Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  The party proceeded to Chaplin’s house on Summit Ridge Drive. Winters reported an unlikely-sounding interlude with Marilyn Monroe at her apartment, followed by a hair-raising drunken drive which ended with Moffat’s Green Hornet car on Chaplin’s tennis court. Dylan was certainly drunk, but Chaplin seemed not to notice. According to one version, he performed a routine where he opened his front-door as the butler. Dylan may have urinated on a flower-bed on the way out. But Chaplin remained good-humoured and even carried out his promise to cable Caitlin in Laugharne, after Dylan had said that his wife would never believe him. The evening ended in a bar where, when someone amicably told Isherwood that he did not think his latest book was as good as his previous ones, Dylan took offence on behalf of his new friend and attacked this very much larger man.

  After further readings at Pomona College, in Claremont, east of Los Angeles, and at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Dylan returned to San Francisco for two more events. The bay area lifestyle proved so enticing that Dylan decided to stay longer than scheduled. Feigning illness, he postponed his next appearance on the other side of the continent in Florida. Instead he abandoned himself to a rich, eighteen-year-old girl called Bambi who drove him around in her yellow convertible and asked if he would mind waiting three years until she came of age, inherited her millions, and they could marry. ‘My God what a swathe you have cut into the even quilt that covered the muddle I called my life,’ wrote Witt-Diamant on his departure. ‘Darling – everyone who heard you loves you – feels – really feels – communication with you – well deep – and everyone is better – healthier – because you were here – pray god you will be soon again.’ Such gushing enthusiasm was impossible for Dylan to resist.

  Passing briefly through New York, he flew to give his delayed talk in Gainesville, Florida on 27 April. However he was still not finished, returning to New England for engagements at Wellesley College and Brandeis University, and to the mid-west to the universities of Michigan, Wayne State and Indiana – all in a punishing schedule the following week.

  At the University of Indiana in Bloomington, one of his duties was to address a group of film students after a screening of his own work for the cinema. He was given an official speech of welcome by the Tennessee-born John Crowe Ransom, a poet for whom he had great respect, who was teaching there for a year. Asked at a subsequent question and answer session if, ‘as a poet’, he felt something-or-other, he answered, ‘I’m only a poet when I’m writing poetry. The rest of the time, I’m … well, Christ, look at me.’ David Wagoner, a young poet who had taken time off from teaching duties at DePauw University, some fifty miles away, noted the cigarette ash caught in the folds of Dylan’s shirt and his seersucker suit. Wagoner and some others befriended the visiting Welshman and took him to a party where Dylan amused his hosts with his impressions and revealed that John Brinnin had bought him the suit as a good travelling outfit because it would never need pressing. ‘But it’s a misnomer,’ he added. ‘I’m neither a seer nor a sucker.’ Dylan told Wagoner he wished he had known more about Ransom’s origins. He would then have made a habit of reading his poems, such as ‘Captain Carpenter’, in a rich Southern drawl, rather than in his own ‘usual evangelistic trombone’.

  Back in New York for his final local appearances, he wrote to Caitlin on 7 May, saying that he was exhausted but was thinking of her, with too little money, alone in their little bedroom in Laugharne. (‘Please Christ, my love, it is always alone.’) He said his speaking schedule would be completely finished in just over a week. But he warned her that, since he was determined to travel back by sea rather than by plane, transatlantic passages were difficult to obtain at this time of year, and he might not be able to make it until early June.

  He was not worried when it turned out thus. He based himself at the Hotel Earle on Washington Square, which allowed easy access to the San Remo and other Greeenwich Village bars. After his final appearance at the Poetry Center on 15 May (when he read prose rather than poetry), he received a call from Anita Loos, author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, who wanted to sound him out about appearing in a play she was interested in, Garson Kanin’s The Rat Race. The idea of appearing on Broadway appealed to Dylan, but it came to nothing.

