Dylan Thomas

By Walford Davies

This critical study covers the whole range of Dylan Thomas's writing, both poetry and prose, in an accessible appraisal of the work and achievement of a major and dynamic poet. It interrelates the man and his national-cultural background by defining in detail the Welshness of his poetic temperament and critical attitudes, as both man and poet. At the same time, it illustrates Thomas's wide knowledge of and impact on the long and varied tradition of poetry in English. In that connection, it delineates and delimits Thomas's relationship to surrealism, compares and contrasts his work with that of other poets of the 1930s and 1940s, and shows how its power survives his early death in 1953, in the decade of the 'Movement' poets and beyond. A major aspect of this book is the close textual analysis of the works quoted; it explores anew the recognition due to the man who wrote the work, and helps us to separate the intrinsic achievement of the work from the foisted perceptions of the 'legend'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781783161522

Book preview

Writers of Wales

Dylan Thomas

Editors:

Meic Stephens

Jane Aaron

M. Wynn Thomas

Honorary Series Editor:

R. Brinley Jones

Other titles in the Writers of Wales series:

Welsh Periodicals in English (2013), Malcolm Ballin

Ruth Bidgood (2012), Matthew Jarvis

Dorothy Edwards (2011), Claire Flay

Kate Roberts (2011), Katie Gramich

Geoffrey of Monmouth (2010), Karen Jankulak

Herbert Williams (2010), Phil Carradice

Rhys Davies (2009), Huw Osborne

R. S. Thomas (2006), Tony Brown

Ben Bowen (2003), T. Robin Chapman

James Kitchener Davies (2002), M. Wynn Thomas

Writers of Wales

Dylan Thomas

Walford Davies

University of Wales Press

Cardiff 2014

© Walford Davies, 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78316-058-7

e-ISBN 978-1-78316-152-2

The right of Walford Davies to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The University of Wales acknowledges the financial support of the Welsh Books Council.

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to Ralph Maud for the pleasure of working with him on our editions of the Collected Poems 1934–1953 and Under Milk Wood, and for his seminal work as a scholar; to Paul Ferris, for his indispensable biography and edition of the poet’s letters; to John Carey, Christopher Ricks and Barbara Hardy for their friendship and inspiration over the years; and to the late John Ackerman, Gilbert Bennet, Gwyn Jones, Graham Martin and John Wain, for their own work and for excellent conversations about literature.

Angharad Watkins and Siân Chapman and their colleagues at the University of Wales Press were models of wise and patient guidance.

Grateful thanks go to Jeff Towns for expert information as to the sources of the photographs that stand here as ‘Portraits of the Artist’ between 1933 and 1952.

For permission to quote from the works of Dylan Thomas, grateful acknowledgement is made to David Higham Associates (London) for UK rights and to New Directions Publishing Corporation (New York) for rights in the USA, its territories and Canada.

Frontispiece: 1952. Holograph of ‘Prologue’ to the Collected Poems 1934–1952: ‘At poor peace I sing / To you strangers, (though song / Is a burning and crested act …’

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Preface

1 ‘Begin at the beginning’: introductory

2 ‘The sideboard fruit, the ferns’: the poet in suburbia

3 ‘The loud hill of Wales’: the Welshness of the work

4 ‘I’ll put them all in a story by and by’: aspects of the prose

5 ‘Now my saying shall be my undoing’: the need to change

6 ‘Criss-cross rhythms’: comparisons of earlier and later poems

7 ‘Ann’s bard on a raised hearth’: towards ‘After the funeral (In Memory of Ann Jones)’

8 ‘Mostly bare I would lie down’: a creative decade ends in war

9 ‘Arc-lamped thrown back upon the cutting flood’; ‘This unbelievable lack of wires’: wartime, film work, broadcasts

10 ‘We hid our fears in that murdering breath’: the war elegies

11 ‘Parables of sun light’: towards ‘Poem in October’, ‘Fern Hill’, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ and beyond

12 ‘Is my voice being your eyes?’: Under Milk Wood

13 ‘The rhymer in the long tongued room’: writing places and the place of the poet

14 ‘As I sail out to die’: the late poems

15 ‘The hero’s head lies scraped of every legend’: the legend and the man

Notes

Select Bibliography

Illustrations

The picture section is placed between chapters 6 and 7.

Cover image: The poet in 1938. The silk necktie ‘made out of his sister’s scarf, she never knew where it had gone.’

