Brinnin had promised to roll out the red carpet if the Thomases managed to catch the Queen Mary on time. Halfway through their voyage they cabled him: ‘See you Pier 90 Sunday Bring Carpet Love Dylan Caitlin.’ He was there at the quayside, clutching a small square of red carpet and a box of gardenias, when they docked around mid-day on Sunday 20 January 1952 He and a small welcoming party waited for two hours until Dylan finally emerged from the customs shed, looking like a koala bear in a vast brown parka, followed by his wife, a character from Anna Karenina in a black fur ensemble.
Brinnin had arranged for them both to stay for a couple of days at the Millbrook, New York house of his photographer friend, Rollie McKenna, who specialised in writers’ portraits. En route he was cheered to see how eagerly Dylan pointed out interesting sights and features of American popular culture to Caitlin. He thought this heralded an improvement in their relationship. He did not at first appreciate the significance of her sullen silence. She endured a photographic shoot on a bitingly cold morning, when McKenna took a well-known portrait of Dylan looking uneasy, climbing among, and as if hemmed in by, the matted vine in front of her snow-bound house. But when McKenna took her guests on a quick sight-seeing tour, including a visit to her alma mater, the all-women’s college, Vassar, at nearby Poughkeepsie, Caitlin feigned disgust at the students in their regulation blue jeans. ‘Ridiculous!’ she commented. ‘They look like intellectual witches.’
It soon became clear that, to Caitlin, every woman in America fitted this description. Noticing her husband talking animatedly to an attractive young women at a post-performance reception, she turned to Brinnin and – one instance among many – asked, ‘Who is that bitch with him now?’ When Brinnin began to explain, she interrupted, ‘Does Dylan sleep with her?’ Often she realised she was being foolish; she said she could put on a ‘first class Queen Mary act’ if required. But her competitive nature could not stand the sight of Dylan at the centre of a circle of eager, mainly female listeners. She let her animosity extend to the country and its people. Asked in a kindly, perhaps slightly condescending manner, what she thought of America, she replied aggressively, ‘I can’t get out of the bloody country soon enough.’ Once, when Dylan was girding himself before a reading, she announced, as if to encourage him, ‘Just remember, they’re all dirt.’
As their New York base the Thomases chose a one-bedroom apartment with integral kitchenette at the Chelsea Hotel, a shabby genteel establishment catering for artists and writers on West 23rd Street. Greenwich Village was perhaps further away than they might have liked. But it was where they liked to meet friends in bars such as the San Remo and the White Horse, slightly west on 10th Street and Hudson. Dylan gravitated towards the latter, which was run by an elderly Bavarian couple. Frequented by Hudson river longshoremen, its atmosphere was similar to a British pub, more Swansea, with its port connections, than London. It offered cheap German food such as schnitzels and bratwursts, and it was round the corner from Ruthven Todd and his quietly spoken new wife Jody, a painter from Oklahoma. Len and Ann Lye were also close, as were some new friends, the sculptor David Slivka and his wife Rose, who wrote on art, antiques and interiors. Although further afield, the Frankenbergs and Williamses could join them when required.
In the mornings Dylan would slope off to the White Horse, leaving Caitlin to work on a journal which she illustrated with her own brand of wild caricature. (Unnervingly, in her more uncommunicative moods, she would take out her notebook and begin sketching everyone around her.) She then liked to go shopping at Macy’s or some other department store. Brinnin had provided Dylan with money in advance of his earnings, though this cache soon ran low, and having to ask her husband for dollar handouts only increased Caitlin’s resentment. On more than one occasion, when she felt she needed medication, Dylan arranged for her to see Pearl’s physician Dr Anne Baumann who more than a year later was forced to threaten legal proceedings in an effort of obtain full payment. In Caitlin’s angry depressed state, shopping became an obsession: like a child in a sweet-shop, she found herself wanting to snatch what she saw in front of her and make for the exit. The abundance and variety of consumer goods was almost unbearably enticing for her.
Later, she would join Dylan but, whereas he tended to stick to beer, she had discovered cocktails and rye whisky on the rocks – a potent combination, given New York’s liberal licensing hours. (It was impossible, she told Helen McAlpine, for ‘a highly trained Britisher’ to leave before closing time, even if that was often three o’clock in the morning.) His friends got used to the couple’s squabbles, often arising out of her sexual taunts, as when, once at the Todds, she dismissed him as ‘just an old fag’, and he replied, ‘If only I were.’ Among his circle, she took to Oscar Williams, who not only had expressed interest in her writing but also seemed to understand how important it was to her as an impecunious mother in Laugharne that he sold Dylan’s work for quick, ready cash. However her special friend was Rose Slivka, who had the knack of keeping her occupied and relatively calm while Dylan was reading and being feted by his mainly female fans (or ‘ardents’, as he called them). When Dylan appeared at the Museum of Modern Art, for example, Caitlin and Rose went to the theatre to see the dancer, Martha Graham.
At the time Brinnin was promoting an American tour by three other British poets – W. S. Graham, David Gascoyne and Kathleen Raine – which may explain why Dylan’s early timetable was so leisurely. The Poetry Center director was also preparing for a talk by Truman Capote in mid-February. Or he may simply have decided, for the sake of Dylan’s well-being, not to burden him with too many readings: the first at Columbia University was a full ten days after his arrival. It was followed in quick succession by two appearances at the YM-YWHA where the applause exceeded anything on his first trip. Otherwise for the next month his only engagements outside Manhattan were brief trips to Washington D.C., Burlington, Vermont, and Montreal, Quebec.
As a result Dylan had plenty of time to attend to minor business matters. One was the issue of his representation in the United States. Ann Watkins no longer wanted to handle Higham’s British authors who were being taken on by the William Morris agency. However there were problems because, following an earlier row, James Laughlin refused to deal with Helen Strauss, the responsible executive at William Morris. A compromise was arrived at whereby Higham would deal directly with New Directions over existing authors such as Dylan. But Strauss wanted to earn her keep, selling Dylan’s poems to magazines – an area Dylan had entrusted on a bilateral basis to the commercial Oscar Williams. So, with Williams in tow, he visited Strauss and an unsatisfactory modus vivendi was reached.
Dylan was able to spend longer than expected messing around with artist friends in the Village. There was an idea he might make a film with Len Lye, who ran several of his own coloured abstract movies for him, in the hope that one might provide the right backdrop for a poem. When nothing seemed right, Dylan offered to write something about a bicycle, Lye remembered.
Suggestions of a film cropped up again when, in anticipation of New Direction’s publication of In Country Sleep and Other Poems at the end of February, Time magazine despatched Irving Berlin’s daughter, Mary Ellin Barrett, from its research department to interview Dylan with a view to a profile. Finding him hungover at the Chelsea, she took him first to a bar for a restorative drink and then to a nearby steakhouse where he toyed with a plate of oysters while a watchful Caitlin urged him to eat something more substantial. He told Barrett about two projects: one was the completion of his novel Adventures in the Skin Trade, the other a film based on the Odyssey. Caitlin was at pains to point out that, though the book existed, the film did not. She was being protective of her husband because, only in January, he had discussed such an idea with the film director Michael Powell. Dylan had advised him to talk to Louis MacNeice who had a better classical education, but relented when Powell countered that he was a much better poet than MacNeice.
