Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  This only emphasised Dylan’s medium-term problem that he still had not resolved the issue of his trip to the United States. Caitlin accused him of wanting to go there for ‘flattery, idleness and infidelity’. He bridled at this, saying with only the slightest hint of smirk, that he was going for ‘appreciation, dramatic work, and friends’. He tried to placate her with promises of taking her abroad to somewhere cheap and sunny on his return. (He mentioned Portugal from where Roy Campbell had extended an invitation to visit.) But Caitlin had heard such undertakings before.

  His relationship with Caitlin in tatters, Dylan found a berth during March with the Lockes in Hammersmith, the latest of his homes from home in the capital. There was talk of his paying rent, but this never materialised, probably offset against the help he gave Harry in writing some cabaret sketches. In return Harry would listen to snatches of Under Milk Wood which was due for its first reading in the United States in two months’ time. Dylan carried the manuscript in a battered briefcase; sometimes tinkering with it at the local Ravenscourt Arms, sometimes staying up all night to work on it. In the middle of the month he took it with him to Cardiff where he tried out parts on another audience, the members of the University’s English Society. However the play’s first semi-official reading was marred when he managed to leave it there (inside the briefcase) and had to make strenuous long-distance efforts to retrieve it.

  This project delayed Dylan’s journal about his earlier American trip for Allen Wingate, which charitably granted him a further extension. Undeterred, David Higham negotiated a contract for him to produce a book on Welsh fairy tales for the Oxford University Press. From across the Atlantic the Grove Press offered Dylan $150 to write an introduction to an edition of the Nigerian author Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard, a book whose ‘young English’ he had praised in an Observer review. Dylan promised to complete this on board ship to New York, but disappointingly he did not. Having declared his interest in emerging African writing, he might have taken the opportunity to explore the links between Welsh and Nigerian literary cultures, with their strong oral traditions and their contrasting colonial relationship with the English language.

  A year earlier, after his Time interview, he had proudly told friends that the magazine was working on his profile and might contact them for reminiscences. Reporters were duly despatched but, when the article finally appeared on 6 April, the mountains of research had been whittled down and incorporated into a review of Collected Poems. Nevertheless, it spared Dylan nothing, declaring, ‘He borrows with no thought of returning what is lent, seldom shows up on time, is a trial to his friends, and a worry to his family.’ John Arlott noted how Dylan had earlier taken to buying Time and studying it minutely. When the piece was published, Dylan wryly began to read to his friends, ‘ “Blubber-lipped, gooseberry-eyed Welsh poet Thomas” ‘. Then recalling the original reporter, he added, ‘Bloody hell, and she said she loved me.’

  Within days Dylan had an opportunity to discuss the article with friends when he went to Cardiff to record his first ever television programme, ‘Home Town – Swansea’, a small-screen variation on the ‘Swansea and the Arts’ feature he had done for BBC radio in 1949. The idea was to show the town’s artistic life through the medium of Janes’s paintings. As well as Dylan and Janes, Dan Jones and Vernon Watkins also appeared, with Wynford Vaughan-Thomas as the link-man. Dylan was in Swansea a few days later to record an indulgent programme of Dan Jones’s devising about the infelicity of hexameters as a poetical form. As a result he was able to consult his Swansea solicitor and friend, Stuart Thomas, who, after taking counsel’s advice, decided to sue Time for defamation. But before a writ could be issued at the end of the month, Dylan had sailed for New York on 16 April. He did not know it at the time but, to cap a dire six months, his sister Nancy died in Bombay on the same day.

  TWENTY-ONE

  TO BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING

  The relationship between life and death had been a favoured poetic theme of Dylan. Sometimes he seemed more aware of the process of the natural world rushing towards its destruction, as in ‘The Force that through the green fuse’; at other times, buoyed by the darker imaginings of the metaphysical poets, he focused on the resilient and even regenerative capacity of inert objects, such as the eyes of the corpse in the line in ‘Light breaks where no sun shines’ – ‘The film of spring is hanging from the lids.’ After so many personal setbacks over the previous six months, he was determined to introduce new vitality to his still far from completed play for voices Under Milk Wood.

