Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  Another promising idea was that Dylan should write a radio series called ‘Quid’s Inn’ with Ted Kavanagh, an Irish New Zealander whom he described as the ‘best gagman in England’. Kavanagh, father of the poet P. J. Kavanagh, was at a loose end after ITMA, the comedy series which made his name, collapsed with the death of its principal actor Tommy Handley in January 1949. Dylan envisaged an ongoing story line based on the characters in a rural pub – a cross between ITMA, Crossroads and The Archers. Kavanagh drew up an outline and, although again nothing came of it, Dylan’s involvement with a professional writer familiar with the comic possibilities of radio rubbed off and contributed to his handling of Under Milk Wood.

  Despite subventions from the usual sources such as Margaret Taylor, Tony Hubbard and Marguerite Caetani, Dylan was forced in December to make a further plea for money to the Royal Literary Fund. Harold Nicolson backed the application, despite his caveats that Dylan was a ‘very heavy drinker’ and his wife ‘almost equally unreliable’. Dylan was thankful for a prompt grant of £300 which was immediately swallowed up by school fees and local tradesmen’s bills.

  In December he began talking of a new most unlikely enterprise. Bunny Keene was again running his own film company, Greenpark, after an interlude at Gainsborough where he liked to claim he discovered James Bomford’s Swindon friend Diana Dors (née Fluck) by casting her in his film A Boy, a Girl and a Bike in 1949. Returning to documentaries, he had been asked to make a film about Iran, following on his earlier successful feature about Cyprus with Laurie Lee. Greenpark’s client was the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), which had the largest concession in the Middle-Eastern country. However it found itself in the centre of political upheaval, as nationalists made common cause with Islamic fundamentalists against the Shah’s pro-western government, targeting the oil industry as the main area of the economy for fruitful agitation. Self-conscious about its image, Anglo-Iranian needed a good public relations job. A bibulous poet was hardly the most obvious candidate for such a task. However a literary man’s overview had worked in the case of Cyprus. Anyway Dylan needed the money, and it seemed politic to get out of the marital home (though only after making sure that, while he was away, Greenpark paid Caitlin £10 a week out of his £250 flat fee). On 8 January 1951, he and Bunny flew to Tehran, via Amsterdam and Lydda.

  Their initial task was to set up the project and write a draft script. Filming, in glorious, expensive Technicolor, would follow. However, Bunny turned out to be an appalling hypochondriac, forever retiring to bed with pills and hot water bottles. Because of the growing political unrest, the bureaucracy was more obtuse and unyielding than usual. So Dylan spent his first few days in Tehran mooching around his oil company guest house, drinking with Scottish engineers, and waiting for Bunny – an unsatisfactory regime since it allowed him to think too much about Caitlin and if she still felt anything for him. At least he could call on Bunny for potions to send him to sleep.

  His initial impressions were that the city was ‘depressing and half-made’. He disliked oil men and their habit of ‘running down the Persian wops’. The effects of poverty were painfully obvious, particularly when he visited a hospital and came across ‘rows and rows of tiny little Persian children suffering from starvation: their eyes were enormous, seeing everything & nothing, their bellies bloated, their matchstick arms hung around with blue, wrinkled flesh.’ On 17 January he and Bunny journeyed south by train to Ahwaz on the Persian Gulf, and on to Abadan, the centre of the oil industry, full of hissing state of the art refineries. In much hotter conditions, Dylan again despised the British oil workers, though he summoned some respect for the local people. One image struck him: four Iranians sitting on a small mudbank in the middle of a river. Their fatalistic ability to make the most of their situation inspired him to tell Caitlin that they too could both be happy in ‘any dusty sunfried place’.

  His timing was atrocious, for at almost exactly the same time his wife was telling Helen McAlpine that she had mentally cast Dylan out of her asylum. After a fortnight of silence, she had received his usual ‘slop bucket douche’ of a letter, leaving her wondering who was the fool. She felt he had her both ways. If he left her, she was still there, and if he came back it was the same. As a result she admitted that she had become exceedingly bitter.

  Dylan was devastated when Caitlin wrote to him along these lines, saying she did not want to see him again. Lonely and unhappy as he already was in southern Iran, he had to wrestle from a distance with the awful possibility that his lifetime’s relationship had broken down. Well might he answer in reply, ‘Your letter, as it was meant to, made me want to die.’ However he did not underestimate his wife’s anger. He said that he would not return to Laugharne unless she wanted him – ‘not as an inefficient mispayer of bills, but as myself and for you’. He asked her to leave a message for him at the McAlpines’: if she did not, he would know ‘everything is over’.