Within weeks Powell had visited Igor Stravinsky in Hollywood where, in the composer’s words, he proposed ‘to make a short film, a kind of masque, of a scene from the Odyssey; it would require two or three arias as well as pieces of pure instrumental music and recitations of pure poetry. Powell said that Thomas had agreed to write the verse; he asked me to compose the music.’ Stravinsky, who had been alerted to Dylan by Auden, offered to write a twelve-minute score for $12,000. Finance proved difficult to raise and the project did not progress, though Stravinsky retained the idea of working with the Welsh poet. At this stage, however, delicate negotiations were still under way, and Caitlin was determined that there should be no media leakage about a project which was not only dear to Dylan but which promised to steer his career in a new and potentially lucrative direction. As a result Barrett’s interview meandered in different directions without getting anywhere. Time did not run it as it was, though the poet’s evasiveness did interest its editors enough to commission a more substantial profile, with unexpected consequences.
After an appearance at the Poetry Center, Dylan was approached by two young women, Barbara Cohen and Marianne Roney, who wanted to record him reading his poetry. They were unable to beat a path through his throng of admirers on that occasion but, encouraged by Brinnin, they telephoned Dylan regularly at the Chelsea. Eventually Cohen managed to speak to him at five o’clock one morning after he had stumbled back from a party. They agreed to meet at the Little Shrimp, the restaurant attached to the hotel. Caitlin again looked on suspiciously as the two women, both twenty-two years old and recently out of college, made their pitch. At the time they had not even set up their company, Caedmon Records, intending to distribute their records through Cohen’s employer, the publisher Liveright. But their enthusiasm, coupled with the offer of a $500 advance against the first 1,000 albums, with a 10 per cent royalty thereafter, helped sway Dylan.
He missed his first scheduled recording session, but turned up at the Steinway Hall on 57th Street a week later, on the afternoon of Friday 22 February. He did not know that Laurence Olivier had been there earlier in the day recording a tribute to King George VI who had died a couple of weeks beforehand. Dylan had a sheaf of poems he intended reading, but the sound engineer Peter Bartók (son of the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók) said that these would only fill one side of a long-playing record. Without much ado, Dylan recalled he had recently written ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ for Harper’s Bazaar. After some scurrying around, a copy of the magazine was obtained, and Dylan gave a lively rendition of his story. It was an astute move because, after the record was pressed by RCA and released on the Caedmon label on 2 April, it sold quietly. As Dylan’s name became more widely known, however, this sentimental story, in particular, captured the imagination of America.
On the evening of the recording, the avant-garde film-maker Maya Deren threw a party for Dylan. Recently returned from Haiti, she was enthusiastic about its Voodoo religion, which struck her as both ancient and modern. The young Anatole Broyard, later a New York Times book critic, observed the extraordinary scene when Deren played tapes of rhythmic Haitian music. As the drumming reached a crescendo, two people remained dancing – one the squat Deren, the quintessential Manhattan artist with her minimal movement and understated appearance; the other Caitlin, bumping and grinding for Britain with her skirt lifted above her head to reveal legs, thighs and cotton knickers. Before long it was clear the two women were in fierce competition. When Deren tried to shoo her rival off the floor, Caitlin shot out a straight right that left a solicitous guest reeling. Then, spying the collection of small Haitian gods Deren had brought back, she began hurling them against the wall. Only Deren’s stricken cries woke a sleeping Dylan who grabbed hold of his wife and, as if suddenly magically empowered, swung her in one remarkable, deft movement through an open door onto a bed in the next room. Since Dylan was in no state to do anything else, Broyard was deputed to watch over her and hold her down if necessary. She threw her arms around his neck and demanded, ‘For God’s sake, man, love me, love me.’ Although he politely declined her invitation, he was one of the few people considered sober enough to take her home. In the car on the way to the Chelsea, she snuggled up to him. When he took her to her room, she asked him in for a drink. ‘Another time’ he said, preparing to dash. (She was trying to get her own back on Dylan by conducting her own affairs, but, in the circumstances, this was difficult. So, according to her friend Rose Slivka, Caitlin sometimes went to the water-front when she would pick up a sailor or longshoreman.)
Soon the legend of the battling Thomases had reached the other side of the Atlantic, where the gossipy Edith Sitwell told a friend about their attendance at a party given by Mrs Murray Crane, the rich widow of a former US senator. A long-time patron of artistic causes, she had helped found the Museum of Modern Art, where she sat on the committee which arranged poetry readings. Her soirées were formal affairs where, as even Sitwell archly put it, the watchwords were ‘Decorum, Bonne Tenue, and the milder and more restrained forms of Evening Dress’. Undaunted, Dylan flew at Caitlin and, according to Sitwell’s informant, ‘kicked, punched and bloodily beat’ her. After being asked to leave, Dylan reappeared and asked for the money for a taxi.
On the Saturday night after Maya Deren’s party, actress Judith Malina observed Dylan banging forlornly on the locked door of the San Remo after closing time. The following evening she saw him again, but this time in full verbal flight on stage at the Cherry Lane Theatre on 8th Street, where she and her husband Julian Beck had appeared with their Living Theater. Oscar Williams had arranged a special performance for the Village artistic community. Tickets were $1 a head, and Dylan had promised to read only his own poems. However the show was nearly cancelled when he arrived claiming to have lost his copy of his poems. Luckily Malina had one, which was duly returned with ten little bookmarks, each with the name of a poem in his meticulous hand. She was one of the few New Yorkers to recognise that Dylan’s poetry had some intellectual content. As a result of a fever she heard his ‘priestly incantation through a veil of discomfort. Till I crossed into the depth of Thomas’ thought beyond the cavernous grandeur of his language.’
Ten days later Dylan and Caitlin travelled north for engagements in the Boston area. They had been offered the use of Brinnin’s apartment on the campus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology where their host’s mother Frances was also staying. While Dylan gave his talks, Caitlin found her latest ally in the unlikely figure of Mrs Brinnin, a bland woman who cooked excellent meals and never disagreed with anything. At the weekend Brinnin took the Thomases to Salem for a lobster dinner which rivalled the one in Wales the previous year in its awfulness. By the end of the evening the whole outing had taken on a similar doomed air, after Dylan insisted on visiting a strip-tease show in Boston, and Caitlin sank menacingly into one of her silent moods.
Once Dylan returned to find his wife contentedly playing with Frances’s make-up. When Brinnin’s mother apologised that this was her fault, Caitlin retorted, ‘If you want to know God’s truth, Dylan thinks all women should simply wash their faces in cold water, like nuns.’ ‘Why not?’ asked Dylan. ‘That’s what men do.’ ‘I’ve been looking for just this colour for years,’ said Caitlin, ignoring him. ‘What’s the name of it, Frances?’ ‘Slut pink,’ Dylan intervened.
Next day the Harvard literary magazine, the Advocate, threw a party for the Thomases. With everything apparently in order, Brinnin was about to ask Caitlin if she was enjoying herself when, recalling her anguished plea to Broyard, she announced imperiously, ‘Is there no man in America worthy of me?’ Her behaviour became so unpleasant that, when Dylan was later asked to join a group of students and she wondered if she was invited too, he replied brazenly, ‘Only if you stop being so awful.’ She flounced off, saying she was returning home with Brinnin who, when he called at his apartment next morning, found a note on the Thomases’ bedroom door which read, ‘Stay out, you scum.’ Wondering for a moment how, once again, he might have offended her, Brinnin discovered Caitlin’s venom was directed at her husband whose entry had been barred when he returned in the early hours.
