Dylan Thomas: A New Life Read online

  Coming from the land of bards, Dylan expected to be supported in this project. But bourgeois society is unsympathetic to artists, particularly those who flout its rules. Dylan retaliated as best he could. He became drunk, he borrowed money and did not return it, he stole his hosts’ clothes and vandalised their houses, he propositioned women and went to bed with as many as he could. His struggle for poetry against propriety and convention ultimately cost him his life. He should have lived in an earlier age when medieval princes cared for their poets such as Dafydd ap Gwilym.

  Dylan was sustained by his strong-willed wife Caitlin. She recognised his genius, but tired of living in his shadow, particularly when she felt threatened by other women. The story of their tempestuous marriage runs through this book. Inevitably its details are contested. Take one topic, alcohol, which played such a central and destructive role. There are tales of her in the pub, looking on angrily as Dylan wasted yet more money and work time, playing the fool for a band of well-wishers. Or was it as his friends allege? That without her fondness for whisky, he would have nursed a pint of beer through an evening and been saved from his furies.

  I wonder how I would have got on with him. We had similar backgrounds in at least one respect: our fathers were schoolmasters and we both attended schools where they taught. I would certainly have enjoyed Dylan’s company, but found his unreliability annoying. (He failed to turn up as best man for Vernon Watkins’s marriage. His friend quickly forgave him, but Watkins’s wife Gwen never quite got over it.)

  At times during my research, the catalogue of Dylan’s vices seemed to grow inexorably. Yet, even at his most exasperating, he retained an appealing innocence – the cherub-like image captured by Augustus John in his 1937 portrait. Dylan’s mentor Bert Trick was by no means alone in regarding him as a secular saint – someone almost Christ-like in his awareness of suffering and in his sensitivity to others.

  Was this another of Dylan’s poses, like the ‘conscious Woodbine’ he adopted when he became a journalist? I don’t think so. What was often described as his ‘sweet’ nature went hand in hand with a joie de vivre – one of the many Dylan paradoxes which, when given verbal form, make his poetry so rich and his life so interesting.

  At root was his artistic integrity. When the alcohol created a haze around him and the internal masks began to slip, he may have joked about his phoniness. But he could do this because he knew it was not true. Throughout his life he maintained his intense vision as he stuck heroically to his poet’s ‘craft or sullen art’. These qualities, when reflected in his verse, ensure his continued, enthusiastic following.

  Andrew Lycett

  May 2003

  List of Illustrations

  Dylan’s father, David John, known as Jack or D.J., as a young schoolmaster1

  Dylan’s mother, Florence (née Williams), as a young woman2

  Dylan as a child3

  Dylan’s mother’s family (the Williamses)2

  Dylan’s father’s family (the Thomases)4

  Dylan’s uncle Gwilym ‘Marles’ Thomas3

  Dylan and sister Nancy on the beach at Swansea4

  Dylan’s cousin Idris (Jones)2

  Dylan’s Aunt Annie (Jones)2

  In his school play, Strife, in spring 1931, with his friend Charles Fisher in the female lead4

  The boily boy, in a Little Theatre production of Hay Fever, 193420

  Dylan – studio portrait taken at Arding & Hobbs, Clapham Junction, 19343

  Dylan and his mother5

  Dylan and his first love, Pamela Hansford Johnson (three pictures)5

  American in London: Emily Holmes Coleman14

  Runia Tharp (painting by Charles Tharp)22

  Bert Trick21

  Fooling around in Laugharne: Vernon Watkins and Dylan4

  A youthful Dan Jones32

  Swansea society: Fred Janes, unknown, Vera Phillips and Charles Fisher20

  Nautical girl: Dylan’s sister Nancy23

  Caitlin Macnamara – studio portrait, 193624

  Young Caitlin25

  Caitlin – party scene25

  Dylan and Caitlin – newly married at Blashford25

  Dylan and Caitlin – on a beach in Dorset25

  Dylan, Caitlin and their new-born son, Llewelyn3

  Dylan at the Salisbury pub in Saint Martin’s Lane, London, 19416

  Dylan and Caitlin, unfinished portrait by Ralph Banbury, c.19397

  Dylan discusses his role in the BBC radio play The Careerist with Louis MacNeice, author of the piece, and Pat Griffiths, who did the sound effects8

