Cockles, Brambles, and Fern Hill: Dylan Thomas in Wales

by JOHN MALCOLM BRINNIN

1

ON SEPTEMBER 5, 1953, I joined my friend Rollic McKenna, the photographer, in London. Dylan and Caitlin Thomas had been guests of hers during the first part of their recent American visit, and now we were to be their guests over a long weekend. We set out in the late morning in a hired Hillman-Minx, drove leisurely across the western Midlands, and arrived in Laugharne, the village where the Thomases lived, in the long marine twilight. After parking the car at the end of the path by the sea wall, we loaded ourselves with photographic equipment, walked to the Boat House, and picked our way carefully down the stony steps of the ragged garden. We could hear scratchy music on the radio as we approached, and the sounds of children’s voices with which the house was always humming. Surrounded by her brood, Caitlin opened the door to welcome us with the characteristic momentary shyness that always made her expression beautiful. Dylan was not at home, she said, but was awaiting our arrival at Browns Hotel; we would all go there for a drink before returning to dinner at the Boat House.

Dylan was in the midst of a card game when we got to the smoky, dimly lighted little pub. A Woodbine hung tremulously from his lips, and his brow was furrowed as he sat absorbed in his grimy handful of cards. He left his game to greet us and we sat down at a table under a naked light bulb.

Dylan and Caitlin had recently been up to London for a holiday, and tales of their visit set us off on gossip about people whom we knew there and in New York, and we all got merry and outrageously unkind. Two or three drinks later, having lightheartedly tried, condemned, and dragged to the guillotine a number of inflated literary reputations, we were on our way through the dark sea-heavy evening toward the Boat House.

Someone had made Caitlin the gift of a brace of wild duck. To ensure its proper preparation she had consulted a French cookbook. There she had been warned that the one offense against wild duck was overcooking; it was a delicacy best eaten as close to its natural state as possible. As we took our places at table in the close-quartered little dining room, where coals hissed in the grate against the chill evening, we were all prepared for a festive meal. Since Dylan was inefficient in the art of carving, Caitlin asked me to serve the duck. When the platter was set down before me, I merely touched one of the ducks with a carving knife when dark wine-colored blood spurted out.

“What a bloody mess you’ve got there,” Dylan said to Caitlin.

“I cooked it just the way the bloody book said,” she answered.

Llewelyn, the only one of the children privileged to dine with the adults, began to make faces from his corner of the table. Dylan told him to stop or he would be sent upstairs to bed. When everyone had been served a clammy slice or a dripping leg, we all began to nibble courageously.

“It’s delicious,” Caitlin announced through the laborious silence, “nothing wrong with this duck at all.”

“I can only eat it if I keep my eyes closed,” said Llewelyn, and made a series of disgusting noises.

“For God’s sweet sake,” said Dylan, “take that bloody thing off the table.”

Caitlin removed the offensive carcass and we filled up, finally, on vegetable greens and milk and gooseberry tart.

There had been a murder in the neighborhood of the Boat House a few months previous, and the terror of it was still on the village. When I was about to escort Rollie to Dylan’s mother’s house, where she was to stay, both Dylan and Caitlin announced that we could by no means go there alone. I protested, but Dylan insisted that he accompany us, particularly since I would be returning alone. Rollie and Dylan and I walked hand in hand through the Stygian lanes, brushing against overhanging brambles that switched our eyes, tripping over stones, and scaring ourselves further with fearsomely detailed horror stories as we went.

On our walk Dylan spoke of his unhappy restlessness through the long summer in Laugharne, and of his desperate attempts to remain anchored to his writing table long enough to complete new poems. There was one new work that he thought might “go.” This was a companion piece to “Do not go gentle into that good night.” While it started off in the same tone, it then changed abruptly toward a more syncopated use of meter and a looser stanzaic organization. As we inched our way through roots and brambles, he recited the first lines: —

When we had come through the dangerous darkness unscathed, I said good night and went to bed in Llewelyn’s room, to read for a little while in a boy’s book of adventure, and to wonder, as my thoughts went back to my previous visit to the Boat House, what storms were brewing, what crises to prepare for.

