All That is Wales

by Professor M. Wynn Thomas

  21Nigel Heseltine, Twenty-Five Poems by Dafydd ap Gwilym (Banbury: The Piers Press, 1968; first published 1944).

  22‘To a Girl Marrying a Man with a Wooden Leg’, Wales, 11 (Winter 1939–40), 303, later collected in The Four-Walled Dream, p. 37; review of Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds, Wales, 11 (Winter 1939–40), 308–9. Heseltine refers to the (anonymous) English reviewer during the course of his own review.

  23Nigel Heseltine, Tales of the Squirearchy (Carmarthen: Druid Press, 1946).

  24Wales, 11 (Winter 1939–40), 306–8; the review immediately preceded Heseltine’s review of At Swim-Two-Birds. Heseltine had earlier reviewed Thomas’s 25 Poems, Wales, 2 (August 1937), 74–5.

  25‘The People of England’, Nigel Heseltine, The Four-Walled Dream (London: Fortune Press, no date), p. 52.

  26Nigel Heseltine, Scarred Background: A Journey through Albania (London: Lovat Dickson Publishers, 1938), pp. 14–15.

  27For full information about Heseltine’s extraordinary, and hitherto largely uncharted, later career, see the essay by Dr Rhian Davies in Welsh Writing in English, 11 (2006–7), 69–101.

  28‘Data on the Squirearchy’, Tales of the Squirearchy, pp. 45–53.

  29‘Homecoming’, Story XI, no pagination.

  4

  ‘THERE’S WORDS’: DYLAN THOMAS, SWANSEA AND LANGUAGE1

  ‘Dylan loved people and loved Swansea. Even the eccentrics and odd characters were his kinsfolk be they Swansea people.’2 The words are those of one of Thomas’s closest friends, Bert Trick, and they seem to me to be a fair summary of the positive aspects of the relationship between the poet and his home town. The negative aspects, mostly limited to that period in late adolescence when he morosely viewed Swansea as the provincial graveyard of his burgeoning talent, are lividly recorded in the self-dramatising letters he sent to his young London girlfriend, Pamela Hansford Johnson. It is still possible, in one sense, to tour Thomas’s Swansea. Yet in another, more important, sense it is not. That is not only because such a substantial part of what he loved about the place was obliterated during three dreadful nights of air-raid in February, 1941. It is more importantly because a writer’s town can be accessed by only one route – through that author’s writings. We might even say that, as an inveterate writer, Thomas turned his town into words. But then, it was Swansea that had first set him on the way to becoming himself a figure fashioned out of language; a linguistic sign. Instead of word being made flesh, in his case flesh eventually ended up being made word.

  This sobering realisation occurs to Thomas at one arresting point in his moving and grossly underestimated radio play Return Journey. Broadcast first in 1947, it is a haunting account of his post-war return to his home town in a wry, comic, poignant attempt to reconnect with his youthful self. He comes ‘home’ in search of what (or rather who) he had once been – a search that is also a search for the Swansea that no longer is. And his first port of call, once he’s left the town’s High Street Station, is naturally one of the many pubs he had frequented when he’d been a young cub reporter, apprenticed to language on the local paper that became the South Wales Evening Post. In an attempt to describe his one-time youthful self to the barmaid, he launches into a virtuosic performance of linguistic self-portraiture:

  He’d be about seventeen or eighteen … and above medium height. Above medium height for Wales, I mean, he’s five foot six and a half. Thick blubber lips; snub nose; curly mouse-brown hair; one front tooth broken after playing a game called Cats and Dogs, in the Mermaid, Mumbles; speaks rather fancy; truculent; plausible; a bit of a shower-off; … lived up the Uplands; a bombastic adolescent provincial Bohemian with a thick-knotted artist’s tie made out of his sister’s scarf, she never knew where it had gone … a gabbing, ambitious, mock tough, pretentious young man; and mole-y, too.3

  And what is the barmaid’s response? It is devastatingly uncomprehending. ‘There’s words: what d’you want to find him for, I wouldn’t touch him with a barge-pole.’

  ‘There’s words’: the phrase haunts me, because in its ambivalence it encapsulates the creative heart of Thomas’s life and writing. ‘There’s words’ is, obviously enough, Dylan’s self-knowing and self-mocking advertisement of his irresistible way with language, voiced here in a naive barmaid’s unconsciously wondering tribute to a poet’s seductive potency of expression. And I’ll be returning to this celebratory aspect of the phrase later. But the exclamation also carries dark, disturbing overtones. His wistful question to the girl behind the bar has in effect been ‘do you remember a young Mr Thomas?’ To prompt her memory he’s launched into a bravura performance. And what is her response? ‘There’s words’. It is as if, horrifyingly, Thomas, the would-be home-comer, discovers he now has existence only in language, not only as a clever arranger of words but as a clever arrangement of them.

