Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  From his ‘water and tree room on the cliff’, Dylan looked out over the estuary, where at low tide the sandbanks teamed with cormorants and the odd stately heron which reminded him of Edith Sitwell. To his right, he could see Sir John’s Hill standing sentinel over the town. The hill epitomised the quirky history of Laugharne, taking its name from Sir John Perrot, one time occupant of the Castle and supposedly a bastard son of King Henry VIII. Lord Deputy of Ireland, Perrot died in the Tower of London after being sentenced to death for treason under Queen Elizabeth I.

  The McAlpines accompanied the Thomases to Laugharne and helped them settle in at the beginning of May 1949. By the middle of the month an increasingly pregnant Caitlin was beginning to feel at home. She too fell into a pattern – swimming in the river, sunbathing on the verandah (often, as quickly became known, in the nude), painting and sometimes, though she tended to hide her efforts from Dylan, writing poems. She sacked her first daily help, an ‘old ugly dumbie’, and took on her ‘treasure’, the dependable Dolly Long who, not unusually for Laugharne, came unmarried but with a child, five-year-old Desmond, a potential playmate at least for the Thomas children. She also saw off Lynette Roberts, who had left her husband Keidrych Rhys and seemed to think that the Thomases should accommodate her.

  In mid-May Dylan felt relaxed enough to write a belated thank-you letter from his shed to Margaret Taylor: ‘Here I am happy and writing.’ Soon his first poem appeared – a meditation on the view towards Sir John’s Hill which, like a judge with a wig of elm trees, looks out retributively on the unthinking, murderous ways of nature, as the ‘hawk on fire’ swoops on the feeding birds in the bay below. In ‘Over Sir John’s hill’ with its assonantal rhymes in each stanza, Dylan creates a glittering verbal snap-shot of the Laugharne seashore, capturing both its diurnal langour and its fleeting moments of action, in a manner reminiscent of both the movement of a nineteenth-century Japanese print and the tooth-and-claw passion of a Ted Hughes poem. Since Dylan had written so little over the previous couple of years, Caitlin regarded this as a favourable sign and tried to encourage him by starting a notebook for him on 1 June – one where, as in the old days, he could assemble his preferred verses.

  Dylan’s sense of well-being was boosted when, around the third week of May, he received an invitation which would change his life. For years he had been yearning for some way of getting to the United States. In April 1949 John Malcolm Brinnin, an ambitious poet and critic in his early thirties, was appointed director of the Poetry Center at the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association (YM-YWHA) in New York. The Center had a regular programme of talks and cultural events. Wanting to make an immediate mark, Brinnin wrote, within ten days of starting his job, asking if, for a fee of $500, Dylan would like to read there. He also offered to act on Dylan’s behalf in arranging additional lectures.

  Because of Dylan’s recent move to Wales, the letter took some time reaching him. Once he had digested it, he wrote a remarkably clear-headed and businesslike response (particularly as he claimed to be suffering from ’flu). He said he would be delighted to take up the offer, preferably in early 1950. But he insisted that, after having had his fares and expenses paid, he would have to return to England with some money in his pocket.

  Laugharne was so attractive in early summer that the McAlpines came again in early June, intending to stay until Caitlin had her baby. Without the Thomases’ company they had tired of South Leigh and particularly of Cordelia: ‘We escaped London and ran smack into Charlotte Street of the 20s’, they wrote jointly to a friend. They felt sorry for their actor friend Harry Locke who had just returned from filming in Austria. ‘How he picks them – lesbians, blood-letters, spiders; and now a spiritual vampire. The little Acton boy rides on his love boat with a cargo of snakes.’ With their extrovert manner and obvious wealth, the McAlpines were popular in Laugharne. But when Dylan took time off to entertain them, his work was quickly neglected. Though the BBC still required its commissioned scripts for Peer Gynt and The Plain-Dealer, he did not produce them. Instead he sent excuses, claiming so many varieties of illness that certain apparatchiks became cynical. After he had written to one producer, saying he had gastritis and was ‘about to be X-rayed for many an ulcerous fear’, someone in the office, clearly not a friend, noted, ‘He looked pretty lively in Great Portland Street today.’ At other times he complained of gout and difficulty peeing (perhaps a recurrence of his old gonorrhoea).

