) Day in September, making enquiries, inter alia, about accommodation, she was stuck in Carmarthenshire, without even a drink. With Aeronwy suffering from acute indigestion and looking pale and withdrawn, Caitlin could stand it no longer. Fed up with her domestic chores, she wrote pleading to Mary Keene, saying she needed a break or she would go mad. Dylan was exploring some promising developments, but in the meantime she wondered if she and Aeronwy could stay with Mary in London.
Dylan’s position was not much better. He was sick of his work for Donald Taylor. Even in Cardiganshire he complained about having to turn out socialist propaganda or, as he put it, ‘filmscripts on Rehabilitation, Better Housing, Post War Full Employment, etc. for the socialist film department of the Ministry of Information’. He had a row with Taylor about this Labour bias, and was forced to recant. The producer tried to maintain Dylan’s interest by involving him in more congenial feature projects about the murderer Dr Crippen and Scots poet Robert Burns, but nothing came of them.
Sensing a way out, Dylan wrote to Oscar Williams from Blaencwm, asking his help in finding a job in the United States, where he thought naively that Time magazine might like to employ him and Harvard University give him a lectureship. Showing he could still turn it on, he played up for his American correspondent the eccentricities of rural Wales, ‘where the Bible opens itself at Revelations’ and where a farm labourer was convinced that the stream by his cottage was Jordan water – ‘and who can deny him’? He also emphasised the ravages of socialism, where, in the Orwellian Ministry of Information, ideas are shuffled by ‘dead young men in briar pipes that are never lit in the office but which they always have protruding from their mouths like the cocks of swallowed bodies’.
His cynicism was jolted when he began to read an edition of D. H. Lawrence’s poems which he had been sent by the BBC so he could make a selection for a reading in September. Dylan was particularly impressed by Lawrence’s laconic ‘Ballad for Another Ophelia’ with its ‘green glimmer of apples in the orchard’. This inspired him to one of his greatest poems, ‘Fern Hill’, which summons up the delights of his childhood in that part of Carmarthenshire, before subverting them in the realisation that they are all passing, indeed past. As three of his most memorable lines describe:
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
&nbs
p; Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
With the war over, Dylan finally found a place to live in London, a flat in Markham Square across from the Devases. Having moved his family there at the end of September, he was able to increase his output for the BBC which was now prepared to let him do talks on, as well as readings of, a range of literary subjects. He also worked on the proofs of his new book of verse, Deaths and Entrances, which he insisted to Dent should include ‘Fern Hill’, even though the poem was not on his original list of contents. ‘It is an essential part of the feeling & meaning of the book as a whole.’
Part of ‘Fern Hill’s appeal is that even its author could not decide if it was ‘for evenings and tears’, as he told David Tennant in August, or if it was ‘joyful’, his description to Edith Sitwell six months later. This reflects its shifting nature for, as James A. Davies has noted, it is the epitome of the modern Welsh poem in English – using the forms of English literature to summon the Carmarthenshire countryside. Davies evokes the critic Homi K. Bhabha, who writes on the changing patterns of English in an age of global multi-culturalism. In the terms of this debate, ‘Fern Hill’ mixes the best of Welsh and English traditions in a manner that is all the more original because not specifically oppositional.
‘Fern Hill’ was first published (with ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’) in the October issue of Horizon. The magazine had kept faith with Dylan through the war and published most of his major poetry. Its editor Cyril Connolly described the furtive routine he used to go through when Dylan appeared with a batch of new poems. He offered cash and the transaction would be concluded ‘as if they were packets of cocaine’. Out of love with most contemporary verse, Connolly recognised Dylan’s achievement in the award of Horizon’s prize for 1945 worth £50.
Dylan Thomas: A New Life Page 32