  Instead he spent what he happily described as ‘one liquid libidinous fortnight in New York’ which ended with him being ‘wheelbarrowed on to the Queen Elizabeth’. He went to parties at the Frankenbergs and at the Oscar Williamses, who epitomised New York artistic style with their penthouse at the top of a modest-sized office block in Lower Manhattan. Despite magnificent views over the water-front, such a place was considered beyond the pale by some New Yorkers, though it anticipated by thirty years the coveted yuppie lofts of the 1980s. In her long cape and beret, and with her raspy voice, Williams’s poet-artist wife Gene Derwood chose one of their parties to paint Dylan. Asked to read from his poems by a fawning female fan, he at first tried to put his head under her dress and then launched into a ten-minute gobbledygook parody of his reading style, complete with bodily mannerisms, which created just the right element of frenzy for Derwood’s portrait. Alcohol flowed, but when dinner was served by Williams, it consisted entirely of mashed potatoes.

  The fastidious Harvard-educated Brinnin had no time for such antics. Stung by recriminations from Bill Read and other friends who said he was ignoring them for this ‘monster’, he left Dylan to himself. By chance the two men ran into each other at an artist’s party on 8th Street. Dylan was in the centre of a crowd with Delmore Schwartz. Seeing Brinnin, he assumed a pouting wounded attitude and rushed towards the nearest window, as if to throw himself out. When asked the matter, he moaned, ‘You’ve deserted me.’ Brinnin claimed he was haunted by Dylan’s rueful unforgiving look: he could not make out if it was acting or for real. On another occasion Brinnin drew up precise accounts of Dylan’s trip and felt hurt when the poet showed no interest. Dylan had said something about not wanting businessmen involved in his affairs (they would certainly have charged him more than Brinnin’s ungrasping 15 per cent). But Brinnin hoped to be recognised for the commercial good sense he had brought to Dylan’s affairs. A complicated relationship, full of fondness, resentment, guilt and dependency, was developing.

  By mid-May the word about Dylan had been buzzing in artists’ circles for nearly three months. During his travels over that period, he had met an extraordinary range of American poets. At times he must have thought that half his audiences were composed of ‘poets’. And still they wanted to meet him. At Brinnin’s suggestion, Theodore Roethke came down from his retreat at Yaddo to talk, drink and go to Marx Brothers movies with him. Once he was taken by Dylan to a sing-song organised by an official group of Welshmen in North America. Roethke noted how ‘to those hard-boiled business men Thomas was the first citizen of Wales, and nothing else.’ When Stanley Moss, a young poet working temporarily at New Directions, recognised him and started chatting in the San Remo bar in Greenwich Village, he was struck by Dylan’s courtesy. ‘You know why I drink?’ Dylan said to him. ‘Because I don’t do anything really useful.’ One early morning, after the bars had closed, they found themselves at a funeral home in Bleecker Street where it was possible to buy some beer and drink it over a coffin. ‘That appealed to Dylan’s sense of sin,’ recalled Moss, who also relished the memory of the Welsh poet, in a taxi, imitating God receiving T. S. Eliot in heaven.

  After Eugene Walter, a camp import from Alabama, met Dylan through Ruthven Todd, he prevailed on a fellow poet, the gamine Jean Garrigue to throw a party for Dylan in his summer apartment on West 9th Street. Seeking to create what he thought was a British environment, Walter decorated the place with roses made from wet Kleenex, green wax paper and wire, and painted the tables and chairs dark green. Then, a more personal touch, he strewed the flagstones with sequins and diamond flitters. Guests included the proto-feminist poet Ruth Herschberger, as well as, from the artistic community, the young Andy Warhol and Curtis Harrington, an experimental film-maker late
r known for his suspense movies. At 3 a.m. Dylan had the stragglers in stitches with his impressions of Queen Mary’s magpie tendencies. Regarded as lesbian, Garrigue nevertheless conceived a tendresse for Dylan and, for a brief while, was often with him. The affair petered out, though Dylan spoke nostalgically of it to Brinnin. Her tender poem ‘A poet kissed me’ suggests what it meant to her.

  The problem was that Dylan was overwhelmed by the attentions of other New York women, and of two in particular. One was Jeanne Gordon, the chirpy ex-model wife of a Yale-educated up-town psychiatrist. According to Brinnin, she knew more about poetry than she let on. She took on a maternal role, worrying about Dylan’s drinking and if his poetry was beginning to repeat itself.

