Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  Basically a jazz-loving artist and experimental film-maker, Lye stood at an intriguing intersection between the worlds of culture and espionage. Through the intervention of Tom Matthews, an American who, like him, had known Robert Graves and Laura Riding in London and Majorca, and who had become an editor (later the editor) of Time magazine, Lye had worked on March of Time, the main newsreels shown in the United States during the war. In 1944 he went to New York, leaving his wife and children out of the reach of German bombs, staying at Todd’s house in Tilty in Essex.

  Immediately attracted to the liberating potential of abstract expressionism and to the general artistic flowering in Manhattan, he decided to stay. He picked up his friendship with Bill (S. W.) Hayter, an organiser of the 1936 surrealist exhibition in London, who was running the influential Atelier 17 design studio on East 8th Street. Hayter’s studio was close to the Artists’ Club where the post-war school of painters such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko hung out (shortly to be joined by Jackson Pollock). While his wife Jane was deciding whether to join him, Lye took up with Ann, the fun-loving American-born wife of ‘Tommy’ Hindle, a British journalist and secret agent. After working for The Times (of London), Hindle had represented the British Secret Intelligence Service (or MI6) in Budapest and Prague, and acted as assistant to the Anglo-Iranian oil company boss in the United States, before joining the United Nations. By the time Jane Lye did come to America, her marriage was all but over. Having gone to Reno, Nevada, for the quickest possible divorce, Lye married Ann Hindle there the very same day. The newly-wed couple moved into an apartment in Washington Street in the West Village.

  By then Ruthven Todd had also joined the exodus to New York. There he put the finishing touches to his 1949 book on William Blake and dabbled in print-making with his friend Joán Miró at Atelier 17, collaborating with him on a poem published by Tambimuttu’s Poetry (London) in an issue which also included his tributes to Bill Hayter and Yves Tanguy (both similarly illustrated by the dedicatee). So it was natural that Dylan should want to see his old friends Todd and Lye and through them discover what was happening in the city.

  They were joined for lunch by Harvey Breit, editor of the New York Times Book Review, who wanted to interview Dylan. But the discussion proved so bibulous and Dylan so elusive that Breit sat on his piece for the best part of three months and then made up most of his quotes. The Times would not have printed Dylan’s answer to a question about his reasons for coming to New York: ‘To continue my life-long search for naked women in wet mackintoshes.’ But it did throw light on Dylan’s estimation of the progress of his career, and on his dissatisfaction with it. When asked about success, he said it was bad for him: ‘I should be what I was.’ Breit pressed if he meant like thirty-five years ago. ‘No, twenty years ago,’ said Dylan, referring back to his first dabblings with mature verse. ‘Then I was arrogant and lost. Now I am humble and found. I prefer that other.’ As if to emphasise the point, at some stage they were joined by Lye’s ex-wife Jane who remained friendly with Todd. She is reputed to have said, ‘Oh, Dylan – the last time I saw you you were an angel.’

  Getting steadily more drunk, Dylan counselled Breit to make his story imaginary, ‘a bard’s eye view of New York by a dollar-made nightingale’, declaring, ‘How can I know what I like until I find out what I want?’ When Jane Lye agreed he had never known what he wanted, he said, ‘Until right now. I do know what I want.’ Asked to expand, he poked his finger into Brinnin and announced, ‘I want him’. After the sudden silence had given way to laughter, he added to the Poetry Center director, ‘You couldn’t manage to change your sex a bit, could you?’ At least that was the way Brinnin told the story in an unpublished fragment of his memoirs. Whether this was a piece of gay wishful thinking is difficult to tell. Certainly Caitlin came to think that there was an element of homosexual love in Brinnin’s developing relationship with her husband.

  On this occasion Brinnin dragged Dylan back to his hotel and watched over him as he slept. After only two hours’ fitful slumber, Dylan was ready for a full evening’s entertainment. He and Brinnin first went to a dinner party at the 12th Street apartment of Marshall Stearns, a professor of English at Hunter College, with a particular interest in the history of jazz. Stearns had written an important introductory essay to Dylan’s poetry in the Sewanee Review in 1944. As Dylan carefully informed his parents, the party’s atmosphere was respectable and academic. One professor’s wife even carried a notebook to take down the great poet’s bons mots. That only encouraged Dylan to heights of outrageousness: he told scatalogical stories, propositioned women, and when asked to explain his ‘Ballad of the Long-legged Bait’, he stopped the conversation with his bawled reply, ‘A gigantic fuck!’