  More seriously, now that his film work had dried up (only Vanity Fair remained to be finished) he was again in dire financial straits. Within three months of returning to Laugharne, his supplies of coal (vital for keeping the house warm) had been cut off, the milk was about to be stopped, and he was having difficulty paying his rates, as well as the butcher and the builder. On his trip to London, he had bounced several cheques at the Savage Club. Once again Margaret Taylor helped out, and Dylan was forced to acknowledge the national debt he owed her.

  He and Caitlin did manage to travel to Wiltshire to stay with Mervyn Levy who had taken over Jankel Adler’s cottage, following the latter’s death in April. Levy took them up to the big house where James Bomford was holding one of his celebrated parties. Offered some punch by her host, Caitlin took hold of the jug and swigged directly from it. Dylan got so drunk that, although he somehow made his way back to the cottage, he was unable to rouse himself to go to the lavatory. Levy was disconcerted to discover the next morning that his old friend had wet his mattress.

  That day Levy was joined by a former army friend, Desmond Morris, who was embarking on the career as a zoologist that would make him famous but who was at the time better known as an artist. Just before lunch Dylan emerged groggily, complaining of the poet’s lot. One of Morris’s paintings happened to be standing at the corner of the dining room. ‘Now look at that,’ said Dylan. ‘You can sell that, can’t you? The painter makes an object that can be sold. But not the poet.’ He took from his pocket a piece of paper which may or may not have contained a poem. ‘Now I can’t sell that, can I? No one would buy that bit of paper, would they?’ Morris was not particularly impressed by the juvenile animal jokes with which Dylan tried to amuse him. (Example: There were two rhinos and one said to the other, ‘I wonder why I keep thinking it’s Thursday.’) But, after settling down to lunch, Morris came to understand the poet’s qualities. Obsessed with the small size of one man the previous evening, Dylan skewered a potato with his fork and began to boom into it, as if a microphone, ‘Our midget which art in heaven, miniature be thy name’. By the time he reached the end of his spoof Lord’s Prayer with the words, ‘For ever and ever, Tom Thumb’, Morris was amazed at his facility with words. (Morris only met one other person with this gift – John Lennon, whose debt to Dylan was acknowledged by Paul McCartney: ‘We all used to like Dylan Thomas. I read him a lot. I think that John started writing because of him.’)

  Soon afterwards Caitlin’s travels came to a temporary halt. On 24 July, she had been swimming energetically near Pendine. On returning home, she experienced pains that she knew meant she was in labour. Since Dylan was nowhere to be found, she contacted Ebie Williams at Brown’s Hotel who drove her into Carmarthen Hospital, where her second son Colm Garan (an Irish name followed by the Welsh word for heron) was born. Dylan greeted this event much as the births of his other children: he abandoned his wife and family, and went off on a binge. The details are sketchy, but he was down in London the following week to record a talk on Edward Thomas whose careful observation of nature had influenced ‘Over Sir John’s hill’.

  In London Dylan stayed with Bob Pocock and with John Davenport (both of whom were newly married). Pocock sent an ambiguous note to Dan and Irene Jones hinting that their mutual friend had not only been drunk but had spent time in a seedy dockside brothel. Dylan did little to indicate otherwise in a letter to Davenport the following week, in which he mentioned feeling ‘rather bruised’ after his ‘tearful jags’ in London. He explained himself by reference to his fina
ncial problems, adding that he had had a minor breakdown.

  Back in Laugharne he stirred himself to put the finishing touches to ‘Over Sir John’s hill’ and send it to Botteghe Oscure, a Rome-based literary magazine which had solicited something of his work. It was run by the enterprising Marguerite Caetani, Princess di Bassiano. Born in Connecticut, she had joined the pre-First World War exodus of American women to Europe where she had married an Italian prince who shared her devotion to the arts. While living in Paris between the wars, she ran a journal called Commerce which published Paul Valéry and, in translation, Joyce and T. S. Eliot. After moving to Italy, she started Botteghe Oscure, meaning literally ‘dark shops’, after a district in Rome where the Caetani family had started in business, though it also housed the headquarters of both the Communists and the Jesuits, which gave the phrase a Machiavellian connotation in Italian. The multi-lingual magazine quickly developed a reputation for paying well for first-rate work by authors ranging from Truman Capote to Giuseppe di Lampedusa. The Princess seemed to know her man for her initial request to Dylan for a poem in June had come with payment in advance.

