Dylan Thomas in Wales

by JOHN MALCOLM BRINNIN

WITH my friend Bill Read from Boston, I sailed for England in July, 1951. When I phoned Dylan Thomas from London he asked us to come to Laugharne immediately, and we promised to arrive at the beginning of the next weekend. We took the rickety night sleeper of the Red Dragon from Paddington Station at midnight and got off at Cardiff just after sunrise. Through the kindness of the British poet Henry Treece, whom I had met in New York, I had been invited by Aneirin Talfan, a friend of Dylan’s who was in charge of the Welsh Home Service, to give a lecture for the BBC. Our stopover in Cardiff was for the purpose of discussing with Talfan the nature of remarks I would make.

Our train from Cardiff to Carmarthen was slow and overcrowded with bulky children in scout uniforms. We watched the landscape change abruptly from the ravaged, begrimed valleys and sooty towns of the mining country to the electric green of the estuary region where sheep lay still as stones on hillsides and little picture-book castles were perched on promontories above inlets and the mouths of rivers. Pulling into Carmarthen in a hiss of steam, we sighted Dylan, the most important and impatient man on the platform. He was handsomely turned out in new tweeds, a bright silk ascot around his neck, a cap sitting rakishly over his protruding curls. He led us out to a waiting car he had hired in Laugharne, and introduced us to his chauffeur, Billy Williams. We got in, settled back for the ride to Laugharne, went about three hundred yards, and stopped at a pub.

Some two hours and six or seven roadside pubs later, we had covered the brief thirteen miles to Laugharne. Entering the village at the beginning of the long Welsh twilight, we drove through crooked streets lined with gray stuccoed houses, caught sight of the jaunty little town clock-tower with its weathercock sitting in the wind, passed by the wooden turnstile leading to the Castle, and stopped in the seaside bottom of the village at the Cross House, the pub where Caitlin, Dylan’s wife, was to join us.

It was the hour when the little pub was just beginning to fill up with villagers and Welsh song, the first notes of which struck us as curiously unmelodic and definitely off key. Through the din of rising choruses, Caitlin arrived, bringing with her two friends, the Leishmans, who had driven over from Swansea to have dinner with us. I was quite taken aback by her Celtic blonde beauty first, and then by the puzzling combination in her manner and bearing of the primitive and the svelte. She was fashionably dressed in a wide-skirted red coat, her loosely-combed flaxen hair falling brightly over her shoulders. Struck by her sharp, exquisitely fine-boned features, her composed, seldom-changing expression, her observant yet frightened or distrustful eyes, I mentioned to Dylan that he had not prepared me for her at all. I had expected a country girl. Minutes later, I noticed Dylan whispering to Caitlin. “Didn’t I tell you?” I heard him say, and he came toward me. “Caitlin says you’re just as nice as I said you were, but she never believes anything I tell her.”

Copy right 1955, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

Someone passed around a jar of pickled cockles and we ate these with our bitters as the pub became more crowded, smoky, and boisterous. A grimy man in a cap began to sing the Welsh national anthem. This was uproariously taken up all around, and we departed from the Cross House on a loud cracked crescendo of Welsh pride.

There were, we learned, two ways of going to the Boat House, where the Thomases lived. Over Caitlin’s protest, Dylan decided that we should go, not through village streets and lanes, but by the seaside path which the tide washed over twice a day. First we had to cross a deceptively narrow rivulet. In attempting to make this in one leap, most of us came down ankle-deep in mud. Bill, carrying Caitlin, lost his footing, and they landed, sprawling, in marsh grass. We pulled them upright, but Bill’s glasses had jumped from his pocket and had already been washed out to sea. Duckfooted, we picked our way along the oozing paths leading under the walls of Laugharne Castle and got to the Boat House through an opening in the breakwater that fenced in the small back yard.

