Dylan Thomas [1 ed.] 9781783160594, 9781783160587

Citation preview

Writers of Wales

Dylan Thomas

Editors: Meic Stephens Jane Aaron M. Wynn Thomas

Honorary Series Editor: R. Brinley Jones

Other titles in the Writers of Wales series: Welsh Periodicals in English (2013), Malcolm Ballin Ruth Bidgood (2012), Matthew Jarvis Dorothy Edwards (2011), Claire Flay Kate Roberts (2011), Katie Gramich Geoffrey of Monmouth (2010), Karen Jankulak Herbert Williams (2010), Phil Carradice Rhys Davies (2009), Huw Osborne R. S. Thomas (2006), Tony Brown Ben Bowen (2003), T. Robin Chapman James Kitchener Davies (2002), M. Wynn Thomas

Writers of Wales

Dylan Thomas Walford Davies

University of Wales Press Cardiff 2014

© Walford Davies, 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP. www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78316-058-7 e-ISBN 978-1-78316-059-4

The right of Walford Davies to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The University of Wales acknowledges the financial support of the Welsh Books Council.

Printed in Wales by Dinefwr Press, Llandybïe

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to Ralph Maud for the pleasure of working with him on our editions of the Collected Poems 1934–1953 and Under Milk Wood, and for his seminal work as a scholar; to Paul Ferris, for his indispensable biography and edition of the poet’s letters; to John Carey, Christopher Ricks and Barbara Hardy for their friendship and inspiration over the years; and to the late John Ackerman, Gilbert Bennet, Gwyn Jones, Graham Martin and John Wain, for their own work and for excellent conversations about literature. Angharad Watkins and Siân Chapman and their colleagues at the University of Wales Press were models of wise and patient guidance. Grateful thanks go to Jeff Towns for expert information as to the sources of the photographs that stand here as ‘Portraits of the Artist’ between 1933 and 1952. For permission to quote from the works of Dylan Thomas, grateful acknowledgement is made to David Higham Associates (London) for UK rights and to New Directions Publishing Corporation (New York) for rights in the USA, its territories and Canada.

Frontispiece: 1952. Holograph of ‘Prologue’ to the Collected Poems 1934–1952: ‘At poor peace I sing / To you strangers, (though song / Is a burning and crested act . . .’

Contents Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Preface 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11

12 13 14 15

v ix xi

‘Begin at the beginning’: introductory 1 ‘The sideboard fruit, the ferns’: the poet in suburbia 5 ‘The loud hill of Wales’: the Welshness of the work 10 ‘I’ll put them all in a story by and by’: aspects of the prose 54 ‘Now my saying shall be my undoing’: the need to change 64 ‘Criss-cross rhythms’: comparisons of earlier and later poems 74 ‘Ann’s bard on a raised hearth’: towards ‘After the funeral (In Memory of Ann Jones)’ 83 ‘Mostly bare I would lie down’: a creative decade ends in war 89 ‘Arc-lamped thrown back upon the cutting flood’; ‘This unbelievable lack of wires’: wartime, film work, broadcasts 94 ‘We hid our fears in that murdering breath’: the war elegies 106 ‘Parables of sun light’: towards ‘Poem in October’, ‘Fern Hill’, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ and beyond 114 ‘Is my voice being your eyes?’: Under Milk Wood 129 ‘The rhymer in the long tongued room’: writing places and the place of the poet 146 ‘As I sail out to die’: the late poems 151 ‘The hero’s head lies scraped of every legend’: the legend and the man 162

Notes Select Bibliography Index

170 176 181

Illustrations The picture section is placed between pages 82 and 83. Cover image: The poet in 1938. The silk necktie ‘made out of his sister’s scarf, she never knew where it had gone.’ Frontispiece: 1952. Holograph of ‘Prologue’ to the Collected Poems 1934–1952. (Reproduced by kind permission of Jeff Towns.) Figure 1: 1934. Aged nineteen in a London studio photograph. (Every effort was made to contact the copyright holder.) Figure 2: 1938. Aged twenty-four. (Reproduced by permission of Jeff Towns.) Figure 3: 1938. The recently married Caitlin and Dylan at Blashford, Hampshire. (Reproduced by kind permission of Jeff Towns.) Figure 4: 1946. The poet of Deaths and Entrances and ‘Fern Hill’. (Reproduced by permission of Getty Images.) Figure 5: 1949. Inside the railings of a tomb in St Martin’s churchyard in Laugharne. (Every effort was made to contact the copyright holder.) Figure 6: 1952. In Millbrook, New York State. (Photograph by Rollie McKenna © Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation, courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography, the University of Arizona Foundation.)

I Brychan a Cristyn a Mari a Rhys ‘young and easy’

Preface Once it was the colour of saying Soaked my table the uglier side of a hill ... Now my saying shall be my undoing, And every stone I wind off like a reel.

In a March 1932 letter to Stephen Spender, T. S. Eliot wrote ‘I always dislike everybody at the centenary moment’.1 Though referring to the centenary that year of the death of no less a figure than Goethe, his point was valid. The living relevance of any worthwhile author does not arbitrarily depend on the calendar, even when a round-figured centenary of a birth comes round. It is, after all, creative writers themselves, wording and rewording as they do, who best illustrate the worthwhileness of this travelling back. Instead of abandoning The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot modestly turned to Pound to help winnow and transform the manuscript. Even Wordsworth’s late sonnet ‘Mutability’ deprecates ‘yesterday’ – which royally did wear His crown of weeds, but could not even sustain Some casual shout that broke the silent air, Or the unimaginable touch of Time.

– and yet that superb phrase ‘the unimaginable touch of Time’ Wordsworth had salvaged from an abandoned poem. Like Wordsworth and Eliot, Dylan Thomas too was much possessed by time. He was also, in Eliot’s phrase about Webster and Donne, ‘much possessed by death,/And saw the skull beneath the skin’ – or as Thomas put it ‘I sit and watch the worm

Preface

beneath my nail/Wearing the quick away’. The possession came to be imagistically less morbid as the career developed, but a preoccupation with time remained. In dramatizing Time rather than just fearing it, he made Time imaginable (‘I saw Time murder me’). No wonder Thomas is everywhere memorably found remembering. At the centenary of his birth, it is worth also our remembering that he wrote some of the best birthday poems in the English language (‘Twenty-four years’, ‘Especially when the October wind’, ‘Poem in October’, ‘Poem on his Birthday’), let alone other poems that celebrate his measured growth from selfawareness to self-possession that do not even mention birthdays. He is importantly good, not just on birthdays, but on days of birth. For him, each diurnal round had always a somewhat ‘creationist’ resonance: ‘Awake my sleeper to the sun . . .’, ‘the mighty mornings of the earth . . .’, ‘And this day’s sun leapt up the sky’, ‘When I woke, the town spoke’, ‘And then to awake, and the farm . . ./with the dew, come back’. Nothing merely calendrical there. And of course a crucial aspect of the originality of the early poetry is the wonder of even prenatal life: ‘Ungotten I knew night and day.’ And in reissuing parts of an earlier self – the imagined child in the womb, a youthful thought or feeling, a brief memory, or a complete childhood – there is often, as in the Wordsworth example, a bibliographical aspect – the late retrieval of unused phrases, lines, even whole poems that seem themselves almost to have been lying in wait for their retrieval. ‘I’ve got’, Thomas wrote to Vernon Watkins in April 1938, ‘one of those very youthfully made phrases . . . that often comes to my mind & which one day I shall use: “When I woke, the dawn spoke”.’ ‘One of those very youth-fully made phrases’: the very phrase is itself an autobiography. The poem that the phrase ultimately opened was written in the summer of 1939, but it had lain abandoned in a poem in the August 1933 Notebook. Michael Holroyd has defined biography as a ‘reversing of the flow of time’: it is also true of a writer’s bibliography. Thomas’s poetic hero was William

xii

Preface

Blake (‘I am in the path of Blake, but so far behind him that only the wings on his heels are in sight’)2 and as Blake once put it ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of Time.’ Period. But so that return should not mean ‘retreat’ (except in Henry Vaughan’s affirmative sense of the word as withdrawal for reconstruction), Thomas kept pointing up the need for an artist always to develop – in Eliot’s phrase, to ‘fare forward’, in Thomas’s phrase to ‘advance for as long as forever is’. The four Thomas lines quoted above as epigraph are the opening and closing of ‘Once it was the colour of saying’, a pivotal poem of 1938, in which the naturalness of looking back (‘Once it was . . .’) is leant against by the need to go forward (‘Now . . . shall be . . .’). It is this live contraflow in the poet’s writing, not just an entry on a calendar, that makes the centenary of Dylan Thomas’s birth when it comes around on 27 October 2014 meaningful. It is also why ‘Once it was the colour of saying’ (with its wry take on once upon a time) is a poem we shall need to revisit.

*

*

*

But even a critic welcomes the chance to travel back, to reconsider something said, or left unsaid. Invited to augment the present essay, I welcome the increased elbow-room. A range of changes and additions makes the essay more leisurely. But the original brief (which included keeping it brief) remains: What is it that most characterizes this particular writer of Wales? At the volume’s first revision in 1990, I thanked my two teenage sons, Jason and Damian, for telling me what needed expansion. Its collateral American edition (St. Martin’s Press, New York) I dedicated to Dorothy Bednarowska, one of the University of Oxford’s greatest teachers of English Literature. My dedication to this new, enlarged edition names my four grandchildren – Brychan, Cristyn, Mari and Rhys. I know already from their endless curiosity about everything in sight that they will be among readers of all the writers of Wales, in both Welsh and English, and with new things of their own to say.

xiii

1. ‘Begin at the beginning’: introductory The shape of this study is that of an essay, with areas of critical attention declared by sub-headings (all of them suggestive quotations from Thomas), rather than by ‘chapter’ breaks. Right up to 1940, the real-time chronology of the vast majority of Dylan Thomas’s poems was not that of his first three volumes (1934, 1936, 1939). And the same is true right through of this question of chronology. An essay- as opposed to chapter-form enables us to interrelate biographical sequence and thematic frequencies more freely and more meaningfully. So let us start even pre-textually, with images. The cover photograph to this volume is right to show Thomas as a young man. After all, he was still a young man when he died, aged 39. Far too often, photographs of Thomas, like portraits of Wordsworth (d. aged 80), reflect the later self instead of the young face behind earlier, more phenomenal, years of achievement. A trick of perspective in the famous John Deakin photograph of Thomas (fig. 5) ‘inside the railings of a tomb [in St Martin’s churchyard in Laugharne in 1949], my hair uncut for months . . . blown up like a great, dancing, mousey busby’, eerily merging the lionized poet with graves and undergrowth only a few yards (and as it turned out, only four years) from where he was himself to be buried; or the innumerable photo shots of Thomas at pub tables and lecture lecterns – all these speak of a twenty- or thirtysomething poet forced to keep abreast of a legend, because a legend set afoot so early. Back of them all lies the different impression caught in the 1934 photograph (fig. 1). Its ‘studio’ self-regard is that of a sensitive nineteen-year-old trapped by

Walford Davies

respectable ordinariness, yet with the look of unused talent that might one day make a legend, but for the time being outrageously reassuring his mother that one day he would be ‘as good as Keats, if not better’.3 In the cover photograph the poet has become a relaxedly glamorous young man of 24 (a silk neckerchief is not a tie, even if it was ‘made out of his sister’s scarf, she never knew where it had gone’). He knew by then, quite rightly, that he could write, having had two acclaimed poetry volumes published, with a third on the way. And yet it was the teenager in that earlier 1934 photograph who, between the ages of fifteen and nineteen, made the bulk of those poems possible. His four poetry Notebooks (ranging from April 1930 to April 1934) slowly came to contain first attempts at over forty of the published poems, a remarkable number when we consider that the Collected Poems 1934–1952, which Thomas published in 1952, a year before his death, saying that they were ‘all, up to the present year that I wish to preserve’, comprised only eighty-nine. The defensive remark about Keats was only to calm his mother’s worry whether teenager Dylan, apparently idling at home in the first three years of the 1930s, should not be following his father’s route ‘to the university’. ‘Anybody’d think you were a Keats or something,’ she’d taunted. To sympathize with him, however, is not to submit to the notion (to borrow the young Milton’s phrase in ‘L’Allegro’), of Thomas as some ‘fancy’s child,/Warbl[ing] his native woodnotes wild’. Thomas’s early poetry Notebooks reveal a different young man, unusually determined to learn his craft as a poet. The tones in which he later described his home, the opportunity to write poems, and his formal education, as ‘demure, chequered’, are anything but injured except in his having to say so. As it happened, Swansea Grammar School, which he attended from 1925 to 1931, with the significant exception of the classes over which his own father reigned as Senior English Master, had a liberal atmosphere. Caught out of the classroom by the genial headmaster Trevor Owen, Dylan replied he was ‘playing truant,

2

Dylan Thomas

sir’, a brilliantly honest answer, yet topped by the headmaster’s rejoinder: ‘Well, don’t let your father catch you!’ But the school had also a take-it-or-leave-it regime in a more estimable sense. The Latin Master J. Morgan Williams recorded that Dylan at one stage ‘wanted to hear a bit of Vergil, though I don’t think he was a Latin scholar at all. He came for about two months, until it was time to edit the magazine, and then I didn’t see him any more.’ Two months of voluntary Latin? – obvious to the reader, as very early to intimate friends, is that here was a tough intelligence not weakened in being independent of academic discipline, ideological commitment, or class knowingness. His attitude later to the modern English poetic lions of the turn of the twentieth century was that of the young Keats to Wordsworth and Coleridge at the turn of the nineteenth – impressed, yes, but mistrustful of their wide philosophical confidence. The analogy is particularly keen when we think of Keats’s mistrust of Wordsworth’s ‘egotistical sublime’ and of any poetry that ‘has a palpable design upon us’. Not for Thomas, either, the ‘cultural memory’ employed relentlessly at every turn by Eliot (whom he dubbed ‘Pope Eliot’) or the collective ‘political’ programmes of Auden and his circle. In a perfectly sincere tribute to Auden in 1937 he could not resist saying that, though he sometimes thought of Auden’s poetry ‘as a great war’ and admired intensely ‘the mature, religious, and logical fighter’, he deprecated ‘the boy bushranger’,4 adding on sending it to Geoffrey Grigson’s New Verse, ‘Good luck to Auden on his seventieth birthday’, when Auden was only thirty. Such comments have the attractive brio of a younger brother. However, they do not remove the difference between, say, Auden’s knowledgeable use of Freud in his poems (for example, the themes of id and superego, the death wish, dreams, and infant sexuality) and Thomas’s vague alignment with Freud – Freud cast light on a little of the darkness he had exposed. Benefiting by the sight of the light and the knowledge of the hidden nakedness, poetry must drag further into the clean nakedness of light more even of the hidden causes than Freud could realise.5

3

Walford Davies

At the stage when a period at university might well have disciplined his widespread reading and enabled him, in Coleridge’s phrase, ‘to generalize his notions’, Thomas remained at home, sickly and much pampered by his mother, but committing poems to a private storehouse of school exercise books (the type with Arithmetic Tables and ‘Danger-Don’ts’ on the back) – the famous poetry Notebooks now at the Lockwood Memorial Library at the University of Buffalo, New York.

*

*

*

In reintroducing Thomas in a Welsh context, however, we have to bear in mind that his perspectives were bound always to be wider than any sticky ‘regional’ label could cover, so strong was his love for the English language itself, the only one he knew: The bad influences I tried to remove and renounce bit by bit, shadow by shadow, echo by echo, through trial and error, through delight and disgust and misgiving, as I came to love words more and to hate the heavy hands that knocked them about, the thick tongues that had no feel for their multitudinous tastes, the dull and botching hacks who flattened them out into a colourless and insipid paste, the pedants who made them moribund and pompous as themselves.6

– he said, pompously. And, less pompously, in a broadcast scripted conversation with Vernon Watkins, Alfred Janes and John Prichard on the subject of ‘Swansea and the Arts’ (1949), his remark that too many artists remained, as they should, in Wales, but were ‘enviously sniping at the artists of other countries rather than attempting to raise the standard of art of their own country.’7 And as early as 1946, in a broadcast on ‘Welsh Poetry’, he cut even more closely to the chase with this: There is a number of young Welshmen writing poems in English who, insisting passionately that they are Welshmen, should, by rights, be writing in Welsh, but who, unable to write in Welsh or reluctant to do so because of the uncommercial nature of the language, often give

4

Dylan Thomas the impression that their writing in English is only a condescension to the influence and ubiquity of a tyrannous foreign tongue. I do not belong to that number.8

Complexities of personal/cultural identity lie behind the nationality of any writer. The simplistic opening line of Auden’s poem ‘Who’s Who’ – ‘A shilling life will give you all the facts’ – is driven by irony.

2. ‘The sideboard fruit, the ferns’: the poet in suburbia Thomas’s beginnings seem to have been almost comic suburban boredom, forced to lighten itself first by ragamuffin adventures and later by group sub-bohemian chats over coffee in the Kardomah Café in Swansea’s Castle Street with friends like musician Daniel Jones, journalist Charles Fisher, artist Fred Janes and (later) poet Vernon Watkins, as more racily with allcomers in the pubs of Swansea, his ‘Little Dublin’,9 and later still in any pub at all. Thereafter, apart from a most impressive output in both prose and poetry, there was only strenuous financial survival, and an America that did to his every word what the poet did to its liquor. Geographically, these see us through from Swansea to London to New York, taught the poet no radically different outward habits, and shaped the routine even in New Quay and in Laugharne where he was several times most at ease, and finally at rest. But they also take us through from the often difficult stylistic and thematic originality of the early poems to the dense and driven passion of the elegies on London’s wartime dead, to the stern professional facility of the filmscripts and the comic facility of the broadcasts, to the pastoral river-run seascapes of the last poetry and the final elegiac cartoon of Welsh life in Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices. Especially in such a foreshortened life, literary criticism does best when it tells us to trust the work rather than the poet, and especially since the

5

Walford Davies

‘legend’ of the life without the work has got so ridiculously out of proportion. Where plain biography is the aim, the approach of Constantine FitzGibbon’s The Life of Dylan Thomas (1965) is penetrating because also more sympathetic than the snapshots in a vacuum of John Malcolm Brinnin’s Dylan Thomas in America (1955). And the same thing goes for the literary-critical side of things. We are not attending to the matter in hand if, favouring different ways with words than those which intrigued Thomas, or sharing the cynical English reflexes of the new generation of poets who reacted against him in the fifties and sixties, we start from suspicion. Nor if, loving Wales herself too well, we expect only orthodox tributes to be paid her. Thomas’s main conscious allegiance was to his ‘craft or sullen art’. In the presence of FitzGibbon’s Life – and of its more capacious if less sympathetic successors, Paul Ferris’s Dylan Thomas (1977) and Andrew Lycett’s Dylan Thomas: A New Life (2003) – the burden of biographical detail (Auden’s ironic ‘A shilling life’) is taken off a short essay. I aim to keep to chronological bearings, but only when they highlight the inner chronology of the work itself. There’s the question, for example, of Thomas’s parents. The suburban home in Swansea into which the poet was born (27 October 1914) had deep and wide roots of a particular kind. His father, the greatest single influence on his early years, and his mother, a kindly intelligent woman whom Thomas came unfairly to characterize as an example of suburban triviality – they both together relayed another and older culture into his life. Both parents had sprung from working-class, rural, Welshspeaking beginnings in Carmarthenshire. Those roots were not completely removed by the upwardly mobile lifestyle that D. J. Thomas consolidated at No. 5 Cwmdonkin Drive (the young Dylan’s ‘Glamorgan villa’), with its neo-Georgian respectability, its middle-class decorative gestures in knitted texts and reproduction Greek statues, and its resident maid. In a 1930–2 Notebook poem we read:

6

Dylan Thomas (Oh change the life!), The sideboard fruit, the ferns, the picture houses And the pack of cards.

Later, in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, Mr Emlyn Evans’s villa ‘Lavengro’ is described in similar terms ending, within quotation marks, with ‘At home with the bourgeoisie’. It is too easy to demonize the strict Grammar School Senior English Master (nicknamed by pupils ‘le soldat’, the soldier, for the very way he entered a classroom) who presided over 5 Cwmdonkin Drive. Yet he did something more serious than just go for settled comfort: he deliberately and unwisely suppressed his own and his wife’s native Welsh language in front of Dylan and his sister Nancy, even while going out at night to teach the Welsh language in Adult Education classes. Thomas senior erased also the further imagined bogey of a Welsh accent by ensuring that his son and daughter received elocution lessons in English, a phenomenon that, at a certain income level in the Swansea of that day, was the fashionable get-ahead thing. Thomas’s un-Welsh accent, so striking in the later broadcasts and readings (‘Cut-glass, they’d call it down in Wales,’ he told Julian Maclaren-Ross, adding ‘I don’t speak Welsh either’),10 was of early involuntary manufacture, and, because not consciously defensive in his case, not snobbish. The sin of the father was not in this case visited upon the son: Dylan was never bedevilled by class consciousness of any kind. And just as free of any silly sense of superiority was the advice given him a decade later by the major critic William Empson (rich family, public school, Cambridge, yet the least snobbish of men), that the young Dylan, up only by his bootstraps in 1930s London, should actively respect his Welshness as an opportunity to ‘nip across the classes’. Yet the sadness of the cutting-off of the Welsh language itself is clear. And especially so once we mention D.J.’s uncle, the Reverend William Thomas (1834–79). Born in Carmarthenshire, this preacher-poet was the father of modern Unitarianism in Wales and a passionate, radical agitator in the landlord–tenant

7

Walford Davies

frictions that followed the wider franchise of the Reform Bill of 1867. He epitomized radical, Welsh-speaking, rural Wales and a delight in poetry just not separable from the Welsh language itself. He would not have been a shadowy figure even for the child Dylan because his Welsh national eminence was, again ironically, something D. J. Thomas was especially proud of. His bardic name, Gwilym Marles, gave Dylan his middle name, Marlais. The first name, Dylan, went back much further, to ‘Dylan Ail Ton’ (‘Dylan, Son of the Wave’), in the fourth tale in the major medieval Welsh classic Y Mabinogi. And yet in 1914 what prompted its choice was at a much shorter remove. A highly publicized London production of Lord Howard de Walden’s opera Dylan, Son of the Wave (music by Josef Holbrooke, conducted by Thomas Beecham) had premiered on 4 July 1914. The name ‘Dylan’ was on the London air four months before the poet’s birth. But this is the point – D. J. Thomas, the poet’s father, was one of a select group convened to promote the visit of Lord Howard de Walden’s new National Theatre of Wales to Swansea in 1914.11 All the more of a contrast, therefore, the break with the Welsh language that ‘D.J.’, as he magisterially liked being called by his school colleagues (the ‘le soldat’ of pupils were asides), demanded of his son and daughter. An aspiring poet himself, he had a First Class degree in English from Aberystwyth, and as early as 1920 came very close to being appointed to the first Chair of English at the new University College of Swansea. It is natural perhaps that he would have projected (unnecessarily, yet fruitfully) literary ambitions onto his son’s future. Compensating for wastefully withholding the Welsh language from his children, his continuing influence on Dylan made at least some recompense. Helped by his own fine reading voice, D.J. decided that his son’s experience of English poetry, especially Shakespeare, did not need to await intellectual maturity. The success is biographical proof of T. S. Eliot’s belief that good poetry gains in any case from a short lag of enjoyment before it is ‘understood’. There was also D.J.’s discriminating early taste in even the very ‘latest’ writers. He

8

Dylan Thomas

admired T. S. Eliot, Edward Thomas and D. H. Lawrence, whose work the young Dylan read ‘in my father’s brown study, with my eyes hanging out’. The emotional distance between the young poet and his strict, often disgruntled father made him appreciate all the more, as if it stood out in relief against his father’s stern character, the literary enthusiasm that was D.J.’s saving grace, and bequest. From his mother’s family, the poet derived simpler associations and environmental pleasures. Her eldest sister, Annie, had married Jim Jones who a little lackadaisically farmed Fernhill outside Carmarthen. It was there that Thomas throughout the 1920s enjoyed those now famous schoolboy holidays, written up satirically (though always warmly where they touched on Ann Jones herself) in the poem ‘After the funeral’ and the story ‘The Peaches’ when he was 25, and lyrically in the poem ‘Fern Hill’ when he was 30. Another aunt, ‘Dosie’, had married the Reverend David Rees, minister of Paraclete Congregational Chapel in Newton, Swansea. This uncle considered the hyperactive boy ‘insane’, a boy who did not need to get his retaliation in first, so devastating did he make it: ‘I hate him,’ he said, ‘from his corns to his dandruff’. At Newton, though, the boy experienced quite naturally the verbal and other legacies associated, too often condescendingly, with Welsh-language chapel and Sunday school. His mother’s family were in fact the aunts and uncles of the broadcast, ‘Memories of Christmas’ (1945). A 1936 photograph is reproduced in Bill Read’s The Days of Dylan Thomas (1965; p. 64) that shows some of these earthy relatives standing with Pamela Hansford Johnson (later Lady Snow), the poet and novelist (lithe and stylish), whose extensive correspondence with Dylan between 1933 and 1935 helped him articulate his sensibility outside the poems, and as a result train his sights on literary London. Nothing could show more graphically than that photograph the poet’s position halfway between thoroughly Welsh-language rural beginnings and later English-language London and world fame.

9

Walford Davies

3. ‘The loud hill of Wales’: the Welshness of the work But that Welsh-speaking life so consciously denied the poet at source – could it still have exerted an influence even on the wider reaches of his poetry? Talk of ‘modified cynghanedd’, when the examples amount to no more than alliteration helped by assonance, has for too long been allowed to hallow some poets as Anglo-Welsh as if they knew fully what cynghanedd involves, even were it a border-controlled prerequisite, which it is not. It is obvious that a primarily Welsh-speaking poet will use the English language more idiosyncratically than a writer inward only with English idioms and traditions, and do so uncompromisingly because unconsciously. Such occasional freedoms occur in the poetry of any métèque – any poet with a non-English linguistic, racial or social background who chooses to write in English. By definition, that is not a complete outsiderness, but it shows idiomatic English when it is at least at one remove, allowing a stylistic leeway in poetry, even when the poet shows, as Thomas does, perfect orthodoxy in prose, however luxurious. Thomas spoke next to no Welsh, and could read none, but the language was daily all around him, part of the immediate world that shaped him. Even if only on the choice of subject matter, let alone of strenuous poetic structures, as a poet he felt himself a relatively free spirit as regards English linguistic expectations. He may exhibit no repeated Anglo-Welsh equivalent to, say, the preponderance of present participles that makes T. S. Eliot’s ‘Ash-Wednesday’ an Anglo-American (or un-English) poem. Even language textures stemming from idiom or placenames or reflecting geography in other ways (such as those that identify the regional geographic roots of a Wordsworth or a Seamus Heaney) do not often have equivalents in the Welshman’s poetry. And yet, like them, he uses other outsider leniencies. We look for the wrong thing when we search for specifically ‘Welsh’ effects; ‘un-English’ effects are a better clue. Given a generalized norm as a yardstick, Thomas shows an above-average instinctive

10

Dylan Thomas

readiness to subvert it. There are moments when an un-Englishness is reflected by individual words that from the point of view of strict grammar are not absolutely correct. In ‘When once the twilight locks’ (1934) the young child is sent ‘scouting on the globe’ of the world, which ‘sewn to me by nerve and brain,/Had stringed my flask of matter to his rib’. ‘Stringed’ should be strung, but abstract correctness would have weakened the concrete connection ‘stringed’ has with ‘sewn’. Thomas raised the difference in order to ignore it. In ‘How shall my animal’ (1938) he sees his mouth as ‘The invoked, shrouding veil at the cap of the face’. A mouth would normally be invoking rather than ‘invoked’. Similarly, in ‘Should lanterns shine’ (1933) the lantern’s beam is described as an ‘unaccustomed light’, where presumably it is the object (the mummy’s face in a suddenly opened tomb) that would be unaccustomed – unaccustomed to the light. Such rogue interchanges are well beyond the common syntactic transferences we call transferred epithets (‘dogs in the wetnosed yards’, for example, in Under Milk Wood). Or take the oddity in this line from his last completed poem, ‘Poem on his Birthday’: ‘Gulled and chanter in young Heaven’s fold.’ The word ‘chanter’ (a deceitful horse-dealer) carries on the sense of deceit in the word ‘gulled’ but ignores the oddness of having a past participle and noun placed together that do not play on the same word (compare, say, deceived and deceiver or chased and chaser; or, had Thomas wanted only the meaning of being deceived, gulled and chantered). Against this almost subconscious licence, what we consistently find urged instead is that the Welshness of the poetry comes only from the influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins. That Hopkins’s poetic eccentricities came, not just from being a convert Roman Catholic at the height of English Anglicanism, but also from conscious emulation of the high-craft complexity of medieval Welsh-language strict-metre poetics, is documentable fact. At St Beuno’s in the Vale of Clwyd Hopkins learned Welsh well enough even to harness the intricate devices of cynghanedd, dyfalu, sangiad and proest (even in Welsh) with a completeness that Thomas knew about, certainly, but chose only to skirt. The

11

Walford Davies

idea that the ‘Welshness’ of his poetics reached him only through Hopkins should be retired from service. An essay on ‘Modern Poetry’ in the Swansea Grammar School Magazine of 192912 claimed rather negatively that modernity ‘had its roots in the obscurity of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ lyrics, where, though more often than not common metres were recognized, the language was violated and estranged by the efforts of compressing the already familiar imagery.’ An unpublished letter of 1938, however, shows that the question of Hopkins’s influence is more layered than that: I have never read Hopkins with any thoroughness or any real affection. This isn’t to say that my poems may not have been influenced by his – I read them first when my ‘work’ was fluid enough, (perhaps I mean watery enough) to find room for any number of foreign bodies, some of which still unfortunately remain, occupying too much space – but the influence is, I imagine, superficial.13

This, he added, ‘is what I believe to be true . . . allowing for selfhypnotism’. But he was not hypnotized. The year of the letter (1938) is significant. Hopkins’s poetry, first published in 1918, had its main influence on those poets whose first publishing decade was the 1930s. Early Auden even wrote Hopkinesque pastiche (‘defeats on them like lavas/have fallen, fell, kept falling, fell/on them, poor lovies . . .’). Hopkins’s influence on early Thomas would have been in terms of encouraging weight and density, not antics. Thomas actually echoes Hopkins only in his last poems – in the relationship of the hawk in ‘Over Sir John’s hill’ and its borrowed phrase ‘high there’ from ‘The Windhover’ – where the echo is in intelligent tribute, not slavery. As it proceeds, the letter to Bob Rees becomes even more interesting: I don’t know whether I was ever ‘determined’ – a slightly selfconscious word, especially if applied to the early, formative period of one’s writing when the main thing was not just to produce another poem but, in Laura Riding’s phrase, to make one poem less – to make ‘a richer texture’ than so much English poetry (though I had,

12

Dylan Thomas then, no literary nationalism), but I think that I was always attracted to the idea of extremely concentrated poetry; I never could like the poetry that allowed itself great breathing spaces, tediums and flatnesses, between essential passages.

‘The idea of extremely concentrated poetry’: that emphasis on critical mass as against only allegedly ‘essential passages’ set off by ‘tediums and flatnesses’ shows his poetic temper to have been from the start Hopkinsian, not Hopkinesque. And significantly, he makes no reference at all in the letter to Welsh strict-metre poetics. Indeed, in the 1946 BBC broadcast on ‘Welsh Poetry’ he claimed that what he calls ‘bardic forms’ relied ‘on a great deal of assonance and alliteration and most complicated internal rhyming: and these effects in English have, in the hands of the few who have attempted to use them, succeeded only in warping, crabbing, and obscuring the natural genius of the English language.’14 Instead of Hopkins being for Thomas a conduit for Welsh-language poetics, a better assumption is that of analogy, between the similar but independent strengths of two unusually original poets, a coincidence of poetic temperament.

*

*

*

The question of influence or allegiance is raised also apropos the so-called ‘Apocalyptic’ poets of the 1940s. Just as, a decade later, inclusion in Robert Conquest’s New Lines anthology (1956) branded a number of quite different writers ‘Movement’ poets, ‘Apocalyptic’ was a christening by anthology. The New Apocalypse (1939), The White Horseman (1941) and The Crown and the Sickle (1945) invited a loose linkage of mainly Celtic poets of the late 1930s and early 1940s, such as Kathleen Raine, David Gascoyne, George Barker, G. S. Fraser, Vernon Watkins, Herbert Read and the anthologies’ editors, J. F. Hendry and Henry Treece. Thomas was hijacked to the cause, but was in fact against linkage to any ‘movement’ at all, especially when described like this:

13

Walford Davies In my definition, the writer who senses the chaos, the turbulence, the laughter and the tears, the order and the peace of the world in its entirety, is an Apocalyptic writer. His utterance will be prophetic, for he is observing things which less sensitive men may have not yet come to notice; and as his words are prophetic, they will tend to be incantatory, and so musical. At times, even, that music may take control, and lead the writer from recording his vision almost to creating another voice. So, momentarily, he will kiss the edge of God’s robe. (Henry Treece, How I See Apocalypse, 1946.)

This has a sliding homogeneity that Thomas was right to resist. By 1938, Treece was writing the first book-length study (Dylan Thomas: ‘Dog among the Fairies’, 1949). The 24 year-old Welshman was mature and honest enough to say that, though flattering, a critical volume was premature. Despite a visit from Treece to Laugharne in August 1938, he refused to sign a manifesto promoting the ‘Apocalypse Movement’. Historical ‘Metaphysical’ or ‘Romantic’ or ‘Surrealist’ currents in his poems were very different from those in the poems in the above anthologies, and certainly not to be suddenly labelled ‘Apocalyptic’. Perhaps most important, the influence of Blake on Thomas was not mythopoeic as on Raine and Watkins, but plain liberal – the freeing of the individual from abstract control, as urged in two major Thomas poems as different and apart as ‘I see the boys of summer’ (1934) and ‘There was a saviour’ (1940). Another mythopoeic poet central to Raine and Watkins was Yeats. Thomas considered Yeats the greatest modern poet (though Hardy was his favourite), but it was not Yeats’s philosophical systems that appealed. Asked in a writers’ questionnaire in 1946 whether it was suitable for a poet to have a second occupation, Thomas used humour to raise the level of the question by answering that ‘even a poet like Yeats, who was made by patronage financially safe so that he need not write and think nothing but poetry, had, voluntarily, to give himself a secondary job: that of philosopher, mystic, crank, quack.’15 What counted for Thomas was Yeats’s command of poetic form in aid of memorable speech with – visions and systems apart – ‘something original to say’. That

14

Dylan Thomas

phrase is the one used of Thomas by A. Alvarez in the next grouping to be christened by anthology – The New Poetry (1962). So the Apocalyptics’ ‘New-Romantic’ reaction in the 1940s against the ‘political’ 1930s was itself reacted against by the Anti-Romantic ‘Movement’ poets of the 1950s, who were themselves in turn reacted against in Alvarez’s introduction to The New Poetry (titled ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’), which polemically praised Ted Hughes’s Dylanish sexual energy over Philip Larkin’s textual urbanity – though both Hughes and Larkin were among Thomas’s sincerest admirers. It is the fate of mere ‘reactions’, as of ‘movements’, to fade. Individual talent is what survives. Thomas was right to see the Apocalyptic Movement as a transitory reading. More important – though he never bragged about it – the poet of 18 Poems, Twenty-five Poems and The Map of Love knew he had shared the 1930s with Auden as something much more than a jealous, alternative younger brother – and had not left when war broke out. He did not need to sideline or supersede or escape anything because he had denied so much less of himself in his work than Auden. As he put it in a 1938 letter to Treece, he had never been in any danger of accepting Auden ‘as head prefect’.16 It is an index of Thomas’s early unignorability in the 1940s that the ‘Apocalyptics’ should have sought to have particularly his blessing, aged 24, and of Thomas’s continuing power that in the 1950s the ‘Movement’ poets should have marshalled themselves against him in particular the minute he died in 1953 aged 39. ‘Movements’ in literature are sometimes more opportunistic than opportune. If to ‘Apocalyptic’ poets of the 1940s, Thomas sounded like themselves, it was because they had been busy seeking to sound like Thomas. A poet often starts coveting the style of another when not ‘in earnest’ (Hopkins’s phrase) with his own natural material – a short recipe for disaster. In the 1930s, Victorian Hopkins had his slavish imitators, but Thomas, interestingly, was not among them, alerted perhaps by having so early his own slavish imitators. Henry Treece himself, for example:

15

Walford Davies Where falcon flies above the crags My heart flies too; Where fallow deer slips in the scree, There falls my hope; The hand that bares the fire-lit blade, It is my own; The finger that pulls tight the string Wears my own ring; The tongue that sings the ancient song Tells my own tale; That moves a mountain in its pride, It is my love. (‘The Lost One’, 1943)

That is pitifully Thomas’s ‘The force that through the green fuse’ (1933) writ weak. And Thomas’s voice was not borrowed only in the UK. Even the American poet Randall Jarrell’s most famous poem ‘The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner’ was imported Thomas – From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze, Six miles from the earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters . . .

Those four lines (of only a five-lined poem) are clearly wrought out of rhythms and phrases from Thomas: ‘For loss of blood I fell on Ishmael’s plain’; ‘I fled the earth and, naked, climbed the weather,/Reaching a second ground far from the stars’; ‘How deep the waking in the worlded clouds’ (from ‘I fellowed sleep’); ‘Death: death of Hamlet and the nightmare madmen’ (from ‘Today, this insect’). Thomas was an unwise choice to imitate, yet the very urge to imitate him reflected something new, beyond musicality, in the nature of his appeal.

*

* 16

*

Dylan Thomas

But to return to the Welshness of the writing. Instead of Hopkins’s knowledge of specific Welsh rules, Thomas had in him something unconsciously Welsh because already unconsciously unEnglish. Otherwise why, given the ease with which he could write accomplished ‘English’ lyricism from the start, and though having just as important political things as his English contemporaries to ‘say’ about the wider world of the 1930s and 40s, did his poetry not continue in the easy, inconsequential style of the earliest Notebooks? The fact that he says that he had back in 1930 (aged sixteen) ‘no literary nationalism’ does not mean that by 1938 he had not slowly come to realize that his increasingly crafted poems were paying a huge Welsh national debt unconsciously. From as early as 1933 he was writing or drafting some of his best poems, poems strengthened by a non-negotiable appetite for difficult forms. Unvoiced national instincts (social, cultural, literary, religious) are there in his welcoming of strictness of form. He wanted poetry throughout to look like poetry and to sound like poetry, not like conversation overheard. He was puzzled why anyone should read a good poem (aloud or not) as if it were prose, unless it was prose. Today, we have even that ridiculous disguise and escape from genuine ‘poetic’ form – the automatic centralizing of lines made so thoughtlessly easy by PCs. Such artificial facility is nowhere near the inward craft that went to the making of ‘shape’ poems such as Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’ or Vaughan’s ‘The Waterfall’ or Thomas’s ‘Vision and Prayer’. In Thomas’s poem the religious tribute is increased by the ambiguous emblematic diamond and hourglass ‘shapes’ created, because they are controlled by concentration, thematic relevance and the human voice, not by simple print-off. Truman Capote was unfair to say of the prose of Kerouac’s On the Road – ‘That isn’t writing: it’s typing’. But Randall Jarrell was quite fair when he said of the poems of Oscar Williams (Thomas’s first anthologist in America from 1940) – that they ‘gave the impression of having been written on a typewriter, by a typewriter’. Unusually for his period, especially given his brief early job as a newspaper reporter, Thomas never

17

Walford Davies

composed poetry on a typewriter.17 The joke against himself in the broadcast ‘Return Journey’ as ‘Two-typewriter Thomas, the ace news-dick’ was clearly just that, a joke. His handwritten, voice-controlled mode of composing poetry was a counting of syllables in pursuit of textural effects that allowed for the measurement of the natural stresses and space units of common sense – a measurement closer to the human pulse than quick taps on a keyboard. In all this, the deep syntax of a poem like ‘My hero bares his nerves’ (1934) was already bravely way ahead of Ted Hughes’s ‘The Thought-fox’: witness the exposed mechanism in Thomas’s final line ‘He pulls the chain, the cistern moves’ as against the clipped urbanity of Hughes’s ‘The page is printed’ (see below p. 75). At the same time, Thomas has been criticized for his use later of Roget’s Thesaurus as a rhyming dictionary. Such critics ignore the fact that even Tennyson (whom both Eliot and Auden praised as having the finest poetic ear of any English poet) used rhyming dictionaries. Any discovery in a thesaurus is in the old poetic tradition of the trouvaille, the found word or image or sound – and therefore of meaning. It is the final, formed poem, not the method of its composition, that persuades you that you are reading or hearing something that is worth saying. Though denied the Welsh language itself, through lifelong association not only with his father but with Welsh-speaking friends such as the poet-novelist Glyn Jones and the scholarbroadcaster Aneirin Talfan Davies, both of whom later wrote studies of the poet, he got to know enough to harness the necessary affinities. Friendship would have made memorable anything they helped explain about the severe discipline of the Welshlanguage poetic tradition. It was under Aneirin Talfan Davies’s direction as a Talks Producer for BBC Wales that Thomas made his very first and last broadcasts.18 In a Welsh-language essay two decades after Thomas’s death, Aneirin Talfan Davies wrote that (my translation) He knew as well as anybody that you cannot follow a poet’s calling without suffering. A poet’s talent doesn’t come with a thin skin. The

18

Dylan Thomas war with words is a bleeding shadow cast on the lonely places of the soul . . . Dylan was a conscientious craftsman. I know of no poet who more energetically sought the perfection of form; and in that sense he was in the line of the poetic craftsmen of the Middle Ages in Wales.19

The fact is that there are Welsh-heritage fingerprints all over Thomas’s poems that do not lead simply back to Hopkins. If ‘fingerprints’ seems forensic, it at least avoids the idea of some vague osmosis. As Stevie Smith put it, ‘Mrs Osmosis/is all right in small doses’. So let us take for once a solid example where the source involves knowledge that clearly was not from Hopkins. Thomas says of his early poem ‘I dreamed my genesis’ (1934) that it was ‘more or less based on Welsh rhythms, and may seem, rhythmically, a bit strange at first’,20 which it certainly is. It starts: I dreamed my genesis in sweat of sleep, breaking Through the rotating shell, strong As motor muscle on the drill, driving Through vision and the girdered nerve.

This is as when Tolkien imitates eleventh-century verse, where he imitates only stress and alliteration: Arthur eastward in arms purposed his war to wage on the wild marches, over seas sailing to Saxon lands, from the Roman realm ruin defending.

Tolkien the don was doing a scholarly exercise, just as Dylan the poet in this one-off case was testing what English stanzas in Welsh englyn form would sound like. The rhythmic stiltedness is similar, and inevitable in both cases. The comparison between Tolkien’s exercise and Thomas’s is interesting, as both were crossing essentially a language, as well as a cultural, barrier. There is nothing of this kind – syllabic or rhythmic, let alone stanzaic – in Hopkins. When heavy-duty Welsh metrics were

19

Walford Davies

taken up by Hopkins at St Beuno’s College in the Vale of Clwyd from 1874 onwards, they were filtered through a very privileged English sensibility, multiple generations away from the Welsh frequency of his surname Hopkins, and anyway transformed aurally by the supranational, suprachronological metrics of his ‘Sprung Rhythm’. Each of the seven stanzas of Thomas’s ‘I dreamed my genesis’, on the other hand, is in narrow imitation of that quintessential form of traditional Welsh-language poetry – the englyn – so celebrated by the Welsh-language society around him. It is worth having an example before us. Here (my translation) is an englyn, ‘Gorwel’ by Dewi Emrys, describing, appropriately, that defining yet indefinite thing – an horizon: Wele rith fel ymyl rhod – o’n cwmpas, Campwaith dewin hynod; Hen linell bell nad yw’n bod, Hen derfyn nad yw’n darfod. (Look, an illusion, like the rim of a wheel – around us, A prime magician’s masterpiece; An old far-off line that doesn’t exist, An old ending that has no end.)