During this second tour Dylan had been trying to extend his repertoire of readings to include not just modern British poets but also older ones such as Webster, Donne and Beddoes. That evening he was due to take this concept further by performing excerpts from Shakespeare and Marlowe. When he announced he was going to do Hamlet, Caitlin interjected scornfully, ‘You – read Hamlet. You can’t read Hamlet.’ Throwing a book at her, Dylan declared, ‘I am going to read Hamlet as Hamlet has never been read before.’ But his wife had a point. She realised he was moving steadily away from poetry to performance. She could see how attractive this was for him – a natural progression from his youthful thespian escapades. But she believed it brought out his worst exhibitionist traits, encouraging vulgar adulation and, of course, leaving her out of the limelight. She also realised it took him away from the boring business of sitting down and writing verse.
Since Brinnin was himself in the middle of a relationship crisis suffering from migraines whenever he had to deal with the Thomases, he must have been relieved on 17 March to pack them off, with railway tickets and a further $400 spending money, on the first stage of their journey across America to the west coast. Their first stop was at Pennsylvania State University, where they were met off the train by a party which included Dylan’s poet friend David Wagoner. This time Dylan was sulking and Caitlin in an emollient mood. She tried to cheer him up by interesting him in a copy of Life magazine which he violently shoved aside. According to Wagoner, Dylan drank his supper and seemed incapable of doing anything further. But, as usual, his reading was perfect, and when he returned to where he was staying – the bachelor house of Phil Shelley, head of the German department – Caitlin, who had not accompanied him, was asleep. However she had washed all the dishes, tidied up and dusted the living room, and changed the sheets on another bed.
From there the Thomases proceeded, via Chicago, to Flagstaff, Arizona. However by the time they reached Chicago they were tired of trains and wanted to spend a night in a bed. So they checked into an expensive hotel and then, finding their onward Pullman reservation out of date, were forced to buy a new one. As a result they arrived in Flagstaff with less than one dollar. Their hosts were Max Ernst and his artist wife Dorothea Tanning. Since Dylan had not met Ernst either at the 1936 surrealist exhibition in London or through the artist’s brief marriage to Peggy Guggenheim, his invitation almost certainly came through Oscar Williams and Gene Derwood who were friends of Tanning. Dylan and Ernst enjoyed each other’s company, drinking in bars in Cottonwood and Sedona, the nearest towns to the artist couple’s house. Enjoying his brief respite from the lecture treadmill, Dylan sent a postcard to Ebie Williams in Laugharne, announcing that he was in Poker Flat saloon in Sedona surrounded by genuine cowboys in ten-gallon stetsons and being treated to rye whisky by a sheriff with two pearl-handled revolvers in his belt. To Daniel Jones he and Caitlin sent a card with a more sardonic message: ‘We were killed in action, Manhattan Island, Spring, 1952, in a gallant battle against American hospitality. An American called Double Rye shot Caitlin to death. I was scalped by a Bourbon.’
The Thomases were prevented from any great excesses by lack of funds. They wired Brinnin to send $100 immediately, but he was out of town and did not get the telegram for four days. In addition they were concerned that carefully engineered financial arrangements in England had broken down and Magdalen College School in Oxford was threatening to expel thirteen-year-old Llewelyn unless his fees were paid. At one stage on the east coast, Dylan had found a rich female well-wisher who was prepared to give him $1,000 towards the cost of his son’s schooling. But Caitlin, suspecting the woman’s motives, had been rude to her and the offer was withdrawn.
She found these financial pressures more worrying than Dylan. In Arizona, her silence became a disappearing act. Her hostess noted how, whenever they were about to go on an expedition, Caitlin was nowhere to be found, and Dylan, like a fat Pan, would wander around calling for her. Tanning attributed this behaviour to a dislike of her small pampered dogs. ‘Ugh.’ Caitlin declared. ‘In England they make bloody little gods out of them.’ (The mangy mongrel Mably clearly did not come in that category. Tanning had a theory that Caitlin’s maternal instinct made her more partial to children than animals.) The first time the Thomases prepared to continue on their journey, they found they did not have enough money and had to turn back. Tanning gave them a couple of prints and Ernst inscribed his book, Misfortunes of the Immortals: ‘To Dylan and Caitlin. (They hastened back at the first sign) Hélas. Très cordialement Max Ernst.’
Dylan’s first stop in San Francisco was the telegraph office where he needed to do some brisk financial juggling to ensure that Llewelyn did not lose his school place. He was able to wire $300 (or so he said) to Oxford, with the help of further sums from Brinnin and William Morris which sent him his Caedmon fee ($500, minus 10 per cent for the agency). David Higham held out the hope that he might be able to obtain a further £100 from Dent if Dylan immediately wrote a promised Prologue to his Collected Poems that his British publisher intended bringing out later in the year. However Dylan found it impossible to write on the road. He had made no progress with the American Journal he contracted to write for Allen Wingate (whose advance was even now paying Dolly Long £3 a week to look after Colm). And three scripts entitled ‘The Small Geography of a Youngish Writer’ which he had promised to write for the BBC on board the Queen Mary had fallen by the wayside.
The Thomases stayed with Ruth Witt-Diamant, an arrangement that worked well. Dylan may have complained that the fridge in their hostess’s house was full of fruit juices rather than beers, while Caitlin was suspicious of the homosexuals who congregated round her husband, showing no interest in her. But the matronly Witt-Diamant had taken the trouble to send children’s clothes to her in Wales, and Caitlin was always grateful to people who showed an interest in her and her children. Over the Easter weekend all three were invited to stay with Mary Short, a member of the rich Carmel set who had met Dylan on his previous trip. The outing was similar to Dylan’s two years earlier, but for Caitlin’s unpredictable presence. Nearing their hostess’s house for dinner, she insisted on stopping and eating something because, she said, she would not know anyone there. In a restaurant in Monterey she downed a plate of spaghetti and a bottle of wine, ensuring that the party arrived late. Robinson Jeffers was again present, and Dylan was expected to sing for his supper. After they had eaten, Caitlin announced, ‘And now we’ll have some fucking poetry.’ When he responded with an insult about her ‘pea-sized brain’, she stormed out of the room. He threw something at her, and followed, never to return. The next day the couple emerged from their room as if nothing had happened. They were charming and Dylan entertained his fellow guests over a lunch-time picnic. On the way back they again stopped at the hot springs at Big Sur and briefly visited Henry Miller. Caitlin later insisted on buying some artichokes, which Miller had been eating and should, she felt, have offered her.
As Brinnin soon learnt on the poets’ grapevine, there were other more alarming stories. When Dylan called on Kenneth Patchen, with whom he had corresponded at the start of the Second World War, he turned up drunk and began to cry, partly from the effects of liquor and partly he was upset at his inability to write. They were joined by Caitlin who, according to Patchen’s wife, Miriam, insisted that ‘I stop spoiling him, that she’d had all this horrible life with him … and nothing would help, and so on and so forth.’
