Having been inconspicuous in the United States, James Laughlin thought it an appropriate moment to send Dylan a word of encouragement. ‘New York, and, in fact, I am informed, the entire United States, seems very quiet after your departure. We all miss you a lot. You made yourself thousands of friends over here, and that is always a good thing.’ However, as a publisher, he was also keen for Dylan to capitalise on his fame. ‘As an author who almost never writes anything himself, I am always embarrassed about prodding others, but I do hope you will be writing again soon. Send along anything which you can turn out, as I shall be eager to see it.’
Dylan’s more immediate concern was finding work in Britain. He resurrected his BBC contacts, but it was not easy to force a way back into their schedules. With MacNeice’s position as a producer no longer vacant, Dylan suggested to Harman Grisewood, Controller of the Third Programme, that the Corporation might still find him some regular employment – possibly an attachment for a year or two. Margaret Taylor’s controlling hand was discernible behind this. Living in London, she missed regular communication with Dylan. So, seizing on the possibility of Dylan working at the BBC, ‘Maggs’ took the initiative in trying to find the Thomases accommodation with the McAlpines. In July 1950 Bill McAlpine had finally found a job as scientific officer at the British Council. He and his wife celebrated by acquiring a large house in St James’s Terrace in St John’s Wood. As a closeish neighbour, Margaret Taylor hurried round to inspect the place. Caitlin was furious at this intrusion in her private life, without even her say-so.
Skilfully timing his trip to avoid a visit to Laugharne by Margaret, Dylan went to London in mid-August to discuss his prospects with Grisewood. Although the Controller himself was positive, and suggested Dylan might play some role in the BBC’s coverage of the Festival of Britain the following year, others in the BBC were less enthusiastic and no job offer materialised.
Within a short time, Dylan’s attentions were diverted, as his romantic entanglement with Pearl resurfaced. In June she had received an invitation from her friend Truman Capote to visit him in Taormina, Sicily, where he was renting D. H. Lawrence’s old villa, La Fontana Vecchia, with a spectacular view of the sea and smoking Mount Etna. This raised the possibility that she might also see Dylan in London. She had had one letter from him – a mere two pages which she fondly described to Brinnin as long. This had stressed that she should write to him at ‘my reactionary red-nosed club’, the Savage. Apart from that, she had only heard rumours that he might be returning to the United States to teach. Still pining for him, she asked Stanley Moss, the poet who had befriended him in New York, if Dylan was serious about her. When he said he thought so, she decided to take leave of absence from Harper’s Bazaar and devote several months to a European grand tour. Coincidentally, Capote invited another good friend, John Malcolm Brinnin, who was therefore also planning a rather shorter transatlantic trip in the late summer. Apart from his social commitments the Poetry Center director wanted to interview Alice B. Toklas in Paris for his ongoing biography of Gertrude Stein.
By early August Pearl had communicated her plans to Dylan. He was concerned the imminent intervention of the United States in the Korean War might delay her trip. ‘Do you still arrive in England on the fourth of September, or will the war stop you, or some other madness?’ he wrote to her as if from the Savage Club. ‘If the dark leagues say No to you, I will declare war on America.’ Although Dylan had taken the elementary precaution of asking Pearl to write to him at the Savage, he was careless what he did with the letters he received there. One day when he was at Brown’s, Caitlin saw some pieces of paper in an unknown hand sticking out of his jacket. She read them and found they were love letters from Pearl. On Dylan’s return from the pub, she confronted him. Typically, he tried to pass the matter off as inconsequential. This was the sort of thing he was always having to dodge from American women, he said. Caitlin wrote a blistering retort to Pearl, but remained wary. As usual when marital relations were tense, Dylan upped his alcohol intake. His wife complained that he had been drinking heavily since his return from America and had done no work, which was hardly the recipe for great advancement.
Dylan was back in London at the end of August. He claimed it was his duty to look after the visiting Brinnin who had not been there since before the war. Meeting Brinnin’s boat train at Paddington station, Dylan looked not only well, but surprisingly smart (with his shoes polished for a change) and, as if to make a point, he was sporting a fat cigar. Over the next twenty-four hours or so, Dylan introduced his American tour agent to his London haunts – the Savage Club, where he seemed at home among the faded sepia photographs; the Salisbury, the pub in St Martin’s Lane favoured by his acting friends; the Academy cinema in Oxford Street, where he smoked and then snored his way through the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (which he must have seen countless times before); El Vino, the journalists’ bar in Fleet Street, and the Mandrake, a Soho chess club which served – under its dishevelled patron, Boris Watson of the old Café An’ – as an afternoon drinking dive.