The clue is the two-syllabled word added to the first line of each of Thomas’s seven stanzas, when its syntactic sense belongs to the next line. In an englyn, this ‘overhang’ is called a gair cyrch (literally, ‘a word leading on to’), which can be of one to three syllables, and can even be of two or three words, as long as it does not make that first line go over ten syllables. In each of his own first lines, Thomas melds Welsh with English requirements by first using up a native English iambic line – and only then adding a ‘word leading on to’: ‘I dreamed my genesis in sweat of sleep, breaking’. But then Thomas adds a gair cyrch to each second and third line, when in a Welsh englyn it is appended only to the first. Added to this is an intricate half-rhyme scheme: the last, unaccented syllable of the first line of each stanza half-rhymes with the last,

20

Dylan Thomas

accented syllable of the second line (‘breaking’/ ’strong’ etc); at the same time, lines 3 and 4 of each of Thomas’s stanzas make half-rhymes only out of the accented syllables of their final words (‘driving’/’nerve’, etc). These are not requirements of a Welsh englyn – a form having already enough requirements of its own. The englyn’s prime demand – strict consonantal chiming within a 10-6-7-7 syllable count – is something Thomas is only shadowing. And yet he is shadowing it – true, as it were, to the spirit beyond the letter. He keeps to his own strict syllable count – an unbroken 12, 7, 10, 8 throughout. And yet his aim is to make each stanza of ‘I dreamed my genesis’ look like an englyn. All Thomas claimed was that the effect was ‘more or less based on Welsh rhythms’. That ‘more or less’ says it all, but not dismissively. And in one sense he did go further – he told Glyn Jones that, had he been a Welsh-language poet, that was exactly the kind of poetry he would have relished writing, no doubt in fuller compliance with the rules.21

*

*

*

So early a burst of creativity, in the privacy of audience-less Notebooks, in a provincial town, a provincial town in Wales (circles within circles) guaranteed Thomas independence from the centralized fashions of literary London. Personal obscurity has always had its advantages. Hopkins, the obscure unpublished Victorian Jesuit, is again useful as general parallel of freedom, as also the reclusive unpublished Emily Dickinson in midnineteenth-century New England. Such poets are literally eccentric (‘away from the centre’) because, for them, the ‘official’ centre lies elsewhere. They are freed, not to emigrate, but to trust in alternative idioms and styles. Constantine FitzGibbon, Thomas’s first biographer, an Irishman at the heart of 1930s literary London, gauged Thomas’s non-Welsh-speaking status in just the right way when he said that ‘because the English words and syntax do not always and exactly fit the ideas and images to be expressed, the recently anglicized “Celt” will examine his

21

Walford Davies

language with a very close attention.’22 The survival of a radically Welsh mode of thought or sensibility beyond the anglicization of a second or third generation cannot be demonstrated in any simple way. But evidence of the likelihood is beyond argument, just as in the case of the second or third generation descendants of European émigrés to America. It is there in the non-negotiable texture of Thomas’s mature poems from the start. It is also there in incidental evidences that would only in a different context seem innocent. For example, in a letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson Thomas spoke of having favourite English words, as if with an outsider’s interest in their potential: The greatest single word I know is ‘drome’ which, for some reason, nearly opens the doors of heaven for me. Say it yourself, out aloud, and see if you can hear the golden gates swing backward as the last, long sound of the ‘m’ fades away.23

Just as with Joyce’s portmanteau words, or Nabokov’s comment to Edmund Wilson (quoted by Thomas) that T. S. Eliot spelt ‘toilets’ backwards, Dylan, reading a restaurant menu one day spotted that ‘live’ spelt ‘evil’ backwards.24 In a late letter he described his small writing-shed at Laugharne as ‘the littered, great hut’. ‘Littered’ is not just a reference to untidiness: via little, it immediately suggested ‘great’, just as ‘great’, via great with, made the writing-shed a productive womb, littered (‘both meanings’ as Thomas was fond of saying) with the manuscript worksheets of poems as if with progeny. It is a Joycean, even Beckettian, way with words that, to borrow Joseph Conrad’s comment in Victory, seems ‘alert enough almost to hear the grass grow’. No-one re-alerts or changes a whole language. But as a Welshman who never fell far from the tree, Thomas, within immediate earshot of Welsh from birth, had ingrained in him an attitude to the English language that enjoyed bracing it even further in intricately structured stanzaic forms. This Anglo-Welsh survival of a cultural temperament exists on both sides of the Welshlanguage barrier, and is itself a barrier against stylistic intrusion

22

Dylan Thomas

from other cultures in the matter of literary assumptions. It is all the more interesting in Thomas’s case because of his mainline admiration for the best of his English-language counterparts. The poetry of his English contemporaries had already been influenced by Eliot and Pound’s concern ‘to purify the dialect of the tribe’ and was in the process of being further influenced by what one might call Audenese – a thin-lipped articulateness turning on irony and cool intelligent understatement. Thomas’s commitment to the reverse was profound, and not to be undervalued because of the mainly jocular way he tended to manifest it in his prose. In the 1949 broadcast ‘On Reading One’s Own Poems’, for example, he found simply alien the way English poets read even their own verse aloud. The English poet, for example, ‘who manages, by studious flatness, semi-detachment, and an almost condescending undersaying of his poems, to give the impression that what he really means is: Great things, but my own.’25 Given the delivery, he half suggests, might it not have been also true of the making? As a Welshman, his natural resistance to the anti-poetic needed a poem to look like a poem, to sound like poetry, and not like conversation overheard. It is a resistance parallel to Yeats’s retention of a musical resonance even while adopting the colloquial hardness ordered by that complete outsider, Ezra Pound. Modern poetry in English in Wales continued to have this natural resistance also to the increasing post-1950s influence of Charles Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’ poetic, in which poems are structured by natural ‘voice’ projection to such a degree as makes irrelevant a poem’s structure on the page – even though that is the very thing that allows a poem to be read differently the next time. Later ‘Anglo-Welsh’ poets found Thomas in verbal and formal matters too rich. A new generation quickly got down to allegedly more ‘realistic’ details of Welsh or personal life, under the stylistic influence of the more cerebrally ‘Welsh’ R. S. Thomas. The centenary of R.S.’s birth fell in 2013, and deserved every minute of its celebration. Yet it represented an odd dog-leg in chronology. R.S. was a year older than Dylan, yet his first

23

Walford Davies

important volume came twenty years after Dylan’s 18 Poems of 1934. Rural depopulation, the problem of ‘second homes’, and the survival of the Welsh language, precipitated an overwhelming case that the English language itself be chastened. And yet R.S.’s own English was never chastened in any way related to Welsh, so elegantly did he take the English language for granted. It is significant that he proclaimed Edwin Muir to be, not Scottish, but a poet ‘decidedly in the manner of English philosophical poetry’ – which is exactly how he himself appears. For example, one cannot imagine Dylan so unselfconsciously coming up with the word ‘deciduous’ (‘the lament of/The poets for deciduous language’), or ‘pleach’ (‘to pleach his dreams with his rough hands’), or ‘immaculate’ (‘Dyeing the immaculate rivers/in all their courses’). In his reading of this last poem on record one should not miss, either, R.S.’s irretrievably English enunciation of ‘tractor’ as tractour. His perfectly relaxed English contrasts markedly with Dylan’s eager, reached-for vocabulary (altarwise, parhelion, Christ-cross-row), his boosted adjectives (mussel pooled, heron priested), his shuffled idioms (the man in the wind and the west moon or wild boys innocent as strawberries or once below a time) and his much more obviously assumed ‘cut-glass’ accent in reading, betrayed by his short ‘a’s and the hardness with which he hits the medial consonants in words such as ‘daughters’ or ‘act’ or the way he pronounces ‘flocks’ by sounding the ‘k’ as well as the ‘c’, almost as if wanting to hear the spelling. The wonderful stress of such locutions, stretched also across daunting formal structures, have no equivalents in R. S. Thomas’s irretrievably arch English. In an interview, responding to the question (my translation from the Welsh) ‘Learning the Welsh language, it must have had a big impact on you as a poet and as a man?’, R.S. replied (my italics), ‘I can’t see that the Welsh language has had any impact at all on me as a poet, though it is a good thing for a poet to have more than one language. I don’t understand the first part of your question. Learning Welsh has had an impact on me as a man. Like every bilingual Welshman, I am now two separate people.’26 ‘Two separate people’: R.S. felt that the

24

Dylan Thomas

border country between the two languages was not in itself a fruitful one. He even spoke of what he termed personal ‘fissiparousness’. R.S. and Dylan represent quite different relationships to the English voice, in all the meanings of that word ‘voice’. Compared with R.S.’s authentic ‘Anglican’ tones (a larger thing than just his accent), the Welsh heft in Dylan’s highdefinition inventiveness in all things verbal (his ‘cut-glass’ accent notwithstanding) takes out new patents on the English language not even applied for by R.S., let alone pending.

*

*

*

But beyond a national authenticity of style, our concern is also with what larger world events looked like to the young Swansea poet in the 1930s. It should not be thought that major issues – poverty, urban unemployment, war, a sense of Europe (all as acute in Swansea as in London, Liverpool or Birmingham) – did not figure at all. They could easily have tempted Thomas to politicize and homogenize his voice, London-fashion, and to get lost in mere fashion. The twenty-year-old Swansea boy who wrote like this – Awake, my sleeper, to the sun, A worker in the morning town, And leave the poppied pickthank where he lies; The fences of the light are down, All but the briskest riders thrown, And worlds hang on the trees. (‘When once the twilight locks’, 1934)

– did so because he could not imagine writing like this: The live ones are Those who, going to work early, behold the world’s Utter margin where all is stone and iron, And wrong. While the dead sleep The bins are emptied, the streets washed of their dung,

25

Walford Davies The first trucks shunted; and the will emerges On alteration. (Stephen Spender, Vienna, 1934)

Such different versions of the proletarian early-riser highlight the radical difference between Thomas and Spender in terms of texture, shape and sound, but also nationality. In December 1934 Thomas reviewed Vienna in New Verse,27 and registered the aesthetic disappointment he had felt on reading it: There is more than poetry in poems, in that much even of the most considerable poem is unpoetical or anti-poetical, is dependent upon the wit that discovers occult resemblances in things apparently unlike or upon the intellectual consciousness of the necessity for a social conscience. In a poem, however, the poetry must come first; what negates or acts against the poem must be subjugated to the poetry which is essentially indifferent to whatever philosophy, political passion, or gang-belief it embraces . . . As a poem, Vienna leaves much to be desired; in the first place it leaves poetry to be desired.

He was in agreement obviously with Eliot’s comment in The Sacred Wood that ‘poetry is not the inculcation of morals, or the direction of politics; and no more is it religion or an equivalent of religion . . . when we are considering poetry we must consider it primarily as poetry and not another thing’. Even earlier, in another review of contemporary poetry, printed in the Adelphi,28 Thomas had rounded on poets as different as Auden, Day Lewis, Pound, Ronald Bottrall and William Carlos Williams in these terms: ‘The Death of the Ear’ would be an apt subtitle for a book on the plight of modern poetry . . . Too much poetry today is flat on the page, a black and white thing of words created by intelligences that no longer think it necessary for a poem to be read and understood by anything but the eyes.

Of course, a response so sweeping could not be fair to all the poets named. Thomas himself suffered from equally summary

26

Dylan Thomas

judgements: literary reputations bring in their own revenges. But we cannot but admire this twenty-year-old’s decisiveness and the no-nonsense urgency of its expression. Like every real poet, the young Thomas felt early the need, to quote the thirtyyear-old Wordsworth, ‘to help create the taste by which he is to be enjoyed’. Integral to a taste for Thomas’s poetry is an acceptance of formal and musical delights as they aid the importance of what he quite clearly had to say. This is what William Empson, the most distinguished and enthusiastic of Thomas’s advocates, had in mind when he used to say of many a maligned poet – with Thomas very much in mind – ‘But he has the root of the matter in him: he has a singing line!’ Thomas’s own critical writings show him bridling at the literal ‘dumbing down’ of form and sound in poetry. Welsh Dylan would have gone to the stake for what English Auden coolly termed ‘memorable speech’.

*

*

*

And yet after the largely parodic juvenilia with which, between 1925 and 1931, he had made the Swansea Grammar School Magazine almost a personal forum, Thomas’s first movements towards something like an individual voice were an attempt first of all towards formal freedom. The bulk of the first three of his four extant poetry Notebooks (1930–3) was of what he called ‘Mainly Free Verse Poems’, the kind of free verse he would have associated with the Imagists, the Sitwells and, in a different league, Eliot. But, as Eliot himself said, ‘No verse is free for the poet who wants to do a good job’. The bulk of the earliest poems in the Notebooks is anything but free – indeed, it is thick-ankled and murkily confessional. Prosaic casualness of any kind did not suit Thomas. For example: When all your tunes have caused The pianola’s roll to break, And, no longer young but careful, There are no words by which you might express

27

Walford Davies The thoughts you seem to let go by, You might consider me . . . (Poem 36, 1930 Notebook)

Such writing lacks the strictness of form that Thomas later called ‘water-tight columns’ of words, where the tension comes, not from local image but from any word at all that allows the whole structure to move. In fact, considering Thomas’s world-class talents as a craftsman, it is time we started seeing the large bulk of the earliest poems in the Notebooks as ‘juvenilia’. Their simple imagism was overtaken by something more akin to Symbolist technique, where images have a full-blown narrative life of their own, allowing paraphraseable statement to fall away. Well into his published career, Thomas criticized Edith Sitwell for not reading the ‘Altarwise by owl-light’ sonnets (1934–5) ‘literally’, for importing a ‘vague and Sunday-journalish’ paraphrase to replace the sonnets’ literal narrative.29 But, fair play to Dame Edith, Thomas was himself well into the second of his four Notebooks before his own eureka! moment. We are often invited to trace this or that poem back to the Notebooks, but the truth is that the poems of the first Notebook (1930) are forgettably inconsequential. And the same goes for the second Notebook (1930–2), with only three exceptions out of 67 poems – ‘The spire cranes’, ‘The hunchback in the park’ and ‘Out of the sighs’. Only in the two remaining Notebooks (February 1933 and August 1933), though surrounded again by undistinguished versifying, despite single salvageable lines or phrases, were there pieces transfigurable into some of the important poems we now know – ‘After the funeral’, ‘I have longed to move away’, ‘And death shall have no dominion’, for example. In identifying them, Thomas showed the faultless disinterested eye of a craftsman as to what, given an adequate base, could be made of them. Most important of all (his eureka!) was recognizing what we now call the ‘process’ poems, poems that interrelate inner physiological forces with outer, almost ‘creationist’ ones, an interrelating whereby the personal is elementalized and

28

Dylan Thomas

the elemental personalized. It was when he had realized (that is, made real) such poems as ‘A process in the weather of the heart’ and ‘In the beginning was the three-pointed star’ that he saw that he was bringing new matter, a new idiom, into English lyric poetry at a level higher than sentimental anthropomorphism. The last eighteen poems in his last Notebook became his first volume 18 Poems in 1934. The other excellent, slightly earlier, poems mentioned above – ‘The spire cranes’, ‘The hunchback in the park’, ‘Out of the sighs’, ‘After the funeral’, ‘I have longed to move away’, ‘And death shall have no dominion’ – had to wait their turn in the next three volumes (1936, 1939, 1946). Back in 1934, what the twenty-year-old recognized was the first unignorable mark his poetry could make outside Swansea. As he came to distrust a casually discursive or paraphrasable voice, the power of form came all the more to provide the frisson of the verse, with a tendency towards half-rhymed stanzaic forms and tight, incantational repetitive patterns. So in the third Notebook (February–August 1933), a casual confessionalism gave way to a chiselling craft that consciously set welcome obstacles in the way, to boost each poem’s resonance. The magnificent ‘Before I knocked’ (1933), for example, sustains no fewer than twenty-three percussive rhymes ending in ‘er’, while all seventytwo lines of ‘I, in my intricate image’ (1935) close with words ending on the letter ‘l’, twenty-four each between its three parts. Throughout his career, Thomas lamented in asides the expensive demands of such formal energy. Yet in the later verse the strain was not broken, witness the careful internal rhymes of ‘The conversation of prayers’ (1945), the patterned image and assonance organization of ‘Fern Hill’ (1945), the deft handling of the villanelle form in ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ (finished 1951), the unbroken syllabic-counts (6, 9, 6, 9, 6, 9, 6, 9, 6) of the lines within each of the twelve stanzas of ‘Poem on his Birthday’ (finished 1951) and the fantastic rhyme-scheme of ‘Prologue’ (1952), of whose 102 lines the first and last lines rhyme, and so on inwards until the exact centre of the poem is a couplet rhyming appropriately on ‘To Wales in my arms’. That last

29

Walford Davies

example shows clearly the calculated obstacle-race quality of Thomas’s mode of composition. A nation to whom strenuously achieved englynion and cynghanedd are a craft not an art recognizes in Thomas one of her own, though hard-earned memorability in Anglo-Welsh poetry has seemed scarce since Thomas’s death. Auden said that a question he would press on a critic to see if he was any good was ‘Do you like, and by like I really mean like, not approve on principle . . . complicated verse forms of great technical difficulty, such as Englyns?’30 This comes naturally from a poet who ended his ‘Dear, though the night is gone’ with the brilliant cynghanedd of its last line: And I, submissive, felt Unwanted and went out.

As already intimated, amazement at the virtuosity of Thomas accommodating the diamond and hour-glass shapes of ‘Vision and Prayer’ (1944) is an initiation into its ‘religious’ resonance, by demanding that the reader’s need be beyond blunt paraphrase. Of course, controlling a naturally expansive voice within and across strict verbal patterns is to be praised or blamed only on results. It is clearly no disqualification of Gerard Manley Hopkins, for example, that his apparently spontaneous sonnet ‘The Starlight Night’ in fact groups its images alphabetically, here indicated in bold: Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies! O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there! Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes! The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies! Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare! Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!

Even the morning hymn of the fictitious poet-preacher Eli Jenkins in Under Milk Wood, naming eighteen Welsh rivers alliteratively (‘Sawdde, Senni, Dovey, Dee,/Edw, Eden, Aled, all . . .’), suddenly

30

Dylan Thomas

sharpens its alliterative trance alphabetically, with ‘Claerwen, Cleddau, Dulas, Daw,/Ely, Gwili . . .’, overleaping the letter ‘f’ just as Hopkins does. It was natural for a classical scholar like Hopkins to become interested in Welsh-language strict-metre poetics. Thomas, on the other hand, not academically trained, was curious because nationally, not just notionally, tuned to the idea of a poet as essentially a maker. From his father, and from friends such as Glyn Jones and Aneirin Talfan Davies, he would have learned about the Welsh strict-metre tradition as much as served rather than surfeited his already natural workmanlike appetite. That impressive poem about his own craft, ‘In my craft or sullen art’ (1945), earns a self-referential right to its key words craft, exercised and labour (‘I labour by singing light’) through its own syllabic rigour. The poem insists that poetry is above all else a craft. As mentioned, Thomas in his later poems has been criticized for his use of Roget’s Thesaurus – even though Tennyson, the prime technician, always used rhyming dictionaries. Keats is often misquoted as saying that ‘if poetry comes not as easily as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all’. For this Welshman, if poetry had had to come ‘as easily as the leaves to a tree’, it would not have come at all. But Keats’s actual phrase of course was ‘as naturally as the leaves to a tree’; how else would it follow on from his previous sentence, that ‘It is easier to think what poetry should be, than to write it’?31 Thomas, like Keats, felt that poetic craft was no less natural for being deliberate. And here, it is worth listening again to Auden: In the process of arriving at the finished work, the artist has necessarily to employ violence. A poet writes: The mast-high anchor dives through a cleft Changes it to The anchor dives through closing paths changes it again to

31

Walford Davies The anchor dives among hayricks and finally to The anchor dives through the floors of a church. A cleft and closing paths have been liquidated, and hayricks deported to another stanza.32

In a volume in which he attributes each quotation to its author, Auden here does not even name the poet. It is as if, in the context of praise for conscientious craft, his indefinite article (‘A poet writes . . .’) implies that the un-named poet was the definitive example. The poet was Dylan Thomas, the poem ‘Ballad of the Long-legged Bait’ (1941).

*

*

*

But to think of Wales is to be reminded specifically in this case of Swansea. And more useful than each contingent biographical detail in retracing our steps is the recreative autobiography of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, the collection of short stories that the poet wrote, mixing amused opportunities, between 1938 and 1940. The stories do not only colourfully register (they also colour in) what urban Swansea and its suburban hinterland meant in retrospect to the poet writing them between the ages of twenty-four and twenty-six. Their ingredients seem almost to have been gifted to him as a writer – memories of Carmarthenshire holidays; schoolboy adventures out to the Gower peninsula on the magnificent Swansea Bay; the ready-made bogies of bourgeois and Nonconformist prohibitions back home; the miniature bohemian freedom in journalism or over coffee in the Kardomah: gifts in an industrial town all the more exciting because skirted by both countryside and maritime opposites, with therefore silent hopes of escaping a life-at-siege. The Portrait’s atmospheric impressionism is truer than any total recall or mere

32

Dylan Thomas

reportage could ever be. It distils for one thing an instinctual Welshness, unerringly caught all over again in the very last short story (‘A Story’ – the perennial favourite about the charabanc outing, 1953), let alone the now classic Under Milk Wood. Any cool sociologizing would have been the death of such warm remembrances. A section from the story called ‘The Fight’ will illustrate the crispness of the Portrait’s appeal. In the story, Thomas draws on an evening notionally at the home of his close schoolboy friend, Daniel Jones: ‘What were you talking to Mr Morris about in the street, Dad?’ asked Dan. ‘We saw you from upstairs.’ ‘I was telling him how the Swansea and District Male Voice did the Messiah, that’s all. Why do you ask?’ Mr Bevan couldn’t eat any more, he was full. For the first time since supper began, he looked round the table. He didn’t seem to like what he saw. ‘How are studies progressing, Daniel?’ ‘Listen to Mr Bevan, Dan, he’s asking you a question.’ ‘Oh, so so.’ ‘So so?’ ‘I mean they’re going very well, thank you, Mr Bevan.’ ‘Young people should attempt to say what they mean.’ Mrs Bevan giggled, and asked for more meat. ‘More meat,’ she said. ‘And you, young man, have you a mathematical bent?’ ‘No, sir,’ I said, ‘I like English.’ ‘He’s a poet,’ said Dan, and looked uncomfortable. ‘A brother poet,’ Mr Bevan corrected, showing his teeth. ‘Mr Bevan has published books,’ said Mr Jenkyn. ‘Proserpine, Psyche – ‘Orpheus’, said Mr Bevan sharply. ‘And Orpheus. You must show Mr Bevan some of your verses.’ ‘I haven’t got anything with me, Mr Jenkyn.’ ‘A poet,’ said Mr Bevan, ‘should carry his verses in his head.’ ‘I remember them all right,’ I said. ‘Recite me your latest one; I’m always very interested.’ ‘What a gathering,’ Mrs Jenkyn said, ‘poets, musicians, preachers. We only want a painter now, don’t we?’ ‘I don’t think you’ll like the very latest one,’ I said. ‘Perhaps’, said Mr Bevan, smiling, ‘I am the best judge of that.’ Frivolous is my hate, I said, wanting to die, watching Mr Bevan’s teeth.

33

Walford Davies ‘Singed with bestial remorse Of unfulfilment of desired force, And lust of tearing late; Now could I raise Her dead, dark body to my own And hear the joyous rustle of her bone And in her eyes see deathly blaze; Now could I wake To passion after death, and taste The rapture of her hating, tear the waste Of body. Break, her dead, dark body, break.’ Dan kicked my shins in the silence before Mr Bevan said: ‘The influence is obvious of course. “Break, break, break, on thy cold, grey stones, O sea” ’ ‘Hubert knows Tennyson backwards,’ said Mrs Bevan, ‘backwards.’

The thirteen mentions of the Bevans by name shows that this was not recollected in tranquility. And the whole is crowned by that bizarre boast by Mrs Bevan that Mr Bevan knows Tennyson backwards. Her mindless repetition ‘backwards . . . backwards’ is a typically Dickensian strike against the well-to-do-but-culturallybackward. Which, of course, is why the story is not about the composer Daniel Jones’s household at all, but about a galère in Thomas’s retributive memory of his early anti-snobbery self. In ‘The Peaches’ a small boy’s view at Fernhill of the snobbish Mrs Williams (chauffeured Daimler and all, ‘sweating because she had walked all the way from the car’) snootily overpowering Dylan’s modest aunt Annie Jones’s down-to-earth goodwill by refusing her tinned peaches is also Dickensian. Only a few years on, the embarrassed schoolboy of the story reciting patent drivel to the Bevans became, in real time, the teenage poet of major poems of the interrelationship between inchoate youth and the primal processes of nature. Thomas’s early material is never far from a correlation with adolescent sexual awakening, morbidity and all. In his actual early poems, though, Thomas was turning out to be one of the few great

34

Dylan Thomas

poets of what it actually feels like without embarrassment to be an adolescent. Keats was of course, tragically, another. But the twenty-three year old Keats took time out to say in the preface to Endymion in 1818 that the imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness.

Given their busy structuring and allusiveness, Thomas’s best early poems are about that theme; they do not just dumbly manifest it. Looking back at them years later in parody in a story, or as what he called ‘the writings of a boily boy in love with the shapes and shadows on his pillow’, was unfair to himself, a tithe of modesty paid as penalty to his early celebrity status. William Empson’s choice of language after Thomas’s death got it just right on the relationship of precociousness to lastingness: What hit the town of London was the child Dylan publishing ‘The force that through the green fuse’ as a prize poem in the Sunday Referee [1933], and from that day he was a famous poet; I think the incident does some credit to the town, making it look less clumsy than you would think.33

‘The town of London . . . the child Dylan’: Empson’s hyperboles chasten the city in calling it a ‘town’ and him a ‘child’ so as to praise all the more the surprising youth of this poet who came from nowhere, with such poems, to take Britain’s capital city by storm. Still, it was literally that city that gave Thomas an escapeticket from his ‘Little Dublin’. Writing to Geoffrey Grigson, editor of the highly influential magazine New Verse in 1933, for example, he said: ‘I have developed, intellectually at least, in the smug darkness of a provincial town . . . Grinding out poetry, whether good or bad, in such an atmosphere as surrounds me, is depressing and disheartening.’34

*

* 35

*

Walford Davies

Thomas left Swansea Grammar School in the summer of 1931. He first went to live in London in November 1934, when he was twenty. The period in between was his most prolific and yet the most marvellous, in the sense of Wordsworth’s aside in ‘Resolution and Independence’ – ‘I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy’. Dylan’s personal voice disturbed the cosmopolitan literary scene with his first mature London publication, ‘And death shall have no dominion’, in the New English Weekly in May 1933. He made his first visit to London in the summer of that year. Several other visits, but mainly the publication of ‘The force that through the green fuse’ in The Sunday Referee, earned him his first volume, 18 Poems, published in December 1934. The ‘Poets’ Corner’ of The Sunday Referee had decided to award the major prize of a first-volume publication to the best contributor. That its critical judgement in such matters was not absolutely sound is suggested by the fact that the first prizewinner was not Thomas but Pamela Hansford Johnson. But that it was close to being sound was shown by the poetry editor’s particularly strong admiration for Thomas’s submitted poems, and the award of the second published volume to the twenty-year-old from Swansea. Thus encouraged, Thomas set his sights more fully on London. Swansea friends such as the artist Fred Janes, the composer Daniel Jones and the broadcaster Wynford VaughanThomas were already leaving the town. On a darker personal level, in 1933 his father contracted cancer of the mouth, forcing him to resign from the grammar school. Holidays at Fernhill no longer took place. In spring 1933, Annie Jones, the dea loci of Fernhill died. One particular world was closing down. It should also be mentioned that the poet’s first adult employment, as a journalist on the South Wales Daily Post (July 1931– December 1932), had long since proved comically uncommitted. Graham Greene in his autobiography, A Sort of Life, pinpointed the virtues of a journalistic apprenticeship for a certain kind of creative writer, claiming that he learns ‘lessons valuable to his own craft. He is removing the clichés of reporters; he is compressing a story to the minimum length possible without ruining

36

Dylan Thomas

its effect. A writer with a sprawling style is unlikely to emerge from such an apprenticeship.’ These were not necessarily virtues Thomas would have agreed with; his poetry had its own kind of discipline, and his prose never looked as if it might salute any ordinary kind of economy. The importance of his early experience of journalism lay instead in his exposure to the foibles and irregularities of Swansea town life, immediately useful for Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, and subconsciously stored for Under Milk Wood. The shortness of Thomas’s career as a journalist was basically down to his cavalier respect for deadlines, which points to the later legend. His three years between school and acceptance into London literary life were dominated by one thing only – getting poems written. Following on childhood urchin naughtiness, Swansea life quickly provided an interim preparatory regime – that of cafe, pub and cinema. Dylan had already written a knowledgeable essay titled – in Swansea-speak, ‘The Films’ – in his school magazine in July 1930. It shows why in the early poems cinema images – those proverbial signs of a ‘mis-spent youth’ – are brilliant not grainy, because so feelingly ingrained: In this our age the gunman and his moll, Two one-dimensioned ghosts, love on a reel, Strange to our solid eye, And speak their midnight nothings as they swell. (‘Our eunuch dreams’)

Another, related activity during these pre-London years was equally influential. Thomas was a well above average actor. He played with gusto in productions at the Grand Theatre and (mainly) the Swansea Little Theatre, whose repertoire ranged from Coward’s Hay Fever to Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem, from Congreve’s The Way of the World to Shakespeare’s Richard II. His voice was already impressive, and his later quality as a broadcaster fed on simple dramatic gifts in delivering a line, all the more agreeable because his experience of treading the

37

Walford Davies

boards, like facing a microphone, was in the best sense of the word, amateur. But here another related tribute has to be paid. It has become fashionable – as a recoil from something so obviously good – to decry Thomas’s readings of poetry as ‘rhetorical’. But if one actually listens to him, with some knowledge of each poem in question, his readings are interpretatively varied. The time has come to draw a contrast between Richard Burton reading Dylan and Dylan reading Dylan – or reading anything worthwhile for that matter. There is an unevadable thespian narcissism about a Burton reading, as distracting as Gielgud’s custard reading of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. Burton does not allow his rich voice to vary and so does not allow other richnesses to happen that depend instead on mind and meaning. In fact, reading ‘Ballad of the Long-legged Bait’, Burton twice pronounces ‘bows’ as if it meant ribbons, not the front part of a ship, and at the start of Under Milk Wood, he pronounces ‘combs’ (‘the combs and petticoats over the chairs’) as hair combs, when it is clearly the colloquial abbreviation for underwear ‘combinations’ (try draping a comb, Dali-like, over a chair). Thomas as reader on the other hand attends to context as well as text, a fact shown clearly in his nuanced readings of poems by other poets. A good example is the variety of pace and undulation with which he breathes quiet character into the simplest lyric, into Hardy’s ‘To Lizbie Brown’, for example, or into Edward Thomas’s ‘The Owl’ and Auden’s ballad ‘As I walked out one evening’, as against the actor’s facility with which he reads ‘The Master and Bos’n Song’ from Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror or the naughty glee with which he reads Henry Reed’s parody of Eliot ‘Chard Whitlow (Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Postcript)’ adding even the clipped dryness of Eliot’s reading voice; or the unembarrassed gusto of his reading of his own late poem ‘Lament’, that brilliant matching of Yeats’s ‘The Wild Old Wicked Man’ and Louis MacNeice’s ‘The Libertine’, or the way he drops his voice in reading ‘After the funeral’ when he comes to the lines ‘Though this for her is a monstrous image blindly/ Magnified out of praise . . .’ or, significantly and unforgettably,

38

Dylan Thomas

his oddly understated reading throughout of ‘Fern Hill’ – as if he had himself only recently come to recognize the shaded, ambiguous richnesses the poem carries, and now wanted to leave activation of them up to each new reader/listener. His Swansea activities during the early years had another thing in common – the cultivation of like-minded friends. The group was not remarkably wide, and suggests something like a jovially defensive inner circle. Ethel Ross has claimed, in an examination of Thomas’s acting years, that ‘there was a slight aura of sin hanging over the theatre in the eyes of many Nonconformists’. And the Mumbles Press, reviewing a production of Rodney Ackland’s Strange Orchestra, in which Thomas played a leading part, lamented the bringing ‘into public view of those things which we normally think most decent to hide’. The threat to his personal sense of freedom was part of his famous aim of ‘bringing things into the nakedness of light’. The stuffy side of Swansea life was suffered, but also quickly seen as a challenge. This suggests that from the start he somehow lacked a positively anchoring context. Certainly, the Swansea he knew, and described in much the same way as Edward Thomas had seen it (‘a poet born there,’ Edward Thomas had said, ‘would have no need of Heaven or Hell’), was the first catalyst in his craft and art. Despite the physical and spiritual social scarring of the twenties and thirties, with their 28,000 Swansea unemployed, his unsuccessful attempts at reflecting the situation in poetry had already blocked for him the main fashionable poetic manner of the early thirties. To his credit, he held that the first test of a poem is its prosodic accomplishment, not its conscience. Otherwise, why not keep to prose, especially since his own quiet socialist beliefs were never in question under the lengthening shadow of Hitler’s National Socialism? ‘Children kept from the sun/Assembled at his tongue/To hear the golden note turn in a groove’ – later, those lines in ‘There was a saviour’ would have a double, light/dark resonance. On the other hand, he must have seen that those early Notebook poems of his which contained lines such as ‘Young men with fallen chests and old men’s .

39

Walford Davies

breath’ or ‘The living dead left over from the war’, begged direct ideological development such as he could not provide. He was a poet not a polemicist. In reviews of poetry which he wrote for London periodicals in the thirties he continued to challenge poets like Stephen Spender and John Pudney for setting political above literary effect in what are, after all, poems not manifestos. Even in the Portrait stories, the social unfairness of that early world of unemployment is only obliquely registered – in for example the curious situation of three young men aimlessly loitering under the pier, which is both the structure and the haunting image of the story ‘Just Like Little Dogs’. Early on, no aesthetic guilt attended his particular view of the craft of poetry – that it represents essentially an independent semantic world. It was a perfectly honourable position because there was in it an element of the professional, too: ‘I had to imitate and parody . . . consciously, or unconsciously: I had to try to learn what made words tick . . . because I wanted to write what I wanted to write before I knew how to write or what I wanted to.’ For that very reason, his field of reference extended quickly beyond Swansea – in the manner, if not always the matter, of a large ‘English’ tradition – though always conscientiously governed by a Celtic respect for formal resonance. Of course, the schoolboy’s merely parodic tendencies did not suddenly disappear. Inside even the maturing voice there remained an assimilative facility that could suggest Auden, Neither by night’s ancient fear, The parting of hat from hair, Pursed lips at the receiver (‘I have longed to move away’)

or Eliot, The lunar silences, the silent tide Lapping the still canals, the dry tide-master Ribbed between desert and water storm (‘We lying by seasand’)

40

Dylan Thomas

or might expand the individual cadence of Wilfred Owen’s line ‘Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were’ into ‘Light breaks where no sun shines’ in that magnificent 1933 poem. Eliot’s particular example, the establishment of an urban poetic world, fascinated the early Thomas in ways he pointed towards in the precocious schoolboy essay on ‘Modern Poetry’ where he wrote of Eliot’s early poems with their ‘succession of sordid details, their damp despondent atmosphere, and their attraction for the gutter, “the sawdust restaurants with oyster shells”, “the yellow smoke of streets”, and “cigarettes in corridors, and cocktail smells in bars”.’35 Some of the Notebook poems followed suit, imitating in Prufrockian or ‘Hollow Men’-type monologues Eliot’s trick of lauding an earlier age only by loading a travesty of the new one onto it: the horses are gone and the reins are green As the hands that held them in my father’s time. The wireless snarls on the hearth. Beneath a balcony the pianola plays Black music to a Juliet in her stays Who lights a fag-end at the flame of love. (February 1933 Notebook)

Those last three lines, so startlingly intruded, are pure Eliot. But even the lost rurality with which they contrast was not Thomas’s background, either. The same slander-by-style lingered seven years later in the urban nightmare made out of a bohemian ‘week in the dirtbox’ of London in the uncollected 1940 poem ‘The Countryman’s Return’.36 London is described as hell for 75 lines out of 101, but is yearned for again in the final two lines by the ‘countryman’ persona. Among ‘birds’ eggs and leaves,/The rusticating minutes,/The wasteful hushes among trees’, he says ‘O to cut the green field, leaving/One rich street with hunger in it’ – which is pure cinema. His defining base was neither rural retreat nor city centre, not even downtown Swansea. A few lines earlier, his real credentials were confessed as those of:

41

Walford Davies A single Walt from the mower And jerrystone trim villas Of the upper of the lower half.

The pun on single malt whiskey is part of the comedy, but so is ‘Walt’ who (despite ‘jerry’) is not Disney but Whitman. ‘You’ll see,’ he wrote to Vernon Watkins, ‘the heavy hand with which I make fun of this middle-class, beardless Walt’.37 The image of mown lawns and trim villas echo what he had said in his first letter to Vernon Watkins six years earlier, written (again perforce) from the countryside, from Cornwall: Here the out-of doors is very beautiful, but it’s a strange country to me, all scenery and landscape, and I’d rather the bound slope of a suburban hill, the Elms, the Acacias, Rookery Nook, Curlew Avenue, to all these miles of green fields . . . I’m not a country man; I stand for, if anything, the aspidistra, the provincial drive, the morning cafe, the evening pub.38

Situationally, the Notebook poem ‘That Sanity Be Kept’ (‘That sanity be kept I sit at open windows . . .’) parallels Eliot’s ‘Morning at the Window’, but in irreducibly suburban guise: That sanity be kept I sit at open windows . . . The sweet suburban music from a hundred lawns Comes softly to my ears. The English mowers mow and mow . . .

The later line ‘I sit at open windows in my shirt’ lightly steals the image of ‘lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows’ from the greatest urban monologue of all, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. Eliot would have forgiven the theft, because he wisely believed that ‘minor poets borrow, major poets steal’, Thomas’s ‘I had to imitate and parody . . . consciously, or unconsciously’. Ezra Pound would have likewise forgiven the debt of the Notebook poem ‘Song’ (‘Love me, not as the ruffling pigeon/ The tops of trees . . .’) to Pound’s own ‘———’ (‘Be in me as the eternal moods/of the bleak wind, and not/As transient things are . . .’).

42

Dylan Thomas

Thomas came gradually to discover, as the cliché has it, his own voice. But he never abandoned the creative use of influences. We cannot fully read even later major poems like ‘In my craft or sullen art’ (1945) or ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ (1951) without sensing Yeats in the background. Behind the dismissal of ‘the proud man’ and ‘the towering dead/With their nightingales and psalms’ in ‘In my craft or sullen art’ lie Yeats’s ‘lines/That young men, tossing on their beds,/Rhymed out in love’s despair/To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear’ (‘The Scholars’), just as ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ finds its very source in nine times repeating, and thereby reverberating, Yeats’s quintessential word ‘rage’. Eliot saw this transference as the necessary tension between what he called ‘Tradition’ and ‘the Individual Talent’ because, as he put it, ‘something completely original is likely to be bad’. With this openness to other voices worth listening to, Thomas’s discovery of his own voice came quickly to have less and less to do with Swansea as such, suburban or otherwise. Even in his 1932 series of essays on ‘The Poets of Swansea’ in The Herald of Wales, it is in an honourably tactful language that he, a teenager, wrote of ‘recent’ Swansea poets like Howard Harris or James Chapman Woods. Yet, even as he acknowledges the recent Swansea past, we sense his longing to join a wider modern poetic world. Beyond a certain point, even allowing for natural youthful exaggeration, his letters to Pamela Hansford Johnson claim that in Swansea he was writing poetry, the poetry he himself wanted to write, in an unhelpful situation.

*

*

*

This much has to be stated because the young poet’s conscious concern was clearly to contribute to the English poetic tradition, as tasted in the books that lined his father’s study. It is interesting, however, to come back at a view that suggests that a poet’s first environment is nothing more than accidental – as if, as Raymond Garlick rightly quipped, Thomas’s poems could have

43

Walford Davies

been written, not in Swansea but in Swanage, a proposition so comically easy to counter. We could, for example, trace the phrase ‘the ghost with a hammer, air’ in ‘If my head hurt a hair’s foot’ (1939) to a childhood that had once hero-worshipped the Welsh Valleys boxer, Jimmy Wilde, nicknamed ‘the ghost with a hammer in his hand’; or we could take a literary tour of Cwmdonkin Park, so often and literally celebrated in the poems. But the early Thomas is not always allusive in this substantive or scenic way. The relevance of Swansea lies at a deeper level. It is an influence of quite conventional proportions: the effect of a society based largely on puritan and bourgeois values on a young sensibility reaching articulation amid adolescent appetites and fears. Objectified as the ‘subject’ of a poem, the situation can seem only the typical impulse of youth towards freedom from conscience and etiquette: I have longed to move away From the hissing of the spent lie And the old terrors’ continual cry Growing more terrible as the day Goes over the hill into the deep sea; I have longed to move away From the repetition of salutes, For there are ghosts in the air And ghostly echoes on paper . . . (‘I have longed to move away’, 1933)

But it is more complicated than that. The revolt is no sooner voiced than Dylan voices its opposite. His second and last stanza says that even this milieu of ‘Half convention and half lie’ might be worth hanging on to, as a correction of self-indulgence and personal uncertainties. It is the u-turn of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Poetry of Departures’: Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand, As epitaph: He chucked up everything And just cleared off . . .

44

Dylan Thomas if It weren’t so artificial, Such a deliberate step backwards To create an object: Books; china; a life Reprehensibly perfect.

An identical u-turn, until we realize that Dylan’s is a choice, not between Larkin’s degrees of ‘reprehensibly’ domestic comfort, but between two national cultures. But such a predicament was seldom a poem’s direct subject. More often it is a complex of irreducible feelings behind the poem’s overt business. Isolated in a social milieu he could not sanction, Thomas posed instead as visionary seer. The antipoetic reality behind the pose was that of what in ‘Do you not father me’ (1935) he calls ‘the wanton starer’, the frustrated teenager casting ‘a cold eye on life, on death’ (Yeats) from the vantage point not just of his private physical being (seen in ‘Ears in the turrets hear’, 1933, as an ivory tower on an island) but of his literal location looking out of the windows of No. 5 Cwmdonkin Drive. It is striking how many of the early poems evoke this mundane perspective, however much transformed, of a view from some window of his birthplace, either westwards overlooking the steep suburban street, with Cwmdonkin Park only a little distance beyond, or southwards over Swansea Bay (‘Hands grumble on the door,/Ships anchor off the bay’) or both perspectives together, as in ‘Do you not father me’: Do you not brother me, nor, as you climb, Adore my windows for their summer scene . . . the wanton starer Marking the flesh and summer in the bay?

