Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  Such was Dylan’s facility with this material that when fellow pupil Idwal Rees read one of these poems in the school magazine, he suspected the hand – or at least assistance – of D. J. Thomas. This was indeed possible because Dylan was not above discreet plagiarisation. In January 1927, he sent the Western Mail another war-related poem, ‘His Requiem’, which he had cribbed directly from the Boy’s Own Paper four years earlier. When this appeared under his own name in the ‘Wales Day by Day’ column, he feigned such delight that, as he noted in his story ‘The Fight’, he plastered the cutting on the mirror in his bedroom, close to a treasured picture of Rupert Brooke, and scrawled on it, ‘Homer Nods.’ (His deceit was not noted until the verses were published in a posthumous edition of his poems.) A couple of years later he was caught out offering his school magazine a short sentimental poem called ‘Sometimes’ about a man who catches sight of his boyhood self and wonders what he might have been. Originally written by the American Thomas S. Jones Jr., this had appeared in Arthur Mee’s The Children’s Encyclopaedia. Ironically, as senior English master, D. J. Thomas supervised the school magazine. When alerted to his son’s theft by the editor, E. F. McInerney, he could only make a suitable show of shock, and the poem was withdrawn.

  Why did a bright boy, who clearly knew how to write verse, resort to such deceit? The answer is that this was his way of dealing with the various pressures on him. His introduction to poetry at Cwmdonkin Drive had been, not unexpectedly, didactic, with assimilation and imitation the main techniques of instruction. He himself recorded how, in the evenings, before settling down to homework that was seldom completed, he would sit in his father’s dim book-lined ‘den’ and read indiscriminately, until his eyes hung out. D.J.’s shelves contained ‘nearly everything that a respectable highbrow library should contain’. Inspired by the magic of words, Dylan began to experiment with the techniques of his favourite literary practitioners.

  I wrote endless imitations – though I never thought of them as imitations, but, rather, colossally original, things unheard of, like eggs laid by tigers – I wrote imitations of whatever I happened, moon-and-print struck, to be goggling at and gorging at the time: Sir Thomas Browne, Robert W. Service, de Quincy, Henry Newbolt, Blake, Baroness Orczy, Marlowe, Chums, the Imagists, the Bible, the Magnet, Poe, Grimm, Keats, Lawrence, Austin Dobson and Dostoievski, Anon and Shakespeare. I tried my little trotter at every poetical form … I had to imitate and parody, consciously and unconsciously: I had to try to learn what made words tick, beat, blaze, because I wanted to write what I wanted to write before I knew how to write or what I wanted to.

  Copying the masters was one thing; passing the results off as his own another. It showed Dylan’s need to demonstrate his poetic ability to his parents, partly to his indulgent mother, who made copies of his work, but rather more to his remote father whose laissez-faire attitude to learning in the home belied his firm ambition for his son. It was no coincidence that Dylan’s main act of plagiarism involved a poem about the war – a topic of such emotional significance to D.J. – nor that it appeared in the Western Mail, the main outlet in Wales for traditional English literary values. Dylan’s parents were so proud of his success that they kept the cheque for ten shillings he had won and did not allow him to cash it. No wonder he felt the need to display his prize poem in his room.

  Having D.J. in the school put the boy under additional pressure. By his third year, Dylan was beginning to concentrate on writing poetry to the neglect of academic subjects. His father was heard to ask staff colleagues what he should do with his son. Since there was no simple answer, Dylan found one way of maintaining his father’s good will was to keep up his own enthusiasm for English literature. The result was an extraordinary trade-off which was perhaps never mentioned, but which almost certainly existed. Recognising Dylan’s talents and recalling his own thwarted poetic ambitions, D.J. learnt to turn a blind eye when his son ignored much of his school curriculum and concentrated his cerebral energies on poetry.

  Something else was going on. With his commitment to a classical liberal education in the tradition of Matthew Arnold (who, though sympathetic to Celtic culture, denigrated the Welsh language) D.J. represented an uncompromising rationality that his son respected but found increasingly difficult to emulate. Dylan could sense that his own approach to life was likely to be more emotionally based, with fewer obvious intellectual certainties.