Frontispiece: 1952. Holograph of ‘Prologue’ to the Collected Poems 1934–1952. (Reproduced by kind permission of Jeff Towns.)

Figure 1: 1934. Aged nineteen in a London studio photograph. (Every effort was made to contact the copyright holder.)

Figure 2: 1938. Aged twenty-four. (Reproduced by permission of Jeff Towns.)

Figure 3: 1938. The recently married Caitlin and Dylan at Blashford, Hampshire. (Reproduced by kind permission of Jeff Towns.)

Figure 4: 1946. The poet of Deaths and Entrances and ‘Fern Hill’. (Reproduced by permission of Getty Images.)

Figure 5: 1949. Inside the railings of a tomb in St Martin’s churchyard in Laugharne. (Every effort was made to contact the copyright holder.)

Figure 6: 1952. In Millbrook, New York State. (Photograph by Rollie McKenna © Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation, courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography, the University of Arizona Foundation.)

I

Brychan a Cristyn

a

Mari a Rhys

‘young and easy’

Preface

Once it was the colour of saying

Soaked my table the uglier side of a hill

...

Now my saying shall be my undoing,

And every stone I wind off like a reel.

In a March 1932 letter to Stephen Spender, T. S. Eliot wrote ‘I always dislike everybody at the centenary moment’.¹ Though referring to the centenary that year of the death of no less a figure than Goethe, his point was valid. The living relevance of any worthwhile author does not arbitrarily depend on the calendar, even when a round-figured centenary of a birth comes round.

It is, after all, creative writers themselves, wording and rewording as they do, who best illustrate the worthwhileness of this travelling back. Instead of abandoning The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot modestly turned to Pound to help winnow and transform the manuscript. Even Wordsworth’s late sonnet ‘Mutability’ deprecates ‘yesterday’ –

                         which royally did wear

His crown of weeds, but could not even sustain

Some casual shout that broke the silent air,

Or the unimaginable touch of Time.

– and yet that superb phrase ‘the unimaginable touch of Time’ Wordsworth had salvaged from an abandoned poem.

Like Wordsworth and Eliot, Dylan Thomas too was much possessed by time. He was also, in Eliot’s phrase about Webster and Donne, ‘much possessed by death,/And saw the skull beneath the skin’ – or as Thomas put it ‘I sit and watch the worm beneath my nail/Wearing the quick away’. The possession came to be imagistically less morbid as the career developed, but a preoccupation with time remained. In dramatizing Time rather than just fearing it, he made Time imaginable (‘I saw Time murder me’).

No wonder Thomas is everywhere memorably found remem­bering. At the centenary of his birth, it is worth also our remembering that he wrote some of the best birthday poems in the English language (‘Twenty-four years’, ‘Especially when the October wind’, ‘Poem in October’, ‘Poem on his Birthday’), let alone other poems that celebrate his measured growth from self-awareness to self-possession that do not even mention birthdays. He is importantly good, not just on birthdays, but on days of birth. For him, each diurnal round had always a somewhat ‘creationist’ resonance: ‘Awake my sleeper to the sun ...’, ‘the mighty mornings of the earth ...’, ‘And this day’s sun leapt up the sky’, ‘When I woke, the town spoke’, ‘And then to awake, and the farm …/with the dew, come back’. Nothing merely calendrical there. And of course a crucial aspect of the origin­ality of the early poetry is the wonder of even prenatal life: ‘Ungotten I knew night and day.’

And in reissuing parts of an earlier self – the imagined child in the womb, a youthful thought or feeling, a brief memory, or a complete childhood – there is often, as in the Wordsworth example, a bibliographical aspect – the late retrieval of unused phrases, lines, even whole poems that seem themselves almost to have been lying in wait for their retrieval. ‘I’ve got’, Thomas wrote to Vernon Watkins in April 1938, ‘one of those very youth­fully made phrases … that often comes to my mind & which one day I shall use: When I woke, the dawn spoke.’ ‘One of those very youth-fully made phrases’: the very phrase is itself an autobiography. The poem that the phrase ultimately opened was written in the summer of 1939, but it had lain abandoned in a poem in the August 1933 Notebook. Michael Holroyd has defined biography as a ‘reversing of the flow of time’: it is also true of a writer’s bibliography. Thomas’s poetic hero was William Blake (‘I am in the path of Blake, but so far behind him that only the wings on his heels are in sight’)² and as Blake once put it ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of Time.’ Period.