But even with that literal view, the emotions had a wider source. The puritan chapel-going culture of polite Swansea in the thirties was already slightly on the decline, but the atmosphere surrounding our youth is that of our parents’, not our own, generation.

45

Walford Davies

Helped by his father’s free-thinking example, Thomas would have been just sufficiently detached from his Nonconformist environment to have had a natural writer’s perspective on it without spurning it as material. Only time could do the rest. Sunday school, on frequent visits to his Aunt Dosie’s house in Newton, and her husband David Rees’s chapel Paraclete next door, had certainly not yet grown into the beatific memory it later became in ‘Poem in October’ (1944) of a child’s Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother Through the parables Of sun light And the legends of the green chapels.

In April 1934, in a letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson, Dylan’s impressions were quite other: Sunday in Wales. The Sunday-walkers have slunk out of the warrens in which they sleep and breed all the unholy week, have put on their black suits, reddest eyes, and meanest expressions, and are now marching up the hill past my window . . . I see the rehearsed gestures, the correct smiles, the grey cells revolving around nothing under the godly bowlers. I see the unborn children struggling up the hill in their mothers, beating on the jailing slab of the womb, little realizing what a smugger prison they wish to leap into.

In ‘I see the boys of summer’ (1934), he transforms this view of unborn children and frustrated youth into a Symbolist indictment of a puritan nurture. The inhibitions of a restrictive national culture are impeached in a dialectical pattern of images of fruition and decay. The ‘frigid threads of doubt and dark’ (puritanism’s poor version of Matthew Arnold’s ‘sweetness and light’) are what these as yet ‘unborn children struggling up the hill in their mothers’ will inherit. In ‘I see the boys of summer’ Thomas was clearly out to demoralize (that is, deprive of their mores) the city fathers, whose voice he parodies in the line ‘O see

46

Dylan Thomas

the poles of promise in the boys’, a line also sabotaged by those phallic poles. From very early on, Thomas’s literary weapon was a certain sexual assertiveness, sharpened excitedly no doubt by the puritanism that he had not himself escaped. It was part of one of the early poetry’s main achievements: that of making adolescence itself articulate. As with D. H. Lawrence, it was a literary theme begotten by despair upon impossibility in a puritan culture in which Bible-based fears of judgement underwrote social retreat into ‘respectability’ (I hope my inverted commas ‘come stinging across’, as Thomas once put it). The situation never drove Thomas, as it did Lawrence, to search for, and invent, a compensating ‘philosophy’. But that is why it had all the more powerfully to sharpen the protest in poems such as ‘If I were tickled by the rub of love’ or ‘When, like a running grave’ (both 1934): ‘Joy is no knocking nation, sir and madam.’ The ‘Welshing rich’ who ‘play the proper gentleman and lady’ in the latter poem are a reluctant audience to a poet who was slowly getting to see himself as ‘a dog among the fairies’. So, in counterpoint as it were, a society gave him a voice. The move from early urgency to the later, leisurely defence of Polly Garter against the gossip round the village pump is a graph almost of the complete career. Protest remained, but softened. Under Milk Wood was a mid-life truce. The rebel ended off entertaining the enemy. The BBC helps referee such things. The most general effect of the Swansea context was to drive the young poet, in poetry and prose, to explore its opposites – in dense, often irreducible images. The overall phenomenon of the early poems and short stories alike was their emphasis on extrasocial norms, the discovery, especially in the poems, of the world of the human body’s cosmic parallels, expressed up-front in openings such as ‘Light breaks where no sun shines’ or ‘A process in the weather of the heart/Turns damp to dry’ or ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/Drives my green age’, all written in 1933/4. These are the poems now called ‘process’ poems, because they celebrate elemental forces, the

47

Walford Davies

eternal necessities that lie too deep for suburbia’s primness to deny.

*

*

*

But another creative response also sprang from the young man’s personal obscurity/insecurity. The poems also choose to resist man’s presumptuous ‘knowingness’, his persistent ‘need to know’. In the ‘process’ poems, this resistance is mainly implied (though often memorably stated: ‘And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose . . .’, where ‘dumb’ means unwise as well as unable to. In that famous poem’s last stanza, truncated from five to two lines – And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm. (‘The force that through the green fuse’)

– the subject raises even the question of tact. It is as when Yeats in ‘A Man Young And Old’ writes: I could recover if I shrieked My heart’s agony To passing bird, but I am dumb From human dignity.

But there is a line of poems such as ‘Why east wind chills’ and ‘Should lanterns shine’ (both 1933), which state more plainly the need for something like what Keats called ‘Negative Capability’ – ‘when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason . . . of remaining Content with half knowledge’ (letter to George and Thomas Keats, 21 December 1817). The stance is poignantly imaged in memories of an obscure childhood in school and park. As if to the manner born, Thomas turns personal obscurity into intellectual virtue, learning (in Eliot’s words) ‘to care and not to care’, learning ‘to sit still’. ‘Why east wind chills’ (1933) kicks off with the childlike questions ‘Why east wind chills and

48

Dylan Thomas

south wind cools/. . . Why silk is soft and the stone wounds’, only to answer by quoting Keats’s word ‘Content’: I hear content, and ‘Be content’ Ring like a handbell through the corridors, And ‘Know no answer,’ and I know No answer to the children’s cry Of echo’s answer and the man of frost And ghostly comets over the raised fists.

The ‘ghostly comets over the raised fists’ (closed fists never caught anything) is an allusion to Donne’s ‘Go and catch a falling star’, itself a poem about presumptuously impossible questions such as ‘Tell me where all past ages are,/Or who cleft the devil’s foot’. Such a poem is a cover note for other Thomas poems which, because they have other themes to follow, contract this running mistrust of tidy answers into ironic local phrases: ‘the discovered skies’ (‘How shall my animal’), ‘the answering skies’ (‘The conversation of prayers’), ‘the unminding skies’ (‘This side of the truth’), ‘the interpreted evening’ (‘Vision and Prayer’), ‘the delusive light’ (‘Love in the Asylum’). In an incisive review of John Pudney’s Open the Sky, Thomas made play even with the title: Open the sky most certainly, but the rules of property control even that imperative idealism; it must be the personal image or illusion of the sky, and the sky must be an individual symbol; too many have opened the communal sky to find some celestial Lenin there grinning over the output of the propagandist poets.39

In 1934, with Thomas only twenty years old, we are already at the heart of something that has puzzled critics – why he was not, given the saturation politics of the 1930s, a ‘political’ poet. He describes Pudney as ‘a gifted retailer of second-hand ideologies and a competent employer of the current vocabulary who is perpetually undecided as to whether he shall publicly propagate what Mr Auden has taught him or whisper privately what he himself has experienced’. And here Thomas forks into another Keatsian allusion. In a letter to Reynolds of February 1818 Keats

49

Walford Davies

wrote that ‘Man should not dispute or assert but whisper results to his neighbour’. One might be surprised by Thomas’s allusiveness, but as already said he read early and eagerly, ‘with my eyes hanging out’, in his father’s intelligently-stocked ‘brown study’. The phrase is an idiom for deep contemplation and yet no mere joke. In both Thomas and Keats intellectual vulnerability is a dominant theme. In Dylan, the ‘young dog’ mask, even the incorrigible swagger of the early poetry and prose, does not obliterate his intellectual impressiveness, any more than the incorrigible ‘poesie’ in Keats obliterates his. As Matthew Arnold said, ‘The thing to be seized is, that Keats had flint and iron in him, that he had character’ (Essays in Criticism, second series). It has become fashionable with some to claim a greater honesty for Thomas’s anti-poetic prose than for his poetry, the implication being that the poetry, lacking something nebulously termed ‘realism’, resorts instead to mere music. The fact is that provincial obscurity is, as much in his poetry as in his prose, to use Thom Gunn’s phrase, a posture for combat. Even seeing Cwmdonkin Park as a world within the ‘sea world’ of Swansea helped him question what it is that we actually call ‘the world’. Though just the thing for urchin adventures, the small patch outside his parents’ front door became what during the First World War the child thought his parents were referring to when they darkly mentioned ‘The Front’. Even Cwmdonkin Park represented the suburban tendency merely to mime the wilder forms of creative life. And even indoors, there was a smug satisfaction with potted fern and aspidistra, the fetishes of respectable poshness and tidiness. A central poem, ‘Especially when the October wind’ (1934), warns the neighbours that the only context in which the young poet can accommodate them at all is that of organic life in which the coexistent data of ‘the wordy shapes of women’ and ‘the water’s speeches’ are in more senses than one beyond bricked-up suburbia. The clock behind the pot of ferns, Thomas says, tells him less about Time than ‘the signal grass which tells me all I know’. It is in recognition, though, of how deeply suburban Swansea

50

Dylan Thomas

was part of him, that the paradox of his letter to Vernon Watkins from rural Cornwall is worth repeating – ‘I’d rather the bound slope of a suburban hill, the Elms, the Acacias, Rookery Nook, Curlew Avenue, to all these miles of green fields and flowery cliffs and dull sea going on and on . . . I’m not a country man; I stand for, if anything, the aspidistra, the provincial drive.’ Only a very good writer can fluctuate convincingly between plus and minus, between acceptance of and resistance to, the very place he came from, and never really left. Later, in ‘After the funeral’ (1938), as we shall see, he renewed his satiric spleen against such emblems. A satiric reflex was integral to the poetry from the start, and critics are wrong to argue a greater ‘honesty’ for the prose over the poetry, as if only prose guarantees realism. Suburban smugness, indirectly targeted in the poems, was emotionally more stifling at the time than was suggested even by that (1936) letter to Vernon Watkins. It was in the service of art that the humdrum existence was recollected (in tranquility) as pure comedy in the Portrait stories. Where stories such as ‘The Peaches’, ‘A Visit to Grandpa’s’, ‘Extraordinary Little Cough’, or ‘Who Do You Wish Was With Us?’ are accurate is in their reworked memories of the always compensating pull of pastoral. The countryside around and beyond Swansea was always present to the young urban boy’s consciousness. But it is inconceivable that he could have written, say, ‘Fern Hill’ or ‘In the White Giant’s Thigh’ in 1934 or 1939, just as he could not have written the Portrait stories earlier in the 1930s among the surrealistic grotesqueries of stories like ‘The Burning Baby’ or ‘The Holy Six’. Back then, his prose was in emotional terms closer to Caradoc Evans than to Jack Jones or Gwyn Thomas or Gwyn Jones, closer also to a surrealism that lay outside Wales altogether. London recognition and residence helped create, in the 1930s, as easy a market for his short stories as for his poems. His reputation was given good initial impetus with poems in the Adelphi, the Criterion and New Verse, stories in the New English Weekly, New Stories and the Adelphi, and reviews in some of these

51

Walford Davies

and other reputable London periodicals. Thomas at this time took his short stories seriously, though he wrote them with considerably less effort and greater speed than the poems. Ten stories were written between December 1933 and October 1934 and entered in a ‘Red Notebook’ which, like the poetry Notebooks, are now in the Lockwood Memorial Library at Buffalo, New York. In the early 1930s he contemplated a ‘novel of the Jarvis Valley’,40 the mythic location of some of the individual tales. But a Jarvis ‘novel’ as merely the collection of individual stories was the first test of how alien to his talent were any large inclusive structures. In 1935 he was legitimately promoting his ‘Altarwise’ sonnets as ‘individual poems’ yet also calling them ‘what is going to be a very long poem indeed’. In 1934 he had told Pamela Hansford Johnson he was working ‘very hard’ on ‘a very long poem’ and that he had finished fifty lines of it.41 Those fifty lines were published that year as the striking poem ‘When, like a running grave’ in 18 Poems. However, the poem he wanted to see as its development is a model of how to kill development, even in a federal whole. ‘I, in my intricate image’ is exoskeletal, its only form being endless surface periphrases, with no thematic structuring guaranteed from within: Man was the scales, the death birds on enamel, Tail, Nile, and snout, a saddler of the rushes, Time in the hourless houses . . .

Thomas realized this and yet placed it instead, equally unfortunately, as a completely separate poem at the very head of his second volume, Twenty-five Poems (1936). This shy(e)ing (both spellings) at large structures is also there in the case of the last major poems – ‘In Country Sleep’, ‘In the White Giant’s Thigh’ and ‘Over Sir John’s hill’. These were conceived as ‘parts’ of an overarching work to be called ‘In Country Heaven’, a poem about the end of the world in a nuclear holocaust, though Thomas added that such a frame was ‘radiantly unworded in ambitious conjecture’.42 The three poems did not

52

Dylan Thomas

need a larger frame. Later, answering a question by a student at the University of California, Berkeley, he said: Grandiose schemes are built in order that they may be dropped. If you have in mind the pattern of a great poem which one day you hope to write you will probably – as most Irish writers do – talk about it, in surprising detail, to barmen and other writers afflicted similarly – and of course never write it. But again, the weight of the idea of the great unwritten poem may help you in constructing some sunny and miserable love lyrics which possibly can be of deeper depth, width, and weight than all the great unwritten greatness.43

Whether as cause or effect, Thomas’s aggregating, as opposed to synthesizing, talent was programmed deep in his very style. For example, his natural delight in consecutive prepositional phrases, in prose (‘in a hole behind the wind in another country’)44 as well as in poems (‘in/the spin/of the sun/in the spuming/ cyclone of his wing’; ‘in my house in the mud/Of the crotch of the squawking shores’; ‘torn and alone in a farm house in a fold/of fields’; ‘in the fat side, from an animal bed/In a holy room in a wave’; ‘in a room with a wet window/In a fiercely mourning house in a crooked year’).45 This aggregate infolding (in . . . in . . . in . . .) as opposed to structural unfolding, is the very DNA of the ‘List lit.’ style46 out of which Under Milk Wood grew, where, for example, ‘Mrs Rose Cottage’s eldest, Mae, peels off her pink-and-white skin in a furnace in a tower in a cave in a waterfall in a wood’. The naturalness of this stylistic instinct must have played a part in Thomas’s abandonment of the stiff ‘The Town That Was Mad’ plot-structure in favour of a simpler 24-hour cycle from night to dawn. There need be no criticism of Thomas for balking at larger structures. Good writers always write to their strengths. Even Wordsworth’s The Prelude is a masterpiece by default. It was meant as a prelude to the more ambitious and anyway unachieved The Recluse. Thomas’s case is obviously smaller, but confirms him as essentially and incontrovertibly a ‘lyric’ writer – in prose as well as in poetry.

53

Walford Davies

4. ‘I’ll put them all in a story by and by’: aspects of the prose In the case of the early stories, this was fair enough: the early prose was not in any case an examination of an objective world. In his correspondence with his Swansea friend, Trevor Hughes, he described them as therapeutic, the expression of a sensibility, with their mawkish sexual emphasis a means of catharsis (‘Everything I do drags up a devil’ – a parallel to his more famous ‘Freudian’ claim that his poetry brings hidden things ‘into the clean nakedness of light’).47 It is odd to think that the warped pastoralism of some of the early short stories, those pièces noires, probably grew out of a townee’s holidays in rural Carmarthenshire at Fernhill. A huge emotional gap lies between such material and ‘Fern Hill’ and ‘Poem in October’ in 1945. In a sense, that gap is the structure of the present essay. The ‘characters’ of the early stories are fantasized Welsh conceptions – a dying poet, six vices (anagramatized as Stul, Edger, Vyne, Rafe, Lucytre and Stipe) as ‘The Holy Six of Wales’, a Reverend Davies, and the historical, notorious Dr Price of Llantrisant, the pioneer of modern cremation. But the ultimate subject is Thomas’s own sensibility. The finest of the stories qua stories (‘The Visitor’, ‘The Enemies’, ‘The Dress’) are impressive. But the overall manner was clearly a phase in development. At their worst, the early stories run to seed in two different directions: to either a self-conscious ‘Anglo-Welsh’ lyricism (‘A Prospect of the sea’, for example) or to a surrealism that too often seems an automatic slap in the face. The surrealist element is startlingly true of some of the stories (‘The School for Witches’, for example, or ‘The Burning Baby’) that at the time Thomas had to leave uncollected in various periodicals of the thirties. A reputable publishing house like Dent, for whom the writer Richard Church acted as an intelligent but morally conservative Editor, came to the poet’s rescue, saving him from a too-easy dependence on ‘avant-garde’ publishers, which would have had to be in France anyway. Church finally accepted the more

54

Dylan Thomas

‘restrained’ of the stories. Seven of them were published, along with sixteen poems, in Thomas’s third collection, The Map of Love, in 1939. But even the stories whose note of violence or arcane sexuality proved relatively acceptable at Dent’s are essentially all of a piece with others at that stage left out in the cold. They all illustrate the young man’s obsessive fusion of the objective reality of people, places and events (what Thomas calls ‘the exterior world’) with their distorted ‘inner’ equivalents in the implosions of an imagination more interested at the time in the self-revelatory potential of the short-story form itself. Whatever the actual experience of those childhood holidays at Fernhill, or of any Welsh world outside the comfortable suburban respectability of 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, it was recorded with a less happy sense of the world’s variety and of the reassuring light of common day than four years later helped ‘lighten up’ and light up the Portrait stories, or ten years later beatified the landscapes of ‘Fern Hill’, or fifteen years later helped Thomas forgive it all in Under Milk Wood. In the short story ‘The Lemon’ (1936), for example, it came out like this: A storm came up, black boiled, from the sea, bringing rain and twelve winds to drive the hillbirds off the face of the sky; the storm, the black man, the whistler from the sea bottom and the fringe of the fish stones, the thunder, the lightning, the mighty pebbles, these came up; as a sickness, an afterbirth, coming up from the belly of weathers; mad as a mist coming up, the antichrist from a seaflame or a steam crucifix, coming up the putting on of rain; as the acid was stronger, the multiplying storm, the colour of temper, the whole, the unholy, rock-handed, came up coming up, This was the exterior world. And the shadows, that were web and cloven footed in the house, with the beaks of birds, the shifted shadows that bore a woman in each hand, had no casting substances; and the foam horses of the exterior sea climbed like foxes on the hills. This that held Nant and the doctor, the bone of a horse head, the ox and black manarising from the clay picture, was the interior world. This was the interior world where the acid grew stronger, and the death in the acid added ten days to the dead time.

55

Walford Davies

The story, switching between dream and reality, has a doctor figure who conducts vivisectionist outrage on ordinary forms of life, grafting a cat’s head on to a chicken’s trunk. The literary example of Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is obviously relevant, but Thomas’s resistance to cold forms of enquiry, scientific or otherwise, is much more finely done in the poems. How much more controlled and persuasive an image of this ‘irritable reaching after fact’ is that which Thomas had employed three years earlier in the poem ‘Should lanterns shine’ (1933), where man’s presumptuous quest for detachable knowledge is imaged as the soulless opening of a tomb in search of ultimate secrets: Should lanterns shine, the holy face, Caught in an octagon of unaccustomed light, Would wither up, and any boy of love Look twice before he fell from grace. The features in their private dark Are formed of flesh, but let the false day come And from her lips the faded pigments fall, The mummy cloths expose an ancient breast. I have been told to reason by the heart, But heart, like head, leads helplessly; I have been told to reason by the pulse, And, when it quickens, alter the actions’ pace Till field and roof lie level and the same So fast I move defying time, the quiet gentleman Whose beard wags in Egyptian wind. I have heard many years of telling, And many years should see some change. The ball I threw while playing in the park Has not yet reached the ground.

In the beam (the ‘false day’ and ‘unaccustomed light’) of the archaeologist’s octagonal lantern, the mummy’s face simply withers up. A comment in Hydrotaphia or Urn Burial (1658) by Sir Thomas Browne, an author Thomas was reading at this time, is

56

Dylan Thomas

relevant: ‘But to subsist in bones, and be but pyramidally extant is a fallacy in duration’. This metaphor-in-waiting would have had its impetus in the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, the kind of image that from the age of eight Thomas would have grown up with in newspapers, encyclopedias and films in the Uplands Cinema in Swansea. Egyptian funerary images (‘My world is pyramid . . ./My Egypt’s armour buckling in its sheet’) spread in a veritable delta through the early poems. Having heard ‘many years of telling’ – ‘And many years should see some change’ – the poet realizes that neither rational ‘head’ nor emotional ‘heart’ nor Lawrentian ‘pulse’ can, separately, ‘defy’ Time. Only the three together can do that, and that only in the living-through of a full life. One thinks of Yeats’s anti-reductionist questions at the end of, appropriately, ‘Among School Children’: O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

As ‘Why east wind chills’ (also 1933) puts it, only then ‘Shall a white answer echo from the rooftops’ – ‘white’ because beyond the colours of separated-out experience, and certainly not ‘blackand-white’, not even black writing on white paper, in fact not in words at all, but their ‘echo’. Not even the question thrown up (‘the ball I threw’), let alone an answer, has ‘yet reached the ground’. The metaphor has something of the effect of the suspension of time on Keats’s Grecian Urn – that other poem of unanswered questions, with its similar ending ‘ – that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’. A tomb in Egypt and Cwmdonkin Park in Swansea – it is an impressive imaginative linkage to be brought off so persuasively by a nineteen-year-old. Compared to such intelligent economy, the indulgences of most of the early prose seem in the service of shock, not insight, more willed than rewarding. With the publication of ‘An Adventure from a Work in Progress’ in the spring of 1939, the stories completely characteristic of Thomas’s early prose came to an end. In that year he said to

57

Walford Davies

Vernon Watkins that he would never attempt that kind of writing again.48 But the crossover from plotless, self-revelatory prose (what he called ‘prose with blood-pressure’) to something more objective was not a sudden break. The change was helped by the process of writing two stories published at the same time as ‘An Adventure from a Work in Progress’. They were ‘The True Story’ and ‘The Vest’.49 The former deals with much the same situation as that encountered in the more typical early story ‘The Visitor’: an old woman lies dying in her bed and Helen, a young woman, is nursing her. Helen kills the old woman in order to free herself from her domestic duties. When the young gardener screams in horror, ‘She opened the window . . . and stepped out. “I am flying”, she said. But she was not flying.’ The story still shares in the nightmare world of the early prose, but the setting this time is realistic (and even more so in ‘The Vest’), with no suggestion of a mystical geography. Further, Helen’s motive is realistically conceived: ‘She wanted a man of her own and a black dress for Sunday and a hat with a flower.’ This is close to the lament of the young woman in the contemporary poem ‘Paper and sticks’ (‘I talk to him as I clean the grate/O my dear it’s never too late/To take me away as you whispered and wrote’), which Thomas included in Deaths and Entrances (1946) but withdrew from the Collected Poems in 1952, realizing that a ‘realistic’ world did not suit his idea of himself as a poet, though it came to suit his work in prose. This movement towards objectivity was paralleled in the first two Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog stories that Thomas was writing at the same time: ‘A Visit to Grandpa’s’ and ‘The Peaches’. Both these have touches of the grotesque, but now within a broad comic mode. Thomas’s struggle to kick free of the early prose is tangible in ‘The True Story’ and ‘The Vest’ exactly because they do not leave grotesquery behind at a stroke. The smallness of the increase in ‘plot’ meant that the prose moved almost imperceptibly out of its lyric, plotless condition – out of being, in effect, poetry by other means. Two quite different stories at this 1936–9 stage of change illustrate in addition the advantage, not just of a basic plot, but

58

Dylan Thomas

of a plot stimulated by another, quite different writer. In ‘Poetic Manifesto’ in 1951 Thomas denied that Joyce’s Ulysses had had any effect on his work, but only because Under Milk Wood had not in 1951 reached the final form that would show where it was coming from. But Thomas adds, revealingly, that ‘On the other hand, I cannot deny that the shaping of some of my Portrait stories might owe something to Joyce’s stories in the volume, Dubliners. But then Dubliners was a pioneering work in the world of the short story, and no good storywriter since can have failed, in some way, however little, to have benefited by it’.50 Thomas’s Portrait story ‘Who Do You Wish Was With Us?’ (1939) seems to owe its pattern to Joyce’s story ‘An Encounter’ in Dubliners. Both concern the journey of two schoolboy adventurers out of town, with both elegiacally savouring factual placenames along the way. The destination in both cases is a factual childhood location: in Joyce the ‘Pigeon House’ (Dublin’s electric power station) and in Thomas the ‘Worm’s Head’ peninsula on the Gower coast. On their journey, Joyce’s adventurers antagonize a crowd of ragged girls, and a crowd of day-trippers is harassed by Thomas’s two youngsters in the same way. Abuse is shouted after both pairs – ‘Swaddlers! Swaddlers!’ in Joyce because the boys are taken to be Protestants, and ‘Mutt and Jeff!’ in Thomas because of the boys’ comic difference in size. Out in the countryside, the boys enjoy their escape from urban/suburban claustrophobia, but the sense of freedom only heightens the two different, inescapable realities they encounter. The meeting with a pederast in Joyce and, in Thomas, the speaker’s friend Ray’s near-monologue on how his family is being wasted by tuberculosis complicate the freedom of the excursion. Escape-but-noescape is the pattern of both stories. This is particularly poignant since Thomas’s story was the nearest approximation to tragic material in his Portrait, paralleled only in the theme of paralyzed loneliness in the Portrait’s final story ‘One Warm Saturday’, which itself in turn reveals distinct legacies from Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. The second linkage is more exotic. Ambrose Bierce’s American Civil War story ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’, in which

59

Walford Davies

a southern civilian (Farquhar) only apparently escapes from execution by northern soldiers, seems to be the pattern for Thomas’s ‘The Dress’ (1936), which Richard Hughes described as one of the most beautiful short stories in the language.51 ‘The Dress’ concerns the escape of a man from an asylum. Closely pursued, he makes his way home to his wife. The narrative progress is that of Bierce’s tale, and a number of direct parallels link the two stories. Both fugitives try to interpret what their pursuers are doing in pursuit: Behind a tree on the ridge of the hills he had peeped down on to the fields where they hurried about like dogs, where they poked the hedges with their sticks and set up a faint howling as a mist came suddenly from the spring sky and hid them from his eyes. (‘The Dress’)

The fugitives use respectively the mist and the cool air to refresh themselves, and emphasis is placed in both cases on the flight through a dense forest, after which they both find a road in the right direction. Both stories emphasize the ominous appearance of the stars – in Bierce the glimpse through the wood of stars set in strange constellations and in Thomas the appearance through the mist of the ‘angles of the stars’. Both fugitives make progress over distinctly spongy ground, and finally come to the fence of a house. At that point, the comfort of seeing the woman centres closely in both cases on a description of her dress: Farquhar sees ‘a flutter of female garments; his wife, looking fresh and cool and sweet, steps down from the veranda to meet him’. In ‘The Dress’ it is the source of the very title – the fugitive sensing clean sanctuary in ‘the flowers on her dress. With the moving of her arm, her dress danced in the light. She sat before him, covered in flowers.’ The fact that Farquhar’s escape is only a split-second hallucination at the moment of death is covered by the fact that Thomas’s fugitive is fleeing from an asylum, and might also be deluded. Anyway, the theme of the extension and enlargement of consciousness at the moment of death (a recurrent theme in Anglo-Welsh writers of the period, including Caradoc Evans’s ‘The Glory That Was Sion’s’, 1915, and Nothing to Pay, 1930) is

60

Dylan Thomas

something that Thomas evokes in four of his other early stories: ‘Brember’ (1931), ‘The True Story’ (1934), ‘The Visitor’ (1934) and ‘The End of the River’ (1934).52 In ‘The Visitor’ the phenomenon is even the total narrative of the story. A dying poet is being nursed by a girl. The ‘visitor’, Callaghan, takes him on a nightly journey through the mythical geography of the Jarvis valley – the fantasy landscape of escape through flight, bridging the worlds of life and death. When the girl enters his room one morning, he asks ‘Why are you putting the sheet over my face?’ Obviously, the notion of conscious narrative surviving beyond the point of death intrigued Thomas. It did not come only from Bierce’s pre-eminent talent for dramatic elision. But it is worth recording that when he was writing ‘The Dress’ Thomas was reviewing a volume of horror stories edited by Denis Wheatley called A Century of Horror.53 Along with stories by, for example, Poe, Wilkie Collins, Maupassant and Arthur Machen, there was a story by Ambrose Bierce. It was ‘An Occurrence at Owl-creek Bridge’.

*

*

*

Thomas decided to move on also from the surrealism of the early stories. Even so, surrealism remained a creative element in his work beyond the break, helping to maintain his trust in visual rather than in discursive talents. It was a visual appetite indulged only in a silly way on his arrival on the London scene in 1933 and his exposure to avant-garde periodicals such as Contemporary Poetry and Prose. In June 1936 the twenty-two-yearold attended the International Surrealist Exhibition carrying cups of boiled string and asking, ‘Weak or strong?’ The poet of 18 Poems and Twenty-five Poems would not have been doing that with any seriousness. As with his professed Communism, his surrealism always had a careful wryness about it, which makes it unnecessary to over-defend him on either score. It is silly not to recognize brilliant sub-official ‘surrealist’ effects in poetry, even when some of them are effects that can happen accidentally in any kind of poetry, through the independent genius of the

61

Walford Davies

language itself. The opening stanza of ‘When, like a running grave’ (1934), for example, is a web of brilliant surrealistic touches: When, like a running grave, time tracks you down, Your calm and cuddled is a scythe of hairs, Love in her gear is slowly through the house, Up naked stairs, a turtle in a hearse, Hauled to the dome . . .

A ‘running grave’? There is clearly a pun on ‘running’ as in a running sore, and yet Dickens actually has a character chased by a running coffin. The ‘scythe’ of Time, which cuts more than your hair, seems here for a moment a scythe made of hairs, which then presses us to allow also the description of uncarpeted stairs as ‘naked’. But there is also that stranger thing: a surrealism of syntax. The main clause above is ‘Love . . . is . . . Hauled to the dome’, but we cannot help thinking for a moment that ‘is’ is a main verb, and that ‘Love’ herself, like some regal pervading presence, ‘is slowly through the house’ – until we see that she is in fact being hauled to the dome. Even smarter is that word ‘gear’. It means clothes of course (as in night-gear), but it is not allowed to escape the mechanical meaning of ‘gear’ because, though Thomas knew that ‘turtle’ in Elizabethan literature is an abbreviation of turtle-dove, he wickedly makes us see also the slowest animal (‘turtle’) in the slowest vehicle (‘hearse’). Such double-exposures or syntactic short-circuits were common in Shakespeare, who always welcomed extra syntactic effects. When King Lear says ‘Behold yon simpering dame,/Whose face between her forks presages snow . . .’, he is saying that the look on her face forecasts frigidity, but the syntax also makes us see, as if in pornographic cartoon, her face literally between her forks. Surrealism as stylistic advantage, rather than fashionable ‘bohemian’ excuse, remained useful. Surrealism in that full-blown sense came to a climax in prose pieces such as ‘In the Direction of the Beginning’ (1938) and ‘An Adventure from a Work in Progress’ (1939)54 and in the images of poems such as the ‘Altarwise by owl-light’ sonnets (1934–5) and ‘Because the pleasure-

62

Dylan Thomas

bird whistles’ (1939). Such works impress more with local outré images than with the satisfaction of a communicating whole. But occasional ‘surrealistic’ touches remained in the later work, all the better for being the expression, not of manic disenchantment but of the fusion of innocence and experience, light and shade. In ‘Ballad of the Long-legged bait’ (1941) we find this Walt Disney-ish image: ‘And all the lifted waters walk and leap.’ It is as if the surface of the water were a spread-out handkerchief picked up in the middle, making its four corners look like legs, walking and leaping. Its buoyant inventiveness upstages even Auden’s ‘ocean . . . folded and hung up to dry’ in the ballad ‘As I walked out one evening’ – a poem Thomas reads so memorably. And right at the end, of course, in the voyeuristic, gossipy Llareggub of Under Milk Wood, we hear that ‘Eyes run from the trees and windows of the street’. Early Thomas was at his best when celebrating man’s prelapsarian, prenatal condition, in which ‘realism’ as such was not even in question. Right up to ‘If my head hurt a hair’s foot’ (1939), with the birth of his first child expected, embryos in the early poems are seen with essentially ‘creationist’ eyes as ‘lost love bounced from a good home’. In the early poems as in the early stories, innocence and experience stand as disparate entities: We in our Eden knew the secret guardian In sacred waters that no frost could harden, And in the mighty mornings of the earth; Hell in a horn of sulphur and the cloven myth. (‘Incarnate devil’)

Later, a poem like ‘Fern Hill’ balances, indeed fuses, the two states in a single word – Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea

– where ‘held’ suggests cradled as well as chained. It is a kind of anachronology in which the question of the Fall is solved by poetry’s own great sin-eaters – metaphor and paradox.

63

Walford Davies

To attend on the development of Thomas’s career in this way is to witness also the reassembly of the human form, as if making amends for the surrealist break-up of its parts. From the pre-natal imaginings of the early poems – ‘That globe itself of hair and bone’ (‘When once the twilight locks’, 1934) to the full embryonic bully of the birth scene in ‘If my head hurt a hair’s foot’ (1939), to the dehumanization of ‘The hand that signed the paper’ (1933 – Thomas’s brilliantly concise concession to political statement), to the ‘war of burning brains and hair’ of the wartime elegies of the 1940s – the first half of his poetic career shows him dissolving and fragmenting the human form, even with the ultimate aim of honouring it. The later poems, in contrast, celebrate a gallery of whole individuals: from his aunt Ann Jones in ‘After the funeral’ to the anonymous heroine of ‘The tombstone told when she died’ (1938), to ‘The hunchback in the park’ (1941), to the hunchback’s pastoral extension in the form of the lonely farmer in ‘A Winter’s Tale’ (1945), to the poet’s son (‘This side of the truth’, 1945), to his daughter (‘In Country Sleep’, 1947), to his externalized self in ‘Poem in October’ and ‘Fern Hill’ (1945), remembered respectively as ‘a boy in the listening summertime’ and as ‘prince of the apple towns’, to the elegized milkmaids of ‘In the White Giant’s Thigh’ (1950), to his father, going ill and gentle into that good night in the famous villanelle. It is also notable that in the second half of the poet’s career, it is through images with essentially pastoral associations that the dignity of individuals is restored.

5. ‘Now my saying shall be my undoing’: the need to change Thomas spoke often of the need to free himself from what he called ‘the churning bulk of the words’. But he was seeking freedom from language’s endless challenges, not from its weight and body as such. In a letter to Charles Fisher in 1935 he said, in

64

Dylan Thomas

a wonderful phrase, that he was aiming at a poetry ‘heavy in tare though nimble.’55 ‘Tare’ here does not mean the nuisance weed in the Bible (Matthew, 13) but the structure and packaging that in mere goods are subtracted to determine net weight. Thomas always wanted at least an awareness of the ‘tare’ to remain as part of the reader’s respect for a poem. A not unrelated doubletake (especially effective in the case of a pietà) is when a sculptor finishes his subject in polished relief, but leaves the rest unreleased from the unhewn stone. But also involved was the question of moral development. A poet does not develop by developing technique alone. On the whole, the deadlock (as Thomas came to see it towards the end of the 1930s) was momentarily broken by the new frame of mind that accompanied his first settlement in Laugharne in 1938, though inevitably punctuated (because of financial needs) by residence elsewhere, especially by the pull of London, which remained constant from his first move there in 1934. The deadlock itself is interesting. Ironically, it was to some degree caused by his quickly increasing reputation. When he learned in April 1934 that his first volume of poems was a possibility, he wisely selected eighteen of his most recent efforts: thirteen from the last of the four Notebooks, four from the period after the completion of the last Notebook, and with ‘Especially when the October wind’ radically revised from an earlier version for inclusion in The Listener two months before the appearance of 18 Poems in December 1934. With such a remarkable and uncompromising collection under his belt, the inevitable follow-up of a second volume struck him as something more frightening than a challenge. For one thing, because of his highly crafted techniques, his production of new poems was painfully slow. For his second volume, Twenty-five Poems (September 1936), he had no option but to return to the Notebooks as his main source. As a result, sixteen poems in Twenty-five Poems were revised versions of pre-1934 items from the Notebooks. On vacation with Geoffrey Grigson in Donegal in July and August of 1935 (and back in Swansea up to Christmas) he methodically reactivated whole poems and

65

Walford Davies

parts of poems from his private early store. Before leaving Ireland, he had completed most of the ‘Altarwise by owl-light’ sonnets but also revised from the Notebooks ‘Grief thief of time’ and, from an early typescript, ‘Do you not father me’. In Swansea up to Christmas, he revised ‘The hand that signed the paper’, ‘I have longed to move away’, ‘Should lanterns shine’ and ‘Foster the light’ in preparation for the second volume, Twenty-five Poems. And the balance between old and new did not change with the third volume, either. The Map of Love (August 1939) came after a period in which only five new poems had been achieved. About half of the poetry content of The Map of Love was again of revised Notebook beginnings. Literary fame and expectation were moving if anything too quickly. In the mid-thirties, much lionized in London, Thomas did not have time to explore in what ways a man of twenty-four might differ from a boy of nineteen, let alone register the serious world-threatening changes of that decade. As stated, a root cause was the laboriousness of his chiselling craft. Even as early as May 1934 he felt that all spontaneous impulse had faded, writing to Pamela Hansford Johnson that ‘the old fertile days are gone, and now a poem is the hardest and most thankless act of creation . . . All day yesterday I was working, as hard as a navvy, on six lines of a poem’.56 And looking back in a poem of 1938, he laments that On no work of words now for three lean months in the bloody Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body I bitterly take to task my poverty and craft: To take to give is all, return what is hungrily given Puffing the pounds of manna up through the dew to heaven, The lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft.

And yet, as with Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: An Ode’, Hopkins’s ‘To R[obert] B[ridges]’, Yeats’s ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ or various poems by Wallace Stevens, we do not believe a good poem that queries whether good poetry is possible. This abnegating strain in Thomas places him in a major

66

Dylan Thomas

line. ‘On no work of words’ is an accomplished and complex conceit merging the idea of being on the dole in the 1930s with the poet’s moral responsibility to repay with creativity for the talent he has been given (‘To take to give is all . . .’) in a metaphor of returning God’s gift of manna, which in turn echoes George Herbert’s reversal metaphor for prayer as ‘exalted manna’. All this is not to ignore a simpler realistic fact – that ‘On no work of words’ was written after Thomas’s first move to Laugharne in 1938, when adult and financial responsibilities had become unignorable. He had married Caitlin Macnamara in July 1937 in Cornwall, and at Laugharne they were awaiting the birth of their first child (Llewelyn, born January 1939). The poem with which the preface to this essay started was a similar self-accusation. As with all self-accusations, it has insider information as to its sense of crisis: Once it was the colour of saying Soaked my table the uglier side of a hill With a capsized field where a school sat still And a black and white patch of girls grew playing; The gentle seaslides of saying I must undo That all the charmingly drowned arise to cockcrow and kill. When I whistled with mitching boys through a reservoir park Where at night we stoned the cold and cuckoo Lovers in the dirt of their leafy beds, The shade of their trees was a word of many shades And a lamp of lightning for the poor in the dark; Now my saying shall be my undoing, And every stone I wind off like a reel. (‘Once it was the colour of saying’)

The ‘table’ is Thomas’s old writing table at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, that impossibly steep street (‘suburbia set at an impossible angle’) that caused the horizontal school field opposite not only to seem small (the size of a cap) but deceptively to appear as if it was the thing tiltingly ‘capsized’. And all this ‘the uglier side of a hill’, the other side of which at that time was the open Carmarthenshire countryside of Fernhill holidays. Following on from

67

Walford Davies

‘Soaked’, ‘capsized’ and ‘seaslides’, the ‘charmingly drowned’ are all the things submerged in the charm of words. These things will now ‘arise to cockcrow and kill’ – that is, will summon a new dawn by killing the old poet in him. Previously, the ‘shade’ affording the courting couples privacy in the park had been for him only a word, ‘a word of many shades’. We shall return to the word ‘undoing’, but it is worth mentioning that the first thing we see being ‘undone’ is the poem’s very form. The tidily achieved quatrain with which it starts is abandoned to only a ghost of a quatrain in the next four lines, and then to a much more opportunistic rhyme-scheme. The last two lines, for example, rhyme with the two opening ones – but at a distance that causes any chiming to go unheard, a significant sacrifice for a poet so fond of being heard. And, just as the poem abandons the expectations raised by its opening quatrain, it also shortmeasures by one line the fourteen lines of the sonnet we might have expected. As a result, the thirteenth line (despite starting with ‘And’) is isolated, enacting the new austerity it speaks of: ‘And every stone I wind off like a reel.’ Something wound off ‘like a reel’ (whether from camera or fishing rod) is either slowly released or just let rip. But that second meaning would not be an advance on the slick ‘seaslides of saying’ the poet now wants to outgrow. Because of ‘stone’ (previously the weapon with which the boy tormented courting couples in the park) the movement in ‘reel’ is slowed down, weighted also by a pun on ‘real’, which crystallizes the poem’s chastening, self-chastising subject – the reality of things and people that self-regarding language had ignored. Things ‘drowned’ matches that dryer metaphor of submergence – of things left in the dark: ‘And a lamp of lightning for the poor in the dark.’ In the 1930s the last thing the derelicts in Cwmdonkin Park opposite Thomas’s home needed (one of whom he immortalized as ‘the hunchback in the park’) was a show of verbal ‘lightning’. What they needed was light. The verbal magnetism between ‘lightning’ (said) and lighting (unsaid) and between ‘reel’ and real (unsaid) is like ‘Cold pastoral’ at the end of Keats’s ‘Ode on

68

Dylan Thomas

a Grecian Urn’ when we’d have expected Cool. The ‘stone’ reminds us also of that other great self-correcting poem, written against ‘polite meaningless words’, Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’, against feeling ‘certain that they and I/But lived where motley is worn’. It is appropriately midstream of Yeats’s poem that we are reminded that ‘the stone’s in the midst of all’, troubling ‘the living stream’. Keats said of Milton that, despite his love of ‘poetical luxury’, he suddenly decided to devote himself ‘rather to the ardours than the pleasures of song’, a decision made by Keats himself in a tragically foreshortened life. In fact, the chastening of ‘poetic’ pleasures by the real world in Thomas’s poem is in a very long line of poetic self-corrections: Pope’s ‘That not in fancy’s maze he wandered long,/But stooped to truth and moralized his song’, Wordsworth’s ‘A deep distress hath humanized my soul’, Coleridge’s ‘I see, not feel, how beautiful they are’ and, the most perfect match of all, Yeats’s ‘Players and painted scene took all my love/And not those things that they were emblems of’. Pope’s ‘stooped’ distils them all, signifying, in the interests of self-development, not an abject bending but a stooping as decisive as that of a hawk. T. S. Eliot said that 25 is the age at which a poet has to change if he is going to change at all. At 25, American Eliot moved to England. The Welsh author of ‘Once it was the colour of saying’ was 25. He had seen he was granting too much weight to language alone. ‘When I experience anything,’ he wrote, ‘I experience it as a thing and a word at the same time, both equally amazing’.57 This is close to the experience described by Joyce in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916): He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself: – A day of dappled seaborne clouds. The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? (ch. 4).