  Dylan in London, 19419

  Family group at Blaencwm in 1942, with Dylan and Caitlin, Florrie, Llewelyn and family friend10

  Dylan and John Davenport (photographed in 1952)11

  Dylan’s surrealist-influenced painting for John Davenport’s children, late 1940s4

  Dylan with poetry producer Patric Dickinson at the BBC12

  Dylan, Helen McAlpine and Caitlin in Ireland, 194626

  Helen McAlpine and Caitlin at the Boat House, Laugharne13

  At Brown’s: Bill McAlpine, Caitlin, Ebie Williams, Mary Ellidge, Dylan, Ivy Williams, Mabley Owen (with young Aeronwy in front)13

  Domestic scene on the veranda at the Boat House: Caitlin, Aeronwy, Dolly Long, Shelagh Long14

  Margaret Taylor30

  Marged Howard Stepney31

  Dylan in Persia, 195115

  Dylan with the actors Griffith Williams and Mario Cabre on the set of the film Pandora and the Flying Dutchman at Pendine Sands, July 195010

  Dylan at work in his hut above the Boat House in Laugharne, 195316

  Dylan’s father, D.J., in typical pose – reading a newspaper at Pelican in Laugharne10

  Dylan at a Foyle’s literary luncheon in January 1953, receiving an award from Foyle’s chairman William Foyle8

  Oscar Williams’s snaps of Dylan in the United States in 1950: with Williams himself, the quizzical tourist, with Stanley Moss17

  Dylan and his American friend and promoter John Malcolm Brinnin27

  Dylan and Caitlin in the United States, 195210

  Dylan and Pearl Kazin, London, September 195114

  Liz Reitell18

  Dylan at a rehearsal of Under Milk Wood19

  Dylan at the White Horse Tavern, Greenwich Village28

  Dylan in Vancouver, April 195029

  Caitlin, Dan Jones and Fred Janes4

  Dylan on television in August 19534

  Dylan, the family man, with Caitlin, Aeronwy, Colm and dog Mably4

  Dylan at play at Vernon Watkins’s house, the Garth, on the Gower in 19514

  Dylan the genial companion10

  Dylan the consummate professional showman4

  The author and the publishers offer their thanks to the following for their kind permission to reproduce images:

  1 Swansea Grammar School Magazine/Swansea Library; 2 National Library of Wales; 3 Unknown; 4 Jeff Towns/Dylan’s Book Store Collection; 5 Lady Avebury; 6 Bill Brandt Archive; 7 Peregrine Banbury; 8 Topham Picturepoint; 9 National Portrait Gallery; 10 Reg and Eileen Evans; 11 John Deakin/Vogue/Condé Nast; 12 Hulton Picture Library; 13 Mary Ellidge; 14 University of Delaware; 15 BP; 16 John Jones Publishing Ltd.; 17 Oscar Williams/University of Indiana; 18 Lois Gridley/Andrew Lycett; 19 Rollie McKenna; 20 Swansea Little Theatre; 21 Kerith Trick; 22 Silvia Tharp; 23 Joan Rubeck; 24 Edward Marnier; 25 Nora Summers/Jeff Towns/Dylan’s Book Store Collection; 26 Harry Ransom Research Center/University of Texas; 27 G.D. Hackett/Jeff Towns/Dylan’s Book Store Collection; 28 Bunny Adler/Jeff Towns/Dylan’s Book Store Collection; 29 Geoffrey Madoc Jones; 30 Amelia Fell; 31 Molly Murray Threipland; 32 Rob and Cathy Roberts

  ONE

  SWANSEA ASPIRATIONS

  Finding the right balance between Celtic sentiment, nationalist roots and the uncompromising demands of upward mobility has always been a feature of life in mainly Anglophone Swansea. By buying a new house in Cwmdonkin Drive, an unfinished terrace tilting alarmingly down a hill i
n one of the burgeoning suburbs to the west of the town, taciturn local Grammar School master D.J. or Jack Thomas and his lively wife Florrie were following a clearly defined path away from their family roots in rural Welsh-speaking Carmarthenshire.