2

AFTER a long deep sleep I woke up in the reflected dazzle of the estuary. At the side of my bed stood silent little Colm with his agate-blue eyes and golden curls, staring at me as if I were Gulliver asleep. To my perhaps overcheerful “Good morning,” I got no reply but a large-eyed slow examination of my face. As I continued to make one-sided conversation while I dressed, Colm studied me with distant judicial interest, then suddenly went babbling away with the dog, Mably, who had just come in with his lazy tail wagging expectantly. I went to breakfast on the terrace with Dylan and Caitlin, ate kippers and toast with strong tea, and watched the skitterish movements of hundreds of sea birds wheeling through the sea-rinsed morning.

For months now nothing had been said about Dylan’s coming to America again, and as we lingered over the sunny breakfast table, I asked Dylan what his plans were. He said he was undecided. There were so many perplexing matters to take into account. An offer which he had received to come to a conference in Pittsburgh had apparently been ill-timed or mistaken, since he had heard nothing further from the sponsoring organization. But the most disheartening news of all had come from Stravinsky; he had written that dealings with Boston University for the commission of a new opera had fallen through and that, for the present at least, no sponsorship would be forthcoming from that quarter. Meanwhile Stravinsky wanted very much to go on with the ideas he had discussed with Dylan on his previous visit to Boston, and hoped he was still planning to come to Hollywood in the fall. Dylan’s pleasure in the opportunity of working with Stravinsky was as strong as it had been on the day they met. But the prospect of having to bring this about by his own finances made the possibility remote.

One other strong temptation from America was a letter sent by a lecture bureau, offering Dylan a transcontinental tour at fees astronomically far above those I had been able to get for him on the purely academic circuit. If he accepted this offer, his audiences would be of quite another stripe — mostly women’s clubs and “culture series” appearances. While this aspect of the offer was little inducement, the fat fees he might command as a “personality” were a genuine allure. At home there was still another good possibility — any day, he said, he might be given a high-salaried contract to work on the script of a new movie in London, a movie about the voyages of Ulysses. Against these developments, there was his determination to get on with his novel, Adventures in the Skin Trade.

When Dylan asked me what I thought he should do, I told him I felt he should try to stay in Laugharne by whatever devices, and find his way back toward a working routine, adding that I was certain he knew that this would be best for him. And of course Dylan did know in his heart that his energies would be more properly directed toward remaining where he was, but he was in the same sort of mood of which he had written: —

While he could easily admit the truth of his better instincts and could acknowledge that the rigorous patience they demanded was essential, he had no confidence that he could force himself to remain at home to work, and no assurance of livelihood that would make such a decision tenable. To earn money, he would have to spend a great deal of time in London. There he would have to work even harder and with less certainty of income than in America.

While we discussed these matters under high white clouds, in the soft warmth of late morning, a distant hiss and rumble resounded through the sea wind, and the whole house suddenly went into a little lit of trembling. Dylan cursed. “I can’t stay in this place!” He explained that the Government had recently established a testing range for guided missiles within earshot of Laugharne. As I soon learned, these whooshings and grumblings, and the sort of minor earthquake that shook the house after them, were apt to punctuate any time of the day. Dylan said he could never get used to them. “I know I won’t do a bloody thing between now and Christmas. We’ve got to find another place to live, away from here — away from London, too, somewhere on the sea, perhaps on the east coast.”