Returning east, Dylan and Caitlin stopped again in Chicago, from where he made a small tour of the mid-west. The highlight of this part of the trip was a reading sponsored by Poetry, the country’s leading ‘magazine of verse’, which had been started by Harriet Monroe in 1912. The editor Karl Shapiro found himself treading a fine line between encouraging a poet whom the magazine was keen to publish, and feeling aggrieved at Dylan’s minor misdemeanours, such as taking his two volumes of D. H. Lawrence’s Collected Poems, as well as a copy of a rhyming dictionary that he promised to review but never did. Dylan stayed with a local grandee, Ellen Borden Stevenson, former wife of the politician Adlai Stevenson. She invited one of Dylan’s favourite American authors, Nelson Algren, to join them. Algren, who had won the first National Book Award a couple of years earlier for his novel The Man with the Golden Arm, found both the Thomases amusing at first. However when Caitlin started drinking, he realised she had a big problem and could feel only pity for her. As for Dylan, Algren claimed to be ‘neither poet nor lush enough to appreciate him fully. You have to feel a certain desperation about everything either to write like that or to drink like that.’ He commended his hostess for her ‘tolerance of our friend, when he put on his small-boy-got-to-have-his-way-or-he’ll-bust-act’.
Dylan was supposed to travel south from Chicago for an engagement in New Orleans on 28 April. However, although this was one date he had particularly urged Brinnin to book, he was exhausted and could not face it. Worse, he told Brinnin that he would contact the organiser at Tulane University, but failed to do so. This story soon did the rounds of the college lecture circuit and, although Brinnin pleaded that this was the only appearance Dylan missed throughout his tours of America, he found subsequent bookings significantly harder to obtain.
On arriving back in New York, the Thomases asked the Slivkas to take them to a lesbian club. A visit to one in Chicago had fallen through. Typical of their lack of co-ordination, Caitlin approached Rose and said, ‘The horny old bugger still wants to go’, while Dylan made a similar pitch to Dave, explaining his wife’s disappointment at missing out in the windy city. Slivka asked around and found a suitable place in MacDougal Street. To his embarrassment, he found himself haggling with someone over whether she and a friend would ‘perform’. Dylan’s approach was to ‘buy the bar’, but Dave told him to put his money away. Eventually Dave left him and Caitlin at the club.
Later that evening, it seems, Dylan and an unidentified male companion moved on to the San Remo shortly before closing time. Already there was the poet Allen Ginsberg who, as a resident of the East Village, did not know Dylan. In his Journals, Ginsberg left an unappealing picture of Dylan making the most of his fame. After being introduced, Dylan told Ginsberg how he had just been in a bar where a girl had asked him if he would like to watch her and another girl ‘do a trick’. Dylan had declined because he did not have the necessary $50. However, determined to conclude his evening with some lesbian entertainment, he asked Ginsberg if he knew any amateurs who might oblige. Ginsberg said he could only supply one girl, but invited Dylan to join him in his attic. When Dylan spent some time chatting with a girl at the bar, Ginsberg heard some ‘hipsters’ wondering why ‘weak-chinned’ men like Dylan enjoyed sexual success. When the two poets left, Dylan at first seemed enthusiastic to join Ginsberg, then said ‘I don’t know what to do’, and finally succumbed to his companion saying he was tired and reminding him that Caitlin was waiting. Having playfully stuck his tongue out at Dylan, Ginsberg was left feeling sorry that he had not made more of the encounter.
Next day, Dylan met Slivka at the mid-town Gotham Book Mart, where he was signing his books and copies of his newly released Caedmon record. When his sculptor friend asked about the previous evening, Dylan said, misleadingly, ‘Oh it was quite an event … after you left’.
Dylan’s words did describe aspects of the intervening period, however. That morning the Thomases received a dramatic telegram from Caitlin’s mother, which read: ‘Fees not arrived therefore Llewelyn dismissed from school Please reply Macnamara’. Since Caitlin (like Brinnin) had been assured by Dylan that this matter had been dealt with, she was furious. She announced she was leaving him and tried, unsuccessfully, to book an immediate return passage. Dylan was mortified and wanted to cancel his signing session at the Gotham Book Mart. Brinnin counselled against precipitate action, and Dylan relented. After a short sleep, he composed himself and looked surprisingly alert as, with Brinnin at his side, he sipped beer and appended his autograph to customers’ May Day purchases. However, the store’s formidable owner, Frances Steloff, could sense something was wrong: ‘He was so quiet and restrained, it seemed to me that he was sad and would have preferred to be left alone.’
After nearly four months in America, Dylan’s last engagement was back at the Poetry Center on 15 May, the day before he sailed for home on the Niew Amsterdam. He spent part of that morning visiting Random House which had expressed an interest in publishing him once Laughlin’s option had expired after another book.
Before going up to the YH-YWHA, Brinnin called in at the Chelsea, hoping once more to gain his charge’s approval for his meticulous accounting. But Dylan could not care less, while Caitlin looked pale and helpless, surrounded by mountains of luggage. She did not attend the reading, which was competent rather than special, except for the fact that Pearl made her way backstage and asked to see Dylan. Her brief marriage had broken up and she was back in New York. Brinnin put them both in the Green Room for twenty minutes (which would have been impossible if Caitlin had been there). Although he had no idea what happened, he got the impression that the ardour in the couple’s relationship had passed.
That night, while Dylan slept, Caitlin flicked through the case of papers he had carried with him throughout his tour. She claimed that, along with unpaid bills, she found a number of love letters from different women. The fact that Dylan had put them in his case unopened suggests that they were not important to him. But Caitlin was aghast at her discovery and spent the whole night reading through them. Dylan’s last few hours in New York cannot have been much fun.
Since Dylan had been swallowed up by well-wishers the previous evening, Brinnin had been unable to bid the Thomases goodbye. So he cabled them on board ship, and Caitlin replied, half thanking him and half attacking him for the way he had organised the trip. While railing against the awfulness of the liner’s food and the fatness of her fellow passengers, she begged him never to encourage Dylan to visit North America again. Adamant that the continent had been an ordeal for her and the ruin of her husband, she suggested presciently that any further visit might be fatal for him.
Despite its enjoyable moments, Dylan’s second trip to America had solved nothing, so far as his life or work were concerned. Rather, it had only emphasised the almost unbridgeable gap that had opened up between him and his wife. In theory, travelling together might have helped heal their wounds. Was not one of Caitlin’s main grouses her sense of frustration at being left at home in Laugharne, tending their children? However her presence at Dylan’s side had only intensified her jealousy and anger. She had hated seeing her husband fawned over – and, even more, seeing the way he enjoyed it. She was fearful he was prostituting his writing talents for his love of performing, and its immediate returns in terms of praise. Her fury was all the greater for being irrational. And this made his efforts to win her round all the more difficult. The impasse in their relationship was to weigh on him and add to his depression.
Waiting for him on his return was a letter from David Higham informing him that Dent was ‘howling’ for the corrected proofs and the Prologue to his Collected Poems. In an effort to capitalise on Dylan’s growing fame, as well as to generate much-needed income for him, his agent had worked hard on Dent to publish this volume later in the year, together with a book version of his Doctor and the Devils script, and to follow these in 1953 with a new edition of his short stories.
Dylan promised, as usual, to attend to these matters. But his own priority was once more re-ordering his domestic affairs. Since he had been unable to work in Delancey Street, it seemed logical for him and Caitlin to return to Laugharne, where Colm was already living with Dolly in the Orchard Park council estate on the hill towards Pendine. The Boat House was still empty, though Maggs, who seemed on the point of a reconciliation with her husband, was making alarming noises about wanting to sell the place, or at least charge rent for it.