At the last venue they were joined by Margaret Taylor, who knew about Brinnin from both Dylan and, more ominously, Caitlin, who had conveyed her suspicions of her husband’s gadding about in the United States. With Maggs in her headmistress role, dinner at Wheeler’s, a fashionable fish restaurant, was a frosty affair. Brinnin remarked how a drunken Dylan ‘rather quickly sobered’ over tasteless oysters and lobster. To prevent discussion straying onto the subject of, say, Pearl, Dylan suggested going to a revue at the London Casino where he insisted on paying for the best seats and then fell asleep. Afterwards the pubs were shut and even the Savage Club would not allow them a drink. While negotiating these matters with the hall porter, Dylan was called to the telephone. He was invited to a late night party which, according to Brinnin, was being given by the black actress Hilda Simms at her house near Regent’s Park. She had played the lead in Anna Lucasta when Dylan had met the cast a couple of years earlier. On this occasion he spent most of his time talking to the singer Lena Horne. From their bantering manner, Brinnin correctly concluded that they had met before.
Over the course of a grey London weekend, Dylan treated Brinnin to more of his blowsy London hospitality. Then the reason for his glad rags and general sheen became clear. On the morning of Monday 4 September, Pearl arrived in town, after crossing the Atlantic in a bucketing English freighter turned passenger ship. As a surprise gift for Dylan she brought his watch which he thought he had seen the last of in New York after a friend dropped it in some beer. But the Frankenbergs had taken it to a repair shop, from where Pearl reclaimed it. Unfortunately within days he had lost it again – this time in Brighton. Brinnin arranged to meet them both for lunch at Wheeler’s, but they did not turn up. Instead Dylan telephoned Brinnin’s hotel and invited him to join them later at the Café Royal. Dylan was in ebullient mood, but clearly wanted to be alone with Pearl, so Brinnin discreetly left after one drink. The three of them met again at the Salisbury the following lunchtime. At Dylan’s prompting, they strolled down to the Thames and took a river bus down the river to a point beyond Greenwich. As a series of photographs show, they were in good spirits. However Brinnin noticed that Dylan, for all his laughter, seemed perturbed. When Pearl went to refill their drinks at the bar, Dylan turned to him with a look of desperation and said, ‘John, what am I going to do? I’m in love with Pearl and I’m in love with my wife. I don’t know what to do.’ (This was the version in Brinnin’s Dylan Thomas in America. In a letter to Bill Read, he said, ‘Dylan seems to be deeply taken with Pearl, to the point where he’s wondering what might be done about it.’)
With Brinnin leaving for France the next day, Dylan and Pearl escaped for a couple of nights à deux to the south coast, to Brighton. If there was an air of caution about this, it had disappeared by the time they returned to London, where, over lunch-time on a Saturday, Dylan squired Pearl around the Stag’s Head without concern for the consequences. Rayner Heppenstall, wh
o happened to be working at the BBC, described her as ‘arty in clothes and manner, intelligent and full of suspicion’. Later in the afternoon the couple went to a party to celebrate George Reavey’s wedding to the American artist Irene Rice Peirera. The wise old bird Wyn Henderson, who was present in her latest incarnation as housekeeper to BBC producer Bertie Rodgers, noted, ‘He was with the Kazan [sic] girl and I thought they seemed much in love and that she was an exceptionally nice girl. I felt uneasy for Caitlin.’
Henderson was right to be wary. News of Dylan’s activities reached Margaret Taylor who went to the Savage Club (where Dylan was nominally staying) and prevailed upon the hall porter to hand her Dylan’s messages. Her suspicions confirmed, Margaret decided to punish her kept poet. Since the Thomases had recently installed a telephone, Margaret was able to dial Caitlin on their new number, Laugharne 68. She said she needed to see her immediately and, without further ado, announced she was catching the next train to Carmarthen. At the Boat House, she flung her arms around Caitlin, kissed her and followed her into the kitchen. Then she told her about Pearl.