  The austere Brinnin, whose worst fears were being confirmed, had to transport him from there, through the sleet, to Harvey Breit’s apartment in the mid-fifties where a star-studded party was being thrown in his honour. In the taxi, Dylan nodded off and was only jolted awake when his cigarette burnt down to his fingers. After a few more drinks at Breit’s, he became even more embarrassing. Brinnin sensed W. H. Auden signalling to him, ‘I told you so’ and other guests imploring him to take the addled poet home. Having lunged at Charles Henri Ford’s sister, the actress Ruth Ford, who neatly side-stepped, Dylan made a play for the elegant Southern writer Katherine Anne Porter who looked not unlike Caitlin. As she prepared to leave, he grabbed her, lifted her to the ceiling, and held her there, as if acting out a scene in some private ballet. The incident quickly became the talk of the town. It later provided a dramatic scene for Sidney Michaels’ Broadway play Dylan, which portrayed it positively, with Dylan telling her that he wanted to raise her to the stars where she belonged, head and shoulders above any other writer. But her own recollection was different: ‘He was most objectionable, trying to get his hands under my dress, and picking me up, until finally I just had to get out.’

  Despite his reservations, Brinnin was enjoying himself, as he giddily admitted to his friend Jack Thompson: ‘He’s here, but I’m not sure I am. Two mornings ago his plane put down at Idlewild. Since then, I’ve had more to drink, less to eat, more to “take in” and more to worry about, than in any other forty-eight hours of my existence. First of all (last of all), he’s a wonder and a delight – simply because each of his long assumed virtues is subsumed by a quality of being – a human dimension, a human ampleur, a human quidditas (how the hell can I get it right?) of such unclouded sweetness as to signal the correction of heresies.’

  The following day Dylan felt awful and vomited periodically, hardly a good augury for his first reading at the Poetry Center that evening. In the taxi up to the YM-YWHA at 92nd Street on Lexington Avenue, he veered maniacally between joyfulness and depression. Back stage in the Kaufmann Auditorium he demanded a cold beer. Five minutes before he was due to appear, he was seized with a coughing fit and retched convulsively. Unable to see how Dylan could carry on, Brinnin had to help him to his feet. But as the curtains parted, Dylan braced himself, puffed his chest, and walked out in front of a capacity house of over one thousand people. He launched into his repertoire of twentieth-century poets, finishing with a selection from his own verse. His audience, which included e. e. cummings and other often reclusive members of New York’s literary aristocracy, was held spellbound, not just by the virtuosity of his delivery, but also by the nuances of his language. At the end, they demanded ‘Fern Hill’, and would not let him go until he obliged. After thunderous applause, a hundred people mobbed him in the vestibule, causing Brinnin to worry for his charge’s safety.

  Dylan had been invited to a post-performance party by Frederick Morgan, editor of the influential Hudson Review. But en route he was again sick and had to be taken back to his hotel. The next morning, the management of the Beekman Tower had had enough. It had tired of his endless calls for room service and demanded he vacate his room. A chastened Dylan telephoned Curnow and arranged to move into his more relaxed Midston House Hotel, on 39
th Street at Madison Avenue. Luckily, he was not reading that night, but the following one. He was able to sleep (with the help of a doctor’s prescription), to visit other parts of the city including Harlem where he insisted on buying some black magazines, and to see people, including Bill Hayter, the anthologist Oscar Williams, who was full of plans for selling his work to periodicals, and, at Dylan’s special request, e. e. cummings, whose wife, the photographer Marion Morehouse told Brinnin over tea that her husband had been so moved by Dylan’s performance that he had walked the streets alone for hours. After a second, equally successful, reading at the ‘Y’ that Saturday evening, his fifth night in New York, Dylan went to a party at the Greenwich Village apartment of Lloyd Frankenberg, the poetry impresario who had written to Dylan in Wales, and his wife Loren MacIver, another painter, whose recent portrait of cummings showed words from his poems billowing onto the canvas, as if from his head.