Thomas’s phrase ‘the colour of saying’ is just like his later statement that ‘I cared for the colours the words cast on my eyes’ in answering a research student’s questions in 1951.58 Both are

69

Walford Davies

closer to Joyce’s metaphor in his rhetorical question about ‘colours’ than to any real derangement of the senses à la Baudelaire’s ‘couleurs et les sons se répondent’ or Rimbaud’s ‘voyelles couleurs’ – to which it has been hijacked, despite Thomas’s objection ‘I wish I could speak French, then I might know why they compare me to Rimbaud’. His compulsive punning, his listing in letters of favourite words at a remove from what they actually denote, or his repeated insistence throughout his career that a good poet works tonally ‘out of words’, not discursively ‘towards’ them – all this suggests a man happy to live in a world of words, certainly – but it is clearly more Anglo-Welsh/Anglo-Irish than French, given that Irish Joyce and Welsh Thomas were basically anglophone. Thomas was sensing the danger that aesthetic form was isolating him from simple human involvement, that the impasse was a failure of humane commitment to recognizable human beings, as opposed to their dramatic physiologies at birth, copulation and death, and to the ordinary reality of the natural world as opposed to its schematization in the elemental, ‘creationist’ scenarios of the early poems (‘In the beginning was the threepointed star,/One smile of light across the empty face’). The word ‘undoing’ (‘Now my saying shall be my undoing’) impeaches the self-absorption of a selfhood that needed now to be ‘undone’, with the career-risk of being undone, in the punning sense of ruined or caught out, because having nothing to say except the saying. A prime characteristic of an early Thomas poem (only gradually varied and overcome) was its resistance to a merely referential use of language. Instead of being about things or states of consciousness, an early poem uses language as, in itself, a nervous, physical thing. It has a reached-for way with English more naturally associated with a writer (Nabokov, for example) whose first language is in fact not English: Foster the light nor veil the manshaped moon, Nor weather winds that blow not down the bone, But strip the twelve-winded marrow from his circle . . . (‘Foster the light’, 1934)

70

Dylan Thomas

And yet, in Thomas’s case, a reached-for effortfulness had never presented a plenary danger. Take this eloquently discursive opening to a very early poem: Out of the sighs a little comes, But not of grief, for I have knocked down that Before the agony; the spirit grows, Forgets, and cries; A little comes, is tasted and found good; All could not disappoint; There must, be praised, some certainty, If not of loving well, then not, And that is true after perpetual defeat. (‘Out of the sighs’, 1932)

On having these lines quoted to him, the poet-critic Donald Davie showed real surprise that they were by Thomas at all, as if he thought Thomas did not know the power of a chaste poetic.59 The lines are as simple as, but better than, Emily Dickinson’s ‘And if indeed I fail,/At least to know the worst is sweet./Defeat means nothing but defeat,/No drearier can befall’. The poem does not betray any difficulty in avoiding Thomas’s more boisterous voice. What in ‘Once it was the colour of saying’ he saw also as an inability to respond to separate lives outside his own was a solipsism dramatized as early as ‘Ears in the turrets hear’ (1933) – a perfectly limpid poem about being too ‘island bound/By a thin sea of flesh/And a bone coast’. But we can go further. Even in a poem of great density, beautifully understated single images occur at powerful moments. Take for example the following phrases: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

‘And a firewind kill the candle’ ‘ruin, the room of errors’ ‘his father’s house in the sands’ ‘Juan aflame and savagely young King Lear’ ‘the keys shot from their locks and rang’ ‘mount your darkened keys’.60

71

Walford Davies

Each is from a densely worded poem, but the chasteness each time seems to contrast with its surrounding texture on purpose, cooling otherwise highly charged material. Phrase (2) is pure understatement in a poem about acrimonious jealousy. In (3) the ‘father’ is Dylan, awaiting the birth of his first child at ‘Sea View’, a dangerously-tall ramshackle house in Laugharne only yards from the sea, coolly evoking the warning (Matthew 7: 26) about houses built on sand. Phrase (4) is a brisk nod to Byron and Shakespeare, but the stress on a ‘savagely young King Lear’ is an astute literary-critical insight into the source of the ageing Lear’s warped sexual language on the heath. In Phrase (5) Thomas’s recurrent image of locks and keys, intensified by wartime scenes of private lives and homes blown open, is here quietly shamed by the then still common experience of hearing a domestic iron key drop innocently onto a stone floor, and ringing. Phrases (1) and (6) reveal the distance Thomas often travelled between literal source and metaphor. Within its poem, the lyrical line ‘And a firewind kill the candle’ is backed by the more humdrum line, ‘There is loud and dark directly under the dumb flame’. The fact is that Thomas had been struck by a sentence in a detective novel – ‘in the middle of a lot of trash’, as he put it – ‘The shadow is dark directly under the candle’.61 But it is the seeming effortlessness of ‘And a firewind kill the candle’ that makes memorable the wind from hell that threatens the light, in this ‘poem about churches’. The line speaks theological volumes. Phrase (6), ‘mount your darkened keys’, from the poem ‘Deaths and Entrances’, distils the tragic human urge to make music in the face of death, as on the Titanic. Thomas had gone ‘to see a smashed aerodrome. Only one person had been killed. He was playing the piano in an entirely empty, entirely dark canteen.’62 That isolated image of ‘darkened keys’ must surely break all records for poetic understatement.

*

*

72

*

Dylan Thomas

Thomas had come to recognize a problem with the texturebound intensity of his craft that was at least partly instinctual. The ultimate sanction for so sincere a poet to develop a more open voice (it was never going to be a ‘public’ one) had to come from within. But, paradoxically, that is why it is time to salute the outside influence of Thomas’s now famous friendship and correspondence with Vernon Watkins. The Letters to Vernon Watkins (1957) show in detail Thomas’s workmanlike concern with the craft of poetry, covering the period from when he was assembling the contents of Twenty-five Poems (1936) to the publication of Deaths and Entrances (1946). The correspondence speaks for itself on such questions as Thomas’s wit, personal warmth, and poetic seriousness. But particularly fortunate is that he found in Watkins, to whose generosity of spirit and critical intelligence he was only one of many witnesses, just the right kind of confidant. In the face of Thomas’s eccentric effects, Watkins did not yield to blank misgivings as Robert Bridges tended to do in relation to Hopkins or Thomas Wentworth Higginson in relation to Emily Dickinson. The two Swansea poets were by no means kindred spirits poetically. On the contrary, Thomas regularly emphasizes quite radical differences between the two. He criticizes Watkins’s poems for their ‘literary’ deployment of language, when what he wanted to see was what he called ‘the strong, inevitable pulling that makes a poem an event, a happening, an action perhaps, not a still-life or an experience put down, placed, regulated’. Also instructive are the reasons he gives for not accepting some of Watkins’s suggested alternatives for tentative phrases in his poems: one Watkins suggestion he considered ‘esoterically off every mark in the poem’.63 But the point is that Watkins recognized and welcomed the uniqueness of Thomas’s genius. As a result, Thomas was all the more able to appraise his potential for development than if he had been faced by blank misgivings. For one thing, he was allowed his own convictions. Two blatant failures – ‘Now’ and ‘How soon the servant sun’ – still went into Twenty-five Poems despite Watkins’s spot-on verdict that they ‘presented a face of unwarrantable obscurity’.

73

Walford Davies

As a result, in sending new poems, Thomas was all the more alert to Watkins’s best, always unassuming, expectations. The privacy of the Notebooks had become a thing of the past. The correspondence with Watkins was a help at a crucial time for him to see himself as he perceptively saw his friend – as ‘a person who has worked through all the beginnings and finds himself a new beginning in the middle’.

6. ‘Criss-cross rhythms’: comparisons of earlier and later poems But the fact remains that, so front-loaded was Thomas’s writing career in proportion to the number of poems written, it was already three-quarters over by 1938. As mentioned, the relationship of a Thomas poem’s date of conception or partial composition to its volume-appearance is often out-of-sync. It is why a merely sequent attention to the first three poetry volumes would be misleading – as it would not be in the case of, say, R. S. Thomas a decade later. The difference between early and later poems (a perfectly honourable gauge, and poignant in so tragically short a life) is clearest if we compare pairs of poems completed and free-standing well to either side of our dividing line (or point of balance) of 1938, when Thomas was at the (st)age Eliot said poets simply had to change. In 1949 Thomas himself said he thought that ‘the poems most narrowly odd are among those I wrote earliest, and that the later poems are wider and deeper’.64 The fact that he added that Time might prove him wrong is what keeps the exercise of comparison worth while as well as open. First, ‘My hero bares his nerves’ (1933) as against ‘In my craft or sullen art’ (1945). Both are about the act of writing. The earlier poem, though, is not so much ‘about’ it as an enactment of it: with the poet seen as a bundle of sensations. Its mechanistic anti-poetic images of ‘wire’, ‘box’, ‘chain’ and ‘cistern’ even con-

74

Dylan Thomas

flate the act of writing with masturbation. The same secret sublinguistic energy (the ‘sharp stink of fox’) is what Ted Hughes (a serious admirer of Thomas) says in ‘The Thought-fox’ goes to the making of a poem. The comparability of the Thomas and the Hughes is sealed by the similar unrealistic abruptness of their endings, but separated by how different they are: ‘The page is printed’ (Hughes) as against ‘He pulls the chain, the cistern moves’ (Thomas). In contrast to both, ‘In my craft or sullen art’ is a different kind of celebration, responding to a world of lovers ‘who pay no praise or wages’ and (even while dismissing them) of proud men and the mighty dead – subjects way outside the poet’s physical selfhood. A comment by Auden captures the general tenor of ‘In my craft or sullen art’: ‘The impulse to create a work of art, is felt when, in certain persons, the passive awe provoked by sacred beings or events is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship or homage . . . nothing is expected in return’.65 The tone and movement of ‘In my craft or sullen art’ is more relaxed and the dilution in its associations enables its repetitions to tick less in the time-bomb fashion of the earlier poem: Not for ambition or bread . . . But for the common wages . . . Not for the proud man apart . . . But for the lovers . . .

And yet the later poem is as structurally rigorous as the earlier one. It sustains a pattern of seven syllables per line ending in one of six syllables that echoes the first line (the snake has its tail in its mouth), thereby sealing in a still basically incantational music. But its more urbane procedure is shown by the knowing use it makes of the word ‘sullen’. Famously, ‘sullen’ was Prince Hal’s word in Henry IV Part One for a background dulled on purpose, to set off something brighter. It is the ultimate lightagainst-dark simile: ‘And like bright metal on a sullen ground . . .’. A source? Yes, most likely – not least because two other celebrated

75

Walford Davies

Thomas metaphors – mitching66 and ‘plenty as blackberries’ come from the same Shakespeare play. This is crucial because ‘In my craft or sullen art’ is saying that poetry is a craft, and that if you want to call it an ‘art’, from the point of view of any poet with a respect for discipline it is a sullen art, dour and hardworking, allusions and all. It is why Thomas not only slides the word ‘sullen’ off ‘craft’ onto ‘art’ in his opening line but also, in his last line, forces the word ‘art’ out on a limb – out into limbo, even: Who pay no praise or wages Nor heed my craft or art.

This interpretation is confirmed by Thomas’s own markedly morose reading of the poem on record. His rendering of that very last line ends with a telling pause (a second, stronger caesura) after ‘craft’ – so that an accurate audio-printing would have to be, not ‘Nor heed # my craft or art’ but ‘Nor heed # my craft ## or art’. Yet the earlier poem is allusive too: My hero bares my side and sees his heart Tread, like a naked Venus, The beach of flesh, and wind her bloodred plait . . .

This clearly evokes Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. Thomas pinned two postcard reproductions of the painting on the wall by his table in his writing shed at Laugharne.67 In the painting, the goddess, delicious on a half-shell, is about to step onto the beach; in the poem the heart is already treading the beach of flesh. In a piece of ekphrastic genius, Thomas fancies that her head, tilted slightly, and with red plaits streaming from it, looks like a heart with emergent arteries, even as she gathers the plaits to cover her modesty. An extra clue is that phrase ‘bloodred plait’. It is a surrealism that was unimaginable in ‘In my craft or sullen art’ twelve years later.

76

Dylan Thomas

Our second pair is the opening of the ‘Altarwise by owl-light’ sonnet sequence, written between Christmas 1934 and Christmas 1935, set against ‘The conversation of prayers’ (1945). The sonnets are the last manifestation of the most obscure aspects of Thomas’s early style. The first two sonnets, written pre-Christmas 1934, are unusual but powerful ‘Nativity’ poems, setting the whole sequence off. This is Sonnet I: Altarwise by owl-light in the halfway-house The gentleman lay graveward with his furies; Abaddon in the hang-nail cracked from Adam, And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies, The atlas-eater with a jaw for news, Bit out the mandrake with tomorrow’s scream. Then, penny-eyed, that gentleman of wounds, Old cock from nowheres and the heaven’s egg, With bones unbuttoned to the halfway winds, Hatched from the windy salvage on one leg, Scraped at my cradle in a walking word That night of time under the Christward shelter, I am the long world’s gentleman, he said, And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.

To turn for a moment to paraphrase (Thomas’s pet hate): at Christ’s redeeming death Abaddon, the angel of the bottomless pit in Revelation 9: 11, ‘cracked from Adam’, that is, broke away from mortal man. And then, for the next three lines, we have Thomas’s own antidote to paraphrase, what he called ‘literal’ reading: A world-devouring ghost creature bit out the horror of tomorrow from a gentleman’s loins. A ‘jaw for news’, is an obvious variation of a ‘nose for news’ & means that the mouth of the creature can taste already the horror that has not yet come or can sense it coming, can thrust its tongue into news that has not yet been made, can savour the enormity of the progeny before the seed stirs, can realize the crumbling of dead flesh before the opening of the womb that delivers that flesh to tomorrow. What is this creature? It’s the dog among the fairies, the rip and cur among the myths, the snapper at demons , the scarer of ghosts, the wizard’s heel-chaser.68

77

Walford Davies

It was disingenuous of Thomas to insist that a poem be described only in its own words. Helpful paraphrase is part of the very act we call reading. To remain only ‘literal’ is to kill the very advantage of poetry, which is metaphor. The Christ-figure in some resurrected form, ‘that gentleman of wounds . . ./ hatched from the windy salvage on one leg’ (the upright of the cross in that stormy crucifixion) ‘scraped at my cradle in a walking word’ appears to the poet in his cradle, saying ‘I am the long world’s gentleman . . . /And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer’. In the second sonnet the Christ-figure addresses the newborn poet as ‘child of the short spark in a shapeless country’ – reminiscent of ‘I who was shapeless as the water’ in the 1933 ‘Before I knocked’, a Thomas favourite among his poems. In the second sonnet the newborn child is addressed as ‘You by the cavern over the black stairs’, a pun conflating the merely dim backstairs of an ordinary house with the profounder dark that Christ descended into in harrowing Hell. The two sonnets, like the whole sequence, though at many points wonderfully accessible, seem almost purposely a final exhausting of the heavy, allusive density of the early phase. This seems especially so when we come to the open accessibility of ‘The conversation of prayers’ (1945), a poem also on the theme of age and youth, past and future, myth and ordinariness meeting: The conversation of prayers about to be said By the child going to bed and the man on the stairs . . .

The very word ‘conversation’ is cognate with conversion and interchange, which is exactly what occurs in the poem between the prayer of the child and that of the man. It also draws on George Herbert’s conceit in ‘Prayer’ – of prayer as ‘reversed thunder’. ‘The conversation of prayers’ – Thomas’s plural title in manuscript, letters and the two periodical printings, was simply the first phrase of the first line. Yet the title was for a long time wrongly printed as singular ‘prayer’, destroying the conceit of

78

Dylan Thomas

exchange and interchange – the very thing the poem is about. It has a ‘folk’ feel to it, another sign that the poetry was moving away from myth towards more communal material. The superstition, for example, that it is unlucky to pass someone on the stairs, or our natural fascination on hearing (as in Hardy’s ‘On a Man Who Lived and Died Where He Was Born’) of a whole life lived in one house, man and boy as the saying once had it; or the bemused question in Yeats’s ‘Girl’s Song’: ‘Saw I an old man young/Or young man old?’, where by dropping the indefinite article Yeats makes the second line arthritic. The ‘folk’ potential of stairs in all this was instinctive in Charlotte Mew’s poems: if for anything we greatly long, It is for some remote and quiet stair Which winds to silence and a space of sleep. (‘Not for that city’) Thin shafts of sunlight, like the ghosts of reddened swords have struck our stair As if, coming down, you had spilt your life. (‘The Quiet House’)

The ‘folk’ feel continued into Thomas via Hardy. And into our own time, too: into an excellent poem by Eavan Boland, an admirer of Thomas’s poetry, where in Thomas fashion her first line doubles as title, for a poem actually about doubles: IS IT STILL THE SAME young woman who climbs the stairs, who closes a child’s door, who goes to her table in a room at the back of a house?69

But, sonically, Thomas doubles a good deal more. ‘The conversation of prayers’ is a poem of four stanzas of five lines each. But it is all along internally mirrored, without changing a single

79

Walford Davies

word, by a simpler ‘alternative’ poem of four stanzas of ten lines each. Here is the first stanza alongside its secret sharer: The conversation of prayers about to be said By the child going to bed and the man on the stair Who climbs to his dying love in her high room, The one not caring to whom in his sleep he will move And the other full of tears that she will be dead . . .

The conversation of prayers About to be said By the child going to bed And the man on the stairs Who climbs to his dying love In her high room, The one not caring to whom In his sleep he will move And the other full of tears That she will be dead . . .

The rhyme-scheme per stanza remains regular for the first three stanzas of the poem as printed (ABCDA) as for the ‘alternative’ poem (ABBACDDCAB). But the last stanza in both cases breaks the pattern and leaves the word ‘dead’ (the very last word of the poem) unanswered, as if giving it the last word. And yet ‘dead’ does rhyme. It rhymes upwards with two very ordinary repeated words in the first three stanzas – ‘said’ (three times) and ‘bed’ (twice) – as well as numbly with its own self ‘dead’ (twice). And what allows all this is that the poem as printed does not confine rhymes to the end of lines. True to the pun in this ‘conversation’ of prayers, all the rhymes criss-cross four-ways inland. Though in terms of theme Thomas’s most claustrophobic poem, the rhyme-scheme makes a bolt for freedom, but only by using those other bolts called rhyme. In cutting cross-country as it were, it releases extra oblique meanings. For example, the phrase ‘the child going to bed’ in the first stanza just is not the same thing as ‘the child by his bed’ (at prayer) in the second. On the other hand, in the second stanza in the line ‘From the man on the stairs and the child by his bed’ that simple ‘his’ conflates man and boy. Whose bed? There are ghosts in this poem. In the last line of the second stanza, to have been willing to say awkwardly ‘the love who dies’ (it is usually love itself that dies) and to have asked pedantically in the first line of the third stanza ‘Whom shall they calm?’ was to have braved a charge of

80

Dylan Thomas

grammatical pedantry. But odd precisions are appropriate in a poem about age and dreams and prayers. In Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess, the narrator dreams he hears the sound of a hunt. He asks ‘Who hunts here?’ Told that it is the ‘Emperor Octavian’, he does not bat an eyelid. Dreams, like prayers, are states not of surprising but of unsurprising exchange and interchange. In Thomas’s poem the conceit of two prayers ‘converting’ is perfectly clear. What we are in danger of missing is how the structural-textural criss-crossing helped enact that very theme. All poems should now and again be put on ‘Pause’, even in the mind’s eye, locked and looked-at for things to be seen that were not even looked for. Thomas’s most claustrophobic poem is also his slowest moving, but we need to slow it down further to hear in it, in its own words, what is ‘about to be said . . .’ Our third pair is ‘Where once the waters of your face’ (1934) as against ‘Poem in October’ or ‘Fern Hill’ (both 1945). The juxtaposition need not detain us as long because we shall be returning to the two later poems. But ‘Where once the waters of your face’, like the two later poems, derived its imagery from local geography. Depending on the tide, the Worm’s Head on the Gower Peninsula is at times accessible, at other times cut off. It is a fact and location superbly dramatized in ‘Who Do You Wish Was With Us?’, one of the finest of the Portrait stories, about Dylan’s childhood outing to the Worm’s Head with a tragic friend. Cold came up, spraying out of the sea, and I could make a body for it, icy antlers, a dripping tail, a rippling face with fishes passing across it. A wind, cornering the Head, chilled through our summer shirts, and the sea began to cover our rock quickly, our rock already covered with friends, with living and dead, racing against the darkness. We did not speak as we climbed. I thought: ‘If we open our mouths we’ll both say: ‘Too late, it’s too late’. We rang over the spring-board grass and the scraping rock needles, down the hollow in which Ray had talked about blood, up rustling humps, and along the ragged flat. We stood on the beginning of the Head and looked down, though both of us could have said, without looking: ‘The sea is in.’

81

Walford Davies

Between story and poem, expectations are reversed. In the story, the sea is an inconvenience to the two young adventurers; for the speaker in the poem it is a metaphoric plus. The story’s surrealistic bit about ‘icy antlers, a dripping tail, a rippling face with fishes passing across it’ could easily have gone into an early Thomas poem. ‘Where once the waters of your face’ treated the dry sea-bed rawly, but in balance with its opposite – the abundant, free-flowing sea that has retreated. There is a touch of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ about this, but with ‘mermen’, ‘corals’, ‘serpents’, etcetera, suggesting the retreat not of Arnold’s ‘the sea of faith’ but of Thomas’s ‘sea-faiths’ – the enthusiasms of an optimistic, imaginative childhood: Where once the waters of your face Spun to my screws, your dry ghost blows, The dead turns up its eye; Where once the mermen through your ice Pushed up their hair, the dry wind steers Through salt and root and roe . . . Dry as a tomb, your coloured lids Shall not be latched while magic glides Sage on the earth and sky; There shall be corals in your beds, There shall be serpents in your tides, Till all our sea-faiths die.

The early poem’s schematic, abstract seascape/landscape is of a different poetic world from the shareable sights and sounds of the two later poems. Yet the thematic connection between them is clear. All three concern the loss of the ‘visionary gleam’ and the celebration of the poet by his early world (compare ‘spun to my screws’ with ‘sang to my horn’ in ‘Fern Hill’ and ‘the water/ -Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name’ in ‘Poem in October’). When Dylan the boy actually enjoyed those holidays at Fernhill he was a green puzzled Swansea adolescent: when he later hoisted his memories into the present, he was a young man shoring necessary memories against the ugly physical and moral ruins of the Second World War.

82

Figure 1: 1934. ‘The Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive’. Aged nineteen in a London studio photograph. Later, on a copy for Pamela Hansford Johnson and her family, Thomas wrote ‘with all my love, Dylan, Christmas 1936’ – adding ‘but the photograph’s earlier I hope.’

Figure 2: 1938. Aged twenty-four: ‘When you looked brassily at my shyest secret.’

Figure 3: 1938. At Blashford, Hampshire, the recently married Caitlin and Dylan, ‘who moved for three years in tune / Down the long walks of their vows’.

Figure 4: 1946. The poet of Deaths and Entrances and ‘Fern Hill’ – as if still ‘under the apple boughs’.

Figure 5: 1949. ‘Inside the railings of a tomb [in St Martin’s churchyard in Laugharne], my hair uncut for months . . . blown up like a great, dancing, mousey busby.’

Figure 6: 1952. In Millbrook, New York State: ‘Though I sang in my chains like the sea.’

Dylan Thomas

7. ‘Ann’s bard on a raised hearth’: towards ‘After the funeral (In Memory of Ann Jones)’ Before the outbreak of war, Thomas had already begun to loosen the autonomous verbal structures of his verse and attempted what amounted to the humanization of his craft. Marriage and approaching fatherhood helped clarify spheres of human relationship. But the dense textures of a characteristic style do not change overnight. The cool objectivity of poems such as ‘Once it was the colour of saying’ or ‘On no work of words’ – that stepping aside, as it were, to talk about the problem – was one thing; returning to larger, less self-conscious themes was another. A further point worth mentioning is that Thomas’s naturally expansive manner was ill-suited to intensely personal or domestic themes, such as love-anger and jealousy. Poems on his relationship with his wife Caitlin – such as ‘Not from this anger’ or ‘I make this in a warring absence’ (both 1938) or ‘Into her lying down head’ (1940) – show a critical disproportion between manner and matter. The Welsh element in Thomas – what has been often irreverently but not irrelevantly called the ‘bardic’ element (the tradition of ‘praise poetry’, of speaking ‘for the occasion’ or ‘for the race’) – was not geared to utterly individual or domestic emotion. A bardic element depends on a poet’s ability to diffuse his emotions on wider, more representative levels. At the lowest level, this voice, still heard in literary columns in county newspapers everywhere, is an unembarrassed embrace of persons, occasions or geography in a blanket of clichés. So we must add one other point to our definition of Thomas’s so-called bardic quality: that the ‘representative’ element should be sharpened by at least some measure of unique personal engagement on the poet’s part. Bardic utterance for the race is an arid exercise if we do not sense that the speaker has a subject beyond locale or nationality. We shall see this judicious balance struck in one of Thomas’s finest poems, ‘After the funeral (In memory of Ann Jones)’. But in approaching it is worth visiting first a particular,

83

Walford Davies

lesser-known poem of the same period, ‘The tombstone told when she died’. To come to it from contemporary poems about Caitlin such as ‘I make this in a warring absence’, whose art seems often a case of killing one bird with three stones, what strikes us in ‘The tombstone told when she died’ (1938) is the economy of its eloquence. A human drama is honoured with a new stringency. Here is the last of three stanzas: I who saw in a hurried film Death and this mad heroine Meet once on a mortal wall Heard her speak through the chipped beak Of the stone bird guarding her: I died before bedtime came But my womb was bellowing And I felt with my bare fall A blazing red harsh head tear up And the dear floods of his hair.

In a letter to Vernon Watkins, Thomas called the poem ‘Hardylike’,70 no doubt because of its anecdotal quality (‘Her two surnames stopped me still./A virgin married at rest’). But it is structurally more complicated than a Hardy poem. Its merging of timescales produces something tougher than ordinary remembrance. For one thing, Thomas’s early delight in dramatic prenatal states is still there (the girl had died before the speaker was conceived, but he had seen her death in a ‘hurried film’ on the ‘mortal wall’ of his mother’s womb – a ‘wall’ that conflates scenic gravestone, cinema-screen and human flesh). Yet even this complexity serves now a drama in the outside world. The phrase ‘the room of a secret child’ (as against mere gossip ‘among men later’) delicately unites the unborn poet and the little girl that the dead bride had once been. The empathy honours the woman’s put-upon vulnerability in a way completely traduced in the poem’s crude Notebook draft – ‘A farmer up valley who needed a girl/To sleep with and talk with, milk and clean sheds’ – with that sexual euphemism ‘to sleep with’. It is a

84

Dylan Thomas

tribute to ‘The tombstone told’ that we think, not just of Hardy, but of Charlotte Mew’s ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ (‘She sleeps up in the attic there/Alone, poor maid. ’Tis but a stair/Betwixt us. Oh! My God! the down/. . . The brown of her – her eyes, her hair, her hair!’) and of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Bride’ (‘her dead mouth sings,/By its shape, like thrushes in clear evenings’). Hence the ambiguity of Thomas’s final lines. The ‘blazing red harsh head’ that ‘tears up’ evokes not only the young woman’s fear of the bridal night, and the phallic rape by Death that intercedes, but (following on ‘my womb was bellowing’) her illusion at the moment of death that she sees the head of her wet-haired, newborn child. We miss the brilliant oxymoron in ‘this mad heroine’ if we read ‘mad’ without ‘heroine’. This is, movingly, a feminist poem. But an even larger test of the poet’s sensitivity had come a few months previously when Thomas had confronted his lack of emotional responsiveness in a less anonymous elegy, ‘After the funeral (In memory of Ann Jones)’. Ann was the kindly ‘Aunt Annie’ who had presided over the schoolboy’s summer holidays at Fernhill. She died in February 1933, yet Thomas’s first response in his February 1933 Notebook was a piece of satiric spleen, characteristic at the time of his reaction to various aspects of social custom, whether ‘Welsh’ or not: The mourners in their Sabbath black Drop tears unheeded or choke back a sob, Join in the hymns, and mark with dry bright looks The other heads, bent, spying, on black books.

While his aunt lay dying of cancer of the womb in the Carmarthen Infirmary in 1933, his reaction in a letter to Trevor Hughes (the original of ‘Ray’ above, on that visit to the Worm’s Head), were it taken out of time and context, would be intolerable: But the foul thing is I feel utterly unmoved, apart, as I said, from the pleasant death-reek at my negroid nostrils. I haven’t really the faintest interest in her or her womb. She is dying. She is dead. She is

85

Walford Davies alive. It is all the same thing. I shall miss her bi-annual postal orders. And yet I like – liked her. She loves – loved – me. Am I, he said with the diarist’s unctuous, egotistic preoccupation with his own blasted psychological reactions to his own trivial affairs, callous and nasty? Should I weep? Should I pity the old thing? For a moment I feel I should. There must be something lacking in me. I don’t feel worried, or hardly ever, about other people. It’s self, self, all the time. I’m rarely interested in other people’s emotions, except those of my pasteboard characters. I prefer (this is one of the thousand contradictory devils speaking) style to life, my own reactions to emotions rather than the emotions themselves. Is this, he pondered, a lack of soul?

But the next paragraph starts ‘There was a certain theatrical quality about your letter, too.’ In these long letters of praise and encouragement, the 19-year-old Dylan’s words, both show-off and self-abasing, would have been seen by Hughes, whose family was haunted by illness, as a spirited well-meaning distraction. But the point is how, five years later, the dramatist inside the poet ensures that the first third of the new ‘After the funeral’ still starts with that old disaffection, though in immeasurably better poetry. The mourners are made brilliantly grotesque by the satiric eye of the ‘wanton starer’ that Thomas had once been: After the funeral, mule praises, brays, Windshake of sailshaped ears, muffle-toed tap Tap happily of one peg in the thick Grave’s foot, blinds down the lids, the teeth in black, The spittled eyes, the salt ponds in the sleeves . . .

And there is that powerfully honest self-contradiction of himself in the image of ‘a desolate boy who slits his throat/In the dark of the coffin and sheds dry leaves’ (desolate, and vowing, yet tearless). But that element is now the base off which the poet makes amends for his earlier grotesquery. The reprise of his old callousness (even in the face of hypocrisy) is in the new poem a tribute, intermixing as it does the boy Dylan’s biography with that of his ‘ancient peasant aunt’. The old disenchantment is exercised in order to be exorcised.

86

Dylan Thomas

It is significant that in The Map of Love in 1939 (and therefore in Collected Poems in 1952) Thomas placed the rewritten elegy to Ann Jones between ‘The spire cranes’ and ‘Once it was the colour of saying’, two poems about the danger of verbal glamour, impugning, respectively, ‘songs that jump back/To the built voice’ without touching the outside world and the self-satisfaction of being only ‘gentle seaslides of saying’. Now, in ‘After the funeral’, having an actual person as its subject, the critique of its own self as poetry is the very thing that gives it its depth. The age-old purpose of an elegy is to mime a resurrection: that is why ‘After the funeral’ incriminates the poet’s self-aggrandizement in the very difficulty of doing justice to its subject: ‘She would not have me sinking in the holy/Flood of her heart’s fame; she would lie dumb and deep/And need no druid of her broken body’. The heartlessness of the young Dylan is merged with what in ‘Especially when the October wind’ (1934) he had termed the perennial factor of (if left only in and for themselves) ‘the heartless words’. The very frisson of the elegy to Ann Jones lies in the danger of its being overblown, of being ‘blindly magnified out of praise’, concerned only with its own survival. Even the traditional summons (à la Milton in ‘Lycidas’) to Nature herself to yield in sympathy (‘Bow down the walls of the ferned and foxy woods . . .’) is felt to be inadequate. Hence, instead, the poem’s stylistic turn at exactly the three-quarter stage into rearguard stringency: I know her scrubbed and sour humble hands Lie with religion in their cramp, her threadbare Whisper in a damp word, her wits drilled hollow, Her fist of a face died clenched on a round pain.

Scrubbed, sour, humble, cramp, threadbare, whisper, damp, drilled, clenched – they are qualities the poet feels he should have emulated from the start, instead of the gigantic, skyward, marble statue the poem was turning this simple woman into. This is very much poetry as process. Even that fixed statue, at the brink of the poem’s final shift into stringency, is allowed to enrich the

87

Walford Davies

change. It has ‘cloud-sopped, marble hands’ – as if, for a moment, they are Ann’s real hands, arms held up because covered in soap suds on washing day. Hence also that final stroke of genius that brings in the nature morte trophies of a Welsh parlour – the stuffed fox and the potted fern (foxes and ferns so wonderfully alive seven years later in ‘Fern Hill’) – back to life: Storm me for ever over her grave until The stuffed lung of the fox twitch and cry Love And the strutting fern lay seeds on the black sill.

All this is a poetry of dynamic experience – as anyone of Thomas’s generation would realize who as a child ever stood in frightened silence among the cold icons (open coffin and all) of the best room on a funeral day. Because it is against stylistic as well as social odds that the poem works its tribute of resurrection, a writer’s dilemma is caught in the poem’s switches of rhythm and style. It is what Stephen Spender meant by ‘rhythmic excitement’, when, instancing Donne, Samson Agonistes, passages of The Prelude, Yeats’s The Tower, Eliot’s The Waste Land and ‘Gerontion’, he adds that he found it also in ‘After the funeral’.71 The ending on ‘twitch and cry Love’ came from Djuna Barnes’s surrealist 1936 novel Nightwood, which Thomas had just reviewed72 (‘I tell you Madame, if one gave birth to a heart on a plate, it would say “Love” and twitch like the lopped leg of a frog’). It is a bizarre source, but a flourish all the more genuine for not leaving the cartoon grotesquery of the younger Dylan’s hypocritical mourners behind, as if in a different poem. In 1938 Thomas had clearly been in a position to enter into an exploration of the Welshness of his roots. ‘After the funeral’, with its re-focused view of Welsh life, and its sometimes uncomfortable hold on him, put pressure on him to celebrate, not just demonize, his heritage. Up to this time there had been nothing as extended to match this grappling with the roots of his conscience and consciousness. ‘After the funeral’ recognizes the wilder inheritance that lay behind the suburban tidiness of his

88

Dylan Thomas

birthplace in Swansea, a home that during the early thirties inevitably bounced the intelligent twenty-something up to London in a process of natural release and relief. Thomas is a particular case in our time of ‘British’ cultural dispossession. Up to 1938, he had been able to use, tamely and lightly, the ‘bardic’ frisson of incidental phrases like ‘the loud hill of Wales’ (‘Especially when the October wind’) or ‘Under the lank, fourth folly on Glamorgan’s hill’ (‘Hold hard, these ancient minutes’) while his sudden public fame demanded, alongside, jokey responses such as ‘Land of my fathers, my fathers can keep it’. ‘After the funeral’ was a different case. It was a case of where – to borrow D. H. Lawrence’s words in Etruscan Places – ‘the soul stirs and makes an act of pure attention, and that is a discovery’.

8. ‘Mostly bare I would lie down’: a creative decade ends in war The chance to follow through and diversify that particular kind of self-adjustment in relationship to his rural, Welsh-language roots was halted at exactly the time it seemed most promising. The year of the new ‘After the funeral’, 1938, was the year Thomas first moved to live in Laugharne, which was a town with its own (in many ways non-Welsh) character. But its immediate hinterland, redolent with sustaining memories, was the countryside of Ann Jones’s Fernhill and the nearby family cottages at Blaen Cwm where the teenager had often stayed and written poetry, and where, in another six years, he was to write ‘Fern Hill’ itself. But the isolated eccentricities of Laugharne, ‘this timeless, beautiful, barmy (both spellings) town’, as Thomas was to describe it in his very last radio broadcast,73 boosted instead the quicker attractions of local, eccentric ‘colour’. Even so, 1938 was the year in which he started the short stories of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. The opening story ‘The Peaches’, contemporary with ‘After the funeral’, is full of the boy’s fond memories of

89

Walford Davies

‘Aunt Annie’, but replete also with details of a stuffy, rejectable inheritance. Given now the greater comic leisure of prose, they no longer needed the abrupt ‘cry Love’ of ‘After the funeral’ to galvanize them: The best room smelt of moth balls and fur and damp and dead plants and stale, sour air. Two glass cases on wooden coffin-boxes lined the window sill. You looked at the weed-grown vegetable garden through a stuffed fox’s legs, over a partridge’s head, along the red-paintstained breast of a stiff wild duck. A case of china and pewter, trinkets, teeth, family brooches, stood beyond the bandy table; there was a large oil lamp on the patchwork table-cloth, a Bible with a clasp, a tall vase with a draped woman about to bathe on it, and a framed photograph of Annie, Uncle Jim, and Gwilym smiling in front of a fern-pot. On the mantelpiece were two clocks, some dogs, brass candlesticks, a shepherdess, a man in a kilt, and a tinted photograph of Annie, with high hair and her breasts coming out . . .

This is not quite yet the lyric-catalogue style of Under Milk Wood, but it is no arbitrary aggregate either. Again, an essentially Dickensian eye is involved. A child’s naturally fascinated fear of dead life in glass cases is there in the stuffed fox, partridge and wild duck, and the adult’s connivance in the ceremonies of halted life is also there, in subtle details. ‘Mothballs’ makes the smell of ‘fur’ not only that of the glass-caged stuffed fox but no doubt also of the treasured fur stole (snarling fox-head and all) for use, like the room itself, on Sundays and posh days only. China, pewter, trinkets and family brooches seem neutral enough items, but slightly jostled by that sly inclusion of ‘teeth’ – are they false teeth or (cradled between ‘trinkets’ and ‘family’) that better memento, milk teeth? Then that photograph of ‘Annie, Uncle Jim, and Gwilym smiling in front of a fern-pot’ – is the fern-pot in the photograph or in the room? The very emphasis on photographs (thrice-mentioned) quickens our sense of merely represented life: the ‘tinted’ photograph of Annie links with the ‘red-paint-stained’ breast of a once ‘wild’ duck. Even syntax plays its part: the reader is directed to look ‘through’ the fox’s legs, ‘over’ the partridge’s head , and ‘along’ the duck’s breast,

90

Dylan Thomas

as if miming the act of taking aim – as a gun or a camera once took aim to produce the dead emblems enshrined in this ‘rarely used’ best room. Not irrelevant, therefore – viewed, as if itself ‘sighted’, through the glass cases – is the neglected ‘weed-grown vegetable garden’ outside. Thomas the writer was also carefully taking aim. The recourse to the healthful importance of memory and reminiscence that enlivens all this was in due course, in more lyrical mode, to produce two of Thomas’s finest poems, ‘Poem in October’ and ‘Fern Hill’. It is an aspect of his work often criticized, without allowing for the fact that the complexity of his involvement with the past (the odi et amo) is what strengthened his rootedness in the present. As George Eliot says in The Mill on the Floss, ‘We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it’. F. R. Leavis said that even ‘unconscious reminiscence’ of one literary work by another is what ‘inspiration so often turns out to be’.74 In that sense, it is no accident that the idea that ten years later became Under Milk Wood first occurred to the poet around this first important period in Laugharne in 1938, on the eve as it were of very different ways of re-inheriting his own people, or of losing even the opportunity to do so. The point is that at Laugharne, a longnecessary anchorage in a particular locale looked possible. London, ‘city of the restless dead’,75 had already begun to pall, but had a continuing pull because, as war approached, without London there would be no daily bread. In two poems of 1939 Thomas recognized how fragile any anchorage at all could be. Echoing Wilfred Owen’s ‘The Promisers’ (‘When I awoke, the glancing day looked gay’), he wrote a better poem than Owen’s, starting ‘When I woke, the town spoke’, in which he laments that even Laugharne, his ‘sea town was breaking’. And in ‘Once below a time’ he enjoins the reader to laugh at the exhibitionist outrageousness of his ‘young dog’ and ‘London’ self. What he yearned for now was a quiet life, simply to write poems at home in Wales –

91

Walford Davies Now shown and mostly bare I would lie down, Lie down, lie down and live As quiet as a bone.

The appetite to do so is reflected in the pun between that odd word ‘shown’ and shorn, followed as it is by ‘bare’, as if meaning both celebrated and exposed. But it was an aim that in December 1939, with the world at war, proved impossible. In three months’ time he was writing ‘The Countryman’s Return’ (published in The Cambridge Front, summer 1940), a poem in which, with Thomas back to earn a livelihood in wartime London, the missed chance to explore and re-inherit his underestimated Welsh pastoral roots has become a superficial urban joke in doggerel. Another way to see the impact of the pernicious crossroads created by the war is to compare Adventures in the Skin Trade with the Portrait stories, two works only a year apart. Whatever appeal Adventures in the Skin Trade (mid-1941) has, it remains, in Thomas’s own word, ‘trivial’ when compared with the slowly reconstituted memories of the Portrait. The unfinished Adventures (‘my unfortunately forced novel’)76 is the half-imagined story of the young Dylan’s initiation into London life as it had occurred some eight years before. As imaginative autobiography, the ‘novel’ was meant to follow on from where the Portrait stories had left off. But, following on from something already so brilliantly well done, it had about it the air of a work bound to be abandoned precisely because its talents had already been much better deployed in the short-story form of the Portrait, and finally deconstructed in the hero’s immolation in the Portrait’s last story, ‘One Warm Saturday’. Here was another case of short individual forms winning over larger structures. As a novel, Adventures in the Skin Trade was a trivialization (which the Portrait was not) of what in ‘After the funeral’ was a central strength, a writer’s ability to take passively upon himself the historical reality of people and events outside himself. Thomas’s overall plan for Adventures in the Skin Trade as told to Vernon Watkins – that the central character ‘would attract adventures to him by his own unadven-

92

Dylan Thomas

turous stillness and natural acceptance of every situation’77 – was a particularly weak reading of what Keats meant by ‘negative capability’, or by his theory of the ‘chameleon’ poet who forgoes his own personality. The first publisher rejected Adventures in the Skin Trade, and Thomas did not disagree: ‘It’s the only really dashed-off piece of work I remember doing,’ he said.78 That verdict was a little harsh (its ear for dialogue, for example, is sharp) but the book’s general effect is too obviously secondhand. Thomas acknowledged that it was ‘a mixture of Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit, Kafka, Beachcomber’, and only the last named need be taken as a joke. The best touches are excellent as parody, but even brilliant satiric touches cannot sustain a whole novel. When the nineteen-year-old Dylan is ruining his teacherfather’s exercise books, tearing up his mother’s photographs, and breaking the family china the night before he leaves for London, Thomas writes it as a borrowed Dickensian situation. Samuel Bennet is afraid ‘that the strangers upstairs he had known since he could remember would wake and come down with pokers and candles’. We recall Bill Sikes’s frustrated burglary in Oliver Twist (ch. 22), all the more because illustrated in Cruikshank’s drawing. But a novel is more than a bag of incidents. On Thomas’s theme of a young man’s need to escape his upbringing, the short poem ‘I have longed to move away’ (1933) had already said it all and better, just as the nightmare of what later happens in the hero’s experience of London in Adventures in the Skin Trade had already been forecast and purged in ‘One Warm Saturday’, the final story of the Portrait. One of the sad effects of any period of war is that it promotes the potential of mere saleability. In the arts, this quickly encourages pot-boiling possibilities. On the eve of this particular war, that fact would have occurred to Thomas. His wartime filmscripts are admirable examples of work in a medium demanding hands-on, emergency professionalism. Yet they were not (except in a moral sense) what he himself would have chosen to be writing at that time.

