Discover Dylan Thomas's life
Dylan Thomas was born on October 27th 1914 and died on November 9th 1953 at the age of 39. He lived in Wales and England and travelled to Ireland, Italy, the Czech Republic, Iran and America. Though his life was short he completed a wealth of work including: hundreds of poems, surreal short stories, beautiful broadcasts about his childhood, a novel and a play-for-voices… all of which were written before he was forty.
In this section you will learn about Dylan’s life and discover the young writer, the actor, the film-maker, the broadcaster and the director, but also observe that he was a meticulous craftsman, ambitious, industrious, contemporary, hugely talented and, at times, introverted. See how the legend of Dylan Thomas was first created by Dylan himself and then how it has been developed and exaggerated since his death.
Photo © Gabriel and Leonie Summers
Carmarthenshire roots
His childhood home in Cwmdonkin Drive was sold in 1937 but Carmarthenshire gave him that ‘sense of place’. From 1937 to his death in 1953 he lived in twelve different places, as well as several addresses in London. Carmarthenshire was a place where he felt he belonged. His wife Caitlin said, “They were the background from which he had sprung, and he needed that background all his life, like a tree needs roots”. She installed windows in his writing shed when they lived in Laugharne so he could look out over the estuary at the family farms, filling Dylan’s views with happy memories of his upbringing.
Dylan’s father
…All the boys who were with me at school, and 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 and all this poetry…
(Dylan’s words to a journalist-1948)
Dylan respected his father hugely, and in DJ, he had his own personal tutor who shared his love of literature with his son. From the time Dylan could talk his father began to impart in him a love of the English Language; and Dylan Thomas himself was aware of this debt to his father’s patient efforts. Dylan spent much of his time in his father’s study, revelling in its rich and up-to-date collection and he would use his new found knowledge to experiment with the techniques of other poets. In fact Bert Trick comments that, “every room you went into in the Thomas’ house was strewn with books. Even in the kitchen, they’d be under the kitchen table, up on the sideboard, piled with books”.
In August 1931, D.J. was diagnosed with cancer of the throat after a dentist noticed an ulcer under his tongue and he travelled to London to have painful treatment with radium needles. Dylan was distraught and there was distinct change in style of his poetry at this time. D.J. improved but he was forced to retire from teaching and he and his wife moved to Bishopston, Swansea. Unfortunately the cancer returned and D.J. died on December 16th 1952. His son wrote one of his most famous poems, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night about his father’s battle.
Paternal background
Grandfather – Evan Thomas – born 1832 – died February 12th 1911.
Grandmother – Anne Thomas nee Lewis – born 1835 – died – January 23rd 1917.
Aunt – Jane Ann Thomas – born 1864 – died August 1903
Aunt – Lizzie Thomas – born 1866 – died May 10th 1900
Uncle – William Thomas– born April 7th 1869 – died 1947 (approx)
Father – David John Thomas – born April 8th 1876, died December 16th 1952.
Uncle – Arthur Lewis – born 1880, died October 15th 1947.
Dylan’s mother
Florence was a wonderful homemaker with a very warm personality. Unlike her husband, she was an extrovert and enjoyed entertaining her children with daily anecdotes, which were must likely exaggerated for full effect! She was a great storyteller, which was a talent her son picked up from her. Florence always ensured the whole family were well-fed and looked after; often preparing welsh cakes, victoria sponges or other sugary delights. This might explain why Dylan had such a sweet tooth. “…he was very fond of rice pudding, I remember that! He had to have that, every meal he had rice pudding”. (Doris Fulleylove, Dylan’s cousin)
Florence was fiercely proud of her son’s achievements and was desperately keen to protect her son. This did have its disadvantages. A friend of Dylan’s, Tom Warner describes Dylan’s first trip to his house, “the first time Dylan came, we noticed that he was just sitting in rather a helpless way with his egg untouched, and by general gestures we realised he wanted someone to take the top off for him-he’d never done it himself”. Years later, his wife Caitlin would remove the tops off his eggs and would prepare him sugared bread and milk cut neatly into squares when he was ill, just as mam would have done. Despite her overindulgence, she had a strong bond with her children.
Maternal background
Grandfather – George Williams – born August 16th 1838, died November 7th 1905.
Grandmother – Anna Williams – born March 19th 1840, died July 5th 1913.
Uncle – Thomas Williams – born July 18th 1860, died May 27th 1938.
Aunt – Anne Williams – born February 26th 1862, died February 7th 1933.
Uncle – John Williams – born September 6th 1864, died October 4th 1911.
Aunt – Mary Elizabeth Williams – born February 9th 1867, died March 13th 1946.
