Shortly before meeting Brinnin in London Dylan had completed another difficult project – his verse Prologue to his Collected Poems. It was a piece of superior craftsmanship rather than poetic genius. In its cheerful evocation of the natural world around Laugharne, it dealt with themes his readers had come to expect. It had extravagant lines such as ‘Seaward the salmon, sucked sun slips’, and puns, including the use of the words ‘undie’ (in both a Gothic horror and, subliminally, a clothing sense) and ‘agape’ (meaning ‘wide open’ but alluding to the Christian tradition of selfless brotherly love). It made references, depending on one’s level of understanding, to America (‘the cities of nine/Days’ night’), jazz (the dove with her ‘blue notes’), nuclear war (‘Out of the fountainhead/Of fear, rage red, manalive’) and the troubled contemporary world (‘at poor peace’). An indication of the pains Dylan had taken – and also of the poem’s tricksiness – was its reverse rhyming scheme: in two sections of fifty-one lines, the first and last lines rhymed, the second and the next to last, and so on. Dylan told Bozman he could not say why he had ‘acros-ticked’ himself in this way. If he had abandoned his earlier stated aim of throwing light on his methods of work and aims, he did write something which, in technique and in concept (with its central conceit of an ark), worked well as a Prologue. It was Dylan’s last completed poem and, unwittingly, reflected as much, from its first line ‘This day winding down now’ to its final reference to ‘God speeded summer’s end’. Dylan had few illusions about it himself, telling Charles Fry, ‘for a whole year I have been able to write nothing, nothing, nothing at all but one tangled, sentimental poem as preface to a collection of poems written years ago.’
True enough, he still had not finished a version of Llareggub for the long-suffering Princess Caetani, whose further forbearance he had to crave. However publication of Collected Poems, 1934–1952 on 10 November brought an encouraging response. Sophisticated reviewers such as Cyril Connolly in the Sunday Times, Philip Toynbee in the Observer and Stephen Spender in the Spectator competed to incorporate Dylan into the English-speaking canon. Toynbee went so far as to call him ‘the greatest living poet’. There was some sniping from the sidelines by critics associated with the Movement, such as John Wain who had no time for his ‘disastrously limited subject matter’. But the public was prepared to read what Dylan had to offer, and Dent’s first edition of 5,000 copies was soon reprinting.
Bozman had been kept waiting for the Prologue until two months before publication. Unhappy about a brief explanatory note his publisher then added, Dylan sent a replacement which included his much-quoted, if confusing remark that his poems were ‘written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn’ fool if they weren’t’. As late as 7 October he was cabling Bozman: ‘Do really think most vital use new note whatever delay.’ Despite these last-minute changes, his publisher was canny enough to encourage him to finish his two other ongoing projects for Dent, The Doctors and the Devils and a volume of stories. The filmscript required no further work (Dylan was not keen on it anyway), but the latter book called for ferreting around to discover what had already been published in Britain and what had not. (Dylan was helped in this by the appearance of a knowledgeable bibliographer, John Alexander Rolph. Certain stories still deemed unacceptable by Dent had appeared in obscure magazines, as well as in Selected Writings, issued by New Directions in the United States in 1946.) Dylan’s notes contain lists of possible stories, including some, such as ‘Bob’s My Uncle’, that he had not even written. The gist of these, as suggested by Bozman, was that Dylan should aim to recreate his Welsh childhood in the manner of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Dylan managed to write one modest story ‘The Followers’, which summoned up something of the Swansea pub life he was rediscovering with friends such as Dan Jones. One of the characters had the unWelsh name Katinka, which Dylan can only have borrowed from Peter DeVries’s American wife. But when Bozman took this a step further and suggested Dylan might consider writing an autobiography, Dylan pointed to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog and said he had neither the inclination nor the material to write another.
