Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  Dylan was supposed to travel south from Chicago for an engagement in New Orleans on 28 April. However, although this was one date he had particularly urged Brinnin to book, he was exhausted and could not face it. Worse, he told Brinnin that he would contact the organiser at Tulane University, but failed to do so. This story soon did the rounds of the college lecture circuit and, although Brinnin pleaded that this was the only appearance Dylan missed throughout his tours of America, he found subsequent bookings significantly harder to obtain.

  On arriving back in New York, the Thomases asked the Slivkas to take them to a lesbian club. A visit to one in Chicago had fallen through. Typical of their lack of co-ordination, Caitlin approached Rose and said, ‘The horny old bugger still wants to go’, while Dylan made a similar pitch to Dave, explaining his wife’s disappointment at missing out in the windy city. Slivka asked around and found a suitable place in MacDougal Street. To his embarrassment, he found himself haggling with someone over whether she and a friend would ‘perform’. Dylan’s approach was to ‘buy the bar’, but Dave told him to put his money away. Eventually Dave left him and Caitlin at the club.

  Later that evening, it seems, Dylan and an unidentified male companion moved on to the San Remo shortly before closing time. Already there was the poet Allen Ginsberg who, as a resident of the East Village, did not know Dylan. In his Journals, Ginsberg left an unappealing picture of Dylan making the most of his fame. After being introduced, Dylan told Ginsberg how he had just been in a bar where a girl had asked him if he would like to watch her and another girl ‘do a trick’. Dylan had declined because he did not have the necessary $50. However, determined to conclude his evening with some lesbian entertainment, he asked Ginsberg if he knew any amateurs who might oblige. Ginsberg said he could only supply one girl, but invited Dylan to join him in his attic. When Dylan spent some time chatting with a girl at the bar, Ginsberg heard some ‘hipsters’ wondering why ‘weak-chinned’ men like Dylan enjoyed sexual success. When the two poets left, Dylan at first seemed enthusiastic to join Ginsberg, then said ‘I don’t know what to do’, and finally succumbed to his companion saying he was tired and reminding him that Caitlin was waiting. Having playfully stuck his tongue out at Dylan, Ginsberg was left feeling sorry that he had not made more of the encounter.

  Next day, Dylan met Slivka at the mid-town Gotham Book Mart, where he was signing his books and copies of his newly released Caedmon record. When his sculptor friend asked about the previous evening, Dylan said, misleadingly, ‘Oh it was quite an event … after you left’.

  Dylan’s words did describe aspects of the intervening period, however. That morning the Thomases received a dramatic telegram from Caitlin’s mother, which read: ‘Fees not arrived therefore Llewelyn dismissed from school Please reply Macnamara’. Since Caitlin (like Brinnin) had been assured by Dylan that this matter had been dealt with, she was furious. She announced she was leaving him and tried, unsuccessfully, to book an immediate return passage. Dylan was mortified and wanted to cancel his signing session at the Gotham Book Mart. Brinnin counselled against precipitate action, and Dylan relented. After a short sleep, he composed himself and looked surprisingly alert as, with Brinnin at his side, he sipped beer and appended his autograph to customers’ May Day purchases. However, the store’s formidable owner, Frances Steloff, could sense something was wrong: ‘He was so quiet and restrained, it seemed to me that he was sad and would have preferred to be left alone.’

  After nearly four months in America, Dylan’s last engagement was back at the Poetry Center on 15 May, the day before he sailed for home on the Niew Amsterdam. He spent part of that morning visiting Random House which had expressed an interest in publishing him once Laughlin’s option had expired after another book.

  Before going up to the YH-YWHA, Brinnin called in at the Chelsea, hoping once more to gain his charge’s approval for his meticulous accounting. But Dylan could not care less, while Caitlin looked pale and helpless, surrounded by mountains of luggage. She did not attend the reading, which was competent rather than special, except for the fact that Pearl made her way backstage and asked to see Dylan. Her brief marriage had broken up and she was back in New York. Brinnin put them both in the Green Room for twenty minutes (which would have been impossible if Caitlin had been there). Although he had no idea what happened, he got the impression that the ardour in the couple’s relationship had passed.