3

THOUGH these outbursts, I was aware of a selfdeceptive ambiguity in Dylan 1 had frequently encountered before. It was not dishonesty, but a confusion of reasons overlying a simplicity of sentiment. One thing was clear. He did not want to condemn himself to months at home, even though staying at home would be the only way in which he could ever meet and overcome the challenge that now, beyond all other known or unknown forces, dominated his existence. While he perhaps did not know the way toward his creative salvation, he did know ways in which creative exercise could be postponed or superseded. It was sadly apparent that Dylan’s energies were directed not toward fighting through to freedom. The draining forces of guilt, and indolence, and onerous little commercial assignments had brought him into a state of morlal anxiety. Desperation had so muddied his sense that even his most intimate relations were affected, He could not admit to himself, much less to Caitlin or to me, that he wanted above all to come back to America, and that he would come back to America. Attempting to give himself the certificate of reason, he seized on anything — financial worries, guided missiles, or invitations from Hollywood — that might support his assertion that he could no longer exist productively in Laugharne. I did not want to give in to his attempts to make his reasoning seem logical, even though I could see that his heart was set on getting away. But at last I did give in — and so abetted his final effort to escape from himself.

If America were what he wanted most, these would be the justifying reasons: first, collaboration with Stravinsky on an opera might very well lead to the bettering of his yearly income for a long time; second, signing for a tour under the auspices of a high-powered lecture agency would mean that in ensuing seasons he could come to America and, in very short periods of time, earn enough money to support himself through the whole year. If, as he thought, lack of money was the main factor that kept him from working, the thing to do was to get money. Nothing else, to my mind, could justify another trip to America. Dylan agreed. But, he asked, how was he to get to America and support himself there, and his family in Wales, while he was working with Stravinsky? I answered that I could, of course, offer him readings at the Poetry Center, not only of his poems, but further productions of Under Milk Wood. If the fees involved were not sufficient to underwrite his whole visit, I would reach out to get him engagements involving a moderate amount of travel along the eastern seaboard.

Caitlin remained with us most of the time through this discussion. When, every now and then, she left to attend to household duties, Dylan would call her back — to listen to some new idea of his, or to have me repeat some notion of mine. I had the feeling that Dylan wanted to convince her that we were not engaged in any sort of complicity that might exclude or displease her. From the beginning of our discussions she had been outspoken in her reluctance to be left alone in Laugharne, no matter how brief Dylan’s contemplated absence might be. When America entered the picture as a real possibility, they discussed the feasibility of her living in London with Colm while Dylan would be in California. Since both Llewelyn and Aeron would be off to school in late September, their welfare would not bring new problems. But Caitlin was not happy in this prospect and gave Dylan no encouragement to entertain it further. I offered the suggestion that, if they would not mind traveling inexpensively across the Atlantic, they might be able to stretch things so that there would be just enough money to take care of them both. Dylan seemed pleased by this, and immediately tried to have Caitlin agree. But, wary, disbelieving, she held back. It struck me that she knew Dylan’s real feelings were not his spoken feelings.

It was a disheartening conference, but at least I had made my feelings plain: against my better judgment. I would act for Dylan within the limited resources at my disposal. The dominant problem — the endless, old, and insoluble problem —was money and how to get it. The problem of how to keep it seemed never to have entered anyone’s head.

Just before noon we strolled into the village, where the high sun made the little pink-washed and while-washed houses look like candy houses, and went to visit Dylan’s mother in The Pelican. She moved about the house on two canes and, in spite of her long convalescence from a broken leg some months before, was as chipper and sweetly hospitable as I had remembered.

Rollie had already been out with her camera for hours. After a chat with Mrs. Thomas, Dylan and I retired into her small, airtight parlor which had the atmosphere of a room embalmed for generations. All of Dylan’s books were kept here in a neat state of preservation, not only his own published works in plain and fancy British and American editions, but also his schoolbooks and those he had read as a child. Our business there was an accounting of Dylan’s American finances which the income tax board had demanded. I settled myself in the little coffin of a parlor while Dylan went across the street to have a pint of bitters and pass a morning’s gossip with Ivy Williams. Rollie returned from her reconnaissance of the village just as I was tediously completing long lists of figures. We called for Dylan at the hotel and went back to the Boat House to have lunch on the terrace. Over our meal we again discussed the plans and possibilities which had occupied us all morning. Both Dylan and Caitlin were still in a state of distressed uncertainty, and our talk was rambling and without the resolution that might have brought relief to us all. Rollie made photographs of our conference: the results show us independently absorbed, thoughtful, and not very happy.

