Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  With Deaths and Entrances, which appeared in February 1946, Dylan accomplished a popular breakthrough. A decade earlier, Twenty-Five Poems had made his name, but only among a small literary circle, while any response to The Map of Love in 1939 had been lost in the drift to war. With the end of hostilities, the British public was looking for a new voice, one to help them reflect on their experiences of the previous six years (which Dylan did supremely well in his four main war poems ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’, ‘Deaths and Entrances’, ‘Ceremony After a Fire Raid’ and ‘Among those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred’), while at the same time looking forward to a future where, even with the atomic bomb, the poetic truths of love, nature and God were still addressed. Dylan’s title Deaths and Entrances incorporated this balancing act: it echoed not only John Donne but Rudyard Kipling, a poet Dylan affected to despise, in the way it signposted the contents of the book, while describing the deeper level of the subject-matter – about the process of life in death, and vice versa. As early as May 1940 Dylan had alighted upon this as the title of his next book ‘because that is all I ever write about or want to write about’.

  In addition, he had begun to rein in the excesses of his poetical style, making his verse more accessible. (Wartime paper rationing may well have had an effect here.) He astutely requested another late addition to the book, ‘In my craft or sullen art’, with its simple, near perfect description of the poet’s job – to write ‘not for the proud man apart/… But for the lovers … /who pay no praise or wages/Nor heed my craft or art.’ Dent printed a first edition of 3,000 copies, and four further impressions. At last Dylan was being widely and enthusiastically read.

  FIFTEEN

  OXFORD, THE BBC AND ITALY

  A chance encounter during the war set up the pattern of Dylan’s life for the next three years. He had left Alan and Margaret Taylor under a cloud, after overstaying his welcome at their house in the spring of 1935. The Taylors had subsequently moved to Oxford, where he taught history at Magdalen College, while his wife busied herself as a hostess cum impresario, ‘a sort of middle-class Lady Ottoline Morrell’, putting on lunch-time concerts. A regular performer at her musical events was the pianist Natasha Litvin, who had married Stephen Spender in 1941. The Spenders escaped the worst of the bombing in London as paying guests at Holywell Ford, the Taylors’ nineteenth-century house in the grounds of Magdalen next to the Cherwell river. One evening the gregarious Margaret Taylor, who had a mission to bring the arts to Oxford’s cold intellectual world, asked the Spenders to bring back some guests for the weekend. ‘Anybody will do,’ she said, doubtless expecting a Horizon regular. The newly marrieds duly obliged, turning up with Dylan and Caitlin Thomas.

  Dylan fell into advising Margaret Taylor on her poetry. He gave her the sort of general advice he had doled out to Pamela Hansford Johnson a decade or so earlier, stressing how she should strive to bring a new interpretation to any words she used. He did it in a clever, encouraging, somewhat sycophantic way which led, in March 1946, to Dylan and his family being invited to live in a summerhouse on the banks of the Cherwell at the bottom of the Holywell Ford garden. Dylan had just spent four days in St Stephen’s Hospital, London, with ‘alcoholic gastritis’ and wanted somewhere to continue his recovery. His new quarters in Oxford were damp, with no running water (nothing unusual for the Thomases), though there was gas and electricity. The kindly Margaret said the children could sleep (and have baths) in the main house, fifty yards away.

  Dylan’s living arrangements suited him well. He was within easy reach of Oxford railway station, starting point for day trips to London where the expanding BBC was happy to find room for the author of Deaths and Entrances. His participation in a poetry reading, attended by Queen Elizabeth and her daughters Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, at the Wigmore Hall in May only improved his marketability, one advantage of which was that no-one queried his travel expense claims.

  Indicative of his new status, he played a small part in arranging the royal event – one of the only occasions he was entrusted with an organisational role. In overall charge was the Society of Authors, whose Secretary, Denis Kilham Roberts, was a poet he had known since his early days in London. Dylan was co-opted onto a committee to choose the programme and performers, who included the poets John Masefield, Edith Sitwell, Walter de la Mare, Louis MacNeice and, for added professionalism, the actors Edith Evans and John Gielgud. On the day, there were warning signs that everything was not right with Dylan. Though everyone was asked to arrive early, he turned up two minutes before due on stage, looking particularly unkempt in a pair of blue and white check trousers. He acquitted himself well, with renditions of three poems – D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Snake’, his own ‘Fern Hill’ and William Blake’s ‘Tyger! Tyger! Burning Bright’, which he read at such a stately pace that one actor remarked on it. ‘Well, I took it as fast as I could,’ returned Dylan, slightly aggrieved.

