Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  Such considerations were not so important at the BBC, where he could always find some work. He had survived the critical mauling of his rendition of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost. According to the Corporation’s own magazine The Listener, Dylan’s booming voice had ‘swamped Milton, it swamped Paradise Lost, it occasionally swamped even the sense, for the louder Dylan Thomas shouts the more his articulation deteriorates, until one fails to hear the words for the noise.’ Producer friends stood by him: Roy Campbell, for example, using him to read one of his favourite books The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp. In the field of talks, they knew Dylan could be relied on to spout entertainingly on anything from boxing to comic writing – a topic on which he bowed to the Americans, preferring Thurber and Perelman’s contemporary social observation over Wodehouse’s period charm.

  However Dylan’s creative energies were still directed less to radio than to films. This was another phenomenon of the times. In the years of post-war austerity, the public looked to the cinema for escape. Particularly in demand was light patriotic entertainment in the vein of the first Ealing comedy, Hue and Cry, produced in 1946. Gainsborough’s interest in the script of The Doctor and the Devils encouraged Dylan to think that, with his documentary scriptwriting background, he could find a well-paid niche in the domestic feature film industry. This ambition received a significant boost in August 1947 when, seeking to save much needed foreign exchange, the Labour government imposed a 75 per cent import duty on foreign (mainly American) films. For a while British studios searched frantically for ‘product’ – anything that would fill the country’s empty screens.

  Dylan flirted with two of the leading studios, Ealing and Gainsborough. For Michael Balcon’s Ealing, he re-wrote the dialogue for two scripts, No Room at the Inn, completed in April 1948, and Three Weird Sisters, which he worked on during the summer. These films are often glossed over, but they were interesting developments in Dylan’s career. Contrary to prevailing trends, No Room at the Inn was a well crafted piece of social realism, about a sluttish woman who runs a home for evacuee children in the village of Market Norton, which could pass for South Leigh or at least Witney. Adapted from a 1945 stage play by Joan Temple, the script shows Dylan developing ideas that interested him, such as the sounds of children playing, the effects of rationing (with the butcher saying, ‘Got a nice bit of tripe – under the counter for you, Agg’), and the sunny vicar with his head in the clouds. Dylan wrote the part of a spiv for Harry Locke, the actor’s first role in a distinguished screen career.

  Three Weird Sisters was another adaptation (from a book by an American mystery writer Charlotte Armstrong). It is the story of three sisters from the Welsh valleys who ask their mean London-based brother to give them part of the family fortune so that they can make good a promise to rebuild their village after it has suffered a pit collapse. When he declines, they attempt, in B-movie thriller style, to kill him and his stuck-up English secretary (and heir) Claire Prentiss. Dylan has fun with names, trying out new ones such as Daddy Waldo and Mrs Probert (later used in Under Milk Wood), and introducing those of friends in Mabli Hughes, Sergeant Flower and Beattie (a woman from South Leigh). A minister makes a chapel speech which refers to ‘my people’ (a nod to Caradoc Evans’s book of satirical short stories). According to the script directions, this should be ‘funereal, sanctimonious and plangent, and not without the emotional chanting hwyl’. One can see Dylan acting out his personal dilemmas about Wales, as he contrasts the brother Owen Morgan-Vaughan’s visceral antipathy to his homeland with the steady human values of the miners in their distress.

  Morgan-Vaughan is given a speech with a line often attributed directly to Dylan: ‘Land of my Fathers! As far as I’m concerned, my fathers can keep it.’ Summoning all the venom of the Welshman in England, this film character adds, ‘You can tell he’s a Welshman by the lilt in his voice. Huh, little back-biting hypocrites, all gab and whine! Black beetles with tenor voices and a sense of sin like a crippled hump. Cwmglas! Full of senile morons and vicious dwarfs, old poles of women clacking at you like blowsy hens, self-righteous little humbugs with the hwyl, old men with beards in their noses cackling at you, blue gums and clackers. Oh the mystical Welsh – huh! About as mystical as slugs!’

  This obscure speech has been taken to represent the sum of Dylan’s attitudes to his country. In fact it was just one of his many ways of looking at Wales. On balance, the coldness and self-interest of London-based Morgan-Vaughan are presented as being much more unattractive than the solid virtues of the indigenous Welsh.