We were deep in the misty gloaming by now, so that our first sense of the house was but a partially true one. Not until daylight could we understand that it was as much given to the sea as sequestered against it. Beginning with the terrace, on which stood a few old weather-beaten chairs and a knobkneed table, there were four ascending levels. Advancing into the house by the back door, you stepped onto the second level, and found yourself at the foot of a stair well from which a dark genie’s cavern of a kitchen led off to your left, and a shining ship-cozy dining room to your right. The stairs were as steep as those on shipboard, but you could keep your balance by hanging on to a rope railing as you ascended. At the head of the stairs, on the third level, was the front door. Opening this, you would find yourself at the bottom of a wild garden through which a stony, muddy path wound steeply upward through blackthorns and wild roses to a sort of promenade paralleling a mossy wall running along the property on which the Boat House stood. Leading off from the front door to the left was the bedroom of the oldest child, Llewelyn; to the right was the sitting room with an adjoining bathroom. To reach the fourth level of the house, you had to pass through the sitting room.

While Caitlin prepared our meal downstairs, we talked in the sitting room as the radio crackled with Light Program music from London. The sitting room was informal, with a coal-burning grate over which stood a collection of china objects on the mantelpiece, and — except for a series of unframed Renoir prints Caitlin had tacked on the walls — wholly mid-Victorian in feeling. The night was warm enough to allow doors and windows to remain open; sleepy birdcalls and the wash of tidal waters filled the silences in our conversation.

Downstairs, the six of us crowded the dining table in a room so tiny that anyone could touch a wall just by reaching out. We were talkative as Caitlin served us a good dinner of baked ham and steaming greens, but most of the conversation was initiated by the Leishmans, who wanted to exchange with Dylan news of old friends they shared in Swansea, where Dylan had lived until he was nearly twenty. Caitlin had very little to say throughout the meal, and I had the fueling that she was meticulously observant but, for some reason, also suspicious. Her physical radiance, which, because she had no awareness of it, showed with a special charm, was a natural attribute; but within it, one felt, there was a spirit alternately caged and restless, quiescent and removed.

It had been a long day for Bill and me, and our pub-crawl along the road from Carmarthen had made us sleepy. When the Leishmans left soon after dinner, we were glad to retire. I was put in the sitting room, which in the nature of things was a thoroughfare for the whole Thomas family as they went to or from their bedrooms; and since Llewelyn was still away at school, Bill was given his room, which was decorated with drawings and photographs of airplanes and battleships, and had a library of boys’ adventure books. Dylan and Caitlin retired to the fourth level, where Aeron and Colm, the younger children, were already asleep in an adjoining room.

2

THE soft singsong voices of children and the dazzle of the sea in every window woke me early. The whole family, except Dylan, had passed alongside my day bed as I slept soundly; now Caitlin, out of doors on the terrace, was calling us to breakfast. As we ate fried eggs in the sweet morning air, Dylan struggled out to join us, groaning, disheveled, but in his characteristically good morning temper, and began his meal with a plate of fried kippers.

Aeron, getting ready for school in the village, came to ask her mother to comb tangles out of her hair. Physically she struck me as being very much like Dylan, with large dark eyes, a ruddy complexion, candy-brown hair golden on the edges, and with a bearing that was staunch and self-contained. In the presence of strangers she seemed not so shy as preoccupied and indifferent. Behind her came Colm, the most beautiful child I have ever seen. His head might have come winging from some Tiepolo ceiling on which bodiless cherubs gaze with a vague sweetness at some sacred event. Silent, attentive only to his mother, he showed no interest at all in the visitors, and shortly disappeared with a little hum of self-pleasure back into the house. As Caitlin worked over her daughter’s knotted locks, Aeron grimaced, screamed, fretted, and otherwise dramatized her agony; yet she refused to allow her mother to give up until every hair was smoothly in place. When, finally, the ordeal was done with, she picked up her books, shot off through the house, up the garden. In a few minutes, looking overhead to the promenade, we could see her sailing by on her bicycle.

We went to the Castle after breakfast, Dylan jauntily leading Bill and me into the village along the high sea-wall. As we walked, I noticed a large bird on one of the sand bars exposed by the receding tide. It was sitting with its black wings stretched out in what seemed a very painful position to hold for more than a moment. Dylan said it was a cormorant. I asked him why the bird was holding itself in so awkward and torturous a manner. “He thinks that’s what a cormorant should do,” said Dylan. “Nobody ever told him otherwise.”