Aunt – Theodosia Williams – born June 30th 1869, died April 15th 1941.
Aunt – Sarah Jane Williams – born March 18th 1872, died September 19th 1879.
Uncle – David George Williams- born 1874, died April 5th 1892.
Uncle – William Robert Williams – born January 22nd 1877, died September 17th 1962.
Mother – Florence Hannah Williams – born April 28th 1882, died August 16th 1958.
Dylan’s parents
According to the biographer Paul Ferris, they were marrying because Florence had fallen pregnant out of wedlock. Addie Elliot (the house help) said, “They definitely had to marry. We all knew in St Thomas”. Paul Ferris then goes on to comment that the baby was either still born or died within a few days; though at the time there was no legal obligation to register such births, and no record of it can be traced. He also suggests that there is some evidence that the child who died in 1904 was a boy.
Dylan's birth
Unusually for the time, his parents owned their house. The Uplands was the hub of the busy suburb “A square, a handful of shops and a pub.” Some examples of the shops were: Mr Gray the newsagent, Mr Green the sweet shop, Mr Black the cobbler, White’s shoe shop. Dylan convinced his friends that your name had to be a colour to open a shop in the Uplands.
His mother hired a maid-cum-nurse – Addie Elliot (nee Drew), who had been ‘in-service’. She agreed to go to Cwmdonkin Drive for six shillings a week. Edith in the story, ‘Edith and Arnold’ was based on Addie. She was there for fortnight before Dylan arrived. At Dylan’s birth were Addie, a midwife, Gillian Jones and Dr Alban Evans. It appears to have been a normal birth and Dylan was born in the evening. Inconveniently, Nancy, his older sister, was ill in bed with the measles.
…oh a lovely little boy he was, dear little chap – he was about seven pounds – he was a lovely baby.” – Gillian Williams (nee Jones)
“Everybody admired him when he was a baby – he had such nice hair. Oh, he was very, very fair and very curly …he was a very good looking boy…and he wasn’t very big, and I’m afraid he was a very cross boy.” – Addie Elliot
Was he full of questions?
“Yes, he always wanted to know…you had to tell him the right story, and if you tried to make up a story, he’d say, “Well, that’s not what you said yesterday!” You had to be correct.” – Addie Elliot
The name Dylan
It is likely that it was Dylan’s father, DJ, who decided on both his first and middle name. DJ was anglicised but he was still a very proud Welshman and picked a name that originates from a collection of mythical Welsh tales called the Mabinogion. The character Dylan Eil Ton (or Dylan Ail Don) appears mainly in the fourth tale, Math fab Mathonwy, and was the son Of Ariarrhod, a half human and half divine figure. The reference to the name in the Mabinogion is fleeting but an impressive one all the same.
“She was fetched to him; the maiden came in. ‘Maiden’, said he, ‘art thou a maiden?’ ‘I know not but that I am.’ Then he took the magic wand and bent it. ‘Step over this’, said he, ‘and if thou art maiden, I shall know’. Then she stepped over the magic wand, and with that step she dropped a fine boy-child with rich yellow hair. The boy uttered a loud cry….”why,’ said Math son of Mathonwy, ‘I will have this one baptized’-of the rich yellow-haired boy. ‘The name I will give him is Dylan.’”
DJ may well have been reminded of the name a few months before his son’s birth. An opera, inspired by the Mabinogion, was staged at Covent Garden with the title, Dylan, the second wave. There are also many suggestions that DJ chose the name Dylan, as it signalled a defiant identification with the ‘new culture’ that had seized Welsh Wales and begun to sweep the chapel culture aside. In the disapproving eyes of the more conservative chapel faithful ‘Dylan’ was a ‘pagan’ name. Writing to Pamela Hansford Johnson in September 1933 Dylan said that, “My unusual name for some mad reason comes from the Mabinogion and means the ‘prince of darkness’” Dylan must have been referring to certain writers on Celtic mythology who claimed to have found evidence of an earlier myth depicting Dylan as the god of darkness, in contrast to lieu, the god of light. Though Welsh Celtic scholars generally refute this claim.
In Wales, there has been much discussion about Dylan’s name and how it should be pronounced. The traditional Welsh pronunciation is ‘Dullan’ and according to an account from Florence Thomas (Dylan’s mother) given to the biographer, Paul Ferris, DJ apparently referred to him in this way. However, in another taped interview with Colin Edwards she said flatly that it was ‘Dillan’. Dylan Thomas himself commented on the pronunciation of his name, “rhymes with ‘Chillun’. Years later, he was also often heard correcting Welsh BBC producers.