  After Brinnin met him off the SS United States on the morning of 21 April 1953, Dylan checked into the Chelsea Hotel. The two men then set off on a refamiliarisation tour of downtown bars. Around late afternoon they reached the White Horse Tavern, where the owner Ernie Wohlleben sent over a bottle of Scotch as a welcoming present, and Dylan seemed genuinely pleased to be back among familiar faces. By the time they moved uptown, to meet Howard Moss of The New Yorker and another colleague at the Algonquin, he was very drunk. They were joined by an unfamiliar figure, Liz Reitell, Brinnin’s new assistant at the Poetry Center. Tired of Dylan’s promises and evasions about the progress of Under Milk Wood, Brinnin had charged her with all aspects of getting the play onto the stage, including arranging a cast.

  She was a tall, striking thirty-two-year-old, with a generous rouged mouth and a shock of thick black hair, which fell over dark enquiring eyes in a fashionable fringe. A model of New York chutzpah, she smoked, drank and talked tough. Her background was in the arts: an alumna of the liberal Bennington College (where she had first met Brinnin while he was on a dance scholarship), she had worked as a costume designer, painter and actress. She had been married twice, the first time, for only one year when she was twenty, to Adolph Green, the writer of musicals, through whom she had become a close friend of Leonard Bernstein. From a close-knit family of German Dunkards, a Pietist sect like the Mennonites, her father was a professor of economics who had written a popular fishing manual.

  When she first saw the man she had to work with, she took an instant dislike to the ‘tousled little drunk’. Dylan was more impressed, though her forward manner and svelte good looks initially put him ill at ease. Brinnin had already disturbed him by saying she was furious at the lack of progress on Under Milk Wood. ‘I could see Dylan shrinking in the face of so much authority’, he observed, ‘and staring at the briefcase she placed on the floor beside her as though it contained orders for his immediate arrest.’ Dylan spilled his martini, and his conversation clammed up. Eventually he announced in his corny way that, as this was his first night back in the country, he wanted to celebrate with something particularly American. After various suggestions such as climbing the Statue of Liberty were rejected, he and Brinnin went to a production of Guys and Dolls. But, after three years on Broadway, the staging had become so lacklustre that they left after fifteen minutes and called it a day.

  Try as Dylan might, he could not escape the spectre of death. Within forty-eight hours he was back in the White Horse having a lunch-time drink, when Ruthven Todd walked in with the news that Norman Cameron had just died. At Dylan’s request, Todd collected three books by Cameron from his house. On his return, Dylan began, slowly and solemnly, to read aloud from them. The only other customers were truckers and longshoremen, who all stopped to listen. Dylan explained that a friend, a poet, had just died. This was his version of a wake.

  Brinnin was determined not to involve himself in Dylan’s private affairs on this trip. The two men did not meet again until, on 25 April, Dylan flew to Boston for a short reading tour of the northeast. He based himself in his agent’s apartment in Memorial Drive, Cambridge (with Brinnin’s mother also in residence to cook for him). By chance living next door were the British scientist Jacob Bronowski and his wife Rita. Primarily a scientist, and now a visiting professor at MIT, Bronowski, as a young man, had been one of the experimental poets who came out of Britain’s Cambridge University in the late 1920s. A
s a young man in the circle of Robert Graves in Majorca, he had known George Ellidge, whose ex-wife, Mary, had accompanied Dylan to the Festival of Britain. Through her and her son Mark, who was at Magdalen College School with his son Llewelyn (and with Margaret Taylor’s son Sebastian), Dylan had become friendly with the Bronowskis when they lived at Monks Risborough, outside Oxford.

  Returning home occasionally, between trips to New York and to his other job, teaching at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, Brinnin was gratified to find his guest hard at work on Under Milk Wood. It was not easy for Dylan: he felt pressurised by Liz Reitell’s regular telephone calls from New York, where she was already rehearsing a cast and anxious to know when she would receive the next drafts of the script. In an unfamiliar environment, his poet’s sense of rhythm was also elusive: as Brinnin remarked, ‘It was as if he had the words but could not find the melody.’ As a result Dylan was unusually tense, particularly in the build-up to his first solo reading of the play in Harvard’s Fogg Museum. He relaxed by going across the hallway to talk about his recently widowed mother with Rita Bronowski, while she was ironing. Reluctantly, Brinnin still felt he had to bolster Dylan’s spirits by taking him, for example, to the Old Howard, the revue theatre where Caitlin had balked at the strip-tease the previous year. Despite the yet unfinished text, the reading on 3 May went well, however, and Dylan was pleased that the audience laughed in the right places.