  That night, while Dylan slept, Caitlin flicked through the case of papers he had carried with him throughout his tour. She claimed that, along with unpaid bills, she found a number of love letters from different women. The fact that Dylan had put them in his case unopened suggests that they were not important to him. But Caitlin was aghast at her discovery and spent the whole night reading through them. Dylan’s last few hours in New York cannot have been much fun.

  Since Dylan had been swallowed up by well-wishers the previous evening, Brinnin had been unable to bid the Thomases goodbye. So he cabled them on board ship, and Caitlin replied, half thanking him and half attacking him for the way he had organised the trip. While railing against the awfulness of the liner’s food and the fatness of her fellow passengers, she begged him never to encourage Dylan to visit North America again. Adamant that the continent had been an ordeal for her and the ruin of her husband, she suggested presciently that any further visit might be fatal for him.

  Despite its enjoyable moments, Dylan’s second trip to America had solved nothing, so far as his life or work were concerned. Rather, it had only emphasised the almost unbridgeable gap that had opened up between him and his wife. In theory, travelling together might have helped heal their wounds. Was not one of Caitlin’s main grouses her sense of frustration at being left at home in Laugharne, tending their children? However her presence at Dylan’s side had only intensified her jealousy and anger. She had hated seeing her husband fawned over – and, even more, seeing the way he enjoyed it. She was fearful he was prostituting his writing talents for his love of performing, and its immediate returns in terms of praise. Her fury was all the greater for being irrational. And this made his efforts to win her round all the more difficult. The impasse in their relationship was to weigh on him and add to his depression.

  Waiting for him on his return was a letter from David Higham informing him that Dent was ‘howling’ for the corrected proofs and the Prologue to his Collected Poems. In an effort to capitalise on Dylan’s growing fame, as well as to generate much-needed income for him, his agent had worked hard on Dent to publish this volume later in the year, together with a book version of his Doctor and the Devils script, and to follow these in 1953 with a new edition of his short stories.

  Dylan promised, as usual, to attend to these matters. But his own priority was once more re-ordering his domestic affairs. Since he had been unable to work in Delancey Street, it seemed logical for him and Caitlin to return to Laugharne, where Colm was already living with Dolly in the Orchard Park council estate on the hill towards Pendine. The Boat House was still empty, though Maggs, who seemed on the point of a reconciliation with her husband, was making alarming noises about wanting to sell the place, or at least charge rent for it.

  In his hut overlooking the estuary, Dylan expressed his relief at being back on home ground by taking out a sheet of paper and writing: ‘Letter on Returning to Wales from the United States of America 1952’ (it was addressed to Witt-Diamant or perhaps to Brinnin). Underneath he continued:

  At home, sweet Christ, at last,

  Wet Wales and the night jars

  My liver at half mast

  For the death of the high lights,

  This red impromptu ink

  With poppycock and love

  Across the fucking drink

  With a ballpoint I shove

  It was atrocious, drunken verse but, as Dylan began to play with words and phrases, he saw how he might develop his Prologue into a poem based on the idea of gathering the local fauna and flora into an ark (or, conversely, book of
poems). He put this matter aside to allow him and Caitlin to make their first triumphal post-America visit to London. Caitlin was dressed to impress in Macy’s finest: she ‘caught our eyes first’, noted Helen McAlpine who was there with the ‘two Margarets’ to greet her off the train, ‘and what a catch! Pale grey suit, crrr-isp white shirt, high heeled sandals, sheerest nylons, tonkety-tonk dangelers in her ears surrounded by a piled heap of disciplined curls. What ho little lady! Dylan had on his best rather reserved look. A carefully graded greeting to each of us in turn. A special wink for me though! So happy we all are to see them again … London has felt so empty since their going.’