  Dylan had read enough to understand that English verse was going through a period of profound change – a topic he wrote intelligently about in an article on modern poetry in the school magazine in December 1929. After an initially crude and emotional response to the war, he suggested, poets were finding themselves in ‘a more contemplative confusion, a spiritual riot’. He may well have decided that, until he found his own voice in this mêlée, it was no bad strategy to continue to imitate. At least that way he could sometimes impress his father. ‘No poet can find sure ground,’ he added, reflecting his own lack of firm footing. ‘Today is a transitional period.’

  Away from the classroom and from literary endeavours, Dylan enjoyed a varied and even successful school career. At the end of his first year, in June 1926, when only eleven, he won the under-15 mile race at the school sports, though his victory reflected not just the school’s poor standard of athletics, but also the substantial start he enjoyed under the handicap system because of his age. Nevertheless his supremacy in this race was repeated again in 1928 and 1929 when he also won the quarter mile. The following year he was second in the senior cross-country race. These performances belied his apparent frailty, reflecting his tenacity and sending a none-too-subtle message to his overweening mother that he was stronger than she would have the world believe. This was important to him and, until his premature death in 1953, he carried in his wallet a cutting (complete with his photograph) from the Cambrian Daily Leader reporting his 1926 triumph. Although he never made the school team, he also enjoyed playing cricket, frequently turning his arm as a medium-paced bowler. Throughout his life one of his favourite forms of relaxation was watching first-class cricket, starting at an early age with games involving Glamorgan at the St Helen’s ground in Swansea.

  As he rose through the school, he became a leading member of the debating, dramatic and reading societies. He was helped as a debater by his elocution lessons which enabled him to project his powerful voice. In one classroom colloquium, he was required to argue that modern poetry made a greater contribution to literature than anything from the past, while his more studious friend Daniel Jones presented the opposing case. Jones later recalled how he methodically researched his own thesis, with telling references to poets from Homer to Browning. But Dylan won convincingly by simply keeping his fellow pupils amused. Jones doubted whether his opponent even mentioned one contemporary poet or quoted a single line of verse. Dylan was not so lucky when he proposed the motion ‘that the modern youth is decadent’ in the full debating society. When he abandoned his proven crowd-pleasing technique and sought to impress with his knowledge of aestheticism, he was defeated. He put this down to his youthful audience’s unwillingness to admit to the sin of decadence. However he relished the opportunity to be iconoclastic: ‘I ran down everything, especially tender! subjects like religion, sanctity, sport and sex.’

  His plummy voice proved an asset when he picked up the acting career he had started at Miss Hole’s. If asked for an enduring image of Dylan, his contemporaries would almost certainly have pointed to one of his roles in the school plays. It might have been him as a fourteen-year-old impressing as Edwin Stanton in John Drinkwater’s Abraham Lincoln, or the following year in the title role in the same author’s Oliver Cromwell, when his character’s distinctive wart lacked adhesive and kept slipping to other parts of his face. Most likely he would have been recalled as Roberts, the strike leader, in John Galsworthy’s Strife, in the spring 1931 production. The school magazine praised his performance, though with reservations, for he ‘seemed to lack the coarsene
ss and toughness of fibre necessary for the interpretation of Roberts; his vowels were occasionally too genteel; and he was innocent of gesture, an essential part of the demagogue’s equipment.’

  Dylan was clearly too much of a respectable Uplands child to be entirely convincing. As the magazine had joked in an earlier feature on ‘Things We Cannot Credit’, ‘That D.M.T. should mispronounce a word’. And there was indeed an irony in his well-endowed Grammar School mounting a play about class conflict during a period of growing industrial unrest. Part of the school’s income came from an estate in the upper Ogmore valley in Glamorgan where a coal-mine had been sunk in the 1860s. South Wales had suffered crippling unemployment for the best part of a decade, though Swansea, with its new oil refinery at Skewen and its seams of ‘modern’ anthracite, had been spared the worst effects. In the late 1920s, however, the slump came to Dylan’s ‘ugly, lovely’ home town. Dole queues lengthened, conditions in St Thomas became more difficult, and boys in the Grammar School’s distinctive red cap were targets of abuse if they strayed outside their narrow suburban confines. Pupils had always been politically conservative and socially exclusive, an inevitable consequence of their type of education. But now these traits became more pronounced. One young master was surprised to find that no-one in the sixth form supported him in his opposition to capital punishment. When he remarked on this in the staff common-room, he found that everyone there was a hanger and flogger as well.

