All That is Wales

by Professor M. Wynn Thomas

  Cwmdonkin Park, Warmley; these were then two Swansea locales important for Thomas’s evolution in language. To these can be added an unexpected third: the Paraclete Congregational Chapel, just around the bay from Swansea in Newton, a corner of the sometime fishing village of Mumbles. It was there that the boy Dylan was regularly subjected of a Sunday to a strong dose of chapel religion administered by his mother’s brother-in-law, who was a local minister. And that made him aware that for more than a century in Wales, the word had been the preserve of the great preachers of the Welsh pulpit, the lords and masters of language who had been allowed the last word on every aspect of life.10

  Realising that if he wanted to become a writer, he’d have to wrestle language out of the iron control of the pulpit, he began early to wage his own war for the word. One of the most celebrated of his attempts to displace what remained of the erstwhile regnant discourse of Nonconformist, chapel-mad Wales is ‘After the Funeral: in memory of Ann Jones’ (CP, 73–4). The poem openly presents itself to us as the very site of a linguistic struggle between Dylan, ‘Ann’s [Dionysiac] bard on a raised hearth’, who commands the power to ‘call all/ the seas to service’, and the ministers and deacons of a repressed and repressive patriarchal culture, with their ‘mule praises, brays’ and ‘hymning heads’ as they soberly preside over Ann’s chapel funeral service. In this inverted version of the Old Testament story about the contest between Elijah and the pagan priests of Baal, it is the pagan champion of nature, the anti-chapel Thomas, who emerges triumphant. That triumph is variously expressed in the poem as a power to raise an ‘alternative’, verbal tombstone in Ann’s memory, and as a power to resurrect the dead fox, so that its ‘stuffed lung … twitch and cry Love/ And the strutting fern lay seeds on the black sill’. The outrageous phallic thrust of that final image is, of course, utterly unmistakeable.

  It is already evident in ‘After the Funeral’ that, to coin an image from Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas is a Polly Garter of a poet. He defies the respectable chapel-cowed community not only by flaunting the fecund sexuality of his poetry but by delightedly indulging in promiscuous verbal liaisons, encouraging words to copulate and thrive so as to breed unpredictable and uncontainable meaning: ‘I like contradicting my images, saying two things in one word, four in two words and one in six… Poetry … should be as orgiastic and organic as copulation, dividing and unifying … Man should be two tooled, and a poet’s middle leg is his pencil’ (CL, 182). Implicitly imaging Nonconformist discourse as authoritarian, univocal to the point of being totalitarian, this poetic Polly Garter rebels by becoming a connoisseur of polysemy, a subversive proliferator of meanings.

  From the beginning Dylan Thomas consciously uses puns, double entendres and a whole wild menagerie of suspect forms and socially proscribed kinds of ‘language’ to reflect on the profligate, uninhibited nature of ‘language’ itself. ‘Llarregub/Llarregyb’ – a word he had already coined and patented as his own in the stories of the early 1930s – was always Thomas’s true native place, a place made exclusively out of the potentialities of language to turn itself back to front, inside out, upside down. In his poetry topsy-turvy language proves itself to be an incorrigible contortionist and shameless shape-changer. ‘Every device there is in language is there to be used if you will’, he told a Texan postgraduate in 1951: ‘old tricks, new tricks, … paragram, catachresis, slang, assonantal rhymes, vowel rhymes, sprung rhythm’.11 ‘Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes’, he added disingenuously. But there was always much more to it than that. To the Calvinistic minister’s implicit model of human words as solidly and respectably underpinned by the Divine Word, Thomas, from his teens onwards, opposed an alternative, radically different model – of the ungovernable liquefactions of language, ‘the sea-slides of saying’, as he suggestively phrased it. His lifelong infatuation as poet, as short-story writer, and even as letter-writer, was with ‘the procreant urge of the word’, to misquote Walt Whitman, one of his poetic heroes.12 In a poem like ‘After the Funeral’, Thomas adopts an openly confrontational stance towards the dominant discourse of Non-conformity and constructs what sociolinguists term an ‘anti-language’; an alternative discourse of his own.

  And if ‘After the Funeral’ is the key text in Thomas the poet’s struggle for mastery of the word, then its equivalent for Thomas the comic writer is ‘The Peaches’, the first story in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.13 Based on Thomas’s boyhood recollections of visiting his relatives’ farm in the rural west, it features a wonderfully comical sermon, solemnly delivered by the would-be preacher Gwilym, a twenty-year-old ‘with a thin stick of a body and spade-shaped face’. He has a captive audience of one – his cousin Marlais, Dylan’s alter ego, a little Swansea townie. Obediently seated on hay-bales in the barn that passes for Gwilym’s chapel, little Marlais listens to his country cousin’s ‘voice rise and crack and sink to a whisper, and break into singing and Welsh and ring triumphantly and be wild and meek’, until the sermon reaches its grand solemn climax:

  ‘Thou canst see and spy and watch us all the time, in the little black corners, in the big cowboys’ prairies, under the blankets when we’re snoring fast, in the terrible shadows, pitch black, pitch black; Thou canst see everything we do, in the night and day, in the day and the night, everything, everything; Thou canst see all the time. O God, mun, you’re like a bloody cat.’