Dylan's middle name
Sister Nancy
Schooling
“He was a cherubic young boy that all mums used to stop and smile, and say ‘Isn’t he sweet?’ If only they knew what was underneath that Dylan. Even in those days, at the age of eight or nine, he was quite a wild boy – in the nicest sense – a boy who would get into all sorts of trouble, but people would say, ‘This can’t be true. This angelic little boy – he couldn’t possibly do these things that he’s doing’. – Hedley Auckland
In September 1925, he went from Mirador School to Swansea Grammar School where his father taught English. The school was founded in 1682 and overlooked Swansea Bay. Its main role was to prepare the boys for university. It was a paying school but fees were small. While there, Dylan was generally disengaged. He was clearly a bright boy but only interested in subjects that excited him, and then he absorbed himself in them, such as the time and energy that went into his contributions and editing of the school magazine. His contributions included poetry, parody – both in prose and verse – and criticism. Apart from English, where he gained ninety eight per cent in the Central Welsh Board Examination, he neglected his studies, passed no other examinations, and regularly appeared bottom of his class each term. Apparently, he once proudly boasted that he was thirty-third in trigonometry.
Dylan described his real education in a talk before a poetry reading, which was retold by his friend Constantine Fitzgibbon. “But my proper education consisted of my liberty to read whatever I cared to. I read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out like stalks”.
Welsh language
However, although Dylan did not speak Welsh, he certainly heard it spoken by relations when they visited. We can also be sure that almost everywhere on the Llansteffan peninsula, the home of his many aunts and uncles, that the sound of Welsh was ever present in the ears of the young poet, as both boy and teenager. All of his mother’s peninsula relatives spoke Welsh. So did their neighbours and friends: at the 1921 census, ninety five per cent of residents in the two parishes around Fernhill were Welsh speakers. Across the whole peninsula, thirteen per cent, more than two hundred people, spoke only Welsh. It was the language of daily life. It was also the language of the pulpit, and Dylan often attended Sunday school at Smyrna chapel where the services were in Welsh.
The poetry of Dylan Thomas is above all oral. It is word-music. For this reason, it must have been second nature to him to steal the music of the two tongues he heard around him. Cynghanedd is a traditional component of Welsh poetry at least fifteen centuries old, and still a powerful music in contemporary Welsh poetry. It is based on alliteration, not of a single repeated consonant, but of several repeated in sequence. It is what you hear that counts with cynghanedd. There are many examples of this rhyming pattern in Dylan’s poetry.
Where blew a flower may a flower no more (cynghanedd sain gadwynog)
Weighed in rocks shroud is my proud pyramid (cynghanedd sain gadwynog)
My world was christened in a stream of milk (cynghanedd draws)
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood (cynghanedd sain)
Do not go gentle into that good night (cynghanedd draws)
Nor heed my craft or art (cynghanedd draws)
When the morning was waking over the war (cynghanedd sain)
To burn and turn of time (cynghanedd sain)
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means (cynghanedd sain)
Though I sang in my chains like the sea. (cynghanedd draws)
Childhood health
Childhood interests
At the age of eleven, Dylan entered the mile race, for boys under fifteen, and came first. His picture was published in the Cambria Daily Leader. He always carried a cutting from the newspaper after his triumph and years later he reportedly showed it to locals in the pub while in New York. He won again in 1928 and 29, while also winning the quarter mile that year. In 1930, he came second in the senior cross-country race.
“Well Dylan was very young – he would probably have a start of about two hundred yards in a mile. But nevertheless, it was an achievement in respect of his tenacity…” (John Morgan Williams)
“It was just sheer determination and courage in the end that got him to the tape…” (Charles McKelvie)
“He had a terrific streak of determination…” (R M Glyn Thomas)
Dylan’s life long love of cricket seems to have started during his childhood when he used to watch it at St Helen’s Rugby and Cricket Ground. Dylan played cricket for the Evening Post cricket team and proved to be a very fast bowler. Later in life, Dylan developed a close friendship with the BBC cricket commentator and poetry producer, John Arlott. Listen to John Arlott talking about Dylan.
Cinema
As a child, Dylan loved to visit his local cinema in the Uplands (known as the bug-house or flea pit) or the Picture House on the High Street in town. He was a fan of cowboy films and watched famous actors such as, Charlie Chaplin (who he would meet years later), Charles Laughton, Emil Jannings and the Marx Brothers. Greta Garbo was his absolute pinnacle.