To enter the Castle we had to pass through a turnstile where, at one time, visitors were asked to pay sixpence admission. The turnstile was untended now. Little trees and bushes reached out from the Castle at all angles. One had the feeling that the whole structure had passed through a kind of transubstantiation, that it was almost one again with the earth on which and out of which it had been constructed. Crumbling everywhere, its life running out like sand in an hourglass, invaded by flora and little fauna such as mice and owls, it seemed to be dying into time, quietly and without protest. By climbing wooden ladders placed inside one of the towers we came to a battlement. The roofs of Laugharne lay below and about us, as many-faceted and monochromatic as an early cubist painting. In the continually restless wash of the estuary beyond, snowstorms of white birds lighted on sand bars, then rose at some invisible signal, wheeled about, and snowed down suddenly somewhere else. The morning had begun to turn damp and gray; we were glad to scramble down from the crenelated heights and follow Dylan to Browns Hotel, where at last the pub was legally open.

Ivy Williams, the innkeeper of whom Dylan had often spoken and to whom I knew he was deeply attached, greeted us pleasantly but noncommittally and served us each a glass of pale ale. A motherly, girlish-faced woman with large intelligent eyes, she smoked cigarettes continually in a long black holder as she gossiped with Dylan. At the same time, she kept disappearing to watch over pots and pans on the stove, coming back to tend bar as other villagers came in for late-morning pick-me-ups.

Dylan’s greetings to the villagers and theirs to him were made in mumblings and monosyllables — a sort of respectful, familiar, yet at the same time distant exchange. They knew, of course, that he had business in the big world, that he had been to America, and that he was regarded importantly in London; and most of them had probably heard him on the radio or seen him on television. Yet nothing in their manner toward him suggested that they were particularly impressed, or even that they understood just what Dylan’s distinction was. For his part, and without effort, Dylan’s manner in his own village seemed to be directed toward looking and acting as much like everyone else as possible.

3

LEAVING Bill and me in the pub to chat with Ivy, Dylan went out to make arrangements for an automobile excursion he wanted us to take in the afternoon, and to call on his father and mother, who lived just across the street from the hotel. The day had become even more gray and cold, with a seachill that seemed to get through one’s clothing and touch the skin. When we returned to the Boat House for lunch, Caitlin was not at all enthusiastic about Dylan’s plans, saying that she would be happy to have the three of us go along without her. But she gave in to our pleadings that she join us, and we all walked back to the village. Dylan had again engaged Billy Williams and his old Buick, which served as a community taxi. We started out by driving northward to St. Clears, then westward, bound for the very tip of southwestern Wales.

Caitlin, seated between me and Bill in the back seat while Dylan chatted with Billy Williams in the front seat, began in a low voice to ask me about Dylan’s amorous adventures in America. Surprised and uncomfortable, I was able to offer only a few vague answers as I tried to find some way of changing the subject. But my evasiveness displeased Caitlin and she did not hesitate to say so. When I could see that she expected me to share with her confidences I had had from Dylan, I was nonplused, yet hopeful of finding some means to save our being alienated so early in a relationship. I then tried to answer some of her questions but, with Dylan’s head barely three feet away from ours, was hard put to say anything that would satisfy her, or to find a way to postpone so inflammatory a discussion.

Because of the Welsh practice of lining roads with high wind-breaking hedges, there was little in the way of landscape to see as we drove along. But eventually we came to an open space just a few hundred yards from the sea, and stopped before a barren little pub facing a rather desolate stretch of pebbled beach over which cold waves threw icy-looking dashes of spray. There was not a bather in sight, but Caitlin announced that she, at least, was going in for a swim. While the rest of us adjourned to the pub, she changed into swimming clothes and, as we watched from the doorway, advanced without hesitation toward the black waters and splashed in. Huddling about the bar like orphans of the storm, we tried to warm ourselves with talk and drink until Caitlin returned, shaking water out of her hair and saying she was wonderfully refreshed. Shivery, we had another drink, climbed into the car, and moved on. But now there were further embarrassing questions and further congenial though ineffective attempts to evade or postpone them, to the point where I could sense that my lack of coöperation was setting up a tension with which I was quite unprepared to deal.

