Important to Me

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

  I had an appalling night. I might love him, but I knew it would be no good. I was not right for him. I did not care to wear the arty clothes he liked – I never have – and I feared and detested the Fitzroy Tavern, the denizens of which all seemed much cleverer than I could ever be. In short, I had no self-confidence.

  Happily as it turned out, Dylan felt likewise. Morning brought no sign of him. One day went by, and another.

  Slowly, he began to reappear, but it was only too plain (if it hadn’t been before) that we had come to an end.

  Late in 1935 I met Neil. Our plans for marrying were fixed for the end of the following year. We met Dylan quite often – sometimes in the Six Bells – and sometimes he would come to spend the evening with us. (From a period of intense misery, I had recovered remarkably quickly.) A short time after Neil and I were married, Dylan came into the Bells, full of excitement. He had met the most glorious girl, the most beautiful girl in the world. Her name was Caitlin Macnamara. (At that time, he pronounced it ‘Cathlin’) He showed us a photograph of what was indeed a beautiful girl, who appeared (this may be a false memory) to be standing on her head. He was alight with happiness. He married her soon after that.

  I never met Dylan’s wife, but I believe she was right for him. When I read her book, Left-over Life to Kill, I was sure of it.

  I saw Dylan again shortly after the war began, when he signed a photograph I had induced him to have taken in 1934: he inscribed it, ‘August 12, 1940. Dylan-shooting begins.’ However, the army would have none of him.

  Did I see him again? Once, when the war was over. I was walking along the King’s Road, when I saw a fat man who seemed vaguely familiar. I had gone past him a good way when I realised who it was. Dylan – fat. Well, he had always wanted to be. I didn’t turn back. I don’t think he would have wished it.

  The later Dylan whom others, like John Malcolm Brinnin, knew so well, was not known to me. There was a whole war between us.

  In one thing I cannot believe; and that is in the figure of Dylan as a sort of congenital womaniser. He was not like that, basically. He admired Harpo Marx, thought himself not physically dissimilar – which was true – and liked to mimic him. I think he took the Harpo Marx side to America, and let it overcome him till he was as powerless against it as he was against alcohol.

  He was thoughtless and unreliable: but he did have the wish to please. I think he would have found it hard to deny the longings of any ardent young girl, but I doubt whether his heart was ever much in it. He was very kind-hearted except when he felt a real and violent opposition to his own wishes.

  In 1937, Neil and I visited Florrie at her sister’s house, Blaen Cwm, Llangain, Carmarthenshire. There were Aunt Polly, Aunt Dosie, Uncle Dai, her husband (a minister), and poor Uncle Tom, who could hear threatening voices coming to him over the wireless even when it was turned off. It was idyllic: the purest and sweetest and floweriest countryside. Through the cottage garden ran a little, stream edged with rushes and primroses. Dylan spent much of his boyhood here. The most wonderful thing Florrie showed me, was a wayside bank so thick with violets and primroses that no green was visible. This has all gone, I suppose. Insecticides, again. The oddest thing she showed me was a village in which the inhabitants had only two surnames between them. This, she airily assured me (she was far from being a prude), was the result of generations of incest. Brother and sister, inheriting a farm between them would wish to keep the property intact; and that was that. Whether it was true I do not know; nor do I know whether it was true that the majority of these villagers were imbecile. Incest is no guarantor of imbecility and may be far from it: but there could have been something wrong with the original genes. Anyway, for Florrie, a romancer like her son, but not deliberately untruthful, it was a sight not to be missed.

  Later, staying with the Thomases at Bishopston, above a glorious deep valley leading to the sea, I got to know Jack very well. He had been senior English Master at Swansea Grammar School, and was surrounded by his books, which had been a solid background for Dylan. He was a tallish, balding, dark, sad-faced man, with a somewhat bitter sense of humour. He adored his wife, and their happy sexual relations continued well into late middle-age. ‘Excuse me, dear,’ Florrie would say sometimes, in the afternoon, ‘but Jack does like me to go up on the bed with him.’

