‘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.
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 letters 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’, inferring 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’.)
Trick and his colleagues failed in their efforts to ban the rally from going ahead in the Plaza cinema, the largest in Wales with 3,500 seats. Surrounded by Blackshirts and swastika regalia, Mosley unleashed a tirade against the Jews and their influence in society. When he said he would take written questions, the first out of the hat came from the Reverend Leon Atkin, who said he had worked for a Jew for a long time and wondered if he should change his employer. Mosley answered affirmatively, adding that he would be certain to find a more reliable Gentile. When Atkin rose to his feet in clerical garb, pandemonium broke out and the meeting had to be abandoned. Dylan claimed to Pamela that he was thrown down the stairs, though there is no corroborating evidence. He added that he had left the Socialist party and joined the Communists, but again this seems to have been in his head. He did however follow up his earlier letter to the Swansea and West Wales Guardian with another which inveighed, even more forthrightly, against ‘the obscene hypocrisy of those war-mongers and slave-drivers who venerate [Christ’s] name and void their contagious rheum upon the first principle of His gospel’.
He tried to explain his political views to Pamela, but they were incoherent. In the same paragraph he could call for an intellectual, rather than a bloody, revolution, and also say that if constitutional government were unable to achieve this, property should be taken by force. What he really wanted was what he called ‘Functional Anarchy’, but this was an adolescent fantasy of freedom – of playing truant from his schoolmaster father and avoiding any orders. Typically, at the same time as he was indulging this political pipe-dream he was preparing to visit Swansea’s St Helen’s ground to watch Glamorgan play a county cricket match. Throughout his life he loved to sit on the boundary of a cricket ground, drinking and chatting, with the sound of willow against leather in the distance. He even played the odd game himself, bowling thirty-four overs in one game in late July, conceding only sixty runs, and taking three wickets.
The first thing he did on his return to London in mid-August was accompany Pamela to a Promenade concert – either a very loving gesture or hugely hypocritical, given his roasting of her only a few months earlier for enjoying this musical institution. The focus of their social activity now shifted from the Cock in Clapham to the Six Bells across the river Thames in Chelsea where Dylan could be closer to his new literary friends. Despite his still very limited output, he had been approached by John Lehmann for some contribution for The Year’s Poetry, another anthology, and by Geoffrey Grigson, who asked him (and several other poets) to answer a questionnaire about his writing.
His replies provided the latest update on his ideas about his craft. He stressed the hard work, both physical and mental: ‘Poetry is the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision that depends, in its intensity, on the labour put into the creation of the poetry.’ His own output was the record of his ‘individual struggle from darkness towards some measure of light’. He reiterated Eliot’s observation about narrative, in the sense of meaning, satisfying one habit of the reader, adding his own gloss: ‘Let the narrative take that one logical habit of the reader along with its movement, and the essence of the poem will do its work on him.’ Asked if he had been influenced by Freud, he answered unconvincingly in the affirmative, for reasons roughly in keeping with his general thesis. Like Freud, he argued, his job as a poet was to expose what was hidden and to make clean. To another question about his politics, he waffled, ‘I take my stand with any revolutionary body that asserts it to be the right of all men to share, equally and impartially, every production of man and from the sources of production at man’s disposal, for only through such an essentially revolutionary body can there be the possibility of a communal art.’
On the last Sunday of the month, Dylan spent half the day with Pamela before departing on his own to have tea, which seems to have meant a long drinking session, with Grigson at his open house in Hampstead. He did not return until after one o’clock the next morning, which annoyed her. Grigson had a full-time job as literary editor of the Morning Post, the sale of review copies from which helped subsidise his own venture, New Verse. As a result, he had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances whom Dylan enjoyed meeting. Among them were Norman Cameron, who had been at Oxford with Grigson, and T. S. Eliot, though, initially at least, Eliot and Dylan did not hit it off. Dylan complained that Eliot treated him as ‘as if I were “from pit-boy to poet”!’
Slight cracks in his relationship with Pamela were appearing. Despite having been introduced to Hughes (with whom she established a watch committee to prevent their mutual friend from drinking too much), she felt Dylan kept his friends apart. She found it ‘wounding’ if, when they were both strolling down the King’s Road, he saw someone he knew, usually a poet, and, without asking her to join him, crossed the road for a chat. She was probably not fully aware of his worries about money. In Grigson, he thought he had found someone he could tap for occasional loans. This was the gist of a letter he penned to the New Verse editor the day after his ‘tea’ party – the first of many such plaintive requests for money he was to send to various potential patrons over the next two decades.
