Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  She meanwhile was getting on with her own life. She had had one letter from him and, as she told Mary Keene, did not expect more until his return. The children were trying, and her eye had begun to wander to local men, but she was coping. Not so Dylan, who plied her from various hotel rooms with many more whining loving letters than she expected. Philip Larkin described this correspondence as ‘all snivelling and grovelling and adoring and so very impersonal’ which was unfair. It did express something of Dylan’s torment – his remorse at leaving his family; not knowing if they had enough money or if perhaps Caitlin would seek sexual comfort elsewhere. This epistolary outpouring of emotion also sought to cover his failures in small things: having neglected to remember Aeronwy’s seventh birthday, he tried to assuage his guilt by sending her a large box of chocolates from Washington.

  On Brinnin’s return, Dylan was waiting at the Biddles’, smoking one of his host’s cigars. Stung by a comment from a Yugoslav maid who had playfully said she knew he could not be rich because she had washed his underwear, Dylan also purloined a couple of Francis Biddle’s shirts. ‘Look!’ he told Brinnin, pulling out a drawer from a Hepplewhite highboy. ‘You could dress a regiment.’ He made no secret of what he was doing, and Biddle did not seem to mind. But his pilfering was another example of his self-destructive biting the hand that fed him. Driving back to New York in Brinnin’s new green convertible, Dylan was on good form, swapping stories with the composer John Cage, who was a passenger with the dancer Merce Cunningham. He was rested and felt no need to drink more than a couple of beers all day. In this relaxed state, Brinnin noted, Dylan showed an ebullience that most people needed several drinks to attain. Alcohol, he felt, was a device Dylan used to put a barrier between himself and emotions and situations he could not control.

  This might have been the reason for his behaviour when he visited e. e. cummings’s wife, Marion Morehouse, to have his photograph taken. Despite his respect for her husband, he arrived inebriated from lunch and quickly launched into an inappropriate seduction routine. He had hardly sat down, she recalled, before he started ‘about the swan-like shape of my neck and how he’d like to snuggle up between the pillows of my breasts and sleep forever. He sounded like a Groucho Marx on a bad day.’ For a while she listened to his childish sexual fantasies, continuing her job with a fixed professional smile. Eventually she had had enough: she dropped her camera and looked him in the eye. ‘ “You want to feel my tits? You want to snuggle up and nibble, or do you want to fuck?” The poor soul was so shocked the blood ran out of him … Once he didn’t have to play Priapus he turned into himself and God knows that’s enough.’

  After a reading at Columbia on the evening of Monday, 13 March, Dylan embarked the following day on the next stage of his journey to the mid-west and on to the Pacific coast. He first flew to Ithaca in upstate New York for a fleeting visit to Cornell university. David Daiches, a Scottish-born lecturer in English who was at the airport to meet him, was surprised when no-one of his description came off the plane. When he boarded the aircraft, he found Dylan still in his seat, the groggy victim of unaccustomed sleeping tablets which he had acquired to counter bouts of insomnia in New York. Dylan fell asleep again over an early dinner but, as usual, roused himself for his performance, telling Daiches, ‘I’m just an old ham. I always respond to an audience.’ Afterwards Daiches drove him to Syracuse to catch the train which would take him to Ohio and through to Chicago, Illinois. Settling into his seat, he looked frightened. ‘Westward into the night,’ he intoned, adding he did not think he would come back: ‘Perhaps I shall die in Utah.’

  His first stop in the mid-west was Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Once there, he complained to Caitlin that he never seemed to sleep in a bed, but only in trains and planes. ‘I’m hardly living; I’m just a voice on wheels.’ He added pathetically that he could find no paper or pencil in his campus room, and was too scared to go out and ask. He continued to Chicago to read at the university, which paid $250, his highest fee – apart from the Poetry Center – so far, and on to South Bend, Indiana (Notre Dame University), Champaign, Illinois (University of Illinois) and Iowa City (the State University of Iowa).

