Dylan Thomas

A Literary Life

W. Christie

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137322579
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Dylan Thomas: A Literary Life offers an account of the poet's life, along with a critical reading of his work, that is designed to close what has been called 'the yawning gap' between Dylan Thomas's popular and critical reputations.

1

Uplands: Growing Up in Cwmdonkin Drive

And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s

Forgotten mornings

Dylan Thomas, ‘Poem in October’

The single most important literary relationship of Dylan Thomas’s childhood was almost certainly the one he shared with his father, David John (‘D.J.’ or ‘Jack’) Thomas, unfair as this must seem to the poet’s mother, Florence (née Williams), who after the fashion of the times did the bulk of the nurturing with the assistance of a live-in maid, Addie Drew.¹ Much later in life, Thomas jokingly recalled the ‘remote and incomprehensible grown-ups who seemed, for some reason, to be living in my world’.² Of his two parents, D.J. was far and away the more remote and less comprehensible: he was an austere, undemonstrative, and irritable man, given to outbursts of anger, whose austerity and ill temper put a constant strain on other members of the small suburban household that was at the centre of the poet’s world until he moved to London nearly twenty years later in November 1934. Within the patriarchal family of 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, Uplands, Swansea, young Dylan very early on identified exclusively with his father, whose very remoteness made its own emotional demands and was no doubt a prime reason for his son’s determination to make an impression. Equally characteristic of this nuclear structure was young Dylan’s tendency to take for granted his mother and his sister, Nancy, as well as the female help.

The family background

‘I first saw the light of day in a Glamorgan villa’, the nineteen-year-old Thomas would write to the correspondent and confidante of his late teens, Pamela Hansford Johnson, ‘and, amid the terrors of the Welsh accent and the smoke of the tinplate stacks, grew up to be a sweet baby, a precocious child, a rebellious boy, and a morbid youth’:

My father [is] a schoolmaster: a broader-minded man I have never known. My mother came from the agricultural depths of Carmarthenshire: a pettier woman I have never known. My only sister passed through the stages of longlegged schoolgirlishness, shortfrocked flappery and social snobbery into a comfortable married life.³

It would be the same throughout the remainder of his short life: Dylan would never say a word against his father, who having renounced his own chapel-going background no doubt seemed broad-minded to an iconoclastic young poet dreaming himself out of the narrow moral and religious strictures of provincial Wales. His mother, on the other hand, coming out of ‘the agricultural depths of Carmarthenshire’, is ‘petty’ (this to the educated, English, metropolitan Hansford Johnson). Thomas then lavishes more words on his sister Nancy than he ever will again, without allowing her the individuality and independence remarked by her Swansea friends. ‘Nancy’, as Paul Ferris has written, ‘is a blank space’.⁴

The world of young Dylan’s childhood, then, was polarized and strictly hierarchical, something Thomas, for all his impatience with social convention, would never be able to shake off in his dealings with women. When he married and had children of his own, the cooking, cleaning, and childrearing would remain his wife Caitlin’s exclusive responsibility and, considering that his work kept him more often than not at home, he would have even less contact with his own children than his father had had with his. Already in this letter to Hansford Johnson we can see Thomas deracinating his father, isolating him from his Welsh-speaking, working-class background. Yet the truth is both his parents traced their immediate ancestry, via the railways, to farming in rural Carmarthenshire. Florence (‘Florrie’) Williams’s family came from farms in the Llansteffan peninsula in the south, David John Thomas’s from around Brechfa, thirteen miles to the north of Carmarthen.⁵ Young Dylan would be the beneficiary of his family connections in rural Carmarthenshire, making occasional visits throughout his childhood that were to become the foundation of some of his most memorable stories and poems – indeed, arguably, of a significant shift of style and setting in his work during the war. But D.J.’s father, Evan, after a period as a miner, had joined the railways as a guard in around 1852, where Florence’s father, George, had joined in the late 1860s, operating as a porter before working his way up to shipping inspector on the Swansea docks.⁶

