Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  EIGHT

  THE RUB OF LOVE

  ‘No, I don’t really spit in the piano,’ Dylan assured Pamela about his impending visit to London. ‘So there’ll be no need to nail the top down.’ He often indulged in ironic self-mockery about his humble Welsh origins, though usually interwove it with more than a hint of braggadocio. So he made no such pledges about not singing lewd roundelays. This was a party piece and he promised that, unless he turned shy and locked himself in the lavatory, he would indulge it. His only domestic vice, he confessed, again with evasive humour, was sprinkling cigarette ash.

  His new year resolutions for 1934 repeated the sort of expansive views about poetry and the universe he had been developing over previous months. ‘I want to imagine a new colour, so much whiter than white that white is black.’ And he had a novel prescription for achieving this goal. He felt man’s lack of vision derived from his rigid upright stance. He would be much wiser if he adopted a different perspective, lying on his back to view the sky and on his stomach to see the earth.

  Dylan was preparing himself for the most important year of his career. Despite this waffle, he was still determined to break new ground, both as a poet and as a man. But he was plagued by a dilemma. On the one hand he could never quite shrug off his sense of his own ridiculousness; for all his fine words, he remained ‘a short, ambiguous person in a runcible hat, feeling very lost in a big and magic universe’. (This was both his weakness and his strength, certainly a large part of his charm.) On the other hand he struggled manfully to understand and portray the world in his own terms. His best poetry brought an openness to technical innovation together with a personal, if unpredictable, quest for universal truth.

  Since Nancy was able to come home and look after D.J., Dylan was finally free to go to London to meet Pamela in late February. He telephoned her three days in advance to say he was coming. She was immediately impressed by his ‘rich fruity old port wine of ’06 voice’. When he first arrived at her mother’s house in Battersea Rise one dull evening, he showed his nerves by asking, ‘Have you seen the Gauguins?’ His obligations to metropolitan culture discharged (he had been practising the remark, which referred to a current London exhibition, all the way from Swansea), he relaxed and she found him ‘charming, very young-looking’ and – a feature often noted – with a ‘most enchanting voice’.

  Although staying with Haydn in Laleham, he managed to spend a long weekend with Pamela, her mother and aunt in Clapham. On that occasion, he quickly polished off the quarter bottle of brandy he had brought, before repairing to the off licence for a more favoured tipple, beer. While they both chatted and played records (he particularly liked a syncopated old 78 ‘The Beat of my Heart’, by the American bandleader Ben Pollack), Pamela gained the correct impresssion that, although well informed about poetry, he knew rather less about novels, music or art. Despite being tied up with rehearsals for a revue she had written, she introduced him to friends, including Victor Neuburg and Runia Tharp, whom he bewitched with his ‘glorious hokum’, and took him to Sean O’Casey’s lacklustre new play Within the Gates. The only moment of concern came before breakfast one cold foggy morning when Dylan wanted to go out for cigarettes. He was still in his pyjamas, over which he had draped a vast blue and violet dressing gown once owned by Pamela’s uncle, and on top of his head was his new black felt hat, his mother’s gift at Christmas.

  In between times Dylan made the rounds of publishers’ and editors’ offices where, as he had no regular source of income, he was as interested in finding a regular job as in selling his recent work. No employment ensued, though his poems and stories created interest and, within a short time, had been printed in the Adelphi, The Listener and New English Weekly. He left Pamela happily typing up ‘The Tree’, one of his mystical stories about the Welsh countryside, for the Adelphi. Within a couple of days of returning to Swansea, he wrote to say he loved her, which threw her into happy confusion.

  The publication of his haunting ‘Light breaks where no sun shines’ in The Listener on 14 March proved a turning point. It brought welcome letters of encouragement from Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson and T. S. Eliot. The magazine had to fend off correspondents who objected to the supposed obscenity in lines such as:

  Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky

  Spout to the rod

  Divining in a smile the oil of tears.

  Dylan claimed disingenuously that this was a metaphysical image of rain and grief. But he was smart enough to realise that a degree of controversy would not hurt his cause. And he thought it worthwhile to visit London again at the end of March.