This did not mean he had given up on Pamela. Determined that she should meet his family, he invited her, a couple of weekends later, to Laleham, but she found his sister and brother-in-law obsessively conventional. She was happier when, at the end of the following week (Dylan’s fifth in London), he went home to Wales and, since she was due some holiday, she accompanied him, taking her mother as chaperone.
The Hansford Johnsons stayed at the Mermaid hotel in the Mumbles, from where Pamela and Dylan made sorties into Gower (there are photographs of the young lovers cavorting in Caswell Bay) and to Cwmdonkin Drive for meals with the Thomases. Pamela thought D.J. charming, but, like her mother, found Florrie’s interminable chatter wearying. (On this matter she had been warned by Dylan, but he did add that his mother was at least kind.) Any free moment Pamela worked on a novel, originally called Nursery Rhyme, but at Dylan’s suggestion, renamed, more suggestively, This Bed Thy Centre (from John Donne’s ‘The Sun Rising’). She would probably have been better at home, because it rained a lot and there was nothing relaxing about the combination of her work and Dylan’s moody behaviour. At one stage she collapsed from nervous exhaustion and had to consult a doctor in the Uplands.
Dylan was now thinking of moving permanently to London. Before leaving, he agreed to accompany Glyn Jones on a pilgrimage to Aberystwyth where they both wanted to see one of their favourite authors, Caradoc Evans, the ‘best hated man in Wales’. Originally from near Llandysul, home of Dylan’s great-uncle, Gwilym Marles, the Welsh-speaking Evans had grown up in Cardiganshire, where he had enraged the locals with his savage satires on chapel and peasant life. His recollections of making his way as a journalist in London, where his literary friends included fellow Welshman Arthur Machen, were particularly useful to Dylan at this stage.
Evans’s wife, the prolific novelist Oliver Sandys (also known as Countess Barcynska from her first marriage) left a conventional account of Dylan’s visit. Her maid announced the two young men: ‘One of them is a poet, or says he is – hopes he is.’ Dylan unravelled some typewritten notes and began reading his poems in his usual mellifluous voice. But both Dylan and Jones were more interested in talking to Evans about short stories than poetry. They made a tour of local pubs with their idol, ‘drinking to the eternal damnation of the Almighty & the soon-to-be-hoped-for destruction of the tin Bethels’. Back at their hotel Jones told Dylan about Dr William Price, the eccentric Chartist who liked to stand naked on a South Wales hilltop, chanting Druidical rites. In 1883, when in his eighties, Price fathered an illegitimate son called Jesus Christ who died in infancy. Price burnt the infant’s body, leading him to be charged with manslaughter. However he was acquitted, thus legitimising the rite and practice of cremation. Dylan was so fascinated that his cigarette burnt several holes in his sheet. However the details stuck, appearing as a central motif in his scandalous story ‘The Burning Baby’ which strayed deep into Caradoc Evans territory in its depiction of a preacher indulging in incest with his daughter. Dylan also drew on his Carmarthenshire experience in his detail of the girl’s brother bringing a dead rabbit into his house. Showing how Dylan’s ideas shuffled round his imagination, the story also included a sow-faced woman called Llareggub (again) who sexually initiated the girl’s brother – the first published instance of the name of the town in Under Milk Wood.
Dylan’s journey to Aberystwyth in October was the furthest he had ventured into rural Wales. Having enjoyed the experience, he wanted to repeat it, and the following year accepted a commission (which he did not fulfil) to write a travel book about his country. Contrary to popular misconception, Wales remained a focus for his literary endeavours. Still toying with his novel about the Jarvis valley, Dylan was influenced, so Glyn Jones recalled, by Caradoc Evans, T. F. Powys and Thomas Hardy and wanted to make South Wales like Hardy’s Wessex.
Dylan’s Celtic heritage is less obvious in his poetry. In May he had told a prospective editor that his poem ‘I dreamed my genesis’ was based on Welsh rhythms. But critics who argue Dylan’s familiarity with Welsh prosodic devices such as the cynghanedd, with its strict syllable count and internal rhythms, are often disappointed. Dylan was promiscuous in his borrowings, and his use of Welsh metres were often mediated through English writers such as Gerard Manley Hopkins and Wilfred Owen. His attitude to Welsh (and Irish) verse is better described in one of the reviewing jobs he was beginning to pick up in London. He argued in Adelphi in September that ‘the true future of English poetry, poetry that can be pronounced and read aloud, that comes to life out of the red heart through the brain, lies in the Celtic countries’, with their tradition of ballads and folk-songs, and their intellectual and artistic traditions unburdened by the dictates of a numb university-educated elite. In other words, English verse needed an injection of Celtic energy.