“…I should think about eight, nine maybe, and we’d go on Saturday morning, used to wear our blazers, …. go in our pockets, there’d be a little poem … just the simplest little poem – we’d come home, pick it up, “Oh look, he’s been at it again!” -Barbara Treacher nee Auckland
During his teenage years, Dylan showed his passion for cinema by writing a detailed essay called The Films and then years later, Dylan wrote screenplays and appeared in symposium in New York, Poetry and the Film.
First World War
Beyond that unknown Wales lay England – which was London – and a country called ‘The Front’ from which many of my neighbours never came back. At the beginning, the only ‘front’ I knew was the little lobby before our front door: I could not understand how so many people never returned from there: but later I grew to know more, though still without understanding.
(An extract from Reminiscences of Childhood)
Dylan was born three months into the Great War. He was actually born during the first battle of Ypres on the 27th of October 1914 and this knowledge had an intense impact on him. He struggled to comprehend how he could have been born at exactly the same time as men were dying on the Flanders battlefields, and common themes in his writing were life, death, creativity and destruction.
The war also had an emotional significance for Dylan’s father, D.J. D.J did not join the army and remained as an English teacher at Swansea Grammar School, and it is likely that he felt shame and guilt about this, especially as the students from the Swansea Grammar school suffered terribly as a result of the war. Seventy-six out of nine hundred old boys died and, all, but one, of the 1917 upper sixth form were killed. D.J’s continued embarrassment was still apparent when, many years after the war, it was reported that he flew into a rage when a pupil laughed at a Wilfred Owen poem. Interestingly, after the war there was a new sort of master who was not required to have degree because he was seen to have a level of maturity from his military service. This, too, must have been difficult for D.J.
The sea
“As soon as he was baptized he made for the sea. And there and then, as soon as he came to the sea, he took on the sea’s nature and swam as well as the best fish in the sea. Because of that he was called Dylan Eil Ton – no wave ever broke beneath him.”
Dylan Eil Ton, from the Welsh mythical tale, the Mabinogion, was a child who had a magical unity with the sea, and its natural life, and, on reflection, it seems an apt choice of name for Dylan Thomas. He developed a deep connection with the physical world around him, which he represented through the strong images he later used in his poetry. His coastal upbringing, had a profound effect on him.
He said of his childhood home, “This sea town was my world” and certainly the most striking feature of Swansea is the wide and splendid curve of the shore, towards which the hills of Swansea descend. In Dylan’s day the tram-like Mumbles Railway ran the full six miles of Swansea Bay and it was this spectacular view that greeted Dylan from his home in Cwmdonkin Drive, high above the Bay. He also spent time walking along the magnificent coastline and sandy beaches of the Gower. Dylan was always most productive when he was living close to the sea. The harmony of the sea views, sounds and smells inspired some of his most poignant works.
Curiously, Dylan never did learn to swim, although, years later, his wife did compare his fish-like hands to fins.
Chapel
“On one hand, he was in revolt against his father’s agnosticism. On the other hand, he was in revolt against the narrow Puritan conventions of his mother’s congregational background, and it was from these tensions that the personality of Dylan Thomas developed.” (Bert Trick on Dylan’s parents)
An important influence of Dylan’s childhood is the conflicting attitudes from his parents towards religion. While DJ, his father, was an avowed atheist, Dylan’s mother regularly attended chapel. Dylan attended Sunday school at Smyrna chapel in Carmarthenshire and was taken to the Paraclete Congregational Church in Newton, Mumbles with his mum and sister. His maternal uncle David Rees was minister. In the short story, The Fight, he depicts his preacher uncle as the pompous Reverend Bevan.
“Mr Bevan said grace. When he stood up, it was just as though he was still sitting down, he was so short. ‘Bless our repast this evening,’ he said as though he didn’t like the food all. But once ‘Amen’ was over, he went at the cold meat like a dog.”
Dylan was born into a community where the Bible had brought literacy to his ancestors, had been the only book available to most people, and its language and stories continued as familiar currency in the Nonconformist community in which he was raised. It had provided myth, verse, word-music, phrase and metaphor for generations of people. The bible was an invaluable resource for Dylan’s own poetry and prose and it seems that even DJ recognised that as Addie, the home help, heard him quoting from it.
“The other thing, of course that’s terribly important about his make-up-and this is probably a truism-the religiosity of the place, the way that when one is very young, up to the age about seven, one is taught about hell-fire. It has its value – there’s beautiful imagery, and Welsh hywl, even at that age, is a wonderful thing to hear from the pulpit, but it’s a terrible guilt-creator for the rest of one’s life…” (Dilys Rowe)
Dylan’s discomfort with this judgemental attitude must have prompted Dylan to make a pilgrimage in 1934 to Aberstwyth to meet Caradog Evans. Caradog’s chapel people subscribed with some gusto to the popular saying that your Welsh non-conformist was one who prayed to God on Sunday and preyed on his neighbours every other day of the week. Dylan described his visit and said, “We made a tour of the pubs in the evening, drinking to the eternal damnation of the Almighty and the soon-to-be-hoped-for destructions of the Tin Bethels. The University students love Caradog and pelt him with stones whenever he goes out.”