In his hut overlooking the estuary, Dylan expressed his relief at being back on home ground by taking out a sheet of paper and writing: ‘Letter on Returning to Wales from the United States of America 1952’ (it was addressed to Witt-Diamant or perhaps to Brinnin). Underneath he continued:
At home, sweet Christ, at last,
Wet Wales and the night jars
My liver at half mast
For the death of the high lights,
This red impromptu ink
With poppycock and love
Across the fucking drink
With a ballpoint I shove
It was atrocious, drunken verse but, as Dylan began to play with words and phrases, he saw how he might develop his Prologue into a poem based on the idea of gathering the local fauna and flora into an ark (or, conversely, book of poems). He put this matter aside to allow him and Caitlin to make their first triumphal post-America visit to London. Caitlin was dressed to impress in Macy’s finest: she ‘caught our eyes first’, noted Helen McAlpine who was there with the ‘two Margarets’ to greet her off the train, ‘and what a catch! Pale grey suit, crrr-isp white shirt, high heeled sandals, sheerest nylons, tonkety-tonk dangelers in her ears surrounded by a piled heap of disciplined curls. What ho little lady! Dylan had on his best rather reserved look. A carefully graded greeting to each of us in turn. A special wink for me though! So happy we all are to see them again … London has felt so empty since their going.’
Helen McAlpine did not specify the ‘two Margarets’. One was obviously Margaret Taylor and the other almost certainly Marged Howard-Stepney, a wealthy Welsh woman who had over the previous year emerged as a new patroness. A cousin of Frances Hughes, she owned a 10,000-acre coal-bearing estate near Llanelli. Her grandfather, Sir Arthur Cowell-Stepney, a mentally deranged one-time Liberal MP, had deserted his wife, renounced his baronetcy and gone to live in the United States where he had a fatal heart attack on an expedition to collect beetles in the Arizona desert. His daughter had died earlier in 1952, leaving her only daughter Marged with a vast income, a drink problem and a desire to help lost souls such as Dylan. Normally Maggs would never have allowed a rival onto her patch but, living apart from her husband, even she had been feeling the pinch. As the price of a reconciliation, or at least his continued financial support, she had promised again to scale down her interest in the Thomases. Marged Howard-Stepney, or Dylan’s ‘new County wet nurse’, as Caitlin called her, had offered to step into the breach, perhaps by paying the rent for the Boat House, perhaps by buying it outright.
As well as visiting Lord’s while in London, Dylan also took the opportunity of calling on E. F. Bozman, the editorial director at Dent who further impressed on him the urgency of the Prologue to his Collected Poems. Dylan also saw Donald Taylor about complications over The Doctor and the Devils. Dent wanted to publish the script under Dylan’s name alone, but Taylor was still angling for a joint credit which pushed back publication into the following year.
Although this London meeting was in mid-June, Bozman had to wait three more months before seeing any sign of the Prologue. Over the summer Dylan ditched any idea of completing this work in prose. But as the 166 worksheets of the poetry version in the Houghton Library at Harvard University indicate, progress was painfully slow. Dylan was beset by illness (pleurisy, he claimed) and by worse than usual financial complications, including the threat of an imminent prosecution for failing to pay his National Insurance. As a result he wrote a grovelling verse letter, couched in a vaguely romantic vein, asking for Marged Howard-Stepney’s help. Caitlin was livid when she found a draft which started, ‘My dear Marged, You told me, once, upon a time, to call on you when I was beaten down, and you would try to pick me up.’ Dylan felt forced to write his wife an appeasing letter, apologising for his ‘heart-throb lies’ to Marged. It is difficult to see what Caitlin objected to so strongly. Dylan’s tone to Marged was abasing, but Caitlin had seen that before and, although she may not have liked it, she had condoned it in the hope of financial reward. Sexual jealousy was a factor: Marged was blonde and better looking than Maggs, though the worse for drink. She had been to bed with John Davenport, and Caitlin was convinced she wanted to add Dylan to her conquests. At root, however, Caitlin disliked Marged for seeking to sideline her. Feeling left out of the conversation once at Marged’s house, Caitlin reached for a torch on the mantelpiece and crashed it down on Dylan who temporarily passed out. ‘My God!’ screamed a distraught Marged. ‘You may have killed a genius.’ But Caitlin was beyond caring, the incident only emphasising the sad depths the Thomases’ marriage had reached.
Otherwise Caitlin set herself resignedly to living in Laugharne. The place had its own manageable routine. She no longer thought of doing anything with her journal about America. Despite Helen McAlpine’s offers to type it up for her, she found it too painful, personal and best forgotten. But she was determined to resist Dylan’s lame suggestions that she join the Women’s Institute or take up gardening. She still had ten years’ active life in her, she liked to say. And to make her point, she indulged the taste for casual sexual relationships that had been a feature of her stay abroad.
If financial and matrimonial difficulties weighed heavily on Dylan, so did vexing personal issues. His recent trip had been physically exhausting (doubtless contributing to his illness on his return). It had also brought into sharp focus what he should be doing with his talents. He realised – as if Caitlin did not frequently tell him – that he was becoming more of a performer than poet. He told Charles Fry, who had been awaiting a manuscript about his travels, that as he made his way across the United States speaking to often disinterested audiences, ‘I began to feel nervous about the job in front of me, the job of writing, making things in words, by myself, again. The more I used words, the more frightened I became of using them in my own work once more. Endless booming of poems did not sour or stale words for me, but made me more conscious of my obsessive interest in them and my horror that I would never again be innocent enough to touch and use them. I came home fearful and jangled.’ There was a hint of this in a repeat interview he had given Harvey Breit for the New York Times where he had remarked on the way certain words had lost either ‘their meaning or their goodness. The word “honor” for instance. A world fit for heroes. A world fit for Neros is more like it.’ When asked why this had happened, he answered elliptically, ‘The wrong people crowed about them.’ It was a statement of disillusion about popular culture, and a call to himself to get back to the drawing board.
The root of the problem, Brinnin understood, was the poet’s ‘inner, barely spoken fear that he had already written all the poems he was going to write’. Loath to make matters worse by urging Dylan away from his work, Brinnin made little effort to contact him when in Europe with Howard Moss of The New Yorker during the summer. But, as he admitted in Dylan Thomas in America, Brinnin had his own anxieties and ambivalences. His reason told him that Dylan had had enough of America. Dylan himself made this clear in the same interview with Breit when he said that he did not expect to be back for a while: ‘I will have had the universities and they will have had me.’ But Brinnin knew that if he met Dylan, the subject would come up, and he would be hard pushed not to suggest a suitable compromise, such as helping him realise the promise of a job offer at a California university, or even, possibly, vacating the post of Director of the Poetry Center for him.
In the meantime America continued to prey on Dylan. His occasional pieces for the BBC seemed to dwell on it. In July he broadcast selections from two of his favourite American poets, Theodore Roethke and Robert Lowell. In New York Oscar Williams had begun selling copies of Dylan’s manuscripts to rich female fans as well as to magazine editors. To keep him sweet, Dylan said he also intended recording some of Williams’s own poems, along with another pot-pourri of work by more radical American poets, such as Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg. Nothing came of these ideas, though Dylan did finish his much delayed digest of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology which he sent to Douglas Cleverdon in August.