However Dylan needed to earn a living and, as an English-speaker, that meant working in London, even if he intended to draw on his Celtic background. He was ambitious, as Glyn Jones realised on an early visit to Cwmdonkin Drive. Dylan had just returned from London and was telling his mother about eminent literary figures he had met – Eliot and so on. When she reminded him he had also encountered the humorist and later MP, A. P. Herbert, he spat out dismissively, ‘Oh, he’s nobody’ – a curious comment, since Dylan enjoyed most people’s company, but it was indicative of his desire to ingratiate himself with certain sections of the establishment.
That did not mean he had to be fawning. Reviewing in New Verse in December, he tore into Stephen Spender’s extended epic ‘Vienna’, repeating his nostrums about poetry having to come before politics or any such other consideration, and suggesting that his fellow poet, who had encouraged him personally, had failed to make either good verse or good propaganda. Dylan called ‘Vienna’ ‘a bad poem; the images are unoriginal singly, and ambiguous, often meaningless, collectively,’ though he never made it clear if he understood much about the event Spender was writing about – the bloody Dolfuss putsch in Vienna which left hundreds of workers dead. Bert Trick claimed that, in the same issue of New Verse, Dylan’s ‘My world is pyramid’ contained his real attitude to events in Austria, particularly the stanza:
My world is cypress, and an English valley.
I piece my flesh that rattled on the yards
Red in an Austrian volley.
I hear, through dead men’s drums, the riddled lads,
Strewing their bowels from a hill of bones,
Cry Eloi to the guns.
(This was the final version of the poem containing Trick’s daughter’s comment: ‘What colour is glory?’) The grocer may well have been right, and Dylan was giving an object lesson in the reality he had tried to convey to Glyn Jones earlier in the year: ‘And as for the Workers! People have been trying to write to them for years. And they still don’t give a damn. The trouble is that in attempting to write for the workers one generally writes down. The thing to do is to bring the workers up to what one is writing.’
Before leaving Swansea, he agreed to address a genteel literary club, known as the John O’London’s Society, after the weekly magazine of that name. The society was run by a Mrs Bates from a room over her husband’s ironmongery shop near Singleton Park. When a member, Leslie Mewis, told Mrs Bates he had met Dylan Thomas at Trick’s, she insisted that the young poet, who was beginning to make a name for himself, should address the members. Against the advice of Trick, who sensed disaster, an invitation was despatched, and Dylan offered to talk on ‘Obscenity in English Literature’. According to Mewis, Dylan initially kept to his thesis, arguing that the most obscene aspect of English literature was its triviality. But he got carried away by the prospect of shocking his mainly female audience (Dylan described them as middle-aged virgins), and launched into a tirade of filth and bad taste. In Dylan’s account, having been introduced as a ‘Young Revolutionary’ he preached the Communist gospel of free love, ending his talk with the rallying cry, ‘Let Copulation Thrive.’ Mewis recalled that, as a bemused audience drifted away, Dylan could be heard swearing profusely.
Dylan enjoyed shocking in the manner of his new friend Caradoc Evans. ‘The more I see of Wales,’ he told Pamela, ‘the more I think it’s a land entirely peopled by perverts. I don’t exclude myself, who obtain a high & soulful pleasure from telling women, old enough to be my mother, why they dream of two-headed warthogs in a field of semen.’
Poet, revolutionary or buffoon: there was no doubt what was the most important to Dylan. The final spur to his moving to London was his dissatisfaction with the way Neuburg was dealing with his collection of poems. As with Pamela’s book, trade publishers had been mooted but failed to materialise. Dylan managed to retrieve his selection of twenty poems and send them to Eliot at Faber & Faber. Eliot’s secretary sent an express letter to Cwmdonkin Drive, asking Dylan to do nothing until the great man had made up his mind. But Eliot delayed just long enough to allow Neuburg to find the resources and a publisher to bring out the book, as originally intended, under the auspices of the Sunday Referee.
