Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  Margaret Taylor’s generosity allowed the Thomases to pick up the threads of normal life. Over the summer of 1946 several friends visited them, including Dan Jones, Norman Cameron and Roy Campbell. John Arlott, who was beginning a parallel career as a cricket commentator, stayed when in town to cover a match between Oxford University and the Indian tourists. Dylan accompanied him, MacNeice and Cecil Day-Lewis on a welcome day out in the Parks. When Edith Sitwell came to Oxford, she gave a party, where another guest was the hostess Lady Sibyl Colefax, who had been impressed enough by Dylan’s reading in front of royalty at the Wigmore Hall to invite him to tea, a measure of his growing social success. Surprisingly, given their different poetic styles, Dylan also struck up a liaison with John Betjeman, who was beginning a stint as secretary of the Oxford Preservation Trust. The two men lunched at Blenheim Palace where Betjeman, until recently, had worked for the Books Division of the British Council. A regular broadcaster himself, he recognised Dylan’s more positive side, recalling how beautifully the Welshman read Thomas Hardy’s ‘To Lizbie Brown’ when they both dined with the Taylors at Holywell Ford.

  Over the year Dylan contributed to over fifty radio programmes, earning about £700, or £19,000 in 2003 figures. Showing some application, he noted details of his finances in a small diary. Although he was not writing poetry and his film work had dried up (without assured government contracts, Taylor had been forced to put his companies into liquidation), Dylan could call on his BBC income, fees from talks, and royalties from books, with the result that, on paper at least, he was not destitute. At the end of May he was owed £85 (around £2,400 in 2003), and by the end of July this had risen to £89. 18s. 4d., including £2. 15s. for a one-hour afternoon talk to sailors at Morley College.

  By then Dylan and Caitlin were preparing to go to Ireland with their new friends, the McAlpines. They intended visiting the Puck Fair at Killorglin in County Kerry, an area that had intrigued Dylan since working on a film script of Maurice O’Sullivan’s memoir Twenty Years A-Growing a couple of years earlier. The trip had taken on an added urgency after Caitlin’s father died in Dublin in March, his last dispirited words being, ‘Tried in the scales and found wanting.’ Bill McAlpine and his wife Helen were obvious travelling companions. He was a bibulous engineer from Ulster, with an acute intelligence and a deep knowledge of literature, in particular of James Joyce. He was able to indulge this hobby, because Helen, a free spirit who struck an immediate rapport with Caitlin, had been married to a millionaire. When he died she was left no money but a substantial house overlooking the river Thames at Richmond.

  Dylan and Bill had reputedly met as fire-watchers but, more likely, they shared pints in the Wheatsheaf or French. On 5 August they and their wives flew to Dublin, where they spent four days, before proceeding to Kerry. Dylan had managed to inveigle a £50 advance out of Picture Post for a story on the fair, a three-day pagan festival turned drinking extravaganza, based loosely round the totem figure of King Puck, a crowned billy-goat. But the commission was never completed for Dylan drank so much he had no idea what was happening. Caitlin and Helen simply left their menfolk and danced with handsome Irish boys.

  Dylan did not mind. He had a wonderful time, even managing to squeeze in a day on O’Sullivan’s Blasket Islands. Back in the United Kingdom, he descended on his parents in Carmarthenshire, where his mother was unwell. From there, he described his Irish trip to Vernon Watkins: ‘We ate ourselves daft: lobsters, steaks, cream, hills of butter, homemade bread, chicken and chocolates: we drank Seithenyns of porter and Guinness: we walked, climbed, rode on donkeys, bathed, sailed, rowed, danced, sang.’ Seithenyn was a legendary Welsh prince whose love of drink caused him to neglect his duties attending the dykes which protected a low-lying kingdom in Cardigan Bay. As a result the sea overwhelmed this community, whose remains, it is said, could be seen at low tide. Dylan’s reference indicates how details of Welsh mythology swirled around his mind, possibly, in this case, contributing to his description of the drowned souls in Under Milk Wood.

