Dylan Thomas and Nostalgia

Georgia Southern University Digital Commons@Georgia Southern Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate Studies, Jack N. Averitt College of Fall 2008 "As-Yet-Still-Forgiven Past": Dylan Thomas and Nostalgia David Bradley Bailey Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/etd Recommended Citation Bailey, David Bradley, ""As-Yet-Still-Forgiven Past": Dylan Thomas and Nostalgia" (2008). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 172. https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/etd/172 This thesis (open access) is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate Studies, Jack N. Averitt College of at Digital Commons@Georgia Southern. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons@Georgia Southern. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “THE AS-THEN-STILL-FORGIVEN PAST” DYLAN THOMAS AND NOSTALGIA by DAVID BRADLEY BAILEY JR. (Under the Direction of Howard Keeley) ABSTRACT Dylan Thomas exhibited a variety of nostalgic influences within his poetry. A careful study of his life will reveal a nostalgia that evolved from adolescent musings upon an ideal past, to a self-destructive urge to return to innocence through death. Thomas incorporates a variety of historical influences within this nostalgia, but his primary influence is ultimately his own tormented past. This study not only focuses on the personal nostalgia of one man, but the variety of ways nostalgia can affect people, history and society as sociological force. INEX WORDS: Dylan Thomas, Poetry, Nostalgia, Paul Klee, Arts and Craftsism, World War I, World War II, John Malcom Brinnin, Vernon Watkins, Psychology, Sociology, Wales, Great Britain, Alcoholism, Garden of Eden “THE AS YET STILL FORGIVEN PAST” DYLAN THOMAS AND NOSTALGIA by DAVID BRADLEY BAILEY JR. B.A., Armstrong Atlantic State University, 2006 A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Georgia Southern University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS STATESBORO, GEORGIA 2008 2 © 2008 David Bradley Bailey Jr. All Rights Reserved 3 ”THE AS YET STILL FORVIGEN PAST” DYLAN THOMAS AND NOSTALGIA by DAVID BRADLEY BAILEY JR. Major Professor: Howard Keeley Committee: Rebecca Ziegler Gautam Kundu Electronic Version Approved: December 2008 4 DEDICATION To Whitney, my Amora, the only light I ever saw. 5 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would first and foremost like to thank my committee. Howard Keeley provided more guidance with writing than four years of college education. Rebecca Ziegler provided infinite advice on research, and her knowledge of Arts and Craftsism was invaluable. Gautam Kundu helped me believe in myself as a teacher and writer. I could not have accomplished any of this without you. Thank you all. 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................6 Introduction Painful Memories of Eden Nostalgia, Disease, and Diagnosis in the Life and Works of Dylan Thomas ..............................................................................................................................................9 CHAPTER 1 Angelic Decay: Dylan Thomas‟s Nostalgic Foundation .................................16 2 Edenic Labor: Dylan Thomas and the Influence of the Arts and Crafts Movement ....................................................................................................44 3 Death in the Garden of Eden: Lost Innocence in the Last Days of Dylan Thomas ........................................................................................................69 4 “Time Shall Belong to Man:” Nostalgia as the Creative Act in the Letters and Poems of Dylan Thomas .............................................................................89 Epilogue Creating Eden: The Future of Nostalgia and Literature ..................................110 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….114 7 LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE 1: In Angel‟s Keeping……………………………………………………40 8 Introduction Painful Memories of Eden: Nostalgia, Disease, and Diagnosis in the Life and Works of Dylan Thomas “Now in a hundred ways I wish I hadn‟t come away; I‟m full of nostalgia and a frightful cold.”