Under Milk Wood
Page 13
p. 35 Tallyho: Caitlin Thomas recalled of her father, Francis Macnamara, that 'he seemed to make love quite impersonally … right at the crucial moment … he would shout "Ship ahoy"' (Caitlin Thomas with George Tremlett, Caitlin: Life with Dylan Thomas, Secker and Warburg 1986, p. 14).
p. 37 jig jig: A euphemism for sexual intercourse, used and understood internationally by prostitutes in sea-ports.
p. 37 [A choir of children's voices…]: When still busily seeking to finish Under Milk Wood, Thomas may have been confirmed in his decision to allow children's voices such a large part in the play by his visit in July 1953 to the Llangollen International Eisteddfodd in order to write a radio feature about that event. The festival's most popular success that year was the Obernkirchen Girls' Choir — where Thomas described as singing 'like pigtailed angels' (Broadcasts, 270).
p. 37 (late of Twll): The point about the prim proprietor Mog Edwards's previous location being 'Twll' is the twll in Welsh means 'a hole'.
p. 39 'The Rustle of Spring': The reference to a salon piece of that name by Christian Sinding (1856-1941), a minor Norwegian imitator of Grieg, popular at the turn of the century. 'The Rustle of Spring' became something of a piano cliché, redolent of suburban middle-class taste. It is comically juxtaposed here with the Pythagorean idea of the 'Music of the Spheres', an allusion which in turn also brings Gustav Holst's The Planets suite to mind. (Cf. 'the Dance of the World', p. 59, and note.)
p. 41 little Willy Wee: This name, like the form itself of Polly Garter's song, comes from the nursery rhymes (e.g. 'Wee Willy Winkie'), suggesting indirectly that Polly's loss is also that of childhood. On p. 59, the Second Woman's Voice adapts an equally familiar nursery rhyme.
It is also worth recalling that, in Adventures in the Skin Trade (1941), another Polly pretends to lament Sam Bennet (Thomas himself) in the same terms: 'His name was Sam and he had green eyes and brown hair. He was ever so short'.
p. 42 It was a luvver and his lars…: The text Gossamer Beynon wants her pupils to pronounce more orthodoxly is the Pages' song from Shakespeare's As You Like It (V, 3), which suits the play's emphasis on springtime innocence and the passing of time.
p. 45 cawl: A traditional Welsh dish, a broth of meat and vegetables.
p. 46 salad-day: Cf. 'My salad days, /When I was green in judgement' (Antony and Cleopatra, I, 5).
p. 49 Lord Cut-Glass: 'Cut-glass', used of an accent, meant upper-class refined. It was a term Thomas used to describe his own un-Welsh accent.
p. 49 a house and a life at siege: For Lord Cut-Glass's 'life at siege', cf. Mr Sapsea in Dickens's Edwin Drood (ch. 4):Mr. Sapsea has a bottle of port wine on a table before the fire … and is characteristically attended by his portrait, his eight-day clock, and his weather-glass. Characteristically, because he would uphold himself against mankind, his weather-glass against weather, and his clock against time.
p. 50 Donkeys angelically drowse: The angelic demeanor of this animal was memorably celebrated in a poem read by Thomas at the Reigate Poetry Club in October 1948 — 'Prayer to go to the Paradise with the Donkeys', Vernon Watkins's translation from Francis Jammes.
p. 50 Doctor Crippen: The American doctor Hawley Harvey Crippen (1862-1910), executed in London for poisoning his wife.
p. 51 What seas did you see …: The poem is at the heart of Thomas's own favorite part of the play. The papers now at Texas include an early shorter attempt, planned to be spoken by a 'Woman', not identified as Rosie Probert. It is interesting from the point of view of words subsequently discarded, for the way in which the original 'When you were master' confirms a naval pun in the 'When you were my master' of the present text, and for images that Thomas, in circling, thought of developing:
p. 54 the White Book of Llareggub: This is a parody of the titles traditionally given to collections of early manuscripts central to the transmission of Welsh literature and Welsh history: for example, the Black Book of Carmarthen, the Red Book of Hergest, the White Book of Rhydderch etc. In an early short story, 'The Orchards' (1936), the hero Marlais wakes from a dream 'more terrible than the stories of the reverend madmen in the Black Book of Llareggub'.