Dylan had found someone to live with in London – Fred Janes, a mercurial occasional member of the Kardomah crowd who, having discovered abstract art in Cork Street galleries, had dropped out of his old-fashioned course at the Royal Academy Schools and was hoping to launch his professional career. Another Swansea painter, Dylan’s childhood friend Mervyn Levy, was at the more adventurous Royal College of Art. He lived at the top of a student hostel in 5 Redcliffe Street, where the lower reaches of Chelsea merge into Fulham. Dylan and Janes managed to rent one room, with a bathroom, on the floor beneath him.
In early November Janes’s greengrocer father drove the two young men to the capital. Weighed down with an oversize suitcase, Dylan wore his trademark pork-pie hat and a vast check overcoat that blew like a marquee over his slight frame. From somewhere he and Janes acquired a couple of camp-beds, a table and a gas oven. By chance, only the previous week, the Hansford Johnsons had moved across the river from Clapham to a new flat in Chelsea. Since some of their furniture was in storage, Dylan asked Pamela if there was anything he could borrow. Still enraptured by ‘darling Dylan’, she provided an iron bedstead (which saw service as a wardrobe – tipped up, with a curtain covering its outward-facing castors), a few chairs (one of which became Janes’s easel) and a dozen yellow dusters. Having helped the two Welshmen settle into this seedy room on 13 November, she was upset not to hear from Dylan for four days. He then sent ‘an entirely fogged note’ which convinced her he was no longer interested in their relationship. Janes and Trevor Hughes tried to reassure her that this was not so and that Dylan was ill. She went round to Redcliffe Street again, and found Dylan indeed in bed, and very bad-tempered. He had been drinking heavily (though this might not have been immediately obvious to Pamela): he admitted to Glyn Jones the following month that alcohol had become ‘a little too close and heavy a friend for some time now’ and, as a result, he had not been eating much.
He made life difficult for Pamela over the following month. The day after her visit, he had recovered enough to tell her that the reason for his lack of communication was that he wanted to marry her and was arranging to do so in three weeks. She was completing the final stages of her novel (fast work: she had only started in September). He offered to take it away to read, but did not return it, so she had to send her mother round to retrieve her text, which he despatched the following day, without a note. Only after she had handed her book in to her agent did he write – to say that drink had won, which, as she confided to her diary ‘upset me plenty but surprised me little’.
The background to this shadow play was the forthcoming publication of Dylan’s book, and his shrewd notion that, in order to promote it, he needed to be seen and recognised as a writer of verse. That meant continuing to seek out, drink with, and develop his poet’s persona in the company of his literary peers. Having been spurred by Eliot’s interest, Neuburg arranged for Dylan’s poems to be published by the Parton Press which operated out of the back of a bookshop in Holborn.
Situated on the outer edges of the main publishing area of Bloomsbury, this was a centre for fringe literary activity. Close to where Harold and Hilda Monro’s Poetry Bookshop had once been, two other local bookshops now operated as occasional publishers. One was the Blue Moon Bookshop, in Red Lion Street, between Holborn and Theobald’s Road. It was owned by Charles Lahr, a resolute bearded anarchist of German Jewish origin, whose dabblings in publishing had brought him the friendship of D. H. Lawrence, as well as T. F. Powys and Rhys Davies. Dylan later became firm friends with several Blue Moon writers including Keidrych Rhys, Oswell Blakeston, Ruthven Todd and John Gawsworth.
The other was the Parton Bookshop, run by David Archer, the effete left-leaning scion of a Wiltshire landowner. Situated on the ground floor of number 2 Parton Street, a run-down Georgian alley (since built over by the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre) between Southampton Row and Red Lion Square, this provided a refuge and often a bed for aspiring young writers, such as George Barker, David Gascoyne and Maurice Carpenter. In 1934 it also gave space to Out of Bounds, the revolutionary anti-public school movement headed by Winston Churchill’s shabbily dressed nephew, Esmond Romilly.
Upstairs was the headquarters of the Promethean Society, founded four years earlier following an appeal, headed ‘The Revolt of Youth’, in the magazine Everyman, calling for opponents of ‘the humbug and hypocrisy, the muddle and inertia that everywhere surrounds us today’. Taking their cue from D. H. Lawrence, the Prometheans emphasised sexual as much as political revolution. They published another leftist literary magazine, Twentieth Century, where one of the assistants was Desmond Hawkins, the aspiring poet whom Dylan had met earlier in the year at Janet Adam Smith’s.