  He had developed a routine where he charmed his audience with a Welsh version of blarney, delivered his quota of favoured poets (taking care never to offer the same selection at more than one place), and ended with a poem or two of his own (usually his later ones, and even then they sometimes had to be dragged out of him). Afterwards he would attend a party with faculty members (occasionally, with predictable consequences, this came before the reading), and later there would usually be some story of his making a pass at a professor’s wife or ogling a nubile young student. However tales of his sexual prowess have been exaggerated. At Kenyon College, he was ill at ease with the students who looked like ‘bad actors out of an American co-ed film’. Earlier, at Mount Holyoke, he said how beautiful girls would ask him to their rooms, saying they were not really poets, but they wanted him to look at verses they had written. ‘And that’s all they want you to do, look at their beastly poems!’

  He stayed longer than expected in Iowa because Brinnin had requested for him to have much needed dental treatment there. A dentist took one look at his mouth (‘m’fuckin’ curse’, Dylan told Ray B. West Jr., his English faculty host) and said remedial work would take up to six weeks, which was not possible. Dylan was forced to kill time, sitting around idly, drinking beer and feeling resentful. Each day, on his way to work, West deposited him at a bar from where he was picked up for lunch by the brilliant, troubled poet Robert Lowell, a visiting fellow, who prevailed on him to address his writers’ workshop. Dylan told West he loved his daughter, but ‘detested’ his new-born son Colm because he felt jealous of ‘the little bugger, suckin’ away there at his mummy’s tits’. At the house of Baldwin Maxwell, chairman of the English faculty, Dylan got into an argument with a doctor’s wife about Britain’s new National Health Service. She described it as a Marxist front, which annoyed him intensely. He exploded with rage, reducing her to tears with his description of her as a ‘bloody fucking bitch’. Such outbursts were more likely than any romantic interludes.

  Unable to stand it any longer, he flew to the west coast on 26 March for what was to be the most enjoyable part of his trip. In San Francisco, his first port of call, he had been booked by Brinnin into the Palace Hotel where Oscar Wilde and Rudyard Kipling had once stayed. Without bothering to unpack, he went out looking for a bar, walking north until he found a suitably nondescript place off Columbus Avenue. After a few drinks, he asked some locals for directions to an address he had written on a crumpled piece of paper. It was the home of Ruth Witt-Diamant, professor of English at San Francisco State College. Dylan had a note – probably, she thought, written by Stephen Spender, who was the only English poet she knew – asking her to look after him in San Francisco. When he telephoned, she immediately offered to put him up in her house in Parnassus Heights. It was only three in the afternoon, but since Dylan had passed out, she drove over to collect him.

  He struck lucky. Witt-Diamant was a kindly middle-aged Jewish woman from Philadelphia who was bored with academia and had good contacts in San Francisco’s burgeoning artistic community. The city acted as a magnet for poets escaping WASP-dominated literary circles in the east. The headstrong, bewhiskered Kenneth Rexroth had acted as mentor to the so-called first San Francisco Renaissance of post-war poets such as William Everson and Robert Duncan, and was now paving the way for the beat poets of the 1950s, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. Parallel to this, Witt-Diamant parlayed the growing interest in poetry, as both written and performance art, to cajole her faculty into establishing the Poetry Center at her college in 1954. Dylan’s visit to San Francisco acted as a useful catalyst in this process.

  With time on his hands before his reading on 4 April, he hung around the bars of North Beach playing pin-ball and drinking with Knute Stiles (later known as an ‘underground’ artist) at the Two A.M
. Club in Mill Valley. Many of Stiles’s friends were gay, such as the poet Tram Combs. Dylan told how a ‘party of queens’ befriended him and took him around the bars. Although he appreciated their kindness and did his best to enjoy himself, he longed for a woman. In one bar, he saw an attractive girl on her own but, when he approached her, he found it was a boy in drag. His sense of sexual frustration hardly abated when he met the Greek-born collage artist Jean Varda who worked in a decommissioned ferryboat in Sausalito and recalled meeting Caitlin when she was fifteen (almost certainly through Augustus John). Dylan could only longingly tell his wife how much he wished he had known her then.

