The two visitors sat up late in the night wondering what they could have done to offend her. They toyed with leaving but next morning she and Dylan were so charming and seemingly oblivious of any irregularity, that they decided to stay. But after a pleasant day meeting Dylan’s parents and friends, reading his latest work and discussing an American tour, they were subjected to another alarming display. Dylan began sounding off over dinner on topics such as the need for compulsory execution of all sex offenders. Anything he said, Caitlin contradicted. Before long husband and wife were throwing things and assaulting each other. When Dylan finally broke away, she snarled at her dumbfounded guests, ‘Thank you for helping a lady.’ She then calmed down and poured out her woes which, for all the practical problems of money, boiled down to her feeling trapped with her family in Laugharne while Dylan lorded it in the United States. Reiterating a line she had already communicated to Brinnin by post, she accused him of flattering Dylan’s ego. She said her husband was not going to America again without her and, as she was not budging, the decision was irrevocable.
Clearly this was an emotionally charged subject in the Thomas household. Earlier that month, it had seemed to be resolved, as Dylan had given Oscar Williams and Marguerite Caetani definite hints that he was going to America. Brinnin’s presence had stirred in Caitlin memories of her unhappiness at the outcome of the previous trip. However Dylan’s parlous finances had their own inexorable logic. Before long details of a new itinerary were being bandied across the Atlantic. By mid-August Laughlin was congratulating Brinnin on the ‘good news’ of Dylan’s return to the United States in the new year. ‘However, I hope you will beat him sternly and constantly on the head, so that he will write more poems, and not just spend all his time in bars. It is really tragic that he indulges himself so continually, and I don’t see how he can survive long at the present pace.’ In London later that month, Laughlin saw Dylan briefly and impressed on him the usefulness of having a new book to coincide with his visit. Dylan’s output since Deaths and Entrances (or Selected Writings in the United States) amounted to six poems. But Laughlin seemed satisfied and asked Dylan if he wanted the book to take the title of one of the poems, with the addition & Other Poems, or if it might be called by one of the many fine phrases in the verse, such as ‘The Hawk on Fire’ or ‘Under a Serpent Cloud’.
While these details were being worked out over the autumn, Dylan’s relationship with Caitlin went from bad to worse. She remained implacably opposed to his returning to America. As a form of revenge, she started casually picking up men, even local youths in Brown’s. Hearing about these one night stands from Ivy Williams, Dylan questioned Caitlin about them and, although she lied, he was relieved to hear her denial.
But the tantrums and the fisticuffs, as well as the bills and the summonses, continued. When Lizzie Lutyens came to stay at the Boat House, she found that her friend had a scar on her forehead and Dylan had fled the nest, threatening suicide. Caitlin was concerned that Dylan had telephoned from Swansea the previous night and announced dramatically, ‘This is the last time you will hear my voice.’ When, after two days, nothing further was heard, Lutyens, on Caitlin’s behalf, telephoned Dan Jones who knew where Dylan was staying. Dan said that, although Dylan did not want to come home, he might be encouraged to meet Caitlin in a local pub. A stormy reconciliation ensued, which resulted in the Thomases missing their last train home and Lutyens (whom Caitlin had begged to accompany her) having to fork out for a taxi. The return journey was farcical, with Dylan demanding to stop for a pee at regular intervals, each time pretending to run away and having to be caught. Lutyens, who was living in the McAlpines’ house, was one of several emotionally scarred women who did their best to give Caitlin emotional support. She was shocked at the way Dylan in Laugharne had taken on Welsh patriarchal attitudes. He even resented the two women going out for walks together. Lizzie encouraged Caitlin to keep up her dancing and felt privileged to be offered her poems to read.
This was a sideline that Caitlin had been quietly developing. Earlier in the year she had been in correspondence with Oscar Williams, thanking him and his wife for sending her some nylon stockings. When he replied, expressing interest in her own writing, she told him she had been trying to write him some verse, but found it difficult because whenever she asked Dylan the rudiments of his trade, he seemed unable to explain. So, if she felt under pressure, she resorted to writing down her thoughts as concisely as she could and she hoped that the results could be described as poetry.
One of her efforts recorded in some detail her contempt for Margaret Taylor, whom she portrayed as prim, emotionally repressed and rapacious. While her style might be faulted, her rhythm rattled along.
Unfortunately for Caitlin, this was the woman who was looking for a house for her and her family in London. Although unhappy at this prospect, Dylan realised he had little option. ‘I hate to leave this sea but I must earn a living and will be writing filmscripts, class very B.’ While still in Laugharne, he occupied himself with The Town That Was Mad project for the BBC. However in his desperation for money (he had been threatened with prosecution for not paying his National Insurance stamps), he was forced to offer a version of this to Marguerite Caetani. In October he sent her the first half of something he called Llareggub. A Play for Radio Perhaps, and promised to complete it soon. In anticipation of this, he begged her to send him £100 now, for the whole work. With this in mind, he took the trouble to explain some of the characters and say it was based on the town where he lived.