  Dylan could not escape the effects of this social conditioning: as he would later tell his girlfriend Pamela Hansford Johnson, ‘You don’t know how True-Blue I really am, and what a collection of old school ties my vest conceals.’ But a couple of months afterward, he was capable of making a complete volte-face: ‘Don’t you go about jeering at my Old School Tie. I hate Old School Ties.’ Finding an appropriate attitude to his socially exclusive alma mater was always a problem, one made no easier by the fact that the school was so clearly identified in his mind with his father. So a solution was to bury and later find himself in poetry.

  He was helped by his friendship with Daniel Jones, whom he met at the very start of his school career. Jones was older (by twenty months) and should not really have been in the same class. But he had attended a preparatory school run by his aunt in his family home and no-one at the Grammar School realised how well he had been taught.

  Dylan gave a fictionalised account of his first meeting with Dan in his story ‘The Fight’. He invested the incident with great significance, telling how he had been trying, with unusual bloody-mindedness, to goad a Mr Samuels who lived next to the school playground. He knew exactly what was needed to get an angry reaction from a man who simply wanted to read a newspaper in his garden. As soon as he was successful, he intended going home to lunch. His easy victory was interrupted when he was pushed down the bank by someone whom he had not heard approach. Dylan threw a stone at his assailant, leading to a bloody fracas, enthusiastically egged on by Samuels. But the adult’s intervention quickly caused the two youths to stop their fighting and join forces in throwing sand in his direction.

  Dan has dated this encounter to his first week at school in September 1925. This would explain Dylan’s unfamiliarity with his classmate. But his story does not describe a new pupil’s behaviour. Its detail comes from slightly later, around 1929. Not that this matters because ‘The Fight’ is about two artistic boys bonding against the adult world. With curly black hair and thick round glasses, Dan looked like a school swot, but his studious manner was offset by a twinkle in his eye and a naughty smile which played through his slightly pudgy features. In him Dylan found a kindred spirit, someone highly intelligent, who shared not only his interest in poetry but his impish sense of humour.

  Dan was barely fifteen and living at Ballarat House in Eversley Road in Sketty when he wrote his first known letter to thirteen-year-old Dylan, dated 30 December 1927. Accompanying this precocious note was a mythological ballad Dan had composed called ‘Persephone’. Indicative of the level of his discussion with Dylan, he mentioned that the poem had been difficult to write because of its 8.6 metre, with a rhyme at the end of every eight-syllabled line. He suggested he might have to resort to Chaucerian scansion to get the correct number of syllables. Even at this stage, Dan bowed to Dylan’s poetic skills in signing off, ‘Acknowledging your superiority in this Art, and hoping my poor attempts will arouse a little pleasure in your condescending breast’.

  The following month the Jones family moved a short distance along the same road to a larger house called Warmley, the appealing backdrop to the domestic scenes in ‘The Fight’. In this story Dylan disarmingly describes how he always wanted to invite a friend to his room at Cwmdonkin Drive, with its plagiarised poem from the Western Mail on the mirror. But no-one ever came. So he was always happy to take the ten-minute walk to Warmley where, as its onomatopoeic name implied, the atmosphere was welcoming, cultured and unconventional – a far cry from the pinched respectability with which he was familiar.

  Dan’s father, Jenkyn Jones, was a Welsh-speaker who earned his living as a bank manager. But that gave no clue to his alternative calling as a church organist and composer of choral music (which he regularly judged on the Eisteddfod circuit). He was a great raconteur with a fund of general knowledge, particularly about astronomy and entomology. Others in the family were equally accomplished. Dan’s Scots-born mother had exhibited her intricate needlework, his older brother Jim was a competent musician with a fondness for jazz, and his Aunt Alice had her preparatory school. Dan himself played the piano to a very high standard and, following his father, composed reams of music. In ‘The Fight’, Dylan mentioned his friend’s seven historical novels, but that only skimmed the surface of his output of poems and stories.