  He also spent time with Rexroth who, as early as 29 March, wrote to Laughlin ‘Dylan Thomas is here. What a problem. It is sure hard to try to keep him from continuously drinking & throwing his money around … I like him very much & he seems to like me. He is sure genuine. A vast relief after these nasty English poets. He is Welsh & proletarian to the core.’ The sentiment was mutual: Dylan felt a natural affinity for the laid-back west coast. After the unreality of New York, it was like returning to Wales, only with sunshine, good wine and excellent food. In addition, Californian poets such as Rexroth wrote about their environment with the same modernist intensity he aimed for in his own writings on the natural world.

  While Dylan was staying, Witt-Diamant had a lunch appointment with Noel Sullivan, a staunchly Roman Catholic millionaire who supported the local arts and lived on a rambling estate on the Pacific Ocean at Carmel near Monterey, south of the city. She asked if she could bring her house guest and enlisted as chauffeur Gavin Arthur, who was the epitome of the nascent counter-culture – a homosexual astrologer of advancing years, father-in-law of philosopher Alan Watts, teacher at St Quentin prison, and grandson of Chester Alan Arthur, the twenty-first President of the United States. Lunch with Sullivan went so well that he invited them all back for supper, saying he would also ask some local people who would like to meet Dylan. In the meantime, Witt-Diamant took Dylan and Arthur to the hot springs at Big Sur. (Now commercialised as Esalen, Dylan called them the ‘pansied Pacific baths’.) On the way they passed Henry Miller’s house. Since Dylan said he knew Miller, Witt-Diamant suggested that they knock on his door. This was answered by ‘a pretty young Polish girl’ (as Dylan recalled) who turned out to be Miller’s wife, Lepska. She said her husband was resting and could not be disturbed. However Miller had been roused and duly appeared. He scolded his wife for being inhospitable and chatted happily with Dylan who found him ‘gentle and mellow and gay’.

  After leaving Miller and visiting the hot springs, it was time to prepare for supper with Sullivan and his guests in Carmel which was known for being stuffy and snobbish. When Witt-Diamant suggested they should stop in the town to buy ties, Dylan reached in his pocket for a crumpled neckpiece which he tore in two, saying that would make two bow-ties. One guest at Sullivan’s ranch was Robinson Jeffers, a local poet with a wide reputation for writing about the surrounding sea and mountains though, unlike his colleagues up the coast in San Francisco, he had become reclusive and misanthropic and, not unusually, was drunk. After five minutes’ social chit-chat, the two poets went into the garden and did not reappear until dinner when Jeffers went (or was taken) home. When Witt-Diamant asked Dylan about his encounter with Jeffers, he said they had hit it off perfectly. ‘And what did you talk about?’ she asked. ‘We didn’t say a thing,’ answered Dylan.

  Earlier Witt-Diamant remembered she had to telephone James Caldwell, a poet in the English department at Berkeley, who had arranged a party later that evening for Dylan. Dylan was having such a good time that he asked her to say he was sick. Caldwell was unimpressed. ‘Is he drunk?’ he asked. When she said no, he blustered, ‘If Mr Thomas can’t make his engagements, we’ll have to make other arrangements.’ Dylan stayed through the meal with the cream of Carmel society. They would have loved him to burst into poetry, but he never liked performing to order in that way. Inevitably he and his party arrived back in San Francisco too late to go to Caldwell who subsequently cabled Brinnin: ‘Contact with Thomas reestablished after lapse. Will do all I can but cannot assume responsibility since he is indisposed to keep appointments. Trust he will meet engagement Tuesday.’ In his archives, Brinnin has written an accompanying note, ‘How many such communications I had to deal with!’

  By the time Dylan gave his scheduled reading at Berkeley on 4 April he had certainly made his mark among the local chattering classes. He was scheduled to appear in a 300-seat hall, while a local zoology professor, Paul Needham, talked in the 1,000-seat Wheeler Auditorium. Shortly before these simultaneous events, it was clear that the numbers turning up for Dylan were larger than expected and would need the more spacious venue. A switch was tactfully arranged. From the moment Dylan started with a joke about not offering ‘Henry Miller with demonstrations’, he had a captive audience. Normally indifferent students suddenly found themselves appreciating what poetry was about. As Dylan excitedly relayed back to his wife, the university’s Speech Department initiated discussions about inviting him back to teach on a six months’ contract. But the dean of the faculty was less enthusiastic: he had heard of Dylan’s reputation for drinking, and decided the Welshman would not be a suitable influence.

