Important to Me

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

  The unthinking, or unimaginative young, who blame my generation for leaving them a world of mess, anger me. We fought a savage war and we won it: which was a good thing for them. Afterwards, we fought for a far greater social security: reforms were sweeping, though of course some people were still untouched by them, and I am now afraid that some of those reforms (I refer particularly to the Health Service) are slowly becoming eroded. Some of us lost a sizeable part of our youth in almost incessant political activity. So where did we go wrong? It is for the intelligent young, whom I like and respect, to put us right. The unemployment figures remain bad, though not on the scale of those of the thirties. The housing shortage continues. Old people, often lonely, cold and neglected, have to struggle along on completely inadequate pensions. The appalling poverty of the Third World is always before our eyes. Organisations such as Oxfam, Shelter and Help the Aged, do what they can, and it is just a little more than a drop in the ocean. There is plenty to worry about.

  Then there is the war in Vietnam, on which successive British governments have tended to keep a cowardly silence. Did America learn no lessons from the reaction both of British and Germans to heavy bombing? It was almost useless, militarily, and it simply served to stiffen resistance. But if President Nixon’s bombing policy does contribute to any kind of peace settlement (I am writing on the 17 January 1973) I shall still say that it was indefensible.

  My many American friends will not misunderstand me. Most of them feel precisely as I do. Are we, in this, ‘all guilty’? Do we share a ‘collective’ guilt, and if so, what does that mean? Am I personally guilty in any way for the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for the recent saturatic bombing of Hanoi? No, I’m not. It would be absurd if I did ‘share’ in it. I have much to be guilty about, but not about these things.

  Yes, we have left the young some fearful problems. But it was not written into our Wills – in two senses.

  18. Kipling’s ‘Natural Theology’

  I ate my fill of a whale that died

  And stranded after a month at sea …

  There is a pain in my inside:

  Why have the Gods afflicted me?

  It cannot be

  I began to smoke cigarettes sporadically, I regret to say, at the age of fourteen: both my father and my mother were very heavy smokers. My grandfather – curious this, from a Victorian papa – liked his girls, in their late teens, to have a cigarette with him. By sixteen, I was well confirmed in the habit, and now I cannot stop any more than can a drug-addict. If I do try to stop, the nicotine level in my blood falls, and I suffer withdrawal symptoms. Frightened nowadays, I go regularly every eight months for a lung X-ray. So far, nothing has shown up on the plates. But in the last year I have developed chronic bronchitis. I could not possibly be stealthy, even if I had a reason to be, because my cough heralds me from the top of the house to the bottom. (Of course, I do not really want to stop: I relish each cigarette from the first in the morning to the last at night.)

  Remember, when I started to smoke, no guilt was attached to the habit. There was no fear of lung cancer, because we knew nothing about it. Furthermore, it was even cheap; sixpence for ten, a shilling for twenty.

  I hoped my children would not develop the habit, knowing how important this was. Andrew doesn’t smoke at all, and Philip very rarely – perhaps three cigarettes per annum, and then only in circumstances of extreme stress. But Lindsay! I promised her money on her 21st birthday, if she hadn’t smoked by then. She since tells me that the sum was too small. But I don’t believe a sum twenty times larger would have stopped her. She is making a gallant try now to curb the habit.

  I have led a singularly sedentary life. Of course, I have spent hours at my desk, or writing on my knee. But I have never had the slightest inclination for exercise. At school, I was remarkably bad at games, though at that time I had, I suppose, a reasonably athletic physique. When it came to picking teams for netball shooting (a detestable game), I was always picked last, and by someone with obvious reluctance to pick me at all, for my team would inevitably lose. I would be shooting on with increasing despair while all the rest had succeeded. I hated gymnastics, and invariably collapsed on to the middle of the vaulting-horse, though by some strange freak, I could climb ropes better than anyone else. Tennis I tolerated, but no more than that. Was I really so inept, or did I want to be? When I won two green ‘gym-stripes’ – for ‘pluck’ because I had volunteered to undergo some particularly frightening performance on the wall-bars for a second time – actually, I was too much of a coward not to put my hand up and so face contumely – hardly anyone (including my mother) could keep a straight face.