  Over the next ten days or so, Dylan criss-crossed the east coast. After first going south to Washington and Lynchburg, Virginia, he returned to New York for a glittering party given for him by Victor Weybright, publisher of the New American Library, who, at Oscar Williams’s urging, had published extracts from Dylan’s pre-war ‘novel’, Adventures in the Skin Trade, and who was now offering a healthy advance of $2,000 – $500 in cash on signing, followed by $1,500 on the book’s completion. Only a few days earlier Dylan had been lost for words when confronted by I. A. Richards, the Harvard (and former Cambridge) academic whom he respected. But his reticence among academics disappeared in the company of professional writers such as Gore Vidal, Michael Arlen and Louis Auchincloss. The only problem was that, in agreeing to go to Weybright’s, Dylan failed to attend a reception for him by the New York chapter of PEN – an invitation which Brinnin had accepted on his behalf.

  Afterwards Dylan went for a hamburger and on to old haunts at the San Remo and the White Horse. The sense of a massive hangover pervades the depressed letter he sent Caitlin the following day from the Chelsea Hotel where he was staying in the room they had shared the previous year. He recounted his punishing schedule, sent her a cheque for $250 (part of the proceeds of his Weybright coup) and told her about his plans to take her away when he returned, not to Portugal this time, but to Majorca where he had learnt that it was possible to rent a house and, significantly, employ servants for very little money. His mood perked up during the afternoon when he ran through what existed of his Under Milk Wood script with the group of actors Liz Reitell had assembled for the premiere the following week. Their professionalism encouraged him to tackle various scenes in different ways. He also made a few linguistic and cultural adaptations for an American audience, such as ensuring that Butcher Beynon went after ‘squirrels’ rather than ‘corgis’ with his cleaver. He was in good form, therefore, for his latest poetry reading, a standing-room only occasion, at the YM-YWHA that evening. Among the appreciative audience was Pearl Kazin, now working for The New Yorker.

  After a quick dash to Philadelphia for a reading, Dylan returned to New York two days later (a Saturday) for a rehearsal of Under Milk Wood. Afterwards he went to the Algonquin for drinks with Liz Reitell. How he spent the rest of the weekend is not known but, when Brinnin went to Boston station on Monday morning, he found Pearl waiting there also. The plot took a twist when Dylan failed to arrive on his scheduled train. On phoning his apartment, Brinnin found that Dylan had cabled to say he was coming by plane. At the airport Brinnin was taken aback to see Dylan sauntering down the ramp in a pair of dark glasses, which he interpreted as a ‘new and ominous sign’. He learnt that Dylan and Pearl had agreed to spend the day together, prior to his next reading at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At a smallish party afterwards, Brinnin noted that Dylan and Pearl were the subjects of inquisitive gossip as they moved about ‘as an intimate twosome’.

  When Brinnin called the following morning to drive him to the airport for a flight to North Carolina, Dylan mentioned spending the night with Pearl at the house of a mutual friend, but his only further comment was that he believed she had already returned to New York. The next day Dylan was back in Boston en route for Storrs in Connecticut to give a reading and to address Brinnin’s graduate class. His schedule of appearances over the previous few days had been more arduous than anything on his earlier trips. Motoring from Boston, Brinnin claims to have discussed this with Dylan and received some hazy non-committal assent when he said he did not want to be responsible for another tour of this kind.

  In Dylan Thomas in America, Brinnin also made play about how, when he and Dylan were at Storrs, Liz Reitell called from New York with frantic enquiries about the Milk Wood script which was due to be performed the following day. She offered to make her way to the campus to help the author with the finishing touches overnight. Dylan convinced her this was unnecessary, but promised to work on it himself. There is no supporting evidence for this: after his talk, Dylan repaired for drinks with the Dean, in whose house he was staying, and off to bed. However next morning, on the train to New York, Dylan did pore over his manuscript, albeit with a bottle of beer in hand. After another rehearsal, he went to Rollie McKenna’s apartment close to the Poetry Center for a further session of feverish writing. With less than an hour to go, he still had not finished. With Liz making noises that the performance would have to be cancelled, he was forced to curtail his frantic burst of creativity and devise a makeshift ending.