Caitlin had finally become silent, and perhaps a little morose, by the time we got to our destination, the village of St. David’s Head. There we left the car to inspect the ruins of a monastery that once marked the farthest western point of medieval Christianity in Britain, and to visit the great crudestone cathedral. We wandered in and out of huge galleries and took photographs on a greensward enclosed by great lichen-covered walls. The happiest result of our visit was a group portrait of Dylan, Caitlin, Bill, and Billy Williams. In spite of the rather low-keyed enthusiasm with which we had started on the trip, and against the low-voiced conversations and mounting tensions that dogged us, the group in the picture somehow looks beatific, almost Biblical.

Back in the car, Caitlin suggested that we return to Laugharne. Dylan would not hear of this, and appealed to Bill and me. We said we would be happy to do whatever they decided; but we both already knew that no one would be happy no matter what anyone decided. We sat in silence at a crossroads, the wind singing mournfully about our impasse. Then, with a shrug of resignation, Caitlin gave in, and Dylan directed Billy to drive us to a place where we might have tea. This turned out to be a stark white wooden house overlooking marshes on the outskirts of St. David’s. As we waited, in magnified unhappy silence, for our skimpy servings of toast and tea, Caitlin remained wordless, her mind closed against the company and far away. Everyone was uncomfortable, restive, and no one could find any means of alleviating the worsening situation. Tea warmed our spirits but little, and when we returned to the car I knew that everyone fell as I did: that the trip had already shown itself to be misconceived, ill-assorted, and interminable. Again Caitlin suggested that we go home. I hoped, desperately now, that Dylan would agree, but he did not. He had in mind a place beyond Fishguard where we could have “a magnificent lobster dinner.”

4

HEADING northward, ever further away from home, we were now a thoroughly disconsolate party. The pub visits Dylan insisted we make every few miles of the way seemed only to deepen our despair. We would straggle back to the car, prisoners of one another, making fizzling little attempts by a word or a gesture to see ourselves in the absurdity of the predicament. But finally, as we rode along in utter silence, we rounded a hilltop to sight Fishguard harbor through a mist so heavy that if seemed permanent, then drove on toward what Dylan described as a famous old cove once used by smugglers and pirates. There, just a few yards from the sea, was a somewhat ramshackle clapboard inn snugly sequestered between cliffs. We were the only patrons. The flustered proprietress, who obviously expected no one on this miserable evening, greeted us with notably more anxiety than pleasure. The promise of a lobster dinner which Dylan had used in goading us onward was, it turned out, rather untenable. The proprietress said she had one lobster — a fairly good-sized one, to be sure — and that she thought she could “make it do.” The thought of searching for another place to have a meal in which no one was interested led us to accept her offer without hesitation.

We were soon settled at a well-appointed candlelit table. Barley soup came first, followed by a sort of salad within the depths of which we might search daintily for infinitesimal fragments of lobster. No one had enough poise to make a joke of this pathetic process, and we picked away in benumbed silence. Then Caitlin ordered our waiter to bring a bottle of white wine. For some reason, Dylan vehemently objected to this. A scene ensued; imprecations and sulky threats were exchanged as the wide-eyed waiter brought in the order and scurried back to the kitchen. Caitlin poured herself a glass, and the rest of us meekly followed her example. Candles flickered in the appalling quiet as, finally, we sipped tea and picked hungrily at a few gutted lobster shells.

As we were getting into the car to begin the long homeward trip, Caitlin ordered Dylan to sit between Bill and me while she joined Billy Williams in the front seat. We drove off, more bogged in hopelessness than ever. Dylan willed himself into sleep almost at once. It was dark now, and with Dylan suddenly unconscious our sense of being encased in a dilemma became even more acute. Caitlin began speaking to Billy and we heard her say loudly that she was anxious to get home, where she was expecting a visit from some “real friends, not Americanos.” Other remarks, only parts of which I could overhear, carried the same resentment. Bill and I remained silent.

At last, but only after having been lost in fog several times at crossroads and having been misdirected by Welsh-speaking natives, we came upon the road to Laugharne and got back to the Boat House about eleven o’clock.

