Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  Dylan went to Laugharne nevertheless, and once more fell in love with the town. He was ‘tired of living among strangers in a dark and savage country whose customs and tribal rites I shall never understand, breathing in alien air, hearing, everywhere, the snobcalls, the prigchants, the mating cries, the tom-toms of a curious, and maybe cannibal, race’. Over the summer, as he became disenchanted with Oxfordshire, the idea of moving back to Wales took hold. Caitlin could recognise the element of fantasy: Dylan thought he only needed to return to Laugharne and all would be right, exactly as it had been before the war. She also understood that he was filled with hiraeth, a Welshman’s deep longing for home. This accounted for the many references to Wales in his work, not just in his radio play about Laugharne, but also in his filmscripts. He used them to air the arguments for and against living in Wales, once so oppressive to him but now increasingly beguiling.

  Sometimes he veered one way, sometimes the other. His visit to Edinburgh to address Scottish PEN about Hugh MacDiarmid in September freed him to speak more candidly than usual: ‘I am a Welshman who does not live in his own country, mainly because he still wants to eat and drink, be rigged and roofed, and no Welsh writer can hunt his bread and butter in Wales unless he pulls his forelock to the Western Mail, Bethesdas on Sunday, and enters public houses by the back door, and reads Caradoc Evans only when alone, and by candlelight.’ Perhaps the Scotch whisky had begun to talk as he continued, ‘Regarded in England as a Welshman (and a waterer of England’s milk), and in Wales as an Englishman, I am too unnational to be here at all. I should be living in a small private leper house in Hereford or Shropshire, one foot in Wales and my vowels in England.’ Although he did not mention returning to Wales, the sub-text was that he coveted MacDiarmid’s ability to make a living and be respected in his home country of Scotland.

  Having identified Gosport House, on the hill near where he had first lived at Eros Cottage, as a possible future home in Laugharne, he encouraged the ever-willing Margaret Taylor to negotiate with the owner on his behalf. When no deal could be struck, he tried a different tack. Knowing that Richard Hughes no longer wanted to live at Castle House, he wrote to him at the end of September, asking if he might take over the lease. (Coincidentally Hughes had just taken over from him as a scriptwriter on A Run for your Money.) Dylan’s letter was followed a week later by another from Margaret Taylor who suggested that Castle House had become, for Dylan, a symbol of personal salvation. Since Hughes was tied up with films, his wife Frances replied to both Dylan and Margaret saying that the house was totally impracticable. Undeterred Dylan sent Margaret to Laugharne again to see if she could salvage something. Apologising to Frances that he too had been prevented from coming by film work, he said that in Laugharne he could ‘work well. Here I am too near London.’ But Mrs Starke, the ultimate owner of Castle House, knew Dylan well enough to be wary, and the move to Wales stalled.

  When his former Strand colleague John Banting wrote from Dublin in November proposing a film about Ireland, Dylan replied he would love nothing better than to ‘dawdle and doodle’ through the countryside. However he feared his contract with Sydney Box and Gainsborough did not allow him to be hired by any other film company but ‘that Rank growth’. He explained that at Gainsborough he worked under Bunny Keene and occasionally made appearances at ‘inarticulate conferences’. But there was no mention of Wales, and otherwise only sadness in his catalogue of mutual friends in the film business whom he no longer saw. Donald Taylor had produced a ‘big, bad’ feature, ‘Perrin & Trail’ and had returned to the Crown Film Unit. Fanya Fisher was ill in hospital and he was annoyed with himself for failing to see her when in London. ‘The 2 feature films I’ve so far written have had viperish notices. The Gargoyle is drabber, and empty of all except touts in well-fed suitings. The old pubs are fuller but empty of all friends.’ If he ever did manage to come to Dublin, he asked Banting plaintively, ‘can you put me up on bed, couch, or blonde?’

  The same deflated mood was apparent in Dylan’s letter to Vernon Watkins the following week. ‘Nothing happens to me. I go to London and bluster, come back and sigh, do a little scriptwriting, look at an unfinished poem, go out on my bicycle in the fog, go to London & bluster.’ After six months in South Leigh, his mother was no better and, although his father had improved, the old man was ‘naggier’ than ever. Since Cordelia was back in the village, his parents had had to move into the Manor House, leaving Caitlin to apologise to Mary Keene that, with three generations of Thomases under her roof, there was no further room in the house and her friend could sadly not come to visit. What was more, Caitlin’s unmarried sister Brigit was pregnant with her second child. Having no money, she and her mother in Ringwood appealed unavailingly to Dylan, the supposed film mogul, for assistance.