His other outstanding work for Cleverdon was The Town That Was Mad, or Llareggub, as he now referred to it. But although Botteghe Oscure had published the half-finished script in April, Dylan still struggled to complete the rest. He tried to get the BBC to put him on a salary for six weeks so that he was not tempted by other offers of work and could complete it. Realising that, from a bureaucratic viewpoint, this was not feasible, Cleverdon lobbied his financial colleagues to pay Dylan five guineas for every thousand words of the script he received. At the time he still hoped for a series, telling Dylan, ‘If only we can get Llareggub on the air, we can start the ball rolling and enable you to live on the proceeds of one script while you are writing the next.’ Such was his personal commitment that he even proposed recompensing the Corporation out of his own salary if everything fell through.
This scheme received a fillip when, in September, at the end of his European trip, Brinnin managed to get through to the Boat House on the telephone and speak to Caitlin who informed him Dylan was in London. The two men arranged to meet at Old Mother Red Cap in Camden Town, where Dylan was talking reluctantly of having to retreat to in the autumn. They drank bitter and played bar football in a leisurely manner. But despite Brinnin’s caveats, Dylan did not delay long before asking about the possibility of another trip to the United States. His main concern was what he might do: he was worried that his readings were getting stale and suggested he might extend his range of dramatic readings. But what then? At this stage Brinnin asked about the progress of Llareggub, adding that this could provide a whole new programme, which he could either read himself or have read by others. Although sceptical of Americans mastering a Welsh accent, Dylan was enthusiastic, and promised to send Brinnin a script by March with a view to a performance some time in May. There was just one problem: what to call it? Brinnin thought Llareggub would not go down well with American audiences. ‘What about Under Milk Wood?’ suggested Dylan, summoning a phrase that suggested innocence and sensuality. And so, in October, a reading performance of a work of this name was announced in the Poetry Center’s bulletin of advance information for the following May.
Shortly before meeting Brinnin in London Dylan had completed another difficult project – his verse Prologue to his Collected Poems. It was a piece of superior craftsmanship rather than poetic genius. In its cheerful evocation of the natural world around Laugharne, it dealt with themes his readers had come to expect. It had extravagant lines such as ‘Seaward the salmon, sucked sun slips’, and puns, including the use of the words ‘undie’ (in both a Gothic horror and, subliminally, a clothing sense) and ‘agape’ (meaning ‘wide open’ but alluding to the Christian tradition of selfless brotherly love). It made references, depending on one’s level of understanding, to America (‘the cities of nine/Day’s night’), jazz (the dove with her ‘blue notes’), nuclear war (‘Out of the fountainhead/Of fear, rage red, manalive’) and the troubled contemporary world (‘at poor peace’). An indication of the pains Dylan had taken – and also of the poem’s tricksiness – was its reverse rhyming scheme: in two sections of fifty-one lines, the first and last lines rhymed, the second and the next to last, and so on. Dylan told Bozman he could not say why he had ‘acrosticked’ himself in this way. If he had abandoned his earlier stated aim of throwing light on his methods of work and aims, he did write something which, in technique and in concept (with its central conceit of an ark), worked well as a Prologue. It was Dylan’s last completed poem and, unwittingly, reflected as much, from its first line ‘This day winding down now’ to its final reference to ‘God speeded summer’s end’. Dylan had few illusions about it himself, telling Charles Fry, ‘for a whole year I have been able to write nothing, nothing, nothing at all but one tangled, sentimental poem as preface to a collection of poems written years ago.’
True enough, he still had not finished a version of Llareggub for the long-suffering Princess Caetani, whose further forbearance he had to crave. However publication of Collected Poems, 1934–1952 on 10 November brought an encouraging response. Sophisticated reviewers such as Cyril Connolly in the Sunday Times, Philip Toynbee in the Observer and Stephen Spender in the Spectator competed to incorporate Dylan into the English-speaking canon. Toynbee went so far as to call him ‘the greatest living poet’. There was some sniping from the sidelines by critics associated with the Movement, such as John Wain who had no time for his ‘disastrously limited subject matter’. But the public was prepared to read what Dylan had to offer, and Dent’s first edition of 5,000 copies was soon reprinting.
Bozman had been kept waiting for the Prologue until two months before publication. Unhappy about a brief explanatory note his publisher then added, Dylan sent a replacement which included his much-quoted, if confusing remark that his poems were ‘written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn’ fool if they weren’t’. As late as 7 October he was cabling Bozman: ‘Do really think most vital use new note whatever delay.’ Despite these last-minute changes, his publisher was canny enough to encourage him to finish his two other ongoing projects for Dent, The Doctors and the Devils and a volume of stories. The filmscript required no further work (Dylan was not keen on it anyway), but the latter book called for ferreting around to discover what had already been published in Britain and what had not. (Dylan was helped in this by the appearance of a knowledgeable bibliographer, John Alexander Rolph. Certain stories still deemed unacceptable by Dent had appeared in obscure magazines, as well as in Selected Writings, issued by New Directions in the United States in 1946.) Dylan’s notes contain lists of possible stories, including some, such as ‘Bob’s My Uncle’, that he had not even written. The gist of these, as suggested by Bozman, was that Dylan should aim to recreate his Welsh childhood in the manner of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Dylan managed to write one modest story ‘The Followers’, which summoned up something of the Swansea pub life he was rediscovering with friends such as Dan Jones. One of the characters had the unWelsh name Katinka, which Dylan can only have borrowed from Peter DeVries’s American wife. But when Bozman took this a step further and suggested Dylan might consider writing an autobiography, Dylan pointed to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog and said he had neither the inclination nor the material to write another.
He was not particularly surprised when, on 16 December, his seventy-six-year-old father died. D.J. had been ill in one way or another for most of the preceding two decades. He had fought off cancer, but his final years were marred by deteriorating eyesight. Even if unable to read the notices, he would have been told of the success of Dylan’s Collected Poems and been satisfied. On the day before he died D.J. got up and went into the kitchen at Pelican where Florence (whom he mistook for his mother) was making onion soup. Later, back in bed, he resigned himself to his fate and declared, ‘It’s full circle now.’ According to Caitlin, Dylan was the only mourner when his father was cremated and buried – not, as might have been expected, in Laugharne, Carmarthen or Swansea, but alongside his brother Arthur in a plot in Pontypridd. Although close to the Crematorium, the Welsh industrial town where he had worked as a young schoolmaster was more important to D.J. than has been recognised. After the ceremony (non-religious in keeping with D.J.’s wishes), Dylan went on a three-day bender. On his return to Laugharne, Florrie said she expected he would do just the same when she died. But drink, as usual, was masking real emotions. As Caitlin realised, Dylan was more affected by his father’s death than even she had expected. In a subdued manner, he told her that D.J. had been responsible for all he had ever learnt. His pain came from realising how little he had been able to communicate with a man who had exercised such great influence over his life. But when, to ease his gout, Dylan took to using D.J.’s walking stick, she dismissed it as another of his affectations.