  Dylan was not finished with Welsh themes or with Ealing. In July 1948 he was toying with writing a script based on an outline by a Welsh actor friend. Clifford Evans had asked his help in developing a comedy about two Welsh miners on a London spree after winning a productivity competition. Dylan attended several conferences about this project – originally called A Nightingale is Singing, later released as A Run for Your Money. But Ealing could not match the £1,000 per script which Gainsborough was then prepared to offer him. An added incentive for switching to Gainsborough was that Donald Taylor’s old partner, Bunny Keene, had recently moved there as a producer-director, after a couple of lean years making documentaries, including one on Cyprus scripted by Laurie Lee and another on Assam with music by Lizzie Lutyens.

  Dylan’s work for Gainsborough had started earlier in the spring with an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Bridge of Falesa, a story about a trader arriving at a copra-producing island in the South Seas, and an incumbent competitor trying to scare him off by playing up the forces of evil in the locality. In some ways, it suggested Carmarthenshire, with its depictions of a closed community, misdirected religion and, not least, the local missionary, a Welsh minister with hwyl. But Dylan’s script was not much more than a conventional cinematic rendering of a classic text, albeit one he respected.

  With the break-down of negotiations with Ealing over Clifford Evans’s outline in July and with another project, The Forgotten Story, quietly sidelined, Dylan was able to turn to Me and My Bike, an idea he much preferred, touting it to Sydney Box at Gainsborough as ‘the first original film operetta’. The story line was slight – about a man who measures his life through the bicycles he has owned and loved – penny-farthings, tandems, tricycles and racing bikes. When he dies, he is greeted by a heavenly chorus of bicycle bells. With the demand for British films, Box was so pleased to have Dylan on board that he put him on contract and gave him his head. ‘For me, as a supposedly imaginative writer, it’s got wonderful possibilities,’ Dylan enthused to Keene about Me and My Bike. ‘Sydney’s carte blanche as to freedom of fancy, non-naturalistic dialogue, song, music, etc is enormously encouraging.’ Now he had scope to make the kind of arty film he wanted, Dylan also intended to introduce elements of popular culture and song.

  All other work at South Leigh was put on hold, poetry did not get written, as Dylan turned his hands to this remunerative script. Margaret Taylor gave him a gypsy caravan so he could work in the field next to the house, untroubled by his family’s demands. Doubtless she felt she was being helpful; completion of the contract would go a long way towards righting Dylan’s still precarious finances. But Caitlin was so infuriated that she knocked over her husband’s bolt-hole. The single-minded Margaret simply moved it further away.

  During the latter half of the year Dylan’s Gainsborough film projects tended to crowd in on one another. He was still working on Me and My Bike while completing a revised script of The Bridge of Falesa in October. The following month, having done most of the ‘first chunk’ of Me and My Bike, he embarked on yet another script for the studio, Rebecca’s Daughters. A return to more conventional narrative, this was the dramatic story of the Welshmen who dressed as women to protest against the crippling burden of tolls in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

  In the new year, Dylan moved on to yet another script, a version of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. But none of these projects for Gainsborough was ever put
into production. In May 1948 the film import duty had been lifted and, within twelve months, Box’s company had folded.

  For a short time, while working for Gainsborough, Dylan’s bank balance did look more secure. During the 1948 financial year he earned £2,482, against which he claimed business expenses of £612, leaving him with a profit of £1,872, or roughly £43,000 in 2003 prices. Unfairly to Caitlin and his family, who usually suffered in penury, Dylan managed to fritter away large proportions of his earnings on ‘treats’ while in London. Staying with Louis MacNeice in Canonbury in late July, when he was working for both Ealing and Gainsborough, he seemed almost opulent. One morning the two poets indulged themselves by going to Lords, but failed to ascertain that the cricket match they hoped to see had already finished. So they made their way across London to the Oval, stopping en route for lunch at a bar where they drank champagne. When they finally reached the Surrey cricket ground, Dylan ‘poured out much curious lore about cricketers’ private lives, all of it funny and most of it, I fancy, true’. In the evening they ate Portuguese oysters and, so it appears from a letter from MacNeice to his absent wife Hedli, went to a revue at the London Casino.