  Dan’s previously unknown diary for 1928 gives fascinating insight into his hitherto only dimly discernible relationship with Dylan. Written partly in easily penetrable code (useful practice for his Second World War job as a cryptanalyst at Bletchley Park), it captures the boys’ mixture of intellectual curiosity and youthful fun. On 29 January, Dylan visited Warmley and listened to Dan playing the piano. A few days later he came and read his own poems. In between the two boys played cards and fooled around fencing in the basement. On 9 February, ‘Dylan read a tuppenny horrible “One Punch Chris”, Jim [Dan’s brother] put on the gramophone, and I read Ben Hur. We made up poems, alternate lines.’

  Dylan’s fondness for trashy books was to endure throughout his life. But the collaborative poems characterised an important stage in his creative development. Temporarily forgetting the ‘official’ rules of great poetry, as drummed into him by his father, he relaxed and tested grandiloquent words and phrases in playful competition with Dan. Several such early efforts survive: seldom great poetry, often nonsensical, occasionally attaining an ingenious surrealism which suggests familiarity with contemporary Dadaism. When the two attempted short stories in a similar way, writing every second sentence, they were not so successful, Dan later recalled. The narrative line simply became too diffuse. But they did manage joint plays and other bits of prose. Dylan found all this experimentation extraordinarily liberating.

  Dan’s real talent was as a musician and in particular as a composer. Before long the boys were collaborating on songs and more elaborate operatic scores, with music by Dan and words by Dylan. The earliest which can be dated exactly is ‘Vier Lieder’ (Four Songs), composed on 27 April 1928. Another piece, ‘Four horizontal Christmas carols’, op. 181, had alternate lines by the prolific M. R. Tonenbach. It was written for chorus in four parts and dated 22 December 1929.

  When Dylan was asked by Dan if could play the piano, he replied that he could do chords but not tunes. This proved no problem: the two youths, and anyone else around, learnt to render Dan’s compositions on an assortment of instruments, including saucepan lids, whistles from Woolworth’s and an old motor horn. Impervious to his neighbours’ banging on the walls, Dan recalled the results were never trite, and at times interestin
g pieces of musique trouvé did occur.

  M. R. (or more usually Max) Tonenbach was one of several exotic names they devised for their musical collaborations. Other alter egos included X. Q. Xumn and the estimable Reverend Alexander Percy, who came complete with cod biography, detailing his imagined exploits, such as being the first man to crawl from London to Brighton on all fours. Their poetry was often in the joint hand of Walter Bram, supposedly a homage to Bram Stoker, but with more than a hint of the Welsh word for ‘fart’ (which is bram). These names peppered the meticulous programmes they made for musical and literary evenings by Mr D. J. Seffrendi and Mr Dylan Marlais at Warmley.

  Dan referred to the house having ‘an artistic compulsion in the air’. But, even in this supportive environment, there was one art Dylan never mastered. When the Jones family went to the seaside, they brought back the grey-blueish clay of Swansea Bay for moulding. Dylan tried to learn this skill but, after a week of mucky effort, threw up his hands, crying, ‘I’m fed up with sculpture’.

  On 2 February 1928 Dan noted in his diary that he and Dylan were preparing to write a journal called The Era. An unpublished letter from Dylan to Dan also refers to this. Confirming his cavalier attitude to classroom attendance, he says he has not been in school since their last meeting and hopes not to go again for some days. He makes no suggestion that he is ill: ‘This luxury has its inconveniences, though, because it prevents me from going out in the nights, at least temporarily.’ So he asks Dan to take the unusual step of calling at Cwmdonkin Drive where they can attend to the ‘Small Review’. Dylan counsels: ‘Bring your Rosetti essay & finish it here while I can go on with D H L[awrence]. You shall also get your facts about Mahler or any other composer you like. Come definitely. There’s no need for embarrassment or whatever makes exterior company nauseous to you. We shall be QUITE ALONE. I shall expect you. Dylan.’