  Another letter (of thanks) went to Osbert Sitwell who was enjoying success with his autobiography. Having recently been left some money, he had joined his sister Edith in supporting Dylan, in his case, with funds which helped allay the costs of the Irish trip. But once he had assessed his financial situation, Dylan realised he needed to return quickly to work. So he also wrote to his BBC contacts and to Donald Taylor to whom he admitted ‘in this tremendous quietness, feel[ing] lost, worried about the future, uncertain even of now. In London, it doesn’t seem to matter, one lives from day to day. But here, the future’s endless and my position in it unpleasant and precarious … I’ve reached a dead spell in my hack freelancing, am broke, and depressed.’

  After a few months of relative ease, Dylan was again under pressure. One way out – apparently encouraged by Caitlin – was to revive his plan to work in America. With typical professional naivety, he had tried to advance this idea earlier in the year by entering unilateral negotiations with at least three American publishers keen to get him on their books – William Morrow, Reynal & Hitchcock and Henry Holt. Oscar Williams played a role in leading these firms to believe that Dylan had no commitment to New Directions beyond his forthcoming book of Selected Writings. At one stage it was suggested that Laughlin’s firm might share Dylan’s publishing with Reynal & Hitchcock and Henry Holt, which played its trump card by offering to pay Dylan’s passage to the United States. Holt’s new editor of belles-lettres, the respected Southern writer, Allen Tate, was so keen to sign Dylan that he suggested an advance of $750. Another Holt director went to the trouble of inviting Dylan to lunch when he was in London, even paying the Welshman’s expenses for the journey from Oxford.

  Predictably James Laughlin was not amused when he learnt of these initiatives. New Directions’ edition of Dylan’s Selected Writings was due out in December with an expanded print-run of 4,000. On an autumn visit to Europe, he forced Dylan to sign a stringent new contract. Dylan promised not to enter discussions with any other American publisher and gave New Directions carte blanche to handle the placing of his articles in US periodicals. While in Italy, Laughlin made a typically canny response and asked the noted typographer Hans Mardersteig of the Officina Bodoni to produce an expensive limited (200 copies) edition of Dylan’s poems.

  For his part, Dylan felt that his unequivocal commitment to New Directions allowed him to pester Laughlin again about visiting the United States, a country which, in the atomic age, seemed more congenial than dank Britain. He had enjoyed his wartime encounters with various people attached to the US military. And the feeling was reciprocated: after meeting him in May, the poet Conrad Aiken described him as ‘a delightful fellow, full of good humour and gusto, and a fine drinker. He thinks of going to the U.S., which I’m not sure is a good idea, but who knows? He might emerge unscathed.’ From friends, Dylan probably heard of Gerald Kersh who, after an extraordinary few years in which he deserted from the British army and emerged as an American war correspondent, had prospered on the other side of the Atlantic, both as an author and a journalist.

  So, in November, Dylan was emboldened to ask his publisher’s help in finding him a house in the countryside, near New York (perhaps in the Adirondacks). He suggested that he could use this as a base for writing, broadcasting and lecturing in the United States, where he promised everything he wrote was ‘yours without any condition to print, publish, in the United States’. He claimed that Edith Sitwell had offered support in setting him up with lectures and readings. Generally, however, she feared the combination of drink and spiralling expenses, telling John Lehmann she was ‘aghast’ when she heard of Dylan’s plans and quoting Margaret Taylor that his mania for crossing the Atlantic was like measles – ‘you have to have it and get over it.’

  A year or so earlier Laughlin had counselled Dylan against rushing to America. He had said that it was too soon: the young academics and critics who would appreciate him were yet to return from the war. This time t
here is no evidence he was any more enthusiastic. So Dylan was forced to remain at Holywell Ford, doing much the same as before. He talked with Higham about a new book for Dent, a compendium of the personal reminiscences he had been doing for the BBC, together with some unwritten stories, which he listed as ‘Bob’s My Uncle’, ‘Poor Will’, ‘Opera Story’ and ‘Welsh Script’, all packaged under the unlikely working title of Top Hat & Gasworks or, alternatively, Bob’s My Uncle. (At least that last bit was true.)