Dylan, urged from sleep, went directly and unspeaking to his room. I was waiting for everyone else to retire before going to bed in the sitting room when Caitlin came up the stairs, brushed by me swiftly, and turned as she reached the entrance to the third floor. “Now you can see what I mean,” she said angrily. “America is out!” Without a further word, she left. Bewildered, I conferred with Bill. We would have to leave, I felt, and at once. Consulting a railroad timetable, we found there was no train from Carmarthen before daylight. With Laugharne already bedded down for the night and “bible-black,” we knew there was no exit.

We tried to come upon some hidden reason for Caitlin’s displeasure and to arrive, with very little to base judgment upon, at some objective sense of our situation. Unless she regarded my refusal to relate details of Dylan’s relations with women in America as a betrayal, we could find nothing overt that might account for her anger or explain her rudeness. We decided, tentatively, that we were but incidental victims of some old grudge, some old unresolved irritation between her and Dylan, or between her and Dylan’s friends. Perhaps, we thought, but with no reason or faith, everything would be different in the morning. Perhaps the little storm our presence had brought on had really nothing to do with us. But we knew we were grasping at possibilities and feeding on cold comfort. We went to bed uneasy, unhappy, and wondering what to do.

5

IN THE morning Caitlin was as sunny and mild as the weather. She greeted us pleasantly, had big cups of tea sent up while we were dressing, and later sat down with us for breakfast on the terrace. It was as if the dreadful day before had never existed. As we sat in sunny ambience, throwing crusts of bread to expectant swans that floated by under the breakwater, we allowed the bad dream to pass. We would take the new day as it came. Soon Dylan arrived with a shining morning face that showed no sign of the stress which had, just nine or ten hours before, sent him into unconsciousness. When the meal was over, he guided Bill and me into the village to visit his parents in their little gray house, The Pelican, on the main street just a few steps from the post office.

His mother — short, voluble, with frizzy white hair — fussed over us and sat us down to a second breakfast of toast, tea, and a hard-boiled egg in a white china cup. His father, a lean, reserved man dressed with careful and quiet elegance, sat by the grate fire, an afghan over his shoulders. As Mrs. Thomas kept chatting inconsequentials, clucking about the kitchen sitting room, one had the feeling that Dylan’s father was content merely to observe this gathering of his son and his son’s friends. Dylan fretted in some embarrassment under his mother’s overattentiveness, yet there was obviously a bond between them that nothing could embarrass. But if he was unquestionably the apple of his mother’s eye, in his father’s eye he was still an object of a curiously dispassionate interest. There was something respectful yet unmistakably distant and wary between the two men, something that made for a mutual lack of ease. His mother’s busy solicitude, one felt, was an old familiar means of denying or ignoring this.

When she took Bill into her kitchen garden to help her dig some vegetables to bring to Caitlin, I had a rambling chat with Dylan and his father about an American’s impressions of Wales and then about America and some of Dylan’s adventures there. But no real conversation developed — mainly, I thought, because none of us, and especially Dylan, could break through the formal father-andson relationship to say freely and unguardedly just what he meant.

David Thomas had been a schoolmaster, I knew, and I had learned from Dylan that much of his own early education had been more the result of his father’s tutelage than of formal schooling. Not until after Dylan’s death did I learn that his father had had an early unrealized ambition as a poet. This revelation explained somewhat my feeling that Dylan’s father looked upon him with as much curiosity as with pride. The poet manqué had brought the poet réussi.

When Bill came back into the kitchen with a basket of beets and carrots and tomatoes, we said good-by and were ushered through the long dark middle hallway that conventionally divides Welsh houses.

Dylan now wanted to go to the pub at Browns Hotel, but since neither Bill nor I was ready to begin another day’s drinking, we all three parted to go separate ways. Bill went off through the village to climb the hedgerowed slopes of Sir John’s Hill; I went back to the Boat House and into Dylan’s studio to make a first draft of my radio script.

