Once he learnt of the visit, James Laughlin, hoping to cash in, asked Dylan if he had any spare poems which might be collected in a book. But Dylan had nothing to hand except the few chapters of his book Adventures in the Skin Trade. Laughlin was not prepared to offer an advance on this ‘because I have gotten the impression from your delay in finishing it that you are really not terribly keen about it’. The publisher had to be content with the forthcoming limited Mardersteig edition of Dylan’s poems, which had been delayed as a result of illness and currency devaluations.
Oddly Dylan did not mention his American visit to Laughlin until mid-October when he casually asked, ‘Have you heard that I’m supposed to be coming to the States in February 1950?’ Laughlin almost certainly had, and it was probably he who encouraged Bishop to approach Brinnin. But Dylan was wary of his New York publisher who had not been keen on his travelling to North America three years earlier. So both men were happy to allow Brinnin to continue to take the lead in arranging this lecture tour. The Poetry Center director played his hand well. He offered Dylan a New York apartment, as well as what he described as a ‘country retreat’ in the upstate artists’ community at Yaddo. He did not press himself too strongly, proposing, in return for arranging a country-wide programme of readings and lectures, to take just 15 per cent commission, rather than the usual agency fees which could amount to three times as much. One selling point he did put forward was his closeness to the college poetry market. But when, by the end of November, requests for Dylan’s presence began to mount up, he expressed genuine concern about the poet’s ability to fulfil a gruelling tour. ‘I don’t want to turn your American visit into a kind of drudgery, and yet I hate to pass up opportunities which might enhance the financial aspect of your tour.’
One unresolved issue for Dylan was what to do with his wife. Colm’s birth had left her physically weaker than with her previous two children. She admitted she was so worried she could not eat and she was more resentful than usual about being left on her own in Wales. When Glyn Jones went to Laugharne in mid-October to discuss with Dylan a BBC programme about being a writer, he found Caitlin by turns indifferent and hostile to her husband, to whom she snapped, ‘I thought you were not going to broadcast any more. And this, giving away your secrets.’ Jones was surprised at the deterioration in Dylan’s appearance. His friend looked fat and comical in baggy trousers, his teeth were brown and crooked, his nose had grown vast and bulbous, and his once golden hair was dark and matted.
Another visitor to Laugharne was Allen Curnow, a young New Zealand poet whom Dylan had met in London at the start of the year and who, sharing his love of cricket, had accompanied him and Louis MacNeice to Lords. Down in Wales, Dylan was still working on his film script of Vanity Fair, though he fulminated that Margaret Lockwood, who had been cast as Becky Sharp, was ‘a rotten actress’. He tried to drag Curnow to the Rhondda where he had been talking about setting a big new poem, ‘a kind of colloquial Lycidas’. His other versifying seemed stalled, however, and he said despondently, ‘The craze for me is over. They won’t like what I’m doing now.’ He was more interested in testing out his proposed readings for America – W. H. Davies, Yeats, MacNeice, Auden and Hardy, including a poignant version of ‘To Lizbie Brown’. He wanted to make an immediate impact on his audience with modern British poems which he copied carefully into a large anthology. When he took Curnow to Brown’s, he wept unashamedly when a Welsh girl with a crystal voice stood up and sang an unaccompanied Victorian ballad called ‘Daddy’, with the lines: ‘They were given to me by your mother dear/The night before she died.’
In mid-November John Deakin, a louche young Soho photographer, came to shoot some pictures for Flair, a glossy new American magazine published by Condé Nast. Dylan took pleasure in taking Deakin to St Martin’s church and having himself pictured in a grave, his unusually long hair blowing in the wind. Depending on the printing, the image can look remarkably ghostly.
Even now Dylan was still thinking Caitlin might accompany him to America. He hoped Brigit would take Colm for three months, while Nancy and her husband Gordon moved to the Boat House to look after Aeronwy and his parents. But by the end of the month he had changed his mind: ‘It would be difficult, expensive, and, I think, bad for her,’ he told Margaret Taylor, apropos his wife. ‘She wants a long and utter rest.’
