Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  She may have mixed this girl with Linda Slee whom Dylan mentioned to Kenneth Tynan in 1948. Dylan boasted of romps with Linda, giving the impression he lost his virginity to her. The daughter of the caretaker at the Rhyddings Congregational church, Linda lived at the back of the cricket ground on St Helen’s Avenue, mid-way in the social pecking order between St Thomas and the Uplands. Exactly Dylan’s age, she had been forced to work in a shoe shop (not Woolworth’s) after finishing at Glanmor School for Girls when she was fifteen. Her daughter Jill Davies remembered her mother talking disparagingly about Dylan. She believed they had mixed as teenagers, but added, ‘I shall never know what was behind her disapproving tone.’ Dylan certainly knew Linda’s artistic future sister-in-law Violet Dabbs, with whom he appeared on stage at the Little Theatre.

  During the summer Haydn and Nancy decided to get married. Since this commitment brought new responsibilities, Haydn decided hastily to move to London in search of not only a better job but also a house in the English home counties where he and his future wife could live. Dylan greeted his sudden departure in early September with a back-handed farewell notice in the Post diary column. This celebrated Haydn’s successes in the theatre (even noting his excellent ‘facial contortionism’ in Hay Fever – a private joke recalling their first encounter at Cwmdonkin Drive), while also revealing that he had left his thespian colleagues in the lurch. The Little Theatre had chosen Haydn to produce its forthcoming play, John Masefield’s Witch. Now it was left with ‘the problem of appointing a new producer at lamentably short notice’.

  So long as Haydn was around, Nancy was reasonably content. But, with her fiancé in London, she felt trapped. D.J.’s health had deteriorated again in the summer and he was frequently bad-tempered. If Dylan had been closer to his father, he might have engaged with him. D.J. would have welcomed a discussion of, perhaps, the finer points of Shakespeare on which he put great store. But his adolescent son had other interests. Relegated to the diary rather than to regular reporting and going nowhere in his newspaper career, Dylan wanted to stay out late and get drunk. Florrie, in response to these pressures, became increasingly neurotic.

  On 23 September, a Thursday, D.J. felt well enough to go out on the town, his first such excursion for some time. He returned home at 11.15 p.m., looking and smelling awful, noted Nancy. The following night Dylan, having been paid, followed suit, coming in ‘very drunk’, at fifteen minutes after midnight. ‘Then there was much row,’ remarked Nancy and she became involved. ‘Nowadays, of course, I come in for Pop’s nightly, nay hourly, grumbles …’ At the time she wrote Haydn a four-page account of ‘all the horrible things that happened’. She later thought better of it, and tore up this letter.

  The next morning she fled into town with her friend Gweveril Dawkins. After coffee at the Kardomah, she returned for lunch with her mother at 1.30. They were eating peacefully when, at around 2.45, her father lumbered in, probably from the pub where he usually repaired after Saturday lessons ended at noon. It was not a pleasant encounter: ‘A very usual Saturday scene,’ recorded Nancy balefully. ‘Mother raving and in tears – I, tiniest bit frightened, rush upstairs, dress, & go out in the rain. It pours down & the wind howls.’ Since she had no money – a not unusual occurrence, she made clear – she could only walk back into town. When she returned at teatime, her father was more composed. But she was unenthusiastic about the ‘cheerful prospect’ of having to remain at home all evening and then spend ‘all a long Sunday sitting with the family – a family who are nervy & quarrelsome’.

  Nancy supplied many other instances of the Thomases’ dysfunctionalism. In October, she was eating alone in the dining room, when her garrulous mother began to ‘grumble at me’, leading to a mild altercation. When the impetuous D.J. heard, he threw a book at his daughter. After swearing at her, ‘using language that I couldn’t repeat’, he blustered, ‘Who are you? Nobody cares what happens to you, it’s a pity you’re alive. All you & your beautiful brother do is to take my money from me.’ Incensed at being classed with Dylan, Nancy kept increasingly to herself, telling Haydn, ‘I honestly do wish I were dead.’