  Over the weekend Dylan wrote to Caitlin – more informatively than his usual gushing protestations of undying love, this time telling her of his schedule, promising to buy her some nylons and even sending her a couple of cheques; and also to his parents – typically a more guarded letter, stressing his sobriety amid the unfamiliarity of America.

  That was not how it looked on the ground. During his first few days in the United States, Dylan had exhibited the excesses and experienced the adulation which would later be associated with rock stars. He had even been thrown out of his hotel. As in the 1960s, it was a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Until Dylan’s appearance, American poetry had been a modest, staid and introverted affair, caught in a strait jacket of academic textual criticism. There was not much new about his subject-matter – the age-old American concerns of nature and spiritual development. But he put them in a different, more challenging context, with his concertina of words and ideas, and he brought them to a wider audience, taking verse out of the printed page and into the auditorium just as culture was being democratised. He managed the former without the usual condescension of British poets and, as for the latter, he anticipated the beat poets with his sense of theatre and ‘happening’. As a result, this small overweight Welshman was feted as a Promethean god – the reaction he had always longed for, though when described as the greatest reader since Yeats, he had still had enough of his self-deflating humour to be able to say, ‘I’m afraid it’s second-rate Charles Laughton.’

  On Sunday 26 February Dylan ventured out of New York City for the first time. His initial destination was Brinnin’s house in Westport, Connecticut, where he stayed a couple of nights before embarking on a short tour of New England universities. Brinnin had to apologise to his boyfriend Bill Read that he was neglecting him, ‘but this weekend must be given over to Dylan’. He was buoyant at the success of the two Poetry Center events and looked forward to them helping him to pay off his own debts. He took his Welsh guest to meet two sets of his neighbours – the novelist Peter DeVries, and his wife Katinka, and the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman and his wife, Shirley Jackson, a well-known short story writer. Drinks with the DeVrieses went smoothly enough, even if the host was later to use Dylan as the model for the poet, Gowan Glamorgan McGland in his novel, Reuben Reuben. Supper with the Hymans the next evening was a more problematic affair. Dylan and Shirley Jackson tried to outdo each other in constructing gory plots for murder mysteries. In Dylan Thomas in America Brinnin described the evening as ending ‘gracelessly’ – a tame description of a pathetic, drunken scene where Dylan, having propositioned the overweight Jackson, chased her round the house while Hyman fell asleep, watching baseball on television. In an unpublished memoir, Brinnin was more explicit, describing Dylan and his hostess emerging – ‘she décolleté, her hair unstrung, he unbuttoned and unzipped.’

  Dylan alarmed Brinnin with his depressed behaviour, as he lolled around at home, reading and guzzling chocolate bars. When he received a letter from Caitlin, he was reluctant to open it – probably, Brinnin sensed, because it contained news he did not want to read, though he was later keen to explain how wonderful his wife was.

  Dylan continued his way north-eastwards, first to Yale which he found ‘formal and donnish and altogether impossible’, and then, having held a ‘moist little waitress all the way’, to Boston where Allen Curnow was at the railway station to greet and convey him to F. O. Matthiessen, the distinguished critic and academic who was his host at Harvard. Curnow was a last-minute replacement for Bill Read whom Brinnin earlier told: ‘You’ll be able to recognise him easily … he’s short, bumbly and a little wild-looking. He’ll probably want to stop for a beer immediately, and you’ll have to give in … but it might be just as well if you’d say you had a definite time in which to deliver him. The best approach to him in all ways is the most casual; overt recognitions of who he is and what he’s done, or any sort of “respectfulness” tend to put him off. Take him as he comes and he’ll return the gesture.’

  Curnow felt that, at Harvard, Dylan was subjected to ‘what no poet should have to endure – least of all one so exciting and excitable as Dylan Thomas’, performance at five, the Advocate newspaper’s cocktail party at 6.30, dinner at Matthiessen’s (attended by distinguished poets including Archibald MacLeish, Richard Eberhart and Richard Wilbur), party at the Wilburs’ campus apartment from midnight to four in the morning, bed around five in a university hall. Matthiessen, who was to commit suicide exactly a month later, informed Brinnin the evening had been a success, though he could not help adding that he only wished ‘for his own endurance that [Dylan] would stick to beer after as well as before his performances’.