p. 54 a pot in a palm: In the original January 1954 broadcast (Argo record RG21/22), without manuscript authority, this was changed in Richard Burton's narration to 'a palm in a pot'. That Thomas intended it, at least finally, as 'a pot in a palm' is shown by the Yale TS. There, he crossed out 'pot', possibly starting to correct the phrase, only to reinstate it again by hand. Whether the present comic touch was originally a happy accident or not, it is highly characteristic of Thomas's sense of satire: the palm, that cliché of front-parlor decor, is pretentiously larger than its container.
p. 56 glass widow: With an ironic play on 'grass widow' — in this context, a wife only temporarily parted from her husband(s).
p. 56 with tears where their eyes once were: Cf. Shakespeare's The Tempest (I, 2, 399): 'Those are pearls that were his eyes', made newly current by T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922).
p. 59 the Dance of the World: In both Western and Eastern literature, the world has often been seen as coming into existence through dance and music. (See J. M. W. Tillyard, 'The Cosmic Dance', The Elizabethan World Picture, 1943, ch. 8.)
But the 'Dance of the World' may be a bogus reference, despite its capital letters. Its function may simply be to suggest the opposite of the traditional Dance of the Death. The actual occasion here — that of 'unmarried girls' preparing for dates at the village dance (cf. 'sixpenny hops', p. 8) — certainly makes an esoteric allusion mock-heroic (cf. 'The Rustle of Spring', p. 39 and explanatory note), and the main joke is that the lethargic 'drinkers in the Sailors' Arms drink to the failure of the dance'. In poems such as 'Fern Hill', 'A Winter's Tale' and 'In Country Sleep', Thomas celebrates analogous concepts such as the dance of the four elements and the Music of the Spheres more seriously.
p. 60 that mystic tumulus, the memorial of peoples that dwelt in the region of Llareggub before the Celts left the Land of Summer and where the old wizards made themselves a wife out of flowers: Thomas has here appropriated a particular section of Arthur Machen's Far Off Things (1922), a volume later incorporated in Machen's Autobiography (1951), where the author recalls that 'as soon as I saw anything I saw Twyn Barlwm, that mystic tumulus, the memorial of the peoples that dwelt in that region before the Celts left the Land of Summer'. However, Thomas could have found the words in Gwyn Jones's A Prospect of Wales (1948) where the exact Machen section is quoted on page 17.
The 'Land of Summer' was the name given by the poet and antiquary Iolo Morganwg (Edward Williams, 1747, 1826) to the country he claimed was the original home of the Welsh before their arrival in Britain. The name was his rendering of Deffrobani (Ceylon — thought to have been the first home of the human race) in the fourteenth century Book of Taliesin.
It seems, however, that what had captured Thomas's imagination in particular was the idea of making 'a wife out of flowers'. He entered the image on its own on several of the worksheets now at Texas, as if waiting for the right moment at which to work it into the text. It alludes to the creation of Blodeuwedd from the blossoms of the oak, the broom and the meadow-sweet, in the Welsh tale Math, Son of Mathonwy, the last of the Four Branches of the medieval Welsh classic, the Mabinogi. (It is from the same source that the name 'Dylan' itself derives.)
p. 60 In Pembroke City when I was young: Mr. Waldo's song is meant to evoke the tradition of the urban broadside ballad, a nice counterpoint to other more rural songs and poems in the play, such as Eli Jenkins's morning hymn and Polly Garter's 'I loved the man whose name was Tom'.
In MS (see Textual Notes), Mr Waldo's ballad had extra lines which Thomas deleted:Sweep sweep chimbley sweep
I cried through Pembroke City
And soon a score of kind young women
Took me in from pity
Poor little chimbley sweep they said
Black as a blackamoor
Are you as nice as chimneys
As Betty the Duckpond swore.
p. 61 might Bach. Oh, Bach, fach: The joke in calling the composer Bach 'mighty' lies in the fact that, in Welsh, the adjective 'bach' means small'. The final vocative 'fach' — bringing in the word's other function as a term of endearment — is incorrectly mutated on this occasion; it should be 'bach' to match the masculine subject.