  He made another circuit of editors, among them Janet Adam Smith, young assistant editor responsible for the poetry pages of The Listener. A product of Cheltenham Ladies’ College and Somerville College, Oxford, she invited him to tea in her flat, where he met her fiancé Michael Roberts, a robust poet and Auden propagandist earning a living as a mathematics teacher, and Desmond Hawkins, another young man making his way on the London literary scene. Hawkins got the mood of the occasion right: ‘The tea-party, for all its friendliness, was inevitably intimidating as a kind of initiation ceremony.’ But the cucumber sandwiches brought the expected results: over the next couple of years both Adam Smith and Roberts were to include Dylan’s work in influential poetry anthologies. They probably sparked in him the idea (never realised) of compiling an anthology of English-language poems and stories by modern Welsh writers.

  Dylan now found himself actively wooed by Victor Neuburg who, after printing three more of his poems, made him the second winner (after Pamela) of the Poets’ Corner prize, again with the promise of publication of a poetry collection. Pamela recognised the shrewd ‘Vicky’ had found a new star to succeed her.

  In Clapham, Dylan played the dutiful suitor, inviting both Pamela and her mother to the Cock pub on the Common. Although abstemious by his own standards, he shocked Pamela by drinking too much. She noted how he knocked back his alcohol in a manner he thought expected of a poet. But she did not care; she was now infatuated, her diary full of references to ‘darling Dylan’. ‘I find I have to keep his name on every page’ she wrote on 20 April. She was even happy to meet his father who was up in town for a medical check-up.

  After his extraordinary output the previous year, Dylan was less prolific in the first few months of 1934. Nevertheless he produced a handful of fine poems. Among them were ‘A process in the weather of the heart’, whose oblique viewpoint successfully pulled it back from parody of his usual ‘death implicit in life’ subject-matter, and ‘Where once the waters of your face’, which explored the experience of the womb through increasingly favoured images of the sea, which had the same eternally nurturing and destructive powers as the weather in the other, slightly earlier poem (both of which were published in the Sunday Referee).

  Then in April, after returning to Swansea from his second visit to Pamela, he wrote two of his greatest poems. ‘I see the boys of summer’ arose from looking out from Cwmdonkin Drive in what must have been a fairly depressed mood. ‘I wish I could see these passing men and women in the sun as the motes of virtues,’ he explained to his girlfriend in London; ‘this little fellow as a sunny Fidelity, this corsetted hank as Mother-Love, this abusing lout as the Spirit of Youth, and this eminently beatable child in what was once a party frock as the walking embodiment of Innocence. But I can’t. The passers are dreadful. I see all their little horrors.’ Looking on as one of the ‘dark deniers’ who, in his verses ‘summon/Death from a summer woman’, his tripping poem captures the fateful sense of tragedy and decay discernible in even the happiest of youths (whose careless state is suggested in simple metaphors of ‘gold’, ‘apples’ and ‘honey’). Dylan’s genius is to overlay his central concept of life’s inevitable progression with a sense that this leads to the necessary overhaul or even overthrow of one generation by the next – a throw-back to his heart-felt if unsophisticated political rantings the previous year.

&nbs
p; But seasons must be challenged or they totter

  Into a chiming quarter

  Where, punctual as death we ring the stars.

  This was Dylan showing that his poetry did not have to be overtly political (in an Auden sense). He had his own way of invoking change, whether it was seasonal, personal, cultural or political.

  At the end of the month he concluded his fourth notebook with ‘If I was tickled by the rub of love’, which, reflecting his unconsummated affair with Pamela, manages to be both physically suggestive and puritanical, railing against sex for failing to overcome death (‘The words of death are dryer than his stiff’). Despite a sense of the futility of life (indicated in ‘And what’s the rub?’ with its Hamlet associations) and an underlying imagery of masturbation (the ‘rub of love’), set within a familiar geography of the womb, Dylan finds solace in the mere act of being human. And so his positive last line, ‘Man be my metaphor’ which encapsulates his concept of his body being the centre of his universe. Dylan told Pamela that, despite its faults, this was the best poem he had written. He implied it would take its place in the Sunday Referee’s promised book of his poems. Indeed he had already determined that ‘I see the boys of summer in their ruin’ should be the first poem in that volume.

  Despite the patronage of the Sunday Referee, he refused to be typecast. When Neuburg described him as an experimentalist in a blurb accompanying the announcement of Dylan’s prize, Dylan claimed not to recognise himself. He protested too much, but indicated his cussedness, when he asked Pamela to tell the editor, ‘I am not modest, not experimental, do not write of the Present, and have very little command of rhythm … I don’t know anything about life-rhythm. Tell him I write of worms & corruption. Tell him I believe in the fundamental wickedness and worthlessness of man, & in the rot in life. Tell him I am all for cancers. And tell him, too, that I loathe poetry. I’d prefer to be an anatomist or the keeper of a morgue any day … And I don’t like words either.’