The atmosphere in the Parton Bookshop was leisurely, idealistic and camp. The stock was interesting enough to attract regular customers such as Colonel T. E. Lawrence. However the shelves and even the pavement were strewn with copies of the Daily Worker and other left-wing journals. Archer (described by Barker as a cross between Proust’s Robert de Saint-Loup and P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster) was totally unbusinesslike. He frequently shut up shop and walked across the road to Meg’s Café, the social centre for aspiring artists and revolutionaries in the vicinity. His business partner was nominally his friend David Abercrombie, son of the Georgian poet Lascelles Abercrombie. (They had been to Russia together in 1931.) But in 1934 David Abercrombie started lecturing at the London School of Economics. His interest in the shop devolved on his brother Ralph who lived above Meg’s Café with Roger Roughton, a languid teenage writer who later committed suicide in Dublin.
In discussing how Dylan came to be published by this uncommercial outfit, Runia Tharp told a Gothic tale about walking home with Neuburg one foggy evening and seeing an arc of light which drew them to the Parton Bookshop. Asked if Dylan Thomas had ever ventured there, Archer replied, distractedly, ‘It is known to all poets.’ However, ever generous in his literary patronage, he agreed to put up £20 to publish Dylan’s collection, while Mark Goulden, editor of the Sunday Referee, promised a further £30.
Over the summer Dylan had been quietly casting through his four notebooks before deciding on what were now to be eighteen poems for his collection. From this material, mainly from the fourth notebook, he chose (and where necessary improved) twelve poems, plus one earlier one, and he wrote a further five between ‘I dreamed my genesis’ in May and ‘When, like a running grave’ in October. The resulting package remains exciting – a concentrated young man’s attempt to refashion the lyrical, hierophantic traditions of his craft in the contemporary idiom of modern poetry. His Welshness played its part, providing not only a vitality but also an alternative vantage point from which to spy out his assault on the metropolitan cultural redoubt.
Personal contact was a natural part of his game plan. His circle of London literary friends, which had started with the old-fashioned Middleton Murry, Rees and Orage, and had grown with Neuburg’s idiosyncratic Creative Circle and Grigson’s wide company of contributors to New Verse, now expanded to include a more unorthodox group of working writers. Acquaintances from these often overlapping groups regularly filtered into the West End where they drank with Dylan in the Fitzroy and other public houses around Charlotte Street.
Dylan’s drinking habits in London have become mythologised, though the broad outlines are simple enough. At this stage one would most likely find him in either the rowdy Fitzroy or the quieter, better upholstered Wheatsheaf, two pubs in Fitzrovia, a working-class area, full of European immigrants, on the other (west) side of the Tottenham Court Road from literary Bloomsbury. Closing time in these two establishments was (according to the licensing laws of the borough of Holborn) 10.30 p.m. So when the clocks approached this hour, drinkers often made a dash south to the rougher Marquess of Granby in Rathbone Place or the Highlander in Dean Street which, being under different jurisdictions, were allowed to stay open until eleven.
Not liking the run-down drinking spots around where he lived, Dylan gravitated naturally to the Fitzroy and Wheatsheaf. These two pubs still attracted some older artists, such as Augustus John and Percy Wyndham Lewis, both of whom had once had studios in the area. They also provided starting points for sorties to eating places ranging from Mrs Buhler’s café at the top of Rathbone Place to exotic foreign-owned restaurants such as Schmidt’s and Bertorelli’s, or, if someone else was paying, Rudolf Stulik’s Eiffel Tower, with its first-floor room decorated by Wyndham Lewis.
Two regulars were the ageing good-time girls, the artist Nina Hamnett and ‘artist’s model’ Betty May. Both had written autobiographies detailing their scandal-ridden lives. Hamnett’s was Laughing Torso, the book which had brought Dylan a libel threat at the Evening Post three years earlier. The title came from her nude bust sculpted by her one-time lover Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, about which she told the writer Ruthven Todd, ‘You know me, m’dear – I’m the one in the V&A with me left tit knocked off.’ Like Augustus John, she had been born in Tenby, another English-orientated town on the South Wales coast, and had studied at the Slade. A fine draughtswoman, she now hung around the Fitzroy cadging drinks, often from immature provincial youths told to look her up by fathers who had known her in better days. Her preference was for rougher trade, particularly sailors, ‘because they leave in the morning’. Richard Aldington referred to ‘poor Nina’ as ‘a curious mixture of slut and whore, but a very decent chap’.