  Dylan liked to boast of his sexual exploits with her. In an unpublished memoir Brinnin recalled waiting in his car while she and Dylan enjoyed a prolonged tryst. It was cold and he had the heater turned up. When Dylan emerged, he made a crude remark about what he had done to make her bleed, adding, ‘Christ, it’s hot in here. Can we turn that thing down a bit?’ In his book Dylan Thomas in America, Brinnin referred to Jeanne under the pseudonym ‘Doris’. After its publication, he received a call from her husband threatening to sue and passing him on to Jeanne herself who remonstrated, ‘Jesus, John, have you got it wrong. In the matter of taste alone, couldn’t you give me a little credit? I tried to be nice to Dylan, that’s all. Where did you get any other idea? And for God’s sake, tell me this: who on earth in their right mind would want to go to bed with that fat slug of veal, with his matted hair and bad teeth?’ She may have been protecting her reputation, particularly if she had enjoyed a passionate or out-of-character fling with the visiting poet. She may indeed have simply wanted to look after him, and he may have flattered her with his attentions and strung her along for the many presents she liked to give him. But another mutual friend has referred to her relationship with Dylan as a ‘very intense affair’, and it would not have been the first time for him.

  The other woman, more important to Dylan, was Pearl Kazin, a striking dark-haired junior editor on Harper’s Bazaar. The daughter of an immigrant house painter in Brooklyn, she had a traditional Jewish respect for education and a personal love of English literature, which she had studied at graduate level at Radcliffe, the female college of Harvard University. Sociable and intelligent, she had moved in similar circles to Brinnin since the war. Only the previous summer she had spent time with him and their mutual friend Elizabeth Bishop at Yaddo, the artists’ colony, near Saratoga Springs in upstate New York. Her brother Alfred was a well-known literary critic and historian, whose friends included Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow. Having recently embarked on a career in literary journalism, she was delighted not only to meet Dylan but to sign him up to write a story for her magazine (a piece of information formally if grudgingly conveyed by agent Ann Watkins to David Higham on 24 May). To Dylan Pearl was the epitome of the sophisticated, open, young American woman of a type he had not encountered since Emily Holmes Coleman.

  For the last week or so of his American trip, Dylan conducted simultaneous liaisons with both these women. Brinnin often unwittingly found himself at the centre of a French-style farce. On 28 May he picked up Dylan and Pearl at the Earle where, as he coyly put it, they were ‘merry over Grand Marnier’. They proceeded, via the Frankenbergs’, to a farewell party for Dylan given by a woman, who was described by a fellow guest, the novelist Dawn Powell, as ‘one of those dumb-intellectual Jewish girls of the twenties’. Also there were Leo Lerman, an editor at Vogue, and the unfortunate Jean Garrigue. The hostess took pride in a large photograph of young Dylan on her wall, with an earring on it. ‘Dylan at twenty,’ she told Powell, probably referring to a picture taken by Nora Summers around the time of Dylan’s marriage. ‘Wasn’t he gorgeous? And that’s the earring I lost when I lost my honour.’ Proceedings became farcical when she refused to allow a rival for Dylan’s affections into her apartment, but this woman later returned and was rushed into a bedroom by him. According to Brinnin, this woman’s husband had forbidden her to attend the party and locked her in a closet, but she had escaped. As Powell left, she noticed Dylan discard the two women on his lap (‘a hand here, a hand there’), lift his shirt tail and perform a ‘perfectly dandy dance’. She told Edmund Wilson, ‘It is rare indeed for us to see an English [sic] poet have such a wonderful time – probably the Welsh coal-miner’s Saturday night. Other reports are that he loves America madly (what kind of Britisher is this?) and at the Pleasure Club (Surrealists’ party place near here) he started to take a swan dive out of the window in a peak of exaltation. Everybody loves him and perhaps this is partly due to his being the personification of the now-glamorized spontaneity of the twenties.’

  The next morning Dylan’s breakfast with Brinnin at the Earle comprised two raw eggs and a sherry. He departed for a dental check-up, before rejoining Brinnin at the offices of the Internal Revenue Service, whose permission was required if he was to travel two days later. Brinnin enjoyed quiet satisfaction at the importance his methodical accounting now assumed. Then Dylan went through his romantic opera bouffe: tea-time drinks with Jeanne Gordon at the Champs Elysées, followed by an evening with Pearl and one or two others.