  After San Francisco Dylan flew north to Vancouver for a couple of readings at the University of British Columbia and the Vancouver Hotel. Unexpectedly his old friend Malcolm Lowry came to listen to him at the second venue. The visionary alcoholic Lowry was living in nearby Dollarton with his second wife Margerie, an ex-Hollywood starlet. Struggling to pick up his career after the successful publication of his novel Under the Volcano three years earlier, he was trying his hand at screenwriting and had just completed an over-long treatment of Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night for Frank Taylor. As a publisher in New York with Reynal & Hitchcock, the talented Taylor had been responsible for Under the Volcano. Bi-sexual, he had turned bi-coastal, and switched jobs to work for MGM as a producer.

  Dylan found Vancouver ‘a quite handsome hellhole’ but, compared with San Francisco, too British. After two notably successful readings, he was happy to chat with Lowry about mutual friends such as John Davenport and Anna Wickham who had committed suicide in 1947, ostensibly in protest against an increase in the price of cigarettes. As they caroused into the night, ‘the only noticeable drunks,’ noted influential local poet Earle Birney, ‘were the inevitable Malcolm Lowry and a certain undergraduate lion huntress who got herself blotto trying to seduce Dylan without success.’ When the Lowrys called on Dylan the next morning to say goodbye, they found the girl ‘hanging over him’, as Margerie put it, and Dylan asking blearily, ‘Won’t somebody do something with this pest?’

  Back in the United States, for a reading at the University of Washington in Seattle, Dylan was approached at a party by another old literary friend, John Berryman, who was teaching there. The two men greeted each other warmly but, after a short conversation, their hostess tried to prise them apart, accusing them of indulging in literary gossip. Berryman recalled that Dylan, who showed little sign of having drunk excessively, replied with slow deliberation, ‘We were just discussing Hitler’s methods of dealing with the Jews, and we have decided that he was quite right.’

  From Seattle, Dylan flew directly to Los Angeles for one of the more bizarre episodes on his tour. Somewhere in his luggage he had found another crumpled piece of paper with a telephone number and the name of Christopher Isherwood, who had been living in California since 1939. On the morning of 10 April Dylan phoned Isherwood from the Biltmore Hotel, where he stayed overnight. The two men did not know each other, although they had several mutual friends. Dylan sounded particularly lost, as he recounted how he was due to give a reading at UCLA that afternoon, but the English department had declined to provide any transport, only telling him how to reach the campus by bus. Taking pity, Isherwood went to pick him up at the hotel. Dylan was touched and rewarded him with a tacky but treasured present – a small crab se
t in plastic, with a key-ring attached. Isherwood accompanied him to lunch with members of the UCLA English faculty who did not know what to make of this crumpled poet. ‘They had conjured up this dangerous little creature,’ wrote Isherwood, ‘excited by the dangerousness of his poems, and now that they had him there in the flesh, he terrified and shocked them by those very qualities which are so admirable as long as they remain merely in the library.’ By the time Dylan gave his reading he had been drinking steadily, but gave no indication of this. As had become customary, he was able to push himself out on the stage and deliver a commanding performance, though Isherwood noticed that the students clapped loudest while the academic staff looked on sour-faced.

  Afterwards Dylan wanted only to relax and have a good time. Two other people he knew in the city were Ivan Moffat, his old sparring partner from the Gargoyle, Strand films and wartime London, who was working as a screenwriter, and Frank Taylor, the publisher-cum-producer. When they enquired what he wanted to do, he said he would like to meet Charlie Chaplin and ‘the most beautiful blonde in Hollywood’. Both Moffat and Isherwood had worked with the buxom blonde Shelley Winters on a series of inferior films, so, having arranged to go on to Chaplin’s house, they invited her to dinner at a popular movie business eaterie, the Players Restaurant (owned by director Preston Sturges) on Sunset Boulevard. During the evening, Dylan, by now well-oiled, became fascinated with Winters’s cleavage. He asked if her breasts were real and, when she said they were, he asked if he could feel them. He was so excited at her assent that, according to Isherwood, he reached across and grappled her, and they both fell off their chairs.