D.J. might have ‘kicked over all traces of his rural Welsh origins’ (to quote Andrew Lycett),⁷ but there was one prominent figure in the Thomas family mythology whose memory he was careful to preserve, and that was his uncle, the bard and radical Unitarian convert and preacher, William Thomas (b. 1834), self-named Gwilym Marles after the Marles or Marlais, a stream that fed the Cothi valley in which the family’s smallholding could be found (‘something between a pseudonym and a courtesy title’, according to Paul Ferris).⁸ After attending the Presbyterian College in Carmarthen, where his Unitarianism, drinking, and theatrical habits drew the family’s disapproval, Gwilym Marles won a scholarship to Glasgow University. It was while he was studying at Glasgow that he established his reputation as a poet, novelist, and pamphleteer in the Welsh language, before returning to three Unitarian livings in Cardiganshire. Once he was established with pastoral responsibilities, Gwilym Marles became more rather than less radical, representing the rights of local smallholders and itinerant labourers when a conservative reaction led to serial evictions.⁹ Given the importance of the chapel in Welsh provincial life and the tradition of pulpit eloquence, it is not uncommon in the family history to find clerical characters like Gwilym Marles, who like his great-nephew also died young at forty five. But Thomas and his sister would both inherit Marles/Marlais as a middle name, so we can infer that Gwilym Marles held a proud place in his nephew David’s imaginative self-fashioning.

That Thomas shared his father’s interest in this piece of family history, however, is unlikely – after all, he could not read his greatuncle Gwilym’s writings and there is no record of his ever making the effort, or of seeking their translation. Nor should we exaggerate the family resemblances suggested by the bardic pose, some early hard living, and an early death. Gwilym Marles, it seems, was a self-conscious bard in the Welsh tradition, where the role carried with it social responsibilities analogous to those he bore as a dissenting preacher. He was driven – and broken – by politico-pastoral activities that have no equivalent in Thomas’s life. There can be no doubt that the impulse to preach was strong in Dylan Thomas, who deployed the language of the pulpit with oratorical ease, but rarely if ever without a vestigial irony and reflex self-mockery. Thomas had the rhetorical power without the social and spiritual conviction.

If David John Thomas’s and Florence Williams’s background was country, both their immediate families had since become city dwellers. Florence had been a seamstress in a local Swansea drapery store when she met her husband, both of them having grown up in Welsh-speaking communities under the umbrella of the chapel, hers in Swansea, his in Johnstown near Carmarthen. D.J. had been a ‘scholarship boy’ whose academic abilities had won him entrance to the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth and the only First Class Honours degree in English awarded by any of the three Welsh university colleges in the year of his graduation. The couple had married on 30 December 1903. After renting accommodation near the Swansea Grammar School where he worked as an English master, they moved into their recently built home at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive in the suburb known as the Uplands with their eight-year-old daughter Nancy early in 1914, the year Dylan Thomas was born on 27 October. As the name Uplands suggests, this was a move by the young professional and his family to signal their arrival. The largely home-owning, middle-class inhabitants of the Uplands had caught what Thomas’s childhood friend, Evelyn Milton, called the ‘bug of respectability’.¹⁰

The language of daily life in the Uplands was English, the language of social status, certainly – ‘Welsh belonged to the old, poor, rural world from which many had escaped’¹¹ – but also, at least as they saw it, of a world beyond the narrow cultural and economic limits of provincial Wales. When Dylan was small, Florence Thomas explained to Ivy Williams many years later, ‘it wasn’t the thing to teach your children Welsh; it wasn’t done’ – meaning, of course, that it wasn’t done in the Uplands.¹² But for those like the Welsh-reared, Englisheducated D.J. Thomas, English was also the language of Shakespeare and the canon of English literature, which mattered terribly to him: ‘his reading aloud of Shakespeare in class seemed to me, and to nearly every other boy in the school, very grand indeed’, recalled the thirtythree-year-old Thomas, ‘all the boys who were with me at school, & who have spoken to me since, agree that it was his reading that made them, for the first time, see that there was, after all, something in Shakespeare & all this poetry’.¹³ Indeed, D.J.’s fellow Swansea Grammar schoolmaster, John Morys Williams, felt ‘he had a better voice than Dylan himself’.¹⁴ Having been raised on Welsh, D.J. was able to supplement his income as a young English teacher by conducting evening classes in the language of his childhood to help maintain the comparative affluence of a house and a lifestyle that stretched his teacher’s salary of £120 pa. ‘Uncle Jack used to coach at nights’, his great niece, Barbara Treacher, recalled, ‘they all did’.¹⁵ If we are to believe John Morys Williams, D.J. was bilingual in every sense and ‘spoke beautiful English and Welsh’.¹⁶

But the Welsh language was not used in the Thomas household and, in spite of D.J.’s attachment to his Uncle Gwilym, there is no evidence of his ever composing in Welsh. ‘He was not absolutely hostile to Welsh’, as James A. Davies observes, ‘He simply had little need of it’.¹⁷ Like his son after him, D.J. could be an engaging raconteur (when he was motivated), ‘and if there was a story with any kind of Welsh embellishment, then he would bring the Welsh accent out’.¹⁸ But the accent, note, not just the language, had to be brought out. It is hard not to conclude from this, moreover, that the Welsh language and Welsh cultural practices had become just that: an ‘embellishment’, even, at times, a comic interlude. D.J.’s interest and his expertise were in literature in the English language and the English language was the language the couple used with their children, even with each other. The Grammar School system in which D.J. taught deferred to a centralized British socio-cultural and educational system whose lingua franca was English, just as English was the language of social and economic advancement. D.J. might have found his son’s unusual Christian name in the Welsh prose epic, The Mabinogion, but for young Dylan’s initiation into literature at the age of four his father chose to read him Shakespeare.¹⁹