  On 31 May, Dylan’s last day in New York, the partying started in his room at the Earle around 4 p.m. The place was strewn with clothes, manuscripts, empty beer bottles, chocolate bar wrappers, sleazy thrillers and faded flowers. As Brinnin offered to pack (someone had to), Dylan’s New York friends, such as Oscar Williams and Gene Derwood, began to drop by. One visitor was James Laughlin who had been curiously inconspicuous throughout Dylan’s visit. He told Rexroth that he had seen Dylan a few times but had not been able to ‘get much sense out of him as he always seemed to be half cooked. It’s just a shame.’ He said Dylan’s most recent reading at the Museum had been excellent, however. ‘He cranks up that big voice and lets it moan.’

  Brinnin was still packing when Jeanne arrived, loaded with expensive presents, including a new tweed jacket, some ties and a box of cigars for Dylan, and a space suit, cowboy outfit and archery set for his children. As she and Dylan broke into a medley of songs from musicals, she sprayed the room and his belongings with a scented air purifier. Shortly afterwards the telephone rang with the news that Pearl was waiting downstairs. Taking the line of least resistance, Dylan invited her up. There were awkward moments, as Pearl remarked, ‘What is that frightful odour?’ and Jeanne, still squirting, countered, ‘I like this odour. Don’t you like it, Dylan?’

  After a few drinks the atmosphere improved. A lively party proceeded to an Italian restaurant in the Village where Jeanne broke down in tears and rushed out. When someone went outside to try and bring her back, Pearl wondered coolly what her rival was doing there anyway. Three cars were needed to convey Dylan, his friends and his luggage to Pier 90 from where the Queen Elizabeth was due to sail at midnight. They all tried to stay on board with him until the last possible moment. When they had left the ship and were waving from the dockside, Jeanne teetered triumphantly down the gang-plank in her high heels. Brinnin noticed Pearl quietly weeping. They embraced silently as the liner pulled away from the pier.

  NINETEEN

  IN THE DIRECTION OF HIS PAIN

  Dylan’s progress through America had developed into a gripping soap opera. To people in the know, the delightful, bumbling, brilliant Dylan came across as a character in his own cartoon or, perhaps, morality play. Conrad Aiken, Elizabeth Bishop’s successor as Poetry Consultant at the Library of Congress, suggested as much, with his barbed observation on how the ‘kind friends who helped [Dylan] pack at his hotel, when of course he was blind to the world, thoughtfully packed about five hundred passionate love letters from all over the country, which naturally in due course his wife would unpack. Good clean fun.’

  The numbers were exaggerated, it was never much fun, and there was an awful inevitability about the outcome. Despite prickly comments to her friends while Dylan had been away, Caitlin we
nt to London to welcome her husband. There was immediate friction because she wanted to enjoy herself (having been cooped up in Laugharne for three months) and he wanted to go straight home (having had his fill of parties in New York). But they overcame these differences and, before long, she was again pregnant. The children were delighted with their presents from America and Dylan himself felt he had at last made a breakthrough in his career. He was enthusiastic about returning to the United States to teach and insisted that Caitlin would accompany him. Not that Ivy Williams and the inhabitants of Laugharne were interested in such matters: they only wanted to know about the stars he had met in Hollywood.

  The main problem for the Thomases remained the perennial one of money. Dylan’s American trip was supposed to put him on a firm financial footing. Yet he returned with very little to show for his time abroad. Caitlin was beginning to worry when she opened a present from Brinnin – a leather handbag, in which he had managed to secrete $800. He had noticed the speed at which Dylan was running through his earnings while in the United States and had astutely put something aside for the family, who he knew were living in difficult circumstances.

  When the accounts were tallied, Dylan had earned a gross sum of $7,860 in America. Roughly two thirds of this had been generated by Brinnin, who took his 15 per cent commission. In addition Dylan had incurred expenses of $2,860, as well as a US tax liability of $212. As a result, Dylan netted just under $4,000 or £1,425, the equivalent of around £29,000 in 2003. This was a reasonable return for three months’ work for anyone. But Dylan had managed to dissipate much of it through drinking and other incidental pleasures, and the British taxman was waiting for his share of an already dwindling amount. The returns might have been better but for his need to pay for his travel and accommodation. If he were to get an indentured position at, say, the University of California, such outgoings would not arise.