  Unfortunately, he had been a heavy drinker, and it was not getting better, though I never saw him obviously drunk. In the evenings he would walk across the Bishopston fields to the pub and return, some time later, rather red in the face, with more bottles of beer, to which he would sit me down. He had had cancer of the tongue: and would relate to me night after night, the horrible sufferings his radium treatments had caused him. Florrie used to blame me for encouraging him; God knows I did not, for he was unstoppable. All I could do was drink up, and listen.

  The treatments, apparently, did arrest the disease, for it was not of cancer that he died.

  Dylan had a story about him. He claims that when he (Dylan) was a very young reporter on a Swansea paper, he was returning drunk on the tram to the Uplands one night, when the tram stopped, and another drunk, but flat out, was reverently laid beside him on the floor. This was Jack Thomas.

  I never believed this. I tended to take nearly all Dylan’s stories with a grain of salt, while not openly expressing this. But I think he knew: and that it was a strike against me.

  Another story he told was of himself, while standing at the bar of a pub, being approached by a huge and minatory navvy, who said with a leer – ‘Wouldn’t think I was a pansy, would you, mate?’ To which Dylan replied, as quick as a whistle, ‘And you wouldn’t think I wasn’t, would you?’

  Again, perhaps, ben trovato.

  His letters reveal his great humour: both the wildest shaggy-dog humour, and genuine wit. Wherever he sat became the focal point of a roomful of people. He responded to flattery, and never minded if it was laid on with a trowel. He was essentially a life-giver, partly because it was in his nature, and partly because life was what he loved to give.

  I am speaking about him only as I knew him, as a very young man. In his later days, famous, wild, distressful, drunken, anxiety-ridden days, I did not know him at all. On Proust’s great cliff of time, which grows unceasingly terrible and vertiginous as we grow older, down which we dare not often look, the figure of Dylan is to me a long way below.

  But we have to climb, if we want to live, and our downward glances must become, with the years, more and more infrequent.

  20. The Liberal Package-Deal

  I have voted Labour ever since I had a vote. Next time, I am not sure what I shall do. Not vote Tory. I shall probably abstain. Meanwhile I remain a liberal, with a small ‘L’.

  Now the liberals have devised a package-deal, every item of which the faithful are required to accept. Let me open the package, and examine a few items. There are some I find unacceptable.

  1) ‘We are all guilty.’ This fatuous shibboleth, as I have said, neatly frees us from the necessity for any guilt at all. We are ‘all’ guilty of the death of Marilyn Monroe. Portentous essays have been written about this. But the word ‘all’ is signficant here. If there is one dissenter, then the proposition is wrong. I am not in the least guilty. Never a cinéaste after the war ended, I did not so much as see a film of hers. This does not mean that when the facts about her miserable final years emerged, I was not filled with pity. But, I was in no way responsible. We are ‘all guilty’ – somehow – of the Moors Murders. I am not. I have never, by speech or writing, contributed to the ambience that could make such horrors possible. Good God, have we not enough sins on our own consciences, that we have to pretend to spurious or perhaps more dramatic ones? Let us avoid sloppy metaphor.

  2) (not unconnected with 1. ‘The guiltlessness of the guilty.’ We are induced to believe that almost no one is ever guilty as charged, or if by chance someone may be, it is never through any fault of his. It is the fault of ‘society’: and by that is meant absolute deter
mination by environment and by nothing else. The mere mention of genetics fills the fashionable thinkers with horror. (Have they observed how the genes operate in children in the same family?) But modern discoveries in genetics also fill these people with fear. What unpleasant truths may we uncover? Ever since the discovery of D.N.A., some scientific rethinking has had to be done. (Dr Jensen has been warned not to go in a lift unguarded, for fear of the possibility of physical attack.) There has been a call to ban genetics, in some universities. But the essence of science is truth – and we must not expect all truths to be agreeable. (In this respect, cast a memory back to the adulation of Lysenko, whose influence on Soviet biology was as bad as it could be. But he drew his conclusions from purely environmental sources: and has been pretty well rejected today; because it cannot and did not work.)