  He could always find work at the BBC, which had latched on to the potential of his ‘organ’ voice. MacNeice realised this could be used, in tandem with Dylan’s character, ‘for all sorts of strange purposes’. He cast his friend as Aristophanes in his ‘panorama of Aristophanic comedy’ Enemies of Cant and then as ‘a funereal but benevolent raven’ in his dramatised fairy story The Heartless Giant. In November Dylan appeared as Private Dai Jones in Douglas Cleverdon’s held-over production of David Jones’s In Parenthesis, causing him to complain to his agent that he should be getting an actor’s fee rather than the rather lesser payment for a talk. ‘He took his radio acting very seriously,’ noted MacNeice, ‘and between rehearsals would always keep asking if he were giving satisfaction. He was a joy to have around the studio, causing a certain amount of anxiety to the studio managers, who could never be quite sure that he would speak into the right microphone, and a great deal of delight to the rest of the cast who particularly admired the queer little dance steps that he always performed (it seems quite unconsciously) while broadcasting.’

  Dylan still hoped his war-time script for The Doctor and the Devils (based on the Edinburgh body-snatchers Burke and Hare) might prove financially rewarding. Donald Taylor talked vaguely of bringing this to the screen, but Dylan wanted to speed up the process. Bypassing Higham again, he sent the manuscript to Graham Greene, one of whose hats was as a director of the publisher Eyre & Spottiswoode. Dylan made typically self-effacing noises about the work, but had a canny notion of Greene’s influence in the worlds of both books and films, something which Margaret Taylor followed up on his behalf. After Dylan mentioned that Michael Redgrave had expressed an interest in playing Dr William Salter, the dour Edinburgh anatomist (based on the real life Dr Robert Knox) at the centre of the story, Greene took the trouble of confirming this with the actor. When Greene suggested that the Rank Organisation, the dominant force in post-war British cinema production, might be interested, Dylan became excited and wondered if he might write something specially for Redgrave. The combination of Dylan’s unilateral approach and Greene’s intervention spurred all concerned, including Taylor, Higham and Dent. After Gainsborough Films bought an option on The Doctor and the Devils (in a deal which would net Dylan around £400), Dent offered to publish the text, though it would be a long time before either film or book came to fruition. (His script for Redgrave appeared the following year as The Shadowless Man, a story steeped in German Romanticism, about a man who sells his shadow. The film industry showed no interest in a nebulous treatment, which Margaret Taylor is said to have played a part in writing.)

  Christmas passed pleasantly enough in the circumstances. Osbert Sitwell sent a cheque which Dylan acknowledged fulsomely: ‘It was all Christmases and birthdays the morning of getting it … it was new shoes and sweaters for the voley river cold, and school bills paid with a flourish, and some Algerian [wine], and books I’ve wanted for months, and a heater for our hutch, and such happiness to think that you were thinking of us and could spare, in the taxed dark, such a very marvellous gift.’ Florrie sent two fat chickens from Carmarthenshire, one of which Dylan and Caitlin cooked for themselves and Aeronwy for lunch on Christmas Day. In the evening they had a big dinner at the Taylors, with turkey and Christmas pudding, and on Boxing Day they took the other chicken to the Veales, where they were joined by Ernest Stahl, a German don at Christ Church, and his wife Kathleen, who both later became good friends. But Dylan was worried about Llewelyn, who spent the holiday season with his grandmother in Ringwood. The boy was suffering badly from asthma; he also seemed very nervous and Dylan noticed he walked in a peculiar manner. After a doctor recommended a change of climate, Margaret Taylor had offered to pay for him to go to a holiday-school on the Isle of Wight. Dylan still had to meet the ongoing medical bills for Llewelyn, and now an unfortunate relic of his past had come back to haunt him: after dodging solicitors’ letters for some time, he had finally been served with a writ for the return of his advance for the unwritten book Twelve Hours on the Streets (of London).

  Dylan shrugged off these problems (which must have made America seem all the more enticing) and took Caitlin to the Chelsea Arts Ball, a fancy dress event to see in the new year of 1947 at the Albert Hall in London. Showing an uncanny ability to find money when required, he went as a chinaman and she as a flouncy Spanish lady. They accompanied several friends from the BBC, including Michael Ayrton, a young neo-Romantic artist with a fondness for the occult. Ayrton had a flat in All Soul’s Place, round the corner from the BBC, where his friend, the composer Constant Lambert, lived in the ground floor flat with his mistress, the ballerina Margot Fonteyn. He had met Lambert through another composer, Cecil Gray, who had admired Caitlin’s father Francis Macnamara enough to make him godfather to his daughter Pauline.