By November Margaret Taylor had found the Thomases some-where to live in London. Unsurprisingly, it was not in Cheyne Walk, but a basement flat at 54 Delancey Street in Camden Town, within a quarter of a mile (across a railway line) of where she herself lived. Maggs convinced herself that if Dylan had a ‘London dump’, he could do his ‘bread and butter work’ in the capital and not have to go to America. Dylan and Caitlin brought their Laugharne help Dolly Long (and her son Desmond) with them to look after the children. Maggs somehow managed to wheel up the old caravan from South Leigh and park it in the garden, allowing Dylan at least temporary respite from the din.
It did not prove a happy experiment. Again potential work projects kept collapsing underneath him: he had had hopes of writing scripts for Donald Taylor who was now a director of Regent Film Productions, with grand-sounding offices in London, New York, Hollywood, Hamburg, Cairo and Singapore. But nothing materialised, and Dylan was reduced to appearing on a BBC light entertainment show ‘Say the Word’. Otherwise he explored the pubs around Delancey Street – particularly the Black Cat, where the Irish immigrants were always good company, and Old Mother Red Cap, where an undertaker kept him amused with tall stories about his trade, such as the time a coffin lid would not close because the corpse had an enormous erection.
At least Oscar Williams continued to work on Dylan’s behalf. In June he bludgeoned Edward Weeks, editor of Atlantic, into accepting ‘In the white giant’s thigh’ and paying $150. Weeks described the poem as ‘a lovely thing, a sort of paean to the life force, musical, highly emotional, compact, full of beautiful pictures, & as one of my assistants says, “unhampered by any consensus to common place logic”. We think it is Grade-A Thomas.’ Williams begged Dylan to send more poems to him, in preference to Botteghe Oscure or other such publications. ‘You are too good, & too well known, & too poor, for any magazine to lay down conditions. The Italian magazine will take months, literally months, before they publish. I can arrange American publication in the meantime, if I had copies of your poems …’ When in October Dylan sent ‘Poem on his Birthday’, along with a dire account of his financial and physical well-being, Oscar considered it ‘a beauty; the strict vowel rhymes throughout add a freshness & simplicity unparallelled in modern poetry; it’s lucid as moonlight on the Hudson on a clear night’. At Atlantic, Weeks agreed, in view of Dylan’s hardship, to pay $200, though he felt $300 – the sum Oscar requested – would have been unfair to earlier contributors
including Frost, Eliot and Auden. In return the magazine asked for a prose note to accompany the poem, as had been the case with ‘In the white giant’s thigh’. Oscar replied wistfully, ‘I have never had much success in getting Mr Thomas to write anything special, within six months of the request.’
By now, for all Maggs’s efforts, America could not be avoided. Surprisingly, however, Caitlin relented and made plans to accompany her husband to New York on the Queen Mary on 15 January. Maggs too changed her position: when the American embassy again queried Dylan about his trip to Prague in 1947, she asked Nicholas Henderson, a young friend in the Foreign Office, to see what he could do to speed matters along. As an added boost, the London publisher Allen Wingate contracted to take a 60,000-word journal of Dylan’s American trip. The responsible editor was Charles Fry, an amiable alcoholic whom Dylan had known on the pub circuit for many years. He agreed to pay a £400 fee (£100 of which was up front), though the specified delivery date was tight.
The reason for Caitlin’s change of heart is unclear. Perhaps she simply wanted to get away and have a good time. She may have been convinced by Maggs that she was better off beside her husband than away from him. She may also have heard that, in an effort to put Dylan behind her, Pearl had married Vincent Kraft, a photographer and former lover of Aaron Copland, and had moved with him to Brazil. As an augury of her new life, making a living by her own pen, Pearl had even sold a story to Botteghe Oscure. It was called ‘The Jester’, which could have been a wry comment on her relationship with Dylan. Although ostensibly about an energetic New York literary figure called Kuney, the piece was full of intimations of Dylan – not least, its second sentence: ‘When his memory absorbs me now, I turn with strange formality to the extremes of the Earth’s turning.’
TWENTY
BATTLE AGAINST AMERICAN HOSPITALITY
Brinnin had promised to roll out the red carpet if the Thomases managed to catch the Queen Mary on time. Halfway through their voyage they cabled him: ‘See you Pier 90 Sunday Bring Carpet Love Dylan Caitlin.’ He was there at the quayside, clutching a small square of red carpet and a box of gardenias, when they docked around mid-day on Sunday 20 January 1952. He and a small welcoming party waited for two hours until Dylan finally emerged from the customs shed, looking like a koala bear in a vast brown parka, followed by his wife, a character from Anna Karenina in a black fur ensemble.