This did little to appease Caitlin, who stormed off to Ringwood with her children for Christmas. Restless there, she joined Dylan in Oxford where they asked Dan Davin if they could stay a couple of days which became a week. They were not easy guests: Davin found a little of the Thomases went ‘a long way – not that I tire of Dylan’s company but I tire of its consequences. And also his mode of arguments – emotional and assertive – gets on my nerves a bit.’ From an academic’s perspective, which summed up Dylan’s worst fears, he added, ‘For he hasn’t a first class brain, or at least a trained one, and a great deal of noise is spent on perceptions which are either obvious or absurd.’ On this occasion Davin sensed that Caitlin was apprehensive about Dylan’s imminent departure. ‘She tended, when in the pub, to become distant, remote, hostile even. An uneasiness would spread out from her and it was difficult to know which of us was provoking it.’ To Mary Keene she tried unconvincingly to remain upbeat, telling her of Dylan’s plans, though she wondered what would happen to her while he was away.
His wife’s anger did little to calm Dylan’s own nerves. To add to his worries, he had fallen and cracked his ribs, his father had contracted pneumonia in the new year, and there were the usual financial concerns, which were hardly addressed by a generous if inadequate Christmas box from Marguerite Caetani. Having met her in London, he was now promising her a story which failed to materialise. When she expressed concern about his drinking, he assured her it was not a problem: ‘it is only frightening when I am whirlingly perplexed, when my ordinary troubles are magnified into monsters.’ Otherwise he was ‘a dull, happy fellow only wanting to put into words, never into useless, haphazard, ugly & unhappy action, the ordered turbulence, the ubiquitous and rinsing grief, the unreasonable glory, of the world I know and don’t know.’ Quickly falling into her prescribed role as another rich patroness, the Princess further tried to ease his way in America by offering to put him in touch with the poet Archibald MacLeish, one of her contributors, and with her sisters in New York and Washington. But even at the end of January 1950, three weeks before his departure, his visa had not yet come through and he asked John Davenport if he knew any US consular official who might expedite matters. When he visited the American embassy in London, he found he had left his passport and cheque book in Laugharne, and Caitlin had to send them on. He did not help himself by showing annoyance when asked about his visit to Prague and its financing.
At this stage Brinnin was beginning to feel concern. A cultivated homosexual who lived with his mother in Connecticut, he kept hearing alarming stories (from W. H. Auden and e. e. cummings among others) about Dylan’s tantrums and unreliability. ‘Thomas’s silence is a worry,’ he confided to his more sexually adventurous lover Bill Read, ‘and in another day or two I’ll be ready to cable, to learn probably only the true extent of his defection.’ This was all the more troubling as the invitations were piling up. The British ambassador Sir Oliver Franks had offered to hold a reception when Dylan came to Washington. Ruthven Todd, who was pursuing his idiosyncratic literary-cum-artistic career on the fringes of the abstract expressionist movement in Greenwich Village, had offered a bed in his study. And Brinnin was intrigued that the out-of-the-way Roman Catholic university Notre Dame in South Bend, Illinois, was getting in on the act and requesting a reading by Dylan.
Eventually, on 13 February, Dylan had to borrow money from his mother to travel to the American consulate in Cardiff to pick up his visa. He continued from there to London to visit a dentist and to finalise arrangements for Caitlin’s finances while he was away. He turned to his rich friend Tony Hubbard who agreed to send Caitlin a regular stipend in retur
n for Dylan penning a quick article on ‘How to be a Poet’ for his proposed magazine Circus. Though hardly qualified to address the sub-theme, ‘Can poetry be made good business?’ Dylan playfully charted the literary career of an unworldly civil servant turned poet. He sprinkled his text with unpromising in-jokes that he infused with his own brand of humour, such as his comment that if his hero Cedric Cribbe had written verse in the 1920s, it would have been ‘a cunningly evocative pudding full of plums pulled from the Sitwells and Sacheverell other people, a mildly cacophonous hothouse of exotic horticultural and comic-erotic bric-à-brac, from which I extract these typical lines:
A cornucopia of phalluses
Cascade on the vermillion palaces
In arabesques and syrup rigadoons …’
Incorporating a gag from his Kardomah days, this parody poked fun at Edith Sitwell in a way no-one else who knew her would have attempted, let alone got away with.