  Soon after this new year encounter, Dylan was convinced that he and Ayrton had agreed to work on a full-length opera for William Walton who, having made his name with the music for Edith Sitwell’s Façade, had recently composed the score for Laurence Olivier’s gung-ho end of war film version of Henry V. Dylan even told his parents he was going to do the libretto and Ayrton the ‘décor’, but, before they were ‘definitely commissioned’, they needed to reconnoitre the Thames estuary, ‘as I want to set the opera in a near-docks area. A very modern tragic opera, in the bombed slums of wharfland. If this ever comes to anything, it will be the biggest English operatic event of the century.’ He looked forward to taking off six months to write the piece which Covent Garden had promised to stage in 1949. (Possibly this was the ‘Opera Story’ he was offering to Dent.)

  How this project took on these fanciful proportions is unclear. The only suggestion that the putative composer knew anything about it came from John Veale who heard from Dylan that Walton considered it too avant-garde. The momentum came from Ayrton who had been working on the sets for Covent Garden’s first big post-war production, a version of Purcell’s opera The Fairy Queen, conducted by Lambert. He was eager to follow this up with something similar and swapped ideas with Dylan who was keen to break into a new medium. The two men did make their voyage down the Thames in mid-January, but by then their objective had changed: Ayrton was talking of doing an illustrated version of Hogarth’s Peregrinations and wanted Dylan to write an introduction. They took a boat as far as Gravesend but, on the way back, Dylan, who had been drinking, showed the pressures on him, when he began to scream, ‘The birds, the birds are getting at me.’ After falling into the cold river (a perilous occupation at that time of year), he was taken to a nearby hostelry where he was revived.

  Dylan was again at a low ebb, as was clear when he cancelled two BBC engagements in February. One was run of the mill – a recording of How Green Was My Valley, but the other was a commitment to accompany Louis MacNeice to Belfast to narrate ‘The Hare’ by the latter’s friend W. R. Rodgers. Ferry tickets from Heysham to Belfast had been bought, but at the last moment Dylan cried off, claiming food poisoning. He did manage to participate in the Third Programme’s daunting series ‘The Poet and his Critic’, in which Tommy Earp addressed his work, and Dylan replied in what he himself described as a ‘warm-hearted and dull’ manner.

  On his sickbed in his ‘converted ark’ at Holywell Ford, Dylan had been thinking about what might have been. In an uncollected poem, with references to William Johnson Cory and Eliot, he mused about how his life might have turned out if he had buckled down at Swansea Grammar School and proceeded to Oxford University.

  Oxford I sing, though in unt
utored tones, alack!

  I heard, long years ago, her call, but blew it back;

  … Ah, not for me the windblown scarf,

  The bicycle to the Trout, the arm-in-arm sweatered swing,

  Marx in a punt, Firbank aloud round the gas-ring;

  Never in flannelled and umbrella’d youth did I

  Tire the sun with talking and drive him down the High.

  But is it now too late? I’ll wear my bottom rolled

  And never dare to smile to show time’s fag-stained mould,

  Comb, over the blitzed bits, my gravely tumbled hair,

  And walk about the place as though there’s no-one there

  But I, single, aloof and eager, cynic, wit,

  With hands that never shake, aged twenty and a bit;

  And after climbing up one flight of stairs I must

  Remember not to faint,

  Here he has crossed out ‘nor chase with squeals of lust/Botany lecturers from women’s colleges’ and has added:

  nor must I pour my gin

  Into my whisky ‘just to make it taste’, nor pin

  My first born’s school report above my little bed

  Nor dare let on I knew old poets since snuffed.

  (The last word was originally ‘dead’.)

  His tone was reflective, touching, a bit solemn, underlined in the way he steered away from ‘squeals of lust’ to the pressing matter of his son’s school report. At the same time, in a notebook dated 1947, he collected anecdotes about Oxford University, including bits of its history, excerpts from its statutes, details of its eccentric figures, such as Dr William Buckland, the Geology Professor who ate his way through the animal kingdom, and a page of local quotations by authors such as Wordsworth, Swinburne and Pepys. He even wrote a line to remind himself to find the ‘exact modern duties’ of the university policemen, the proctors and bulldogs.