  Helen McAlpine did not specify the ‘two Margarets’. One was obviously Margaret Taylor and the other almost certainly Marged Howard-Stepney, a wealthy Welsh woman who had over the previous year emerged as a new patroness. A cousin of Frances Hughes, she owned a 10,000-acre coal-bearing estate near Llanelli. Her grandfather, Sir Arthur Cowell-Stepney, a mentally deranged one-time Liberal MP, had deserted his wife, renounced his baronetcy and gone to live in the United States where he had a fatal heart attack on an expedition to collect beetles in the Arizona desert. His daughter had died earlier in 1952, leaving her only daughter Marged with a vast income, a drink problem and a desire to help lost souls such as Dylan. Normally Maggs would never have allowed a rival onto her patch but, living apart from her husband, even she had been feeling the pinch. As the price of a reconciliation, or at least his continued financial support, she had promised again to scale down her interest in the Thomases. Marged Howard-Stepney, or Dylan’s ‘new County wet nurse’, as Caitlin called her, had offered to step into the breach, perhaps by paying the rent for the Boat House, perhaps by buying it outright.

  As well as visiting Lord’s while in London, Dylan also took the opportunity of calling on E. F. Bozman, the editorial director at Dent who further impressed on him the urgency of the Prologue to his Collected Poems. Dylan also saw Donald Taylor about complications over The Doctor and the Devils. Dent wanted to publish the script under Dylan’s name alone, but Taylor was still angling for a joint credit which pushed back publication into the following year.

  Although this London meeting was in mid-June, Bozman had to wait three more months before seeing any sign of the Prologue. Over the summer Dylan ditched any idea of completing this work in prose. But as the 166 worksheets of the poetry version in the Houghton Library at Harvard University indicate, progress was painfully slow. Dylan was beset by illness (pleurisy, he claimed) and by worse than usual financial complications, including the threat of an imminent prosecution for failing to pay his National Insurance. As a result he wrote a grovelling verse letter, couched in a vaguely romantic vein, asking for Marged Howard-Stepney’s help. Caitlin was livid when she found a draft which started, ‘My dear Marged, You told me, once, upon a time, to call on you when I was beaten down, and you would try to pick me up.’ Dylan felt forced to write his wife an appeasing letter, apologising for his ‘heart-throb lies’ to Marged. It is difficult to see what Caitlin objected to so strongly. Dylan’s tone to Marged was abasing, but Caitlin had seen that before and, although she may not have liked it, she had condoned it in the hope of financial reward. Sexual jealousy was a factor: Marged was blonde and better looking than Maggs, though the worse for drink. She had been to bed with John Davenport, and Caitlin was convinced she wanted to add Dylan to her conquests. At root, however, Caitlin disliked Marged for seeking to sideline her. Feeling left out of the conversation once at Marged’s house, Caitlin reached for a torch on the mantelpiece and crashed it down on Dylan who temporarily passed out. ‘My God!’ screamed a distraught Marged. ‘You may have killed a genius.’ But Caitlin was beyond caring, the incident only emphasising the sad depths the Thomases’ marriage had reached.

  Otherwise Caitlin set herself resignedly to living in Laugharne. The place had its own manageable routine. She no longer thought of doing anything with her journal about America. Despite Helen McAlpine’s offers to type it up for her, she found it too painful, personal and best forgotten. But she was determined to resist Dylan’s lame suggestions that she join the Women’s Institute or take up gardening. She still had ten years’ active life in her, she liked to say. And to make her point, she indulged the taste for casual sexual relationships that had been a feature of her stay abroad.