In recent years Dylan had been able to rely on his sister’s help at times of family crisis. But Nancy had returned with Gordon Summersby to India, from where news now came that she also was seriously ill, suffering from cancer. As usual with Dylan, publication of a book seemed to make little impact on his bank balance. Beset by a claim from the Inland Revenue for tax on his earnings in the United States in 1950, he pleaded for financial assistance from Stephen Spender, whose generous review of his Collected Poems had pleased him above all others. It was an odd move: he might have approached someone more wealthy, particularly as he was lukewarm to Spender as a man, and often disparaging about him professionally. But the review had convinced him that Spender understood what he was trying to do with his verse, and Dylan retained a romantic view of the community of poets.
He sensed a change in Spender’s direction too. The pre-war Communist fellow traveller had shaken off Auden’s influence and was shortly to become editor of the cultural magazine Encounter (though unbeknownst to him it was partially funded by the CIA). Spender was now championing not only Dylan but Edith Sitwell against the Movement, the robust and precise poets who had reacted against the Apocalypse since the war. As a result the old battle-lines in the poetic establishment between the politically engagés and the romantics were being redefined. As recently as 1949 the emotional Roy Campbell had had a famous spat with Spender, whom he regarded as a throw-back to ‘Macspaunday’ of the 1930s. Campbell had also delighted Edith Sitwell by taking on Geoffrey Grigson for different reasons. Campbell and Sitwell formed a close alliance, promoting aesthetic and religious, rather than social, values in poetry. (He was responsible for her converting to Roman Catholicism in 1955.) This was the school that Dylan naturally inclined towards. He always tried to help Campbell, partly as a friend, and partly, for the same reason he looked to Spender, because he was a fellow poet. He had reviewed Campbell’s autobiography for the Observer the previous year (a newspaper association that he hoped would lead to further commissions, but he never managed to complete one more.) In November Dylan had agreed to assist Sitwell by sharing the reading with her in a public performance of Humphrey Searle’s musical setting of her poem The Shadow of Cain. Ironically the poem, which Dylan did not like, was a protest against the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Spender, by then a regular at Sitwell’s Sesame Club gatherings, showed his colours by attending the production at the Palace Theatre in London.
In early January 1953 Dylan and Caitlin took a break from family, work and other problems and went to Swansea for a couple of days of carousing with Dan and Irene Jones. As he was often in town to record for the BBC, Dylan had got into the habit of staying with his old friends in Rosehill Terrace, Sketty. When the Jones’s young son (called Dylan, after him) was struck with epiphysis, a bone disease which affected his heel, Dylan sent a list of the best ‘bone-boys’ in London, signing off characteristically, ‘The last is best but all are top. Yours, with love, bottom.’ Dylan Jones and his young sister Cathrin became used to the detritus in their visitor’s room – apple cores, sweet packets and detective novels which the poet bought at his friend Ralph Wishart’s bookshop opposite Swansea railway station and exchanged on a three for two basis. Once when playing a cricket ‘test’ match, the older Dylan broke a window. When he came with Caitlin, the grown-ups would spice up long boozy evenings by acting out impromptu plays of a surrealistic Goon-like nature. One called Bizimuth survives in an old wire tape recording. It calls for a cast of five: Arnold, an impotent architect; Patricia, his wife; Derek, ‘a queer, Arnold’s master’; Phoebe, ‘a lesbian, pervertedly in love with Derek (maid), formerly Patricia’s mistress’; and Arthur, ‘child of all the above, of doubtful parentage, sex and inclinations’. The Warmley spirit still survived after more than two decades. On this occasion, as was their habit, Dylan and Dan went to the Odeon cinema in Sketty to see a film which Dan noted in his diary as The Silent Man. This may have been the old silent Western of that name, but it was more likely The Quiet Man, John Ford’s recent fond evocation of his Irish background.
Either name was eerily appropriate, in the light of what happened on 10 January, the day after the Thomases returned to Laugharne. In the late afternoon, the peace of the town was disturbed by the murder of a seventy-seven-year-old spinster, Elizabeth Thomas. Someone entered her cottage in Clifton Street through a small ground-floor window and bludgeoned her to death. The man arrested for her murder was George Roberts, known as Booda, one of the family of ferrymen who lived next door to the Thomases. Booda, a deaf mute, had been witnessed standing outside the victim’s house. Dylan had known the Robertses since before the war when Booda’s Uncle Jack rowed him across from below Llanybri on his first visit to Laugharne. As colourful neighbours, they were well known to Dylan’s visiting friends such as the McAlpines. Because his disability prevented him from doing much else, Booda, in particular, performed odd jobs for the Thomases, sometimes looking after their children. A well-known photograph shows him carrying Dylan across the estuary at low tide in 1940.
Such was the turbulence within the Boat House, however, that the murder was scarcely mentioned by the Thomases, even in Caitlin’s chatty letters to Helen McAlpine. Normally Dylan liked telling people about the wild habits of Laugharne’s benighted townspeople. But he was even more silent than his wife. It was as if the incident had taken place on the far side of a psychic boundary he could not cross. In the midst of his own misery, the idea of this strong deaf and dumb man resorting to violence against an innocent victim was too much to handle. Over the next few weeks, the case became a cause célèbre taken up by the national newspapers, as it moved from the local magistrates’ court in St Clears to the Glamorgan Assizes in Cardiff. On 24 March the case was thrown out, largely because a judge found it impossible to believe that the police could or should have extracted an eight-page ‘confession’ from a man who did not even speak deaf and dumb language. But at no time did Dylan stand up and declare that Booda was innocent. He preferred to ignore a matter which took place on his doorstep. Caitlin wrote a strong though ambiguous poem in which she expressed sympathy and solidarity with Booda. However she seemed to imply his guilt, blaming his family for locking him in a loveless prison from which he had been forced to break out.
Dylan coped by immersing himself in a period of frenzied, if not particularly productive, activity. On 13 January he was in London for a further performance of The Shadow of Cain, this time broadcast by the BBC from the Albert Hall, with him reading all the verse, as Edith Sitwell was in the United States. Dan Jones heard it in Swansea and thought it ‘terrible’. Afterwards Dylan attended a party in Searle’s studio in Ordnance Hill where he ‘danced wildly and stuffed sausage rolls down the ladies’ cleavages’. (Searle lived close to the McAlpines in St John’s Wood, which had temporarily taken over from Camden Town as Dylan’s centre of operations when in London.)
Next day Dylan returned to Swansea to record three ballads by Vernon Watkins for the BBC. Dan Jones bought ‘a lot of drink’, including ‘Irish’ ‘whisky’ (the two sets of quotation marks in his diary implying that this was a misnomer), and threw a small party for friends, including Watkins, the BBC producer Aneirin Talfan Davies and the jeweller Alban Leyshon. The following morning the funeral of Booda’s alleged victim took place in Laugharne. As if determined to ignore it, Dylan hit the Swansea pubs with Dan, visiting the Tenby, Red Cow and King’s Head (with a visit to at least one other hostelry and to Ralph’s bookshop in between). After a lunch-time pint or two in the Metropole, they went to the cinema. Dan noted the film they saw as The Osage Trail, though it was more likely to have been a mediocre 1952 Western called Fort Osage. They ended up at the Station Inn before Dylan caught the train home.