  He tried opium as a palliative, but was not impressed, settling for vodka made from beetroot, which tasted like ‘stimulating sockjuice’, and a local beer full of glycerine. He can hardly have been great company when, with Bunny crying off sick with tonsillitis and opting to stay in Abadan, he took off to spend a couple of days camping with geologists in the hills. On his return, he and Bunny flew to Shiraz, the delightful tree-lined city of the poets Hafiz and Sadi, from where, suffering from gout, Dylan chose to write not to Caitlin but to Pearl, giving her a rather more jaundiced impression of ‘lonely … stricken’ Iran and the sexually frustrated expatriates trying to run its oil industry.

  The two colleagues returned from Isfahan to a snowbound Tehran for a week of scripting. On his last night, 13 February, Dylan gave a reading of his poems to the Anglo-Iranian Society at the British Council. At an accompanying party, he consumed so much vodka (the only available drink) that Olive Suratgar, widow of a head of English at the university, became seriously worried. Emotionally racked though he was, the trouper could still work his old magic: ‘when he read so beautifully’, Mrs Suratgar found herself ‘shivering with delight’.

  The following day Dylan flew to London where he found Caitlin had failed to carry out her threat and was again waiting for him at the McAlpines. It was a complicated, unhappy home-coming. Finding that his bored wife had been in town for several days, he suspected her of having an affair with the younger amusing South African-born poet David Wright. She admitted a romantic fling, but it does not seem to have been consummated. However Dylan had an excuse to flounce off and feel doubly hurt. His behaviour may have been linked to the fact that Pearl was passing through London, on her way back to America from Sicily.

  Within a week he returned to Laugharne where a fraught situation became alarmingly worse when Caitlin found another batch of letters from Pearl, one replying to a cable from Iran reiterating his love and continued desire for her. Having been careless enough to let the letters be found, Dylan compounded his stupidity by still trying to assert that there was nothing to his affair with Pearl who, he said, was another Margaret Taylor. Caitlin was adamant that even someone as hare-brained as herself could not accept that.

  It was a miserable start to a miserable year. Dylan was forced to find a temporary berth at the McAlpines, from where he pursued various unlikely possibilities of work, such as the Quid’s Inn project. With no doors opening, the outcome was predictable. ‘Dylan is here,’ wrote his hosts to the newly married Reaveys. ‘He came back last night like a prize fighter’s sparring partner! An enormous black eye, shirt torn to ribbons. He said he tried to hit a fellow smaller than himself, but when he looked up at him from the floor, he was over six foot. (Overheard: Dylan’s description of the weather in Wales: grey, wet, windy and cold like an old man’s bum.)’

  There was little respite at the BBC. Although sympathetic, Cleverdon at the Third Programme was reluctant to let him start on any new scripts ‘until he has finished the two or three which have already been commissioned for some time’. Looking for a way round the problem
, either Cleverdon or perhaps Margaret Taylor may have asked their friend John Betjeman if he could prevail on George Barnes, the former head of the Third Programme and now head of BBC Television, to find Dylan a job. Betjeman did his best: ‘I like [Dylan Thomas] all right myself, and I like some of his poetry, and I know that he really understands poetry, and reads it and interprets it beautifully.’ Noting that Maggs was coming to see Barnes about this, Betjeman stressed that Dylan was ‘more important than I am. He can’t provide for his family. I at least can do that.’

  Although nothing came of this initiative, the Home Service was happy to take a piece from Dylan on Iran which, despite lifting a long paragraph directly from a letter to Caitlin, skilfully conveyed the country’s delicate balance between progress and tradition. At the Welsh service in Cardiff Aneirin Talfan Davies expressed interest in Dylan reporting on the ongoing Festival of Britain, and giving it a Welsh twist. After the usual delays, Dylan prevailed on an Oxford friend, Mary Ellidge, to accompany him, telling her how he hated exhibitions. They went by way of a Bloomsbury pub, where they met Richard Huws, a Welsh sculptor whom Dylan had known before the war. Huws had designed several features for the Festival site, including a celebrated water mobile, and seemed an appropriate guide since Dylan was writing for a Welsh audience. He proved his worth by declaring that the most stimulating places in the twenty-two pavilions were the bars – all decorated with murals by different artists. When Dylan reached Huws’s modernist steel and platinum water mobile, Ellidge remarked on the use of Handel’s Water Music as accompaniment. ‘Is that what it is?’ said Dylan, noting this information on a cigarette packet. The detail duly appeared in his talk, together with colourful journalistic observations on places such as the Dome of Discovery and the Transport Pavilion. His comment on the British character – ‘that stubborn, stupid, seabound, lyrical, paradoxical dark farrago of uppishness, derring-do, and midsummer moonshine all fluting, snug and copper-bottomed’ – bears repeating, but his florid verbal picture of the night-time Thames was from the public relations side of his documentary film-making days.