TEXTUAL NOTES
TEXTUAL NOTES
The following notes indicate the differences between the present new edition of Under Milk Wood and the previous standard text, the J. M. Dent edition edited by Daniel Jones in 1954 and revised by him in 1974. We have used the edition reset in 1985, and we note below all the particulars where our study of the manuscripts has suggested that changes should be made.
As indicated in the Introduction the most important change is perhaps the conflation of the First and Second Voices into one voice, headed 'First Voice' at the opening of the play, with the narration thereafter distinguished from the other characters' parts typographically. This formatting device does not, of course, affect one word of what is spoken. And to communicate some sense of the poet's intention in the four places where he had the Second Voice take over in mid-sentence the narration of the First Voice, we indicate the shift by dropping the line down at that point, and noting the fact in a footnote.
The text of Under Milk Wood has been scrutinized by the editors in relation to the two manuscripts of the play that had, separately, what might be considered the poet's latest attention. That there are two and that they both survived, is a matter provoking some amazement. The essential story of these two copy-texts begins with the first performance of the play in New York City on 14 May 1953, the one in the Poetry Center of the Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association, when Dylan Thomas himself took part and directed the play. It was tape-recorded, and subsequently issued by Caedmon Records (Caedmon Records TC2005). The text used by the actors in that premiere was typed in New York under the supervision of Elizabeth Reitell — some of it, according to her account, only minutes before curtain time:
The curtain was going to rise at 8.40. Well, at 8.10 Dylan was locked in the backroom with me. And no end to Under Milk Wood. He kept saying 'I can't, I simply can't do this.' I said, 'You can, the curtain is going to go up.' Strangely enough he wrote the very end of Under Milk Wood then and there, and he wrote the lead-up to it. He would scribble it down, I would copy it, print it so that the secretary could read it, hand it to John Brinnin, and hand it to the secretary to do six copies. We all jumped into a cab finally, and got over the theatre at half-past eight and handed out the six copies to the actors.1
This May 1953 typescript is what Thomas took back to Laugharne with him and worked on in a desultory manner for the next four months. What he did in the main was write out a fair copy of the play up to a certain point on twenty-three foolscap pages, which correspond to the first nineteen pages of the New York typescript. (These typescript pages he gave to Daniel Jones when visiting him in early October 1953 on his way to London and America again. They are now deposited in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Texas.) The rest of the May 1953 typescript, pp. 20-51, containing alterations and markings made during the New York production and for the solo reading he did at Tenby in early October 1953, was tacked on to the written-out twenty-three pages; and this is what Thomas presented to Douglas Cleverdon of the BBC at lunch-time on Thursday 15 October 1953 (Douglas Clever, The Growth of Milk Wood, Dent 1959, p. 35). Two secretaries worked throughout the next day typing the text onto duplicating stencils in the BBC script format. Thomas wanted to collect the original on Saturday to take with him to New York on the Monday. What ensued is now part of literary anecdotage. Thomas picked up the manuscript at the BBC on the Saturday, but then lost it. Cleverdon supplied him with a copy (in fact, three copies) of what had been typed at the BBC. Thomas told Cleverdon where he might have left the original and said that, if he found it, he could have it. Cleverdon did find it, at a pub called the Helvetia, in Old Compton Street, Soho. After a court dispute with the Trustees of the Dylan Thomas Estate,2 he sold it to the Times Book Company Ltd — but not before analyzing the variants in The Growth of Milk Wood. This is the manuscript Cleverdon abbreviates there as 'MS', and we will follow suit. After 1969, 'MS' itself disappeared from view. The present editors were finally able to trace it to the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, and wish to express their appreciation for permission to quote from it.
We also have to thank the staff of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library, with respect to a photocopy of the BBC mimeographed script (here designated 'TS') which Thomas used as his working copy during the last performances of the play on the 24th and 25th of October 1953 at the Poetry Center of the Yong Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association in New York City in what turned out to be the last two weeks of his life. Elizabeth Reitell deposited the 'TS' at Yale in May 1961 along with a copy of her letter to Daniel Jones of 1 June 1954, which had accompanied a copy of 'TS' that she sent to him at that time, amply authenticating it. In this letter she explains that, though some of the markings on the pages are hers and Ruthven Todd's, 'nothing was done, however, without Dylan's knowledge, consent and direct personal supervision.'