  After a short night’s rest Dylan was ready to drive to a reading at Mount Holyoke and from there, next day, to Amherst (both in Massachusetts). By now the pressure (and the drink) were getting to him: before mounting the stage, he suddenly plunged his head in his hands and exclaimed, ‘I can’t go on. I miss my wife, I miss my children. I’m sure they’re all dead.’ Back home, if he had been working on a poem, he would have given up. But the actor in him realised the performance had to go ahead. He steeled himself and regaled his audience with his usual gusto.

  Reuben Brown, a member of staff at Amherst, was alarmed at the overall spectacle. When he sent Brinnin the $100 fee for the evening (rather less than the average of around $150 Dylan was receiving for most engagements), he observed that the poet was ‘a very sick man. He suffered terribly from the whole business, and it was hard to know whether to encourage or discourage him … Isn’t there a possibility of getting some grant for him that will give him a rest?’

  Dylan was on the lecture treadmill, and there was no jumping off. He returned to New York where Brinnin found him ‘in a heavy hung-overish desuetude’, looking back on his brief New England tour (he had liked Harvard best) and proudly maintaining he had not missed an engagement all week. Dylan had a Saturday night dinner date at the Austrian restaurant, Stahl’s, with Frederick Morgan, the Hudson Review editor whose party he had flunked. Brinnin was miffed that Oscar Williams, a friend of Morgan, also attended – an early instance of the rivalries that were to develop over Dylan between different factions. Williams was in his most fawning mode, eager to effect a sale to the magazine. But the dinner was marred by a row over religion, with a drunken Dylan making disparaging remarks about Roman Catholicism, the faith of both Morgan and his co-editor, Joseph Bennett, who was also present. Perhaps fearing he had talked himself out of a commission, Dylan was later – unusually for him – worried about having been indiscreet. Having found his guest obnoxious in the restaurant, Morgan warmed to him back at his hotel, where Dylan curled up on his bed and showed interest at the plight of Ezra Pound. Like many people, Morgan recognised Dylan’s basic sweetness and, ignoring his indiscretions, happily paid over the odds for ‘Over Sir John’s hill’. (Curiously, another New Yorker, the Columbia professor William York Tindall, recorded Dylan attacking the Roman Catholic church – an indication, perhaps, that, feeling far from home, Dylan reverted to the anti-Papism o
f his forefathers. Generally, he was sympathetic to the faith of friends such as John Davenport, and drew on it for the theological underpinnings of his poetry.)

  After a long weekend in New York, he ventured south again to Bryn Mawr, the Pennsylvania women’s college (and alma mater to Ella Wheeler Wilcox whom he had parodied as a schoolboy), before proceeding, without ever feeling totally well, to Washington for his appearance at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Unbeknownst to him, wheels had turned, and he was staying at the elegant Georgetown mansion of Marguerite Caetani’s sister, Katherine, and her husband Francis Biddle, who had been President Roosevelt’s attorney general during the war. The Biddles did their bit for Dylan, holding a reception, attended by Beltway cultural luminaries, such as Luther Evans, later the Director General of UNESCO, and Kimball Flaccus, author of an unfinished biography of the Kansas-born humorist Edgar Lee Masters, who had died earlier that month and was much admired by Dylan. Having been on his best behaviour all evening, Dylan went to the Library of Congress the following day and recorded his poems for its archive. Over lunch with Elizabeth Bishop and her friend Joe Frank, he plied her with questions about how American poets made a living. She could not help feeling frightened for his future: when she said something trite to her companion about him appearing to be bent on self-destruction, Frank said he felt Dylan did not want to live and gave him two or three more years.

  With the Biddles away for a long weekend in Bermuda and Brinnin also out of town at an arts festival in Virginia, Dylan was left to his own devices for the next couple of days in Washington. On the whole he enjoyed himself, though Caitlin would not have known it from the way he went on about missing her, or about America – ‘this vast, mad horror, that doesn’t know its size, or its strength, or its weakness, or its barbaric speed, stupidity, din, selfrighteousness, this cancerous Babylon’.