  Dylan’s love of cricket fascinated Philip Lindsay. Noting that his friend ‘worships’ the game, he wondered if this went with being a poet. He did not know any artists who liked cricket, but felt that ‘something in the grace, the poise, the rhythm of the batsman probably appeals to the poet’. With the Australians touring in 1948, Lindsay hoped to see them at Lords with Dylan. When this did not happen, he told Dylan he put himself to sleep by imagining himself as the great Australian batsman Donald Bradman. Dylan replied that he often saw himself as a top English bowler. Lindsay thought of writing a piece about an imaginary encounter between their dream selves.

  In truth, despite moments of extravagance, Dylan was still leading a perilously hand-to-mouth existence, though his liquidity had improved. In August he was forced to turn down a request for a loan from his friend John Davenport, who himself had fallen on hard times. He quoted a mountain of calls on his finances, from the Italian who still had not been paid for his trip to Elba, through a looming repayment he needed to make to Margaret Taylor, to Caitlin’s desire for a new pressure cooker and a nightgown. Yet at the same time he was applying to join an expensive London club, the Savage, which catered for writers and artists. He was already an unlikely member of the National Liberal Club, a traditional, rather stuffy watering hole for politically minded London Welshmen following in the tradition of Lloyd George. But Dylan soon realised this was the wrong place for him. He called it the National Lavatory Club, after Lord Birkenhead, who used to call there regularly for a pee. When the hall porter challenged the Conservative politician, reminding him that this was a gentleman’s club, Birkenhead replied, ‘Oh is it that as well?’ Dylan felt much the same and now, after just over a year at the National Liberal, he was applying to the Savage.

  In early September Dylan travelled alone to Edinburgh where, as part of the newly established Festival, he gave a short talk on Hugh MacDiarmid to Scottish PEN. While there, he bumped into Kenneth Tynan, who was just starting a career as a theatre critic after leaving Oxford in the summer. Short of money and with a girl friend in tow, the flamboyant Tynan asked for a loan, and Dylan, unusually, was able to oblige. Dylan had many young friends such as Tynan at Oxford. Over the years he had become a familiar figure to undergraduates such as Alan Brien, at Jesus College, who remembered him in the Cornmarket on Saturday afternoons, ‘staggering along loaded down with string bags, behind his striding, empty-handed Viking Irish wife – the very seaside postcard of a booze-flushed, snub-nosed, ox-eyed, henpecked slave husband, aching to slide off into a pub and lose wife, shopping and consciousness’.

  Those students who knew Dylan better often found him friendly and supportive, imparting his knowledge in the pubs like a worldly tutor they might have liked. In the George, he discussed the Mistletoe Bough legend with Paul Redgrave, from St Catherine’s College. Recently featured in an Alfred Hitchcock film Rope, this was the story of a bride who became trapped in a wooden chest while playing a game of hide and seek and was only found as a skeleton ten years later. Dylan said that it could be located at only three places in Britain, one of which was Minster Lovell, five miles from South Leigh. When Redgrave mentioned another Gothic tale about the village, which was also close to where he lived, Dylan proposed a visit by bicycle. When Redgrave arrived at the Manor House at ten o’clock the following morning, he found Caitlin peeling potatoes and Dylan still in bed. She offered him a drink from a murky bottle which looked like cough mixture but which she said was rum and cider. She knew nothing of Dylan’s arrangement and, when told, remarked in a knowing tone that it was Thursday, market day in Witney, when the pubs were open all day.

  Dylan emerged in an oversized fisherman’s jumper which accentuated the whiteness of his legs. His breakfast consisted of two bottles of beer which were despatched to a four-foot mountain of empties at the door. After a perilous cycle ride, he and Redgrave were in Witney by eleven. Having drunk in every pub, they continued to Minster Lovell, where Dylan refused to eat lunch in another hostelry, exclaiming, ‘Eating is the death of good drinking.’ He would not allow the student to pay, saying he was a ‘film mogul’ earning £60 a week. At closing time, he leered at the barmaid and said slowly, ‘How would you like to fornicate with an oval Welshman?’

  After an unsuccessful attempt to locate the Mistletoe Bough, they ended back at Redgrave’s cottage at Church Hanborough, where Dylan was intrigued to learn of a poltergeist in the local church. They agreed to go there later that evening and read from John Donne’s sermons. Clutching a candle, Dylan mounted the pulpit and began to read ‘Doth not man die even in his birth?’ Realising this was a Dylanesque theme, Redgrave took a copy of Deaths and Entrances from his pocket and asked Dylan to read ‘Fern Hill’. Having laid the poltergeist to rest, they proceeded to another pub in Eynsham. When closing time was called at ten p.m., Dylan said he was ‘buggered’ if he was going to ride home. He said there was a train due at half past the hour and he would take it. Dylan turned out to be the only passenger: as he was leaving, he lowered the window and shouted, ‘Missed the Mistletoe Bough but caught the bloody Ghost Train! See you in the George.’