  Even if the genes prove to play a larger part in our make-up than some of us like to accept, this only means that we must enforce an ever-improving environment for their correction, so far as is possible. Our responsibilities will become more serious, not less.

  Suggestions for the sterilisation of the ‘unfit’ are revolting to the dignity of any man. Medical science is so far advanced, that many people considered unfit can be helped to a normal life. I have seen mentally afflicted children coaxed, by an infinity of patience and loving-kindness, into living a life where happiness is possible for them.

  Of course, the dread of an intensification of racialism is behind all this – and it is by no means a dishonourable dread. England has made its assimilations pretty generously, especially when confronted by the expulsions of General Amin. But oddly enough, that dread tends to make some people look upon all immigrants as the same. Some are able: some of those I know, exceedingly so. Some are not: they are bewildered by brusque removal from their original way of life, tend to cling together, and so do become practically unassimilable. With all this, we have to cope: we must and we will. Environment, here, is of desperate importance.

  The young thug who stands in the dock, charged with having beaten up an eighty-year-old woman for a few pence? It may be his hard luck that he is unlucky both in genes and in environment. But it does not become us to assume, in a burst of bleary sentiment, that he cannot be guilty as charged: we must wait for the verdict. Even more, it doesn’t become us, and with the same bleary sentiment intensified, to feel that, if he really happens to be guilty of the fact, it is no fault of his. Our judicial system may not be perfect, but it is the best we can manage now.

  People here often say, ‘Let us reserve our chief pity for the victim.’ Well, let’s.

  We must have an eye to the defenceless. Some students of a Scottish university recently disgraced themselves by trying to mob the Queen, one man waving a bottle in her face. To begin with, they were insulting a woman peculiarly defenceless because of her office. She was in no position to retaliate, even by word (though the younger members of her family have recently taken to doing so). The rest of us, in her position, would have had something to say. She went on gallantly smiling, which I think Queen Victoria would not have done. And perhaps Queen Victoria would have been right. Whether the defenceless are mugged by victims of environment or not, it is absurd to weep crocodile tears over the muggers.

  3) ‘The abomination of censorship of any kind.’ As I have said already, we have it, have we not? – and stringently – in the form of the Race Relations Act. Who would wish to see it repealed?

  No liberal, I think, would dispute this. But he rarely raises a voice against films of revolting violence being offered to a society in which crimes of violence rose by 30 per cent only last year (1972). Art! They cry. Integrity! And the worst of all cant – these films are moral, and made for moral reasons. They are not. They are made for a certain public which revels increasingly in blood and violence, and they are good box-office. This is not to say they are necessarily devoid of art: but art can be, and has been, used for a lot of dirty work.

  When I wrote my short book, On Iniquity, I said I was glad to see the passing of the film-censor – a wide-minded man, by the way – but that I felt things were too much for him. Nowadays I am by no means sure that I should express such enthusiasm.

  Violence on cinema and television screen is probably not corrupting in the sense that viewers necessarily go out and do likewise (though some imitative crime has been observed). But they do tend to get thoroughly desensitised. They can take worse and worse displays of cruelty until they have little feeling left – not only for the creatures of fantasy, but ultimately, for human beings. And along that road lies Auschwitz.

  Do not imagine that all those camp officials were enthusiastic sadists. Many were. But the majority had been conditioned to a point where they became quite devoid of feeling. Those prisoners – particularly the Jews – were not human beings any more. They were just slaughterhouse animals.

  It is no use to say scornfully, ‘You needn’t go to the cinema, and you can turn off the T.V.’ People do go to the cinema and find it extremely hard to turn off the television set when they see something brutal (though I think for the most part that our television companies are in the main fairly responsibly-minded – at any rate, they are, in relation to their American counterparts) because brutality is fascinating, so long as we ourselves are not at the receiving end. The very thing we hate seeing, so hypnotises us that the switch often isn’t turned.