93

Walford Davies

9. ‘Arc-lamped thrown back upon the cutting flood’; ‘This unbelievable lack of wires’: wartime, film work, broadcasts Thomas’s reaction in conversation and letters to the actual onset of the war had mixed serious outrage with witty fear. He naturally worried about personal and family survival and wryly added under the date in a copy of the newly published The Map of Love for Pamela Hansford Johnson on 3 September 1939, ‘Dylan-shooting begins’. He enquired about the possibility of one of the ‘reserved occupations’ in the Ministry of Information or the BBC, on the basis of quite genuine conscientious objection to war. His personal protest ranged from comedy (‘My little body I don’t intend to waste’) to an obsession with time (‘all I want is time to write poems’) to a genuine anti-war philosophy in attempting to organize contributions by writers to an ‘Objection to War’ manifesto. Thomas did tend to speak unguardedly, and no doubt varied his reactions to suit different correspondents, but the warped focus on ‘celebrity’ in our culture since his time has obscured the fact that the varied range of his responses at the outbreak of war was pretty average. In a letter to his father in August 1939 his different reactions are quietly combined: It is terrible to have built, out of nothing, a complete happiness – from no money, no possessions, no material hopes – and a way of living, and then to see the immediate possibility of its being exploded and ruined through no fault of one’s own . . . If I could pray, I’d pray for peace. I’m not a man of action, and the brutal activities of war appal me – as they do every decent-thinking person.79

Behind any dramatic self-regard lay the deeper reaction relevant to the work itself – profound moral shock – for there is such a thing as moral as well as physical bravery. During an air raid over Chelsea in 1943, Vernon Watkins, sheltering with Thomas under the round table of the now famous 1944 Bill Brandt photograph, tried to calm him with thoughts of immortality.

94

Dylan Thomas

Watkins, the most honest of men, never forgot Thomas’s reply. In his 1954 elegy ‘A True Picture Restored’, counterpointed against the rhymed stanza form of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, Watkins placed Thomas’s words verbatim, so they are all the more authentic because at a point where they go unrhymed: In London, when the blinds were drawn Blackening a barbarous sky He plucked, beneath the accusing beams, The mote out of his eye. In the one death his eye discerned The death all deaths must die. ‘My immortality’ he said, ‘Now matters to my soul Less than the deaths of others . . .’80

Merely (merely?) personal survival was in the event secured by fate. A C3 medical rating (weak lungs) depressed him, but kept him out of harm’s way; major literary friends organized financial support; scriptwriting for the Latin American Service of the BBC was followed by what became his financial mainstay – work on documentary filmscripts for Strand Films under the monopolizing aegis of the Ministry of Information, and later for the smaller, reorganized Gryphon Films. And gradually there came the famous BBC broadcasts. These rescues took care of themselves. But they did not dispel his sense of the moral insult of war. This increased from the first London air raids on, including the extensive devastation of Swansea in 1941, but deepened beyond sufferance in the face of the obscenity of Nazi genocide and nuclear holocaust. The deepest levels of his response were not paraded in letters nor betrayed (both meanings) by the young poet-aboutLondon that he had become. Yet, as we shall see, his wartime poems registered at the deepest level of all, in Robert Frost’s phrase, art’s ‘momentary stay against confusion’ as in Thomas’s own phrase, ‘the momentary peace which is a poem’. It was why he could rise to the emergency challenge of the very different

95

Walford Davies

medium of film as being also enabling, even if only at a tangent to poetry.

*

*

*

The standard work on documentary film of the period – the 1947 Arts Enquiry Report, The Factual Film: A Survey – noted that the three most significant films made by Strand were New Towns for Old (1942), These Are the Men (1943) and Our Country (1944). Dylan Thomas worked on all three. He also worked, as scriptwriter and producer, on Strand’s highly acclaimed Ministry of Information region-by-region picture of wartime Britain, Wales – Green Mountain, Black Mountain (1943; the only filmscript also made in a Welsh-language version). As producer, he would have determined the locations and chosen who was to read out his English script. His role in Balloon Site 568 (1942), New Towns for Old, These Are the Men and the undated This is Colour was listed variously as deviser, compiler, producer, director, scriptwriter and narrator, and even then Thomas would also have put in intermittent work as editor. Anyway, the record is clear: twentythree filmscripts in six years, undertaken in meticulous support of the honourable side of a war in which I have no heart but only That one dark I owe my light. (‘Holy Spring’)

Within the genre called ‘documentary’ there was of course a difference of type between, on the one hand, the direct propaganda films about war-torn Britain, reflecting Blitzed centres like London and Coventry (with the demolition of Swansea always in Thomas’s mind), for which he wrote voice-overs, and on the other hand the more general wartime ‘feature’ films, for which he wrote directorial material and dialogue. But in the serious emergency of war the ultimate aim was one – to boost the country’s sense of identity, confidence and optimism, whether directly through propaganda or obliquely through imaginative

96

Dylan Thomas

entertainment, with an eye in both cases to a future beyond war. Both types were in that sense ‘documentary’. Because of the work of John Grierson, who coined the term, and for whom Donald Taylor, head of Strand Films, had worked in the 1930s, ‘documentary’ films had long earned serious analytical, political and sociological respect. Thomas was only an accidental recruit to the cause – that of the nation as of the genre. And of course in propaganda times, any kind of purely ‘literary’ effects are not always to be looked for. But this was Britain and Churchill and Dylan Thomas and Donald Taylor, not Germany and Hitler and Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl. At any talk of literary quality nobody reached for his revolver.81 At certain points one even senses an interplay between the filmscripts and Thomas’s other prose, and even his poetry. When one reads in The Doctor and the Devils (1944; about Burke and Hare, the nineteenth-century Edinburgh body-snatchers and one of the few filmscripts actually made into a film), Dr Rock’s boast about himself being ‘a material man’, claiming that ‘to study the flesh, the skin, the bones, the organs, the nerves of Man, is to equip our minds with a knowledge . . . to search beyond the body’, John Ackerman’s linkage of the boast with Beddoes (another anatomist, and as it happens a poetic influence on early Thomas) is right. ‘I search with avidity,’ wrote Beddoes, ‘for every shadow of a proof or probability of an after-existence both in the material and the immaterial nature of man’.82 But it is not enough to link this just to the morbidity of the early stories. The sheer presumption of Dr Rock, as of the poet Beddoes, is the stance we saw sensitively countered above in Thomas’s early poem ‘Should lanterns shine’, advocating the need, regarding the major issues of life, to do without ‘any irritable reaching after fact and reason’ by remaining ‘content with half knowledge’. But Thomas’s work in films carried also more positive rewards. There is no doubt that the necessary grasp of multiple perspectives called for in film between description, dialogue and a narrating voice helped the maturation of Under Milk Wood. Of course, as suggested, whether in ‘propaganda’ or ‘feature’ film,

97

Walford Davies

an impassioned poet like Thomas had to suspend worries about the difference between (dare one say it?) poetry and verse, or between pure and applied prose. But it was a difference he was free to signal courteously in a letter of October 1944 to Donald Taylor.83 Taylor had made cuts in the verse-commentary to Our Country. Thomas accepted that the cuts were inevitable in film but still felt free to say that they ‘did destroy some of the continuity of the verse as verse. The words were written to be spoken and heard, and not to be read, but all the same there was in the original version – before your most necessary cuts – a literary thread, or, at least, a sense thread, which is now broken.’ The stand-off was friendly because between two principled colleagues, but also because between one medium and another, language and film. Having stressed that ‘the words were written to be spoken and heard, and not to be read’, Thomas continued: ‘Heard spoken to a beautiful picture, the words gain a sense of authority which the printed word denies them’. Ironically, this was an ‘authority’ that a third, unmentioned medium, blind radio, also provided, via pictures in the mind. Though nine years too early for anyone to know it, it was a delicious forecast of the achievement of Under Milk Wood as a ‘Play for Voices’. But there are still many touches in the filmscripts that are simply better than they had to be, despite the fact that filmscripts respond to edited film, unlike ‘scenarios’, which actually prescribe what is to be seen and heard on screen in the first place. One of the best of the directly propagandist films is Wales – Green Mountain, Black Mountain (1942), which Thomas both scripted and produced. Through its celebration of hard-crafted work in different landscapes, it successfully combines a unity of fact with a solidarity of cause between rural and industrial Wales, between north and south, and between present and past, whether ancient or recent. This is done in the simplest terms, and yet there are touches that reveal a poet at work. For example, the image of ‘churchyards where the stone angels stand cold in front of the sun’. And just as memorable is the image of the Rhondda coalminers who ‘go down into the splintered darkness

98

Dylan Thomas

of the mines, into the blind propped under-world with horses and canaries. They go down like ghosts in black, only their smiles are white.’ A ‘splintered’ darkness captures a miner’s unnaturally quick shift out of daylight into daytime dark; it links also with the reference in ‘propped’ to the wooden pit-props that inadequately supported the roof of the ‘under-world’ of coalmines. The dual image of blackened faces with white smiles even illustrates the split between static literature and moving film. It is when miners come up, black-faced that ‘their smiles are white’. But Thomas knew all that. Paradox is not exclusively a literary effect: Thomas was probably anticipating a quick Cut! – itself a splintering – between a shot of white-faced miners going down and a quickly succeeding black-faced one of them emerging again (regularly shown on newsreels). Auden, who for a period in the 1930s also worked for Strand Films, even used a stopwatch to time his verse commentaries to match the timing of such effects.84 As it happens, Auden and Thomas are linked in the only lines of verse in Thomas’s Wales – Green Mountain, Black Mountain, starting Remember the procession of the old-young men From the dole queue and back again, From the pinched, packed streets to the peak of a slag In the bite of the winters with shovel and bag, With a drooping fag and a turned up collar, Stamping for the cold at the ill lit corner . . .

The lines clearly share the railway rhythms of Auden’s GPO Film Unit ‘Night Mail’ (‘This is the night mail crossing the border,/Bringing the cheque and the postal order . . .’). But it is interesting that ‘Night Mail’ itself was not published until 1950. If there was a direct borrowing, it would have had to be because Thomas had taken the trouble to view the original 1936 film, in which Auden’s lines (to Benjamin Britten’s syncopated music) occupied three minutes at the end – and remembered them.

99

Walford Davies

An equal alertness is there in the ‘feature’ films. The Doctor and the Devils has at the very least an assured sense of atmosphere and characterization. But even its incidentals have the sharp verbal touch also of a morally intelligent writer. For example, the comment that in the city ‘There are many, many children, some very old’ is brilliantly distilled Dickens – much richer than the phrase ‘old-young men’ just quoted. The same poetic strength is there in the 1944 filmscript for the first half of Maurice O’Sullivan’s Twenty Years A-Growing. This was contemporary with the writing of ‘Poem in October’ and ‘Fern Hill’, which in a way match the light/dark lyricism of O’Sullivan’s classic autobiography of a childhood on the Blasket Islands, off Kerry: Through this we see a LONG SHOT of Maurice and Mickil walking in a meadow, picking flowers. Half the great meadow is in sunlight. Half in deep dusk through which we see the strange shapes of trees moving and strange hills. Closer now, we see the children sit down by a stream, their arms full of flowers. They sit in the sunlight. We hear birds singing above them, but, from a distance, we hear, too, the note of the owl as though it came from the dark half of the great meadow.

We also get in ‘the strange shapes of trees moving’ an echo of ‘Especially when the October wind’ (‘walking like the trees’ via Mark 8: 24) and of Eliot’s ‘Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers’ from ‘La Figlia Che Piange’. There is poignancy in the fact that it was a still young man, Dylan, who wrote the filmscript who had had in 1939 to abandon ‘Poem in October’, a poem about his own childhood. The intrusion of work on film in wartime clearly brought back to mind poems that had been interrupted. But of course, paradoxically, the film work also primed a release of new poems. Stephen Spender, an admirer who blew hot and cold about Thomas, and sometimes got it wrong, got it right when he said that because of war and wartime, ‘writing scripts, broadcasts, and so on, has given him the sense of a theme’.85 ‘Theme’ here has to be understood not

100

Dylan Thomas

only in the sense of the deaths and horrors of war as direct subject matter. The work for film provided a new access for Thomas’s naturally religious celebratory instincts, which, however, demanded poetic form for their exploration. At the same time, in producing poems for his greatest single volume, Deaths and Entrances (1946), he found himself driven back down the track of his own life to test, by recreating it, a vanished innocence. (In a sense, the simpler broadcasts ‘Reminiscences of Childhood’ and ‘Memories of Christmas’ shared in the pattern.) During his pre-war settlement in Laugharne, childhood memories had seemed poignant, unsustainable: but five years of war were to make them indispensable. A decade after the letter to Donald Taylor above, on 28 October 1953, the day after his thirty-ninth birthday and only twelve days before he died, Thomas took part with Arthur Miller and others in a symposium arranged in New York by the movie distributor Cinema 16 on ‘Poetry and the Film’.86 His contributions were intelligent and entertaining, and all the more relevant to film for being both those things at once. In film ‘the right word might only be a grunt,’ he said, all at once recalling, inverting and rubbishing J. C. Squire’s notorious dismissal of Eliot’s The Waste Land – ‘a grunt would serve equally well’. His comments on film always promoted a pragmatic, jargon-free respect for the integrity of any medium at all, especially when one medium is being compared with another. ‘I haven’t,’ he said in the symposium ‘a theory to my back’. Asked the positively clunking question ‘Don’t you think it would be possible in some way to weld poetry to the film . . . in the way that Elizabethan drama somehow welded language to the film?’ he did not throw his hands up at the crass impossibility of words being ‘welded’ to anything at all, but replied courteously that just as a poem comes out . . . one image makes another in the ordinary dialectic process (somebody left out the word ‘dialectic’, well I may as well bring it in you know). So, as in a poem one image breeds another, I think, in a film, it’s really the visual image that breeds another – breeds and breathes it.

101

Walford Davies

His joke against ‘theory’, or against a Marxist insistence on making that easy word ‘dialectic’ compulsory (‘I may as well bring it in you know’), or his running joke throughout the symposium against film-speak jargon such as ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’, speaks volumes. Then, asked who actually makes a film, he sensibly replied that, surely, the poet ‘could work very closely with someone who knew film technique to carry it out. But I think the poet should establish a scenario and a commentary that would do that as well. And he may as well star in it as well.’ The specifics of a poet ‘establishing a scenario and a commentary’ are poignant: only a few days earlier Thomas had put the last touches he was ever able to put, scenic and narrative, to Under Milk Wood. And he would have been particularly proud of that final rider – that ‘he may as well star in it as well’. After all, his reading of the ‘first voice’ remains definitive. In this filmic atmosphere, he felt flattered by the fact that as early as the first tour he had been entertained at Charlie Chaplin’s home because Chaplin specifically wanted to meet him, but was also knowledgeable enough to disagree with Alfred Hitchcock’s statement of 1927 that ‘When moving pictures are really artistic they will be created entirely by one man’. Hence perhaps Dylan’s quip that ‘he may as well star in it as well’ – the earliest hit at Hitchcock’s walk-on/walk-off appearances in his own films. William Empson said of Thomas – ‘You must realise that he was a very witty man’.87 But the compliment does not apply only here, twelve days before his death, talking about films. It applies to everything he ever wrote, including, when we least suspect it, his poems.

*

*

*

Born in 1914, Thomas had grown up with the growth of cinema itself, not just of wartime film. Dying in 1953, his mature literary career 1933–53 was coterminous with the golden (pre-television) age of radio, or ‘the wireless’ as it was then popularly known. Indeed, given his vocal, verbal, acting and poetic talents, it was

102

Dylan Thomas

more in broadcasting than in writing for film that he was ‘the man for the moment’. The warmer, more clubbable society of radio – with its wider range of contributors (including many leading writers of the day) – seems to have served as antidote to the more isolated, more ‘applied’ requirements of film. Radio created room for the fuller integration of a personal voice through insight, humour, irony, satire and a spread of tastes, including his enthusiastic practitioner’s knowledge of poetry. In that last connection, Thomas’s part in enlarging the audience for poetry in English in an inimical but therefore challenging decade cannot be exaggerated. The poets he introduced, read and explained (recommending by his very voice) covered a wide range. Not all of the recordings survived, but most did, including some not subsequently broadcast. But their coverage of poetry ranges from an anonymous New Year carol through a whole programme on Sir Philip Sidney, to Shakespeare and Traherne and Vaughan, to Milton and Blake, to Keats, to Tennyson, Hopkins and Bridges, to a wide range of twentieth-century British and American poets. Of particular relevance is the extent of Thomas’s choice of ‘Anglo-Welsh’ poets: not only Vaughan, Hopkins, W. H. Davies, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, David Jones, Idris Davies, Vernon Watkins and Alun Lewis, but also less well-known names such as Sir Lewis Morris, Meurig Walters, Ken Etheridge, William Morgan, John Ormond, John Prichard and Alan PryceJones. To mark the pioneer significance of this, it is worth noting the difference between two influential lectures, two decades apart, on the very concept of ‘Anglo-Welsh’ literature by two major figures in modern Welsh culture. In 1938, Saunders Lewis’s title was a question: Is there an Anglo-Welsh Literature? In 1957, Gwyn Jones’s title was a confident statement: The First Forty Years. What we now call ‘Welsh Writing in English’ is today recognized worldwide as a distinct genre worthy of major commentary and research. Yet in 1938 Saunders Lewis’s view of even Dylan himself was that ‘there is nothing hyphenated about him. He belongs to the English.’88

103

Walford Davies

That is bad literary history. There are, beyond the Welsh language or notional/national subject matter, multiple ways in which a poet is recognizably Welsh. Seven years back from Lewis’s lecture, the seventeen-year-old Dylan had announced in the South Wales Daily Post in June 1931 a plan for a periodical to be called ‘Prose and Verse’, that would publish ‘only the work of Welshmen and women – this includes those of dim Welsh ancestry and those born in Wales – who write in English.’89 The periodical did not come about, but, seeking to keep Keidrych Rhys’s periodical Wales (launched summer 1937) in healthy competition with Gwyn Jones’s periodical Welsh Review (launched February 1939), Thomas complained to Rhys that Wales was featuring ‘names . . . that belong to London . . . and not, in thought or action or feeling, to anything connected with Wales.’90 At this time he also suggested to the novelist T. Rowland Hughes at the BBC in Cardiff ‘readings from the work of Welsh poets, or poets of Welsh ancestry, who wrote or write in English’ including ‘the younger men, contributors to the periodical “Wales” and to most of the verse periodicals published in London and abroad, who are now making what is really a renaissance in Welsh writing. I don’t think anything of the sort has been done before on the air.’91 In any concept of ‘Anglo-Welsh’ literature, whether in ‘first flowering’ or as a ‘renaissance’, there is no way of not seeing Dylan Thomas at the heart of its modern history – and not just as its prime exemplar but as its passionate advocate. We should not underestimate, either, the role Thomas played in all this on the still new world of radio: ‘I don’t think anything of the sort has been done before on the air.’

*

*

*

But if any one broadcast stands out – after Under Milk Wood of course – it is ‘Return Journey’ (1947). Thomas’s ‘return’ to bombdemolished Swansea was a feature appropriately rehearsed and recorded in Wales, with Thomas just as appropriately playing both the narrator and himself. Though inventive at every turn,

104

Dylan Thomas

there was nothing off-the-cuff about it. Cecil Price (ironically the second holder of the Swansea Chair of English that Thomas’s father had failed to win when it was first established in 1920) asked Thomas how he had managed to remember the names of all the shops destroyed in the February 1941 air raids. ‘It was quite easy’, Thomas replied, ‘I wrote to the Borough Estate Agent and he supplied me with the names.’ Cecil Price’s reply was the perfect tribute: ‘Why is it that no one ever credits a poet with common sense?’92 Thomas had also gone to see a master from the Grammar School to find out how much of the school was destroyed. It was with the same conscientiousness that he later marshalled the five mountain and eighteen river names in Eli Jenkins’s morning hymn in Under Milk Wood (even the fact that Llyfnant has a waterfall). The difference in ‘Return Journey’ is that the names of the shops (‘Eddershaw Furnishers, Curry’s Bicycles, Donegal Clothing’ . . .) and of the staff and pupils killed (‘Baines, W./Bazzard, F. H./Beer, L. J. . . .’) only accidentally bump up against the alphabetical and alliterative arrangement possible for other, more impersonal, things – rivers and mountains. The ugly results of blitzkrieg cannot, and perhaps should not, be reshuffled. It is a sobering reminder of the difference between human life and the impersonal life of nature or art. Douglas Cleverdon, the first-class BBC producer so crucial in nurturing Under Milk Wood through to completion, said that ‘Return Journey’ was ‘a model of its kind . . . Dylan knew exactly how to create a work of permanent value from the fluid medium of radio’.93 And beyond the script, we still have today Thomas’s reading as Narrator. It has a marked quietness about it, partly so as to set off the variety of the ‘character’ parts, but also so as to establish the elegiac leitmotif that he wanted to underlie and underline the whole. Even so, the text is again full of touches that are better than they obviously had to be: NARRATOR: The Kardomah Café was razed to the snow, the voices of the coffee-drinkers – poets, painters and musicians in their beginnings – lost in the willy-nilly flying of the years and the flakes.

105

Walford Davies MINISTER: Ydych chi wedi colli rhywbeth – dan yr eira? . . . Oh, I see, English. Lost anything – under the snow?

That abrupt introduction of a question in Welsh, politely translated, is masterly. Thomas is in search of more important things than some small item lost under the snow, and the sudden memory of his parents’ first language, and that of his early friends, would have been among them, especially since the Minister goes on actually to talk about translation. Even the Minister’s apology ‘Oh, I see, English’ (not ‘Oh, English, I see’) is authentic. Unlike his work for film, Thomas’s broadcasts took him through to the very end of his life, to that high point in the very history of radio, the ‘play for voices’, Under Milk Wood. And the broadcasts, like the filmscripts, had basically their own interrelationship with Thomas’s mainline poetry and prose. In a rich question-and-answer exchange with students at the University of Utah, he suddenly volunteered the connection: It is impossible to be too clear. I am trying for more clarity now. At first I thought it enough to leave an impression of sound and feeling and let the meaning seep in later, but since I’ve been giving these broadcasts and reading other men’s poetry as well as my own, I find it better to have more meaning at first reading.’94

10. ‘We hid our fears in that murdering breath’: the war elegies It is not that Thomas suddenly started writing like Betjeman, but that a broad accessibility had become a desideratum in the emergency of war. Major poems such as ‘There was a saviour’ (1940), ‘Deaths and Entrances’ (1940), ‘Among those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred’ (1941), ‘Ceremony after a Fire Raid’ (1944) and ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’ (1945) show how personally deep the shock had gone. Thomas in the late 1930s had been writing poems on that very different creative phenomenon – rumours of

106

Dylan Thomas

war. ‘A saint about to fall’ (1938), for example, ‘to a child about to be born . . . telling it what a world it will see, what horrors and hells’.95 Or ‘When I woke’ (August 1939), regarding which Dylan told Vernon Watkins that ‘This war, trembling even on the edge of Laugharne, fills me with such horror and terror and lassitude’.96 Such ‘war’ poems are not minor in being only preliminary. Even Auden himself, as Empson said, was not a poet of war but the laureate of rumours of war. Indeed, at the actual outbreak of war, Auden, Isherwood and others. left for America. Theirs was only a case, in Coleridge’s phrase in ‘Kubla Khan’, of ‘voices prophesying war’. Staying in the midst of it all, Thomas in 1941 sold his four poetry Notebooks (along with a ‘Red’ Notebook devoted to short stories) via a ‘House of Books Sale’ catalogue, reaping for the penniless poet a mere fraction of the $140 (= £35) paid to the London bookseller Bertram Rota. As mentioned, the Notebooks went to the Lockwood Memorial Library at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In selling them, Thomas was marking a point of no return. He once said that the point about burning bridges is that ‘they burn so beautifully’. Indeed, the last poem salvaged from the Notebooks – ‘The hunchback in the park’ – proved to be one of his finest poems by any reckoning. Constantine FitzGibbon observed that Thomas was twenty-six, the age at which Keats had died. The burning of even creative bridges can be itself creative. Eliot’s point – that around the age of twenty-five, all poets have to change – comes back to mind. An interesting aspect of the actual wartime elegies, coming to them chronologically from ‘After the funeral’ or ‘A saint about to fall’ or ‘Once it was the colour of saying’, is the way in which they function with the minimum sense of authorial (as opposed to wartime) context. Their actual occasion – deaths in the bombing raids – is met by a ‘bardic’ impersonality, an ignoring of any doctrinal limits to Thomas’s essentially religious view of life. The shift of his attention and energy to London, when two years earlier they had looked to be centering on Laugharne, found him without a Welsh background. The result is that, ironically,

107

Walford Davies

his war poems bring out in new, exposed form the properties of his essential poetic voice. We still have affirmation as opposed to political persuasiveness (contrast Auden’s ‘1st September 1939’, with its undertones of ‘I told you so’ and its preacherly view that ‘Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return.’). And we still have that uncanny interpenetration of things, emotions and events as if by a metaphysical awareness predating the poem’s actual occasion, and that unyielding sense of the poem as an achieved form, and therefore of each war elegy as essentially a ‘tribute’, beyond assent or disagreement – but with a new degree of accessibility. In ‘There was a saviour’, for example, any hesitation about the poet’s authority on his theme – the Church’s perversion of Christ’s original teaching into an institutional, desensitized system – fades in the face of his essentially Blakean hatred of moral escapism: When hindering man hurt Man, animal, or bird We hid our fears in that murdering breath, Silence, silence to do, when earth grew loud, In lairs and asylums of the tremendous shout.

Or take the ending: Exiled in us we arouse the soft, Unclenched, armless, silk and rough love that breaks all rocks.

In the first dark months of war, to be ‘armless’ – without armaments, harmless, and literally armless (mutilated) – was already tragic fact. But another image is also there – the armless statue of the Venus de Milo. Despite its relatively late date, the statue was in fact a Roman variation of the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite admiring her face in the shield of Ares (the Greek god not just of war but of sheer blood lust). The war that produced Thomas’s poem was marked at its end with the same disillusionment in Auden’s ‘The Shield of Achilles’, in which Thetis (The Iliad XVIII) sees depicted on her son’s shield, not

108

Dylan Thomas

good order and life, but their opposites. Of course, Thomas’s poem is Blakean, not ‘classical’ in that sense, but its theme is still the ageless need to choose agape over eros, charity over selflove.97 That one word ‘armless’ determines the whole lexicon of the final line: ‘unclenched’ is all the more harmless when succeeded by something literally ‘armless’ (not the same thing as unarmed) reminding us also of the ‘raised fists’ we saw in ‘Why east wind chills’; and ‘silk and rough love’ is no clunking paradox if we spot this particular image of a broken icon, polished though hewn out of stone, that ‘breaks all rocks’ in the name of love. The selfishness that causes war, yet does not plead guilty when war comes, is the timeless point of the poem – ‘O you who could not cry/On to the ground when a man died . . .’. Just as subtly as that opening image (‘Children kept from the sun/Assembled at his tongue/To hear the golden note turn in a groove’) retrieves a modern Blakean memory of children regimented in Sunday School (‘kept from the sun’), the very last image uses archaeology to the same purpose. In a letter, in full Blakean mood, Thomas wrote that ‘The churches are wrong, because they standardize our gods, because they label our morals, because they laud the death of a vanished Christ, and fear the crying of the new Christ in the wilderness’. And, to advance all this, for ‘There was a saviour’ Thomas chose the verse form of his favourite poem, Milton’s ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’. Such brilliantly concertinaed effects, large and small, working out of, as well as towards, sources are part of Thomas’s very conception of craft. His two poetic heroes were William Blake and Yeats. Blake wrote that ‘Without contraries is no progression’, and Yeats saw man as creatively caught between what he called ‘the antinomies of day and night’. At the head of his last (August 1933) Notebook Thomas wrote – as epigraph, as if already poignantly anticipating the possibility of a published volume – To others caught Between [Twixt] black and white This Book Started. 23rd August 1933

109

Walford Davies

He need not have crossed out that archaic ‘Twixt’. A third William he came to admire – William Empson – had even opened his wonderful poem ‘Arachne’ with ‘Twixt’: Twixt devil and deep sea, man hacks his caves; Birth, death; one, many . . .

And it was Empson who was later to say of Thomas that he had ‘a keen though not at all poisoned recognition that the world contains horror as well as delight . . . his chief power as a stylist is to convey a sickened loathing that somehow at once (within the phrase) enforces a welcome for the eternal necessities of the world’.98 The sheer vulnerability of such an openness to experience could well be part of why this sometimes drastically difficult poet has always struck an immediate chord with young, puzzled readers. It takes a real gift to reconcile extreme opposites within a readership as well as within a poem. Similarly, in ‘A Refusal to Mourn’ (1945), one might consider presumptuous the use of assertive cadences in the act of refusing to mourn: I shall not murder The mankind of her going with a grave truth Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath With any further Elegy of innocence and youth. Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter, Robed in the long friends, The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother, Secret by the unmourning water Of the riding Thames. After the first death, there is no other.

But the whole poem is in the age-old tradition of occupatio, whereby a poem claims that it cannot or will not do the very thing it is already doing. Occupatio is essentially a moral trope, unsettling expectations and alerting us to the need for modesty,

110

Dylan Thomas

an attitude especially relevant in a poem on the death of a child. The slack condescension of some critics in describing the poem as a piece of hwyl in the tradition of the Welsh sermon or the Welsh political oration (as if these had not themselves grown from serious religious feeling or logic or human need but from some crude pulpit or soap-box ‘enthusiasm’) is by now itself a cliché. When Eliot attacked E. M. Forster’s praise of D. H. Lawrence as the greatest imaginative novelist of his generation with quips like ‘it depends what you mean by “imaginative”’ and ‘depends what you mean by “novel”’, one cannot but admire the dignified rightness of Forster’s reply – that there are times when one would rather feel like the fly than the spider. Haughty patronizing dismissal has always been the fate of depressed, marginalized communities everywhere. The element of religious zeal in the Welsh-language Wales of Thomas’s childhood, following the diwygiadau (religious revivals) of the first years of the century, is long since itself a diluted phenomenon, not least because of stands such as Thomas’s own against that ethos, in for example his picture of the hell-fire preacher in ‘One Warm Saturday’, the final story of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog: . . . a hell-fire preacher on a box marked ‘Mr Matthews’ was talking to a congregation of expressionless women. Boys with pea-shooters sat quietly near him. A ragged man collected nothing in a cap. Mr Matthews shook his cold hands, stormed at the holiday, and cursed the summer from his shivering box. He cried for a new warmth. The strong sun shone into his bones, and he buttoned his coat collar. Valley children, with sunken, impudent eyes, quick tongues and singing voices, chest thin as shells, gathered round the Punch and Judy and the Stop Me Tricycles, and he denied them all.

Though essentially satiric, this scores serious hits against wrong feeling, or lack of feeling: expressionless women used as a ‘congregation’; the ragged derelict ‘collecting nothing’, not even in a cup; the run of thermal words – cold, stormed, summer, shivering, warmth, sun, the strong sun shone into his bones, he buttoned

111

Walford Davies

his coat collar; the Valley children’s ‘sunken eyes’ and chests ‘thin as shells’. And the preacher, like Peter, ‘denied’ them all. Given such a corrective passage, it takes critical cheek to describe either ‘Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid’ or ‘A Refusal to Mourn’ as mere hwyl. Philip Larkin spoke bravely of the bottom line of any worthwhile poem: ‘I often feel poems have to have some falsity in them, like yeast, or they won’t rise’ – to any occasion at all.99 ‘A Refusal to Mourn’ certainly uses sonorous orchestrations, but they are seriously graded and textured. A poem on the unnatural death of a child, its first stanza uses only feminine rhymes, which disappear in the second, return once in the third (the first to reveal that the ‘child’ was in fact a girl) and more fully in the fourth and last stanza, where one rhyme links ‘daughter’ and ‘mother’. Already keyed into this by the third stanza is an unusual use of the word ‘mankind’. In ‘mankind-making’ in the first stanza the word means simply ‘the human race’. But in the third – ‘I shall not murder/The mankind of her going’ – its sense has deepened. It still carries Chaucer’s resignation at inevitable human mortality (‘For no man can fordo the law of kind [nature]’). But it also reminds us that in Shakespeare the word ‘mankind’ when applied to a female connotes something unnatural, as in ‘a mankind witch’ (The Winter’s Tale, II, iii, 68) or in Coriolanus (IV, ii, 16) when Sicinius challenges Virgilia with a question that is also an appalled exclamation – ‘Are you mankind?’, meaning ‘You are masculine in your cruelty’, a meaning pointed up by Thomas’s counterpoint of genders: ‘the mankind of her going’, helped by the inside pun on being ‘kind’ in the first place. The obscenity of the girl’s death is profoundly there despite the music. Of course, Thomas remained imbued with his unacknowledged fathers’ ghosts and voices. But nothing is bardically taken for granted, certainly not when the subject is that of innocent deaths. Clark Emery wrote well against Elder Olson’s dismissal of ‘Among those Killed in the Dawn Raid Was a Man Aged a Hundred’ (1941), bringing out (though too often extra-textually) the collapsed richness of the poem.100 But what neither critic

112

Dylan Thomas

spotted (the clue is in the title – Thomas’s longest) was its extra vein of irony. On top of the sheer futility of war technology killing a man already at death’s door, Thomas’s title was an actual newspaper heading. Part of his target was such a dead headline about the dead.101 The poem, like ‘A Refusal to Mourn’, hints at the rhetoric of a Welsh graveside occasion (fused ecumenically with paganism), but its real springboard was the nullity of that newspaper headline. The morning is flying on the wings of his age And a hundred storks perch on the sun’s right hand.

The group of war elegies looks increasingly impressive as time goes by, all the more challenging because of the slow release of meanings and an element of delayed significance. Keith Douglas even went so far as to say that the full body of Second World War poetry would not be completed till after the war was over. The full extent of what we call ‘war’ poetry has a necessarily delayed visibility. Yeats, who died on the eve of the Second World War, sensed as early as 1914 a ‘blood dimmed tide’ more obscene than any facts imaginable even in 1939, let alone 1914. It is exactly where experiences or truths as seen by non-combatants such as Yeats or Eliot or Thomas weigh in with those of combatants. Major poems not directly about war – Eliot’s Four Quartets is the prime example – share human authority with lesser poems directly prompted by war. It is only now in the twenty-first century that the exact impressiveness of Thomas’s war elegies is visible. They are among the most positive of those engendered by that war, affirming life and sexuality, refusing to mourn, evoking entrances as well as deaths, and decently transcending negation, even amid fire-raids, even after the nonsensical technological killing of a centenarian. All this is in turn closer to the real temper of the British people at the time – the resilience and the guts – than poems by those poets who travelled towards the war along only cool abstract ideological lines, some of whom got out of Britain when the war came.

113

Walford Davies

11. ‘Parables of sun light’: towards ‘Poem in October’, ‘Fern Hill’, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ and beyond Between 1941 and 1944 Thomas wrote very few poems. His wife Caitlin felt that the distractions of London life, and what she considered his distracting work in films and broadcasting, were slowing down the poet’s further development. In a literaryhistorical sense she was wrong, and yet right to continue her role of involved, intelligent wardenship of Thomas’s best interests as man as well as poet. The relative poetic silence of the 1941–4 period was indeed due to the interposition of filmic and radio commitments. But the unsettledness was more profound than that. During those years, Thomas was happiest and at his most creative when back in Wales – in Swansea, Laugharne, Tal-sarn or New Quay. There was always something Antaeus-like about his relationship with Wales, as if his creative strength depended on the very ground of Wales. Wartime London struck him with an overpowering sense of only fragmentary, present-tense experience. Wales on the other hand kept him in touch with the past – his own, of course, but also a past of wider resonance. In a broadcast about returning to live in Wales he made a very perceptive distinction: while in London, he had found no difficulty in remembering surface Welsh details ‘like settles in the corners, hams on the hooks, hymns after stop-tap’, but ‘what was harder to remember was what birds sounded like and said in Gower; what sort of a sound and a shape was Carmarthen Bay; how did the morning come in through the windows of Solva; what silence when night fell in the Aeron Valley.’102 These deeper resonances of memory were to prove his best line of development out of the lean years. It was no accident that the only poem he chose to rework from the early Notebooks before he sold them was that quintessential Swansea poem, ‘The hunchback in the park’, whose resurrection occurred, ironically, in the same month (July 1941) as the writing of ‘Among those

114

Dylan Thomas

Killed in the Dawn Raid’. In contrast with the latter poem, the experience in ‘The hunchback in the park’, relayed out of the Swansea past, helped him reassemble, momentarily, his sense of place and geography in relation to his own spiritual development. What Wales really provided when the war years seemed painful and endless was a pastoral context, urban Swansea notwithstanding – because hardly even standing. Rural Wales generated an expansive store of imagery and sensation for the final stage of the poet’s career. Much of the poignancy of even the London war elegies comes in that sense of a frustrated pastoralism (‘I know the legend/Of Adam and Eve is never for a second/Silent in my service’ – ‘Ceremony After a Fire Raid’). Deployed in the face of shock and disgust, it celebrated the transcendence of pantheistic life over human slaughter: He’ll bathe his raining blood in the male sea Who strode for your own dead And wind his globe out of your water thread And load the throats of shells With every cry since light Flashed first across his thunderclapping eyes. (‘Deaths and Entrances’)

And it was this element, released, that flooded back into the poet’s voice when, in 1944, he returned to complete ‘Poem in October’, carefully placing it to follow ‘A Refusal to Mourn’ in Deaths and Entrances, describing it to Vernon Watkins as a ‘Laugharne poem: the first place poem I’ve written’:103 It turned away from the blithe country And down the other air and the blue altered sky Streamed again a wonder of summer With apples Pears and red currants And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother Through the parables Of sun light And the legends of the green chapels.

115

Walford Davies

What is characteristically Welsh about this luminous poem is the way in which its structure is provided, not by argumentative development, but by the tonal unity of an essentially geographic narrative, which in turn matches a strong English tradition of ‘walk’ poems. ‘Poem in October’ relates, on a level deeper than ordinary literary influence, to ‘Regeneration’ by that most eminently hyphenable Anglo-Welsh, Welsh-speaking, courtieraristocrat, Brecon-and-London-based poet, Henry Vaughan: Here, I repos’d; but scarse well set, A grove descryed Of stately height, whose branches met And mixt on every side; I entred, and once in (Amaz’d to see’t), Found all was chang’d, and a new spring Did all my senses greet; The unthrift Sunne shot vitall gold A thousand peeces, And heaven its azure did unfold Checqur’d with snowie fleeces, The aire was all in spice And every bush A garland wore; Thus fed my Eyes But all the Eare lay hush.

‘All was chang’d, and a new spring/Did all my senses greet’: the very essence of the change in ‘Poem in October’ from a ramble into a vision is in those lines by Vaughan. In his broadcast on ‘Welsh Poetry’ (1946), Thomas spoke of Vaughan’s ‘authentic and intense vision’ moving across ‘a wild, and yet inevitably ordered, sacred landscape’.104 In clear reaction to the danger of stultification, memories of childhood had already started to become a species of spontaneous therapy. In February 1943 Thomas had broadcast his ‘Reminiscences of Childhood’ on BBC radio – the medium that provided him with supplementary support from 1937 to the end of his life.

116

Dylan Thomas

Deaths and Entrances, his fourth volume of poetry (February 1946), illustrates equally the polarity between released lyricism (‘Poem in October’ and ‘Fern Hill’) and shocked assertion (‘Deaths and Entrances’ and ‘Ceremony after a Fire Raid’) that epitomized all his wartime writing. Both kinds were responses to an emergency. But it seems clear that the outstanding achievement in Deaths and Entrances is ‘Fern Hill’. And one of its central implications for Thomas was the defeat of cynicism. As with the childhood images of Eliot’s Four Quartets, ‘Poem in October’ and ‘Fern Hill’ start the movement of Thomas’s career, despite fears, towards warm celebration, towards an unfeared because increasingly accepted close. The context out of which they sprang was the strange resurgence of creativity that came to him in the last two years of the war, based in Llan-gain (with Laugharne down the road) and New Quay (sparking the beginnings of Under Milk Wood). Linked to this new lease of energy is the fact that Under Milk Wood, despite its long literary beginnings, got in Laugharne its final impetus to get transformed into a major work.

*

*

*

This essay has been modulated by the hindsight that fine works such as ‘Poem in October’, ‘Fern Hill’ and Under Milk Wood provide: in Philip Larkin’s phrase in ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, ‘there we were aimed’. The reader will always need to return to certain blocks that need to be filled out or reassessed. But it still stands that the late work that finally established Thomas’s reputation as a major poet is of such unembarrassed orchestration. Surrender to the fashionable surrealism of the thirties or to the collapsed narratives that had clotted the ‘Altarwise’ sonnet sequence (1934–5), was no longer necessary. In that earlier phase, the only style open to Thomas for pointedly autobiographical utterance was the uncharacteristically bare if pregnant economy of poems such as ‘Out of the sighs’ (1932), ‘Should lanterns shine’ (1933), ‘I have longed to move away’ (1933), ‘O make me a mask’ (1937), ‘Twenty-four years’ (1938) and ‘Once it was the

117

Walford Davies

colour of saying’ (1938). Paradoxically, this helps us make our first point about ‘Fern Hill’ – that its new kind of formal discipline does not kill the tensions that produced it. A still common charge against ‘Fern Hill’ is that of an escapist, bourgeois indulgence, as in Roy Fuller’s description of it as ‘dilute Wordsworthianism’.105 The fact is that any close reading shows that ‘Fern Hill’ is anything but watered-down. How else would it, for so long, have prompted so much opprobrium, let alone praise? Even Philip Larkin (no sentimentalist, though eminently capable of Hardy-like plangencies, and an admirer of Thomas) had to have ‘Fern Hill’ and ‘The Peaches’ warmly in mind in the first place to make his cold anti-elegy, slyly titled ‘I remember, I remember’, work so well: And here we have that splendid family I never ran to when I got depressed, The boys all biceps and the girls all chest. Their comic Ford, their farm where I could be ‘Really myself’. I’ll show you, come to that, The bracken where I never trembling sat . . .

Any notion that ‘Fern Hill’ is simply Thomas Hood’s ‘I remember, I remember the house where I was born . . .’ writ large ignores the intelligence of its detailed organization, most especially the way in which its movement is justified by an accumulative functional richness of associations at every stage. Close reading shows, not dilution but economy. It will be a pleasure to have a reminder of the poem’s texture before us: Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green, The night above the dingle starry, Time let me hail and climb Golden in the heydays of his eyes, And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves Trail with daisies and barley Down the rivers of the windfall light.

118

Dylan Thomas And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home, In the sun that is young once only, Time let me play and be Golden in the mercy of his means, And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold, And the sabbath rang slowly In the pebbles of the holy streams. All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air And playing, lovely and watery And fire green as grass . . .

The style has a quicksilver effect, releasing secondary ‘ghost’ possibilities into its primary statements with a suggestiveness that draws the reader’s attention to the sheer simultaneity of things. In stanza one above, the boy as well as the apple boughs is syntactically ‘About the lilting house’. Similarly, ‘Time let me hail and climb’ is all at once abstract assertion and a concrete description of the child hailing the cart driver and climbing aboard the hay cart. ‘Golden in the heydays of his eyes’ refurbishes the cliché whereby one thinks oneself the apple of someone’s eye; and in context ‘heydays’ registers also as hay-days. ‘Once below a time’, is not a facile neologism because it sobers the innocent presumption in ‘climb’ three lines back by asserting that the child is in fact ‘below’ (subject to) time, especially with night ‘above’. The ‘windfall light’ is momentarily the light of luckily-allowed grace – the farm after all was Shakespeare’s ‘other Eden, demi-paradise’ and Marvell’s ‘The Garden’ (‘What wond’rous life in this I lead!/Ripe apples drop about my head’), let alone the Bible’s actual Eden and (since it speaks of the boy following Time ‘out of grace’) the garden exited in Milton’s Paradise Lost. And yet, back in Carmarthenshire, the ‘windfall light’ is also just the light off early-fallen apples. In a letter from the Blaen Cwm cottage near Fernhill, at the time he was finishing ‘Fern Hill’ itself, Thomas quoted three stanzas of a D. H.