What Dylan’s benefactress thought would be gained by telling tales is hard to say. It was a personal, emotional reaction. She herself was jealous of the slim young American with the Juliette Greco fringe. She feared her own controlling influence in Dylan’s life might end if, perhaps, he were to leave his family and go to the United States. No doubt, she also felt genuine concern for Caitlin and her children.
The immediate reaction was predictable. Caitlin was furious and thirsted for revenge. Only her pride held her back from abandoning her children and chasing after her husband in London. She waited until he returned later that week, and confronted him. Once again, Dylan tried to lie his way out of the situation and tell her she had got the wrong end of the stick. She remained unconvinced, sensing that this affair meant more to him than the others. More hurtful than anything was the thought of Dylan parading his girlfriend in the pubs they both used to frequent. It was this public humiliation that embittered her.
Dylan thought he had pacified her but, realising he was still in deep trouble, he wrote to Helen McAlpine begging her, if asked by Caitlin, to say that everything the ‘grey scum’, as he referred to Margaret, had said was LIES (and he capitalised the word for effect). ‘All was LIES,’ he reiterated. ‘And, incidentally, it was. And, incidentally, the girl has gone to France, not to return.’ In his alcoholic haze, he half-believed what he said: he could certainly argue that Pearl had known Reavey’s new wife in New York. And it was true that Pearl had left for France. She had been escorted to the air terminal by Margaret Taylor, who continued to write to her telling her how lucky she was to be out of England.
As the autumn nights drew in, rows at the Boat House often turned into physical fights. On occasions Dylan would pass out and Caitlin would worry that she had killed him; other times she had to concoct elaborate stories about her own black eyes. Dylan was terrified that he had destroyed his marriage. And it is a moot point whether or not this was true. Caitlin admitted she never forgave him for this infidelity and she began to punish him with a series of her own affairs. At the same time, she was surprised at the degree of tenderness that still remained in her marriage. But Dylan could not see this. Within four months, he was writing to her, ‘I’m in darkness because I do not know if you will ever love me again. And I’ll die if you do not. I mean that. I shall not kill myself: I shall die.’ And, without really trying, he did his best to speed the process.
He knew it was important to return to writing poetry, but found it difficult. He had promised Mike Watkins of the Ann Watkins agency in New York that his ‘first task’ on returning to England would be to write a poem for the agency to submit to either The New Yorker, Atlantic or the Hudson Review. But he made no progress on that score. The best he could do was polish up ‘In the White Giant’s Thigh’ with a view to sending it to Botteghe Oscure. After one argument, Caitlin found a fair copy of the poem and somehow, being pregnant, took umbrage at its sexual connotations. She became so angry that she tore it up and threw it out over the verandah. Then, with the reverence for the creative act that was so important to her relationship with Dylan, she felt remorse and, while he was still asleep the next morning, tried to gather the pieces. He sent the sixty-line poem to Marguerite Caetani, complete with a note which placed it, as intended, in the context of a more ambitious work.
This way ‘In the White Giant’s Thigh’ metamorphosed from a gloomy text into part of a more substantial celebratory poem, ‘In Country Heaven’. This as yet unwritten longer work, which may have been gestating for over three years, was to start in the vein of ‘In the White Giant’s Thigh’, with God weeping over the earth’s self-destruction. (In Dylan’s dizzying theology, God was ‘the godhead, the author, the first cause, architect, lamplighter, the beginning word, the anthropomorphic bawler-out and black-baller, the quintessence, scapegoat, martyr, maker’.) But then the ‘heavenly hedgerow men’ who once inhabited earth begin to recall the contrasting pleasures and pains of life on that planet. ‘And the poem becomes, at last, an affirmation of the beautiful and terrible worth of the earth. It grows into a praise of what is and what could be on this lump in the skies. It is a poem about happiness.’
