Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  This could have been background research for another talk, but was more likely a labour of love. Looking back, Dylan felt he might have enjoyed being an undergraduate, with a licence to be supercilious. But his own career path had been different, so, by way of compensation, he invested considerable time and emotional capital in researching his real background for a BBC programme about Swansea. He spent two days visiting the town and talking to friends such as Fred Janes, Vernon Watkins and Walter Flower. Concerned to have the correct details of its wartime destruction, he wrote to a municipal official to obtain the names of all the shops in the High Street destroyed by German bombing. Looking for further information about his school, he wrote to his old classics master John Morys Williams and was surprised to learn of the extent of the damage it had suffered. In his script for ‘Return Journey’, he passed through Swansea, conducting quasi-fictitious interviews in bars, school, newspaper office and finally Cwmdonkin Park, as he searched for memories of his youthful self. Neatly turned vignettes summoned up his childhood, such as when a young girl he was trying to pick up on the Promenade said to her friend, mocking his Grammar School accent, ‘No thank you, Mr Cheeky, with your cut-glass accent and your father’s trilby! I don’t want no walk on no sands. What d’you say? Ooh, listen to him, Het. He’s swallowed a dictionary.’ The result was good radio both technically and emotionally, because it created a paradox: with his charm, sense of character and felicitous phrases, Dylan evoked the spirit of his youth, but, he also made clear that the past was dead. Much as he might want to go back, he could not.

  While he was indulging in this exercise in nostalgia, Edith Sitwell had been working behind the scenes on his behalf. If she did not think he was ready for America, she realised he needed a break. So she prevailed on the Society of Authors, where her brother Osbert was deputy chairman and she was responsible for a committee which awarded travelling scholarships, to give Dylan £150 so he could take himself and his family to Italy. By the time ‘Return Journey’ was broadcast in June, the Thomases were ensconced in a villa in Florence.

  At the age of thirty-two Dylan ventured outside the British Isles for the first time. The railway journey to his interim destination – a small pensione at San Michele di Pagana, a mile outside Rapallo, on the Mediterranean coast – might have put him off the experience. He went in an unruly family party, including not only his wife, son and daughter, but also his sister-in-law Brigit Marnier, who was there as a glorified nanny, and her son Tobias, a companion for his cousin Llewelyn with whom he had been brought up at Blashford. The trip, via Switzerland, took three days, largely because the party’s baggage was lost at the Italian border. Dylan and Caitlin had to spend their first morning in Italy in the Kafkaesque bowels of Milan station, trying, through judicious bribery of officials with English cigarettes, to find out what had happened.

  Italy was lively and chaotic, where Britain was dour and accepting of continuing austerity. Both countries were coping in their different ways with the aftermath of war which, in political terms, meant getting used to a continent of Europe divided into capitalist and Soviet camps, both protected by atomic weapons. But whereas Britain had come through the hostilities battered but victorious, with its institutions intact, Italy had not only been defeated, but had experienced the trauma of Fascism. With Marxism on its borders, threatening its political core, its response was to dissolve its compromised monarchy, formally ban the Communists from government (in May 1947, the month after Dylan arrived), and stitch together an uneasy American-brokered coalition, fronted by the Christian Democrats with links to the Mafia.

  En route, Dylan had been horrified by the blown-up bridges and other signs of war. In San Michele, he was taken aback by the hordes of dirty children who followed him wherever he went, and fascinated by the intricate workings of the black market which, once he had mastered the system, allowed him to double the spending power of his English pounds. He quickly adapted to his bright sunny environment. His pensione on the sea-front was delightful – like ‘a clean pink ship in the sea’, he told his benefactress Edith Sitwell. It served generous meals starting with spaghetti, followed by meat (with artichoke, spinach and potatoes), then cheese (including his favourite gorgonzola), all sorts of fruit, and coffee, washed down with delicious red wine. Red, pink and white villas glistened kaleidoscopically among the fir trees in the surrounding hills. As Dylan knew, Rapallo had a reputation as a retreat for artists and writers. Yeats had visited and commented appreciatively, while Max Beerbohm still entertained at his house on the edge of town. Only the previous year Dylan had signed a letter of support for former resident Ezra Pound who had been accused of treason, found unfit to plead, and incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital.