  As an act of solidarity, as much as anything else, Bill and Helen McAlpine took a cottage in South Leigh at the end of November. Bill had been searching, without success, for a job in newspapers, but his wife still had funds and he wanted to be closer to his friend Harry Locke who was now living with Cordelia. It must have been very soon afterwards that Caitlin discovered that she too was pregnant. This at least gave Dylan one more reason for going to Wales. He celebrated by again breaking his arm, the upshot of a pre-Christmas shopping trip with Bill to Witney. They went by bicycle and it was not so coincidentally ‘market day’. On their return journey Dylan was knocked over by a lorry and his main purchase of assorted nuts spilled onto the road, leading to a variety of cracks about him losing or breaking his nuts. When Cordelia went to the Manor House to inform Caitlin her husband had been taken to hospital, she found her sitting happily, reading a Penguin and listening to Radio Luxembourg. ‘Showing off as usual,’ Caitlin spat out dismissively. ‘Always has to be the centre of the stage. Dylan. Dylan. Dylan … And what have I got? Another bloody baby to feed and change and prop up.’ On her way home, Cordelia passed the Mason’s Arms, where she found Dylan already ensconced, his presence advertised by the ambulance outside.

  Dylan’s injury gave him an excuse to delay various projects. But for all his skiving, he was still in demand professionally. The new year brought a couple of attractive offers from the BBC – an adaptation of William Wycherley’s bawdy Restoration comedy The Plain-Dealer, and a new version of Ibsen’s verse drama Peer Gynt for BBC television. Both ideas interested Dylan, even though the lead time for the Ibsen was just eight weeks and he had to admit ruefully that he had never seen a television drama and wanted to visit a studio to watch one being made.

  Before he could do so, Margaret Taylor came up with welcome news. After weeks of toing and froing, she had found him a place in Laugharne. Determined that he should have what he wanted, she had paid £3,000 for a lease on the Boat House, a six-roomed white cottage perched as if on stilts at the very edge of the river Taf. Dylan was thrilled: this was a place he and Caitlin had once identified as their dream house in Laugharne. What was more Margaret had arranged with Ebie Williams to rent a house on King Street, the main thoroughfare, for D.J. and Florrie. By February 1949 all the paperwork had been completed and Dylan was saying confidently, ‘In the Spring, we go to Wales to live in a house on an estuary.’

  Before that, he had one more place to go. In March, to his pregnant wife’s disgust, he took up an unexpected invitation to visit Czechoslovakia, and so blundered unconvincingly into the international political arena. Over the previous two years Europe’s bitter post-1945 divisions had hardened into outright Cold War, with the threat of atomic war ever present. Dylan was not the only person to feel frightened: at the other end of the social spectrum, Nancy Mitford had written to Evelyn Waugh about world events: ‘I wake up in the night sometimes in a cold sweat. Thank goodness for having no children, I can take a pill and say goodbye.’ Since then, the situation worsened. Hopes of pluralism in Eastern Europe were dashed with the Communist coup which overthrew the democratically elected liberal government in Czechoslovakia in February 1948. Although Marshal Tito’s show of anti-Mosco
w independence in Yugoslavia bucked this trend, the opposing battle lines were drawn more firmly when Washington sped to implement its Marshall Plan for the economic regeneration of Western Europe, establishing the framework which led to the setting up of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation in 1949, and the Soviet Union responded by preventing road and rail access to Berlin.

  With the political tub-thumping came cultural diplomacy. Vast official gatherings of writers and artists (sometimes described as peace conferences) were held, encouraged by the West (with the United States’s Central Intelligence Agency increasingly to the fore) in so far as they allowed intellectuals in Communist countries to maintain links with the outside world. Dylan had had a taste of the politicisation of culture in Italy. He also knew plenty of people who had attended such conferences. In August 1948 Alan Taylor had participated in the grandiose Congress of Intellectuals for World Peace in Wroclaw (formerly the German city of Breslau) in Poland. Although sympathetic to Soviet aspirations in Eastern Europe (anything was better than the Germans, he felt), the historian nevertheless angered his hosts by demanding that their attacks on imperialism should be directed towards Russia as much as to America.