In September Dylan recorded a version of this explicatory note for the BBC. It provided a framework for him to give a promised broadcast of his recent poems. Somewhat unconvincingly, Dylan claimed that two more poems – ‘In Country Sleep’ and ‘Over Sir John’s hill’ – also formed part of the foreword to ‘In Country Heaven’. With the addition of ‘In the White Giant’s Thigh’, they at least gave Dylan something to read on the wireless and earn his twenty guineas. The programme’s producer was Douglas Cleverdon, a former Bristol bookseller, who had featured Dylan’s voice in a number of broadcasts, including In Parenthesis, Milton’s Comus and the maligned Paradise Lost. Now Cleverdon wondered if something might be made of Dylan’s long-held interest in writing the intimate history of a Welsh town, sometimes called Llareggub. Over the years this idea had evolved and even had dry runs, growing from discussions with Bert Trick and Richard Hughes before the war, through ‘Quite Early One Morning’, his evocative sketch of New Quay (or somewhere very similar) in 1944, to miniature radio dramas such as ‘The Londoner’ in 1946 and Dylan’s later filmscripts.
The recent death of Edgar Lee Masters had concentrated Dylan’s mind on the American author’s Spoon River Anthology, about a mythical town in Illinois as seen through the eyes of the characters in the local graveyard, all keen to settle old scores. Cleverdon astutely set Dylan to editing the Anthology for a BBC programme, with the idea that the related subject-matter might also encourage him to finish his own radio play about an imaginary town. This latter project became known as The Town That Was Mad. As conceived in the autumn of 1950, this had a discernible plot about a town which, under obscure post-war legislation, was certified mad. In order to disprove this allegation, its inhabitants (with names familiar to Under Milk Wood) had to go to court where they were cross-examined by the blind Captain Cat. When the legal process was completed and the town’s madness was confirmed, Captain Cat welcomed this verdict as a triumph for individuality.
Dylan took his family to London in September to work on these projects and to allow Caitlin to have an abortion (a topic on which there was never much debate). Initially they stayed in the Drayton Gardens flat of Mary Keene who had spent some time in Laugharne while Dylan was away and had liked the place. When Dylan became ill with something like pleurisy, Mary’s doctor advised him to stop drinking. He replied predictably that he preferred the sickness to the cure. With Dylan in bed, Mary felt she had to move out with her daughter Alice and stay with friends. The Thomases seemed to have no sense that they were putting her out. When she returned, Caitlin said to her, ‘I suppose you’ve come to throw us out.’ Mary could only reply, ‘Can’t you see it’s the other way round.’
Dylan then moved his family into a rented flat in South Kens
ington. With Cleverdon eager for a script that could be scheduled for the first quarter of 1951, Dylan at one stage escaped these cramped domestic quarters and moved into the Cadogan Hotel, once favoured by Oscar Wilde. When he and Caitlin visited Cleverdon and his wife Nest to read the work in progress, Philip Burton and his ward Richard were present. Nest Cleverdon was appalled that Caitlin could leave her three children, including one-year-old Colm, alone in a strange flat. But the reading was appreciated by all – all, that is, except Caitlin, who piped up at the end, ‘Bloody pot-boiler’.
She might have been happier if it had been so and certainly if her husband had managed to finish it. But although Dylan sent Cleverdon a script of thirty-nine pages, he himself did not like it. The BBC offered him additional work to tide him along. In November he chaired a discussion on bad verse with several other poets including George Barker – somewhat ironically, since only the previous month he had stood at the bar of the Stag’s Head and, hooting with laughter, had read out various sentences from Barker’s new novel The Dead Seagull to Rayner Heppenstall, who also now worked for the BBC. The recording of the programme, ‘Poetic Licence’, was preceded by a ‘lunch’ for which, as the BBC archives dutifully record, Dylan had to borrow £5 from the producer. The lunch was clearly liquid, which led the reviewer in The Listener to note the ‘cheerful animal noise from which only one or two human phrases emerged’. But the indulgent Corporation did not want to divert Dylan too much as its main objective was to secure delivery of its promised radio play.
With bills again piling up alarmingly, Dylan was forced to look elsewhere for money. Through the McAlpines he maintained good contacts in the film industry, where he claimed to be discussing a project with the young producer Ben Arbeid. (In an effort to curry favour with his patroness, he also asked Arbeid to look at The Shadowless Man, the filmscript he had written with Margaret Taylor. Arbeid indicated the project’s lack of commerciality by tactfully suggesting it should be sent to Jean Cocteau.)
Dylan Thomas: A New Life Page 44