  He was soon labouring over another more complicated offering for Botteghe Oscure. He told Vernon Watkins he spent three weeks on the first line of ‘In the White Giant’s Thigh’ – ‘Through throats where many rivers meet, the curlews cry’. The view from his shed is there, but the poem itself is the first part of a wider-ranging state of the universe message, as recorded around the time of his thirty-fifth birthday. As his more accessible ‘Poem on his Birthday’ showed, this was an important milestone: he felt he had reached the middle of his three score years and ten, and was on the slippery, depressing downward path. This required him to look out not just on the estuary below him but on the wider world, which was not a pretty sight. ‘In the White Giant’s Thigh’ is ostensibly about Dylan’s visit to an ancient fertility symbol – probably the Cerne Abbas giant in Dorset, not far from Blashford – and his empathy with the women who, after a life of active but barren sexuality, resorted to visiting this phallic centre in search of some sympathetic magic which would help them conceive. It is also an anguished reflection on his own failure to produce verse. As the introduction to a longer poem, it pointed to Dylan’s despair at a godless world where the atomic bomb can reduce all to barrenness.

  As usual, there were distracting trips, mainly to London where, unrealistically, he hoped for Louis MacNeice’s BBC job after his friend joined the British Council in Athens, and to Swansea for a programme on the town and its recent artistic flowering, made with his old friends Vernon Watkins, Fred Janes, Dan Jones and John Prichard. As compere, Dylan reprised his recent ideas about the difficulties of being a creative Welshman. With his uncanny knack, he struck the right note by remarking that Swansea was the most romantic town he knew.

  He was supposed to attend the annual dinner of the Swansea branch of the British Medical Association as guest of honour in October, but, as he explained in an unnecessarily facetious letter of apology three months later, he had set off from London with good intentions. But before reaching Paddington station, he had met a rich friend with a sports car who offered him a lift as far as Bristol. En route the car had been involved in an accident. What he admitted sounded like ‘a thin tall story’ was, in fact, partly true: the friend was Tony Hubbard, the spoilt son of a Woolworth heiress and an old army colleague of Mervyn Levy, whom they were hoping to visit in Bristol. Hubbard dispensed his money liberally in projects which ranged from collecting early Francis Bacon paintings to subsidising Dylan Thomas. In late 1949 he was being courted by Dylan and various cronies to finance a new magazine which would offer a radical religious perspective on a world made more dangerous by the Soviet Union’s recent explosion of its own atomic bomb. The people behind the project were John Davenport, a right-wing Europhile Catholic, and Randall Swingler, a Marxist who had tired of the British Communist party’s kow-towing to Moscow and had let his Marxist magazine Our Time fold. Making their own literary Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the two men had set up Arena, a ‘literary magazine interested in values’, with the slogan, ‘European, with no Iron Curtain’. But, despite Edith Sitwell’s support and Dylan’s unfulfilled promises of contributions, that was already floundering. So plans were afoot to steer Hubbard’s wealth towards a more marketable journal called Circus.

  On the occasion Dylan was to address the Welsh doctors, he doubtless did think he would reach Bristol and take a train on to Swansea. But he, Hubbard and another passenger, the poet turned advertising man Bernard Gutteridge, stopped off in Oxford to see Dan Davin. Before long Hubbard had produced some chicken and a bottle of champagne from the back of his car, and Dylan used the opportunity to try out some verse he intended to read in America. When he reached the last of several poems by Hardy, he burst into tears. Davin remarked astutely in his diary the following day: ‘Dylan is very emotional but like a good Welshman also very suspicious. Thus when he has expressed himself very warmly, in fact exposed himself, he will suddenly react violently towards a self-sneering cynicism. It imparts a curious rhythm to his talk.’ There was also much talk of books and magazines, and the New Zealander gained the impression he was being paraded in his professional capacity as a publisher to impress Hubbard.