  I have never liked walking except in Venice, where, spurred on by the anticipation of some marvel likely to be around the next corner, I would happily walk for miles. At home, I try to shop within a very small area. I sit most of the day in my orange-coloured chair; working, reading, or doing crossword puzzles. At sixty, quite naturally, my figure is not what it was: it has not deteriorated too rapidly during the past five years, but it still deters me from shopping for clothes. When I do go shopping for them, Lindsay accompanies me so that I don’t return – which is almost inevitable when I go alone – empty handed and profoundly out of love with myself.

  During the past two years, my health has been a little dubious. Two minor operations, a subacute intestinal obstruction (no fun this, no fun at all), and a minor stroke. I recovered rapidly from the last, except that I could hardly use my right hand for holograph. This was dreadful, since I had to tap out my last novel, The Holiday Friend, straight on to the typewriter. Few American writers would think this a deprivation: but I did. I am a very good typist, and I type much faster than I can think. So page after facile page found itself in the waste-paper basket. This is the first book since that I have managed to write by hand, and that hand has become crabbed and not too easy to read.

  For these last rather dramatic misfortunes, I think I am not to blame. I had eaten none of that stranded whale. But for general debility, I am. I have brought it upon myself, and it is not the Gods who have afflicted me.

  Si no fagas tus deudas,

  Dios se las cobrará,

  as the Spanish proverb has it. Or, in the version, not literal, but more familiar in English, ‘Take what you want, and pay for it, says God.’

  My doctor of many years, David Sofaer, has watched over me like a hawk: and does not rebuke me. Perhaps he should. I am all too often bringing to him minor neuroses, though sometimes I bring him troubles which are not the result of whale-eating.

  Longevity has usually a genetic basis. If your parents die at seventy-eight, or perhaps eighty-eight, your chances are good. We have no such examples in my family, except, perhaps, from Grandmother Johnson. Charles has a better chance. His father died – willingly – at eighty-four, when he was no longer able to play the organ in church. His mother at a good age. Am I being morbid? Possibly I am. It is the mood of an hour. But I do realise, that had I looked after myself better, there would be no reason for morbidity. What a fool I shall seem if I reach eighty myself, a sort of Empress Dowager, with a silver-topped cane – I like to imagine this – lashing out at those who do not please me!

  Yet, as George Herbert says—

  I once more smell the dew and rain

  And relish versing. O my only light!

  That I am he

  On whom Thy tempests fell all night.

  A poem that has meant more to me, personally, and has been of greater encouragement, than any poem ever written.

  On the other hand—

  We had a kettle: we let it leak:

  Our not repairing it made it worse.

  We haven’t had any tea for a week …

  The bottom is out of the Universe!

  19. Dylan

  It was in 1933. He had won a prize for a poem in Victor Neuberg’s column. It began,

  I sit at open windows in my shirt sleeves.

  I knew it was
derivative and I knew from what. Nevertheless, it seemed to me more distinguished than anything I had seen in the Sunday Referee. I wrote congratulating him. I received a stately little reply, complimenting me pleasantly on my own work. He could not have meant it (and he didn’t) but it was nice of him. That led to a long literary correspondence, letters to and fro sometimes one a week, sometimes twice or more. The letters grew very long and confidential. He told me all about himself (but lied about his age: it was long afterwards that I learned he was two years younger than I), his aspirations, his enthusiasms. He sent me poems, sometimes typed, sometimes fragments incorporated in the letters themselves. I sent him mine. Here he could not bring himself, out of literary honesty, to deceive me very far: his criticism was sound, astringent and not infrequently hilarious. I, on the other hand, could not come to terms with his, when they were of impossible obscurity. I think, in most cases, I was right: and that ‘Fern Hill’, in its basic simplicity, was later on to prove my case. But I succumbed to his word-magic, even while I sometimes made fun of it. His ‘poppied pickthank’ became a joke between us: why not ‘pippied pop-thank’? I asked. I believe he found several other variants.