In the short story, The Peaches, Dylan once again makes fun of the preachers. He humorously includes a conversation his cousin Gwilwm is having with God in a subtle attempts to undermine the preachers who he felt held power over the congregation with their performance and tricks.
“Thou canst see everything we do, in the night and day, in the day and night, everything, everything…O God, mun, you’re like a bloody cat.”
Though, the young Dylan was keen to break the spell the preachers had over the Welsh imagination, he himself used the same skills he observed in the pulpit, when performing years later. He engaged and delighted audiences with the magical power of language.
1930s
This was one of Dylan’s most productive periods as a writer as he wrote hundreds of early drafts of some of his most famous poems. Discover how he ambitiously made a name for himself in the literary circles in London, and at the same time, met his wife, had his first child and accepted the fact that the world was at war once again.
Click the links below for further information.
Notebooks
Thirteen of his first collection 18 Poems came from the latest notebook (August 1933) and approximately half of the poems of his second and third collections, Twenty-five Poems and The Map of Love had their origin in these notebooks. Dylan typed out his notebook poems when he was ready to submit them to publishers; about eight of these early typescripts, some of which fill gaps in the notebooks, have found there way into the British Library and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, Texas.
By the age of 20, Dylan had already written first drafts of two thirds of his later published poetry. He furiously scribbled notes, ideas, words and phrases into his adolescent notebooks. He was a perfectionist and it could take him days, weeks, months and years to write a poem. He would pin large white pieces of cardboard to the wall to see the whole of his story or poem in progress and there were piles of discarded pieces of paper on the floor. As well as observing how his poetry evolves you can see: word lists, drawings, rhyme schemes, cigarette burns, crossings out, coffee stains, annotations, doodles, under linings, use of coloured pencil, ink blots and practice signatures. Each poem is dated, numbered and a few are simply called ‘Pome’.
The notebooks truly confirm his friend Bert Trick’s words.
“To read Dylan, either prose or his poetry, and especially as he read it, which flowed out in a lovely stream of words, you would think that these words, and these sentence build ups, came easy to him – but they didn’t. They were the result of meticulous craftsmanship.”
His writing routine began after breakfast of ‘an apple, an orange, and a banana’. He would take a look at the newspaper in bed, then come downstairs for a couple of hours reading, and then he walked to the nearby Uplands Hotel for a couple of pints of beer, returning home for an afternoon’s writing.
Dylan sold his notebooks in the 1940s. He wrote to Bertram Rota, the bookseller, and explained that he was interested in selling them. Rota went to Buffalo University. No one had ever asked the library for payment for manuscripts of this kind before, in fact, to discourage any deliberate manufacturing of worksheets; the librarian had made it a rule never to pay. Charles Abbot, librarian of the Lockwood Memorial Library of the University of Buffalo, New York wrote in a letter in September 1941 – “Persuaded a private friend to buy them for us. It is a transaction which is most unlikely to occur again”. The four notebooks were bought for £6, £7.10, £6.10, and £5, respectively.
Amateur dramatics
I’ve been acting on and off – mostly off – both as an amateur and a vague professional since I was the size of your thumb… My speciality is the playing of mad men, neurotics, nasty ‘modern’ young men and low comedians – quite straight acting.
(Letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson – 1933)
It was Dylan’s gift as a performer, both of his poetry and prose, that helped ensure the success of his poetry. It was during his early years that he truly learnt his trade. His earliest known role was in a Christmas play at his primary school, when he was given the part of the colonel; but at Swansea Grammar School Dylan became a member of the debating, dramatic and reading societies. His successes in these areas were no doubt helped by his previous elocution lessons; he was able to perfectly project his voice and win debates using humour. A review of his acting abilities appeared in the school magazine “D.M Thomas gave a good performance as Oliver Cromwell, in spite of the fact that physically he was not up to the part… he looked as young and fresh and clean as if he had just come off the cover of a chocolate box.” Whilst still at school, Dylan joined the YMCA Junior Players and took part in a series of plays. One production was about two men in the world, and all the rest were women.