The studio, which Dylan called “the shack,” was painted green, perched above the house and about a hundred yards from it on the stone-walled path leading into the village. While it was no more than ten feet long and seven feet wide, large windows on two sides brought in sunlight and sea light, saving it from seeming cramped. One window looked upon a watery vista — shallows between long sloping hills — terminating in the Irish Sea; the other looked out across the narrow part of Carmarthen Bay toward Sir John’s Hill. The interior, originally whitewashed, was now a grimy, weatherand insectspeckled gray. On the walls were tacked-up photographs which wet weather had curled or faded or mottled with mildew. Topmost in the room, over the small wooden table that served Dylan for a desk, was a handsome portrait of Walt Whitman. Other photographs showed Marianne Moore in a big black hat, a youthful version of Edith Sitwell, a study of a Mexican mother and child by Cartier-Bresson.

As a whole, the studio was a rat’s nest of chewed, rolled, and discarded papers — piles of manuscripts, unanswered (often unopened) letters, empty cigarette packages, small stacks of literary periodicals, tradesmen’s bills, and publishers’ brochures. Snatches of reworked poetry lay under empty beer bottles. Volumes of poetry moldered where they had been placed months, years, before. Besides its single table and two straight-backed chairs, the studio contained three or four half-filled cartons of books and a small black coal-burning stove.

I cleared a small space for myself in the litter of the table top, opened a window to let out wasps that had suddenly come to life, and sat down to make notes for my broadcast.

A few hours later Dylan and Bill came to take me to the Cross House, where we drank for a while as the customary Saturday night song-fest raged about us. We bore it until our eardrums ached, then said good-nights and walked by the village route back to the Boat House.

Sitting down to dinner some time after ten, we came around to discussing weird murder cases and our various notions of proper punishment for convicted sex fiends. Dylan zestfully told of a man who had disemboweled a young virgin, arranged her entrails in decorative patterns, and written her name in her own blood on a windowpane. Caitlin felt that this was a case where the murderer should receive the same treatment. Dylan felt that all sex fiends should be shot.

There seemed to be no disagreement in their points of view, but as the gruesome conversation progressed I became aware of a rising tension between them and of a tendency in Caitlin to ridicule any idea that Dylan might express. Holding an empty matchbox in his hands, Dylan suddenly flipped this in Caitlin’s direction and it landed on her shoulder. She picked up the matchbox and threw it in his face. Dylan said that that was unfair— the matchbox had just slipped from his fingers. Before he could finish His sentence, Caitlin, with one fierce grip, reached for his hair and pulled him out of his seat and onto the floor. The first thing Bill and I knew, we were in the midst of a melee. Chairs got knocked over, dishes were pushed from the table as, blow for blow, the combatants wrestled toward the kitchen. Gaping, we sat benumbed over our cooling food and listened helplessly to sounds of skirmish coming from the next room. With a sudden sharp cry, Dylan broke away and we could hear him running up the stairs. In a moment Caitlin came back to the dining room and, towering over us, her eyes flashing, her face steely, said, “Thank you for helping a lady in distress!”

Stunned by the episode, we tried limply to explain that we felt we could not interfere, and attempted otherwise to make some semblance of conversation that might lead us out of nightmare. We were successful in this, oddly enough, and a long discussion of Dylan’s and Caitlin’s married life ensued. Listening, not without genuine sympathy, to her litany of Dylan’s inadequacies as a father, husband, and provider, we had come upon the one means of gaining Caitlin’s interest and, temporarily at least, her acceptance. In our shaken state, Bill and I could contribute little but monosyllables of agreement and, we hoped, understanding. But our small response seemed no discouragement to Caitlin, and she poured out her grievances for more than an hour.

During this monologue I found the telling clue to her distrust and dislike of me. “Dylan always speaks of you as his closest friend in America,” she said, “but all you do is flatter him and make him feel like some sort of god. When he came back from America his head was bigger than ever. They ought to know what he’s really like in America — all those fool women who chase after him while I’m left here to rot in this bloody bog with three screaming children and no money to pay the bills he leaves behind him. He won’t go to America again without me — and I shan’t go, so that’s that.”

She left us to our own devices then. Once more, confounded and dismayed at the unhappiness we had seen so blatantly expressed, we went to bed. The house where lived “the plagued groom and bride who have brought forth the urchin grief,”the house which Dylan had described as “a sea-shaken house on a breakneck of rocks,” was, we knew, shaken by something more violent and no less threatening than the sea.