  The fireworks came afterwards. Caitlin was reported to have approached the Queen and said, ‘I say, do you like this? I don’t. I think I shall ask for my money back.’ According to Edith Sitwell, Caitlin then flicked some ash on the Queen’s dress. That part of the story might have been embellished after what happened when the participants and their spouses were invited to join Sitwell for dinner at her club, the Sesame in Grosvenor Street. After Sitwell’s sister-in-law Georgia announced, ‘There is a woman in the cloakroom more roaringly drunk than anyone I have ever seen in my life’, Dylan intoned grimly, ‘That will be my wife.’ And so it turned out. Caitlin was sitting next to John Hayward, the crippled bibliophile and close friend of T. S. Eliot. When she spilt some ice-cream on her arm, she asked him to lick it off. When Hayward refused, she let fly, ‘Mother of God! The insults of Men. You great pansy.’ Improbably, Sitwell thought that Caitlin had taken a fancy to Hayward, whom she insisted on calling ‘Old Ugly’.

  Dylan joined in the act, attacking the encroaching Leavisite academic consensus, which had not wanted Milton read earlier in the evening, and even taking Eliot to task for publishing ‘such awful poetry’. Sitwell claimed Dylan had been as ‘good as gold’ with her. But she said the date of the evening would, after her death, be found inscribed on her heart, like the word ‘Calais’ on Queen Mary’s. ‘I am worried to think how his friends will be driven away if she goes on like that. He is such a wonderful poet – a really great one, and has very endearing qualities as a person.’ Regarding him indulgently as the son she never had, she was even prepared to overlook the fact that he failed to turn up to lunch with her the following day – ‘I suppose because he would have had to apologise for her’.

  His more regular fare on the wireless involved him declaiming and pontificating on a wide range of poets, from his beloved Milton to Walter de la Mare in series such as ‘Book of Verse’ (produced for the Overseas Service by his friend John Arlott), ‘Time for Verse’ (edited by Patric Dickinson) and ‘Living Writers’ (the last two for the new arts-orientated Third Programme, which started broadcasting in September 1946, further adding to his range of outlets).

  Building on his ‘Reminiscences of Childhood’ and his New Quay portrait ‘Quite Early One Morning’, he developed a line in sharply observed talks, often incorporating a version of his own experiences, such as his ‘Memories of Christmas’, a warm evocation of Swansea yule tides he might have liked, but seldom had. This originally went out on the BBC Wales ‘Children’s Hour’ in December 1945, but was recorded in London where Derek McCulloch, director of ‘Children’s Hour’, was a trifle over-anxious: ‘There is a tremendous risk in taking Dylon [sic] “live” in the programme for reasons I do not think I need enlarge upon. He is notoriously tricky.’ Dylan later amalgamated this talk with a piece for Picture Post in a Christmas article for the American magazine Harper’s Bazaar. This provided the text for one of his most enduring pieces, ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’, recorded by the commercial firm Caedmon in New York in February 1952.

/>   In July 1946 he expanded his repertoire with a short radio drama, The Londoner, described as ‘a day in the life of Mr and Mrs Jackson, Ted and Lily, of number forty-nine Montrose Street, Shepherds Bush, London, W12’, Part documentary about the post-war capital (picking up from his stalled book on the streets of London), part prototype radio soap opera, this production anticipated Under Milk Wood, to the extent of using an omniscient narrator and starting (and ending) with dreams. It even included allusions to the atom bomb and to television. Laurence Gilliam, the BBC’s director of features, described it to Dylan as ‘a most sensitive and successful piece of radio’. No-one was surprised that, when Dylan recorded another colourful talk ‘Holiday Memory’ in October, Edward Sackville-West should ask in the New Statesman ‘why this remarkable poet had never attempted a poetic drama for broadcasting’.

