Feeding the Hunger of History: Society and Politics in Dylan Thomas’S Prose and Dramatic Works
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Feeding the Hunger of History: Society and Politics in Dylan Thomas’s Prose and Dramatic Works Jamie Thorogood Submitted in partial fulfilment of the award of Doctor of Philosophy Awarded by Oxford Brookes University Submitted September 2018 For my daughter, Claudia Rose Thorogood ABSTRACT This thesis argues for a much more considered and nuanced reading of Dylan Thomas’s political outlook than extant criticism has tended to present. It makes a case for the reading of Thomas’s socialism as intrinsic to his ethical vision, and explores this through close analytical attention to his prose and dramatic work. It proceeds by considering how those political views were formed and reformed, and contextualises them alongside and against the political expressions of his contemporaries, notably the ‘Auden Group’. Particular attention is paid to the socialist undertones of Thomas’s film scripts and radio plays of the 1930s and 1940s, his radio broadcasts and short stories, and the argument is framed within, and draws substantially on, existing criticism. Socialism is explored here in both the strong, ideological sense, and in a more understated concern with the practices and interdependencies of the small communities that Thomas places at the heart of his creative work. The thesis concludes that Thomas largely rejected the more theoretical party politics of the Left in favour of an emotionally-direct expression of his political beliefs that aligned more closely with his ‘poetic’ voice, and that this approach was arrived at through his work as a short story writer and scriptwriter for film and radio. It argues that Under Milk Wood is, consequently, the most developed example of this style, and proposes a reading of the play against the backdrop of post-war recovery and renewal, drawing on Thomas’s political and social views. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS With sincere thanks to my supervisor, Prof. Daniel Lee, for his invaluable guidance and support, and for his kindness and understanding. Thanks also to Prof. Kövesi, Dr. Eric White, and all the wonderful staff at Oxford Brookes University, especially those in the Department of English and Modern Languages. I am also particularly grateful to Prof. Daniel G. Williams of the University of Swansea for acting as examiner. I am indebted to my family for their love and encouragement, and especially to my mother, whose unwavering determination is inspirational. I am also grateful to my partner, Caroline, for her incredible intellect, her constant support, her insight, her wit, and, above all else, her love. Finally, I would like to thank my daughter, Claudia, for helping me to see the world a different way, and to whom this work is joyfully dedicated. Contents INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................... 1 1. THE FILM SCRIPTS ....................................................................................................... 20 1.1 The People’s City ........................................................................................................... 28 1.2 The Makers The Workers .............................................................................................. 33 1.3 A ‘grief-fed’ Country ..................................................................................................... 40 1.4 ‘To them we speak a strange and foreign tongue’ ......................................................... 46 1.5 The Death of a Class ...................................................................................................... 55 1.6 Under the Common Sun................................................................................................. 69 2. THE RADIO SCRIPTS .................................................................................................... 70 2.1 Society and Culture ........................................................................................................ 82 2.2 ‘This apparently hell-bent earth’ .................................................................................... 96 2.3 ‘The rich are rich’ ........................................................................................................ 107 2.4 “Congratulations on starting the revolution” ............................................................... 112 3. PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG DOG .................................................... 114 3.1 Personal But Not Private .............................................................................................. 116 3.2 Patronizing the Lower Classes ..................................................................................... 133 3.3 Who Do You Wish Was With us? ............................................................................... 156 3.4 A Man With Visions Needs No Other Company......................................................... 166 4. UNDER MILK WOOD .................................................................................................. 169 4.1 A Troubled Sanctuary .................................................................................................. 173 4.2 ‘Milk waking Wood’.................................................................................................... 192 4.3 Not Wholly Bad or Good ............................................................................................. 204 4.4 Too Great a Sense of Eternity ...................................................................................... 215 CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................................... 219 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................. 223 INTRODUCTION His socialism was basically Tolstoyan, the attempt of the spiritual aristocrat to hold in one embrace the good heart of mankind, a gesture and a purpose uncontaminated by the realpolitik of the twentieth century.1 …you could never pin a label on Dylan and say that he was a Socialist or a Communist or an anarchist or anything else – he was far out on the left in politics. He believed in the freedom of man to be man, that he shouldn’t be oppressed by his fellows, and that every man had the stamp of divinity on him, and anything that prevented that divinity having full play was an evil thing.2 In 1944 […] Thomas wanted the Communist Party cultural journal Our Time to publish “Ceremony After a Fire Raid”, and “pressed” the poem “upon [Arnold] Rattenbury because, he said, he wanted to advertise that he remained a Socialist”. […] On his 1952 visit to America, he also agreed to do a poetry reading for the Socialist Party of the U.S.A. without expecting his usual fee.3 I, too, belong to no political party. I am a Socialist, and, so far as I know, there is no Socialist party.4 Determining whether or not Dylan Thomas was a Socialist is made difficult by past attempts to define, even shape, his politics. Notably, one famous early biographer, John Malcolm Brinnin, claimed that he was not a Socialist (rather, he adopted or developed some form of spiritual aristocracy), whilst a life-long friend, Bert Trick, claimed that Thomas was beyond Socialism. Victor Paananen persuasively argues that he was an active supporter of an organised, party-political Socialism, and then Thomas himself writes that he was a Socialist but not a member of a Socialist party, as one did not, to his mind, exist. This somewhat confusing group of statements clearly points to a complexity in the nature of Thomas’s politics, and, moreover, suggests that somewhere in Thomas’s frustratingly recursive statement above there is, indeed, the truth of his political beliefs, albeit one which would defy straightforward 1 Victor Golightly, ‘"Writing in dreams and blood": Dylan Thomas, Marxism and 1930s Swansea’, Welsh Writing in English, Vol. 8 (2003), 67-91 (p. 68).| 2 Dylan Remembered – Vol. 1, 1914 – 1934, ed. by David N. Thomas (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press Ltd., 2003), p. 164. 3 Victor Paananen, ‘The Social Vision of Dylan Thomas’, Welsh Writing in English, Vol. 8 (2003), 46-66 (pp. 51- 52). 4 Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters, ed. by Paul Ferris (London: J. M. Dent, 2000), p. 889. 1 explanation. It is, therefore, my intention to avoid trying to prove beyond doubt whether Thomas was a Socialist (according to one or other definition), and instead examine the Socialist themes in his works, how they emerge in his depiction of society, and how they evolved over time in relation (and reaction) to the turbulent period during which Thomas lived and wrote. The unconventional, informal nature of Thomas’s political beliefs may explain why the prevailing view of Thomas has been changing as critics have gone back over the wealth of material that he left, and as the even greater wealth of material that has been written about Thomas since he died has been addressed. It is a reassessment that has been driven, in part, by the relatively recent publication of the film scripts in 1995, as well as what appears to be a shift away from the more biographically-informed response to his work towards something more recognisably critical and historically aware (notable exceptions notwithstanding, such as Ralph Maud’s excellent Entrances to Dylan Thomas’ Poetry (1963)).5 The scripts, when taken alongside the better-known prose works, point towards a compassionate view of society, one sympathetic to the pressures of life, especially where the working