The reason why the present editors have taken into consideration both MS and TS is that, as the above history of the vagaries of the manuscripts should make clear, neither of the two texts is impeccable. The Yale TS, as Elizabeth Reitell's letter stress, 'contains all changes, corrections, deletions and revisions made by Dylan up until the time of his death'. But this all happened in the hubbub of a New York performance. Even Reitell suggests that the changes made solely for the American audience should be discounted. We would go further and suggest that discrimination should be applied in respect to all the changes made during those hectic days. For instant, on p. 25 of the Yale TS we see Dylan Thomas deleting the word 'creature' in Polly Garter's lovely monologue:
You're looking up at me now. I know what you're thinking, you poor little milky creature. You're thinking, you're no better than you should be, Polly, and that's good enough for me.
Thomas substitutes interlinearly the word 'thing' — and 'milky thing' might do, except that the next sentence is: 'Oh, isn't life a terrible thing, thank God?' The alteration of 'creature' to 'thing' must have been made in a moment of forgetfulness about that second 'thing'. We feel that, in such instances of clear loss, a last minute change cannot impose an overriding constraint on us. There is also in the Yale TS the rather drastic deletion of two now much valued passages, of which no editors — anyway, not ourselves — would want to deprive readers.
As for the Rosenbach MS, which should be authoritative in that Thomas had the leisure of Laugharne to apply himself to it, the second half of it is pretty much the May 1953 stage script, produced in circumstances no less hectic than the Yale TS. And even in the first twenty-three pages of fair copy, Thomas occasionally nodded, and produced, for instance, 'covern' for 'coven' and other small errors, which he corrected in the Yale TS.
In short, the best text of Under Milk Wood has to be an amalgam of the two extant sources. The Daniel Jones edition of Under Milk Wood (1954), especially the second edition (1974), made some good choices in the face of textual cruxes, which we are happy to follow, usually without the fuss of a footnote. The following notes, however, explain a considerable body of readings in the Jones edition with which we have had to disagree in order to present a text as definitive as can be achieved in a situation where the unfinished and complicated state of the manuscript leaves some of the wording perforce to the judgement of editors.
Abbreviations
MS = Rosenbach Library manuscript and typescript, formerly in the possession of Douglas Cleverdon of the BBC
Yale TS or TS = Yale Library typescript, mimeographed at the BBC, formerly in the possession of Elizabeth Reitell of the Poetry Center, New York.
Botteghe = 'Llareggub' in Botteghe Oscure IX (May 1952)
Mademoiselle = 'Under Milk Wood' in Mademoiselle (February 1954).
p. 3 jolly, rodgered: Thomas wrote 'jolly, rodgered' in MS. The BBC typist hyphenated it as 'jolly-rodgered'; but in the Yale TS Thomas restored the original form. There is no manuscript authority for the 'jollyrodgered' of the Jones edition.
p. 3 Only your eyes are unclosed, to see: The BBC typist dropped the MS comma, which is here restored. There is no manuscript authority for the italicization of 'your' in the Jones edition, nor for the running-together of this, the next sentence, and the previous sentence into one paragraph. Nor does Thomas italicize the names of the boats here, or elsewhere, as the Jones edition does.
p. 4 hymning, in bonnet: The comma of the MS, omitted in the BBC typing, is restored in Thomas's pen in the Yale TS.
p. 4 domino; in Ocky Milkman's loft: MS had 'domino' and 'lofts'. In the Yale TS Thomas deleted the 's' of 'lofts' but actually re-emphasized the 'e' of 'dominoe', a misspelling which, in agreement with the Jones edition, we have not preserved.
p. 4 Sailors' Arms: The plural form with the apostrophe is Thomas's preferred spelling in MS and TS, though he is not entirely consistent throughout.
p. 4 coms: The colloquial abbreviation of 'combinations' (under-clothing). Thomas had 'combs' in MS, TS and Botteghe, but (possibly to avoid confusion with the other sense of 'combs') in the copy of Botteghe used in the Institute of Contemporary Arts Reading in May 1952 he crossed it out and interlined 'coms', which we adopt. (We appreciate access to this copy of Botteghe, now in the possession of Robert Williams.)
p. 4 seacaptain: One word in MS and TS, not hyphenated as in the Jones edition.