  We should not pretend to be better, or more high-minded, than we are. Most liberals take a far more lofty and optimistic view of human nature than I do.

  Films of extreme ugliness and incitement to brutality may arrive smothered with X-certificates, but most children, if not obviously infantile, will get to see them somehow. (They are very cunning in this respect.) I say quite clearly that some of these are unfit for public viewing, and should not be offered to it. I am not prepared, for one, to believe that anything contributing to the brutalising of society should be tolerated.

  On the subject of books, I agree with the liberals that there should be no censorship. Books are not a part of the mass-media (more’s the pity, perhaps) and reach fewer people. I do not, however, object to seizure of the worst ‘hard core’ pornography (I wish someone would lay down guide lines between what is soft, and what is hard) nor of the now rare desensitising ‘comics’ proffered to children. You may remember that we did, in fact, prohibit the import from America of ‘horror comics’, and that there was no outcry against that. I saw a good many of them, and they were sickening. I remember one about the villain sewing up a girl’s mouth with a sewing-machine.

  My only objection to our recent ‘liberties’ – which have been a blessing to most of us, and let us not forget, though overall the effect on literary art has been more bad than good – is that it has made many writers, however unsuited to them it is, compelled to put in the compulsory ‘sex-scene’, and to fulfil the fashionable demand for four-letter words. How pitiably few these are, and how they have already lost their impact! I once shocked a student audience by saying that I proposed to use none of them, but should substitute ‘shog off’. This is from Shakespeare, and it merely means ‘move along’. I think this gave them far more kicks than any of the more common expletives.

  I would, however, say one thing further about pornography: I wonder that the Women’s Liberation Movement is so silent about it. That is, a great amount of it is devoted to the degradation of women. The Story of O, by someone (a man, I think) writing under the pseudonym of Pauline Réage, is devoted to this, and to this alone. The heroine is slowly, lovingly, and slaveringly reduced, by appalling cruelties, to the state of an animal: at the end she is a non-person. She seems to enjoy it, but this makes things no better. The writer has some talent: which makes them worse. Such talents are better buried under a bushel, and left there.

  Of the theatre I have little to say. Take off your clothes, or don’t: most of us have seen it all before, and it has become a cliché. Simulate sodomy and fellatio if you must, but don’t make a habit of it. The fashion
for insulting the audience seems to have worn itself out. It is a very odd kind of audience which finds this sort of infantile tomfoolery pleasing.

  4) ‘Blasphemy is quite O.K.’

  The liberal assumption is that England, formerly a Christian country, has no Christians in it.

  Well, the churches are half-empty, the clergymen ill-paid, and faith is at a discount. But it is still there. Why those of us who are still believers should be gratuitously insulted, or wounded, time and time again, is beyond me. For those of us who still think that the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, are the finest set of rules ever given man to live by, however feeble we are in their observance, to have such teachings mocked by – forgive me – intellectual tiddlers, is intolerable. If they were not tiddlers, they would pay the same respect to a religion which has endured for centuries, as to the beliefs of the Stoics and Epicureans, which I do not imagine they have studied.

  It is a remarkable fact that the most beautiful and astringent biblical film ever made – The Gospel According to Matthew – was made by Pasolini: a Communist. No vulgarities here, no wallowing in the bloody details of the Crucifixion: just a straight and severe story about a great man. I noticed that many clergymen, who queued at the Paris Pullman cinema, came to scoff; and remained to pray.

  We must respect one another’s beliefs. Charles is not a believer, but he respects my beliefs. In lowest terms, perhaps it all comes down to a question of sensitivity?

  5) Non-selective education of any kind. If it means fair shares for all, I understand and sympathise, but if it means that the brightest will be forced to proceed at the pace of the dullest, then I say that this is social and human nonsense, and will only lead to gross unfairness to a minority. And that minority any civilisation needs, if it is to survive.