Brinnin had arranged for them both to stay for a couple of days at the Millbrook, New York house of his photographer friend, Rollie McKenna, who specialised in writers’ portraits. En route he was cheered to see how eagerly Dylan pointed out interesting sights and features of American popular culture to Caitlin. He thought this heralded an improvement in their relationship. He did not at first appreciate the significance of her sullen silence. She endured a photographic shoot on a bitingly cold morning, when McKenna took a well-known portrait of Dylan looking uneasy, climbing among, and as if hemmed in by, the matted vine in front of her snow-bound house. But when McKenna took her guests on a quick sight-seeing tour, including a visit to her alma mater, the all-women’s college, Vassar, at nearby Poughkeepsie, Caitlin feigned disgust at the students in their regulation blue jeans. ‘Ridiculous!’ she commented. ‘They look like intellectual witches.’
It soon became clear that, to Caitlin, every woman in America fitted this description. Noticing her husband talking animatedly to an attractive young woman at a post-performance reception, she turned to Brinnin and – one instance among many – asked, ‘Who is that bitch with him now?’ When Brinnin began to explain, she interrupted, ‘Does Dylan sleep with her?’ Often she realised she was being foolish; she said she could put on a ‘first class Queen Mary act’ if required. But her competitive nature could not stand the sight of Dylan at the centre of a circle of eager, mainly female listeners. She let her animosity extend to the country and its people. Asked in a kindly, perhaps slightly condescending manner, what she thought of America, she replied aggressively, ‘I can’t get out of the bloody country soon enough.’ Once, when Dylan was girding himself before a reading, she announced, as if to encourage him, ‘Just remember, they’re all dirt.’
As their New York base the Thomases chose a one-bedroom apartment with integral kitchenette at the Chelsea Hotel, a shabby genteel establishment catering for artists and writers on West 23rd Street. Greenwich Village was perhaps further away than they might have liked. But it was where they liked to meet friends in bars such as the San Remo and the White Horse, slightly west on 10th Street and Hudson. Dylan gravitated towards the latter, which was run by an elderly Bavarian couple. Frequented by Hudson river longshoremen, its atmosphere was similar to a British pub, more Swansea, with its port connections, than London. It offered cheap German food such as schnitzels and bratwursts, and it was round the corner from Ruthven Todd and his quietly spoken new wife Jody, a painter from Oklahoma. Len and Ann Lye were also close, as were some new friends, the sculptor David Slivka and his wife Rose, who wrote on art, antiques and interiors. Although further afield, the Frankenbergs and Williamses could join them when required.
In the mornings Dylan would slope off to the White Horse, leaving Caitlin to work on a journal which she illustrated with her own brand of wild caricature. (Unnervingly, in her more uncommunicative moods, she would take out her notebook and begin sketching everyone around her.) She then liked to go shopping at Macy’s or some other department store. Brinnin had provided Dylan with money in advance of his earnings, though this cache soon ran low, and having to ask her husband for dollar handouts only increased Caitlin’s resentment. On more than one occasion, when she felt she needed medication, Dylan arranged for her to see Pearl’s physician Dr Anne Baumann who more than a year later was forced to threaten legal proceedings in an effort to obtain full payment. In Caitlin’s angry depressed state, shopping became an obsession: like a child in a sweet-shop, she found herself wanting to snatch what she saw in front of her and make for the exit. The abundance and variety of consumer goods was almost unbearably enticing for her.
Later, she would join Dylan but, whereas he tended to stick to beer, she had discovered cocktails and rye whisky on the rocks – a potent combination, given New York’s liberal licensing hours. (It was impossible, she told Helen McAlpine, for ‘a highly trained Britisher’ to leave before closing time, even if that was often three o’clock in the morning.) His friends got used to the couple’s squabbles, often arising out of her sexual taunts, as when, once at the Todds, she dismissed him as ‘just an old fag’, and he replied, ‘If only I were.’ Among his circle, she took to Oscar Williams, who not only had expressed interest in her writing but also seemed to understand how important it was to her as an impecunious mother in Laugharne that he sold Dylan’s work for quick, ready cash. However her special friend was Rose Slivka, who had the knack of keeping her occupied and relatively calm while Dylan was reading and being feted by his mainly female fans (or ‘ardents’, as he called them). When Dylan appeared at the Museum of Modern Art, for example, Caitlin and Rose went to the theatre to see the dancer, Martha Graham.
At the time Brinnin was promoting an American tour by three other British poets – W. S. Graham, David Gascoyne and Kathleen Raine – which may explain why Dylan’s early timetable was so leisurely. The Poetry Center director was also preparing for a talk by Truman Capote in mid-February. Or he may simply have decided, for the sake of Dylan’s well-being, not to burden him with too many readings: the first at Columbia University was a full ten days after his arrival. It was followed in quick succession by two appearances at the YM-YWHA where the applause exceeded anything on his first trip. Otherwise for the next month his only engagements outside Manhattan were brief trips to Washington D.C., Burlington, Vermont, and Montreal, Quebec.
Dylan Thomas: A New Life Page 46