  In the silence that follows ‘the one duck quacked outside’. ‘Now I take a collection,’ Gwilym said’ (CS, 128). Then, as the story proceeds, Gwilym’s Calvinistic sermon (the emphasis is on a humanly distant, prying, preying God) is implicitly trumped by the alternative, secular, story-weaving power of little Marlais from Swansea town, as he plays with his Swansea friend Jack Williams in the secret dingle on the farm: ‘There, playing Indians in the evening, I was aware of me myself in the exact middle of a living story, and my body was my adventure and my name.’

  * * *

  By the end of his teens, Thomas was understandably beginning to feel distinctly isolated in Swansea. In 1933, when he was nineteen, he could write like this, in one of his outrageously pretentious letters to Pamela Hansford Johnson. ‘In my untidy bedroom, surrounded with books and papers, full of the unhealthy smell of very bad tobacco, I sit and write’ (CL, 47). In one way, his Swansea had shrunk to a single cramped room ‘by the boiler’, to which he regularly retreated between 1930 and 1934 to fill notebook after notebook with remarkable drafts of poems, steeped in adolescent eroticism, many of which, duly reworked, would find their way into his first two published collections. By now, he could superciliously describe his Swansea as a ‘dingy hell’ from which he longed to escape, ‘and my mother is a vulgar humbug, but I’m not so bad, and Gower is beautiful as anywhere’ (CL, 63). In a letter to the West Wales Guardian he expressed disgust at ‘this over-peopled breeding box of ours, this ugly contradiction of a town for ever compromised between the stacks and the littered bays’ (CL, 142).

  By this time, the Thomas who yearned to escape the confines of his home town and who had ostensibly retreated from its philistinism into the safety of his own bedroom, was also the Thomas who had for a couple of years been a ‘young dog’, cutting a figure in the local pubs, on the stage of the Swansea Little Theatre, and in the mildly bohemian company of his acquaintances at the Kardomah Café. As a cub reporter on what became the Evening Post, Thomas was wholly unreliable and frankly irresponsible. But, as James A. Davies has emphasised, it

  increased his knowledge of Swansea and particularly of its crisis areas and low life: the hospital, the police station, the mortuary and its sad cargo, and the docks area with its sleazy pubs and loose women. He cultivated a ‘reporter’s image’ influenced by American films; a pulled-down porkpie hat, dangling cigarette, and check overcoat. (RG, 21)

  And it was during this period that the habit of trawling the pubs began. He captured the atmosphere of his life at this time in the last two stories of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.

&
nbsp; The old Kardomah Café was conveniently situated directly opposite the Evening Post buildings (diagonally opposite the Castle), and so at lunch times Thomas and his fellow trainee journalists like Charles Fisher could always slip across the road. Once again, he therefore occupied a frontier zone, a sociolinguistic positioning that contributed significantly, time after time, to the development of his distinctively hybrid imagination. This cultural situation is again conveniently represented for us by the Kardomah’s physical location and accordingly mixed clientele at that time. It was located in Castle Street, at the bottom of High Street, adjacent to the red-light district of the Strand and the racy docks area of Swansea. But it was also in the heart of the old Swansea’s downtown shopping area, next to prestigious stores like Ben Evans, and so patronised by middle-class and working-class shoppers alike.

  The strong development of the Swansea Art School under Grant Murray after the First World War meant that the town was home to a young artistic set, and from the late 1920s onwards one of the favourite haunts of young artists was the Kardomah. It was to this set that Thomas the cub reporter attached himself. Those gathering periodically at the café included the two young artists Fred Janes and Mervyn Levy, a young man who spoke Yiddish at home (that frontier zone again) because he was the grandson of the refugee Russian Jew who had opened the first cinema in Swansea. Other regulars were aspiring writers Tom Warner and Charles Fisher, who was to enjoy a very colourful career as a globe-trotting journalist and died in Canada at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Daniel Jones, Thomas’s boyhood friend who would go on to fame as a symphonic composer, would also sometimes join the company. The model for them all were the Viennese and South Bank Parisian cafés frequented by intellectuals and artists who had contributed so notably to the development of the modernist arts.

  The Kardomah was, for Thomas, the successor to Cwmdonkin Park and Warmley – a congenial space within a comfortingly protective, intimately knowable, but ultimately philistine town where his imagination could be allowed full play, and find stimulation in the company of others. The informal café setting also promoted cross-fertilisation between different art forms. This fluid, highly informal group consisted of painters and musicians as well as poets, many of them fascinated by the modernist experimentations that had foregrounded the formal, compositional properties of art at the expense of the old, traditional, representational paradigms. And these interests, too, chimed with those of the young Thomas, reinforcing his instinct to treat words rather as, say, the Cubist painters treated objects. He captured the flavour of their meetings in the story ‘Old Garbo’, from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog:

  Most of the boys were there already. Some wore the outlines of moustaches, others had sideboards and crimped hair, some smoked curved pipes and talked with them gripped between their teeth, there were pin-striped trousers and hard collars, one daring bowler … ‘Sit by here,’ said Leslie Bird. He was in the boots at Dan Lewis’s.14