  But Dylan had no intention of staying. For all its good points, the town of Rapallo was a Riviera hotspot and the area was likely to become expensive later in the summer. Dylan told Edith Sitwell that he wanted not a holiday, but a place to live where he intended to work ‘like a fiend, a good fiend’. Before settling down, however, he wanted to go to Rome where he knew Ronald Bottrall, head of the British Council and a published poet. He had fond notions that Bottrall might set him up with lucrative lectures and even find him a job in the burgeoning Italian film industry. Friends such as Stephen Spender seemed to be earning a decent living on the international lecture circuit. But Bottrall was a Leavisite with little sympathy for Dylan’s poetry. The best he could do was give a party for the visiting British poet and his wife, who had travelled to Rome by bumpy overnight bus. Dylan met some local authors, including Mario Praz, an Anglophile historian of art and literature, who had made an international name for himself with The Romantic Agony, his study of the romantic imagination.

  Unable to stomach the idea of a sixteen-hour return bus ride, the Thomases caught a bucketing army plane to Genoa, within easy reach of Rapallo. Five days later, they were off again to Florence, where they hoped to find a house for a long-term stay. There they bumped into Stephen and Natasha Spender, with whom they enjoyed a couple of good meals. Through the British Council they had an introduction to Eugenio Montale, a left-wing man of letters who was to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1975. He invited them to meet some ‘intellectuals’ over dinner. Dylan had never shown much enthusiasm for such gatherings and, when Montale, in the formal spirit of the occasion, came to pick up his guest at his hotel, he found that Dylan, after drinking, had locked himself in a cupboard and refused to come out. Eventually prised from his hiding place, Dylan did not prove a scintillating dinner companion. When Montale arrived to collect the Spenders for a similar event the following day, he informed them severely, ‘Monsieur Thomas est un homme tres étrange.’ As a result, he cancelled his planned ceremonial dinner, and took them out for a more relaxed and agreeable tête-à-tête.

  Dylan’s Florentine contacts did come up with a suitable house, however. Belonging to a local lawyer, the Villa del Beccaro was a substantial mansion, complete with colonnaded swimming-pool, set among pine-trees and terraced vineyards, in the hills five miles south-west of the city. Possibly because the place had served as the German army headquarters during the war, the rent was a manageable £25 for two and a half months until the end of July. Although Dylan liked the setting, he did not find it conducive to work. The children made such a din round the pool all day that he was forced to take a room in a peasant’s cottage on the estate. He claimed he was writing a long poem, ‘In Country Sleep’, but in letters to friends he indicated his tortuously slow progress. He also told David Higham he hoped to finish a radio play, possibly Under Milk Wood, though nothing more was heard about it on this trip.

  Much as Dylan talked up Tuscany and its food in letters to his parents and to Margaret Taylor, it was clear, as the summer became hotter, that he was not enjoying himself. His creative spark was missing. Often he took a horse and trap to nearby Scandicci and then caught a tram into Florence, where he sat disconsolately in the well-known Café Giubbe Rosse, sheltering behind what local poet M
ario Luzi called a ‘small forest of bottles’.

  Florentine writers and artists tended to speak French, so they found conversation with him difficult. If they invited him to dinner, he fell asleep during the meal. When he reciprocated and asked them to the Villa del Beccaro, he felt an obligation to amuse them: ‘I have to stand on my head, fall in the pool, crack nuts with my teeth, and Tarzan in the cypresses.’ By then he was fed up with Italian ‘intellectuals’, describing them as ‘rarefied and damp: they do not write much but oh how they edit! They live with their mothers, ride motor-scooters and translate Apollinaire.’ Dylan had little of Spender’s aptitude for the fierce if finely tuned cultural diplomacy of the period. Having been stifled under Mussolini, these literati were keen for outside contacts, but equally they realised their biddable position in the ideological struggle between Communism and liberalism. With his British Council contacts, Dylan seemed to offer a possible entrée into a world of artistic slush funds or, at the very least, invitations to prestigious conferences abroad. But he refused to play that game.