  The upshot was that Dylan and his friends stayed the night. After a liquid lunch they then proceeded to Bristol. En route Hubbard’s car did indeed have a collision, which led to Dylan spending the next night at Levy’s and missing his appointment with the Swansea doctors.

  He was prevented from giving one of his great unwritten speeches. He might have put some flesh on his amorphous left-wing views and articulated his true attitude to the new National Health Service, the pearl of the new Labour government, but he balked, perhaps alarmed, as often in the past, at having to make a public statement. His politics in this period did creep out, however. A couple of years earlier he had earned three guineas for his apothegm printed in the I-n-s-u-l-t-s column of Strand magazine: ‘One should tolerate the Labour government because running down Labour eventually brings you alongside the Conservatives, which is the last place you want to be.’ His Socialism was apparent in a later talk about America, in which he satirised ‘the brassy-bossy men-women, with corrugated-iron perms, and hippo hides, who come, self-announced, as “ordinary British housewives”, to talk to rich minked chunks of American matron-hood about the iniquity of the Health Services, the criminal sloth of the miners, the visible tail and horns of Mr Aneurin Bevan, and the fear of everyone in England to go out alone at night because of the organized legions of cosh boys against whom the police are powerless.’ In Laugharne, which was old-fashioned Welsh Liberal in its politics, this was dangerously left-wing stuff. When he voiced an opinion there about living in a slave state, he claimed he was almost struck down.

  His most passionate political stance continued to be his opposition to war in the era of the atomic bomb. He battled to find ways of representing the threat of an impending holocaust in his poetry. But when it came to specific issues, he remained adamant that, as in the 1930s, politics had little place in the arts, excusing himself for failing to make yet another meeting with Davenport by poking fun at Arena’s political commitment: ‘I got caught up with rewording a petition against decadent tendencies in the cultural field.’ On a practical level, however, he signed the Stockholm Peace Appeal in 1950 and the Authors’ World Peace Appeal the following year. The former was a Soviet-inspired attempt to hijack the cold war pacifist movement, and the latter was a follow-up designed to attract writers and other opinion-formers. As with his trip to Prague, Dylan acted more with his heart than his mind. In matters of realpolitik, he remained an ingénue. However that is not to underestimate the strength of his feelings. When Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for spying for the Soviet Union against the United States in June 1953, he described it as ‘murder’ which ‘should make all men sick and mad’.

  By the autumn, news of Dylan’s impending visit to the United States wa
s beginning to percolate through American literary circles. The prospect of hearing him speak was creating excitement. Lloyd Frankenberg was a New York-based poet and critic who had recently written Pleasure Dome, a well-documented book stressing the importance of a poet’s voice in communicating the meaning of verse. Dylan, at his request, sent him a tape of ‘Poem in October’ and ‘In my craft or sullen art’ for re-mixing onto a long-playing record of poets reading their work. Frankenberg asked him to contribute to a series of poetry readings he ran at the Museum of Modern Art, where the work of his artist wife Loren MacIver was on display. In October the modest, inventive Elizabeth Bishop, Poetry Consultant (now known as Poet Laureate) at the Library of Congress, wrote to Brinnin saying she had seen advertisements for Dylan’s forthcoming visit to the YM-YWHA and wondered how he might be contacted to give a similar talk at the Library in Washington.

  Interest was further stimulated by New Directions’ publication of an anthology, The New British Poets, edited by Kenneth Rexroth, a fiery San Francisco poet who inspired the pre-Beat generation of West Coast versifiers. Describing Dylan’s impact as ‘a cultural coup d’état’, Rexroth enthused, ‘If Auden dominated the recent past, Dylan Thomas dominates the present. There can be no question but that he is the most influential young poet writing in England today … He takes you by the neck and rubs your nose in it. He hits you across the face with a reeking, bloody heart, a heart full of worms and needles and black blood and thorns, a werewolf heart …’