  Dylan’s trips to London allowed him to meet friends who had also found berths in radio, a medium which reflected the educational and egalitarian ideals of the new Labour government. Many were poets whose special status at the BBC was recognised in an illustrated feature for Picture Post, titled ‘A Nest of Singing Birds’. Among them was John Arlott, who had only recently graduated from being a poetry-and cricket-loving policeman to a BBC producer. He valued Dylan as a reader of verse, describing him standing at the microphone, ‘feet apart and head thrown back, a dead cigarette frequently adhering wispily to his lower lip, curls a little tousled and eyes half-closed, barely reading the poetry by eye, but rather understanding his way through it, one arm beating out a sympathetic double rhythm as he read.’ As a narrator, Arlott thought Dylan ‘a trifle too explosive, but stimulating if used only occasionally’.

  A day at the BBC involved protracted lunch-time drinking at a nearby pub, usually the Stag’s Head in New Cavendish Street or (Dylan’s preference) the George (christened the ‘Gluepot’ for obvious reasons) in Great Portland Street. When he was producing, Roy Campbell, the tall, iconoclastic South African poet, was careful to make sure that Dylan stayed off whisky, at least until after he had recorded. Once he failed to do this, and heard Dylan slur his introduction to ‘Ode on Shaint Sheshilia’s Day’. Nevertheless Dylan was the ‘best all-round reader of verse’ Campbell ever produced. His blind spot was ‘correct’ poets, such as Pope and Dryden. But he made up for this with his superlative performances of ‘wild and woolly’ poets such as Blake and Manley Hopkins. Then he ‘became almost Superman’.

  Dylan’s BBC friends included Louis MacNeice, who had recently acquired Tilty Hill House, a part-fifteenth-century mansion near Dunmow in Essex, from Dylan’s one-time girlfriend Veronica Sibthorp and her latest paramour, the painter John Armstrong. Ruthven Todd lived down the hill at Tilty Mill. When he invited Dylan to stay, he was initially fearful of the impression his friend would make. However Dylan charmed the locals, showing intelligent interest in country life. When Todd moved to the United States in 1947, Tilty Mill was taken over by George Barker’s former lover, Elizabeth Smart, who shared it with the painters Robert MacBryce and Robert Colquhoun (the two Roberts) who either ‘caused havoc’ or, according to one’s taste, proved excellent nannies for her children. In London, MacNeice and Todd introduced Dylan to two of his favourite BBC cronies – Bob Pocock, another poetry-loving policeman who had been on the fringes of Soho pubs and broadcasting for some time, and R. D. (Reggie) Smith, an amiable, thick-set former student of MacNeice at Birmingham, whose novelist wife Olivia Manning chronicled his days as a British Council lecturer in her Balkan and Levant trilogies.

  Radio also attracted musicians, such as the composer Elisabeth Lutyens, who had rebelled against the values of both her father, Sir Edwin Lutyens, the imperial architect, and her mother Lady Emily, who devoted her life to the Indian guru, Krishnamurti. Instead Lizzie (as she was called) concentrated on writing twelve-tone serial music, which gave some order to a dishevelled life, though she had recently turned to more conventional film scores. A natural Soho-ite, she befriended the Thomases around 1942. For a short while they were tenants of her and her second husband, Edward Clark, also a musician, off Tottenham Court Road. Her status as Aeronwy’s godmother indicated she was persona grata with both Dylan and Caitlin. She had few illusions about Dylan’s trickiness, remarking he was ‘as difficult to pin down as quicksilver with his ever-changing moods from solemnity to giggles’. At one stage he annoyed her by failing (despite, she claimed, having been paid £50) to provide the words he had promised for The Pit, a politically committed composition about coal-miners that she had written for William Walton.

  By her account, Dylan, although in demand, still had some basic learning to do in radio. In September 1946 she accompanied him and Reggie Smith to Kent to record some ‘actuality’ for a programme about the seaside resort of Margate, part of an exchange with the American station WOR which was supplying a similar feature on Coney Island. In the spirit of his wartime propaganda exercises, where detail was not so important as overall effect, Dylan had already roughed out a breezy script, full of bathing beauties, girls in ‘Kiss me Quick’ hats, and his stock-in-trade, a documentary-style ‘Voice of Information’. He then celebrated with Smith, leaving them both with massive hangovers. Dylan had forgotten that Margate was entering the off-season. When he and his colleagues went to reconnoitre the sea-front, they found only one middle-aged matron with bunions, while Dreamland, the amusement arcade, was deserted. When Dylan spied a pretty girl selling scent and made a bee-line for her, he was fended off by her boyfriend who squirted one of her cheapest products at him. As a result Lizzie had to keep leeward of him for several hours. Back at the hotel, he made a statutory ‘alcoholically-polite’ pass at her, before crashing out.