  Money was a perpetual problem, particularly with D.J. who complained, when she made coffee for visiting friends: ‘I will not have you making food for half Swansea. If they want to eat tell them to go home. Who pays for this food I’d like to know?’ Florrie, who was anything but her usual ‘sweet’ self, did not help. When Nancy asked for money to buy materials for a coat, her mother maliciously suggested that she was preparing to get married. When Nancy denied this, Florrie claimed she was ‘only teasing’. But she had probably picked up the idea from reading her daughter’s correspondence. When she found that Haydn had put sealing wax on his letters, she was incensed. This was ‘quite the rudest thing I ever heard of’, she screamed. Nancy told her fiancé that she could ‘manage to stick her, but Daddy I can’t stick. Shortly I think he will go bankrupt; Dylan home, all helps to completely unnerve him. He now revenges for everything on me.’

  An example occurred at the end of the autumn term, when she thought she would please her father by cooking him a special pie. But he would have none of it: ‘he grumbled & grumbled & raved & swore’. When she remonstrated, he flew off the handle, asking her ‘who the bloody hell’ she thought she was, dictating to him in this way. He’d screw her ‘bloody head off’. When she dashed upstairs for safety and emerged with a small bag, saying she was leaving, he taunted her: ‘No such luck, you’ll come cringing back, I know.’

  Nancy sought refuge at Blaencwm in Carmarthenshire. But, although she enjoyed Aunt Polly’s company, Uncle Bob was more trying than ever. ‘Last night Uncle Bob was terrible,’ she told Haydn. ‘I do wish we could have him put away.’ The next morning she arrived down to breakfast to find her aunt in a state because Bob had not lit a fire and refused to allow the oil stove to be used. ‘Thank God you’re not living in a mean, small in all senses, petty village & house. Where each lump of coal is looked at & thought about. Where you have bread and butter for breakfast, boiled ham for dinner (cake for tea when you are down or when any visitor arrives), otherwise bread and butter for tea & supper. This menu daily. How would you feel? A really potty man & a dear old aunt who has a dreadful cough & spits – & has some skin trouble. Can you let me live on like this? Not if you love me & want me sane. Or shall I return home? Where they are all potty …’

  As the year drew to an end, Nancy became desperate to leave Cwmdonkin Drive. She implored Haydn to find her a job in London. Anything, even a post as a governess, would do. She thought of spending Christmas at her Aunt Polly’s. Normally she could rely on festive cheques from her aunts and uncles. But these had not arrived, so, to post a letter to Haydn, she had to borrow three half-pennies from the maid.

  When the couple announced their engagement at Christmas, they received short shrift from the Thomases. Florrie told her daughter not to expect any favours. ‘Your wedding – remember Daddy won’t have any money & any sort of fuss will kill him. If you expected any sort of special fuss or clothes you ought to be ashamed of yourself …’

  By then the Thomases had additional reason to be concerned about money, for Dylan’s short newspaper career had come to an end. One of his last pieces, in the Herald of Wales in early November, was partly a paean to his uncle the Reverend David Rees who was retiring as minister in charge of the Paraclete Congregational church in Newton. He had little time for his uncle, who epitomised the worst of organised religion for him. The feeling was mutual: the preacher once became so exasperated with his nephew that he suggested he should be sent to a mental asylum. So Dylan’s apparently warm encomium was a lie, an example of his ability, which he deprecated, to spin out specious ‘little (Oscar) Wilde words’. ‘Give me pen & paper – the trick’s done: a thousand conceits, couched in a hermit’s language, spoiling the whiteness of the page.’ He could turn it on when he wanted, but municipal politics and rugby reports did not inspire him even that far.

  Around November he
simply stopped working for the Post. There is no evidence to support his claim that he was offered a five-year contract and turned it down. Rather, his obvious lack of interest in his work, his increasingly drunken behaviour (probably linked to bouts of depression) and his own desire to concentrate on his poetry led to the only possible conclusion – that he should leave the paper. Although the parting was probably a mutual decision, he admitted he was ‘already showing signs of a reporter’s decadence’ and feared ‘the slow but sure stamping out of individuality, the gradual contentment with life as it was, so much per week, so much for this, for that, so much left over for drink and cigarettes. That be no loife for such as Oi!’ Since he kept no notebooks as such from July 1932 to January 1933, it is difficult to match his verse to his mood.