The Anglicization of young Dylan, begun at home, was institutionalized when he started his formal education at Mrs Hole’s school in Mirador Crescent at the age of seven. In an interview with Colin Edwards, Thomas’s friend and fellow magazine editor at Swansea Grammar School, Percy Smart, recalled that Mrs Hole ‘showed no trace of Welsh in her speech’.²⁰ Along with his sister, Nancy, however, young Dylan was also treated to extracurricular elocution lessons at ‘the small academy in Brynymor Crescent run by Miss Gwen James, a grocer’s daughter who had studied at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama’.²¹ Gwen James’s sister, Esther, remembered her saying ‘that it was a big voice for a small boy’,²² and between themselves Mrs Hole and Miss James conspired to eradicate any trace of a Welsh accent from young Dylan’s speech, developing what he called his ‘cut-glass’ accent – cultured, that is, but not crystal, not the authentic product. However fabricated and incongruous the accent, it would stand Thomas in excellent stead during his brief career as an amateur actor and, later, throughout his much longer career as a professional broadcaster and poetry reader.

Thomas’s Welshness

The fact that Thomas was reared in an Anglicized suburb speaking and writing only in English and that he remained a determined monoglot throughout his life, attempting no other languages, least of all Welsh, raises the issue of Thomas’s Welshness and attitude to his native Wales, which is worth tackling at the outset. That it should be an issue at all is a measure of the radical changes in cultural and ideological self-consciousness undergone by colonized nations since the Second World War and, more recently, of corresponding changes in the critical and theoretical orientation of literary studies. Having said that, though the move to preserve and propagate the Welsh language might have had to wait until much later, these changes had their origins during Thomas’s own lifetime and questions of nation and nationality were questions with which Thomas himself had to deal on occasion. One phenomenon of the late 1920s and early 1930s – the years of Thomas’s poetic apprenticeship – had been the emergence of Saunders Lewis’s Welsh Nationalist Party, Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru, which had grown ‘alongside other Welsh cultural organizations, as Welsh intellectuals contemplated the longterm consequences of the emigration and economic devastation which accompanied the continuing slump’.²³ Lewis was a lecturer at the University College in Swansea and a linguistic essentialist who advocated an organic, Welsh-speaking society – one that, notoriously, disqualified English-speaking poets as unrepresentative. In his famous address to the Urdd Graddedigion Prifyscol Cymru Cangen Caerdydd in 1938 entitled ‘Is there an Anglo-Welsh Literature?’, Lewis named ‘Mr Dylan Thomas’ as an example to enforce his new nationalist rule: ‘there is nothing hyphenated about him. He belongs to the English’.²⁴

Robert Pocock recalled having ‘only once heard Dylan express an opinion of Welsh nationalism. He used three words. Two of them were Welsh Nationalism’.²⁵ No doubt it was while discussing the emergent nationalism of the likes of Saunders Lewis that Thomas countered with the characteristic bluntness of someone resisting simplistic categorization. (He became recalcitrant when subject to any kind of labelling, whether artistic, cultural, or national.) Thomas had his disapproval of Welsh nationalism in common with the majority of his Welsh contemporaries, it should be said. ‘Like most of the Welsh in the 1930s (and many of them still)’, writes Paul Ferris, Thomas ‘saw the nationalist dream as a delusion’ and ‘had no time for secessionists’.²⁶ It was not just timorousness before a more confident and powerful neighbour. Nor was it just greed, though there can be no doubt that secessionism, then and since, has had to negotiate the exigencies of a capitalist economic system that finds its strength and rationale in a culturally homogenizing expansiveness. For other Welsh intellectuals, Saunders Lewis’s sacrifice of Englishlanguage writers to an ideal of racial purity slid dangerously close to the more sinister versions of national socialism being cultivated on the Continent, themselves a development of the racial and organic and linguistic ideals of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romantic nationalism that lay behind Lewis’s paradigm. It is too easy to forget what the word ‘nationalism’ conjured during the 1930s. Recalling Thomas’s visit to Prague in 1949 in an interview with Colin Edwards, Zdenêk Urbánek argued that ‘he was much more liked than other poets who were singing about the glories of t...