  This story makes sense of an anecdote told by Wynford Vaughan-Thomas. Dylan returned to London to have lunch with Edith Sitwell, with whom he had resuscitated his friendship of the 1930s, after she had written an enthusiastic review of Deaths and Entrances. For some reason, he was unusually apologetic. ‘I’m sorry to smell so awful, Edith, it’s Margate.’ She could only placate him: ‘Yes, of course, my dear boy, naturally it’s Margate. Of course, I quite understand that.’

  After a day’s work at Broadcasting House, Dylan would have a few pints at the Stag or George, before catching an early evening train back to Oxford, where he was often in time for a dinner party or more drinks, preferably at the Turf, or sometimes, when the beer there had run out the Gloucester Arms, or even White’s, a club until recently popular with American servicemen, where Dylan liked to order gin fizzes. One of his drinking partners was John Veale, a young composer whose first symphonic study was being produced locally. Although grateful to Dylan for introductions to MacNeice, Lutyens and Roy Campbell, Veale was disapproving of the older man’s lifestyle. When they first met, Veale had not yet been demobbed. Despite having little money, he lent Dylan three shillings and sixpence for a taxi, but was taken aback two weeks later when he asked for the money back and was greeted with ‘a look as if I’d delivered an unforgivable insult’. Margaret Taylor adopted Veale as one of the creative talents with whom she liked to surround herself. He recalled ‘ghoulish’ dinners attended by MacNeice, Lutyens, Joyce Cary and Graham Greene, whose estranged wife lived in Oxford. They were all so carefully orchestrated as to lack any warmth or spontaneity.

  As for Margaret’s favourite, there was no doubt. Veale said she lionised Dylan, though this downplays the strong emotional attachment she felt towards him. She had a history of throwing herself at younger men, such as Robert Kee, a handsome student of her husband. After joining the RAF as a bomber pilot, Kee was shot down over Europe and imprisoned in Stalag Luft III. In bland letters to the Taylors, he sent odd messages to non-existent aunts, which were in fact coded references to his fellow inmates. After Kee escaped, Margaret rented and decorated a flat for him in London’s Percy Street, but was put out to find that, while working on his prison memoir (published by Greene at Eyre & Spottiswoode as a novel A Crowd is not Company in 1947), he used it to entertain Janetta Woolley, a
pretty girlfriend, who was part of Cyril Connolly’s Horizon set.

  Initially Alan Taylor had indulged his wife over Dylan, thinking, against his better judgement, that their new tenant would help take her mind off Kee. He even agreed to take him in to dinner at Magdalen’s High Table where Dylan and the College President, the distinguished scientist, Sir Henry Tizard, sought, in Taylor’s words, ‘to impress one another, a very curious conversation’. The historian was distraught when Caitlin told him bluntly that his wife had simply transferred her affections from Kee to Dylan. Part of Margaret genuinely believed in the poet’s talent, and was prepared to indulge him out of a private income, but another wilder part relished the spirit of dionysiac mayhem he brought to staid Oxford gatherings. She took him to literary societies, accompanied him to pubs, and invited him to her distinguished dinner parties where, more often than not, his behaviour was appalling. Once Dylan returned drunk from London to find that she had cooked a dish of jugged hare. When he said he was not hungry, she insisted. ‘All right then,’ he grudgingly agreed. ‘I’ll eat the hare of the bitch that dogs me.’ On another occasion, he was in an even worse state at a gathering for Lord David Cecil and Hugh Trevor-Roper, who recalled, ‘He promptly overturned a full decanter of claret – good claret too – drenching the fastidious Lord David. That dinner party was not a success.’

  Veale was not impressed: ‘Dylan was accustomed to being trailed around by people in whose eyes he could do no wrong. He was allowed to get away with anything. I didn’t approve of it. I had a sneaking sympathy with Alan Taylor who thought Dylan was a fraud.’ Certainly there was no love lost between Dylan and Taylor who recorded succinctly in his memoir, A Personal History, ‘I disliked Dylan Thomas intensely. He was cruel. He was a sponger even when he had money of his own. He went out of his way to hurt those who helped him.’