  Such exuberance appealed to most Oxford undergraduates. Michael Hamburger, who had returned to Christ Church after war service and was feeling out of place, recalled seeing Dylan with Margaret Taylor in White’s, off St Aldate’s. For him, Dylan’s presence brought the club to life. Although he had a sense of someone drinking himself to death, he felt he was at least experiencing something real: an authentic Soho Bohemian in the boring world of student poseurs.

  But poetic fashions were changing. The neo-romanticism of the war years, which Dylan had tried to avoid, was giving way to a simpler conservatism, which would later be identified with the Movement. Some undergraduates now regarded Dylan more as an entertainer than a great poet. ‘Our taste ran to austerity,’ noted Alan Brien retrospectively, ‘to spare, taut, tight-lipped verse slimmed of fat, slimmed of ornament, music and magic terms of abuse. What we wanted was the sound of a mind at work, a mind in battledress. Dylan’s mind wore a ceremonial uniform of his own design, self-indulgent, and self-displaying, he was the Boy’s Own Poet.’

  Away from the university Dylan still had legions of admirers and imitators, including the unlikely figure of Harold Pinter, whose poetry was steeped in his imagery. Another fan was Muriel Spark, editor of the Poetry Review (the journal of the Poetry Society), who convinced the poet Derek Stanford of Dylan’s greatness by reading him ‘Fern Hill’.

  But Philip Larkin, who had recently started his first job as Assistant Librarian at the University College of Leicester, was one poet who had changed his mind. Encouraged by his friend Kingsley Amis who could not stand ‘that crazy Welch fellow Thomas’, Larkin observed, ‘I think a man ought to use good words to make what he means impressive: Dylan Thos. just makes you won
der what he means, very hard.’ He noted Dylan’s use of the words ‘immortal hospital’ in ‘Holy Spring’ in Deaths and Entrances. ‘Now that is a phrase that makes me feel suddenly a sort of reverent apprehension, only I don’t know what it means. Can’t the FOOL see that if I could see what it means, I should admire it 2ce as much.’

  Unconcerned with academic niceties, Tynan appreciated Dylan for his swagger and celebrity status. Once seeing Dylan swaying drunkenly down Oxford High Street, he asked if he could help. ‘Get me some more bloody crème-de-menthe, you fucking idiot,’ Dylan screamed. Recognising a fellow romantic soul, Tynan took him back to his rooms in St John Street. He was astute enough to remark at the time that Dylan was ‘a surly little pug, but a master of pastiche and invective. Thinks himself the biggest and best phoney of all time, and may be right.’

  For over a dozen years, Dylan had brilliantly carried off the role of a drunken Welshman adrift in the competitive world of Anglo-Saxon letters. But now he was tired; he could recognise he was out of sympathy with trends in poetry; and he was thinking of going home.

  His parents’ ailments provided a spur, but there were other reasons for his wanting to be back in Wales. At South Leigh he had been working on a play about a Welsh village, which had been gestating in his imagination since he first mentioned it to Bert Trick in 1933. His stay in Elba had stimulated him. Rio Marina reminded him of Wales, and some of the phrases he used in letters from there – such as ‘fishers’, ‘webfooted waterboys’ and ‘sunblack’ – were echoed on the first page of his manuscript of what came to be known as Under Milk Wood.

  During 1947 he discussed the idea with Philip Burton, the BBC producer of ‘Return Journey’. In March 1948 he referred to it in a letter to John Ormond at Picture Post: ‘A radio play I am writing has Laugharne, though not by name, as its setting.’ Ormond, a younger poet from Swansea, had been responsible for the magazine’s earlier feature about poets at the BBC. On this occasion Dylan was seeking a commission from Picture Post about Laugharne. He promised not only details of the town’s quaint history, but also no repetition of his ‘disastrous’ Puck Fair visit, when the magazine had stumped up expenses and he had failed to deliver. Mindful of that precedent, Picture Post decided not to throw good money after bad.