  The publication of ‘The Woman Speaks’, a Donne-like poetic fragment from a play, in Adelphi in March brought a letter of appreciation from Glyn Jones, a Cardiff schoolmaster with roots in the mining valleys. No matter that – strangely for a Welshman – Jones had been bamboozled by the poet’s first name and imagined he might be addressing a woman (even stranger when the verses were more gory than Dylan’s usual cerebral evocations of death). The two men immediately hit it off. Dylan was delighted to find someone with similar professional interests, aspirations and sometimes style. Jones had family links in the Llanstephan peninsula and a keen sense of the London literary market. (He too had appeared in Adelphi.) In general he was a more reliable sounding board for discussions on writing than the lacklustre Trevor Hughes.

  Dylan tried to explain to Jones what he was trying to do. Although he claimed to be a Socialist (and presumed Jones was the same), he dismissed the recent poems of Auden or Day-Lewis because they were neither good propaganda nor good poetry. (‘The emotional appeal in Auden wouldn’t raise a corresponding emotion in a tick,’ he said damningly.) His own ambitions were set higher. He was not worried about being obscure, taking his cue from Eliot’s dictum that meaning could be subordinate to overall effect: it was a trick to ‘satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him’. Most modern writers evolved their own types of obscurity, from Gertrude Stein and the French-Americans around the Paris magazine transition who had tried, mathematically, to strip words of their associations and bring them back to their literal sound, to the heavily culturally laden outpourings of Eliot which required, he joked, an intimate knowledge of Sanskrit weather reports. His own obscurity he described succinctly as based on the cosmic significance of the human anatomy.

  Since he was again wrestling with his stories-cum-novel about Carmarthenshire (or Jarvis valley) life, and they both had local ties, Dylan and Jones agreed to meet over Whitsun on their ancestral Carmarthenshire turf in Llanstephan at the mouth of the river Tywi. From there, they would walk over the great headland called Parc yr Arglwydd (the Lord’s Park) and take the ferry across the Taf estuary to Laugharne. Dylan immediately fell in love with what he called the ‘strangest town in Wales’ – an enclave of Norman England, with an ancient charter, unique borough privileges and a castle, where Richard Hughes, author of the 1929 bestselling novel A High Wind in Jamaica, lived. He found Jones rather prim and disapproving of his habit of drinking pints of Guinness at lunch. But Laugharne itself was remarkable, with its cockle-pickers, cormorants, sea-carved rocks and lowering skies. ‘I wish I could describe what I am looking on,’ he told Pamela. ‘But no words could tell you what a hopeless fallen angel of a day it is … I can never do justice … to the miles and miles and miles of mud and grey sand, to the un-nerving silence of the fisherwomen, & the mean-souled cries of the gulls and the herons …’ Just over four years later he would be married and living there, and would indeed do justice to the unique qualities of the place. Brown’s, the pub he enjoyed, would become his regular, and later he would live at the Boat House, next door to the ferryhouse, home of Jack Roberts who had rowed him across the Taf. While lying in a field of buttercups on this first visit, examining an army of scarlet ants playing over his hand, he had picked up a sheep’s jawbone and written of death. It was all so ‘incorrigibly romantic’, he trilled, as if putting into action his new year resolution about seeing things from different perspectives.

  At Laugharne he sounded relaxed. But this was illusory. Pamela had been urging him to see a doctor about his health, but he could not bring himself to make an appointment. He was still drinking heavily and sleeping badly. On his way back to Swansea, he stopped in Gower where he stayed with an old reporter friend called Cliff. The first night he was there, Cliff’s fiancée joined them. She was ‘tall & thin and dark with a loose red mouth & a harsh sort of laugh’. Dylan claimed that, after a heavy session at the pub, she started making passes at him. When they went to bed, she refused to sleep with Cliff and came to join Dylan. He later told Pamela apologetically that he had slept with this girl over the next three nights. He added that he did not know why, because he loved her, Pamela. He implied it must have something to do with his drinking, for he was ‘on the borders of DTs’ (delirium tremens). And he begged her forgiveness. Doubts have been raised about whether this incident took place as he said, or even happened at all. Was he trying to put Pamela off? Or did he want to suggest his worldliness and sophistication? Clearly he was in a depressed state made worse by alcoholic poisoning. Pamela was devastated to receive his letter telling her about this incident, and resolved, reluctantly, to have no more to do with him.