The petite Betty May brought to Fitzrovia the panache of Paris where she had danced in a café chansant and lived with the leader of an Apache gang. (Tiger Woman, the title of her autobiography, came from the nickname she gained after fighting off a knife attack from a woman who thought she was this French thug’s rightful girlfriend.) After turning her back on prostitution, she married Raoul Loveday, an Oxford undergraduate who was an acolyte of Aleister Crowley. When they were both visiting Crowley’s abbey in Sicily, Loveday died in mysterious circumstances – she thought because he had been forced to drink the blood of a sacrificed cat. (The story recalls Victor Neuburg who, as part of an occult initiation ritual, had suffered the indignity of being turned into a camel by his homosexual lover, Crowley.) Hamnett had told Loveday’s story in Laughing Torso, which resulted in Crowley unsuccessfully suing her for libel.
Although many years Betty May’s junior, Dylan had hopes of bedding this still attractive woman, boasting to Trick in December that he was going to ghost an article on her behalf for the News of the World, and his payment would not be monetary. Apart from obvious fellow poets of his own age, he also claimed to have met the sculptor Henry Moore (possibly through Vera Phillips who was studying interior design under him at Chelsea Polytechnic), as well as the anti-fascist poet Edwin Muir and his wife Willa, and Wyndham Lewis, who were all part of Grigson’s circle.
Finding his level in this world, while waiting expectantly for his book, proved distracting for Dylan. He was forced to adapt his pose slightly: no longer was he the leading light in a small group of provincial aesthetes; posing as Keats or Wilde was hardly original in London. Dylan found that one way of keeping his new friends amused was playing the professional Welshman. He joked to Grigson how in Carmarthenshire he had lived on carrots, and then adding that this was not quite true: he had had onions as well. But he found Londoners generally had little interest in Wales. To them it was an industrial wasteland, or else, as he once said to Pamela, ‘I, to you, move in a fabulous, Celtic land, surrounded by castles, tall black hats, the ghosts of accents, and eternal Eisteddfodau.’ So he learnt to grab his audiences’ attention with different ruses. His powers of mimicry allowed him to conduct elaborate conversations in the guise of characters such as an Indian intellectual or an Austrian professor. His regional accents were so true that he once convinced a visitor from Yorkshire that they had lived in the same road in Bradford. But these thespian tricks complemented his greatest social asset which was his ability to spin out a tale. He did not go in for side-splitting punch-lines, but his skill in adopting the tones and sending up the attitudes of the motley characters in his elaborate shaggy-dog stories kept everyone riveted. His warm, often inspired, generally theatrical delivery was the most obvious aspect of his Welshness.
Gradually Grigson noticed Dylan becoming more confident as his persona evolved from literary fop to Toughish Boy or the Boy with a Load of Beer. In those first few weeks in his new digs, he appeared to do little writing, telling Trick that it was impossible to concentrate or even find anywhere to work in his cramped living space, where any piece of paper was immediately liable to be covered in egg and mashed potato. One solution, he admitted, might be for someone to do the washing up. At least he earned a small amount of money from reviewing for Bookmen and New Verse. And that small income enabled him to buy the necessary rounds and keep up his job of self-promotion in the Fitzroy.
It was a lifestyle he enjoyed. On 20 December he went round to Pamela’s, presumably to give her a copy of his book which had been published two days earlier in an edition of 500, though only half that number were bound and finished (the remainder had to wait until 1936). But he did not make himself welcome. His behaviour was so obnoxiously self-centred that her diary mentioned nothing of his triumph, only: ‘Shopping in morning. Dylan came round in afternoon and boasted of all his rather revolting Bloomsbury fun and games.’
A couple of days later Dylan returned home for Christmas, without saying goodbye to her. In Swansea he parked with Tom Warner fifty copies of 18 Poems, which, from time to time, he would ask him to send out to designated recipients. On new year’s eve Pamela thought he was being romantic when the telephone rang and she heard some Dylan-like noises, before being cut off. She later learnt that this had not been Dylan, but someone else playing a cruel joke. Nevertheless she had begun to rumble Dylan’s way of promoting himself. At the end of her diary she scribbled a ‘Song for DT’, which included the damning verses:
Princess, as you can see, my aim
Has been to lift myself to fame
No more I’ll need to toil and moil
For I’ve been thrown out of the Café Royal …
I never trouble now to write,
For I have set the town alight.
And who would waste the midnight oil
When they’ve been thrown out of the Café Royal.