But so that return should not mean ‘retreat’ (except in Henry Vaughan’s affirmative sense of the word as withdrawal for reconstruction), Thomas kept pointing up the need for an artist always to develop – in Eliot’s phrase, to ‘fare forward’, in Thomas’s phrase to ‘advance for as long as forever is’. The four Thomas lines quoted above as epigraph are the opening and closing of ‘Once it was the colour of saying’, a pivotal poem of 1938, in which the naturalness of looking back (‘Once it was …’) is leant against by the need to go forward (‘Now ... shall be …’). It is this live contraflow in the poet’s writing, not just an entry on a calendar, that makes the centenary of Dylan Thomas’s birth when it comes around on 27 October 2014 meaningful. It is also why ‘Once it was the colour of saying’ (with its wry take on once upon a time) is a poem we shall need to revisit.

*  *  *

But even a critic welcomes the chance to travel back, to reconsider something said, or left unsaid. Invited to augment the present essay, I welcome the increased elbow-room. A range of changes and additions makes the essay more leisurely. But the original brief (which included keeping it brief) remains: What is it that most characterizes this particular writer of Wales?

At the volume’s first revision in 1990, I thanked my two teenage sons, Jason and Damian, for telling me what needed expansion. Its collateral American edition (St. Martin’s Press, New York) I dedicated to Dorothy Bednarowska, one of the University of Oxford’s greatest teachers of English Literature. My dedication to this new, enlarged edition names my four grandchildren – Brychan, Cristyn, Mari and Rhys. I know already from their endless curiosity about everything in sight that they will be among readers of all the writers of Wales, in both Welsh and English, and with new things of their own to say.

1. ‘Begin at the beginning’: introductory

The shape of this study is that of an essay, with areas of critical attention declared by sub-headings (all of them suggestive quotations from Thomas), rather than by ‘chapter’ breaks. Right up to 1940, the real-time chronology of the vast majority of Dylan Thomas’s poems was not that of his first three volumes (1934, 1936, 1939). And the same is true right through of this question of chronology. An essay- as opposed to chapter-form enables us to interrelate biographical sequence and thematic frequencies more freely and more meaningfully.

So let us start even pre-textually, with images. The cover photograph to this volume is right to show Thomas as a young man. After all, he was still a young man when he died, aged 39. Far too often, photographs of Thomas, like portraits of Wordsworth (d. aged 80), reflect the later self instead of the young face behind earlier, more phenomenal, years of achievement. A trick of perspective in the famous John Deakin photograph of Thomas (fig. 5) ‘inside the railings of a tomb [in St Martin’s churchyard in Laugharne in 1949], my hair uncut for months ... blown up like a great, dancing, mousey busby’, eerily merging the lionized poet with graves and undergrowth only a few yards (and as it turned out, only four years) from where he was himself to be buried; or the innumerable photo shots of Thomas at pub tables and lecture lecterns – all these speak of a twenty- or thirty­- something poet forced to keep abreast of a legend, because a legend set afoot so early. Back of them all lies the different impression caught in the 1934 photograph (fig. 1). Its ‘studio’ self-regard is that of a sensitive nineteen-year-old trapped by respectable ordinariness, yet with the look of unused talent that might one day make a legend, but for the time being outrageously reassuring his mother that one day he would be ‘as good as Keats, if not better’.³

In the cover photograph the poet has become a relaxedly glamorous young man of 24 (a silk neckerchief is not a tie, even if it was ‘made out of his sister’s scarf, she never knew where it had gone’). He knew by then, quite rightly, that he could write, having had two acclaimed poetry volumes published, with a third on the way. And yet it was the teenager in that earlier 1934 photograph who, between the ages of fifteen and nineteen, made the bulk of those poems possible. His four poetry Note­books (ranging from April 1930 to April 1934) slowly came to contain first attempts at over forty of the published poems, a remarkable number when we consider that the Collected Poems 1934–1952, which Thomas published in 1952, a year before his death, saying that they were ‘all, up to the present year that I wish to preserve’, comprised only eighty-nine. The defensive remark about Keats was only to calm his mother’s worry whether teenager Dylan, apparently idling at home in the first three years of the 1930s, should not be following his father’s route ‘to the university’. ‘Anybody’d think you were a Keats or something,’ she’d taunted.