119

Walford Davies

Lawrence poem starting ‘Oh the green glimmer of apples in the orchard’ and including: Nothing now will ripen the bright green apples Full of disappointment and of rain, Brackish they will taste of tears, when the yellow dapples Of autumn tell the withered tale again.106

The play there between green and yellow reminds us of Thomas’s ‘green and golden’. The poem keeps pluralizing its resonances. It is memorably about morning and joy, and yet Thomas said that ‘it’s a poem for evenings and tears’.107 Again in stanza two, above, both the boy and the barns are ‘about the happy yard’. And ‘Singing as the farm was home’ suggests both because the farm was home and (by analogy with ‘happy as the grass was green’) that the boy was singing as surely as the farm was home. In the two lines Time let me play and be Golden in the mercy of his means

we hear that Time let me play; Time let me exist; Time let me alone; Time let me play and be golden – all because of the way Thomas has broken the sentence over the line-break. The second and third meanings would not be there had the two lines been only one. In stanza three, the phrase ‘rang slowly’ at the end of the previous stanza has suggested (via ‘streams’) an analogous ghost phrase, ran slowly, so that stanza three opens, ‘All the sun long it was running’ – with a connection between stanzas that we sense but cannot point to. And that ‘rang’ at the end of the second stanza has brought another sequence of images to the threshold of stanza three: the musical associations of ‘lilting’, ‘singing’, ‘play’, ‘sang’ and ‘rang’ continue into the third stanza, musicalizing simple words like ‘air’ and ‘playing’ without detriment to their literal sense. As a result, the famous final line of the poem – Though I sang in my chains like the sea

120

Dylan Thomas

– has been fed by a sequence of musical imagery throughout, saving it from isolated sentiment. Just as unsuspectedly, stanza three makes us witness the four elements of creation, not by signposting them, but by allowing them simply to dance into life: it was air And playing, lovely and watery And fire green as grass.

This is so much more subtle than ‘Music of elements, that a miracle makes!/Earth, air, water, fire, singing into the white act’ in ‘In Country Sleep’. Then, if ‘fire green as grass’ puzzles us, a phrase from stanza one – ‘happy as the grass was green’ – helps make it mean fire as intensely red as grass is green. There is also its analogue in D. H. Lawrence’s description of nature bursting up ‘in bonfires green’ in ‘The Enkindled Spring’. Lawrence links the force of young human life to the ‘fire’ in nature by dropping the distinction between green and red, Dylan by dropping the distinction between green, red and golden. And so on – to the embarrassment of someone other than the poet or an alert reader. This wealth of effects is helped also by two very different structural facts about ‘Fern Hill’ – one, the surprising stringency of the syllabic count of syllables in each line and, secondly, the fact that this most musically memorable of poems is unrhymed. It uses instead a pattern of assonance where only the vowels match (in stanza one, ‘boughs’-‘towns’, ‘green’-‘leaves’, ‘starry’‘barley’, and so on). The advantage of assonance, as opposed to terminal rhyme, is that it is in league with a child’s hatred of the full stop. The sheer intelligence of the enterprise is clear. What it deserves in return is an openness to its aim of reconstituting in us the simultaneity of a child’s responses. John Malcolm Brinnin records that he saw at the Boat House in Laugharne (where he had come to persuade Thomas to visit America) over two hundred worksheets for ‘Fern Hill’. The reader’s business is to test whether such energy lives also on the page. It does, because the poem

121

Walford Davies

remains faithful to two psychologies at once: that of the remembered child and that of the grown man remembering, to that of innocence as well as that of experience. So instead of merely denoting the boy’s rapture, it enacts it. The accumulative framework of the poem’s thirty-two ‘and’s resurrects the child’s hectic voice as an experience, something more than a mere notion. In the final stanza (the only one in which adult reflection is in unilateral control) ‘and’ has become a tamer link-word inside the sentence, whereas throughout the first five stanzas it is (again) a wry avoidance of the full stop: after all, three stanzas actually start with ‘And’. The child’s voice is also caught in that relaxed and dangerously repeated word ‘lovely’ in stanza three. ‘Lovely’ was a great Swansea word, but it is also a word a child anywhere uses more meaningfully than an adult. The best gloss on it is the use in the short story ‘A Prospect of the Sea’ of that other comfy word ‘nice’: He could think of no words to say how wonderful the summer was, or the noise of the wood-pigeons, or the lazy corn blowing in the half wind from the sea at the river’s end. There were no words for the sky and the sun and the summer country: the birds were nice, and the corn was nice.

Through an attention also to pace and texture, Thomas was able to rival in words visionary effects more often associated with other, more visual, media. We see this if we think of ‘Poem in October’ and, say, Monet’s painting The Poppy Field, or if we compare ‘Fern Hill’ with Chagall’s technique of causing images to float in lilting and tilting spatial relationship with one another. Both poems explore the inner connections already there in language. C. Day Lewis once wrote a pastiche of the manner of ‘Fern Hill’.108 It was a labour of love, but no mere assemblage of this poem’s incidentals ever reproduces its resonant toughness. In ‘Fern Hill’ and ‘Poem in October’ the child’s innocent way of seeing is caught in an inward kind of language and movement palpably different from the poem’s outer meditative frame. The speaker of the Portrait story ‘Extraordinary Little

122

Dylan Thomas

Cough’ starts by saying that its events took place ‘some years before I knew I was happy’. The very condition of the experience retrieved is again a version of ‘negative capability’, seen now as a kind of Edenic instinctiveness. The outer frame of ‘Fern Hill’ (‘Now as I was . . . Oh as I was’) and ‘Poem in October’ (‘O may my heart’s truth/ Still be sung . . .’) has in contrast an assertive quality bred in reaction to the horror of the war just ending, when even victory over genocide was compromised by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To borrow Eliot’s words in ‘Gerontion’: ‘After such knowledge, what forgiveness?’ Thomas despaired of the implications for ‘this apparently hell-bent world’ in the plan he outlined for his series of projected poems to be called collectively ‘In Country Heaven’, of which the three late poems ‘In Country Sleep’, ‘Over Sir John’s hill’ and ‘In the White Giant’s Thigh’ were originally meant to be only parts. ‘The earth,’ he said, in a 1950 broadcast, ‘has killed itself. It is black, petrified, wizened, poisoned, burst; insanity has blown it rotten’.109 In that sense, the sister poems ‘Fern Hill’ and ‘Poem in October’ were already ‘war’ poems.

*

*

*

Thomas would have felt the danger in terms also of family responsibilities. A second child, Aeronwy, had been born in 1943. Nothing serves more than children to give that sense of something pushing you to the edge of your own life. In turn, there was the poet’s own father’s increasing infirmity. Thomas’s relationship with his stern father over the years of his growing fame had developed, to the credit of both, from awed respect into something more orthodoxly affectionate. Our beginnings never know our ends. It was in the same year as ‘Fern Hill’ (1945) that Thomas started the villanelle ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’, though it was not finished till 1951. It stands in contrast to the more loosely confessional ‘Elegy’ on his father that Thomas left unfinished at his own death. Thomas’s best touches still came when difficult emotion had to negotiate a

123

Walford Davies

difficult poetic form. In the villanelle five tercets are followed by a quatrain, with the first and last line of the first stanza repeated alternately as the last line of subsequent stanzas, and gathered into a couplet at the end of the quatrain. And all this on only two rhymes. It is one of the poems Seamus Heaney most admired, quite apart from his appreciation of any poem at all that shows a poet ‘breaking stones for pleasure’. The villanelle is also more subtly allusive than commonly recognized, though the allusions would not have their effect without the strung, straitening influence of the form. The last stanza clearly evokes both King Lear on the heath and Gloucester thinking he is at Dover Cliff, with a tense use of commas: ‘And you, my father, there on the sad height,/Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray’. That comma between ‘Curse’ and ‘bless’ is brilliant. Again, the phrase ‘Because their words had forked no lightning’ wonderfully contracts Romeo’s words: How oft when men are at the point of death Have they been merry! which their keepers call A lightning before death. (Romeo and Juliet, V, 3)

There is even the way in which the last wave (‘the last wave by’) comes across not only as maritime metaphor, but as the ‘last wave’ of a dying person. Thomas would have seen the disciplining advantages of the villanelle form in superb examples by Auden and especially in Empson’s ‘Villanelle’ and ‘Missing Dates’. Indeed, one of Thomas’s parodies in the satiric novel The Death of The King’s Canary is a shortened villanelle titled ‘Request to Leda (Homage to William Empson)’.110 In ‘Do not go gentle’ Thomas capitalizes on the form’s main advantage – that the two key repeated lines can retain their character (the imperative force in both ‘Rage’ and ‘Do not go gentle’) whether they’re freestanding or just syntactically continuing the previous line, because they shimmer between their imperative mood in the first and last stanza and their indicative mood in the four middle stanzas:

124

Dylan Thomas Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.

When the two key lines finally come together at the end, their imperative mood comes through more tenderly. This is a triumph of lyric poetry against formal as well as human odds.

*

*

*

From the end of the war to early May 1949, Thomas lived mainly in London and Oxford and its environs, with visits to Ireland, Italy and Prague. The Prague visit (March 1949) was as guest of the Czechoslovak government, to attend the foundation of the Czech Writers Union. Louis MacNeice was also invited, but did not reply. Accounts of the visit provide a particular insight into Thomas’s character in these last, highly political, years. In snowed-under Prague he enjoyed the company of the poet Vitězslav Nezval and the novelist Jan Drda, patiently endured the inevitable bureaucratic proceedings, and relished mixing with the Czech people, even with official translator in tow. At ‘The Writers’ Home’ at Dohi, he enjoyed walking in the snow in the park. ‘Properly speaking,’ Drda recorded, ‘Dylan Thomas did not seem to walk at all, he frisked and gambolled, he made the impression of a bear floating in the air.’ But it was still this ecstatic bear that protested at the painful literalmindedness of the Czech translator he had been allocated. To make a serious point comically (one of Thomas’s underestimated talents), he even climbed onto the Charles Bridge to clasp one of its famous statues, threatening melodramatically to jump into the river if this particular translator was not replaced. He had obviously learned extra things from his work in film. A wide-eyed official from the Czech Ministry of Information

125

Walford Davies

asked why, therefore, had he come at all, to which Thomas answered, ‘Why not? I’m Left.’ He was genuinely moved by signs of democratic improvements in Czech society, a fact he made clear in a committed speech before the Congress of Writers. But he was saddened that no genuinely free-spirited poetry was publishable in Czechoslovakia at that time, though adding that ‘A real poet must stand everything, and it doesn’t matter if he publishes or not’.111 Within a month of his return from Prague, the family were finally settled at Laugharne. Even so, an idea in his mind since the end of the war had been of emigration to America. The same scatter of motives that had characterized his reaction to the outbreak of war marks his letters to English and American friends on this new possibility. His reputation in America had grown quickly. In 1945 he was awarded the Levinson Poetry Prize of the magazine Poetry (Chicago), and emigration plans and offers became from month to month more tempting and more urgent. Edith Sitwell, who had early and genuinely (though not always intelligently) celebrated his genius, he now saw as a prime guarantor for lecturing and reading engagements in America, an arrangement that in the event became the pattern from 1950 onwards, but under the organization (and, as it turned out, the secret eye) of John Malcolm Brinnin, Director of the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association Poetry Center in New York. Initially, the plan, with Caitlin’s agreement, had been for definite emigration, and Thomas had seriously considered a job with Time magazine and appointments at Harvard and other universities. He saw the possibility as the only real means to start afresh and, as he put it in a demotic phrase, to ‘work a lot and very much’. His output of new poems in the immediate postwar years was small. In impecunious conditions, constant film and radio ‘hack work’ (Caitlin’s term – as unfair to Dylan’s media work as to Edward Thomas’s prose) threatened to endanger the production of new poems and further development as a poet. After the work in films slowly came to an end between 1945 and 1947, he still did over eighty

126

Dylan Thomas

broadcasts for the BBC. The broadcasts made him a household name, but again drastically reduced the time necessary to write poems. It was an imbalance that he came to see as clearly as Caitlin had done. It ultimately forced him (to borrow Castlereagh’s words) ‘to call the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old’.

*

*

*

But before his first departure for America a new phase of creativity had started. It coincided with the poet’s final settlement at Laugharne (early in May 1949) where, within three months, a third child, Colm, was born. A final kind of settled happiness seemed possible – marred only by financial worries, from which Thomas could never in any case be free. Between arriving in Laugharne and the first American tour of February– May 1950, he did only six broadcasts (two in any case from Wales) and worked with happy energy at new poems and at Under Milk Wood in the cliff-side shed close to the now famous Boat House overlooking the magnificent bay and tidal beach of the Taf and Towy rivers that dominate the atmosphere of the last works. Atmosphere precipitated by geography is the main mode of the last poems. A greater sense of human community, added to this geographic rootedness, would have widened the range of this last phase and helped him to explore further the potential – iconoclasm melting into praise – that he had shown ten years before in ‘After the funeral’. More important to Thomas himself would have been the personal quality of wise passiveness that he was able, in the exercise of his craft or sullen art, to realize. It would be folly to suggest that the last phase was all sweetness and light: the letters of the last four years remain full of financial worries and the need for excuses. Yet the tonal achievement of the last poems – each representing what Thomas called ‘the momentary peace which is a poem’ – does point to what he himself would have felt, and welcomed, as a personal maturity. With cruel irony, when his last recorded BBC talk – ‘Laugharne’

127

Walford Davies

– was broadcast on 5 November 1953, it coincided exactly with the first news in Britain of his final collapse in New York. In that short talk he comically trivialized the town’s character, but Laugharne still measured the poet’s quietus of acceptance, recorded in the comic vision of Under Milk Wood combined with the visionary associations of the last poems. It is only because we are able to look back that we see the very different mood, premature more than immature, of the young man who had as early as May 1934 spent ‘Whitsun in the strangest town in Wales’. Back then, in a long letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson, feigning an inability to describe the Laugharne sights before him, he if anything all the more energetically conjured them up: Each muscle in the cockler’s legs is as big as a hill, and each crude footstep in the wretchedly tinted sand deep as hell. These women are sweating the oil of life out of the pores of their stupid bodies, and sweating away what brains they had so that their children might eat, be married and ravished, conceive in their wombs that are stamped with the herring, and, themselves, bring up another race of thicklipped fools to sweat their strengths away on these unutterably deadly sands.112

Even allowing for the dramatic flair he always showed in suiting letters to their recipients, we still see the difference between the young man of twenty and the older (though still young) man who wrote the last works. That letter of 1934 could be contrasted also with a poem like ‘Lament’ (1951), which comes through as enjoyed comedy with affinities, as we noted, to Yeats’s ‘The Wild Old Wicked Man’ and Louis MacNeice’s ‘The Libertine’ and ‘The Suicide’. I whistled all night in the twisted flues, Midwives grew in the midnight ditches, And the sizzling beds of the town cried, Quick! – Whenever I dove in a breast high shoal, Wherever I ramped in the clover quilts, Whatsoever I did in the coalBlack night, I left my quivering prints.

128

Dylan Thomas

‘Lament’ was the most surprising poem of all to have been included in the Collected Poems of 1952. Though a very accomplished piece, its affinities are with the kind of material that was soon to go into the writing of Under Milk Wood, where ingredients of ugliness or even nastiness are transformed into comedy, though any slack sense of that word ‘comedy’ does not cover all aspects of the ‘Play for Voices’.

12. ‘Is my voice being your eyes?’: Under Milk Wood It is not possible in a brief study to follow Thomas from venue to venue on those four triumphant yet tragic American trips, any more than from pub to pub at home. And the six poems of his final separate volume In Country Sleep (published only in America, in February 1952) are the appropriate lyric and autobiographical note for the final end. So in the meantime the work to turn to here is Under Milk Wood, the single work of long and plural gestation by which, partly because of its immediately posthumous publication, Thomas has come to be most widely known. If the early prose was surrealistic myth-making and the Portrait stories (in Thomas’s phrase) ‘illuminated reporting’, the term that comes to mind to describe Under Milk Wood is ‘Chaucerian’, the opposite of the unnerving Swiftian element in the description of the mourners in ‘After the funeral’ while also containing it. It is clear that, at a time when the poems (early so strangely unpeopled) were seeking to re-populate themselves, Under Milk Wood turned at a stroke to a literary form unimaginable without people, employing as it does a dramatis personae of 54 characters. As Thomas put it, ‘the kind of poetry I was writing was not fluid enough to represent lived-around subjects, and I wanted to find a form that would be’.113 The comment interestingly implies that, because the need had arisen, poetry and prose had once again – in a different sense from the mixed prose-poetry of the early

129

Walford Davies

stories – become interchangeable, though he still called it ‘prose with blood pressure’. The repopulation of his work was helped of course by the fact that the characters of the play for voices are necessarily to some degree caricatures. But, as in Chaucer or Shakespeare, our laughter is never thoughtless, even among caricatures. In fact, our first impulse to call Under Milk Wood ‘Chaucerian’ in merely a lighthearted sense diminishes every time we experience the pull of its undertow. The play distils a particular brand of Welsh gothic too often unrecognized. The comedy retains a residual darkness because of the degree of its instinctive investment in spectral presences, psychological anxieties and the misrule of the carnivalesque. As a result, swerving endlessly as Under Milk Wood does between light and shade, the only defence it needs against a charge of idle simplicity is T. S. Eliot’s defence of Ben Jonson’s comic art: It is what it is; it does not pretend to be another thing. But it is so very conscious and deliberate that we must look with eyes alert to the whole before we apprehend the significance of any part. We cannot call a man’s work superficial when it is the creation of a world; a man cannot be accused of dealing superficially with the world which he himself has created; the superficies is the world. Jonson’s characters conform to the logic of the emotions of their world. They are not fancy, because they have a logic of their own; and this logic illuminates the actual world, because it gives us a new point of view from which to inspect it.114

Added to all this is the impact of the Second World War. As early as 1934 Thomas had written that ‘Artists, as far as I can gather, have set out, however unconsciously, to prove one of two things: either that they are mad in a sane world, or that they are sane in a mad world’.115 In 1943 Thomas outlined to Richard Hughes the novelist (whose home was in the grounds of Laugharne Castle) an idea that shows that his need to start thinking of a structure for his play was taking him in a strange direction. A whole village is certified as mad by an inspector sent down from London, and this despite the fact that, as the

130

Dylan Thomas

villagers’ own testimony proves, the place is on the contrary an island of sanity in a mad world. A year later Thomas pushed the idea further in a conversation with Constantine FitzGibbon. The village was to be declared not only mad but dangerous: ‘Barbed wire was strung about it and patrolled by sentries, lest its dotty inhabitants infect the rest of the world with their feckless and futile view of life’.116 FitzGibbon makes it clear that Thomas had in mind, not the world of UK detention and prisoner of war camps, but the obscenity of the Nazi concentration camps. This was the underpinning of a work that in the upshot is ‘comic’ only in the broadest sense of that genre. A new impulse for writing the play came naturally from the sudden burgeoning of Thomas’s career as a radio broadcaster. He had been reading poetry and acting on radio on an occasional basis since 1939. But from 1943 onwards the number of his contributions dramatically increased. If we include readings, in the ten years left to him he was to record no fewer than 156 broadcast contributions – of which 28 were full scripts of his own. The most important one at this point is the BBC broadcast ‘Quite Early One Morning’, a feature recorded for the Welsh Home Service in December 1944, and the first brief attempt at evoking a sleeping community, the start of Under Milk Wood. It sprang from Thomas’s experience of living, between September 1944 and July 1945, at New Quay, a seaside village on the Cardiganshire coast. It portrays a still-sleeping community as a visitor moves through its streets on an early morning in winter, ‘like a stranger come out of the sea’.117 The broadcast helped start a gallery of characters. Prototypes for characters such as Captain Cat, Eli Jenkins and Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard are there, though they speak counter-productively in artificial quatrains. The narrator is essentially Thomas himself, tired of London, and the work a brief radio feature essentially the equivalent of a short story. In August 1946 he wrote to Margaret Taylor, who had visited New Quay a year after Thomas’s period there: Time has stopped, says the Black Lion clock, and Eternity has begun. I’m so glad you met and like Dai Fred who bottled your ship. Did

131

Walford Davies you come across Dewi, the battery-man? Evan Joshua of the Bluebell? The Norman you know is New Quay’s noisiest and least successful fighter; every summer he starts a fight, and every summer some tiny little ape-man knocks him yards over the harbour-wall or bang through the chemist’s window. Did Mrs Evans the Lion twitch, wink, and sip?118

The four-page ‘Quite Early One Morning’ was too short to deliver even the ‘mad town’ idea. Yet it hints at it in a joke about one unpopular (= outsider) inhabitant of the village, a ‘retired male nurse who had come to live in Wales after many years’ successful wrestling with the mad rich of Southern England’: He measured you for a strait-jacket carefully with his eye; he saw you bounce from rubber walls like a sorbo ball. No behaviour surprised him. Many people of the town found it hard to resist leering at him suddenly around the corner, or convulsively dancing, or pointing with laughter and devilish good humour at invisible dog-fights merely to prove to him that they were normal.119

‘Good humour’, whether devilish or not, is different from humour. It is a suitable description of some characters within Under Milk Wood, but an inadequate description of others in the (in some ways) dark elegy that the whole work finally became. The small dramatis personae of New Quay was augmented tenfold – complicating it – through Thomas’s experience over many years of Laugharne. Equally important, the work was artistically transformed by the widening twenty-four-hour parabola he conceived for the full masterpiece it grew into. The move to Laugharne in May 1949 was crucial. We should not forget that Dylan’s experience of Laugharne had had three previous incarnations. First, he spent Whitsun there in May 1934 with the novelist Glyn Jones, which was when he called it ‘the strangest town in Wales’, with ‘a population of four hundred . . . a townhall, a castle, and a portreeve. The people speak with a broad English accent, although on all sides they are surrounded by hundreds of miles of Welsh county. The neutral sea lies at the

132

Dylan Thomas

foot of the town, and Richard Hughes writes his cosmopolitan stories in the castle’.120 It was the beginning of Laugharne’s significance for the play, and sealed a lifetime’s friendship with Glyn Jones, who said that 1934 was not even Thomas’s first visit to Laugharne. Secondly, between early May and late November 1938, Thomas, now married to Caitlin, actually lived in Laugharne. By the time they left the village, their first child Llewelyn was on the way (born 30 January 1939, celebrated in the poem ‘A saint about to fall’). It was a period that also produced the finished key poems ‘Not from this anger’, ‘O make me a mask, ‘When all my five and country senses’, ‘The spire cranes’, ‘How shall my animal’, ‘After the funeral’, ‘On no work of words’ and ‘The tombstone told when she died’, all the poems that attest 1938 as the crucial turning-point. As regards prose, this period in Laugharne produced ‘A Visit to Grandpa’s’ and ‘One Warm Saturday’, the first and the last written of the wonderful Portrait stories. Thirdly, from 2 May 1941 the Thomases lived for three months at Laugharne Castle with Frances Hughes while Richard Hughes was away at the war. There he completed ‘On the Marriage of a Virgin’, ‘Among those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred’, ‘The hunchback in the park’, and the prose Adventures in the Skin Trade. To write in, he had the summer house looking over the lower half of the town with its marshy harbour and looking across at Sir John’s Hill. Thomas told Vernon Watkins (who visited him there in June, and many times thereafter) that he hoped to settle down in Laugharne. In 1941 this was not to be, but, reflecting something deep in that hope, it was during this particular residence at Laugharne that he sold his Notebooks, as if drawing a line against retrieval and revision to give birth to the new. In May 1949 Margaret Taylor bought for the Thomas family the by now iconic ‘Boat House’. The poet’s plural arrivals in Laugharne had always been in May, the Spring season without which the ultimate play for voices is unimaginable, compared with ‘one morning . . . after a night of tar-black howling and

133

Walford Davies

rolling’ at New Quay in ‘Quite Early One Morning’. Laugharne represented Thomas’s first permanent home since leaving 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, Swansea in the early 1930s as a nineteen/ twenty-year-old. It was that new sense of permanence, spiced with the village’s richness of character and atmosphere, that finally made any abstract ‘The Town That Was Mad’ scenario unnecessary. As Caitlin put it: Dylan loved all that small-town pomp and the nonsense gossip that he lapped up every morning in Ivy Williams’ kitchen at Brown’s Hotel . . . Dylan found it very cosy, and it was there that he picked up all the character vignettes which he moulded into Under Milk Wood. The folk of Laugharne were engaged in an endless wrangle of feuds, affairs, fights, frauds and practical jokes . . . Dylan captured all that, and the lives of the more respectable people behind their blinds who wouldn’t come to the pub anyway, who wore their best Sunday suits, and walked to church with a Bible under their arms: he saw it all.121

Naturally, some characters and phrases from New Quay (‘deeper waves than ever tossed’, ‘bombazine-black’, ‘the knitted text and the done-by-hand watercolours’, and the ‘big seas of dreams’) joined in Laugharne a much larger store. So much so that Thomas started considering whether the idea of the work should be even further developed as a stage comedy in verse. It was only in late 1950 that he started imagining the full work as we now have it, when, much to Thomas’s relief, Douglas Cleverdon advised him to drop the ‘Mad Town’ plot altogether and see the work, not as a radio play, but as a radio ‘feature’. Cleverdon crystallized the distinction: A radio play is a dramatic work deriving from the tradition of theatre, but conceived in terms of radio. A radio feature is, roughly, any constructed programme . . . that derives from the technical apparatus of radio . . . It can combine any sound elements – words, music, sound effects – in any form or mixture of forms – documentary, actuality, dramatized, poetic, musico-dramatic. It has no rules determining what can or cannot be done. And though it may be in dramatic form, it has no need of a dramatic plot.122

134

Dylan Thomas

From its first broadcast in 1953, it was popularly dubbed ‘the best radio play ever written’. Of course, counter-boasts could be entered. From 1957 on, for example, one could have imagined a real claim for Samuel Beckett’s brilliant All That Fall. The comparison is not crudely between so-called tragic and so-called comic material – the wireless is a medium that wryly merges the two. The claim for Under Milk Wood is how totally and cleverly suffused it is with language’s ability to make us see what we cannot, on radio, literally see. All That Fall is not concerned with what is Under Milk Wood’s most radical feature – its selfreferential delight in the very medium it is using, which is part of why the comedy and inventive word play never feels thin or gratuitous, because we feel involved in what makes it all possible. When Maddy in Beckett’s play says, ‘Do not imagine, because I am silent, that I am not present’ it is an isolated salute to the medium. Each time you listen to Under Milk Wood, all the play’s resources, tirelessly and unerringly, are within you. Each time, to borrow T. S. Eliot’s words in Four Quartets, ‘you are the music while the music lasts’. The evanescence of pictures in the mind means that a ‘play for voices’ has to be all the more vivid. The very paradox of a vivid evanescence is written into the play in self-referential touches throughout. The very first direction – ‘Silence’ – threatens the world of sound by which a radio play lives. In a playful awareness of its own form, the play then continues to threaten itself with words notionally on their way back towards silence – ‘muffled’, ‘lulled’, ‘dumbfound’, ‘hushed’, ‘dumb’, ‘gloved’, ‘furred’. At one stage in the worksheets now at the University of Texas, Thomas considered teasing even our dependence on words at all, by evoking their opposite, in the wordlessness of dreams: Mrs Rose Cottage’s eldest, Mae, is dreaming of dreaming of tall, tower, white, furnace, cave, flower, ferret, waterfall, sigh, without any words at all.

135

Walford Davies

But though radio is a good medium for the quick montage of dreams, Thomas recognized that that staccato list would still have come through as, well, words, not brisk pictures. He rewrote the passage so that we are led instead through the discrete words into a delightfully indiscreet picture: Mrs Rose Cottage’s eldest, Mae, peels off her pink-and-white skin in a furnace in a tower in a cave in a waterfall in a wood and waits there raw as an onion for Mister Right to leap up the burning tall hollow splashes of leaves like a brilliantined trout.

In these ways the act of so-called ‘seeing’ is never taken for granted. The very fact that the play starts and ends with dark night makes the medium the message. On radio, beyond the words, there is, literally, only a non-seeing. As a friend of Richard Hughes’s, Thomas knew that the very first play specifically produced for radio was Hughes’s A Comedy of Danger (1924), set in the pitch black of a coalmine after an accident. Everything in such works depends, in Captain Cat’s wonderful phrase, on ‘the noise of the hush’, on what Under Milk Wood also calls a ‘calling dark’. Using a clever inversion of the ordinary call to attention, Can you hear me from there?, the play repeatedly, confidently, tells us that ‘From where you are you can hear . . .’ because ‘where you are’, close to the wireless set, is the only place where you can hear. When later momentarily threatened (‘all too far away for him, or you, to hear’), listeners all the more alertly stick by their station. Our natural human curiosity wants that heard darkness to be a darkness visible. It is the instinct that makes John Wain’s poem ‘Blind Man Listening to Radio’ and Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Broadcast’ so true to the hidden reciprocity of senses. Wain’s poem ends: I lie in bed, twirl a serrated knob. From my ear, a beam goes out across oceans, continents. I taste the crash of surf, the wind in the gull’s pinions, the hard feet of mules in the high passes.

136

Dylan Thomas

In Larkin’s poem his girlfriend is at a live concert, broadcast from the City Hall in Hull. Listening at home, Larkin finds himself imagining her ‘gloves unnoticed on the floor’ (a prop not mentioned in Radio Times!), with the applause at the end leaving him desperate to pick out Your hands, tiny in all that air, applauding.

Hands in the air of even a City Hall auditorium are tiny, but ‘all that air’ here means also the blind and vast airwaves. Access via the heard to the seen is exactly what is celebrated in Under Milk Wood. On the very first page, ‘the courters’-andrabbit’s wood limping invisible down to the . . . sea’ is a play not only on ‘limping’ (refurbishing the romantic cliché whereby woods normally run down to the sea) but also on the word ‘invisible’ (not only is it night, we are listening to radio). On the last page, we are told that a breeze ‘sighs the streets’ close under Milk Wood. We might not feel prompted overmuch to imagine the sound of a sigh, but that the breeze comes from ‘the creased water’ is something we suddenly visualize, as clearly as the ‘tear-splashed blush’ of the bullied boy in the children’s forfeiting game. Beyond these small touches, the language is also all the while negotiating the multiple angles from which things are visible in the first place. Hence Lily Smalls’s view of her own face in Mr Beynon’s shaving-glass or the view that the morning seagulls have of Dai Bread hurrying to the bakery, reversed as it is later in Willy Nilly’s view ‘in sudden Springshine’ of ‘herring gulls heckling down to the harbour’. These varying perspectives are shared out and interchanged between narrator and character, like angles between different cameras: MRS PUGH . . . Has Mr Jenkins said his poetry? MR PUGH Yes, dear.

137

Walford Davies MRS PUGH Then it’s time to get up. Give me my glasses. No, not my reading glasses, I want to look out. I want to see. Lily Smalls the treasure down on her red knees washing the front step.

Lily Smalls is only the first of a series of main characters whom Mrs Pugh then ‘sees’, like a CCTV camera, on our behalf. Radio is reminding us of film. Like Mrs Pugh, we too must be careful not to keep only our ‘reading glasses’ on. When we read on the first page that ‘Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organplaying wood’, we should remember that Thomas was since childhood a keen cinema fan. Glow-worms as bridesmaids and trees like the cartoon pipes of an organ – everything no doubt swaying and bulging musically – it is pure Walt Disney. And yet these visual effects are successful only because the words on the original page have already the heart of the matter in them. A remarkable thing about Under Milk Wood as a play for voices is the sheer number of expressions which, though perfectly quietly at home when we hear them, have a weird memorability that makes them also return singly to the mind as from a written text. Given time for reflection, we identify the kink in their logic that makes each one memorable. For example, the description of night, going through the graveyard ‘with winds gloved and folded’ is by simple analogy with the folded wings of carved angels on gravestones. Slightly more puzzling might be Mog Edwards’s boast that he will take Myfanwy Price away to his Emporium on the hill ‘where the change hums on wires’, an image that memorializes a feature of the posh Swansea shops of an era that was coming to an end. But the important thing about Under Milk Wood is that its quality is best appreciated if we recognize also its essentially low-key ambitions. As early as 1959 Raymond Williams123 wrote

138

Dylan Thomas

well on the play because he took its ‘dramatic’ modesty for granted, complimenting instead its freedom from what Williams called the ‘primary complaint against the majority drama of [the twentieth] century . . . the thinness, the single dimension, of its language.’ Conversely, David Holbrook’s one-dimensioned moralistic attack124 is made irrelevant because he pelted the play only with readerly touchstones (from Chaucer to Lawrence and Joyce and T. F. Powys), with no concern at all for the medium as well as the message. As early as 1932, Thomas had mentioned to his Swansea ‘communist grocer’ friend, Bert Trick, his aim of writing a Welsh equivalent to Ulysses. His point was only that the idea of a series of events taking the space of only twenty-four hours appealed to him. He modestly confessed that the stories in Joyce’s Dubliners sobered his assessment of his own short stories. But Under Milk Wood is a ‘trivializing’ work only in the root Latin sense of ‘belonging to the common streets’, like Joyce’s work. Thomas reduces a view of life to immediately entertaining details, which is not to say that he does not manage to catch profound resonances. We do not get anywhere with the play unless we see, first, that its jokes are relaxed and funny – and funny exactly because they are relaxed: His mother, propped against a pot in a palm, with her wedding-ring waist and bust like a blackcloth diningtable, suffers in her stays. REV. ELI JENKINS Oh, angels be careful there with your knives and forks, he prays. There is no known likeness of his father Esau, who, undogcollared because of his little weakness, was scythed to the bone one harvest by mistake when sleeping with his weakness in the corn. He lost all ambition and died, with one leg. REV. ELI JENKINS Poor Dad, grieves the Reverend Eli,

139

Walford Davies REV. ELI JENKINS to die of drink and agriculture.

Yet, even here, there is a brilliant unstrained surrealism at work. Is it the photograph, or the mother in the photograph, that is ‘propped against a pot in a palm’? As for the palm (that period photographic prop), it is described as large enough to contain its pot. Eli Jenkins’s ‘Oh, angels be careful there with your knives and forks’ is a prayer, not just an exclamation, given the mad confluence of the associations of ‘diningtable’, the mother’s cruelly restrictive corsets and the father’s unfortunate encounter with the ‘scythe’. And all this in response to a photograph of his mother, when there survives ‘no known likeness [photograph] of his father’ – a deft hint of excommunication even from the family album in this holy room. It is the surrealism of nicely layered comedy. The play was only really started towards the end of the war, yet its true genesis lay much further back. The fantasticating ‘loner’ stance of the narrator was essentially autobiographical: the young Swansea schoolboy in the Portrait story ‘Just Like Little Dogs’ (1939) had brought it memorably into play: I was a lonely nightwalker and a steady stander-at-corners. I liked to walk through the wet town after midnight, when the streets were deserted and the window lights out, alone and alive on the glistening tramlines in dead and empty High Street under the moon, gigantically sad in the damp streets by ghostly Ebenezer Chapel.

In Robert Frost’s phrase, the author of Under Milk Wood had long ‘been one acquainted with the night’ – I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet When far away an interrupted cry Came over houses from another street.

The basic idea of a detached onlooker and a sleeping community had been exercised in the prose works from the early thirties

140

Dylan Thomas

onwards. ‘Quite Early One Morning’, in 1944, was the first formal attempt at expanding the idea, but ten years earlier the device had been employed in the short story ‘The Orchards’ (1934), where in fact the name ‘Llareggub’ was first used, along with other uncanny anticipations of the play: ‘A baby cried, but the cry grew fainter. It is all one, the loud voice and the still voice striking a common silence, the dowdy lady flattening her nose against the panes, and the well-mourned lady.’ Or compare these details from the uncollected short story, ‘The Horse’s Ha’ (1936): ‘out came the grocer with an egg in his hand, and the butcher in a bloody coat . . . Butcher and baker fell asleep that night, their women sleeping at their sides . . . over the shops, the cold eggs that had life, the box where the rats worked all night on the high meat, the shopkeepers gave no thought of death.’ What lies between them and comparable details in the later play for voices is disinfection of the author’s earlier disaffection. In ‘The Orchards’ even the directorial involvement of a sightless audience was used (my italics): ‘Poor Marlais’s morning, turning to evening, spins before you . . . Marlais’s death in life in the circular going down of the day that had taken no time blows again in the wind for you.’ David Holbrook’s view that this scenario device in Under Milk Wood was merely a plagiarism from Eliot’s ‘East Coker’ (‘If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close’) is wrong. It was already there in Thomas’s 1930s prose, and was developed throughout the 1940s via the disciplines of film and radio. For example, the narrator–listener–viewer relationship in The Doctor and the Devils (1944) is a clear prototype, with camera directions such as ‘Morning’, ‘From a long way off’, ‘From our distance’, ‘Closer now’, ‘Closer still’ and ‘Now, with his eyes, we see . . .’ Even the superb freshness of the morning sequences of Under Milk Wood owes something to comparable sections in Twenty Years A-Growing (1944) and The Doctor and the Devils, and their continued equivalents in The Beach of Falesá (1948), a filmscript based on the short story by Robert Louis Stevenson, one of the best writers since Dickens to remind us that the line between

141

Walford Davies

so-called ‘popular’ and so-called ‘major’ writing is not easily defined. At the same time, the catalogues of Welsh domestic items (the ‘List lit.’ aspect) were there in the Notebooks from 1930 onwards (especially in ‘Especially when the October wind’, 1934), long before they were made a meal of in ‘After the funeral’ and ‘The Peaches’ in 1938, and a veritable feast of in Under Milk Wood. In terms of just human material as opposed to medium, one could go back to a parody of modern plays about famous people by the seventeen-year-old Dylan in the Swansea Grammar School Magazine: MUSSOLINI: Is nothing in this place ever right? WIFE (complacently): No dear. I hope you remembered to change your underclothing. MUSSOLINI: I did. And to air my shirt. And do my teeth. And wash behind my ears.125

This, thirty-two years before the play, was a forecast of Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard’s exchange with her two dead husbands: MR OGMORE: I must put my pyjamas in the drawer marked pyjamas. MR PRITCHARD: I must take my cold bath which is good for me. MR OGMORE: I must wear my flannel band to ward off sciatica . . .

Nor should the play’s tap roots in other writers be overlooked. Along with their precious attractiveness, we are not meant to miss the satire in the words written ‘in his poem-room’ by Eli Jenkins: ‘Llareggub hill, 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.’ Eli Jenkins’s morning and evening hymns parody the local poeticizing that we still find in our county newspapers. But the satire at this point has a more impressive source – the story of Blodeuwedd, the girl created ‘out of flowers’ by the wizard Gwydion in the Mabinogion, even if Thomas’s direct source was the Celtic romanticism of Arthur

142

Dylan Thomas

Machen’s Autobiography (1922): ‘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.’ The play appears anything but soft-centred when we recognize these layers of satiric anti-romantic strikes that are also part of its wider acknowledgement of the dark. Another missable example is the leg-pull when the narrator says that ‘The music of the spheres is heard distinctly over Milk Wood. It is “The Rustle of Spring”’. It helps if we know that ‘The Rustle of Spring’ by the Norwegian composer Christian Sinding was a salon piano piece, a cliché of bourgeois musical taste that carried ‘best room’ connotations of static ordinariness. And how long, we wonder, had Thomas known the American Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915). He wrote a penetrating essay in introduction to a radio reading of selections from that work in September 1952 (sadly never broadcast), exactly when he was revising Under Milk Wood. The parallels between the two works are obvious. In Masters’s series of freeverse poems, the dead of the town of Spoon River speak from the graveyard of the fears, loves and wants that had driven them in life; and the ‘Epilogue’ even has the dramatic structure of Thomas’s play, complete with First and Second Voices. The work clearly had an influence on the marvellous ‘drowned sailors’ sequence that Thomas placed so prominently early in the play, and which T. S. Eliot told Vernon Watkins was his favourite part of Under Milk Wood.126 That sequence probably owed something also to Thomas Hardy’s poems ‘Friends Beyond’ and ‘Voices From Things Growing In A Churchyard’. That very run of authors’ names – Masters, Hardy, Eliot, Machen, Watkins, Thomas – is an interesting convergence around so apparently simple a work. But of course the work was not simple, and its final completion was anything but speedily achieved. A section appeared as ‘Llareggub: A Piece For Radio Perhaps’ in the international magazine Botteghe Oscure in April 1952. During the third American tour (April–June 1953) it was read in an unfinished state at Harvard and at the Poetry Center of the Young Men and Young

143

Walford Davies

Women’s Hebrew Association in New York (of which John Malcolm Brinnin was director) with Thomas adding material literally up to the last minute. It was those New York readings that finally reassured him of the work’s inevitable public appeal. Behind the play there had always lain a sociological rationale of sorts. This had first become conscious as early as December 1939, when Thomas told Richard Hughes that ‘what the people of Laugharne need is a play about themselves, a play in which they can act themselves’. The idea of those depicted being also the actors is interesting: at the opposite end of the social spectrum, it had once been a feature of the Masque – in Milton’s Comus, for example. Even when performed today on stage, Under Milk Wood gains an extra dimension when the actors are not thespian professionals. ‘Effortful Performances Fail Miserably’ is a review headline Thomas would love to have lived to agree with. And, as noted above (pp. 130–1), Thomas in his description of an enlarged plot to Richard Hughes in 1943 and to Constantine FitzGibbon at the end of the war (when news of the horror of Hitler’s concentration camps had become widespread) was contemplating a work not just of sociological but of worldpolitical impact, however much at-an-angle its treatment. Once entertained, those abandoned scenarios of democratic involvement on the one hand and of anti-totalitarianism on the other remained potential in the work. They helped him see the play as something more than ‘lite’ pastoral. As in Shakespeare’s As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale, exclusion of the ‘real’ world can be a retreat into sanity. So while there is an important sense in which Under Milk Wood is an unpretentious sport, it holds good also to an important truth – the notion of basic innocence. Where this surfaces in pat sentences by some dodgy or simplistic characters – ‘Isn’t life a terrible thing, thank God’ (Polly Garter), even ‘We are not wholly bad or good’ (Eli Jenkins) – it is never meant to be more than passingly approved or indulged. A much deeper persuasiveness is invested in the play’s pastoral, visionary tones as a whole. Mary Ann Sailors, for example,

144

Dylan Thomas goes down the cockleshelled paths of that applepie kitchen garden, ducking under the gippo’s clothespegs, catching her apron on the blackcurrant bushes, past beanrows and onion-bed and tomatoes ripening on the wall towards the old man playing the harmonium in the orchard, and sits down on the grass at his side and shells the green peas that grow up through the lap of her frock that brushes the dew.