He later joined the Swansea Little Theatre (who now perform at the Dylan Thomas Theatre), alongside his sister Nancy. He took acting very seriously and worked very hard, as did the whole group. A friend Thomas Taig comments, “It was an amateur company with a difference, because amongst this company were a number of people with professional experience… they were unpaid professionals really”. In the six months between October 1933 and March 1934 he, and the others, learnt, rehearsed, and put on five productions in the theatre at Mumbles, each running for several nights, and at least nine touring performances of Upstream and The Way of the World. The Little Theatre was as much about friendship as performance, and there were many social activities as well.
Dylan’s first biographer Constantine Fitzgibbon also suggests that Dylan may have occasionally worked as an extra at the Grand Theatre in Swansea, and that, in the spring of 1934, he considered applying for a job with the Coventry Repertory Company.
Newspaper reporter
Kardomah Gang
This talented group of school friends attended Swansea Grammar at the same time. They would often meet in the Kardomah Café on Castle Street in Swansea and were joined by other artists, musicians and poets during the 1930s. Regulars included poets Charles Fisher, Dylan Thomas, John Prichard, musician Daniel Jones, artists Alfred Janes, Mervyn Levy, Mabley Owen and Tom Warner. Mainly boys buts sometimes joined by Evelyn (Titch) Phillips and her sister Vera. The poet Vernon Watkins, Dylan’s friend and mentor joined them, though this was later as he first met Dylan in 1935. Before it became a café, it was the chapel where Dylan’s parents, D.J. and Florrie, got married.
In February 1941, Swansea was heavily bombed in a ‘Three Nights Blitz’. Unfortunately the original Café, was destroyed, however it reopened after the war in a new location.
There were also other regular weekly meetings. On Wednesday nights a group met at Dylan’s house, 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, where they would use Dylan’s father’s study. Dylan’s mother would bring sandwiches and cocoa. When his father returned from the pub at closing time the group would go upstairs, to Dylan’s room to continue talking, or to hear what he had been writing. On Sunday afternoons and evenings (until the early hours of Monday morning) they went to Bert Trick’s house at 69 Glanbrydan Avenue, where there were readings and music. Mrs Trick would give them sandwiches, sweet jellies and cakes. The permanent group included: Bert Trick, Nell Trick, Dylan Thomas, Fred Janes, Tom Warner, John Jennings, and then sometimes Charles Fisher, Gwyn Thomas, Gilbert Evans and on a few rare occasions Dan Jones.
1st national publication
“A candle in the thighs, Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age”
The Listener was the literary body of the BBC and letters began to arrive at the Corporation’s office complaining that the BBC had published an obscene poem. They were forced to make a public apology. It was only after the Second World War that the BBC truly forgave Dylan Thomas and his great talents on air were recognised. T.S. Eliot having seen this poem wrote to Dylan.
Pamela Hansford Johnson
When the Referee published Dylan’s poem, ‘That Sanity Be Kept‘, in September 1933, an intense correspondence began. Dylan’s letters to Pamela provide the most vivid and detailed accounts of his life, and thoughts, at the time and give us illuminating glimpses of the growth of the young poet’s mind and sensibility. They also set out formative attitudes and concepts. He poured out his heart and soul. The full correspondence with Pamela was more than fifty thousand words and half of the letters were written before they met in February 1934. The letters are now in the Lockwood Library of New York, Buffalo University.
During 1934, Dylan made trips to London to visit her, the first being in February. Pamela describes his visit in her diary.
He was very small and light. Under a raincoat with bulging pockets, one of which contained a quarter bottle of brandy, another a crumpled mass of poems and stories, he wore a grey-necked sweater, and a small pair of trousers that still looked much too big on him. He had the body of a boy of fourteen. When he took of his pork-pie hat (which, he also told me later, was what he decided poets wore) he revealed a large and remarkable head, not shaggy – for he was visiting – but heavy with hair the dull gold of threepenny bits springing in deep waves and curls from a precise middle parting.
Their literary friendship then became a brief love affair and although Dylan proposed to her (she refused) their relationship seemed to slowly dissolve after Pamela and her mother stayed in Swansea in September 1934. Unfortunately, the weather was appalling. They also discovered that Dylan was only nineteen. He had told Pamela he was twenty-one. Pamela became a novelist and later married Lord CP Snow.
1st London visit
In August 1933, he went to visit his sister in Chertsey. During that visit, he saw the editor of New English Weekly and, as a result, they published his stories a few months later. He also saw Sir Richard Rees the editor of Adelphi. Rees accepted a poem ‘No Man Believes When A Star Falls‘ and published it in the next edition of the magazine. This was a vital experience for Dylan as he discovered which magazines and papers might publish his poems, and he had at least a whiff of the literary atmosphere in the capital.