He was not particularly surprised when, on 16 December, his seventy-six-year-old father died. D.J. had been ill in one way or another for most of the preceding two decades. He had fought off cancer, but his final years were marred by deteriorating eyesight. Even if unable to read the notices, he would have been told of the success of Dylan’s Collected Poems and been satisfied. On the day before he died D.J. got up and went into the kitchen at Pelican where Florence (whom he mistook for his mother) was making onion soup. Later, back in bed, he resigned himself to his fate and declared, ‘It’s full circle now.’ According to Caitlin, Dylan was the only mourner when his father was cremated and buried – not, as might have been expected, in Laugharne, Carmarthen or Swansea, but alongside his brother Arthur in a plot in Pontypridd. Although close to the Crematorium, the Welsh industrial town where he had worked as a young schoolmaster was more important to D.J. than has been recognised. After the ceremony (non-religious in keeping with D.J.’s wishes), Dylan went on a three-day bender. On his return to Laugharne, Florrie said she expected he would do just the same when she died. But drink, as usual, was masking real emotions. As Caitlin realised, Dylan was more affected by his father’s death than even she had expected. In a subdued manner, he told her that D.J. had been responsible for all he had ever learnt. His pain came from realising how little he had been able to communicate with a man who had exercised such great influence over his life. But when, to ease his gout, Dylan took to using D.J.’s walking stick, she dismissed it as another of his affectations.
In recent years Dylan had been able to rely on his sister’s help at times of family crisis. But Nancy had returned with Gordon Summersby to India, from where news now came that she also was seriously ill, suffering from cancer. As usual with Dylan, publication of a book seemed to make little impact on his bank balance. Beset by a claim from the Inland Revenue for tax on his earnings in the United States in 1950, he pleaded for financial assistance from Stephen Spender, whose generous review of his Collected Poems had pleased him above all others. It was an odd move: he might have approached someone more wealthy, particularly as he was lukewarm to Spender as a man, and often disparaging about him professionally. But the review had convinced him that Spender understood what he was trying to do with his verse, and Dylan retained a romantic view of the community of poets.
He sensed a change in Spender’s direction too. The pre-war Communist fellow traveller had shaken off Auden’s influence and was shortly to become editor of the cultural magazine Encounter (though unbeknownst to him it was partially funded by the CIA). Spender was now championing not only Dylan but Edith Sitwell against the Movement, the robust and precise poets who had reacted against the Apocalypse since the war. As a result the old battle-lines in the poetic establishment between the politically engagés and the romantics were being redefined. As recently as 1949 the emotional Roy Campbell had had a famous spat with Spender, whom he regarded as a throw-back to ‘Macspaunday’ of the 1930s. Campbell had also delighted Edith Sitwell by taking on Geoffrey Grigson for different reasons. Campbell and Sitwell formed a close alliance, promoting aesthetic and religious, rather than social, values in poetry. (He was responsible for her converting to Roman Catholicism in 1955.) This was the school that Dylan naturally inclined towards. He always tried to help Campbell, partly as a friend, and partly, for the same reason he looked to Spender, because he was a fellow poet. He had reviewed Campbell’s autobiography for the Observer the previous year (a newspaper association that he hoped would lead to further commissions, but he never managed to complete one more). In November Dylan had agreed to assist Sitwell by sharing the reading with her in a public performance of Humphrey Searle’s musical setting of her poem The Shadow of Cain. Ironically the poem, which Dylan did not like, was a protest against the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Spender, by then a regular at Sitwell’
s Sesame Club gatherings, showed his colours by attending the production at the Palace Theatre in London.
In early January 1953 Dylan and Caitlin took a break from family, work and other problems and went to Swansea for a couple of days of carousing with Dan and Irene Jones. As he was often in town to record for the BBC, Dylan had got into the habit of staying with his old friends in Rosehill Terrace, Townhill. When the Jones’s young son (called Dylan, after him) was struck with epiphysis, a bone disease which affected his heel, Dylan sent a list of the best ‘bone-boys’ in London, signing off characteristically, ‘The last is best but all are top. Yours, with love, bottom.’ Dylan Jones and his young sister Cathrin became used to the detritus in their visitor’s room – apple cores, sweet packets and detective novels which the poet bought at his friend Ralph Wishart’s bookshop opposite Swansea railway station and exchanged on a three for two basis. Once when playing a cricket ‘test’ match, the older Dylan broke a window. When he came with Caitlin, the grown-ups would spice up long boozy evenings by acting out impromptu plays of a surrealistic Goon-like nature. One called Bizmuth survives in an old wire tape recording. It calls for a cast of five: Arnold, an impotent architect; Patricia, his wife; Derek, ‘a queer, Arnold’s master’; Phoebe, ‘a lesbian, pervertedly in love with Derek (maid), formerly Patricia’s mistress’; and Arthur, ‘child of all the above, of doubtful parentage, sex and inclinations’. The Warmley spirit still survived after more than two decades. On this occasion, as was their habit, Dylan and Dan went to the Odeon cinema to see a film which Dan noted in his diary as The Silent Man. This may have been the old silent Western of that name, but it was more likely The Quiet Man, John Ford’s recent fond evocation of his Irish background.