  This is a realisation already anticipated in an earlier failure of his in Return Journey to conjure up memories of his younger self in Swansea people, this time by mentioning him by name. The blank reply he this time gets from the barmaid, as she turns to another customer at the bar for confirmation, is ‘this is a regular home from home for Thomases, isn’t it, Mr Griffiths?’ (RJ, 75). Even the surname ‘Thomas’, it turns out, is not a reliable personal signifier, an identifier of self: ‘Thomas’ is after all the most common of surnames in Swansea, a byword for all and sundry. It is much more common even than the familiarly Welsh ‘Mr Griffiths’ – a surname the barmaid can here confidently (even pointedly) deploy to denote a real, living, single person. It is as if Dylan the returnee finds himself lost in language. No wonder, therefore, that, as he walks the streets of his old town, he seems to have become a merely ghostly presence wandering among the ‘blitzed flat graves’ of shops, ‘marbled with snow and headstoned with fences’ (RJ, 73). Words, it is implied, have usurped and thus obliterated his living, individual human identity. This is a point underlined, as the radio play subtly emphasises, by the way the barmaid’s phrase ‘There’s words’ precisely echoes her earlier phrase ‘There’s snow’. As Return Journey makes graphically clear, the exceptionally heavy snowfall under which Swansea disappeared in the notoriously hard winter of Thomas’s return to the town in 1947 is symbolic of the obliteration, during the terrible three-night Blitz in 1941, of the centre of the old town which had been the heartland not just of the town but of the young Dylan too.

  The war in Europe had ended only some two and half years before Thomas’s return to Swansea in 1947, and so much of the town still lay in ruins. Devastated by bombing, large areas from the docks to the shopping centre remained in a derelict, devastated state. ‘What’s the Three Lamps like now’, asks the returning Thomas of the barmaid. And the reply comes from a customer leaning on the counter: ‘It isn’t like anything. It isn’t there. It’s nothing mun. You remember Ben Evans’s stores? It’s right next door to that. Ben Evans isn’t there either’ (RJ, 77). Buildings, places, these are now just names, just words. Whereas Thomas had once been able to take his substantial, material bearings from these buildings, and thus been able to orientate himself, now, disorientatingly, where there were solid shops there are nothing but ‘hole[s] in space’. Those ‘displaced’ shops now have an existence – a ‘place’ – only in language. ‘Eddershaw Furnishers, Curry’s Bicycles, … Hodges and Clothiers … Crouch the Jeweller, Lennard’s Boots, Kardomah … David Evans, … Burton’s, Lloyd’s Bank’ (RJ, 78): ‘there’s words’, just as the barmaid said. This vivid elegy for a Swansea town that is no more may remind us how aware, and how appalled, the post-war Thomas was that the age had turned nuclear since last he’d visited his home town. Bombed Swansea was, so to speak, his personal Hiroshima. It’s as if the hopeless sense of nihilism by which he had been afflicted following the first nuclear explosions had fatefully heightened his sense that his beloved, Swansea-generated world of words and memories was itself likewise nothing but an endless chain reaction of signifiers.

  After all, Swansea and language had always been s
o intimately interconnected in Dylan Thomas’s experience as to be virtually interchangeable. It’s therefore not surprising that Return Journey should from the very outset show us a Dylan who, in returning to Swansea, is brought face to face not with his younger self but with language itself. It was there that he had first been brought alive to words. I’d therefore like briefly to consider just a very few of the many important locations and occasions of his original awakening not just to the world but to the word in his home town.

  * * *

  Let’s start with one of his best-known poems: ‘Do not go gentle into that good night,/ Old age should rage against the close of day;/ Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’4 This famous villanelle bespeaks Thomas’s awareness that his father hadn’t only begotten him; it was his father, too, who had made him a poet. Because what is rarely, if ever, noticed by commentators is that ‘Do not go gentle’ is Dylan’s despairing, taunting challenge to his rapidly ageing father to assume the role of a King Lear. Behind the poem lies the aged Yeats’s recently published poem ‘Lapis Lazuli’, a poem Thomas would certainly have known, not least because his great Swansea friend Vernon Watkins was a Yeats fanatic.5 In that poem Yeats famously celebrates the defiant ‘gaiety’ with which the great Shakespearean heroes meet their end, ‘gaiety transfiguring all that dread’, a phrase echoed in Thomas’s ‘Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay’. Thomas is also picking up on Yeats’s use of the verb ‘blaze’: ‘Black out: Heaven blazing into the head’.