  However his Irishism (or was it Joyceism?) indicated his determination to put a brave face on his circumstances. In November he was back enjoying himself with Dan Jones at Warmley. With Tom Warner’s technical help, the two friends set up the Warmley Broadcasting Corporation, an elaborate trail of wires and loudspeakers which allowed them to transmit from an upstairs drawing room to a small sitting room below. Their innovation was initially unknown to others in the house. After Dylan innocently asked Dan’s father if he could listen to a foreign station on the radiogram, he seemed to tune in some Beethoven piano music. After a few bars, the notes began to sound increasingly discordant. Jenkyn Jones went through various stages of being quizzical, perplexed and annoyed. Only then was it revealed that the music was coming from Dan upstairs. (A note in the Henry Ransom Center in Austin attributes the WBC’s founding to Daniel Hautboy Jones and Dylan Moreorless Thomas, with assistance from Tom (Tiptoes) Warner, advisory mechanician.)

  Although not included in a notebook, his remarkable poem ‘Especially when the November wind’ expresses some of the exhilaration and at the same time trepidation he feels about his ‘chosen task’ of poetry ‘that lies upon/My belly like a cold stone’. Experiencing his youth ‘like fire’, he speculates again about the restrictive nature of words, and finds comfort in being able this time ‘to feel November air/And be no words’ prisoner’.

  With little else to occupy him, Dylan, on a whim, attended the funeral of his old French master R. M. ‘Lulu’ Lewis in Ystalyfera, an industrial village outside Swansea in early December. As he told Percy Smart, he had been trying to develop the Zen-like facility of dissociating himself from the emotions of others. He observed the obsequies ‘as morbidly & as selfishly as a Russian dramatist’, wondering if, when he died, his mother would ‘turn on her ready tap of recollections and, cloaking misdeeds with tears, dwell tenderly upon such virtues as I may present at the gold gates.’ (She was to do exactly that twenty-one years later.)

  Once again Dylan was determined to tough it out. He counselled Smart to heed the words of P. G. Wodehouse in his 1922 novel The Clicking of Cuthbert where the celebrated Russian novelist Vladimir Brusiloff tells a sedate literary gathering in England: ‘No novelists any good except me. Sovietski – yah! Nastikoff – bah! I spit me of zem all. No novelists anywhere any good except me. P. G. Wodehouse and Tolstoi not bad. Not good but not bad. No novelists any good except me.’ This was a sentiment Dylan clearly shared: after quoting this in haphazard fashion, he added, ‘I cannot say better than that.’ Despite his inability to hold down a job, his regard for his own writing skills remained healthily intact.

  SIX

  A TORMENTED THING

  Only a few weeks into the new year of 1933, Dylan suffered a dramatic adverse reaction. With no job and no visible means of support, he stayed in bed most mornings, and then would rise in a fearful temper, ‘rushing & raving like a tormented thing’. He tried to write in the afternoons, before going to Warmley in the evening. But Dan was immersed in his university studies, and Dylan often found himself at a loose end. If he had any money, he spent it in pubs. But it was never clear where he found his cash. On more than one occasion in January, Nancy thought that he had stolen sums from her or her friends. ‘What will become of him Heaven knows,’ she tut-tutted to her new fiancé. She was hardly mollified by the way her mother fussed over the teenage prodigy and on one occasion forced her to stop writing to Haydn because the ink was required by Dylan who had just risen from his bed. ‘Dylan has to get up to work & now no ink, etc.,’ Nancy interpreted. ‘Not fair for the child, etc.’ As a cushion for his freelance writing career, Dylan had wrung a promise from J. D. Williams to take occasional articles. Whether his former editor felt so happy about this arrangement after the first offering is doubtful. In a piece for the Post in early January, the young would-be poet explored the thin line that artists trod between sanity, eccentricity and madness. He quoted the examples of several writers who interested him, including William Blake, Oscar Wilde, John Donne and John Keats. For some reason, he also threw in a modern case of ‘eccentricity’ – the painter Nina Hamnett, Welsh-born doyenne of the louche Bohemian set who congregated in London’s Fitzrovia. Dylan stated that Hamnett’s recent autobiography, Laughing Torso had been banned. Since this was untrue, she threatened legal action, forcing the paper to make a hasty climb-down.