  A fortnight later, in mid-June, she had given him another chance and Dylan was back in London, asking her to marry him. She decided to keep him waiting. So Dylan shuffled between her house and Trevor Hughes’s in Rayners Lane, visiting editors such as Richard Rees and finding himself an agent – David Higham at the established firm, Curtis Brown – who had only limited confidence in the marketability of Dylan’s poetry, suggesting that his ongoing novel about the Jarvis valley would be a better proposal to try to sell.

  Dylan himself was hardly bullish about the putative book, which he described – not inaccurately – as the ‘hotch-potch of a strayed poet, or the linking together of several short story sequences’, and he feared he might soon have to scrap it. A week later the book had progressed slightly: it had a name – A Doom on the Sun – and had become ‘a kind of warped fable in which Lust, Greed, Cruelty, Spite etc., appear all the time as old gentlemen in the background of the story’. He described a scene in which Mr Stipe, Mr Edger, Mr Stull, Mr Thade and Mr Strich watch a dog dying of poison. By the end of the month, progress remained slow, but the project was ‘as ambitious as the Divine Comedy, with a chorus of deadly sins, anagrammatised as old gentlemen’ and a host of other characters including ‘a bald-headed girl, a celestial tramp, a mock Christ, & the Holy Ghost’. These old gentlemen appeared, with the letter
s of their names rearranged, in Dylan’s story ‘The Holy Six’, which also referred to Llareggub, leading back to ‘The Orchards’ which was originally known as ‘Anagram’. It was clear now that Dylan’s stories were parts of a novel in which word-play featured. But these alphabetical constructions had no role but to amuse their author as symbols of the world’s topsy-turvy nature.

  There was at least a new mercenariness to Dylan’s approach. Only recently he had told Pamela that novels were the best way for a writer to earn a living. By comparison, short stories did not pay and ‘poetry would not keep a goldfinch alive’. One reason for such thinking was, so he claimed, that his father was retiring from Swansea Grammar School at the end of the summer term, and ‘after that I face the bitter world alone’, implying that, even now, he received some form of parental allowance. (In fact D.J. did not leave his job for another three years.) Dylan had considered working in the docks or a provincial repertory company. He had thought seriously about asking Lady Rhondda, daughter of the former D. A. Thomas, one of the richest colliery-owners and industrialists in South Wales, for a job on her right-wing journal Time and Tide. But, determined to make his way with his pen, he had forced himself to turn down trips to the Mediterranean and, bizarrely, to the Soviet Union with a Welsh Communist organisation. ‘It’s all useless’, he said, rather sensibly, ‘for, when I came back, I’d be just where I was before I went away – a little less pale perhaps, but as green as ever as to what I must do in this dull, grey country.’

  Back in Swansea, John Jennings, a member of Trick’s evening discussion group, had been hired to edit the Swansea and West Wales Guardian, a new weekly Swansea edition of an established Pembrokeshire newspaper with a radical agenda. During the summer he had been campaigning strongly against the entrenchment of the right wing in Swansea politics, where an influential councillor, a coal merchant called W. T. Mainwaring Hughes had switched from Tory imperialism to Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. When Hughes arranged for Mosley to hold a rally in the town, a group of anti-fascists, including Trick, friends in the Socialist League (a Marxist splinter group from the unenterprising, bureaucratic local Labour party), and members of Swansea’s small Jewish community, tried to stop him. Dylan weighed in with a letter to the local Guardian which clearly had Mainwaring Hughes in mind as it fulminated against ‘Christ-denying Christians, irrational Rationalists, and the white-spatted representatives of a social system that has, for too many years, used its bowler hat for the one purpose of keeping its ears apart’. (The paper gave it a large two-deck headline TELLING THE TRUTH TO THE PUBLIC / EXPOSE HUMBUG AND SMUG RESPECTABILITY.) Mainwaring Hughes retaliated that he could make ‘neither head nor tail’ of the letter: ‘It is indeed too bad that Mr Dylan Thomas should have to stay in such a town, or for that matter, in such a country. What’s the matter with Russia as the spiritual home of one who wants to “teach to hate and then to believe in the antithesis of what is hated”, or Cefn Coed?’ (This was the psychiatric hospital above Cwmdonkin Drive, which Dylan had referred to in his 1932 notebook poem ‘Upon your held-out hand’. He told Hughes, ‘It leers down the valley like a fool, or like a snail with the two turrets of its water towers two snails’ horns’ – an image he later appropriated for St Martin’s Church in Laugharne in his ‘Poem in October’.)