—Dylan Thomas, The Collected Letters (222) Postmarked 20 April 1936, the above passage is from Dylan Thomas‟s letter to his close friend and fellow Welshman, the poet and painter Vernon Watkins. An intriguing—perhaps the most intriguing—aspect of the statement is the ready connection it makes between nostalgia and bodily disease. One wonders if Thomas‟s physical ailment induces his nostalgia or if the nostalgia causes the “frightful” illness. Whether consciously or no, Thomas here penetrates to the fascinating roots of the word nostalgia. In her recent book Nostalgia in Transition, 1780-1917, Linda M. Austin discusses this etymology, building on the Greek terms nostos (“homecoming”) and algos (“pain”). According to Austin, army physicians originally recognized nostalgia among mercenary Swiss troops serving on Italian and other foreign plains during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At first, diagnosis centered mainly on physical symptoms like pain in the internal organs and lethargy, although a few medical reports also noted patients‟ mental or emotional preoccupation with returning to their mountainous homes. As medical science advanced, nostalgia—homesickness, mal du pays, or das Heimweh— became increasingly identified with the psychological, perhaps for practical reasons. Lacking means to treat the affliction and needing men-at-arms, Enlightenment-era doctors and military personnel took to describing nostalgia as a non-critical, acceptable condition of the mind, perhaps beginning the relatively casual relationship humanity maintains with it to this day. Austin develops her analysis of how the establishment characterized nostalgia, writing, Authorities, physicians, and scholars had to focus…on making a perverse, pre- occupied, and delusional imagination coexist within immediate moral and political imperatives. If the victims themselves could not be expelled [from active military deployment], their potentially mutinous and contagious melancholia had to be represented as functional. This representation would enlist literary tradition, associationism, and aesthetics; together, they helped establish a theory and practice of nostalgia that eventually would underwrite much popular production 9 and consumption of the past and its artifacts and become an accepted affect of normal and everyday remembrance. (4-5) In other words, literature, philosophy, and the study and practice of beauty were rendered peaceful “homes” for martial homesickness, permitting nostalgia to be seen as a tolerable, even beneficial, behavior. As we begin this study, it is worth remarking that traces of malady—psychical, but also physical—are present in nostalgia, however aestheticized the phenomenon becomes. While we lack hard evidence that Dylan Thomas was aware of nostalgia as a complex, partially bodily illness, his bitter epistle to Vernon Watkins perhaps justifies our teasing out possible connections between his frequent poetic and dramatic longings for lost places—the “dingle starry” of “Fern Hill,” for example—and his various sicknesses, especially his legendary capacity for self-destruction through alcohol abuse. Some critics might flag as ill-advised attempts to read Thomas‟s biography into his literary opus; however, Thomas‟s letters and other non-literary writings highlight nostalgia almost as much as do poems like “Fern Hill,” extended narratives like A Child‟s Christmas in Wales, and short stories like “Adventures in the Skin Trade.” My thesis takes a chronological, multi-generic approach to works by Dylan Thomas, who died in November 1953, shortly after his thirty-ninth birthday. As the biographer Ralph Maud shows, Thomas began writing poems in notebooks as early as age 15, and he selected lyrics from notebooks composed between then and his nineteenth year for his first full published volume, Eighteen Poems (1934). Details from Thomas‟s life become remarkably useful for deepening interpretations of themes, images, symbols, narratives, and even form within individual poems. While exploring Thomas‟s nostalgia is a complicated endeavor, one can identify a tripartite developmental trajectory. Many of Thomas‟s teenage writings experiment with nostalgia, although the budding poet lacks the life experiences necessary to yield highly developed nostalgic poetry. As if aware of this lack, he often resorts to vague, amorphous imagery. As he matures, Thomas begins to focus his nostalgia on more concrete images. In particular, he deploys metaphors of the poet as craftsman, connecting with the Arts and Crafts movement, which criticized the modern industrialization of Britain by privileging a medieval peasant aesthetic. Towards his end, Thomas often invokes an idyllic 10 childhood, extolling the building up of moral foundations in youth. However, he constantly betrays his own suffering and self-destructiveness by imposing images of death and decay upon his platonic child subjects. In other words, the nostalgia of Thomas‟s latter years is at once idealistic and an irrefutable symptom of despair. The above three phases are the stuff of my first three chapters. My fourth and final chapter explores how, throughout his writing life, Thomas saw and used nostalgia as a powerful poetic tool. It argues that nostalgia persists within Thomas‟s

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