6

WHILE we had now become used to the incredible, we were still incredulous when, once more, the morning revealed everything in order, everyone calm, soft-spoken, and congenially at ease. We played games with Aeron and Colm after breakfast, lazily fingered through the Sunday newspapers from London, and listened vaguely to religious music on the radio.

As Bill took his camera and was about to set off on a tour of the village, Dylan asked me if I would mind coming to the studio to hear some of his new poems. Taking two bottles of ale with us, we climbed through the brambled garden, walked along the upper wall from which we could see the great esses the tide left in the estuary, the “scummed, starfish sands/With their fishwife cross/Gulls, pipers, cockles, and sails,” and went into the studio.

He first read “In the White Giant’s Thigh,” then “Poem for His Birthday.” His reading in private, while naturally less loud, was fully as rich and dramatic as in public. His professional attitude toward each poem as a text to be communicated dissolved any feeling of embarrassment that might have touched so intimate a performance. Then he scrawled the inscription, “To dear John from cheap Dylan, with love,” across the bottom of a typewritten copy of a poem he was going to use as a prologue to the new English and American editions of his Collected Poems, and asked me to read it. But first he would have to point out the rhyme scheme, which he did not think anyone would notice without careful study. The first line of the first section rhymed with the last line of the second section — with one hundred other lines between; the second line of the first section with the second last line of the second section, and so on until lines fifty-one and fifty-two formed the only rhymed couplet in the poem. When I expressed amazement at the intricacy of this scheme, Dylan said, “As a matter of fact, the poem began as a letter to you.”

“What happened to the letter?” I asked.

“I just kept the idea and some of the images and went on with the poem instead.”

He had finished another poem, still untitled, which he had written for his father, who, he felt, had but little time to live. It began, “Do not go gentle into that good night.” I asked him if he had shown the poem to his father. He had not, he said, but hoped he would have the courage to read it to him very soon. What he most wanted me to hear were fragments of a “kind of play for voices” he was thinking about. This would be called “Llareggub Hill” and was to be a dramatic poem on the life of a Welsh village very much like Laugharne. It would have no conventional dramatic continuity, but would consist of an interweaving of many voices, with the strong central voice of a narrator to supply the unities of time, place, and situation. He then read me the section that revealed Captain Cat speaking the dreams that take him back to a life at sea. This was one of the fragments that were to be expanded into his last work, Under Milk Wood.

7

WE BEGAN to speak of working methods. I had noticed that on many of his manuscripts Dylan would add a single word or a phrase, or a new punctuation, then recopy the whole poem in longhand. When another addition or revision was made, no matter how minor, he would copy the whole poem again. When I asked him about this laborious repetition, he showed me his drafts of “Fern Hill.” There were more than two hundred separate and distinct versions of the poem. It was, he explained, his way of “keeping the poem together,” so that its process of growth was like that of an organism. He began almost every poem merely with some phrase he had carried about in his head. If this phrase was right—which is to say, if it was resonant or pregnant—it would suggest another phrase. In this way a poem would “accumulate.” Once “given” a word or a phrase or a line, he could often envision it or “locate” it within a pattern of other words or phrases or lines that, not given, had yet to be discovered.

He had picked up somewhere a notion that he liked: poems are hypothetical and theorematic. In this view the hypothesis of a poem would be the emotional experience, the instant of vision or insight, the source of radiance, the minute focal point of impulse and impression. While these make up what is commonly called inspiration, poetic logic should prove the validity of the ephemeral moments they describe. To look at a new poem, then, is to ask: How successfully does it demonstrate its hypothesis ?

About the reading of poetry, he felt that only perusal of the printed page — or perhaps the interior critical monologue, or private discussion — could give to each poem the full concentrated time that any poem is justified in asking for the assessment of its success or failure to demonstrate its own hypothesis. In public, only the poem itself can be presented, and there its effect depends upon the immediacy with which the hypothesis, the moment and motive of inspiration, can affect the reader through his ear. In other words, and as he was later fond of saying, the printed page is the place in which to examine the works of a poem, the platform the place in which to give the poem the works.