  The usual staging post was Swansea’s industrial centre a couple of miles east, around the clanking docks which had sprouted at the mouth of the river Tawe to service the coal-mines and belching copper and tin-plate works a little inland. This was where most of the town’s immigrants from the countryside had settled in the nineteenth century. But over the years the more respectable and ambitious among them had pushed westwards towards the salubrious Gower peninsula, colonising sea-facing ridges in haphazard fashion.

  When Florrie became pregnant in early 1914, the Thomases staked their claim to bourgeois respectability. They had been living with their eight-year-old daughter Nancy in rented accommodation in Cromwell Street, close to the Grammar School, nearer the centre of town. But a residential construction boom had followed the innovative South Wales Cottage Exhibition in Swansea in 1910. When local builder W. H. Harding advertised a neat new row of houses to the north of Walter Road, the main thoroughfare leading out of Swansea towards Gower, the family raised £350 to buy a ninety-nine-year lease on a four-bedroom, semi-detached house, with bay windows, in Cwmdonkin Drive.

  The purchase was financed with a 5 per cent mortgage, which was just about manageable on a teacher’s salary of around £120 a year. The Thomases also paid a small ground rent, but this was reduced in the first year, probably because the house was unfinished. Although the surrounding area, known as Uplands, was well developed, only one other dwelling in their street had been completed in 1914, and that was occupied by Harding himself.

  Unusually for a couple of modest means, the Thomases’ house was owned by both husband and wife – a reflection, perhaps, of the greater financial resources in her immediate family, the Williamses. Florrie’s mother Ann (or Anna) had died the previous year leaving her with, inter alia, an interest in a couple of leasehold shops in Pontypridd.

  The youngest of eight children, Florrie herself had been born and brought up in St Thomas, a polluted dockside quarter on the lower reaches of Kilvey Hill on the other side of town. Both her parents hailed from farms in the Llanstephan peninsula to the south of Carmarthen. Following one of the few assured routes out of rural poverty, her father George had joined the railways in Swansea in the 1860s. Originally a porter, he worked his way up to shipping inspector on the docks for Great Western Railway – a responsible job which involved monitoring freight in and out of the busy port. (He was even mentioned, along with the local stationmaster, in the Swansea commercial directory for 1900.)

  Not that his life was easy. He, his wife Ann and their family lived in a cramped house in Delhi Street, carved out of Lord Jersey’s Briton Ferry estate. The date of the development is clear enough, as intersecting streets have the names Inkerman and Sebastopol. This part of St Thomas was built after the Crimean War and Indian Mutiny to accommodate people who flocked to Swansea from the countryside to find work in the rapidly expanding port, following the opening of the North Dock (in 1852) and South Dock (in 1859).

  Until his death in November 1905, the ‘quiet, retiring’ George was a pillar of a poor but busy working-class community. Around him was strewn the human and physical evidence of an uncaring industrial society. Political consciousness was stirring: in 1898, a vociferous trade unionist from St Thomas called David Williams (no relation) became the first Labour candidate to win a seat on Swansea Council. George Williams’s approach to improving society was different: an old-fashioned Nonconformist, he was a deacon of the English-speaking Canaan Congregational chapel and superintendent of the local Sunday School. One daughter, Florrie’s sister Polly, played the organ there, while another Theodosia (Dosie) had married the former minister, the Reverend David Rees. Two sons, John and Bob, worked in the docks.

  In his thrifty way, George salted away some money. He managed to buy number 30, the house next door to his own at 29 Delhi Street, as well as his two shops in Pontypridd. Willie Jenkins, son of his neighbour on the other side, also worked hard, founding a leading coal shipping agency, before becoming an MP and Mayor of Swansea in the 1940s, and being awarded a knighthood. He probably helped George’s son, John, on the road to prosperity. John Williams was a stevedore, but people remembered him carrying out his own coal trading business down at the port. By the time of his death in 1911 he owned two of the plushier houses in the vicinity – one inhabited by the Reverend J. Llynfi Davies, a former minister at Canaan, to which John had demonstrated his largesse by donating a Bible and hymn-book for the pulpit.

  With residents such as the Williamses, the Jenkinses and also the Leyshons, who were teachers, St Thomas was a lively old-fashioned neighbourhood, with a proud tradition of self-help. Not surprisingly, Florrie looked there, rather than to the spruce environs of Cwmdonkin Drive, for domestic assistance when she was pregnant. Her need for someone in the house had increased following the death of her mother in July 1913. Her sister Polly knew a St Thomas girl, Addie Drew, who was ‘in service’ with the Leyshons. For six shillings a week, plus board and lodging, Florrie was able to hire this eighteen-year-old as maid-cum-nurse.