Either name was eerily appropriate, in the light of what happened on 10 January, the day after the Thomases returned to Laugharne. In the late afternoon, the peace of the town was disturbed by the murder of a seventy-seven-year-old spinster, Elizabeth Thomas. Someone entered her cottage in Clifton Street through a small ground-floor window and bludgeoned her to death. The man arrested for her murder was George Roberts, known as Booda, one of the family of ferrymen who lived next door to the Thomases. Booda, a deaf mute, had been witnessed standing outside the victim’s house. Dylan had known the Robertses since before the war when Booda’s Uncle Jack rowed him across from below Llanybri on his first visit to Laugharne. As colourful neighbours, they were well known to Dylan’s visiting friends such as the McAlpines. Because his disability prevented him from doing much else, Booda, in particular, performed odd jobs for the Thomases, sometimes looking after their children. A well-known photograph shows him carrying Dylan across the estuary at low tide in 1940.
Such was the turbulence within the Boat House, however, that the murder was scarcely mentioned by the Thomases, even in Caitlin’s chatty letters to Helen McAlpine. Normally Dylan liked telling people about the wild habits of Laugharne’s benighted townspeople. But he was even more silent than his wife. It was as if the incident had taken place on the far side of a psychic boundary he could not cross. In the midst of his own misery, the idea of this strong deaf and dumb man resorting to violence against an innocent victim was too much to handle. Over the next few weeks, the case became a cause célèbre taken up by the national newspapers, as it moved from the local magistrates’ court in St Clears to the Glamorgan Assizes in Cardiff. On 24 March the case was thrown out, largely because a judge found it impossible to believe that the police could or should have extracted an eight-page ‘confession’ from a man who did not even speak sign language. But at no time did Dylan stand up and declare that Booda was innocent. He preferred to ignore a matter which took place on his doorstep. Caitlin wrote a strong though ambiguous poem in which she expressed sympathy and solidarity with Booda. However she seemed to imply his guilt, blaming his family for locking him in a loveless prison from which he had been forced to break out.
Dylan coped by immersing himself in a period of frenzied, if not particularly productive, activity. On 13 January he was in London for a further performance of The Shadow of Cain, this time broadcast by the BBC from the Albert Hall, with him reading all the verse, as Edith Sitwell was in the United States. Dan Jones heard it in Swansea and thought it ‘terrible’. Afterwards Dylan attended a party in Searle’s studio in Ordnance Hill where he ‘danced wildly and stuffed sausage rolls down the ladies’ cleavages’. (Searle lived close to the McAlpines in St John’s Wood, which had temporarily taken over from Camden Town as Dylan’s centre of operations when in London.)
Next day Dylan returned to Swansea to record three ballads by Vernon Watkins for the BBC. Dan Jones bought ‘a lot of drink’, including ‘Irish’ ‘whisky’ (the two sets of quotation marks in his diary implying that this was a misnomer), and threw a small party for friends, including Watkins, the BBC producer Aneirin Talfan Davies and the jeweller Alban Leyshon. The following morning the funeral of Booda’s alleged victim took place in Laugharne. As if determined to ignore it, Dylan hit the Swansea pubs with Dan, visiting the Tenby, Red Cow and King’s Head (with a visit to at least one other hostelry and to Ralph’s bookshop in between). After a lunch-time pint or two in the Metropole, they went to the cinema. Dan noted the film they saw as The Osage Trail, though it was more likely to have been a mediocre 1952 Western called Fort Osage. They ended up at the Station Inn before Dylan caught the train home.