Against the realism of cockleshelled paths, clothespegs and tomatoes ripening on the wall, the shelling of peas ‘that grow up through the lap of her frock’ is an exquisite late surrealist touch. This time, the historical otherness of radio really compensated Thomas’s dislike of larger dramatic structures. The ‘Play for Voices’ enabled him to live (as a main side of him always liked doing) in a world of words. Because it does not rely on cold literary or ‘literal’ response for any dramatic empathy, or on any serious sociological estimate of the nature of Welsh society (or of society anywhere), its power is lost in any stage production that is not absolutely minimalist. It was inevitable that the renaissance of Welsh-language cultural-nationalist pride during Thomas’s adult lifetime should have prompted unfair resentment at what seemed a free-trading in ‘stage-Welshness’. But the resentment never had any of the internecine intensity described in Yeats’s 1907 poem ‘On Those That Hated the “Playboy of the Western World”’, Synge’s take on rural Ireland at that time, which of course led to bitter riots. In fact in Wales, as early as 1968, a truce was signed across the Welsh-language divide in T. James Jones’s deft adaptation of the play into Welsh, that other living but quite different language of Wales, as Dan y Wenallt. The very stature of this essentially Welsh work, and its creative struggle to be about ‘a place of love,’ is reflected in the subtle ease with which it has become an embracing classic, wide open to any kind of sabotage exactly because it is already so busy sabotaging itself.

145

Walford Davies

13. ‘The rhymer in the long tongued room’: writing places and the place of the poet Some of the best of Thomas’s later work – ‘Over Sir John’s hill’, ‘In the white giant’s thigh’, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ and the first part of Under Milk Wood – was published in the Italian magazine Botteghe Oscure. That dark phrase, which literally means ‘the dark workshop’, would have been lightened for Thomas not only by the quality and cosmopolitan range of the authors the magazine published (including, in English, Wallace Stevens and Auden) but by its association with radical democratic politics in Europe – like the Italian Communist Party Offices, the magazine was housed in a street carrying that name. But more important is the way in which the ambiguity of the image of a ‘dark workshop’, a cave of making, applies to his own workplaces over the years. These ranged from the back ‘bedroom by the boiler’ in his childhood home in Swansea, to a simple summer house in the ruins of Laugharne Castle, to a rundown Chelsea studio, to the derelict Apple-House at Llanina, to a damp summer house in the grounds of Magdalen College, Oxford, to finally and famously, above the Boat House at Laugharne, an old shed (‘my hut on a cliff’) overlooking two estuaries whose rivers, the Taf and the Towy, would have taken his mind back daily to even more privative Carmarthenshire roots. All these workplaces were cribbed, cabined, confined. But they were not dark: they all looked out on magnificent views. Pace ‘In my craft or sullen art/Exercised in the still night/ When only the moon rages’, Thomas never wrote at night: so different from Auden who even in daytime demanded that all blinds be pulled down so that he could work by electric light – ‘a light one/could mend a watch by’. Thomas’s work rooms were only dark – oscure – in the sense of closely housing the energy of his ‘craft or sullen art’. Despite the hard work demanded by structurally complicated poems, Thomas always lightened up about his meagre writing locations, yet without obscuring their

146

Dylan Thomas

meagreness. As late as the broadcast ‘On Reading One’s Own Poems’ (1949) he thought it worth simplifying them all, not unjustly, as ‘small rooms in Wales’. In an unpublished letter of 31 December 1944 he wrote to thank Lord Howard de Walden for allowing me to use the oneroomed cottage at Llanina for work and escape from the cries of children. I started work there before Christmas – on having your letter – but had to go to London very soon after to write a little film. Now I’m back, I hope to go on using the cottage and to get through a lot of work. It is not, by the way, the small guest-house in front of the main house that I am using – the floor of that has been entirely removed – but an empty cottage the cliff side of the garden wall: a really excellent workroom.127

Here he first exaggerates the old Apple-house at Llanina by calling it a ‘cottage’, but not without also collapsing ‘oneroomed’ into a single word. It was a small stone building at the back of the walled garden of the mansion at Llanina that de Walden had taken as his family home in Wales on leaving Chirk Castle. According to Lady Howard de Walden, it was ‘uninhabitable with a hole even in the roof’. Hence her surprise when her husband warned her against going there because there was ‘a young man living there’.128 So she missed the chance of meeting the thirty-year-old Dylan Thomas. Some five years later Thomas was to write to his friend Hector MacIver from an even more straitened writing room, the garage-shed at Laugharne, now as iconic as the Boat House itself – that ‘My study, atelier, or bard’s bothy roasts on a cliff-edge’.129 The writing location is relevant when the location gets to be a substantive presence in the poem itself, absorbing location into theme. This is magnificently the case of the rotting tower at Ballylee where, like Il Penseroso’s Platonist, Yeats ‘toiled on’, writing the great poems of his 1928 volume The Tower. But it becomes doubly relevant in poems that reflect self-consciously the actual act of their writing. Thomas is at the very head of that category. In the 1936 short story ‘The Orchards’, Marlais ‘raised

147

Walford Davies

his pencil so that its shadow fell, a tower of wood and lead, on the clean paper; he fingered the pencil tower, the half-moon of his thumb-nail rising and setting behind the leaden spire.’ The periphrasis (describing the pencil as ‘a tower of wood and lead’) draws even more attention to the slow self-consciousness of craft. In ‘My hero bares his nerves’ the poet’s nerves, ‘so wired to the skull/Ache on the lovelorn paper/I hug to love with my unruly scrawl . . ./And tells the page the empty ill’. In ‘When all my five and country senses’ the ‘five senses’ merge with the five fingers of the writing hand and, because of each nail’s halfmoon, become a ‘handfull zodiac’. In ‘The hand that signed the paper’ the image is used to accuse a Nazi tyrant’s hand, not that of a poet working under the wiser tyranny of words. It is no wonder that this usually separable image of a hand, writing should have been brought to the foreground in Ceri Richards’s paintings in illustration of Thomas’s poems. The image of a hand, writing is perhaps most telling in one of Thomas’s finest and earliest poems, ‘The force that through the green fuse’, about being unable to tell: And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

The ‘invisible worm’ of Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose’ is clearly there, but just as clear is the ‘crooked worm’ of Thomas’s jack-knifed forefinger on his pen, at work not on a winding sheet but on a ‘sheet’ of paper. It is like Edward Thomas’s right hand Crawling crab-like over the clean white page, Resting awhile each morning on the pillow, Then once more starting to crawl on towards age.

Edward Thomas’s poem is titled ‘The Long Small Room’, just as Dylan’s writing-shed at Laugharne in ‘Poem on his Birthday’ is ‘the long tongued room’, both phrases as if lengthening the straitened space in which the poem is actually created.

148

Dylan Thomas

In this connection, Thomas’s use above of the French word ‘atelier’ – an artist’s workshop, a place where a master’s talent was traditionally passed on by demonstration to pupils – though playful, is also interesting. Its literary equivalent today would be our widely popular ‘Creative Writing’ courses. Given his endless concern with essentially the craft of verse, Thomas would have been a prime catch to oversee any creative writing group. America knew as much and had started making him offers. But, not unusually for his generation in Britain, as opposed to America, he had doubts about the value of such courses. A very long letter to Margaret Taylor on the subject in June 1950 ends, ‘I shall write again, and not all about Poets-in-Bloody-Residence and Work-Bloody-Shops’.130 In the radio script of 1952 on Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology he emphasized in a pointed aside the difference between a classic painter’s atelier and a modern poetry workshop: In poetry workshops . . . would-be poets are supposed to study the craft under some distinguished practitioner. Perhaps the original idea was to provide for apprentice poets what a master’s studio once did for apprentice painters. But the master-painter used to paint all the time, and his apprentices assisted him and were busy under his direction. A master-poet, if he exists, is supposed, in these literary warrens, to spend nearly all his time dealing with, and encouraging, the imitations, safe experiments, doodlings and batchings of his students, and to do his own stuff on the side. What a pity he does not have the apprentice poets to help him with the duller bits of his own work. There is a future in this, however ghastly.131

Thomas’s instinct here is at last fully in accord with Hopkins. A Hopkins letter drew an important distinction between ‘inspiration’ and craft: The strictly poetical inspiration of our poetry seems to me to be of the very finest, finer perhaps than the Greek; but its rhetoric is inadequate – seldom first-rate, mostly only just sufficient, sometimes even below par. By rhetoric I mean all the common and teachable element in literature, what grammar is to speech, what thoroughbass is to music, what theatrical experience gives to playwrights.

149

Walford Davies

Hopkins (the Classics ‘star of Balliol’) had received the finest education possible as to what ‘rhetoric’ meant, but here democratizes that ancient term as the ‘teachable element in literature’. Craft, like rhetoric, is teachable; inspiration, whatever that is, is not. Thomas would have agreed. He was balking at teachability in ‘creative writing’ courses only if it was at the expense of his own writing. (In a sense he was here at his nearest to agreeing also with Caitlin’s laments about ‘wasting time’ on filmscripts and broadcasts.) But there were alternatives, and they show that Hopkins and Thomas, though a century apart, were both the same side of a dividing line. Writing workshops ‘on campus’ had only barely become fashionable even at the end of Thomas’s life. Instead, Hopkins had had his say and feedback, had stood corrected or challenged, only in his friendlyargumentative correspondence with Robert Bridges. Less rewardingly, his American contemporary Emily Dickinson’s poems, also unpublished in her lifetime, were greeted only with kindly incomprehension by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Bridges on receiving Hopkins’s poems was out of sympathy, certainly, but not all at sea. Non-comprehension, like non-publication, was a creative stimulus in the case of both those poets. Hopkins to Bridges: ‘You are my audience’. Dickinson to Higginson: ‘Are you too deeply occupied to say my verse is alive? The mind is so near itself it cannot see distinctly, and I have none to ask’. Bridges’s warm-even-when-agitated tone in dealing with Hopkins’s strict matters of form and diction reminds us of the friendly disagreements in Thomas’s correspondence with Vernon Watkins. Each one of those four did have someone worthwhile to ask and answer to. An image from a Hopkins poem describes perfectly the Thomas/Watkins correspondence: the letters were ‘to-fro tender trambeams’. ‘Tender’ because tactful, yet also because easily lost (Bridges’s and Watkins’s and Higginson’s letters did not survive); and ‘trambeams’ (an image from the rails of early tram-cars) because the important poems enclosed with the letters were hard-worked but pleasant lines of communication. Despite serious disagreements, what the Hopkins/

150

Dylan Thomas

Bridges and the Thomas/Watkins correspondence salute is the importance of craft and, inside craft, something that can be called ‘tacit knowledge’. The phrase is Michael Polanyi’s for the kind of knowledge that is describable only in actual individual practice. Beyond a certain point, it ceases to be teachable, because it is essentially self-correcting. It is like good manners as opposed to mere etiquette, more deeply a moral good.

14. ‘As I sail out to die’: the late poems In a BBC broadcast of September 1950 called ‘Three Poems’, Thomas introduced readings of ‘In Country Sleep’ (1947), ‘Over Sir John’s hill’ (1949) and ‘In the White Giant’s Thigh’ (1950) as parts of a long poem that he was going to call ‘In Country Heaven’. As already said, the putative scheme was as fantastic as ‘The Town That Was Mad’ idea for the ‘play for voices’. In it, God and the inhabitants of Country Heaven would learn of the atomic extinction of the Earth. Country Heaven suddenly goes dark, and those inhabitants who were once on Earth call to each other, through the darkness, their memories of that place: ‘They remember places, fears, loves, exultation, misery, animal joy, ignorance, and mysteries, all we know and do not know.’ In the end, as with Under Milk Wood, the three poems are left free of any abstract plot that would have stultified their already adequate lyric concreteness. What we have of the unfinished ‘In Country Heaven’, half-heartedly evolved between 1947 and 1951, is a verse rendering of the explanation of the 1950 broadcast. It aimed to be no more than notional and situational. In the broadcast, the poet’s tone about it was already self-deprecating: What can I say about the plan of a long ‘poem in preparation’ – I hope the quotation marks come stinging across . . . What can I say about this long poem-to-be except that the plan of it is grand and simple and that the grandeur will seem, to many, to be purple and grandiose and the simplicity crude and sentimental?

151

Walford Davies

Great poems are not to be promised in arranged marriages. These three major poems achieve individually and separately what a composite umbrella could not begin to cover unless the whole was integrated, and had about it the feel of a created not an assembled thing. Independent of any overarching agenda, each poem already does what Thomas wanted their matrix to do – offer ‘praise of what is and what could be on this lump in the skies’. Each is already ‘a poem about happiness’ – in Thomas’s particular Hardyesque sense of elegy as a celebration of vitality exactly because it does not survive. All Thomas’s later poems embody this slowly accelerated theme of affirmative acceptance in the face of decay. In early poems such as ‘Where once the waters of your face’ or ‘Our eunuch dreams’ (both 1934), affirmation had been vulnerably left to the flourishes of final-stanza optimism: And we shall be fit fellows for a life, And who remain shall flower as they love, Praise to our faring hearts. (‘Our eunuch dreams’)

But at the tragically early close of Thomas’s career, the quality of affirmation is spread throughout the whole ‘praise’ texture of the poem, praise that links him equally with heterodox Blake, orthodox Hopkins, agnostic Keats and maverick Auden (‘Praise what there is for being’). In the late poems occasional summary gestures – ‘A hill touches an angel’ or ‘The country is holy’ – stand proud, vulnerably redundant. For example, ‘Over Sir John’s hill’ in paraphrase would not excite anyone at all. Indeed, its final line – ‘for the sake of the souls of the slain birds sailing’ – risks reducing the diffused wonder of the whole into inadequate explicitness: in what sense, after all, do birds have souls? The strength of the poem, like that of Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’, lies instead in engaging us on a tonal, descriptive level in which even Scripture is only obliquely scripted. Such poems are, first of all, events. As events rather

152

Dylan Thomas

than commentary, their linguistic resonance lies beyond any programme. ‘Over Sir John’s hill’ is only just into its stride when certain words, though perfectly at home in themselves, start magnetizing like iron filings towards other words, not just to the view outside the window: Over Sir John’s hill, The hawk on fire hangs still; In a hoisted cloud, at drop of dusk, he pulls to his claws And gallows . . .

In the aftermath of an ugly war, and at a time (1949) when capital punishment was still in force, ‘hangs’, ‘hoisted’, ‘drop’, ‘pulls’, ‘gallows’ were not, for anti-capital-punishment Thomas, merely clever words leading to a merely literary ‘tyburn’ (l. 9). The execution of innocent and guilty alike (‘in a hoisted cloud . . . the noosed hawk’ shows the guilty hawk itself as hanged victim) is something Thomas saw daily outside the window of his writing shed at Laugharne – out there in real-time, not in abstraction in a lamp-lit room. The word ‘still’ (‘The hawk on fire hangs still’) means not just motionless, not just merely endless, but in a deeper sense, both eternal and now, as with Keats’s ‘still unravished bride’, the Grecian Urn itself. Even closer, though, is Keats’s word ‘evermore’ (and its punning rhyme ‘every maw’) in a poem so close in seascape and occasion to ‘Over Sir John’s hill’ and ‘Poem on his Birthday’ – Keats’s 1818 verse-letter to John Reynolds: I was at home, And should have been most happy – but I saw Too far into the sea; where every maw The greater on the less feeds evermore: – But I saw too distinct into the core Of an eternal fierce destruction . . . Still do I that most fierce destruction see, The shark at savage prey – the hawk at pounce, The gentle Robin, like a pard or ounce, Ravening a worm.132

153

Walford Davies

Also enjoined in Thomas’s words ‘on fire hangs still’ is the idiom to hang fire – death itself holding back but with that menacing delay that only makes death seem more cruel. This daily hanging fire as spectacle would not have been there for Auden, writing only by a light one could mend a watch by. The same careful layering is there in the poem’s self-reflective close. Bay-watching from his writing shed above the estuary, Thomas resolves to grave, Before the lunge of the night, the notes on this time-shaken Stone . . .

In collapsing ‘engrave’ into ‘grave’ he highlights the tense relationship between creativity and death, a connection clinched when ‘grave’ at the end of one line and ‘stone’ at the start of the next-but-one yield between them the ghost-word gravestone, leaving only a one-line delay to allow ‘Before’, ‘lunge’, ‘notes’ and ‘time-shaken’ to suggest, in-between, the energy of the life that dies. And even then, in a poem so concerned with noose and halter, ‘lunge’ activates, beyond its simple meaning of a sudden thrust in fencing, its other meaning – a rope used to restrain horses, roping us back to ‘noose’ and ‘gallows’. Here theme, craft and location insist on coalescing. Like Yeats, Thomas trusts the fact that ‘rhyme can beat a measure out of trouble’ (‘The Sad Shepherd’). Like Donne in ‘The Triple Fool’, he necessarily keeps trusting in the curb on pain that craft provides – the fact that ‘Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce,/For he tames it, that fetters it in verse’. It is a kind of safety in numbers. Thomas has a Hardy-like ability to recreate also the kind of sad human energy that seemed once able to outface death. A good example is that of the childless women buried on the hill in ‘In the White Giant’s Thigh’, who once gay with anyone Young as they in the after milking moonlight lay

154

Dylan Thomas Under the lighted shapes of faith and their moonshade Petticoats galed high, or shy with the rough riding boys, Now clasp me to their grains in the gigantic glade, Who once, green countries since, were a hedgerow of joys.

This shows that the possibility eminently displayed in ‘After the funeral’ back in 1938 was still open – of re-peopling the landscape, of Thomas’s becoming (in Goldsmith’s phrase in The Deserted Village) something of a ‘sad historian of the pensive plain’. This embracing quality in the late poems reflects the poet’s spiritual maturity: they are no mere sign-off messages. Thomas urges his sleeping daughter Aeronwy to trust in his assurance of a ‘designed’, ‘true’, ‘sure’, ‘shaped’ and ‘ruled’ universe (the key words in the final lines of ‘In Country Sleep’) because he himself feels that paradox of being supported as well as chastened by inevitability. For that word ‘ruled’ Thomas had originally written ‘chained’, reminding us of the great paradox of the final line of ‘Fern Hill’. ‘Over Sir John’s hill’ likewise communicates, without distress or palliation, the straightforward fact of death, the sense that victory comes in seeing things straight. Yeats’s resolution of loss and remorse in what he called ‘tragic gaiety’ comes to mind, but now in utterly un-Yeatsian language.

*

*

*

Thomas’s religious position has been the topic of much discussion, and various formulations have been offered, from Empson’s ‘pessimistic pantheism’ or FitzGibbon’s suggestion of something like a reluctant agnosticism, through to Aneirin Talfan Davies’s bid to make Thomas all but a Catholic. One thing is clear – the folly of placing him inside any mere orthodoxy. That the poems are full of a wide range of quite orthodox Christian allusions is of limited significance. A Christian framework is only one of many imagistic legacies whereby poets have for centuries (in ordinary life, let alone in poems) been provided

155

Walford Davies

with a structure for thought – without which, in certain contexts, they would not have been actually thinking at all. In the apparent decline of Christian belief, Yeats created for his poems his own intellectual framework, occult and often freakish. Thomas, with his own resistance to any kind of dogmatic conclusiveness, accepted the Christian tradition, whose images, and indeed most of whose insights, he found congenial as man and poet. Brought up in a society whose puritanical version of the Christian tradition struck him as having more to do with local negative control than with any penetration of the numinous – and deeply affected throughout his life by the free-thinking pessimism of his father – he had always a leeway to make up towards orthodoxy or anything simply ‘doctrinal’. His career in poetry was the refinement, not of belief, but of feeling. In poetry, his final position is poignantly recorded in ‘Poem on his Birthday’, completed in July 1951, which, like ‘Over Sir John’s hill’ and all his last works, exults in its Laugharne location. ‘In the mustardseed sun’, he says, By full tilt river and switchback sea Where the cormorants scud, In his house on stilts high among beaks And palavers of birds

he is caught creatively between the natural urge to describe and celebrate and the absence of any fixed, quieting belief of orthodox proportions that might frame his celebratory instincts: And freely he goes lost In the unknown, famous light of great And fabulous, dear God. Dark is a way and light is a place, Heaven that never was Nor will be ever is always true . . .

As a result, he floats without any particular direction in his ‘driftwood thirty-fifth wind turned age’. The poem was started in 1949, when, aged 35, he was biblically halfway through man’s

156

Dylan Thomas

allotted span: ‘Oh, let me midlife mourn . . ./the voyage to ruin I must run’. The wild life around him are emblems of mortality. But unlike the ‘steeple stemmed’ herons or the ‘rippled’ seals, or the flounders and gulls ‘doing what they are told’ (another demotic expression, like ‘mitching’, nice’ and ‘lovely’, salvaged from his Swansea childhood), he does not have the mindless luxury of only automatically fulfilling natural purpose. In a synopsis of the poem, he brought out a bizarre paradox: how is it that fear of ‘his own fiery end in the cloud of an atomic explosion’ impels him all the more towards praise? In a wonderful sentence, he says it is because ‘He does not like the deep zero dark’. He, a craftsman in words, toils ‘towards his own wounds which are waiting in ambush for him.’ The poet sings in the direction of his pain. Birds fly after the hawks that will kill them. Fishes swim toward the otters that will eat them. He sees herons walking in their shrouds, which is the water they fish in; and he, who is progressing, afraid, to his own fiery end in the cloud of an atomic explosion knows that, out at sea, animals who attack and eat other sea animals are tasting the flesh of their own death . . . [He] sees the logical progress of death in everything he has been and done. His death lurks for him, and for all, in the next lunatic war.133

This was Keats’s conundrum even in Napoleonic times: Very few men have ever arrived at a complete disinterestedness of Mind: very few have been influenced by a pure desire of the benefit of others – in the greater part of the Benefactors (of) and to Humanity some meretricious motive has sullied their greatness – some melodramatic scenery has fascinated them – in wild nature the hawk would lose his Breakfast of Robins and the Robin his of Worms . . . The greater part of Men make their way with the same instinctiveness, the same unwandering eye from their purposes, the same animal eagerness as the Hawk . . . I go among the Fields and catch a glimpse of a stoat or a fieldmouse peeping out of the withered grass – the creature hath a purpose and its eyes are bright with it . . . there is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify – so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism

157

Walford Davies – The pity is that we must wonder at it: as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish . . . Even here though I myself am pursuing the same instinctive course as the veriest human animal you can think of – I am however young writing at random – straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness – without knowing the bearing of any one assertion of any one opinion. Yet may I not in this be free from sin? (Keats to his brother, February–May 1819).

‘Yet may I not in this be free from sin?’ – it is the same hope of innocence, despite ideological blankness, and in the face of a world gone mad, that animates Thomas’s later poetry and Under Milk Wood. It has more to do with the creative imagination, goodwill and the hope to win through than with any specific creed of any kind. Even without Eliot’s theology, Thomas at the end nears the aim of Four Quartets – an acceptance of Time at, and because of, the brief moments when Time is intersected by a sense of the Timeless. This is more important than the fact that some of the imagery in Eliot’s poem fed into Thomas’s final poems. For example, Eliot’s ‘The starfish, the horse-shoe crab, the whale’s backbone’ (‘The Dry Salvages’) reminds us of ‘Poem on his Birthday’: There he might wander bare With the spirits of the horseshoe bay Or the stars’ seashore dead, Marrow of eagles, the roots of whales And wishbones of wild geese.

In the same way, Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ – Dust inbreathed was a house – The wall, the wainscot and the mouse

– brings to mind Thomas’s ‘In the White Giant’s Thigh’: The dust of their kettles and clocks swings to and fro Where the hay rides now or the bracken kitchens rust.

158

Dylan Thomas

Human individuality is now merged in an acceptance of general mortality, whose rule is not personal annihilation but endless impersonal change. It must have been partly for this reason that Thomas had turned his career round to start embracing humanity – that entity that in his early poems had only been anatomized, atomized even. He had gradually changed course – and with strikingly warm emotion for so tragically short a life. If the last poems illustrate any danger, it is that of, now and again, too much descriptive glamour. But, to borrow Keats’s key word (and Hazlitt’s), the ‘gusto’ of it all is convincing. Ted Hughes admired and inherited the heavy tangibility of Thomas’s poetry; yet if we take an image that Hughes probably borrowed from Thomas, the difference in viscosity is striking: the shark’s mouth That hungers down the blood-smell even to a leak of its own Side and devouring of itself. (Ted Hughes: ‘Thrushes’) The rippled seals streak down To kill and their own tide daubing blood Slides good in the sleek mouth. (‘Poem on his Birthday’)

In fact, it is against that denser textural background that finer touches in Thomas’s poem stand out – the simple line ‘Dawn ships clouted aground’, for example or, more important, the lighter modulation with which the poem ends: . . . and how More spanned with angels ride The mansouled fiery islands! Oh, Holier then their eyes, And my shining men no more alone As I sail out to die.

Thomas’s embrace of the ‘mansouled fiery islands’ stretching beyond the estuary outside his writing-shed at Laugharne is in the tradition of Langland’s ‘a fair field full of folk’, words

159

Walford Davies

a rearrangement of which, ‘a field full of fair folk’, Langland himself would have welcomed. As the climax to a tragically brief career, it is a powerful blessing.

*

*

*

The summer of 1951, because in the first place his London visits were few, was the poet’s last productive period. His final three years were disrupted by the logical consequences of his four American visits (February–June 1950, January–May 1952, April– June and October–November 1953). Because of real and imagined indiscretions in America (he was always in all things his own worst enemy), his relations with Caitlin were strained close to breaking, but his incompetence with money drew also nonfamilial attention, that of the Inland Revenue, which meant that the financial currency of his American trips and worldwide celebrity – reckonable today in terms of many thousands of pounds – was never allowed to secure even simple domestic stability at home in 1953. As soon as one tour was over, the next had to be considered. In between the first and second American visits he also went to Persia to make a documentary film (subsequently cancelled) for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Caitlin insisted on accompanying him on the second American tour early in 1952, but failed to improve its profitability in terms of money saved. The Inland Revenue was now claiming a staggering £1,607 on the disappeared earnings of the first visit. The gap in the financial bottom line was closed by Dent’s wise decision to publish, in November 1952, the Collected Poems 1934–1952, full of wonderful lines of another kind, for which Thomas spent a whole year writing his ‘Prologue’ in verse, to the exclusion of any other poem, as if in the silence between tax returns. Collected Poems 1934–1952 consolidated, to the amazement of admirers and detractors alike, the sheer quality of the thirty-nine-year-old poet’s achievement over only two decades. He claimed in a prefatory note that its ninety poems (out of very many times more that number) represented ‘most of the poems I have

160

Dylan Thomas

written, and all, up to the present year, that I wish to preserve’. The volume was awarded the Foyle’s Poetry Prize and, selling 30,000 copies in the British edition alone in 1953–4, heralded financial rewards that the poet himself did not live to receive. Despite the fears and logical consequences that were coming home to roost, and the fact that his father died, blind and in pain, a month after the publication of Collected Poems in 1952, the pointers were towards a challenging future, symbolized above all by a projected collaboration with Stravinsky in the writing of an opera. But Thomas was tired and obviously ill. The pattern of American lecture tours could be neither avoided nor survived. Interestingly, he offered to cancel the second American tour if unbroken work on film could provide him with an income. That did not prove possible, but it highlights the insane timetable of the tours, best appreciated, not in a biographer’s narrative, but in a bald date-place-next-place listing, airport to airport, city to city, state to state, with the brief gaps filled only by parties, in which the only constant was Dylan himself. On 9 November 1953 he died in the Catholic St Vincent’s Hospital, the oldest charity hospital in New York City. The causes of his death were complex, and unfortunately clouded for many generations afterwards by the myths and contradictions that immediately followed. At the heart of it all was his increasingly irresponsible drinking on these tours, which if unchecked would itself no doubt, unaided by exhaustion and chronic self-neglect regarding food and sleep, have ultimately led to the same result. But it is now recognized as fact that what precipitated the cause of death at that time was the repeated prescription by a maverick doctor, Doctor Milton D. Feltenstein, of half a grain of morphine sulphate. Even for hopeless pain, the correct dose would have been one-sixth of a grain. So Thomas’s discomfort was treated with three times that amount. It immediately caused serious breathing difficulties, which deprived Thomas’s brain of oxygen. One can at last be that precise about the clinical death. But Thomas also expressed ‘fear’ (his own word) of a kind of wider professional death. He felt he had already become (his word again) an ‘invalid’ in

161

Walford Davies

the particular sense of not being able to write new poems. And pervading everything, there was what appeared at the time to be, because of his infidelities abroad, like hers at home, an irreparable alienation from Caitlin.

15. ‘The hero’s head lies scraped of every legend’: the legend and the man Among the endless awards and acclaims that followed Dylan Thomas’s death, one picks out the fact that W. H. Auden was pleased to be the lead signatory of the Appeal Letter in America in support of Thomas’s family: it raised $20,000 in two months, with Auden adding that he thought Thomas’s death ‘an incalculable loss to literature’. In Britain, T. S. Eliot was the lead signatory. Two decades earlier, in November 1934, Eliot’s secretary had sent Thomas a message to say that ‘Mr Eliot’ hoped ‘that you will not make any decision about the publication of your poems before hearing from him’.134 Eliot retained a serious regret that, through this lapse in communication in 1934, he had missed signing 18 Poems, and therefore the rest of Dylan Thomas’s poetry, for Faber: ‘I always thought him,’ Eliot said, ‘an important poet.’ That major acclaim may not now surprise us. But it makes us wonder all the more why exactly so negative and disreputable a legend has been spun around Dylan Thomas since his death. The poet’s work, of course, will speak for itself: it is what any creative work is designed to do. Yeats said the final word about all that when he urged that ‘the poet who writes the poem is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast’.135 At the same time, no human life is ever a mere aggregate of ‘facts’ externally perceived. Those ‘facts’ (unlike the firm lineaments of a serious poem) are too often biddable and too often marshalled selectively. Abstract truth often lies at the extreme edge, but truth about a person usually lies somewhere near the middle.

162

Dylan Thomas

There is no doubt that on many occasions towards the end Thomas behaved badly. But why are his good personal qualities (personal kindness, profound moral outrage at the obscenity of war, the total absence of cynicism or clubbable snobbery or racism of any kind) – why are they never praised as having gone to the making of the poems? ‘I loved them for their faults/As much as for their good’ are words from a Thomas poem to which we shall return. Holding forth on a writer’s untidy life, to the often ignorant exclusion of the tidy work, has frequently passed as criticism with scoundrels from the beginnings of literary history. But in our time the mindless running down of Dylan Thomas, so often with no ‘on the other hand’ about it, has been unusual. It reflects a particular kind of hauteur. For example, Kingsley Amis, blasé about the welcome and kindness he and his family enjoyed during his twelve well-to-do university years at Swansea, became Thomas’s moral scourge, insulting him at every turn of his posthumous fame. And yet in 1986 Amis unembarrassedly agreed to become one of only four Dylan Thomas Trustees. Even in that role, his hatred of Thomas continued unabated in letter, review, essay, poem and novel, with increasingly suspect animus. There must have been something about the very chemistry of it all. Racial, cultural, class, even professional ‘academe’ tremors are certainly detectable, the latter inadequately disguised in the 1950s ‘Movement-type’ envy of Thomas’s apparently effortless conquest of lucrative America, an acclaim and reward that Amis sought but failed to secure. Supplementing his hatred of the poetry, his other case – that Thomas often asked for money to keep on writing – became an obsession, an obsession that Amis, ‘the meanest member of the Garrick Club’, activated relentlessly as if in a species of moral camouflage. The point is that facts morally much more unacceptable than penury are known about other writers (blatant racism, an obsession with pornography, chronic cynicism, snobbery, abandonment of family, deliberate cruelty even). Yet detractors, often themselves writers with marked qualifications in each and every one of those things – they do not have them interposed between the reader and the work.

163

Walford Davies

This is especially relevant when a detractor also shows plain ignorance of the work. In Amis’s case, there was his view, for example, that Thomas wrote only one poem that was not about himself! Or the fact that Amis should have been so clearly all at sea regarding this Thomas poem: An old man or a young man, And I am none of these, Goes down upon the praying mat And kneels on his knuckled knees, Whenever a fine lady Does his poor body good, And if she gives him beauty Or a cure for his hot blood, He weeps like one of the willow trees That stands in a grave wood . . . Old or mad or young or wise, And she is all of these, Whenever a poor man needs her She does her best to please: For, oh, she knows in the loveless nights And in the nights of love That bitter gratitude is all A loving woman can have – And she weeps like one of the willow trees That stands in a grave wood.136

These are the first and third of three stanzas written quite obviously as a pastiche of Yeats. In 1990 it was officially run past Kingsley Amis as trustee, for validation as to whether it was by Thomas. ‘It could very well be,’ Amis pluckily opined, ‘an example of Dylan Thomas’s early work. The refrain at the end of each verse can be said to be characteristic’.137 The refrain is not at all characteristic, even of the few early Thomas refrains that there are: ‘And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose’ or ‘And death shall have no dominion’ or ‘Hands, hold you poison or grapes?’ In fact, the poem is not early at all, but very late. As a pastiche, it is a bit of an exercise, though serious with it: even in

164

Dylan Thomas

pastiche we see Thomas’s unfailing craftsmanship. Nothing about the poem is remotely like characteristic Thomas, early or late. It is a piece hitting off the tradition of a poem such as Yeats’s ‘John Kinsella’s Lament for Mrs Mary Moore’. The lines from the middle stanza, ‘Whenever a woman pleases him/With what she does not need’, is a deft inversion of Yeats’s ‘For Death who takes what man would keep,/Leaves what man would lose’, which was already in a tradition, tonally transformed, from Wordsworth’s ‘The Small Celandine’ (‘O Man, that from thy fair and shining youth/Age might but take the things Youth needed not’) or Wordsworth’s ‘The Fountain’: ‘the wiser mind/ Mourns less for what age takes away/Than what it leaves behind’. For Amis to place the poem so wrongly is breathtaking. The writer Alun Richards once recalled a nervous Dylan’s thoughts following a talk and reading for Swansea university’s English Society in the students’ union, an old house not far from Thomas’s birthplace in the Uplands, in April 1951.138 In the Uplands Hotel both before and after the event Thomas and Richards ended up sitting with the student officials while Amis and other members of the English Department staff were at the bar. Richards recalled Dylan’s sad disappointment at what he felt as the patronisation shown him at the bar. Amis’s description of the event in a letter to Philip Larkin was, like all his letters to Larkin about anything, a comedic exercise à la, and in aid of, Lucky Jim. As it happens, his later account of the event was not completely antagonistic, but that was six years later, and four years after Thomas’s tragic death. It is called journalism. Amis took advantage of Thomas’s slipstream only when it suited him. In turn, Larkin was Amis’s secret sharer in terms of many prejudices. But being a major poet, and an infinitely finer critic than Amis, Larkin placed Thomas’s achievement at the highest level. ‘I can’t believe D.T. is truly dead,’ he wrote in a letter, ‘It seems absurd. Three people [Eliot, Auden and Thomas] who’ve altered the face of poetry, and the youngest has to die’.139 Even twenty years later, interviewed about his Oxford Book of TwentiethCentury English Verse (1973), Larkin went further: ‘I do feel that

165

Walford Davies

he was the last person to produce a corpus of work that really was worth arguing about . . . I don’t think, to be quite honest, that we have had his equal’.140 But, for once, at the centenary of his birth, the point is the man as well as the work. Clearly in support of Thomas as a person is that when he came to prominence he did not turn to cynicism or snobbery. For example, he always took great pains with any young author who wrote to him for advice. His lengthy replies, spontaneous and engaged, were truthful but always encouraging (‘Always I encourage, always!’ – Yeats). It was not in Thomas’s nature to patronize. In an unpublished three-page letter of February 1938 he wrote to the young Guy Hartcup (later the well-known historian of scientific and technological aspects of the Second World War) who had sent him poems for comment, stressing that they were in emulation of Auden and Spender. Thomas pointed out the poems he liked best, but gently discriminated between Auden and poets too glibly linked with him, who lacked Auden’s ‘craftsmanship, his wit, irony and religious imagination’. And then – and this to a totally unknown correspondent – he apologizes for ‘this perhaps too dictatorial letter’ and offers to write more fully, but with the rider that he would ‘not like to write at any length about them until I knew whether or not you had been offended’ by the points he had made. There is realistic tenderness there. In February 1953 he wrote a long letter to Idris Davies, having heard that the poet was seriously ill, gently encouraging him with just the right mix of humour and practical help, offering to send him any books he might like to have, and to review his imminent Selected Poems.141 Before the year’s end both poets were dead. No wonder that Empson – with Eliot, Auden and Larkin the most eminently qualified admirer of the work – always decently took time out to praise the street-level socialism and generosity of spirit of the man. Empson told the present author that he could not name any writer from the multiple London literary circles that he daily moved in, who would have brought his parents, because of their failing health in old age, to live near him.142

166

Dylan Thomas

Such insights into the character of the man at his best (‘man well drest’ – George Herbert’s metaphor was never just about clothing) have been almost completely obscured. And they were also there in an international context. At a cocktail party in Iowa, Dylan apparently reduced an American doctor’s wife to tears, but that was because this pitiless hostess had claimed that Britain’s newly established National Health Service was nothing but a ‘Marxist front’! Thomas clearly recognized her as a symbol of the second of the five ‘Giant Evils’ targeted by William Beveridge in his report of 1942, namely ‘Ignorance’ – well-heeled, unfeeling ignorance. It took the American poet John Berryman to cast light instead of heat on all that ‘Dylan Thomas in America’ business. Berryman recorded witnessing an assault by yet another superior hostess, the ‘Duchess of Utah’ as she was already long known. At this woman’s house, following one of Thomas’s acclaimed readings, as Berryman testifies, Dylan had spoken courteously and individually with all present. However, the hostess chose insultingly to break up his particular conversation with Berryman with the coded quip that theirs was cabal talk about – Heaven forbid – poetry! Thomas, quick at sensing awfulness, quelled her with a fiction. No, Berryman and he had only been discussing their full agreement with Hitler’s treatment of the Jews. Berryman stresses that Thomas was anything but anti-Semitic: ‘Across the country, I am sorry to say,’ he wrote, ‘Americans delighted in pinning Thomas to the wall, and now and again he spoke out’.143 Berryman, himself an important poet inspired by the Welshman’s work, came to be, as fate would have it, the only person in the room in St Vincent’s Hospital in New York when Thomas died on 9 November 1953. His words on emerging from the room – ‘Poetry is dead’ – were something more than melodrama. The present author had the privilege during the 1980s of getting to know the world-renowned New Testament scholar W. D. Davies of Duke University, North Carolina. He and his wife Eurwen, both fluent Welsh speakers, were Thomas’s distinguished hosts at Duke University in May 1953 on Thomas’s last

167

Walford Davies

tour – on the eve, as it happened, of returning to New York for the first ever public reading of Under Milk Wood. I asked Professor Davies for his impressions of Thomas as a man. He said that it was as simple as this: that when Thomas had left them, he felt ‘an unusual sense of absence’. He sensed, he said, that in conversations in his home he had learned something deeper even than the poems Thomas had read and talked about in the auditorium at Duke. As he put it: ‘After Dylan Thomas had left, what had customarily seemed to us important, like dayto-day protocol, seemed now just that much less important; and more genuinely important things, which we perhaps had taken for granted, or actually lost sight of, assumed new significance, precisely because of his visit’.144 Thomas had at an early stage felt serious disappointment, not at criticism, but at that worse thing, betrayal. Two early examples of ‘friends’ he felt had betrayed his trust were Norman Cameron and Geoffrey Grigson. Both did a suspicious turn from pro to con without revealing their real motive. The sharpness of Thomas’s sense of betrayal is registered in a striking poem – ‘To Others than You’ (1939). He sent it first to Vernon Watkins, the last person to whom its accusation applied, hence the play in the odd title. The title, however, is of much wider application. It is a rewording of the cliché ‘present company excepted’ – that common remark that is itself unimaginable without irony. While the title dabbles in the language of innocent duplicity, the poem’s own target is from the very first line highly serious: ‘Friend by enemy I call you out’. In other words: Friend, by calling you an enemy, I call you out of hiding – Who palmed the lie on me when you looked Brassily at my shyest secret . . . I never thought to utter or think While you displaced a truth in the air, That though I loved them for their faults As much as for their good, My friends were enemies on stilts With their heads in a cunning cloud.

168

Dylan Thomas

With an embarrassment of choice, given the richly polemical world of the 1930s, Thomas picks out, not any ‘political’ opposites, but the hypocrisy in print of two-faced enemies who, face-toface, act only as friends. In celebrating in this essay Dylan Thomas’s birth a hundred years ago, there could be no better tribute than Gabriel Pearson’s in a review of the volumes Early Prose Writings and Dylan Thomas: The Poems in 1971. Pearson’s words are doubly relevant, combining as they do both the work and the life in that one word ‘legend’ – until then, a word used only of the untidy life. Pearson’s final sentence (especially its last four words) is the very best advice one could give to a new reader of this particular poet of Wales: The legend is still an un-negotiated legacy, fraught with predictable discomfort however you play it, whether with aloofness, or bold enthusiasm. Either way, Thomas remains powerful, disreputable and not to be patronized.145

169

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8 9 10

11

12 13

14 15

16 17

18

Stephen Spender, ‘Remembering Eliot’, in T. S. Eliot: The Man and his Work, ed. Allen Tate (London: Chatto and Windus, 1967), p. 49. Paul Ferris (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters, New Edition (London: Dent, 2000), p. 43. Paul Ferris, interview with Florence Thomas, ‘Go and Write, Boy’, Everybody’s Weekly, 21 April 1956, 23, 39. ‘Tribute to Auden’, New Verse, 26–7, ‘Auden Double Number’ (November 1937), 25. ‘Answers to an Enquiry’ (1934), reprinted in Walford Davies (ed.), Dylan Thomas: Early Prose Writings (London: Dent, 1971), p. 150. ‘Poetic Manifesto’ (1951), in Davies (ed.), Early Prose Writings, pp. 156–7. Ralph Maud (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Broadcasts (London: Dent, 1991), p. 220. Ibid., p. 31. Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters, p. 495. Julian Maclaren-Ross, Memoirs of the Forties (London: Alan Ross, 1965), p. 122. See Hazel Walford Davies, ‘Mudiad y Theatr Genedlaethol Gymreig’, in Hazel Walford Davies (ed.), Y Theatr Genedlaethol yng Nghymru (Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 2007), pp. 36–7. Reprinted in Davies (ed.), Early Prose Writings, pp. 83–6. Letter to Bob Rees, an early Swansea friend. In 1938 Rees was a school teacher in England, and was possibly prompted to ask about Hopkins’s influence by a colleague of his at the time – Norman MacKenzie, later a major editor of Hopkins’s poetry. Maud (ed.), The Broadcasts, p. 45. ‘The Cost of Letters’, reprinted in Davies (ed.), Early Prose Writings, p. 152. Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters, p. 328. And yet the press release for the 2008 biopic The Edge of Love showed the actor playing Thomas ‘“smouldering” at a typewriter’. From ‘Reminiscences of Childhood’, ‘Quite Early One Morning’ and ‘Memories of Christmas’ (1943, 1944 and 1945) to ‘The International Eisteddfod’, ‘A Visit to America’ and ‘Laugharne’ (July, September, October 1953).