  On the morning of 27 October 1914, she sent down to St Thomas again for a trusted midwife, Gillian Jones, whose family ran the grocery shop opposite the Canaan chapel. With Dr Alban Evans, the stout Miss Jones had helped deliver the Thomases’ daughter Nancy. She cheerfully made her way by tram across town to take her place once more beside the same doctor. Some time that evening (reports differ as to the hour, though by general consent it was a few days later than expected), Florrie gave birth to a seven-pound boy in the main front bedroom of her still uncompleted house.

  *

  Now it was her husband’s turn to defer to his antecedents. This was unexpected since he, more than Florrie, seemed to have consciously kicked over all traces of his rural Welsh origins. He taught English in an established, some might say snooty, English-style Grammar School which prided itself on preparing its best boys for university. Parents at Swansea Grammar School made a decision that they wanted their sons educated in the language in which business was conducted, scientific progress debated, and continents governed. This pragmatism percolated down the social scale: to many, including both Thomases’ families, English was the language of economic advancement. They might, like many of Florrie’s relations, including her mother, continue to speak Welsh among themselves. But they were determined their children would benefit by learning English.

  This was controversial, of course. Wales had an independent history, an expressive language, and a distinguished literature – older than English, in fact. But teaching in Welsh had been banned by the Blue Books in 1847, ostensibly to counter poor standards in Welsh-speaking schools. This blatant piece of cultural colonialism had been reversed a quarter of a century later. But the damage had been done. A majority of the one and a half million strong population still spoke Welsh, but they were predominantly country folk in dead-end agricultural jobs. The emerging middle-class spoke English, and the political challenge to this linguistic hegemony would not come for another two decades.

  Nowhere was English more entrenched than in Swansea and its environs. The coastal strip beside the Bristol Channel had long offered invaders – whether Romans, Danes, Normans or Plantagenets – a foothold in the mysterious mountain fastness of Celtic Britain. By the early twentieth century a two-tier principality had developed, with North and West Wales maintaining their native culture, with its language and traditions, while the South and East had fallen, at least superficially, to the English from across the border. That is not to say there were not major discrepancies. For example, Swansea was a centre for dissenting Nonconformism (otherwise a rural phenomenon). In their chapels, the urban working classes, recently arrived from the countryside, clung to traditional values in the face of maritime cosmopolitanism. As a result Swansea was a town of
twitching curtains (with all the attendant hypocrisy) as well as of intellectual energy and commercial drive.

  Jack Thomas, the graduate of University College, Aberystwyth, embraced all this, and knew which way he was going. Slim (at this stage) and clearly vain, he wore his hair slicked like a younger member of the royal family. Later, the cow-licked was trained to cover a bald patch and when that became too obvious, he wore a hat. He was always smartly dressed, adopting the style of an English country gentleman in suits, checks at weekends and brogues. The shelves in his new study groaned under the weight of standard English texts from the Dent and Everyman libraries. His greatest delight was Shakespeare. Walking the three-quarters of a mile from Cwmdonkin Drive to the Grammar School on Mount Pleasant (a journey he made twice most days, as he liked to come home for lunch), he even invented a new identity. To the outside world he was no longer known by the familiar ‘Jack’ but by the more remote initials ‘D.J.’ which he deemed more fitting for a serious-minded schoolmaster.

  However, when he named his new suburban villa and his infant son, nature proved more powerful than nurture, and he drew directly from his Welsh background. The house later became widely known by its number, 5 Cwmdonkin Drive. However, for a dozen years after its construction, it also had a proud Welsh name, Glanrhyd. And, as for the baby, he was called, mellifluously and romantically, Dylan Marlais.

  The house looked back to Glanrhyd y Gwiail, the smallholding where his grandfather had lived in the middle of the last century in the Cothi valley, thirteen miles north of Carmarthen. Ostensibly the families of both D.J. (as he will be styled) and Florrie came from the same county, west of Swansea. But the bleak, spectacular hills of its northern reaches provided a much tougher environment than the rolling plains around Llanstephan, where seafaring and the railways helped stimulate the mainly agricultural economy.