Dylan remained in London to fulfil an undertaking to appear in a reading of Picasso’s surrealist play Desire Caught by the Tail, which was being presented at the Rudolf Steiner Hall to celebrate the second anniversary of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. He had lent his support to the Institute, the brain-child of his old friend Roland Penrose (whose wife Lee Miller had photographed him three years earlier, for American Vogue when it printed Holiday Memory). However there were still aspects of London sophistication which alarmed his Welsh Nonconformist conscience. Knowing that Penrose was a sado-masochist, with a penchant for whipping, he became alarmed when he learnt that Vogue journalist Rosamond Bernier was living at Penrose’s house in Hampstead. ‘I won’t have you tied up,’ Dylan told her earnestly. According to Bernier, ‘Some girlfriend of his had been tied up in Roland’s house. It was funny that Dylan, who was very hard drinking and living, had quite a conventional attitude to that. I told him, “thanks, but I can look after myself.” ’
But when it came to artistic expression Dylan had no inhibitions. Refreshing his avant-garde credentials in advance of his American visit, Dylan had, in his role as Stage Manager, to inform the audience of imaginary stage props and directions such as the ‘immense bath-tub full of soap suds’ from which The Tart ‘gets out stark naked, except for her stockings’.
With his departure only four days off, he might have stayed in London. Instead he took his regular third-class sleeper back to Carmarthen in order to say goodbye to his parents. At the weekend a small party travelled from Laugharne back up to London. Probably driven by Billy Williams, it included Ivy Williams and Caitlin, as well as Dylan. Their immediate destination was Margaret Taylor’s new house in Park Village East, just off Regent’s Park, where she was living while her husband was taking a year’s leave of absence from Magdalen. He had since tired of her obsession with Dylan and moved to a nearby flat. In her desire to give Dylan a rousing send-off, poor, scorned, infuriatingly ardent Margaret was free to gather the McAlpines and other friends for a bibulous party, followed by lunch of oysters and Guinness at Wheeler’s the following day.
EIGHTEEN
A VOICE ON WHEELS
Dylan loved the United States for its cowboys and its cartoons. He had been attracted by them as a young boy and, to the surprise of many people who regarded him as a poet preoccupied with weighty issues of life and death, he had no reason to change his mind. Such examples of American culture epitomised for him the best of the country – its capacity for innovation, humour and surprise. That New World energy created the humorists he liked. It fuelled not just the films of the Marx Brothers but also the thrillers of Dashiell Hammett and the novels of Nelson Algren. It had been apparent in the cast of Anna Lucasta. It also threw up critics who were open to Dylan’s subject-matter and technique. As John Sweeney, a Harvard academic with one-time links to transition in Paris, had written in his introduction to Selected Writings, Dylan’s ‘poetry springs directly from primitive and traditional sources, but it is peculiarly the poetry of his own time. It is the record of a struggle towards spiritual rebirth.’ Such notes were encouraging, and helped maintain interest in Dylan’s work.
Not that Dylan really knew much about the United States. It might be a place of great vitality and also a place where he could earn a decent living. But he had little idea of the profound changes that had taken place over the previous decade. By 1950 the influx of mainly Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Europe was beginning to make its presence felt in America’s intellectual and cultural life, and nowhere more so than in New York. Radical thinkers such as Erich Fromm at the New School for Social Research were introducing new psychoanalytical techniques to American criticism. Artists such as Max Ernst, often associated with the Guggenheim Gallery, were stimulating painters and sculptors and creating a new American genre known as abstract expressionism. Such influences – and others more locally generated, such as the prevalence of black music, particularly jazz – were entering the wider culture, where they were seized on by a generation of ex-soldiers eagerly seeking education under the provisions of the post-war GI Bill.
Within New York’s avant garde, two tendencies were apparent, based, roughly speaking on the opposite sides of Greenwich Village. The West Village tended to be more sympathetic to tradition (even if trying to go beyond it), slightly more affluent and more in tune with uptown media such as the New Yorker and Harper’s Bazaar. The East side was less accommodating towards the establishment. It provided the crucible for the early work of Beat writers, such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, for radical film makers such as the youthful Kenneth Anger, and for Frank O’Hara and the New York school of poets who were determined to make something of the language of the American street in the way Wilhelm de Kooning and his colleagues had pioneered an indigenous school of painting in abstract expressionism.