Notes 19

20 21 22

23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44

45

46

47 48

Aneirin Talfan Davies, ‘Dylan Thomas: y crefftwr’ [‘Dylan Thomas: the craftsman’], Gfiyl: Cylchgrawn ‘Y Cymro’ (summer 1964), 28. Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters, pp. 161–2. Private conversations with Glyn Jones, July 1988. Constantine FitzGibbon, The Life of Dylan Thomas (London: Dent, 1965), p. 3. Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters, p. 90. Quoted by Alastair Reid. See E. W. Tedlock (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Legend and the Poet (London: Heinemann, 1960), p. 53. Maud, The Broadcasts, p. 215. ‘Gwilym Rees Hughes yn holi R. S. Thomas’, Barn, July 1973, 386. Davies (ed.), Early Prose Writings, pp. 169–70. Ibid., p. 166. Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters, p. 301. ‘Making, Knowing and Judging’ (1956), Auden’s Inaugural Lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, in W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), p. 47. Letter to John Taylor, February 1818. ‘The Poet and The City’, in Auden, The Dyer’s Hand, p. 85. William Empson, ‘Collected Poems and Under Milk Wood’, in C. B. Cox (ed.), Dylan Thomas: A Collection of Critical Essays, ‘Twentieth Century Views’ series (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 87. Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters, p. 33. The Swansea Grammar School Magazine, December 1929, 82. Cambridge Front, summer 1940, 8–9. Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters, p. 505. Ibid., p. 248. Davies (ed.), Early Prose Writings, p. 168. Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters, p. 163. Ibid., p. 198. See notes to Walford Davies and Ralph Maud (eds), Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems 1934–1953 (London: Dent, 1988), pp. 259–63. Interview, Occident, spring 1952. Dylan Thomas, Adventures in the Skin Trade (London: Putnam, 1955), p. 42. From, respectively, ‘Vision and Prayer’, ‘A saint about to fall’, ‘A Winter’s Tale’, ‘It is the sinners’ dust-tongued bell’ and ‘After the funeral’. A phrase used by Stephen Abell in a review of Tom Wolfe’s novel Back to Blood, in TLS, 9 November 2012, 19. ‘Answers to an Enquiry’, New Verse, October 1934, 8–9. See introduction to Vernon Watkins (ed.), Letters to Vernon Watkins (London: Dent and Faber and Faber, 1957), p. 20.

171

Notes 49

50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58

59 60

61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74

75 76 77 78

Walford Davies (ed.), Dylan Thomas: Collected Stories, introduction by Leslie Norris (London: Dent, 1983), pp. 12–15 and 32–5 respectively. ‘Poetic Manifesto’, reprinted in Davies (ed.), Early Prose Writings, p. 157. Davies (ed.), Collected Stories, p. 21. Ibid., pp. 357–8, 12–15, 24–31, 50–5 respectively. ‘Grand Goose Flesh Parade’, Morning Post, 5 November 1935, 16. Davies (ed.), Collected Stories, pp. 117–18 and 119–23 respectively. Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters, p. 208. Ibid., p. 156. Quoted by Alastair Reid. See Tedlock (ed.), The Legend and the Poet, p. 54. ‘Poetic Manifesto’, reprinted in Davies (ed.), Early Prose Writings, pp. 154–60. Personal conversation at Aberystwyth, summer 1986. From, respectively, ‘It is the sinners’ dust-tongued bell’, ‘I make this in a warring absence’, ‘A saint about to fall’, ‘Into her lying down head’, ‘Among those killed in the dawn raid’, ‘Deaths and Entrances’. Typescript of a broadcast by Vernon Watkins, 5 March 1958. Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters, p. 525. Ibid., p. 402. Maud (ed.), The Broadcasts, p. 214. ‘Making, Knowing and Judging’, in Auden, The Dyer’s Hand, p. 57. In a conversation with M. H. Abrams at Wheaton College, Illinois in 1986, I mentioned that ‘mitching’ in Thomas’s ‘Once it was the colour of saying’ had in south Wales the sense of ‘playing truant’. Abrams said he had thought it only a borrowing of Hamlet’s phrase ‘miching mallecko’ (III, 2), but was delighted at its homegrown source, adding that it was a Thomas poem he greatly admired. They were there on my two visits in the early 1960s. Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters, p. 348. Eavan Boland, New Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2005). Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters, p. 376. Spender, ‘Remembering Eliot’, pp. 46–7. Reprinted in Davies (ed.), Early Prose Writings, pp. 182–4. ‘Laugharne’, in Maud (ed.), The Broadcasts, p. 280. F. R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (London: Chatto and Windus, 1936), p. 132. Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters, pp. 392–3. Ibid., p. 551. Vernon Watkins, Foreword, Adventures in the Skin Trade, p. 10. Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters, p. 546.

172

Notes 79 80

81

82

83 84 85

86 87 88

89 90 91 92 93

94

95 96 97

98 99

100

101 102 103 104 105

106 107

Ibid., p. 455. Published in Watkins’s 1962 volume Affinities. See Gwen Watkins, Portrait of a Friend (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1983), p. 106. Interestingly, attributions and misattributions alike of this infamous remark started in free-world documentaries – Frank Capra’s seven 1940s documentaries under the title Why We Fight, shown to American troops before shipping out. John Ackerman (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Filmscripts (London: Dent, 1995), p. 102. Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters, pp. 587–8. Reported in ‘Poetry and Film’, Janus, May 1936. ‘Poetry for Poetry’s Sake and Poetry beyond Poetry’, Horizon, xiii, 76 (April 1946), 221–38. Ackerman (ed.), The Filmscripts, pp. 406–8. Empson, ‘Collected Poems and Under Milk Wood’, p. 87. Saunders Lewis, Is there an Anglo-Welsh Literature? (Caerdydd: Urdd Graddedigion Prifysgol Cymru, 1939), p. 5. Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters, p. 41. Ibid., p. 400. Ibid., p. 385. Tedlock (ed.), The Legend and the Poet, p. 20. Douglas Cleverdon, The Growth of Milk Wood (London: Dent, 1969), p. 15. Reported by Marjorie Adix. See Tedlock (ed.), The Legend and the Poet, p. 62. Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters, p. 377. Ibid., p. 453. Interestingly, Auden claimed that ‘agape is the fulfilment and correction of eros, not its contradiction’, Theology, November 1950, 412. Empson, ‘Collected Poems and Under Milk Wood’, p. 88. Philip Larkin, Letters to Monica, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber and Faber and the Bodleian Library, 2010), p. 205. Clark Emery, The World of Dylan Thomas (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1962), pp. 173–6. Davies and Maud (eds), Collected Poems 1934–1953, p. 244. ‘Living in Wales’, in Maud (ed.), The Broadcasts, pp. 204–5. Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters, p. 580. Maud (ed.), The Broadcasts, p. 33. ‘Woodbine Willie Lives!’, Roy Fuller’s second lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, TLS, 22 May 1969, 554. Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters, p. 622. Ibid., p. 629.

173

Notes 108

109 110

111

112 113

114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121

122 123

124

125

126

127

128

129 130 131 132

133

134 135

‘Boy with Dolphin: Verrochio’, in C. Day Lewis, Collected Poems (London: Jonathan Cape with the Hogarth Press, 1954), p. 344. Maud (ed.), The Broadcasts, p. 225. The poem was published separately in Horizon, VI, July 1942, 6. The novel, written with John Davenport, was only published (by Hutchinson) in 1976. Jack Lindsay, Meetings with Poets (1968), a revision of an article for Meanjin (autumn 1966). Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters, pp. 162–6. Quoted by H. Hewos, ‘The Backward Town of Llareggub’, Saturday Review, XXXVI, June 1953, 25. ‘Ben Jonson’, in T. S. Eliot: Selected Essays (London: Faber, 1932), p. 156. Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters, p. 90. FitzGibbon, The Life of Dylan Thomas, p. 269. Maud (ed.), The Broadcasts, p. 11. Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters, p. 673. Maud (ed.), The Broadcasts, p. 13. Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters, p. 162. Caitlin Thomas with George Tremlett, Caitlin: Life with Dylan Thomas (London: Secker and Warburg, 1986), pp. 118–21. Cleverdon, The Growth of Milk Wood, p. 17. Raymond Williams, ‘Dylan Thomas’s Play for Voices’, in Cox (ed.), Dylan Thomas: A Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 89–98. David Holbrook, ‘“A Place of Love”: Under Milk Wood’, in ibid., pp. 99–116. ‘The Sincerest Form of Flattery’, The Swansea Grammar School Magazine, XXVII, July 1931, 191. From conversations with Vernon Watkins at Pennard Cliffs, 1962 and 1963. By courtesy of Thomas Seymour, Howard de Walden’s grandson, and the Howard de Walden Management Ltd. Margherita Howard de Walden, Pages From My Life (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1965), pp. 262–3. Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters, p. 795. Ibid., pp. 849–53. Maud (ed.), The Broadcasts, pp. 255–6. Hyder E. Rollins (ed.), The Letters of John Keats, 1814–21, I (Cambridge, MA: 1958), p. 262. Recorded in Bill Read, The Days of Dylan Thomas (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965), p. 149. Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters, pp. 199–200. W. B. Yeats, ‘A General Introduction for My Work’, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 509.

174

Notes 136

137

138 139

140

141 142 143

144 145

First published in Walford Davies (ed.), Dylan Thomas: Selected Poems (Penguin Classics, 2000), pp. 99–100. An untitled fair copy at the Harry Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas is in the manner of Thomas’s worksheets and in Thomas’s handwriting of the early 1950s, showing that the poem was in progress up to the point of the fair copy. Zachary Leader (ed.), The Letters of Kingsley Amis (London: Harper Collins, 2000), p. 1094. Personal conversation. Anthony Thwaite (ed.), Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 218. Anthony Thwaite (ed.), Philip Larkin: Further Requirements (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), p. 100. Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters, pp. 966–8. Personal conversation at Oxford, 1968. John Berryman, ‘After Many a Summer’, TLS, 3 September 1993, 13– 14. Private letter to the present author. Review of Dylan Thomas: Early Prose Writings and Dylan Thomas: The Poems, The Spectator (20 November 1971), p. 732.

175

Select Bibliography Bibliographical Cleverdon, Douglas, The Growth of Milk Wood (London: Dent, 1969). Davies, Walford and Ralph Maud, ‘Concerns About the Revised New Directions Dylan Thomas’, P. N. Review, 160, 31/2 (November– December 2004), 67–70. Goodby, John, Dylan Thomas, Oxford Bibliographies Online, . A thematic bibliography that details recent theoretical engagements with, and fresh literary-historical contextualizations of, Thomas’s work. Lane, Gary, A Concordance to the Poems of Dylan Thomas (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1976). Maud, Ralph, Dylan Thomas in Print: A Bibliographical History, with an updating appendix by Walford Davies (London: Dent, 1972). Rolph, J. Alexander, Dylan Thomas: A Bibliography (London: Dent, 1956). See also the section on Dylan Thomas in the annual bibliography of Welsh Writing in English in the eleven published volumes (1995– 2006/7) of Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, ed. Tony Brown; together with the bibliographies included in the journal’s continuation (ed. Katie Gramich) under the title Almanac: A Yearbook of Welsh Writing in English, 12–16 (2007/8–2011/12). Both yearbooks contain a range of critical essays on Thomas.

Primary Texts Ackerman, John (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Filmscripts (London: Dent, 1995). Davies, Walford (ed.), Dylan Thomas: Early Prose Writings (London: Dent, 1971). ––– (ed.), Dylan Thomas: Collected Stories, introduction by Leslie Norris (London: Dent, 1983). ––– (ed.), Dylan Thomas: Selected Poems (London: Penguin Classics, 2000). –––, Dylan Thomas: Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices (London: Penguin Classics, 2000).

Select Bibliography ––– and Ralph Maud (eds), Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems 1934–1953 (London: Dent, 1988). The definitive edition of the Collected Poems 1934–1952. ––– and — (eds), Dylan Thomas: Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices (London: Dent, 1995). Ferris, Paul (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters, New Edition (London: Dent, 2000). Jones, Daniel (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Poems (London: Dent, 1971). Maud, Ralph (ed.), The Notebook Poems 1930–1934 (London: Dent, 1989). Watkins, Vernon (ed.), Letters to Vernon Watkins (London: Dent and Faber and Faber, 1957).

Biographical Brinnin, John Malcolm, Dylan Thomas in America: An Intimate Journal (London: Dent, 1956). Davies, James A., Dylan Thomas’s Swansea (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000). Ferris, Paul, Caitlin: The Life of Caitlin Thomas, with revised author’s note (London: Random House Pimlico, 1995). —, Dylan Thomas: The Biography, New Edition (London: Dent, 1999). FitzGibbon, Constantine, The Life of Dylan Thomas (London: Dent, 1965). Holt, Heather, Dylan Thomas the Actor (Swansea: Heather Holt, 2003). Jones, Daniel, My Friend Dylan Thomas (London: Dent, 1977). Lycett, Andrew, Dylan Thomas: A New Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003). Read, Bill, The Days of Dylan Thomas, with photographs by Rollie McKenna and others (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965). Thomas, Caitlin, Leftover Life to Kill (London: Putnam, 1957). ––– with George Tremlett, Caitlin: Life with Dylan Thomas (London: Secker and Warburg, 1986). Thomas, David N., A Farm, Two Mansions and a Bungalow (Bridgend: Seren, 2000). Thomas, David N. (ed.), Dylan Remembered: Interviews by Colin Edwards, 2 vols, (Bridgend: Seren, 2003, 2004). Watkins, Gwen, Portrait of a Friend (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1983).

Commentaries Ackerman, John, A Dylan Thomas Companion (London: Macmillan, 1991). Davies, James A., A Reference Companion to Dylan Thomas (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998).

177

Select Bibliography Emery, Clark, The World of Dylan Thomas (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1962). Kershner, B., Dylan Thomas: The Poet and His Critics (Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 1976). Maud, Ralph, Where Have the Old Words Got Me?: Explications of Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003). Tindall, William York, A Reader’s Guide to Dylan Thomas (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962).

Criticism A. Printed Books Bayley, John, The Romantic Survival: A Study in Poetic Evolution (London: Constable, 1957). Bold, Alan (ed.), Dylan Thomas: Craft or Sullen Art (London and New York: Vision Press, 1990). Conran, Tony, The Cost of Strangeness: Essays on the English Poets of Wales (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1982). Cox, C. B. (ed.), Dylan Thomas: A Collection of Critical Essays, ‘Twentieth Century Views’ series (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966). Davies, Aneirin Talfan, Dylan: Druid of the Broken Body: An Assessment of Dylan Thomas as a Religious Poet (London: Dent, 1964). Davies, Walford (ed.), Dylan Thomas: New Critical Essays (London: Dent, 1972). –––, Dylan Thomas, ‘Open Guides to Literature’ series (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986). Goodby, John, The Poetry of Dylan Thomas: Under the Spelling Wall (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013). Goodby, John and Chris Wiggington (eds), Dylan Thomas, ‘New Casebooks’ series (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). Hardy, Barbara, Dylan Thomas: An Original Language (Athens, Georgia and London: University of Georgia Press, 2000). Holbrook, David, Llareggub Revisited: Dylan Thomas and the State of Modern Poetry (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1962). Jones, Glyn, The Dragon Has Two Tongues: Essays on Anglo-Welsh Writers and Writing (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001). Jones, T. H., Dylan Thomas, ‘Writers and Critics’ series (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1963). Kleinman, H. H., The Religious Sonnets of Dylan Thomas: A study in Imagery and Meaning, ‘Perspectives in Criticism’ series (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1963).

178

Select Bibliography Lerner, Laurence, The Uses of Nostalgia (London: Chatto and Windus, 1972). Maud, Ralph, Entrances to Dylan Thomas’ Poetry (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963). Mayer, Ann Elizabeth, Artists in Dylan Thomas’s Prose Works (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995). Miller, J. Hillis, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (London: Oxford University Press, 1966). Moynihan, William T., The Craft and Art of Dylan Thomas (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968). Nowottny, Winifred, The Language Poets Use (London: The Athlone Press, University of London, 1962). Olson, Elder, The Poetry of Dylan Thomas (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1954). Peach, Linden, The Prose Writing of Dylan Thomas, ‘Macmillan Studies in Twentieth-century Literature’ series (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988). Pratt, Annis, Dylan Thomas’ Early Prose: A Study in Creative Mythology (Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press, 1970). Stanford, Derek, Dylan Thomas: A Literary Study (London: Neville Spearman, 1954). Tedlock, E. W. (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Legend and the Poet (London: Heinemann, 1960). Thomas, M. Wynn, In the Shadow of the Pulpit: Literature and Nonconformist Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010). Treece, Henry, Dylan Thomas: ‘Dog Among the Fairies’ (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1949).

B. Essays and Published Lectures Davies, James. A, ‘A Picnic in the Orchard: Dylan Thomas’s Wales’, in Tony Curtis (ed.), Wales, The Imagined Nation: Studies in Cultural and National Identity (Bridgend: Seren, 1986). Davies, Walford, ‘Imitation and Invention: the Use of Borrowed Material in Dylan Thomas’s Prose’, Essays in Criticism, XVIII, 3, July 1968, 275–95. –––, Dylan Thomas: The Poet in his Chains, The W. D. Thomas Memorial Lecture (Swansea: University College, Swansea, 1986). –––, ‘“Bright Fields, Loud Hills and the Glimpsed Good Place”: R. S. Thomas and Dylan Thomas’, in M. Wynn Thomas (ed.), The Page’s Drift: R. S. Thomas at Eighty (Bridgend: Seren, 1993). Fraser, G. S., Dylan Thomas, ‘Writers and their Work’ series for the British Council (London: Longmans, Green, 1957).

179

Select Bibliography Hardy, Barbara, Dylan Thomas’s Poetic Language: The Stream that is Flowing Both Ways, the Gwyn Jones Lecture (Cardiff: University College, Cardiff, 1987). Heaney, Seamus, ‘Dylan the Durable?: On Dylan Thomas’, Salmagundi, 100 (fall 1993), 66–85. Lewis, Peter, ‘The Radio Road to Llareggub’, in John Drakakis (ed.), British Radio Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981). Rawson, Claude, Dylan Thomas (Talks to Teachers of English 2) (Newcastle upon Tyne: Department of Education, King’s College, 1962). Vendler, Helen, ‘Under Milk Wood: Lists, Made and Undone’, in Alyce von Rothkirch and Daniel Williams (eds), Beyond the Difference: Welsh Literature in Comparative Contexts: Essays for M. Wynn Thomas at Sixty (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004). Wourm, Nathalie, ‘Dylan Thomas and the French Symbolists’, Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 5 (1999), pp. 27–41.

C. Journals – Special Dylan Thomas Numbers Adam: An International Review, 238 (1953). Dock Leaves, vol. 5, 13 (spring, 1954). Poetry Wales, vol. 9, 2 (autumn, 1973). Les Années 30: Dylan Thomas, 12 (June, 1990). The New Welsh Review, vol. 4, 4 (spring 1992). The Swansea Review (2000).

Audio/Visual Dylan Thomas at the BBC, introduced by Paul Ferris, BBC Audiobooks Ltd, 2003, also on CD ISBN 0563-530863. Dylan Thomas: The Caedmon Collection, UACD 95(11), 2002. CD collection of all the Caedmon recordings of Thomas’s readings of poetry and prose, including the recording with the original cast in New York in 1953 of Under Milk Wood. Dylan Thomas: The World I Breathe: Interview with Robert Lowell, ‘N.F.T. Festival’ Film New York 1964, produced and directed by Perry Miller, narrated by John Malcolm Brinnin. Gwen Watkins in Conversation with Jeff Towns VIBETV DVD (Swansea: The Dylan Thomas Society of Great Britain in conjunction with the Dylan Thomas Centre, 2010).

180

Index Abrams, M. H. 172 n66 Ackerman, John 97 Adelphi, The (journal) 26, 51 Adult Education classes 7 Aeron Valley (Cardiganshire)114 All That Fall (Samuel Beckett) 135 Alvarez, A. (‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’, Introduction to The New Poetry) 15 America 5, 17, 22, 126, 127, 160–3, 167 Amis, Kingsley 163–6 Anglicanism 11 ‘Anglican’ 25 Anglo-Welsh Literature 10, 22, 23, 54, 60, 70, 103, 104, 116 Aphrodite (Greek goddess of love) 108 ‘Apocalypse Movement’ 13–15 ‘Apocalypse Movement’ manifesto 14 Ares (Greek god of war) 108 Arnold, Matthew 46, 50, 82 Auden, W. H. 3, 5, 12, 15, 18, 23, 26, 27, 30, 31–2, 38, 40, 49, 63, 75, 99, 107, 108–9, 124, 146, 152, 154, 162, 166 Barker, George 13 Baudelaire, Charles 70 Beachcomber (newspaper satirical column) 93 Beach of Falesá, The (Robert Louis Stevenson) 141 Beaux’ Stratagem, The (George Farquhar) 37 Beckett, Samuel 22, 135 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell 97 Beecham, Thomas 8 Berryman, John 167 Betjeman, John 106 Beveridge Report, The (1942) 167

Bierce, Ambrose 59–61 Birth of Venus, The (Botticelli) 76 Blaen Cwm (family cottages) 89, 119 Blake, William xii–xiii, 14, 103, 108–9, 148, 152 Boland, Eavan 79 Botteghe Oscure (international journal) 143, 146 Bottrall, Ronald 26 Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) 56 Bridges, Robert 73, 103, 150–1 Britten, Benjamin 99 Broadcasting 131 Browne, Sir Thomas 56 Burton, Richard 38 Byron, George Gordon 72 Cambridge Front, The (journal) 92 Cameron, Norman 168 Capote, Truman 17 Carmarthen Bay 114 Carmarthenshire 6, 7, 32, 54, 67, 119, 146 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart 127 Century of Horror, A (ed. Denis Wheatley) 61 Chagall, Marc 122 Chaplin, Charlie 102 Charles Bridge (Prague) 125 Chatterton, Thomas 36 Chaucer, Geoffrey 81, 112, 129, 130, 139 Chelsea 146 Chirk Castle 147 Churchill, Winston 97 Church, Richard 54–5 Cinema 16 (Movie Distributor, New York) 101 Cleverdon, Douglas 105, 134 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 3, 4, 66, 69, 107

Index Comedy of Danger, A (Richard Hughes) 136 Communism 61 Conquest, Robert 13 Conrad, Joseph 22 Contemporary Poetry and Prose (journal) 61 Cornwall 42, 67 Coventry 96 Coward, Noel 37 Criterion, The (journal) 51 Crown and the Sickle, The (anthology) 13 Cwmdonkin Drive (No. 5, childhood home) 6–7, 45, 55, 67, 134 Cwmdonkin Park 44, 45, 50, 57, 68 cynghanedd (Welsh poetic form) 10, 11, 30 Czech Congress of Writers 126 Czech Ministry of Information 125–6 Czechoslovak government 125 Czech Writers Union 125

Douglas, Keith 113 Drda, Jan (Czech novelist) 125 Dubliners (James Joyce) 59, 139 Duke University, North Carolina 167–8 dyfalu (Welsh poetic device) 11 Dylan Thomas: A New Life (Andrew Lycett, 2003) 6 Dylan Thomas: ‘Dog among the Fairies’ (Henry Treece, 1949) 14 Dylan Thomas in America (John Malcolm Brinnin, 1955) 6, 121, 126, 144 Dylan Thomas: The Biography (Paul Ferris, 1977) 6 Eliot, George 91 Eliot, T. S. xi, xiii, 3, 8, 9, 10, 18, 22, 23, 26, 27, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 48, 69, 74, 88, 100, 101, 107, 111, 113, 117, 123, 130, 135, 141, 143, 158, 162, 165, 166 Emery, Clark 112 Empson, William 7, 27, 35, 102, 107, 110, 124, 155, 166 ‘Encounter, An’ (James Joyce) 59 englyn (Welsh poetic form) 19–21, 30 Etheridge, Ken 103 Evans, Caradoc 51, 60

Dan y Wenallt (Welsh-language adaptation of Under Milk Wood by T. James Jones) 145 Davie, Donald 71 Davies, Aneirin Talfan 18–19, 31, 155 Davies, Eurwen 167 Davies, Idris 103, 166 Davies, W. D. 167–8 Davies, W. H. 103 Days of Dylan Thomas, The (Bill Read, 1965) 9 Deakin, John 1 Dent (publisher) 54, 55, 160 Deserted Village, The (Oliver Goldsmith) 155 ‘Dewi Emrys’ (David Emrys James) 20 Dickens, Charles 34, 62, 90, 93, 100, 141–2 Dickinson, Emily 21, 71, 150 Disney, Walt 42, 63, 138 diwygiadau (religious revivals) 111 Dohi (location of the Czech ‘Writers’ Home’) 125 Donegal 65 Donne, John xi, 49, 88, 154

Faber and Faber (publisher) 162 Factual Film: A Survey, The (Arts Enquiry Report) 96 Feltenstein, Milton D. (New York doctor) 161 Fernhill (the farm) 9, 34, 36, 54, 55, 67, 82, 85, 89, 119 Fisher, Charles 5, 64 Forster, E. M. 111 Foyle’s Poetry Prize 161 Fraser, G. S. 13 Freud, Sigmund 3, 54 Frost, Robert 95, 140 Fuller, Roy 118 Garlick, Raymond 43 Gascoyne, David 13 Gielgud, John 38 Goebbels, Joseph 97

182

Index Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von xi Gower Coast 32, 59, 81, 114 Grand Theatre, Swansea 37 Greene, Graham 36–7 Grierson, John 97 Grigson, Geoffrey 3, 35, 65, 168 Gryphon Films 95 Gunn, Thom 50 ‘Gwilym Marles’ (William Thomas) 7–8

Ireland 65–6, 125, 145 Italy 125 James, David Emrys (‘Dewi Emrys’) 20 Janes, Fred 4, 5, 36 Jarrell, Randall 16, 17 Jarvis Valley (mythic location of early prose) 52 Johnson, Pamela Hansford 9, 22, 36, 43, 46, 52, 66, 94, 128 Jones, Ann (or ‘Annie’, the aunt at Fernhill) 9, 36, 89–90 Jones, Daniel 5, 33–4, 36 Jones, David 103 Jones, Glyn 18, 21, 31, 132, 133 Jones, Gwilym (first cousin at Fernhill) 90 Jones, Gwyn 51, 103, 104 Jones, Jack 51 Jones, Jim (uncle by marriage at Fernhill) 9, 90 Jonson, Ben 130 Joyce, James 22, 59, 69–70, 139

Hardy, Thomas 38, 79, 84, 85, 118, 143, 152, 154 Harris, Howard 43 Hartcup, Guy 166 Harvard University 126, 143 Hay Fever (Noel Coward) 37 Heaney, Seamus 10, 124 Hendry, J. F. 13 Henry IV Part One (Shakespeare) 75–6 Herald of Wales, The (newspaper) 43 Herbert, George 17, 67, 78, 167 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth 73, 150 Hiroshima 123 Hitchcock, Alfred 102 Hitler, Adolf 39, 97, 144, 167 Holbrook, David 139, 141 Holbrooke, Josef 8 Holroyd, Michael xii Hood, Thomas 118 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 11–13, 15, 17, 19–20, 21, 30–1, 66, 73, 103, 149–51, 152 Howard de Walden, Lady 147 Howard de Walden, Lord 8, 147 Hughes, Frances 133 Hughes, Richard 60, 130, 133, 136, 144 Hughes, Ted 15, 18, 75, 159 Hughes, Trevor (schoolboy friend) 54, 85–6 Hughes, T. Rowland 104 Huxley, Aldous 56 Hydrotaphia: or Urn Burial (Sir Thomas Browne) 56

Kafka, Franz 93 Kardomah Café (Swansea) 5 Keats, John 2, 3, 31, 35, 48–50, 57, 68–9, 93, 103, 107, 152, 153–4, 157–8, 159 Langland, William 159–60 Larkin, Philip 15, 44–5, 112, 117–18, 136–7, 165, 166 Latin American Service (BBC) 95 Laugharne (Carmarthenshire) 5, 14, 22, 65, 67, 72, 76, 89, 91, 101, 107, 114, 115, 117, 121, 126, 127, 128, 130, 132–4, 144, 146, 147, 148, 153 Lawrence, D. H. 9, 47, 85, 89, 111, 119–20, 121, 139 Leavis, F. R. 91 Levinson Poetry Prize, of Poetry (Chicago) 126 Lewis, Alun 103 Lewis, C. Day 26, 122 Lewis, Saunders 103–4 Life of Dylan Thomas, The (Constantine FitzGibbon, 1965) 6, 21–2, 107, 131, 144, 155

Imagist poets 27 International Surrealist Exhibition (1936) 61

183

Index Listener, The 65 Llan-gain (Carmarthenshire) 117 Llanina (Cardiganshire) 146, 147 Lockwood Memorial Library (University of Buffalo, New York) 4, 52, 107 London 5, 7, 8, 9, 21, 35, 36, 41, 65, 66, 89, 91–3, 96, 107, 114, 125, 160

‘Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, An’ (Ambrose Bierce) 59–61 Olson, Charles 23 Olson, Elder 112 On the Road (Jack Kerouac) 17 Ormond, John 103 Owen, Trevor (headmaster) 2–3 Owen, Wilfred 41, 91, 103 Oxford 125, 146 Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse, The (ed. Philip Larkin, 1973) 165

Mabinogion, The (Y Mabinogi) 8, 142 Machen, Arthur 142–3 MacIver, Hector 147 Maclaren-Ross, Julian 7 MacNeice, Louis 38, 125, 128 Magdalen College, Oxford 146 Marvell, Andrew 119 métèque 10 Mew, Charlotte 79, 85 Miller, Arthur 101 Milton, John 2, 69, 87, 88, 103, 109, 119, 144 Ministry of Information 95–6 Monet, Claude 122 Morgan, William 103 Morris, Sir Lewis 103 ‘Movement’ Poets 13, 15, 163 Muir, Edwin 24 Mumbles Press, The (newspaper) 39

Paraclete Congregational Chapel (Newton, Swansea) 9, 46 Pearson, Gabriel 169 Persia 160 Polanyi, Michael 151 Pope, Alexander 69 Pound, Ezra xi, 23, 26, 42 Prague 125–6 Price, Cecil 105 Price, William (of Llantrisant) 54 Prichard, John 4, 103 proest (Welsh poetic device) 11 Pryce-Jones, Alan 103 Pudney, John 40, 49 Raine, Kathleen 13, 14 Read, Herbert 13 Reed, Henry 38 Rees, Bob (schoolboy friend) 12 Rees, Rev David (uncle-in-law) 9, 46 Reform Bill, The (1867) 8 Rhys, Keidrych 104 Richard II (Shakespeare) 37 Richards, Alun 165 Riefenstahl, Leni 97 Rimbaud, Arthur 70 Roget’s Thesaurus 18, 31 Roman Catholicism 11, 155 Ross, Ethel 39 Rota, Bertram (bookseller) 107

Nabokov, Vladimir 22, 70 Nagasaki 123 National Health Service, The 167 National Theatre of Wales, The 8 Nazi genocide 95, 131 New Apocalypse, The (anthology) 13 New English Weekly, The 36, 51 New Lines (anthology) 13 New Poetry, The (anthology) 15 New Quay (Cardiganshire) 5, 114, 117, 131, 132, 133–4 New Stories (anthology) 51 New Verse (journal) 3, 26, 51 New York 5, 101, 126, 128, 144, 161, 167, 168 Nezval, Vit zslav (Czech poet) 125 Nightwood (Djuna Barnes) 88 Nonconformist society 32, 39, 46 Nuclear war 95

St Beuno’s College 11, 20 St Martin’s Church (Laugharne) 1 St Martin’s Press (New York) xiii St Vincent’s Hospital, New York City 161, 167 sangiad (Welsh poetic device) 11

184

Index Second World War 130–1 Second World War poetry 113 Shakespeare 8, 62, 72, 75–6, 103, 112, 119, 124, 130, 144 Sidney, Sir Philip 103 Sinding, Christian 143 Sir John’s Hill (Laugharne) 12, 52, 123, 133, 146, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156 Sitwell, Edith 28, 126 Smith, Stevie 19 Solva (Pembrokeshire) 114 South Wales Daily Post, The (newspaper) 36, 104 Spender, Stephen xi, 26, 40, 88, 100, 166 Spoon River Anthology (Edgar Lee Masters) 143, 149 Squire, J. C. 101 Stevenson, Robert Louis 141–2 Stevens, Wallace 66, 146 Strand Films 95–6, 97, 99 Strange Orchestra (Rodney Ackland) 39 Stravinsky, Igor 161 Sunday Referee, The 35, 36 Surrealism 61–3 Swansea 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 25, 32–3, 37, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45–6, 47, 50–1, 57, 66, 82, 88–9, 90, 95, 104–6, 114, 134, 138, 139, 157, 163 Swansea Bay 32, 45 Swansea Grammar School 2–3, 36, 105 Swansea Grammar School Magazine 3, 12, 27, 142 Swansea Little Theatre 37 Swift, Jonathan 129 Symbolist technique 28

Thomas, Caitlin (wife) 67, 83, 84, 114, 126–7, 133, 134, 150, 160, 162 Thomas, Colm (son) 127 Thomas, David John (‘D.J.’, father) 2, 6–9, 31, 36, 46, 123–5, 156, 161 Thomas, Dylan Poetry: ‘After the funeral’ 9, 28, 29, 38, 51, 64, 83, 85–9, 92, 107, 127, 129, 133, 142, 155 ‘Altarwise by owl-light’ sonnets 28, 52, 62, 66, 77–8 ‘Among those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred’ 106, 112 114–15, 133 ‘And death shall have no dominion’ 28, 29, 36, 164 ‘An old man or a young man’ 164–5 ‘A process in the weather of the heart’ 29, 47 ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, By Fire, of a Child in London’ 106, 110–12, 113, 115 ‘A saint about to fall’ 107, 133 ‘A Winter’s Tale’ 64 ‘Ballad of the long-legged Bait’ 32, 38, 63 ‘Because the pleasure-bird whistles’ 62–3 ‘Before I knocked’ 29, 78 ‘Ceremony after a Fire Raid’ 106, 115, 117 Collected Poems 1934–1952 (1952) 2, 58, 87, 129, 160–1 Deaths and Entrances (1946) 58, 73, 101, 115 117 ‘Deaths and Entrances’ 72, 106, 115 ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ 29, 43, 64, 123–5, 146 ‘Do you not father me’ 45, 66 ‘Ears in the turrets hear’ 45, 71 18 Poems (1934) 15, 24, 29, 36, 52, 61, 65, 162 ‘Elegy’ 123

Taf (river entering the estuary at Laugharne) 127, 146 Tal-sarn (Cardiganshire) 114 Taylor, Donald (Strand Films) 97, 98, 101 Taylor, Margaret 131, 133, 149 Tennyson, Alfred 18, 31, 34, 103 Thetis (The Iliad XVIII) 108 Thomas, Aeronwy (daughter) 123, 155

185

Index ‘Especially when the October wind’ xii, 50, 65, 87, 89, 100, 142 ‘Fern Hill’ 29, 36, 38–9, 51, 54, 55, 63, 64, 81, 82, 89, 91, 100, 117, 118–23, 155 ‘Foster the Light’ 66, 70 ‘Grief thief of time’ 66 ‘Hold hard, these ancient minutes’ 89 ‘Holy Spring’ 96 ‘How shall my animal’ 11, 49, 133 ‘How soon the servant sun’ 73 ‘I dreamed my genesis’ 19–20 ‘I fellowed sleep’ 16 ‘If I were tickled by the rub of love’ xi–xii, 47 ‘If my head hurt a hair’s foot’ 44, 63, 64 ‘I have longed to move away’ 28, 29, 40, 44, 66, 93, 117 ‘I, in my intricate image’ 29, 52 ‘I make this in a warring absence’ 83, 84 ‘Incarnate devil’ 63 ‘In Country Heaven’ 52, 123, 151 In Country Sleep (1952) 129 ‘In Country Sleep’ 52, 64, 121, 123, 151, 155 ‘In my craft or sullen art’ 31, 43, 74–6, 146 ‘In the beginning’ 29, 70 ‘In the White Giant’s Thigh’ 51, 52, 64, 123, 146, 151, 154, 158 ‘I see the boys of summer’ 14, 46–7 ‘Lament’ 38, 128–9 ‘Light breaks where no sun shines’ 41, 47 ‘Love in the Asylum’ 49 ‘My hero bares his nerves’ 18, 74–6, 148 ‘Not from this anger’ 83, 133 ‘Now’ 73 ‘O make me a mask’ 117, 133 ‘Once below a time’ 91

‘Once it was the colour of saying’ xi, xiii, 67–70, 71, 83, 87, 107, 117 ‘On no work of words’ 66–7, 83, 133 ‘On the Marriage of a Virgin’ 133 ‘Our eunuch dreams’ 37, 152 ‘Out of the sighs’ 28, 29, 71, 117 ‘Over Sir John’s hill’ 12, 52, 123, 146, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156 ‘Paper and Sticks’ 58 ‘Poem in October’ xii, 46, 54, 64, 81, 82, 91, 100, 115–17, 122, 123 ‘Poem on his Birthday’ xii, 11, 29, 148, 153, 156–7, 158 Poetry Notebooks xii, 2, 4, 6–7, 17, 21, 27–9, 39–41, 42, 65–6, 74, 84, 85, 107, 109, 114, 133, 142 ‘Prologue’ vi, 29, 160 ‘Should lanterns shine’ 11, 48, 56–7, 66, 97, 117 ‘Song’ (‘Love me, not as the ruffling pigeon’) 42 ‘That Sanity Be Kept’ 42 ‘The conversation of prayers’ 29, 49, 77–81 ‘The Countryman’s Return’ 41–2, 92 ‘The force that through the green fuse’ 16, 47–8, 148 ‘The hand that signed the paper’ 64, 66, 148 ‘The hunchback in the park’ 28, 29, 64, 68, 107, 114–15, 133 ‘The Map of Love (1939) 15, 55, 66, 87, 94 ‘There was a saviour’ 14, 39,106, 108–9 ‘The spire cranes’ 28, 29, 87, 133 ‘The tombstone told when she died’ 64, 84–5, 133 ‘This side of the truth’ 49, 64 ‘Today, this insect’ 16 ‘To Others than You’ 168 Twenty-five Poems (1936) 15, 52, 61, 65, 66, 73

186

Index ‘Twenty-four years’ xii, 117 ‘Vision and Prayer’ 17, 30, 49 ‘We lying by seasand’ 40 ‘When all my five and country senses’ 133, 148 ‘When I woke’ xii, 91, 107 ‘When, like a running grave’ 47, 52, 62 ‘When once the twilight locks’ 11, 25, 64 ‘Where once the waters of your face’ 81–2, 152 ‘Why east wind chills’ 48–9, 57, 109 Prose: Adventures in the Skin Trade 92–3, 133 ‘An Adventure from a Work in Progress’ 57, 58, 62 ‘A Prospect of the Sea’ 54, 122 ‘A Story’ 33 ‘Brember’ 61 ‘In the Direction of the Beginning’ 62 ‘Modern Poetry’ 12, 41 ‘Poetic Manifesto’ 59 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog 7, 32–4, 37, 40, 51, 58, 59, 81, 89, 92, 93, 111, 122 ‘A Visit to Grandpa’s’ 51, 58, 133 ‘Extraordinary Little Cough’ 51, 122–3 ‘Just Like Little Dogs’ 40, 140 ‘One Warm Saturday’ 59, 92, 93, 111–12, 133 ‘The Fight’ 33 ‘The Peaches’ 9, 34, 51, 58, 89–91, 118, 142 ‘Who Do You Wish Was With Us?’ 51, 59, 81 ‘Red Notebook’ (prose manuscript notebook) 52, 107 ‘The Burning Baby’ 51, 54 The Death of the King’s Canary 124 ‘The Dress’ 54, 60–1 ‘The End of the River’ 61

‘The Enemies’ 54 ‘The Films’ 37 ‘The Horse’s Ha’ 141 ‘The Holy Six’ 51, 54 ‘The Lemon’ 55 ‘The Orchards’ 141, 147 ‘The Poets of Swansea’ 43 ‘The School for Witches’ 54 ‘The True Story’ 58, 61 ‘The Vest’ 58 ‘The Visitor’ 54, 58, 61 Broadcasts: ‘Laugharne’ 127–8 ‘Memories of Christmas’ 9, 101 ‘On Reading One’s Own Poems’ 23, 147 ‘Quite Early One Morning’ 131–2, 133–4, 141 ‘Reminiscences of Childhood’ 101, 116 ‘Return Journey’ 18, 104–5 ‘Swansea and the Arts’ 4 ‘The Town That Was Mad’ (original plan for Under Milk Wood) 53, 134, 151 ‘Three Poems’ 151 Under Milk Wood 5, 11, 30–1, 33, 37, 38, 47, 53, 55, 59, 63, 90, 91, 97, 98, 102, 104, 105, 106, 117, 127, 128, 129–45, 146, 151, 158, 168 ‘Welsh Poetry’ 4, 13 Film: Balloon Site 568 96 Green Mountain, Black Mountain 96, 98–9 New Towns for Old 96 Our Country 96, 98 The Beach of Falesá 141 The Doctor and the Devils 97, 100, 141 These Are the Men 96 This is Colour 96 Twenty Years A-Growing 100, 141 Thomas, Edward 9, 38, 39, 103, 126, 148 Thomas, Florence (mother) 2, 6, 9 Thomas, Gwyn 51 Thomas, Llewelyn (son) 63, 67, 133

187

Index Thomas, Nancy (sister) 2, 7 Thomas, R. S. 23–5, 74 Thomas, Theodosia (‘Dosie’, aunt) 9 Thomas, William (‘Gwilym Marles’) 7–8 Time (magazine) 126 Titanic, The 72 Tolkien, J. R. R. 19 Towy (river entering the estuary at Laugharne) 127, 146 Traherne, Thomas 103 Treece, Henry 13–14, 15–16 Trick, Bert 139 Trouvaille 18 Tutankhamun (tomb) 57 Twenty Years A-Growing (Maurice O’Sullivan) 100, 141

Wain, John 136–7 Wales (periodical) 104 Walters, Meurig 103 Watkins, Vernon xii, 5, 13, 14, 42, 51, 58, 73–4, 84, 92, 94–5, 103, 107, 115, 133, 143, 150–1, 168 Way of the World, The (Congreve) 37 Webster, John xi Welsh Review, The (journal) 104 White Horseman, The (anthology) 13 Whitman, Walt 42 Wilde, Jimmy (boxer) 44 Wilde, Oscar 95 Williams, J. Morgan (Latin master) 3 Williams, Oscar 17 Williams, Raymond 138–9 Williams, William Carlos 26 Wilson, Edmund 22 Woods, James Chapman 43 Wordsworth, William xi, xii 1, 3, 10, 27, 36, 53, 66, 69, 88, 165 Worm’s Head (Gower Peninsula) 59, 81, 85

Ulysses (James Joyce) 59, 139 Unitarianism 7 University College of Wales, Aberystwyth 8 University College of Wales, Swansea 8, 105, 165 University of California, Berkeley 53 University of Utah 106

Yeats, W. B. 14, 23, 38, 43, 45, 48, 57, 66, 69, 79, 88, 109, 113, 128, 145, 147, 154, 155, 156, 162, 164, 165, 166 ‘Y Gorwel’ (Welsh englyn by Dewi Emrys quoted) 20 Y Mabinogi (The Mabinogion) 8, 142 Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association Poetry Center (New York) 126, 143–4

Vale of Clwyd 11, 20 Vaughan, Henry xiii, 17, 103, 116 Vaughan-Thomas, Wynford 36 Venus de Milo 108 Virgil 3

188