  Dylan knew many other Communist fellow-travellers. The combination of his political naivety, innate anti-authoritarianism and horror of war made him naturally sympathetic to talk of peace among his left-wing friends. Inevitably, mixing in interlocking circles of broadcasters, artists, film-makers, drunkards and academics, he came across many 1930s-style Communists, such as John Sommerfield, who had fought in Spain, and Jack Lindsay, brother of his former fellow scriptwriter. Dylan told Lindsay around this time, ‘If all the party members were like you and John Sommerfield, I’d join up on the spot.’

  Linked with these two, trying to ensure Marxism’s continuing intellectual respectability, was the Wykehamist poet and journalist Randall Swingler who, inter alia, edited Our Time, a Communist party-sanctioned magazine which had first published Dylan’s poem ‘Ceremony After a Fire Raid’ in May 1944. Having worked in various capacities at the Left Book Club and Daily Worker, Swingler had had high hopes of a Labour culture that drew on the working man’s experiences of war. However, after fighting in North Africa and Italy, he was bitter that his brand of English radicalism and poetry in the tradition of Blake had been marginalised, and that Britain’s new cultural commissars were bourgeois figures such as Orwell and Spender who, he wrongly suggested, had never been near a battle-front.

  When the new Communist regime in Prague wanted British participants at the inauguration of a writers’ union, Lindsay recommended Dylan to Aloys Skoumal, the sophisticated cultural attaché at the Czech embassy, who had translated classic English authors such as Swift and Sterne. Dylan knew something of Czech poetry from a wartime acquaintance with Jiri Mucha, son of the art nouveau painter Alphonse Mucha. Mucha had worked with John Lehmann on Daylight, a cultural magazine for Czechs that operated as an offshoot to Penguin New Writing, and had also helped Norman Cameron translate the Czech poet, Vitezslav Nezval. In an earlier incarnation, Nezval had been a writer on Hedy Lamarr’s sultry film Ecstasy in the 1930s; by a curious trick of history, he was head of the Czech Ministry of Information in 1949. After spending an evening at Skoumal’s house in Willesden, north London, Dylan was happy to accept his invitation to go to Prague.

  Louis MacNeice, the only other invitee, smelt a Stalinist propaganda ploy, and declined to reply. So Dylan was on his own when he flew to the Czech capital in March 1949. Caitlin would have liked to accompany him, but he preferred to escape family commitments, leaving her wondering if once again he was having an affair. She could only fulminate at the restrictions enforced by her pregnancy, while Dylan to her chagrin was enjoying himself in Prague.

  The weather there was bitterly cold and the food poor, but he enjoyed playing the cultural tourist, which seemed to involve little more than talking, drinking and visiting the opera. He also liked the city, which John Davenport astutely remarked appealed to his Gothic imagination. (By the same token, Dylan’s lack of sympathy with classicism had contributed to his unease in Italy.) An early call was lunch with Jiri Mucha, and he also met other writers, including the poets Nezval and Vladimir Holan and the novelist Jan Drda. He spent an evening with Edwin Muir, an acquaintance from his early days in London, and now Director of the British Institute in Prague. Because of the cold, Dylan bought a fur hat to wear with his yellow duffel coat. Apart from being coveted as a fashion item – a symbol of capitalist individualism, like jeans in later years – the coat marked him out as a foreigner when he walked around town. On such occasions, he liked to give his official minders the slip and disappear into a bar. He became so annoyed with the unwanted presence of one translator that he mounted the Charles Bridge, embraced a statue and threatened to jump into the river.