  ‘Tragedy wrought to its uttermost … Hamlet rambles and Lear rages’, Yeats had written. And Thomas next proceeds to borrow yet another Yeatsian word: ‘rage’. ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’ Thus in urging his father to turn ‘age’ into ‘rage’ just like Lear, Dylan Thomas is trying to provoke the sick atheist into once more roaring the disgusted cry that had characterised him in his prime: ‘it’s raining again, damn Him.’6 Via Yeats, then, Thomas is implicitly alluding to the figure of King Lear throughout ‘Do not go gentle’. And why is he doing so? Well, it is in part his way of confessing himself to be, as poet, the offspring of a passionate Shakespearean – his father had actually read the Bard’s poetry to him in his very cradle. ‘Do not go gentle’ implicitly bears witness to the vivifying effect of poetic language on little Dylan at the very beginning of his life, and so the villanelle is able convincingly to claim a like power to re-vivify D. J. Thomas at the very end of his life. Therefore, in being a poem about Dylan’s father, ‘Do not go gentle’ is also inescapably a poem about origins, about Swansea as a cradle of language, and about the power of words to shape personal identity.

  D. J. Thomas was, by some reports, not an easy man to live with. Aloof, frustrated and irascible, he seems to have been periodically irritated by the class difference between his sophisticated educated self and his comfortably homely chatterbox of a wife from working-class Swansea East. Young Dylan was thus encouraged early to escape and make an alternative home for himself in language, which is what he memorably did in magical Cwmdonkin Park, whose true ‘keeper’ was not the park keeper but, of course, the hunchback. Bent out of true, ‘The hunchback in the park’ is the physical image of the enticingly deviant, the alluringly monstrous, the rivetingly grotesque (CP, 93–4). Like the poet, he is the eternal outsider. To enter his territory is to cross over to the wild side, to join the company of ‘the truant boys from the town’. Truancy must have held an irresistible appeal for a schoolmaster’s son who went on to revel in the truancy of words.

  Tributary influences on ‘The Hunchback in the Park’ are many, and obviously include the film of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the William books by Richmal Crompton that Thomas devoured as a boy.7 But all influences tend towards the same conclusion; that as a poet he feels most at home with the errant life and the wild energy of words. Those are the words that, like the truant boys, once they’re clearly heard can then seem to ‘run on out of sound’. This truant phrase, like so many of Thomas’s, is itself a hunchback, because it wilfully distorts a well-known idiom – ‘run on out of sight’. In the process it reveals all poetry to be language misshapen, like the hunchback himself. It also reminds us that, for a poet like Thomas, a poem is a device for allowing words to ‘run on out of [the] sound’ of their usual, ordinary usage and meaning. A poem is a magical ‘park’ where words are let out to play, given their head, and allowed to go wherever their exuberant energy of life may take them. ‘Run on out of sound’ can mean either ‘run on out of the reach of sound’, or it can mean ‘run on propelled only by sound’ (compare with ‘I did that out of spite’), just like one of Thomas’s poems.

  ‘The Hunchback in the Park’ is often sentimentally read as enchanting idyll and indulgently supposed to be a poem as innocent as strawberries. But stalking the text is an incipient, because pre-pubescent, sexuality, hinted at in the description of the hunchback himself as ‘the old dog sleeper’ – the phrase ‘old dog’ (with its echo of the Welsh hen gi) implies a dirty old womaniser, the roguish aged twin of the ‘young dog’ Thomas himself boasted of being in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Of course the poor old hunchback can be such only in his sleep, and even then he is capable only of a eunuch dream of ‘a woman figure without fault’, the old man’s pathetic twist on the Pygmalion story. The sublimated sexuality of his frustrated making is paralleled and contrasted with the activity of the incipiently sexual boys who ‘made the tigers jump out of their eyes/ to roar on the rockery stones,/ and the groves were blue with sailors’. The word ‘blue’ there refers not only to the colour of the sea and the uniform of sailors, but also to their blue language and thus by connection to the docks from which the Cape Horners sailed in the heyday of Swansea as Copperopolis. This dockland area, with its adjacent red-light district of the Strand, was distantly visible from Dylan Thomas’s window away at the far end of town from his home in the affluent genteel suburban Uplands. Indeed, wickedly hidden in that phrase ‘the groves were blue with sailors’ is a subversive allusion to the bourgeois neighbourhood in which young Dylan lived, because the name of the triangle of streets directly adjacent to Cwmdonkin Park is ‘the Grove’. In exultantly making the groves ‘blue with sailors’ Thomas is therefore slyly using his power as poet to turn the respectable Grove into a district of low repute.