  I knew beyond the slightest doubt, even then, that he was to become a very important poet, even a great one. Where he will eventually find his place, it is far too early to tell: but he is established permanently among the poets of the twentieth century.

  He wrote me word-pictures of his father and mother. He was to tell me many stories about them, sometimes quite apocryphal: but while he thought his mother feather-brained, he was fond of her: and he worshipped Jack Thomas, his father. I was later to know both of them well.

  It was obvious that we should have to meet. In February 1934, if my memory serves me – which it very often doesn’t – I invited him to stay with us for a few days in the house on Battersea Rise. By this time we were, of course, fully prepared to fall in love.

  He arrived at the door, palpably nervous. After a brief exchange of courtesies, his first words to me were ‘Have you seen the Gauguins?’ There was a Gauguin exhibition in London at the time. He afterwards told me that he had been rehearsing this query, which seemed an appropriate form of opening an exchange between artist and artist, all the way in the train from Swansea.

  He was smallish: and looked smaller than he was because his clothes were too big. A huge sweater exaggerated a boyish frame. His trousers were baggy. (Though a maudlin Welsh friend who saw them hanging on a clothes-line, was once heard to drool – ‘such little trousers!’) He wore a pork-pie hat, revealing, as he took it off, the most beautiful curling hair, parted in the middle, the colour in those days – when he washed it – of dark gold. But in the curiously-shaped face, wide and strong at the top, tapering to weakness at the mouth and chin, there were those marvellous eyes, dark brown, luminous, almost hypnotic.

  Then, there was the magnificent organ voice. At that time, it had lost all the Welsh lilt: Dylan, like his father, spoke standard English. He was to recover the lilt later on, when it came in useful.

  My mother was as enraptured with him as I was, and spoiled him as though he had been a child. He didn’t in the least appear to mind this; even, he welcomed it. He would offer no resistance when, going off to meet friends, she suggested that he might wash his neck.

  Dylan and I talked late into the three or four nights that he stayed with us. About art. About music. About the novel. About poetry.

  He knew all about the last. Otherwise, he was inclined to stupendous bluffing. He did not, I think, know much about the classic novels, except in the most surface fashion. Of painting, very little. Of music, very little too: though he chided me for admiring Wagner. But he could hold forth, in that resounding voice, upon all these things, and he did. After all, he was only nineteen.

  Between these sessions of one-upmanship, we played the gramophone: Dylan particularly liked an old 78 record of a then popular, but now forgotten, favourite: a jolting tune, with the rhythm of a train, called ‘The Beat of my Heart’. I cannot pretend that whenever I hear it I think of him: because I never do hear it.

  We drank a little beer, which Dylan fetched from the off-licence. I must emphasise that at this time, and for some time afterwards, whatever he himself said, he was not a habitual drinker. It was true that he arrived at cur house with a quarter-bottle of brandy in his pocket, but that could not be expected to go far. Drinking was, for him, one of the great romantic necessities of the poet’s image: he fantasticated his drinking. Later, tragically, the fantasy became the reality. The other two necessities were, to become tubercular, and – extremely oddly – to get fat.

  The few days drew to an end, with tension between us, but nothing said. The letters went on: Dylan wrote to me that he loved me. In the spring he came back to stay with us. I don’t know how long the stay was scheduled to last this time, but in fact it lasted about six weeks. We were deliriously happy. We talked of marriage, certainly we would marry some day, when Dylan had a job. He talked of becoming a bicycle salesman, doing his rounds in yellow rubber hood, cape and boots. ‘When bicycles hang by the wall,’ he would sing blithely.