  ‘Sit by here’ is an example of the young men’s self-mocking affectation of the Welsh English that was the vernacular idiom of this cultural frontier town, situated on the very edge of the thoroughly Welsh-speaking industrial Tawe (Swansea) valley. And it is obvious that the language spoken by the youths in the café was a mix of the standard ‘educated’ English of their grammar-school backgrounds, the Welsh English of the streets, the high ‘literary’ language of the modernist writers with whom they were obsessed, and the flavoursome slang of the American gangster movies they so loved. Whereas the language used by the leading English poets of the day, such as W. H. Auden, tended to be very much the limited product of an English public school, middle-class milieu, a Swansea Welshman like Dylan Thomas was early exposed to a variety of linguistic registers, class sociolects and cultural discourses that helped make him the distinctively ‘hybrid’ poet he became.15 And conversations around the tables in the Kardomah obviously featured a constant switching between these many different examples of language usage. No wonder therefore that one of the places Thomas revisited so movingly in imagination, and indeed in implicit homage, in Return Journey was the site of the Kardomah, reduced to rubble in the Blitz:

  I haven’t seen him since the old Kardomah days … Him and Charlie Fisher – Charlie’s got whiskers now – and Tom Warner and Fred Janes, drinking coffee-dashes and arguing the toss [… about] Music and poetry and painting and politics, Einstein and Epstein, Stravinsky and Greta Garbo, death and religion, Picasso and girls[.] (RJ, 81)

  * * *

  These were also years during which Thomas was active with the Swansea Little Theatre, ‘based in Mumbles … close to congenial pubs’, as Jim Davies has astutely noted. This was a breakaway group from the Swansea Amateur Dramatic Society, interested in staging more sophisticated plays, such as classics by Shakespeare, Chekhov and Ibsen.16 During his time with the group, Thomas had roles in William Congreve’s The Way of the World, Noel Coward’s Hay Fever and a couple of other contemporary plays. He attracted good notices for his performances, but was also criticised for his inability to adapt his accent and mode of delivery to suit the different parts he was required to play. But the experiences that he gained through his acting obviously contributed very substantially to his subsequent career of public performance, both as a brilliant radio broadcaster (who first took the microphone at the Swansea studios of the BBC) and as an incomparable reader of his own poetry.

  His theatrical experience enabled him to perfect his public persona – or rather, his public personae, as he actually proved far more adept in life than he did on stage at changing his personality to suit his various audiences. One of the leading figures in the Little Theatre was Thomas Taig, at that time lecturer in the English department at the fledgling University College of Swansea, and after Thomas’s death, Taig was to stress how consummate an actor he had become in the street theatre of life itself. ‘I think of him as infinitely vulnerable,’ Taig wrote, ‘living from moment to moment a heightened awareness of sense-impressions and emotional tensions, the victim rather than the master of his environment.’ It was his acting skills, Taig added, that eventually enabled Thomas to overcome these handicaps and eventually to achieve a mastery, of sorts, of his environment – but at considerable, and eventually tragic, cost to his inner self (DR, 100–4).

  Eerily enough, Daniel Jones was to paint a very similar picture of Thomas in one of the last interviews he gave before his death. He spoke of the Dylan he knew so well as a lost soul, one who could never reconcile public performer and inner being. Jones’s Dylan is one who never really knew who he was – he’s the lost soul we’ve already met, who in that opening passage from Return Journey returned to Swansea in a vain attempt to reintegrate his present with his past. Never lost for words, Daniel Jones’s Dylan was consequently condemned to be forever lost in words, doomed to be a garrulous performer for all and sundry to the very last. So maybe the barmaid had indeed innocently seen him for what he was, when she’d exclaimed ‘There’s words’.

  After his first departure for London in 1933, Thomas was never again really a native of Swansea. And then, over those three terrible nights in 1941, the centre of Swansea was razed to the ground. It’s scarcely an exaggeration to claim that the erasure of his home town’s heartland was a traumatic event in Thomas’s life. After it, he felt imaginatively orphaned. The umbilical cord connecting him to the richest and most dependable source of his creativity had been cut for ever. He’d always been restless, but after the war he became a displaced person.

  There’s even a sense in which both of his most popular works – Under Milk Wood and ‘Fern Hill’ – are elegies for the lost Swansea of his boyhood. In Under Milk Wood he recreated, after an adult fashion, the zany world he invented with Daniel Jones during those years of high-spirited collaboration in Warmley. And ‘Fern Hill’, although of course a poem nostalgically recalling boyhood holidays on his aunt’s west Wales farm near Llansteffan, is also a poem directly responding to the two events that changed Tho
mas’s world for ever. The first was the bombing of Swansea; the second was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Thomas’s mind they tended to merge into a single nightmare – the irreversible loss of what had remained to him of human hope and innocence. ‘Fern Hill’ is an elegy for such a lost world. And his radio play, Return Journey, about his imaginary journey back to Swansea in the terribly cold winter of 1947 in search of an irretrievably lost town and an irretrievably lost self, is a memorable elegy for both self and Swansea that also darkly foreshadows his own imminent death.