  Dylan kept up his occasional speaking engagements. But when he addressed a meeting of the English Society at Swansea University in April, he ran up against Kingsley Amis, to whom he represented the worst of a bombastic, old-fashioned style of poetry. Amis, an English lecturer there, treated his friend Philip Larkin to a venomous description. Dylan’s ‘conversation consisted of one or two written-out solos and a string of very dirty and not very funny limericks … His talk was horrible: shagged epigrams topped up with some impressionistic stuff about America that I imagine he had inserted from another talk and with a backlash of dutiful impropriety.’ Amis expanded on this in the Spectator, where he described Dylan as looking like ‘a dissolute but very amiable frog’. He enjoyed an exchange where, when Dylan mentioned he had been in Persia, ‘pouring water on troubled oil’, Amis asked if he could write that down and Dylan replied he already had. Although he sensed signs of charlatanry, even Amis could not deny Dylan’s voice was magnificent and his delivery ‘infectious’.

  During the first few months of the year, two out-of-town friends had acquired small houses in Laugharne. One was Mary Keene who prevailed on Matthew Smith to buy her a two-room cottage in the Laques, a lane towards the bottom end of the town. Mary’s daughter Alice fitted in well as a playmate for the Thomas children. Having been raised in London, she was astonished at the material poverty of the local people. She also recognised Caitlin’s extraordinary spirit: ‘I didn’t like her, but she was terrific’, bundling the children off for picnics and even taking Mary swimming with no regard for any embarrassment her friend might feel about her metal leg. Alice observed the rest of the Thomas family – D.J. pale and thin, a very different specimen from his son; Florrie laughing, with, as was common practice in the Welsh countryside, a village girl to share her bed and keep her warm; Llewelyn protective of his ground-floor room at the Boat House, which he perceived to be under threat from the girls; Aeronwy seeking to assert her independence in the face of her domineering mother. (She wanted to learn to cook, for example, when Caitlin would have her dancing.)

  The other was Margaret Taylor who purchased a place on the Grist, from where she was able to monitor Dylan’s progress. It soon became clear that the Laugharne experiment was not working. Dylan admitted he found it difficult to write when feeling guilty that the local traders had not been paid. A note of frustration with the Welsh town had begun to creep into his communications, whether to John Davenport, to whom he moaned about ‘my horribly cosy little nest, surrounded by my detestable books, wearing my odious warm slippers, observing the gay, reptilian play of my abominable brood, basking in the vituperation of my golden, loathing wife’, or to Lloyd Frankenberg and Loren MacIver, for whom he took to cummings-inspired verse:

  In this pretty as a stricture town by the eel

  y, oily, licking sea full of fish that taste like feet …

  under a bathwater sky …

  Nine hundred gabies, two chapels soprano with rat

  s; five catafalque pubs licensed to sell enbalming gin And aconite tobacc

  o: such is my home

  To Brinnin, he simply said, ‘I’m sick of Laugharne. It has rained here since last June.’ Margaret Taylor understood the message and began talking about finding him a flat or house in London, possibly in Cheyne Walk, where he could once again be close to more lucrative sources of income, such as the film industry.

  Perhaps it was her influence that led to Dylan completing some excellent poems during the spring and early summer. ‘Lament’ is a swaggering, punning account of a one-time sexual athlete’s rise and fall back into the enveloping folds of family and religion. To an extent he is poking fun at himself, though the colliery imagery (emphasised in the title ‘The Miner’s Lament’ used in one work-sheet in Texas), gives the poem a more universal, and added metaphorical, appeal. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ is an anguished protest against his father’s declining powers, particularly his loss of sight. But as often in Dylan’s poetry it was more complicated than that. When he sent both these poems to Marguerite Caetani in quick succession in May, he said of the latter, ‘The only person I can’t show the enclosed poem to is, of course, my father, who doesn’t know he’s dying.’ The reason was that, in its careful villanelle form, it was also about men discovering their lives had been failures – a category that included his father, if not Dylan himself. At the same time it is a plea to seventy-five-year-old D.J. not to lapse into sentimental religion of the kind satirised in ‘Lament’, but to retain his quality of fierce scepticism that had been such an important influence in Dylan’s development. (In a talk the following year, Dylan would tell how his father was so firmly opposed to the notion of a personal God that he would stand at the window and growl, ‘It’s raining, blast Him!’)