4

OUR project for the afternoon was a drive into the countryside of Dylan’s childhood — to the landscape of “Fern Hill.” Caitlin said she preferred not to join our excursion. We called for Dylan’s mother and set out toward St. Clears. There we gained the road leading into Carmarthen and drove a few miles before turning off at Banc-y-felin. The day was blue, the country still in its midsummer green. Mrs. Thomas entertained us with a flow of anecdotes of gentry and yeomanry, called Dylan’s attention to a hundred houses or woodlands or chapels, and seemed altogether delighted in her role of cicerone. Outside the village we stopped by the hilltop church one can see from the Boat House — the one which Dylan had in mind when he wrote, “Pale rain over the dwindling harbour / And over the sea wet church the size of a snail / With its horns through the mist” — and walked in pastures around it to look back on Laugharne and to pick out through the distance landmarks we had come to know.

In Llanybri we went into a shop to buy ices and brought them out to the car. Villagers passing by recognized Mrs. Thomas and stopped to chat. “These are Dylan’s friends,” she would tell them. “They’ve come all the way from America to see my boy.”

From Llanybri we soon came to Fern Hill, the highland farm where Dylan spent long childhood holidays with his now deceased aunt and uncle. A yellow-washed wall glowing in the afternoon light hid nearly all of the house from the road. As we drew up, the new owner and his dog came out, as if by appointment. When Mrs. Thomas had introduced us, he led us through a little fine-graveled courtyard and into the house by way of a tiny conservatory roseate with giant geraniums. Great sides of cured bacon hung in neat rows from the rafters of the dining room above heavy dark tables and chairs and a glinting exhibition of blue and white china. When our host suggested we wander through the house at our own pleasure, Dylan led Rollie and me through a series of curiously antiseptic and lifeless rooms. In the parlor, that memorable room of “a stuffed fox and a stale fern” where once Dylan was “a desolate boy who slits his throat / In the dark of the coffin and sheds dry leaves,” there stood now only a few overstuffed pieces of mail-order furniture. It all seemed much smaller and emptier than he remembered, Dylan said, and I could see he was becoming nostalgic and unhappily thoughtful in this pilgrimage to a house that memory and imagination had furnished so differently.

We went then through the front door out onto a greensward hedged by boxwoods, walked halfway around the house and into a sprawling old orchard where rotting apples lay by the hundreds under gnarled trees, and out onto the spongy turf of surrounding pastures. Seen from a little distance, the house assumed a simple beauty, black shutters against yellow-wash giving it the appearance of a child’s drawing of a house. The high-domed barn was still as it used to be, and the long sloping view through heavy air resonant with far-off chapel bells and the lowing of cattle. We picked red and yellow apples from boughs that almost touched the ground, and munched on them as we walked, and Dylan told us stories about people who had lived at Fern Hill — about a hangman who, overcome with remorse for his long career as master of the gallows, had hanged himself; and about his roistering uncle, whose fabulous drunkenness had made him the terror of the district. But the experience of Fern Hill so many years after his last visit had saddened Dylan, and he remarked many times how shriveled and colorless everything now seemed. These were, after all, the same fields where

5

WHEN we came back to the car after our rambling tour of the farm, Rollie took shots of Mrs. Thomas and Dylan as they chatted with the congenial new owner, and then we drove to the village of Llanslephan and on to Lords Park. Mrs. Thomas seemed as happy as a baby in a pram when we left her in the car to saunter awhile through tall groves of druidieal trees, to stare at the moss-grown ruins of a castle, and to watch from a distance the movements of a few solitary bathers on the long strand at the point where the River Towy flows into Carmarthen Bay. But there was nothing to linger over; so we went on to pay a call to distant relatives of Dylan’s in their ancient homestead.