  In his official capacity Dylan was more conciliatory, particularly when he attended the inevitable conference celebrating the writers’ union. Unlike the combative Alan Taylor in Wrocaw, he gave a cringing speech about his respect for the Czech revolution. But at the end of six days in Prague his enthusiasm for the union had waned. He had initially liked the idea of an organisation that catered for creative people and paid them a wage even if they were not working. But local authors alerted him to their fears of creeping totalitarianism. On his last night in Prague he went to a small private party to meet Holan, an unusual event, since the poet hardly ever left his own flat. For one of the guests Dylan scribbled a poem which compared the union to a cage. Then he crumpled it up, saying he did not want it misused by the capitalist press. Holan left after an hour, but Dylan stayed all night, treating his hosts and their guests to some dialogue from his ongoing play about a Welsh village. On leaving he wrote in a visitors’ book that he had been taught that there were only two kinds of people in Prague – slaves and bosses – but in this flat he had met people who were neither slaves nor bosses ‘but my friends’.

  SEVENTEEN

  VIEW FROM THE SHED

  Dylan was returning not just to a place he loved but to a way of life. With his mother and father also settling in the same Welsh village, he was rediscovering the world of his childhood. Why Caitlin, who had complained vigorously about D.J. and Florence in South Leigh, went along with this is curious. She probably believed what Dylan had told Frances Hughes – that at Laugharne he would be able to work.

  The main change since he had lived there at the start of the decade was the war-related growth of the weapons research establishment at Pendine, which had become the major employer of former fisherfolk. Otherwise the ancient Corporation, with the portreeve at its head, still administered the town, while the ubiquitous Williams family provided for its more mundane daily requirements. As always, Laugharne’s singular history and constitution attracted a broad range of unusual inhabitants, who displayed many of the anarchic high spirits of South Leigh.

  As its name implied, the Boat House gave Dylan a different perspective from his previous dwellings in the town. Originally two fishermen’s cottages, it had been knocked into one in the early years of the century to serve as a holiday home for a Worcestershire doctor. There were six cramped rooms and a kitchen with a coal-fired Rayburn stove. Otherwise conditions were predictably basic. At the time Dylan moved in there was no electricity or running water, though Margaret Taylor soon helped install both. The house’s position, set tight against a red sandstone cliff, made for dampness which was not helped by the sea lapping against its lower walls at high tide. It was a haven for rats.

  On the other hand, not many buildings have their own private harbour at the back or an outside wooden verandah offering magnificent views over the Taf estuary. In her throwaway style, Caitlin transformed the inside, which had to cater for two children and another on the way. Her pièce de résistance was the lavish dressing table in the main bedroom, which she adorned with white net and ribbons and covered with her own exotic potions and scents. Since there was no handrail on the internal staircase, the rope banister be
came a feature, adding to a nautical feel, though Llewelyn, now aged ten and a boarder at Magdalen College School, had different ideas, insisting on his own room which he decorated with photographs of African tribesmen.

  Forty-one steps led above the roof level to a path, which ran along the side of the cliff and into the town. Some hundred yards in that direction stood a smallish wooden building, once the garage for the doctor’s Wolsey, when it was the only motor car in Laugharne. This shed was commandeered by Dylan as his place of work. He plastered its walls with pictures of art plucked from magazines, including an Italian primitive and a Rouault, and with photographs of writers he admired such as Walt Whitman and a youthful Edith Sitwell. And then he began to write.

  As his children soon learnt, Dylan had a routine. In the mornings he would read, before venturing along the cliff path for his daily visit to his parents at their new house, called Pelican, opposite Brown’s Hotel, on King Street. He liked to stay there to complete The Times crossword with his father. Around mid-day he went across the road for a drink or two, and for an update on the local gossip from Ivy Williams. Florrie sometimes made noises about his pub visits – ‘Now, don’t think I’m interfering, dear, I just happened to be looking out of the window as you fell down Brown’s steps’ – but, according to Caitlin, she did ‘that Welsh trick’ of pretending her son did not drink. At two Dylan made his way back to his shed (now warmed, in the winter months, by the anthracite stove Caitlin had lit in the morning) and he wrote until the early evening. Then he would descend to the Boat House where, if he was lucky, Caitlin had boiled some water for a bath. He would sit in the tub, reading, eating sweets or pickled onions, and sipping a fizzy drink, until it was time for supper, followed by another visit to the pub. Llewelyn and Aeronwy were not allowed to disturb him during those crucial afternoon working hours. Even when they could hear him murmuring to himself, trying out lines of his endless drafts of verse, they knew they had to creep past.