  By July Dylan was promising the Princess another piece, a longish poem on a birthday theme which he said he liked better than anything he had written for a long time, ‘which does not say a great deal’. This was ‘Poem on his Birthday’ which, from its internal reference to his thirty-fifth birthday, originated nearly two years earlier. Again on one level it is a personal record of Dylan’s heightened sensitivities as he reaches the half point in his allotted Bible span and begins to ‘sail out to die’. At first he approaches this subject-matter through a familiar gentle Laugharne landscape of cormorants and curlews. Typically of Dylan, he both ‘celebrates and spurns’ the anniversary. But, as he looks at nature, he realises not just the prevalence of death but how creatures seem unthinkingly to seek it out. Similarly, as he told Bill Read when he came to Laugharne with Brinnin that summer, a poet ‘sings in the direction of his pain’, or, put differently, toils ‘towards his own wounds which are waiting to ambush him’. In a complicated exposition of his theology, Dylan recognises the attraction and mystery of religion. But it is not for him: his blessings are more tangible and earthly – the four elements and five senses. As
he stated to Brinnin during this visit, his aim was to produce ‘poems in praise of God’s world by a man who doesn’t believe in God’. ‘Poem on his Birthday’ is his statement of this position – a cosmically aware, religiously minded humanist’s anthem, a personalised version of ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’.

  Despite his respect for a spiritual viewpoint, his own atheism had recently become more pronounced, perhaps the result of renewed proximity to his father. One night he stayed in Notting Hill with the Roman Catholic writer Bernard Wall, a friend of John Davenport. According to Wall, Dylan proposed translating with him the poems of Umberto Saba, a Jewish poet from Trieste. When, the following morning, Wall’s wife Barbara made Dylan a cup of tea, they started talking about religion. At her mention of her faith, Dylan stated categorically, ‘The after life is one of the most terrible things you Christians have thought up. When I’m dead I want to be buried and to feel the violets growing over me.’

  As the crossings out on his worksheets attest, ‘Poem on his Birthday’ did not come easily. But it was a stunning work, fully justifying his personal note of satisfaction. Devastatingly, on its completion in August, he took it on one of his job-searching trips to London where, finding himself unable to afford the fare back to Wales, he sold the manuscript to the short-lived World Review which paid him a miserable £10, considerably less than his potential fee from Botteghe Oscure.

  Dylan was still working on the poem when Brinnin and Read came to stay in late July. Having rediscovered London the previous year, Brinnin wanted to come back and develop his contacts in the English literary world. But, however much he might protest the contrary, he was also quietly determined to get Dylan back for another American tour. After meeting John Davenport, Edith Sitwell, David Gascoyne and others, he and his boyfriend travelled to Cardiff, where he was broadcasting on Dylan, and to Carmarthen where they were met at the station by the poet himself. Over the next three days the pleasures of their introduction to Laugharne and West Wales were dampened by their hosts’ fighting among themselves and, in particular, by Caitlin’s hostility towards the Americans personally. This surfaced when Dylan hired Billy Williams and his ancient Buick to take them all round Pembrokeshire. After stops at various pubs, Dylan was chatting garrulously to Billy in the front, when Caitlin began questioning Brinnin at her side in the back about Pearl, wanting to know what sort of a person she was, where she was now, and if she intended coming back to England. Brinnin squirmed with embarrassment, partly because of the topic and partly because Dylan was so close. He realised he had not satisfied her curiosity and, by the time the group reached St David’s Head, at the far western tip of Wales, a distinct tension had arisen. A photograph taken in the ruins of the bishop’s palace next to St David’s cathedral shows an apparently contented group, though, according to Brinnin, ‘the camera had never lied more gracefully’. Caitlin, who had insisted on taking a swim in the nude, refused to speak when they stopped for tea. Then, with the atmosphere darkening and everybody longing to return home, Dylan insisted on leading them to a place in Fishguard for ‘a magnificent lobster dinner’, which turned out to be nothing of the sort. On the return journey Caitlin sat in the front while Dylan slept on Brinnin’s shoulder. Occasional snatches of her conversation would reach the back, such as her comment that she was looking forward to a visit from some ‘real friends, not Americans’. Back at the Boat House, after Dylan went directly and silently to bed, Brinnin prepared to sleep on a sofa in the sitting room, while Read took Llewelyn’s bedroom. As she swept upstairs, Caitlin turned and spat out the words, ‘Now you can see what I mean. America is out.’