  His interest in such subject-matter was linked to his own fragile state of mind, as suggested in a poem in April:

  Within his head revolved a little world

  Where wheels, confusing music, confused doubts

  Rolled down all images into the pits

  Where half dead vanities were sleeping curled

  Like cats, and lusts lay half hot in the cold.

  Women appeared to him as distant monsters with ‘serpents’ mouths and scolecophidian voids’. (‘Scolecophidian’ is not in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. It is a showy Dylanism meaning ‘worm-like’.) For the first time, a questing spiritual dimension was to be found in his work. In common with adolescents through the ages, he could not help wondering: in a threatening world, where was God? where was love?

  To absent friends such as Percy Smart and Trevor Hughes, he tried to paint a rosier picture. He talked of using his new-found leisure to write not just poems (which he described as his ‘incurable disease’), but stories and even a short novel. Beginning to hanker after a wider audience, he claimed that Sir John Squire had accepted a story for the palely Georgian London Mercury. Luckily, perhaps, nothing further was heard of that initiative, while an approach to Geoffrey Grigson, iconoclastic editor of the recently founded journal New Verse, only resulted in the return of Dylan’s poems.

  The reality, he was forced to admit to Hughes, was more banal: ‘I continue writing in the most futile manner, looking at the gas oven.’ His disposition was not improved by the death of his Aunt Annie from cancer of the womb in February. Even as she lay dying in Carmarthen Infirmary, he was both concerned and also rather pleased that he could feel no emotion. ‘She is dead. She is alive. It is all the same thing.’ This was the same numbness to others’ emotions he had felt at ‘Lulu’ Lewis’s funeral a couple of months earlier. It reflected partly his own self-absorbed anger, and partly a feeling that this was the proper literary response – a Wildean defiance of conventional morality that would allow him to concentrate, as a poet, on his own emotional reality. After her funeral, he could only dash off a sour verse response. (Five years later, he had second thoughts and revised this notebook poem in a more upbeat fashion.)

  In Rayners Lane, Hughes was, if anything, more doleful, looking after his arthritic mother, mourning a dead brother, and trying to write stories himself. Despite his own problems, Dylan had to counsel his friend not to be so morbid, but to look for that ‘fountain of clearness’ to be found in an extraordinary quintet comprising Bach, Mozart, D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats and – a growing preoccupation – Jesus Christ. He chided Hughes for thinking that suffering helped the cause of art. ‘The artistic consciousness is there or it isn’t. Suffering is not going to touch it.’ And he tried to explain his own idea of the artist’s role. Everyone, he believed, had to live in the outer world, with its hardships and unha
ppiness. ‘Where the true artist differs from his fellows is that that for him is not the only world.’ He has an ‘inner splendour’, and it is his business to reconcile those external and internal experiences. Despite his efforts to articulate his aims, he admitted he seldom achieved them: most of his poems were ‘outer poems’ and therefore unsatisfactory.

  Part of Dylan’s confusion arose from his sense of impotence in the face of local developments. Swansea was no longer protected from economic realities by its anthracite fields or even the Anglo-Persian oil terminal. Unemployment had risen (28,000 people were jobless, or 20 per cent of the population, according to one estimate), and social conditions deteriorated. As in the good times, the town responded in its own peculiar way. The Labour party’s control of local affairs had stimulated a right-wing reaction among the normally complacent petit bourgeoisie. Soon after its formation in 1931, Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists opened an office in Walter Road – clear evidence that recession had reached the Uplands.

  Swansea’s religious and political conservatism created a moral backlash Dylan found distasteful. In February he pilloried the role of the Watch Committee as guardian of public morality. He must have known of the decision by the local Council’s Library and Arts Committee to refuse a portrait of the writer Caradoc Evans who had made a career out of satirising the religious-based hypocrisy of his fellow Welshmen. Evans, a favourite of Dylan, thanked the Committee ‘for proving the accuracy of some of my pen portraits of the Welsh people’.