DYLAN THOMAS Also by John Ackerman WELSH DYLAN THE IMAGE AND THE DARK (poems) CATALOGUE OF DYLAN THOMAS EXHIBITION *A DYlAN THOMAS COMPANION DYLAN THOMAS: The Film Scripts (editor) * Also published by Palgrave Macmillan Dylan Thomas at nineteen DYLAN THOMAS His Life and Work JOHN ACKERMAN Third Edition © John Ackerman 1964, 1991, 1996 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road. London WI P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First edition (Oxford University Press) 1964 Reprinted 1965 (twice) Second edition (Macmillan) 1991 Third edition (Macmillan) 1996 Published by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills. Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 978-0-333-63404-2 ISBN 978-1-349-24366-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-24366-2 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 96 Published in the United States of America 1996 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-12903-3 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-312-12905-7 (paper) TO MY MOTHER CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS viii PREFACE, 1996 ix INTRODUCTION, 1990 xv THE WELSH BACKGROUND 1 II THE INTRUDERS: INFLUENCES AND RELATIONSHIPS 14 III EARLY YEARS 23 IV 18 POFMS 38 V TWI,NTY-HW,' POFMS 62 VI '11-11,' MAP OF I.OW 73 VII A PROSE INTERLUDE: THE EARLY STORIES 90 VIII PORnlArr OF 'IH" ARTIST AS A YOUNC DOC 104 IX J)J,'A'IHS AND I~NnlANC/~~ 115 X COU.H;nv POI,'MS 138 XI THE ARTIST IN COMEDY 162 NOTES 185 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 191 INDEX 195 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Grateful acknowledgements are due to the following: David Higham Associates Ltd. and J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd. for permission to quote from Dylan Thomas's published works and from Caitlin Thomas: Leftover Life to Kill; New Directions Ltd. (Dylan Thomas: Adventures in the Skin Trade); Atlantic-Little, Brown and Company (1. M. Brinnin: Dylan Thomas in America); Faber and Faber Ltd. (Vernon Watkins: The Lady with the Unicorn, The Death Bell, Letters to Vernon Watkins); Random House, Inc. (Karl Shapiro: In Defense of Ignorance); quotations also reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp., U.S.A.; and the Times Publishing Company (Dylan Thomas Obituary Notice). ILLUSTRATIONS Dylan Thomas at Nineteen Frontispiece (Br killd !,ermiHioll "I the lute MISS PAMELA HANSFORD JOHNSON) Working sheet F. I of 'Poem on his birthday' 150 (By killd !,f'I"lIIilliOIl oj DAVID HIGHAM ASSOCIATES LTD.) Working sheet F. 2 of 'Poem on his birthday' 151 (Br killd !,,,rmi.llioll oj DAVID HIGHAM AssonATES LTD.) Working sheet F. 3 of 'Poem on his birthday' 152 (By killd !,l'I"lIIiHioll (~I DAVID HIGHAM ASSOCIATES LTD.) Working sheet F. 4 of 'Poem on his birthday' 153 (Br killd !,l'I"miHioll of DAVID HIGHAM AssonATES LTD.) PRE F ACE, 1996 The book offers an interpretation of Dylan Thomas's life and work in relation to his Welsh background, outlining the impact of social and literary traditions, in order to help the understanding of his poetry and focus his prose writing. I have considered biographical details valuable in so far as they illuminate the poetry and prose or the man who wrote it. It was in his introduction to a poetry reading at the Massachus­ setts Institute of Technology, Boston, in 1952, that Dylan Thomas declared 'If I had been born and brought up in an igloo and lived on whales, not in it, about the same would be true, except that then it would have been extremely unlikely had I become a writer'; his pun whales/Wales signalling his witty comic vein. Thomas's own words are keys to his work, whether from his letters, reviews and articles or his replies to questions and introductions at his readings. 