For some Americans, these developments were proving hard to stomach. In Washington a patriotic strain of conservatism was emerging. In January 1950 the former State Department official Alger Hiss had been convicted of lying to Congress’s powerful House Un-American Activities Committee about having once been a Russian agent. And on 9 February, less than a fortnight before Dylan’s arrival, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin announced he had a list of Communists working in the State Department. His great anti-Communist witch-hunt had begun.
Such thoughts were a long way from Dylan’s mind when he first stepped out on American soil at Idlewild airport, New York, on 21 February. It was a bright, freezing morning, and he was glad of the warmth of his old duffel coat. Clutching a copy of Max Beerbohm’s Seven Men, a parting gift from John Davenport, he shook hands cagily with the dapper, balding John Malcolm Brinnin, who had risen early to meet him. Then, complaining of a terrible flight caused partly by a massive hangover and partly by sitting next to a man in a dark suit whose opening conversational gambit was ‘You know, Hitler was a much misunderstood man’, he proceeded directly to the bar to order a breakfast of double Scotch and soda. Once refreshed, he could see the world in a better light. He was most impressed by the sight of his host’s black Studebaker in the parking lot. Looking out over the unprepossessing suburb of Queens, as they sped towards Manhattan, he trilled, ‘I knew America would be just like this.’ As they entered an underpass on the throughway, Brinnin idly compared the experience to the womb. ‘Ee-ee-EE,’ roared Dylan, appreciatively. ‘It does remind me of Mummy.’ But when they came to the point where Manhattan’s glittering skyscrapers appeared on the skyline ahead, the first-time visitor was stunned into silence by the magnificent sight.
He had another stunning panoramic view of the city from his thirtieth-floor room in the mid-town Beekman Tower Hotel. By this time the excitement was beginning to pall. Peering through a plate glass window at the teeming city below, he had vertigo and became apprehensive: ‘it is all an enormous façade of speed and efficiency and power behind which millions of little individuals are wrestling, in vain, with their own anxieties.’ After a bloody encounter shaving, he was happy to be brought down to earth, both literally and metaphorically,
in Costello’s, an Irish bar with a familiar feel, round the corner from the hotel.
On a whistle-stop sight-seeing tour, Brinnin claims to have been so alarmed at Dylan’s coughing fits that he mentioned them to him. According to Brinnin’s intriguing, not wholly accurate and occasionally self-serving memoir Dylan Thomas in America, Dylan said he had a liver condition, adding, as if it was nothing, ‘I think it’s called cirrhosis of the liver.’ This was an unlikely comment but, for Brinnin, who was later accused of failing to prevent Dylan drinking himself to death, it helped establish that the Welshman was in poor physical shape when he first arrived in the United Estates.
After the RCA building, Dylan tired of tourism. Since Brinnin had business to attend to in the afternoon, Dylan telephoned his friends Ruthven Todd and Allen Curnow, the New Zealander who had recently visited him in Laugharne, and they came to join him. By the time Brinnin returned for dinner at an Italian restaurant in the Village, Dylan had been drinking all day (though he seems also to have enjoyed American food, particularly T-bone steaks, every one of which, he told his parents, was the equivalent of a month’s ration for an English family). Afterwards they all went to the San Remo, a local cafe-bar on the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal streets frequented by writers. Even when an exhausted Brinnin was forced to call it a day, Dylan continued with Curnow and the young American poet Patrick Boland.
Extraordinarily, when Brinnin called at the Beekman Tower the following morning, Dylan was not only up but out, having left a note ‘Dear John, Gone to 3rd Avenue. See you at Costello’s. Come at once. (I like this peremptory tone.) Ever, Dylan.’ Dylan turned out to be ensconced not exactly where he said but in a similar Third Avenue hostelry called Murphy’s, together with Todd and Len Lye, another pal from London.
Dylan Thomas: A New Life Page 40