To get there we had to leave the macadam road and follow a wagon track uphill. At the top of the rise we turned into a mud-filled farmyard surrounded by big and small buildings stark with new white-wash. A cluster of people, from infants to withered crones, suddenly popped out of half a dozen doors to look at us with curiosity, and then to welcome us. Since Rollie was anxious to get some pictures, we left Mrs. Thomas to the women, who led her into the main house, and went with Dylan and an old man to wander the surrounding pastures. We could not understand a word of our guide’s English, but Dylan seemed to, so we left all conversation to them. Sinking in the soaked fields up to our ankles, we followed the old man as he limped along on his staff. We found little of special interest to photograph, and returned through mounds of “house-high hay" around which white chickens peeked and scratched.

Inside the bare, scrubbed kitchen with its fireplace big enough for five men to stand abreast in, its hanging sides of bacon, great black iron pots, and witches’ brooms, we were given large white cups of warm milk out of a pail brought in by a red-faced milkmaid. We drank it, bravely, and were surprised to find we liked it. Four women, gathered in a semicircle, chatted with Mrs. Thomas. While we could make out but snatches of their Welsh-accented English, we could tell by their glances that we were part of their conversation.

The fifth woman of the farm, the matriarch of the family, remained in an adjoining room. When she was ready to receive us, we were led by Mrs. Thomas, proceeding slowly and almost ritualistically on her two canes, into her presence. We were told that she was ninety-six years old, quite deaf, and unable to speak a word of English. As she sat in the reflected glint of long shelves of heirloom china, her shriveled little body entirely covered in a Spanish profusion of rich black silks, she addressed us with an interest and pleasure that made a kind of benediction. Deeply moved by the dignity of the woman and the power of matriarchy that sustained her bearing, we could only bow and smile and somehow try to convey our respects. Through Mrs. Thomas, who acted as interpreter, she extended an invitation to stay for tea. Mrs. Thomas felt that we could not refuse, and we could see that she herself wanted us to accept. But Dylan demurred, partly on his own account and partly, we supposed, because he knew we wanted to take advantage of the early evening light for more photographs in the region.

Everyone attended our departure, and we waved to the figures in all the doorways as we drove out of the yard and down the wagon-rutted hill. Not far along the bramble-lined road we came to a little gray house. A smiling old man in an unblocked felt hat that made him seem taller than he was by a whole foot was standing by his gate. Mrs. Thomas said, “There’s old Tom, my brother. We’ll have to stop.”As we drew up alongside the sagging wooden fence, she spoke to him through the open window of the car. Looking puzzled, he merely smiled. Then Dylan realized that, since Mrs. Thomas was wearing sunglasses, her brother did not recognize her. When she took the glasses off, he grinned broadly but still did not seem disposed to speak. Mrs. Thomas asked him a number of questions in quick succession, but his answers were mumbled and inaudible. Undaunted, she went on, promising to come over soon to help him out, reporting the names of some of the people we had encountered on our drive, and asking about the health of relative’s. Then she waved him a blessing and we drove off. Tom, she explained, had lived alone ever since the death of his wife forty years ago. Once a year she came over to his house to help him put things in order.

Near Llanybri again we stopped close by a gray chapel surrounded by a graveyard in which stone crosses and wind-smoothed gray slabs stood in little huddles. The sun was low in the sea now, and the music of hymns from the evening service floated over the windless hilltop. This was the burial place of all of Dylan’s maternal ancestors. When we left the car and walked toward the crowded gravestones, Dylan and his mother went ahead. Proceeding slowly on her canes, she paid respects to one grave after another, pointing out to Dylan names he had probably forgotten. The newest inscription, outlined in shining gold that seemed inordinately bright among the uniformly weathered grayness, was the name of Anne Jones, Dylan’s aunt. Dylan followed after his mother silently, listening to her little stories of the dead. Mrs. Thomas moved staunchly yet laboriously, her eyes wet as she now and then looked away from a grave and into the yellowing distance, her words to Dylan merely informative, betraying little of what we could tell she was feeling. In the cool evening sun, each with his own thoughts, we stood in a glassy silence. The only sounds coming into our meditations were a rumor of vespers from the chapel, a low chorus of voices answering one voice, and the sweet whistling cries of swallows as they wheeled and dipped over the churchyard.