Discovering Laugharne
I am spending Whitsun in the strangest town in Wales. Laugharne, with a population of four hundred, has a town hall, a castle, and a portreeve. The people speak with a broad English accent, although on all sides they are surrounded by hundreds of miles of Welsh country. The neutral sea lies at the foot of the town, and Richard Hughes writes his cosmopolitan stories in the castle. (Extract from a letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson)
Establishing his reputation
In spring 1935 interest began to grow and The Spectator, New Verse and Times Literary Supplement all published favourable reviews. It was more than enough to launch a poet. It was further helped a few months later in February 1936 when Edith Sitwell positively reviewed it in the London Mercury. This was a pleasant surprise, as two years previously she had been very disparaging about Dylan’s poem, ‘Our Eunuch Dreams‘. Soon afterwards, his second collection Twenty-five Poems were published. Edith became a friend and advocate for Dylan for the rest of his life.
During this period, Dylan learnt how to network with the great, the artistic and the literary. His poems and stories appeared in literary magazines and papers, and he became a well-known poet.
18 Poems
During the summer and autumn of that year his reputation as a poet grew as more and more of his poems were published in New Verse, the Criterion, the Delphi and elsewhere. He was selling his short stories too and doing some reviewing for the Adelphi and working for the Morning Post. 18 Poems was published on December 18th 1934.
Visiting Ireland
I’m ten miles from the nearest human being (with the exception of the deaf farmer who gives me food), and, in spite of the sea and the lakes and my papers and my books and my cigarettes (although they’re damned hard to get, and I’ve few left of them) and my increasing obsession with the things under the skin, I’m lonely as Christ sometimes and can’t even speak to my Father on an ethereal wave-length. I came here – ‘here’ is a cottage studio, once owned by an American artist, perched in a field on a hill facing a l0t of wild Atlantic – with Geoffrey G. (Grigson), but he’s gone back to town. And here is a wild, unlettered and unfrenchlettered country, too far from Ardara, a village you can’t be too far from. Here are gannets and seals and puffins flying and puffing and playing a quarter of a mile outside my window where there are great rocks petrified like the old fates and destinies of Ireland & smooth, white pebbles under and around them like the souls of the dead Irish. There’s a hill with a huge echo; you shout, and the dead Irish answer from behind the hill…..
…My days these days are planned out carefully, or at least conveniently, to the clock I haven’t got (if time is the tick of a clock, I’m living in a funny dimension, in an hourless house): I rise at nine, I breakfast and clean up till ten, I read or write from ten till one, I lunch at one, then I walk over the cliffs to the sea and stay or walk about there till half past three or four, then tea, after tea I write until the early dusk, then I climb over the hills to the high lakes and fish there until dark. Back. Supper. Bed. I have a little illegal poteen whiskey with my supper, and I smoke black shag in a bad pipe. One day a week I shall walk ten miles to Glendrumatie where there is a shop and a porter bar. It rains and it rains.
(from a letter to Bert Trick, summer 1935)
Meeting Caitlin
Caitlin, whose name rhymes with Catkin, was born on December 8th 1913. Her father, Francis Macnamara was an Irish man from Ennistymon, County Clare and her mother, Yvonne (nee Majolier) was half Irish, half French. They had two daughters and a son before Caitlin was born, in London. They moved in artistic and literary circles and one of their close friends was Augustus John, who later introduced Caitlin and Dylan. Shortly after Caitlin’s birth, her parents separated, and later divorced. Yvonne took the children to live near Ringwood in Hampshire. Caitlin spent most of her childhood in Hampshire but also visited her father in Ireland. Francis could only afford to send £300 to the family per year so there was not enough money for the girls to be sent away to school. They were educated at home by a series of mademoiselles. She did, in her teens, spend a few terms at an academy for young ladies near Bournemouth.
Dylan and Caitlin had a temperamental relationship, which has been widely noted. It was fiery and full of arguments and there were infidelities, on both sides. However, what has sometimes not been recognised, is the positive influence Caitlin had on Dylan, and the sacrifices she made for his art. Caitlin had learned to dance in a free-style way, in the manner of Isadora Duncan, and was a chorus girl at the London Palladium and in Paris. After meeting Dylan, she became a homemaker and provided Dylan with the routine and stability he needed to help him focus on his writing. Later when living in Laugharne Caitlin insisted that Dylan stay in his writing shed from two until seven. She would even lock the door (her contribution to his literary output) and he seemed to accept this. She had a strong need for physical exercise and swam or walked long distances frequently, as well as taking every opportunity to soak up the sun, not always available in West Wales. She continued to dance, publically in the pubs at night, but also privately at home.