To sympathize with him, however, is not to submit to the notion (to borrow the young Milton’s phrase in ‘L’Allegro’), of Thomas as some ‘fancy’s child,/Warbl[ing] his native wood-notes wild’. Thomas’s early poetry Notebooks reveal a different young man, unusually determined to learn his craft as a poet. The tones in which he later described his home, the opportunity to write poems, and his formal education, as ‘demure, chequered’, are anything but injured except in his having to say so. As it happened, Swansea Grammar School, which he attended from 1925 to 1931, with the significant exception of the classes over which his own father reigned as Senior English Master, had a liberal atmosphere. Caught out of the classroom by the genial headmaster Trevor Owen, Dylan replied he was ‘playing truant, sir’, a brilliantly honest answer, yet topped by the headmaster’s rejoinder: ‘Well, don’t let your father catch you!’ But the school had also a take-it-or-leave-it regime in a more estimable sense. The Latin Master J. Morgan Williams recorded that Dylan at one stage ‘wanted to hear a bit of Vergil, though I don’t think he was a Latin scholar at all. He came for about two months, until it was time to edit the magazine, and then I didn’t see him any more.’ Two months of voluntary Latin? – obvious to the reader, as very early to intimate friends, is that here was a tough intelligence not weakened in being independent of academic discipline, ideological commitment, or class knowingness. His attitude later to the modern English poetic lions of the turn of the twentieth century was that of the young Keats to Wordsworth and Coleridge at the turn of the nineteenth – impressed, yes, but mistrustful of their wide philosophical confidence. The analogy is particularly keen when we think of Keats’s mistrust of Wordsworth’s ‘egotistical sublime’ and of any poetry that ‘has a palpable design upon us’. Not for Thomas, either, the ‘cultural memory’ employed relentlessly at every turn by Eliot (whom he dubbed ‘Pope Eliot’) or the collective ‘political’ programmes of Auden and his circle. In a perfectly sincere tribute to Auden in 1937 he could not resist saying that, though he sometimes thought of Auden’s poetry ‘as a great war’ and admired intensely ‘the mature, religious, and logical fighter’, he deprecated ‘the boy bushranger’,⁴ adding on sending it to Geoffrey Grigson’s New Verse, ‘Good luck to Auden on his seventieth birthday’, when Auden was only thirty. Such comments have the attractive brio of a younger brother. However, they do not remove the difference between, say, Auden’s knowledgeable use of Freud in his poems (for example, the themes of id and superego, the death wish, dreams, and infant sexuality) and Thomas’s vague alignment with Freud –

Freud cast light on a little of the darkness he had exposed. Benefiting by the sight of the light and the knowledge of the hidden nakedness, poetry must drag further into the clean nakedness of light more even of the hidden causes than Freud could realise.⁵

At the stage when a period at university might well have disciplined his widespread reading and enabled him, in Coleridge’s phrase, ‘to generalize his notions’, Thomas remained at home, sickly and much pampered by his mother, but committing poems to a private storehouse of school exercise books (the type with Arithmetic Tables and ‘Danger-Don’ts’ on the back) – the famous poetry Notebooks now at the Lockwood Memorial Library at the University of Buffalo, New York.

*  *  *

In reintroducing Thomas in a Welsh context, however, we have to bear in mind that his perspectives were bound always to be wider than any sticky ‘regional’ label could cover, so strong was his love for the English language itself, the only one he knew:

The bad influences I tried to remove and renounce bit by bit, shadow by shadow, echo by echo, through trial and error, through delight and disgust and misgiving, as I came to love words more and to hate the heavy hands that knocked them about, the thick tongues that had no feel for their multitudinous tastes, the dull and botching hacks who flattened them out into a colourless and insipid paste, the pedants who made them moribund and pompous as themselves.⁶

– he said, pompously. And, less pompously, in a broadcast scripted conversation with Vernon Watkins, Alfred Janes and John Prichard on the subject of ‘Swansea and the Arts’ (1949), his remark that too many artists remained, as they should, in Wales, but were ‘enviously sniping at the artists of other countries rather than attempting to raise the standard of art of their own country.’⁷ And as early as 1946, in a broadcast on ‘Welsh Poetry’, he cut even more closely to the chase with this:

There is a number of young Welshmen writing poems in English who, insisting passionately that they are Welshmen, should, by rights, be writing in Welsh, but who, unable to write in Welsh