There was one line in “Fern Hill,” he said, that embarrassed him. He felt he should not have allowed the poem to be published until the line had been excised in favor of a better one. But months of thinking how to change it had led nowhere. When I asked him what the offending line was, he gave me a copy of the poem and asked me to pick it out. I could not. Then he pointed to the passage,

and said with a sneer, “‘Ran my heedless ways’ — that’s bloody bad ! ”

Our talk rambled then, but I remember clearly Dylan’s saying that now, finally, he was determined to write only “happy poems.” But that was a great trouble— it was so very much more difficult to write a poem happy in sentiment, rather than tragic, and still manage to have it come out believable and good. He was absorbed in this notion, I could see, but also troubled. Implicitly, he was saying what many of his poems had already said: that his wisdom was the perception of joy — an insight so comprehensive and instantaneous that the meaning of joy is defined not as a relative state of human emotion but as another name for life itself. Yet there was little joy in his face as he thumbed hesitantly through a clutter of unfinished manuscripts, and little conviction in his voice as he spoke of his writing plans. At last, as if to conclude our visit, he said that his aim now was to produce “ poems in praise of God’s world by a man who doesn’t believe in God.”

Stepping out of the shack into twilight, we went into the village to the hotel to drink bitters in Ivy Williams’s kitchen and play nap with her and two villagers who dropped by. This was a card game; our stakes were big black pennies; a winning hand seldom resulted in a gain of more than sixpence. When we had played for about an hour, Caitlin came in. She had been across the street to visit Dylan’s parents, who, she reported to the company, were outspoken in praise of “Dylan’s nice American friends.” They had naturally expected that Americans would be coarse and loud, she said, but felt that these two were “gentlemen.” Still uneasy in the circumstances of the weekend, I was more pleased that Caitlin should want to repeat the sentiment than by the sentiment itself.

Dylan was reluctant to leave the card table, but after some urging Caitlin got him to leave the game and start for home. It was late evening, calm and starlit, when we reached the Boat House. Dylan said he was too sleepy for supper. Since Bill and I were departing early in the morning, we said good-by to him with some mention of a possible meeting a few days hence in London or a few weeks hence in Paris. After shaking hands with us in the sad-eyed, apologetic, winning way with which I was now familiar, he went off to bed. Sitting down to our final meal with Caitlin, Bill and I were apprehensive, but we need not have been. We soon talked at ease in the blue glow of the grate fire; Caitlin even spoke of coming to America, as if that were what she most had had in mind all along.

Next morning we were up at five. Caitlin gave us toast and tea, and in a warm farewell that seemed to cancel all our mutual misgivings, we carried our bags up the stony garden path and waved to her from the high gate, A hired car was waiting for us at the end of the sea-wall. We drove through shining morning mist to Carmarthen and boarded a train for London.

Mr. Brinnin’s manuscript was, of course, submitted to Mrs. Dylan Thomas; in consenting to its publication she asked that the following statement be included: —

There is no such thing as the one true Dylan Thomas, nor anybody else; but, necessarily, even less so with a kaleidoscopic-faced poet. He is conditioned by the rehearsing need to withhold from the light his private performance till it is ready for showing. I am not quarreling with Brinnin’s presentation of Dylan. It is impossible to hit back at a man who does not know that he is hitting you, and who is far too cautious of the laws of libel to say plainly what can only be read between the lines. I want only to make clear that an intensive handful of months, at divided intervals, over a comparatively very short number of years do not, however accurately recorded and with whatever honest intentions, do justice to the circumference of the subject. And, though I have tried very hard to keep off this painfully tricky, already overwritten subject, I think it is only fair, after reading Brinnin’s one-sided, limited to Dylan’s public and falsely publicized life version, that I should try to show what went before. To give some dawning idea of the long-growing years, with none of Brinnin’s skill but with a longer and, I hope, deeper understanding of the changing man hidden inside the poet. I feel that I should (that it is an Augean duty, pushed on to me against my will) do my best, with a still hot shovel of overloaded feeling and a lot of windily winding words, to vindicate first Dylan, then me, then both of us together.

And hope that the truth that I am trying blindly to say, to find out for myself, will come out through all the literary muddles and faultily not detached attitude. And I hope it is a better truth than Brinnin’s.