  We would make trips across the river to Chelsea – to both of us having an aura of high romance – and sit in the garden of the Six Bells, near the little fountain that dripped its tears, while we watched the shadows of the players on the bowling-green grow longer as the sun fell. (A part of the Six Bells, including the fountain, was destroyed in the war. On my sixtieth birthday the Manager – prodded, I think, by an imaginative friend of mine – sent me a piece of that fountain as a present, in memory of Dylan and myself. It is in my own small garden now.) We had great walks over Clapham Common, over those vast fields above which the stars were clear and the lovers lay in the dark – it was hard not to tread on them – to a favourite pub. It was about that period, or before it, that Dylan wrote ‘Altarwise by Owllight’. An American critic bemused me by saying that it revealed Dylan’s deep knowledge of astronomy. All Dylan knew about the subject was that he could recognise the Plough. ‘Look!’ he would say, pointing ecstatically upwards, ‘I do know that. That’s Charles’s wain, “over the new chimney!” ’

  During the six weeks, he was making friends widely, and becoming rather well known. He was also getting introductions to persons of influence. I shall never forget the day on which he first met T. S. Eliot. He didn’t come back, and he didn’t come back: it was late when he did. He was sober, but glowering, and for a long while would not speak. When he did, it was to say with awful bitterness – ‘He treated me – he treated me – as if I were “from pit-boy to poet”!’ This unfortunate beginning, however, had a happy ending. Eliot became one of his most sturdy backers.

  But the canker was beginning to appear in the bud. Dylan did introduce me to one or two of his older Welsh friends: but to no one else. He believed in keeping his friends in compartments, and the friends of his boyhood didn’t like it. If we came out together into the King’s Road, and he spotted a poet whose acquaintance he had recently made, he would leave me, cross the road for a conversation and join me later. It was a wounding habit.

  Life continued to be, for the most part, idyllic. Then, later on that year, my mother and I were invited to stay with Dylan’s parents in Swansea. (Someone has just pointed out to me that my mother’s continual presence seems to them pretty peculiar. It did not seem so at the time. But now I cannot think of the late Jack Buchanan’s plaintive song ‘And her mother came too’, without laughing.) I realise now that he did not wish this to happen. At Paddington, he got us carefully on to the wrong train, where we remained until my mother realised this, and we raced to catch the Swansea one. I think he knew it was the wrong train in the first place, and was prepared to go to Torbay or anywhere else, so long as it wasn’t home.

  Florrie and Jack I became instantly attached to, and this affection lasted for many years, long after I had parted from Dylan. She may have been a light-weight, but she had a delightful sense of the ridiculous. Ja
ck I respected and admired, though I was not to see the odder side of him till later.

  The holiday began favourably. After spending a few days with the Thomases, overlooking the ‘capsized hill’, my mother and I moved to an hotel at the Mumbles, where Florrie and Dylan met us every day. Dylan would be intensely affectionate, then moody. These moods worried me. I had not seen them before. I was struggling to finish This Bed Thy Centre, and I was not feeling well. A doctor ordered rest: and I took time off from the bank. Meanwhile, Dylan’s letters continued as before.

  I am unable to be sure of the chronology of the events which followed, for ten years after Dylan’s death I released my diaries of our friendship and his letters to me to the University of New York at Buffalo. But they went something like this. Dylan was often in London, and things seemed well between us. Then he and two friends acquired a one-room flat in Finborough Road, between Chelsea and Fulham. They begged whatever furniture I could spare and I did my best. Divans. The odd chair. A dozen yellow dusters. They would not let me see the result till they were thoroughly moved in.

  Then I did go to see them. They had reached a peak of artistic romanticism. It was the setting of an up-dated La Bohème. The divans had been upended, so that their legs looked like tiny truncated posts of tester beds. The dusters, for decorative purposes, adorned the walls. They greeted me uproariously; and at once I knew that I was not wanted. I was no longer of their kind. That I had written a successful book made it, for Dylan, worse: like Scott Fitzgerald, I don’t think he wanted another writer in the family.

  I went away stunned with misery. But even that was not the end. Dylan began coming round again, telephoning, and at last insisting that we must marry. We would go to Chelsea Register office next day and put up the notice.