On 21 January Dylan was back in London, having drinks with the unlikely combination of Marged Howard-Stepney and his bibliographer John Alexander Rolph. She was on the point of buying the Boat House outright from Maggs Taylor and had apparently offered Dylan further financial help. The very next day she was discovered dead on the carpet of her Hampstead house. She had taken an overdose of sleeping pills but, since there was no obvious indication that she had done this intentionally, the coroner returned a verdict of misadventure. Any hopes Dylan might have had of her leaving him some money were dashed when it was found she had died intestate. Having to deal with a third death in a matter of weeks, Dylan overdid the degree of closeness when he said his ‘best friend in the world … [had] died of drink and drugs’. But he was upset at the loss of another intimate, in this case the potential benefactor who would have allowed him to maintain a base at the Boat House.
Her loss was all the more difficult and the whole period more bewildering because, since early December, he had known that Caitlin was again pregnant. She told friends (though not, it seems, her husband) that she was not sure who the father was. Even if the unborn baby had definitely been Dylan’s, the outcome would have been the same. Caitlin decided to have another abortion and accompanied Dylan on his latest trip to London. They stayed with Cordelia Sewell and Harry Locke who had married and were living in King Street, Hammersmith. Caitlin painted a grim picture of a back-street abortionist poking inside her (with Dylan nowhere to be seen). Her experience coloured her attitude to Dylan winning the Foyle’s Poetry Prize for 1953. She felt that he might have spent on her some of the welcome £250 which constituted the award. Instead it went on Llewelyn’s fees at Magdalen College School and presumably on her abortion.
Passing back through Swansea in the first week of February, Dylan was intending to work on a four-part series of readings from Welsh poets for the BBC. But his voice had broken down under the strain of the past couple of months and the recording had to be postponed. Dylan and Caitlin, who was still with him, quarrelled ‘bitter[ly]’. They retired to a freezing overcast Laugharne – he to bed ‘feeling more crooked than ever’; she to vegetate, ‘feeling like death’.
In Swansea again the following week to complete his recording, Dylan went with Dan Jones to the Uplands Hotel where, by chance, they met an old school friend Guido Heller, who lived on Gower. Unaware of recent developments, Heller was delighted to find Dylan’s humour apparently unchanged. Observing a terrier beside the bar, Dylan remarked, ‘I do like a dog, but that dog has got to have a really nice brown arse.’ His eyes lit up when Heller mentioned a disused rectory at Rhossili where the Thomases might live. However he became less enthusiastic when Heller reminded him there was no pub in the vicinity.
His brother-in-law Gordon Summersby in Bombay removed some pressure by promising to look after his mother financially. Florrie herself was almost unnaturally ebullient, particularly after Caitlin sent Aeronwy to stay and share her bed. Dylan’s immediate problem was his own accommodation. With a further visit to America looming (and Caitlin predictably unhappy about it), even he realised he could not leave his wife and children without a roof over their heads. When Maggs next came to Laugharne, they had a heated row and she beat a tearful retreat. Caitlin painted a dramatic picture of a terrified Ebie Williams taking their patroness to Carmarthen station, as she wailed in the back seat, her blue hair flapping wildly over her face. The upshot was that the Thomases could stay in the rat-infested Boat House, but only if they were prepared to pay £2 a week in rent.
Faced by further pressing bills, Dylan was forced to hand over responsibility for paying them to his agent. Higham was only able to do this by halting all other disbursements to Dylan who became more than ever dependent on unpredictable amounts of cash that Oscar Williams was able to generate from sales of his poetry to magazines or, in manuscript form, to wealthy ‘ardents’ in the United States. This often led to misunderstandings, as when Williams sought to sell Howard Moss at The New Yorker a copy of Dylan’s latest poem, ‘Prologue’. He also tried to assist Karl Shapiro at Poetry (Chicago) in putting together a Dylan Thomas issue. But when the magazine needed at least one new poem to make the venture worthwhile, Williams could not supply it. The only possible candidate was ‘Prologue’ and its sale to periodicals was being handled by Helen Strauss as part of the build-up to the publication of the American edition of his Collected Poems by New Directions in March.
This only emphasised Dylan’s medium-term problem that he still had not resolved the issue of his trip to the United States. Caitlin accused him of wanting to go there for ‘flattery, idleness and infidelity’. He bridled at this, saying with only the slightest hint of smirk, that he was going for ‘appreciation, dramatic work, and friends’. He tried to placate her with promises of taking her abroad to somewhere cheap and sunny on his return. (He mentioned Portugal from where Roy Campbell had extended an invitation to visit.) But Caitlin had heard such undertakings before.
His relationship with Caitlin in tatters, Dylan found a berth during March with the Lockes in Hammersmith, the latest of his homes from home in the capital. There was talk of his paying rent, but this never materialised, probably offset against the help he gave Harry in writing some cabaret sketches. In return Harry would listen to snatches of Under Milk Wood which was due for its first reading in the United States in two months’ time. Dylan carried the manuscript in a battered briefcase; sometimes tinkering with it at the local Ravenscourt Arms, sometimes staying up all night to work on it. In the middle of the month he took it with him to Cardiff where he tried out parts on another audience, the members of the University’s English Society. However the play’s first semi-official reading was marred when he managed to leave it there (inside the briefcase) and had to make strenuous long-distance efforts to retrieve it.
This project delayed Dylan’s journal about his earlier American trip for Allen Wingate, which charitably granted him a further extension. Undeterred, David Higham negotiated a contract for him to produce a book on Welsh fairy tales for the Oxford University Press. From across the Atlantic the Grove Press offered Dylan $150 to write an introduction to an edition of the Nigerian author Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard, a book whose ‘young English’ he had praised in an Observer review. Dylan promised to complete this on board ship to New York, but disappointingly he did not. Having declared his interest in emerging African writing, he might have taken the opportunity to explore the links between Welsh and Nigerian literary cultures, with their strong oral traditions and their contrasting colonial relationship with the English language.
A year earlier, after his Time interview, he had proudly told friends that the magazine was working on his profile and might contact them for reminiscences. Reporters were duly despatched but, when the article finally appeared on 6 April, the mountains of research had been whittled down and incorporated into a review of Collected Poems. Nevertheless, it spared Dylan nothing, declaring, ‘He borrows with no thought of returning what is lent, seldom shows up on time, is a trial to his friends, and a worry to his family.’ John Arlott noted how Dylan had earlier taken to buying Time and studying it minutely. When the piece was published, Dylan wryly began to read to his friends, ‘“Blubber-lipped, gooseberry-eyed Welsh poet Thomas”’. Then recalling the original reporter, he added, ‘Bloody hell, and she said she loved me.’
Within days Dylan had an opportunity to discuss the article with friends when he went to Cardiff to record his first ever television programme, ‘Home Town – Swansea’, a small-screen variation on the ‘Swansea and the Arts’ feature he had done for BBC radio in 1949. The idea was to show the town’s artistic life through the medium of Janes’s paintings. As well as Dylan and Janes, Dan Jones and Vernon Watkins also appeared, with Wynford Vaughan-Thomas as the link-man. Dylan was in Swansea a few days later to record an indulgent programme of Dan Jones’s devising about the infelicity of hexameters as a poetical form. As a result he was able to consult his Swansea solicitor and friend, Stuart Thomas, who, after taking counsel’s advice, decided to sue Time for defamation. But before a writ could be issued at the end of the month, Dylan had sailed for New York on 16 April. He did not know it at the time but, to cap a dire six months, his sister Nancy died in Bombay on the same day.