The drive homeward, over the Coomb, into St. Clears, and across a little stone bridge over the River Taf, was lighted operatically by a long gaudy afterglow that colored our faces as we caught glimpses of the sea from the many hilltops we climbed and descended. Mrs. Thomas, sprightly again, laughed with Dylan as they recounted old stories the day’s visits had recalled, and waved greetings to friends who, in their Sunday best, stood by gateposts or fished from bridges.

We came back to Laugharne at dusk. When we had seen Mrs. Thomas to the doorstep of The Pelican, we dropped by at Ivy Williams’s. She took us into the kitchen that was always comfortable with gurglings and rumblings, and served us a pint before the card players arrived, settling themselves by habit around the oilcloth-covered table. Leaving Dylan to sit in on a game of nap, Rollie and I went to join two fishermen who had that morning offered to take us out onto the tidal flats. These were villagers whom, once, Dylan had described: “Out there, crow black, men tackled with clouds, who kneel to the sunset nets.” When they mounted a motorcycle, we sped after them on a road running through darkening sand dunes, then walked with them in our bare feet through the cold sand scabrous with cockles for nearly a mile into the sea. There they picked up the silvery wriggling fish, mostly plaice, that had become ensnared in the little fence-like nets, and plopped them into burlap bags slung over their shoulders. When we got back to the Boat House, Dylan had returned from the pub and was listening to news on the radio. We warmed our benumbed feet at the grate fire in the dining room and Caitlin served us heavy soup and bread. Then she brought in an enormous tin pail of cockles which we cracked open and ate by the hundreds.

Dylan was still asleep when I went into the village early the next morning. At The Pelican I found Mrs. Thomas and Aeron in bed together, propped up on huge downy pillows, having a morning’s chat with Rollie. While Aeron made drawings with her crayon set, among which was a picture of a princess who looked for all the world just like her grandmother, Rollie and I had breakfast on trays, talked with Mrs. Thomas of Dylan and America, and showed her a number of photographs of Dylan that had been taken in New York. Since the morning sun was good, we then set out to make an attempt at documentary coverage of Laugharne. We climbed brambled walls, peeked into gardens, moseyed through narrow lanes, and otherwise insinuated ourselves into every nook and cranny, from the muddy edge of the estuary to the top of the hill from which the shining roofs and gables made patterns that sometimes looked medieval and sometimes cubist. We got many suspicious glances as we went and, at times, found that whole streets would suddenly be shut up against us. Trying to look harmless and genial, we patted the heads of dogs and spoke to those children who had not been snatched inside by wary mothers. But the evil eye of the camera could not be concealed or the threat of its spell overcome. For half the time we went like pariahs.

Lunch at the Boat House was occasion for another long discussion of uncertainties. It was quite apparent now that we would come to no firm resolution before Rollie and I would have to return to London that evening. Dylan’s mind was really quite made up, I thought; and he would come to America against all hazards, but this decision would not be announced until he had conferred with Caitlin and found some means of overcoming her intransigence. I felt in any case that the difficulty in coming to a decision was due only partly to the many troublesome practical considerations that had to be taken into account, and more deeply to some basic disagreement between them.

When lunch was over, all three of the children walked with us into the village to have their pictures taken with their grandmother. The most promising background we could find was an old gnarled apple tree in the kitchen garden of The Pelican. There in the checkered shade of a summery afternoon, with the whole family gathered on or about a green bench, Rollie took a series of group portraits. During the sitting, Aeron became cross and irritable, announcing that she was going back into the house. Her grandmother calmed her with a kindly but stern admonition, and soon everyone was looking expectantly into the eye of the Leica. Dylan, perhaps momentarily overwhelmed by his position as paterfamilias, was coöperative and interested. yet seemed rather expressionless and had little to say. His notably quiet manner may have been simple deference to Rollie and the family scene she was bent on capturing. Yet one cannot help thinking that there was a solemnity in the event of which he was wholly conscious.

Now it was time for Rollie and me to set off for London. Surrounded by three generations of Thomases, we piled into the little car and drove off to a chorus of good-by and the excited barking of Mably, who had had his picture taken too.