On 21 January Dylan was back in London, having drinks with the unlikely combination of Marged Howard-Stepney and his bibliographer John Alexander Rolph. She was on the point of buying the Boat House outright from Maggs Taylor and had apparently offered Dylan further financial help. The very next day she was discovered dead on the carpet of her Hampstead house. She had taken an overdose of sleeping pills but, since there was no obvious indication that she had done this intentionally, the coroner returned a verdict of misadventure. Any hopes Dylan might have had of her leaving him some money were dashed when it was found she had died intestate. Having to deal with a third death in a matter of weeks, Dylan overdid the degree of closeness when he said his ‘best friend in the world … [had] died of drink and drugs’. But he was upset at the loss of another intimate, in this case the potential benefactor who would have allowed him to maintain a base at the Boat House.
Her loss was all the more difficult and the whole period more bewildering because, since early December, he had known that Caitlin was again pregnant. She told friends (though not, it seems, her husband) that she was not sure who the father was. Even if the unborn baby had definitely been Dylan’s, the outcome would have been the same. Caitlin decided to have another abortion and accompanied Dylan on his latest trip to London. They stayed with Cordelia Sewell and Harry Locke who had married and were living in King Street, Hammersmith. Caitlin painted a grim picture of a back-street abortionist poking inside her (with Dylan nowhere to be seen). Her experience coloured her attitude to Dylan winning the Foyle’s Poetry Prize for 1953. She felt that he might have spent on her some of the welcome £250 which constituted the award. Instead it went on Llewelyn’s fees at Magdalen College School and presumably on her abortion.
Passing back through Swansea in the first week of February, Dylan was intending to work on a four-part series of readings from Welsh poets for the BBC. But his voice had broken down under the strain of the past couple of months and the recording had to be postponed. Dylan and Caitlin, who was still with him, quarrelled ‘bitter[ly]’. They retired to a freezing overcast Laugharne – he to bed ‘feeling more crooked than ever’; she to vegetate, ‘feeling like death’.
In Swansea again the following week to complete his recording, Dylan went with Dan Jones to the Uplands Hotel where, by chance, they met an old school friend Guido Heller, who lived on Gower. Unaware of recent developments, Heller was delighted to find Dylan’s humour apparently unchanged. Observing a terrier beside the bar, Dylan remarked, ‘I do like a dog, but that dog has got to have a really nice brown arse.’ His eyes lit up when Heller mentioned a disused rectory
at Rhossili where the Thomases might live. However he became less enthusiastic when Heller reminded him there was no pub in the vicinity.
His brother-in-law Gordon Summersby in Bombay removed some pressure by promising to look after his mother financially. Florrie herself was almost unnaturally ebullient, particularly after Caitlin sent Aeronwy to stay and share her bed. Dylan’s immediate problem was his own accommodation. With a further visit to America looming (and Caitlin predictably unhappy about it), even he realised he could not leave his wife and children without a roof over their heads. When Maggs next came to Laugharne, they had a heated row and she beat a tearful retreat. Caitlin painted a dramatic picture of a terrified Ebie Williams taking their patroness to Carmarthen station, as she wailed in the back seat, her blue hair flapping wildly over her face. The upshot was that the Thomases could stay in the rat-infested Boat House, but only if they were prepared to pay £2 a week in rent.
Faced by further pressing bills, Dylan was forced to hand over responsibility for paying them to his agent. Higham was only able to do this by halting all other disbursements to Dylan who became more than ever dependent on unpredictable amounts of cash that Oscar Williams was able to generate from sales of his poetry to magazines or, in manuscript form, to wealthy ‘ardents’ in the United States. This often led to misunderstandings, as when Williams sought to sell Howard Moss at The New Yorker a copy of Dylan’s latest poem, ‘Prologue’. He also tried to assist Karl Shapiro at Poetry (Chicago) in putting together a Dylan Thomas issue. But when the magazine needed at least one new poem to make the venture worthwhile, Williams could not supply it. The only possible candidate was ‘Prologue’ and its sale to periodicals was being handled by Helen Strauss as part of the build-up to the publication of the American edition of his Collected Poems by New Directions in March.
Dylan Thomas: A New Life Page 49