  For Thomas, Cwmdonkin Park was both nursery of the imagination and an adventure playground for language. That it was so may have been in part due to its proximity to what in those days was referred to as a School for the Deaf and Dumb, the significance of which for Thomas was pointed out in an important but neglected essay by my late friend Vic Golightly.8 It was awareness of signing that lay behind such phrases as ‘the rows/ Of the star-gestured children in the park’. Hence, from earliest days, Thomas was aware of language not as voiced, fixed and given, but as a system of flexible signs, a nimble means of signifying. That words could be produced in all forms, shapes and sizes would have been self-evident to one who grew up in a bilingual environment. Welsh was the first language of both his parents, and his country relatives were virtually monoglot Welsh-speakers. There were Welsh-language dictionaries, grammars and poetry anthologies on his father’s shelves. And the English spoken all around him as a boy would have been colourfully influenced by the Welsh language. Indeed, the very phrase ‘there’s words’ is a good example of this. A familiar form of Welsh English, it derives from the use in Welsh of dyna (‘there’) where in English an exclamatory ‘What’ or ‘How’ would be used. Hence ‘There’s posh’, ‘There’s lovely’ and so on. The young Dylan would also have been very familiar with code-switching – a primitive example of it in the text of Return Journey being the use of ‘Tawe water’ to denote a pint of beer – ‘Tawe’ being the Welsh name of the river at whose mouth – Aber-tawe – Swansea stands.

  To mention code-switching is to be reminded of an intriguing fact. Thomas’s two closest friends at Swansea, the poet Vernon Watkins and the musician Daniel Jones, went on to work during the war at
the government’s secret code-breaking centre of Bletchley Park. They seemed to share with Dylan an exceptional sensitivity to the complex patterned character of closed signifying systems such as language. Thomas’s was an interestingly hybrid model of poetry. He repeatedly spoke of it in organicist and biological terms suggestive of natural processes. But he also described his poems as laboured assemblages, which is why of late they’ve caught the attention of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school of poets. Thomas could represent poems as word machines for multiplying meaning. In the interests of the latter he did not respect the individual integrity of a single word but was happy to reduce it to its constituent parts if this served his purposes. This is most evident in the case of his only known Joycean, multi-lingual pun. His notebooks record his discovery that the Welsh word amser (meaning ‘time’) could be split into the two syllables am (which normally means ‘around’) and sêr, which means ‘stars’. The outcome of this bizarre nuclear splitting of a word to release its arbitrary additional signifying possibilities was the line he included in ‘The force that through the green fuse’, about ‘how time has ticked a heaven around [am] the stars [sêr].’ He has treated amser as if it were a code word, a miniature cipher that needed to be cracked to reveal its secret meaning.

  Had I time I’d like to explore the broad analogies between both the making and the reading of Thomas’s poetry and those of cipher-construction and cipher-breaking. Central to all these processes is the construction and deconstruction of patterns of equivalence. But if Thomas can be read as a maker of codes, he can also be read as a maker of anti-codes, since while his poems operate, like codes or ciphers, on the principle of equivalence, they knowingly resist the reduceability to singleness of meaning that any code or cipher presupposes.

  * * *

  After the ‘Cwmdonkin’ period in Thomas’s development came the period of Warmley, the substantial middle-class Sketty home of Dylan Thomas’s great friend and fellow artist Daniel Jones. It was there that two lads crossing the threshold into their teens conspired to create their own theatre of the absurd out of the incorrigible zaniness of language. If Cwmdonkin Park was the nursery of Thomas the poet, then Warmley was the nursery of Thomas the comic writer – and I’d even venture to suggest that he may have had a greater natural genius for comedy than he had for poetry, because comedy allowed (and indeed positively encouraged) him to gleefully exploit the sheer glorious silliness of words. He revelled in the anarchic accidents of meaning and loved the adventitious character of words. In later years he was, after all, shrewdly and glumly to surmise that he might be more ‘a freak user of words than a poet’.9 In Warmley Dan and Dylan (even their names conveniently rhyme) mirrored the Marx Brothers’ films and anticipated the Goon Show, that madcap classic of post-war British radio, by inventing characters outrageously named Miguel Y. Bradshaw, Waldo Carpet, Xmas Pulpit, Paul America, Winter Vaux, Tonenbach and Bram (CL, 196). Across the sky of their Warmley world there flew ‘panama-shaped birds from the Suez Canal’, and the ‘Radio Warmley’ they invented broadcast rhymes of which Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear might not have been entirely ashamed: ‘a drummer is a man we know who has to do with drums,/ But I’ve never met a plumber yet who had to do with plums,/ A cheerful man who sells you hats would be a cheerful hatter,/ But is a serious man who sells you mats a serious matter?’ (CL, 5). The adult Thomas was to view Warmley nostalgically as the epitome of ‘the queer, Swansea world, a world that was, thank god, self-sufficient’. And of his Warmley alter ego Percy he was to write ‘Percy’s world in Warmley was, and still is, the only one that has any claims of permanence … his was a world of our own, from which we can interpret nearly everything that’s worth anything’ (CL, 197). To which I’d add the question, What is Llareggub, after all, but a Warmley for grown-ups?