  If financial and matrimonial difficulties weighed heavily on Dylan, so did vexing personal issues. His recent trip had been physically exhausting (doubtless contributing to his illness on his return). It had also brought into sharp focus what he should be doing with his talents. He realised – as if Caitlin did not frequently tell him – that he was becoming more of a performer than poet. He told Charles Fry, who had been awaiting a manuscript about his travels, that as he made his way across the United States speaking to often disinterested audiences, ‘I began to feel nervous about the job in front of me, the job of writing, making things in words, by myself, again. The more I used words, the more frightened I became of using them in my own work once more. Endless booming of poems did not sour or stale words for me, but made me more conscious of my obsessive interest in them and my horror that I would never again be innocent enough to touch and use them. I came home fearful and jangled.’ There was a hint of this in a repeat interview he had given Harvey Breit for the New York Times where he had remarked on the way certain words had lost either ‘their meaning or their goodness. The word “honor” for instance. A world fit for heroes. A world fit for Neros is more like it.’ When asked why this had happened, he answered elliptically, ‘The wrong people crowed about them.’ It was a statement of disillusion about popular culture, and a call to himself to get back to the drawing board.

  The root of the problem, Brinnin understood, was the poet’s ‘inner, barely spoken fear that he had already written all the poems he was going to write’. Loath to make matters worse by urging Dylan away from his work, Brinnin made little effort to contact him when in Europe with Howard Moss of The New Yorker during the summer. But, as he admitted in Dylan Thomas in America, Brinnin had his own anxieties and ambivalences. His reason told him that Dylan had had enough of America. Dylan himself made this clear in the same interview with Breit when he said that he did not expect to be back for a while: ‘I will have had the universities and they will have had me.’ But Brinnin knew that if he met Dylan, the subject would come up, and he would be hard pushed not to suggest a suitable compromise, such as helping him realise the promise of a job offer at a California university, or even, possibly, vacating the post of Director of the Poetry Center for him.

  In the meantime America continued to prey on Dylan. His occasional pieces for the BBC seemed to dwell on it. In July he broadcast selections from two of his favourite American poets, Theodore Roethke and Robert Lowell. In New York Oscar Williams had begun selling copies of Dylan’s manuscripts to rich female fans as well as to magazine editors. To keep him sweet, Dylan said he also intended recording some of Williams’s own poems, along with another pot-pourri of work by more radical American poets, such as Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg. Nothing came of these ideas, though Dylan did finish his much delayed digest of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology which he sent to Douglas Cleverdon in August.

  His other outstanding work for Cleverdon was The Town That Was Mad, or Llareggub, as he now referred to it. But although Botteghe Oscure had published the half-finished script in April, Dylan still struggled to complete the rest. He tried to get the BBC to put him on a salary for six weeks so that he was not tempted by other offers of work and could complete it. Realising that, from a bureaucratic viewpoint, this was not feasible, Cleverdon lobbied his financial colleagues to pay Dylan five guineas for every thousand words of the script he received. At the time he still hoped for a series, telling Dylan, ‘If only we can get Llareggub on the air, we can start the ball rolling and enable you to live on the proceeds of one script while you are writing the next.’ Such was his personal commitment that he even proposed recompens
ing the Corporation out of his own salary if everything fell through.

  This scheme received a fillip when, in September, at the end of his European trip, Brinnin managed to get through to the Boat House on the telephone and speak to Caitlin who informed him Dylan was in London. The two men arranged to meet at Old Mother Red Cap in Camden Town, where Dylan was talking reluctantly of having to retreat in the autumn. They drank bitter and played bar football in a leisurely manner. But despite Brinnin’s caveats, Dylan did not delay long before asking about the possibility of another trip to the United States. His main concern was what he might do: he was worried that his readings were getting stale and suggested he might extend his range of dramatic readings. But what then? At this stage Brinnin asked about the progress of Llareggub, adding that this could provide a whole new programme, which he could either read himself or have read by others. Although sceptical of Americans mastering a Welsh accent, Dylan was enthusiastic, and promised to send Brinnin a script by March with a view to a performance some time in May. There was just one problem: what to call it? Brinnin thought Llareggub would not go down well with American audiences. ‘What about Under Milk Wood?’ suggested Dylan, summoning a phrase that suggested innocence and sensuality. And so, in October, a reading performance of a work of this name was announced in the Poetry Center’s bulletin of advance information for the following May.