  At 8.40 p.m. the house lights dimmed, and a single spot picked out Dylan on stage, in his role as narrator. Then, as his five fellow actors came into view, his Welsh lilt could be heard: ‘To begin at the beginning …’ For a couple of minutes, members of the audience remained silent and still, as they made efforts to picture ‘the small town, starless and bible-black’. Then, with the arrival of Captain Cat, they realised they were not going to have to sit through a difficult avant-garde piece: they could sit back and enjoy themselves. They were treated to a life-affirming portrait of a Welsh community which mixed the spirit of Celtic whimsy with the social realism (and some of the technical tricks) of wartime documentary, leavening them with coarser elements from the demotic depths of BBC light entertainment. At the end, after the cast had taken fourteen curtain calls, Dylan stepped back to receive applause alone. He still managed to look faintly sheepish as he repeated, ‘Thank you, thank you.’

  After this performance, Dylan went to ground in New York for six days. When he met Brinnin again in Massachusetts, he seemed not only more relaxed but much happier. He was already talking about another ‘play for voices’ which he envisaged as a collaboration between himself and Nancy Wickwire, an American actress in the Under Milk Wood cast who had trained at the Old Vic. It was the love story of two people who were never lovers, telling of a couple in a Welsh industrial town who pass close to one another throughout their lives but never meet.

  It soon became clear that there had been a dramatic change in Dylan’s relationship with Liz. For three weeks, she had badgered him to finish the play. With the production successfully launched, she was able to turn her nurturing instincts towards him personally. She found a man genuinely amazed that someone had taken his play seriously and had devoted time and energy to helping him achieve what he intended. The last woman to have done that was Pamela Hansford Johnson twenty years earlier. It was not the sort of treatment he was used to from Caitlin.

  After a noisy back-stage drinks party at the Poetry Center, he might have paired off with either Pearl Kazin or Jeanne Gordon, w
ho were both present. Instead he departed with Liz. Over the next few days, with no script to burden them, they drifted round the Village, visiting friends, sitting in bars and enjoying each other’s company. Dylan was particularly taken by the way Liz made brisk sketches of characters they met and places they visited. Her artistic skills matched his verbal dexterity.

  It was a measure of the divide in Dylan’s marriage that he did not even bother to tell Caitlin about the play’s New York success until at least a week later. He referred to it in only the most perfunctory manner: ‘I’ve finished that infernally eternally unfinished “Play” and have done it in New York with actors.’ By then he was back in Cambridge, Massachusetts, staying at Brinnin’s on Memorial Drive.

  By chance Igor Stravinsky was in Boston, conducting performances of his opera The Rake’s Progress, based on Auden’s libretto. This inspired Boston University’s ambitious opera workshop to think about sponsoring a further collaboration between Stravinsky and a poet. On 20 May Sarah Caldwell, the workshop’s director, cabled Dylan, care of Brinnin at the YM-YWHA, asking if he might be interested in such a project. The next day, having picked up a copy of the score of The Rake’s Progress from the Bronowskis, Dylan was ensconced in the exiled Russian composer’s suite at the Copley Plaza hotel in Boston. His nervousness showed in the number of cigarettes he smoked. But this endeared him to the bed-ridden Stravinsky, who, in many ways, was similar – small in stature, sensitive, childishly playful, and eclectic in his influences. Before long they had agreed to work on an opera about a man and a woman, the only survivors of an atomic catastrophe, rediscovering the physical world around them and having to create a new language and new theories about the origins of the universe. Stravinsky was generous enough to attribute the idea to Dylan and, indeed, the concept sounded similar to the poems Dylan had been trying to write in his ‘Country Heaven’ sequence. Stravinsky invited his new friend to stay with him and develop it in Los Angeles. ‘What a beautiful man,’ enthused Dylan. ‘Sweet as a bee and small as a grasshopper.’