  He did notice his wife was learning Italian, but did not understand the significance there either. Not only was she thoroughly at ease in a sexually charged Latin culture which valued buxom golden-haired women – having her bottom regularly pinched was the least of her worries – but she relished the tables being turned. For once she did not have to play the retiring wife while Dylan basked in the limelight. Rather the opposite: she was the centre of attention, while he was a Welsh nobody, all the more isolated by his inability to speak the language.

  Despite Brigit’s presence, there were rows. On one occasion, he wrote Caitlin a rambling, maudlin letter from the Giubbe Rosse. It suggests he may have physically assaulted her, perhaps burning her arm with a cigarette. He admitted he felt so guilty that he had expunged the details from his account. ‘There is shame, and disgrace, and grief, and despair, but there is only love about which I know nothing except that what I feel for you must be love because, to me, it is religion, and faith, and the world. I love you, Caitlin. I think you are holy. Perhaps that is why I am bad to you.’

  His homesickness tended to abate when the postwoman appeared at the door with letters from England, particularly those from Margaret Taylor. She had been with her husband in Yugoslavia, making his life a misery by constantly saying how much she would have preferred being in Italy with the Thomases. Now back in Oxford, she sent Dylan welcome reminders of the life he was missing – light novels, magazines, and British newspapers which he relished for their crosswords and cricket scores. Margaret’s books were invariably published by her friend Graham Greene at Eyre & Spottiswoode, among them a seedy sub-Greene thriller, More Deadly than the Male by ‘Ambrose Grant’, otherwise known as James Hadley Chase. Dylan pronounced it ‘very good’ but not as good as Patrick Hamilton. To buoy his spirits more, he twiddled the knobs on a wireless set and picked up his friend John Arlott commentating on a test match at Trent Bridge.

  He was relieved when Margaret picked up on his none-too-subtle requests for assistance in finding a place where his family could live on their return to England. ‘I am domestic as a slipper,’ he claimed. ‘I want somewhere of my own, I’m old enough now, I want a house to shout, sleep and work in. Please help, though I deserve nothing.’ She reported back that she had discovered the grandly named Manor House at South Leigh, a village in the countryside near Witney, some twenty minutes by train from Oxford. Having come into some money following her mother’s death, she proposed to buy and rent it to Dylan for a pound a week. (Her husband Alan claimed he paid for it as a way of getting Dylan off his back. It is clear, however, that she was the purchaser.) With his mind anywhere but on his immediate work, Dylan wondered how he could furnish it, and where he could send his children to school. Once again, Margaret came to his aid, offering to use her patronage to obtain Llewelyn a place at Magdalen College School, founded in 1480 and alma mater of William Tyndale, Richard Hooker and Thomas Hobbes. As so often, Dylan had ambivalent reasons for wanting to send his son to a fee-paying boarding establishment he could ill afford. As the son of a schoolmaster, he knew the value of giving Llewelyn the best possible education. At the same time, not wanting an extra child under his feet, he convinced himself that a further period away from home would be good for Llewelyn’s and everyone’s well-being.

  By mid-June it had become so hot that Dylan, sweating profusely, could only work for two hours a day. When he went into Florence, the heat was ‘like a live animal you fight against in the streets’. Even the children wilted, becoming restless and bad-tempered. He had been hoping for the distraction of visits from the McAlpines and from John Davenport. When for various reasons none of them could make it, he was disappointed.

  In July he began to think of his journey home to England. But a new problem arose when he realised he had not booked his train tickets and was down to his last £10. Having tried unsuccessfully to borrow £100 off the British Council, he begged Margaret Taylor to send him £5 (in single pound notes – nothing else was negotiable) and, of course, she did. He subsequently found he could pay for his tickets from England. But no railway passage was available until mid-August. So, having acquired extra funds through an illegal exchange with an Italian who was coming to London, he decided to take his family to Elba for the fortnight between the end of the lease on his villa and his trip home. (Three years later the Italian was still politely enquiring if he could bank the two undated English cheques Dylan had given him for £175, and his debtor was skilfully eluding him.)