'My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time' he tells us in the same lecture, much of it no doubt 'in my father's brown study'. His father had gained a First Class Honours degree in English and was a notable teacher of English literature. In this large ground floor study Dylan shelved his own books (mainly poetry), and relates how he wrote 'before homework ... the first botched scribblings of gauche and gawky heart-choked poems' and 'began to know one kind of writing from another, one kind of badness, one kind of goodness'. This is the poet's insight into his youthful creativity and his apprenticeship in the making of poems. Speaking of his schoolboy resolution he recalls his 'endless imitations ... of whatever I happened to be galloping then, Thomas Browne, Robert W. Service, Stevenson, de Quincey, Eskimo Nell, Newbolt, Blake, Marlowe, the Imagists, the Boy's Own Paper, Keats, Poe, Burns, Dostoevsky, Anon. and Shakespeare. I tried my little trotters on every poetical form. How could I know the tricks of this trade, unless I tried them myself?' ('I am Going to Read Aloud' The London Magazine, vol 3, no. 9). He concluded with a flourish and caveat 'I couldn't trust the critics then-or now'. We see here something of the practice and mystery of early poetic self-discovery, albeit self-mockingly though amusingly remembered. The link between the mature poet's craftsmanship and the poem's final evolution is highlighted in discussion of manuscript versions of 'Poem on his Birthday' and 'Prologue', later in this book. ix x PREFACE, 1996 Dylan Thomas's great need throughout his life was a room apart from the family where he could write undisturbed, for he worked regular hours every day, broken only when broadcasting, on location during his war-time work on documentary films, and of course during his long American tours. He was the most disci­ plined and dedicated of poets, his later major poems taking months, often years, on their journey to completion, as his manu­ scripts show. In the late thirties his first sea-facing Laugharne homes of Eros and Sea View provided a room to write in. Staying in Richard Hughes's house near Laugharne Castle in May 1941 Thomas wrote enthusiastically to Vernon Watkins 'I have the romantic, dirty, summerhouse looking over the marsh [from the castle ruins] to write in.' In his 1949 broadcast reading of 'Poem in October' Thomas recalled his writing poetry 'in small rooms in Wales', certainly remembering the two stone cottages of Blaen Cwm, Llangain, owned by his mother's family and near Fernhill farm. He often stayed at Blaen Cwm in the thirties and forties. Here he finished 'Vision and Prayer', 'Poem in October', 'In my Craft or Sullen Art', 'Fern Hill', and re-wrote 'Unluckily for a Death,' in the summers of 1944 and 1945, all included in Deaths and Entrances. This quiet, remote, rural corner of West Wales was a place for poetry, undisturbed by his London's busy film world and work at this time. His writing-shed above the Boat House home that he called his 'water and tree room on the cliff', bird-haunted and from its windows vistas of Sir John's hill, the estuary, and on the opposite shore, of the hill farms and fields recalling his childhood visits, is now famous and fabled. The one room studio flat in Manresa Road, Chelsea, just off the King's Road, where Dylan and Caitlin lived in 1943 proved especially cramped, particularly after their baby daughter Aeronwy was born in March. Their friends Theodora and Constantine Fitz­ gibbon came to the rescue: there was a spare room for Dylan in their nearby house in Godfrey Street and he went daily to write there. In October 1944 when living in their Newquay bungalow­ again overlooking the sea, this time Cardigan Bay-Dylan apol­ ogises to Donald Taylor, the Director of Strand Films who employed him as a script writer during the war years, for his slow work on the film script Twenty Years A-Growing. He complained 'this little bungalow is no place to work in when there's a bawling child PREFACE, 1996 Xl [the baby Aeronwy] ., the rooms are tiny, the walls bum-paper thin.' But he then cheerily announces that 'Now, however, I have just taken a room in a nearby house: a very quiet room where I know I can work till I bleed.' During his time in Oxfordshire, he lived first in the one-room summerhouse of Margaret and A. J. P. Taylor's home in Oxford; he lamented in a letter to Vernon Wat­ kins in April 1946, when he was frequently reading and talking about poetry on the radio 'I want to write a poem of my own again, but it's hard here with peace and no room.' His generous patron Margaret Taylor provided him with a gypsy caravan to work in. It followed him to the next Oxfordshire home she provided, Manor House in South Leigh, and finally to the garden of the flat she bought for him in Delancey Street, Camden Town (where I recently visited it!).