  Best known as the place of Napoleon’s exile in 1814–15, Elba was a starkly beautiful island in the Mediterranean, south of Livorno. Yet to be discovered by tourists, it was recommended by Luigi Berti, one of the Florence-based intellectuals who originally came from there. Berti, who made his living as an editor and translator, was taking his summer holiday with his family at Rio Marina on Elba’s east coast, and suggested the Thomases might like it too. Professionally Dylan had little time for Berti: he was scornful that a man who had rendered Henry James and Virginia Woolf into Italian could say, ‘In Elba oo veel lak der skool di fishdog’, apparently a reference to schools of dogfish. But he was happy to have someone he knew close at hand.

  To his surprise, Dylan loved Rio Marina, a small unostentatious town where the only occupations were fishing and working in the iron mines. The latter had been exploited since Etruscan times, leaving a mottled grey-blue landscape, and adding to the general air of pagan antiquity. During the day, when cold beer was like ‘bottled God’, Dylan even ventured into the sea, where he would lie in the shallows, smoking a cigarette, and reading the New Statesman. In the evenings he drank cheap potent brandy with the Marxist mayor. The combination of pre-Christian culture and Communism appealed to him: ‘Communism in Italy is natural, national, indigenous, independent.’ It reminded him of the best aspects of Wales. In his enthusiasm he failed to notice that his wife was flirting (and she later claimed sleeping) with their hotel-keeper.

  By the time Dylan began his journey home, he had been away for four months. In his luggage he carried just one work to show for his labours – the first draft of his long unsatisfactory poem ‘In Country Sleep’. Reflecting his difficulties not just in writing but in communicating with Italians, this work retreated from his recent moves towards simplicity of vocabulary, prosody and meaning. It assembled a mass of religious, fairy tale and rural images, permitting a number of interpretations, of which two predominate – that he was writing about either his relationship with Aeronwy or, perhaps, the destructive power of jealousy in his marriage with Caitlin. The poem allows for both these, and is also about Dylan’s own sense of well-being or, in religious terms, his faith which, in order for him to feel alive, needs to be under assault from some malevolent force – call it the devil, the ‘thief’ (as in the poem), or, as Dylan put in a late interview, perhaps drink. ‘Alcohol is the thief today. But tomorrow he could be fame or success or exaggerated introspection or self-analysis. The thie
f is anything that robs you of your faith, of your reason for being.’ One would be hard pressed to gather that Dylan had worked on these verses in a foreign country. The only hint comes in the suggestion of atomic catastrophe threatening the country idyll. Then, as the last line promises, you shall find ‘your faith as deathless as the outcry of the ruled sun’. This last image, implying man’s baleful harnessing of the sun’s energies, lies in contrast to the benevolent ‘lawless sun awaking’ five lines earlier. When the clowning in the Villa del Beccaro stopped, the shadow of Hiroshima was one of the few subjects Dylan and his Italian literary acquaintances could agree on.

  SIXTEEN

  LONGING FOR HOME

  The symbolism is inescapable: no sooner had Dylan returned to England than he broke his right arm – the one he used to write. He had arranged to stay with the McAlpines in London before going on to Oxfordshire. But they were away and, in his attempt to gain access through a window, he slipped and injured himself. This was not the first or last time he fractured a limb, a tendency which ran in his family. Ironically, he told Philip Lindsay in outraged tones that he had been sober at the time. If so, noted his old scriptwriting colleague, it was a malicious act of the gods, since Dylan had ‘probably fallen down more times unhurt than any man in London’. Nevertheless alcohol consumption was bound to have affected his spatial sense and, because of related poor diet, weakened his bones.

  Belying its grand name, the Manor House at South Leigh was a damp, ungainly Edwardian edifice, set in a low-lying area, next to a farm. It had neither electricity nor bathroom, and made do with an outside lavatory. Most of the mains water was drawn off by a cattle drinking trough, halfway up the drive. The inside was soon dominated by Caitlin’s distinctive decorative style, which relied on pictures and photographs randomly torn from magazines. The kitchen tended to be tidier, with the children’s clothes hanging in front of the stove. By the light of the oil lamp, it could look quite homely.