Caitlin was somewhat of a ‘free-spirit’ and was not always concerned about conforming to what was considered ‘appropriate’ behaviour, often much to her young daughter’s horror.
“ When Mother realized that no one ever visited the lawn except us, she used to slip off her suit to swim with nothing on. I would object loudly, imagining eyes peering from all the bushes growing across the cliff-face”
“ Mother was fond of a canary-yellow quilt skirt which made a circle when she pirouetted. On walks she would cartwheel, her skirt like a glorious waist ruff. One woman remembered her striding down the main street wearing a black velvet skirt with a white blouse: ‘not at all what we were used to…she commented ‘very striking though…’”
After Dylan’s death Caitlin moved to Italy and lived there for about forty years. After she died in 1994, she was brought back to Wales, at her request, to be buried with Dylan in Laugharne.
Playing the poet
“Curls thatched his head and a Bohemian poetry tie flowed down and out below his soft collar.”
His style became one of self-expression and was indicative of the persona he was presenting to the world. The idea of the doomed, young poet was also vital and he talked often about having ‘galloping consumption’. His friend, Rayner Heppenstall, describes an evening in London with Dylan. “As we went out into the cold Dylan began to cough and spit. He looked down at his spittle in the roadway and said: ‘blood, boy! That’s the stuff.’”
Over the years, there have been many conflicting stories about Dylan’s behaviour in the pubs and clubs of Soho and Fitzrovia and one of the reasons for this could be what his friend Gwen Watkins referred to it as, ‘Instant Dylan’. He took on a chameleon-like approach and adapted his ‘performance’ accordingly. Glyn Jones remembers his changing behaviour well. “…He was inclined to take on the atmosphere of the company that he was in. I’ve heard him myself condemn opinions or actions in one group of people, and then when he goes into another group, whose atmosphere is different, he would then not condemn, but praise this…”
Dylan also had a wonderful knack of making anybody feel that they had known him all their lives. Except, they had not.
Mental health
I am tortured by every doubt and misgiving that an hereditarily twisted imagination, an hereditary thirst and commercial quenching, a craving for a body not my own, a chequered education and too much egocentric poetry, and a wild, wet day in a tided town, are capable of conjuring up out of their helly deeps… (Extract of a letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson, May 1933)
According to John Malcolm Brinnin when describing Dylan in America, he commented that, more than once, Dylan said that he thought he had seen the gates of hell. This letter shows that he had seen them much earlier. It seems to suggest that Dylan was at breaking point and it was a cry for help. When Glyn Jones met Dylan around that time, he said, “I was struck by his extreme awareness, his sensitiveness and response to every subtle change of mood and direction in our talk.” This was made worse by Dylan’s father’s diagnosis of throat cancer in August 1933 and the painful treatment that followed. The dread and uneasy atmosphere at Cwmdonkin Drive was having a very negative impact on Dylan. Dylan was unable to switch off from work and he was struggling with insomnia. His friend Constantine Fitzgibbon believes that Dylan had a nervous breakdown of sorts in November 1933. There is a parallel between his frame of mind in 1933 and the description of Dylan as he was during his last days in New York. Ironically, Dylan was writing furiously at this time and thirteen poems of his first collection, 18 Poems , came from the latest notebook that was started in August 1933.
The Great Depression
It was in 1931, the bitterest year of the Depression in Wales, and the years of severe poverty and unemployment when Dylan was a journalist and saw its effects, especially in some of the dockside pubs.
…I think a great deal can be made of the fact that, in the very short period when Dylan was a reporter on the Evening Post he certainly absorbed, in that period, a tremendous feeling for Swansea, particularly the seamier side of Swansea, down in dockland, which in those days was a pretty rough quarter.(A.E (Bert) Trick – Swansea Labour party man to whom Thomas dedicated his poem, ‘The Hand That Signed the Paper’.”)
Though his poetry was not usually politically driven, Dylan’s views were generally regarded as quite left wing. Augustus John said, “like so many of his generation, he discovered in himself a fellow-feeling for the under dog; and though never really a political poet he remained firmly and steadfastly on the left, unlike many contemporary English poets of the thirties”. Many believe that his socialism was owed more to his experience of the Depression in Wales than to Marxism. According to his first biographer Constantine Fitzgibbon, when he got to London he met a number of communists but he often did not like their views. In 1934, Geoffrey Grigson circulated a New Verse questionnaire with a question about political views. This is how Dylan answered.
“I take my stand with any revolutionary body that asserts it to be the right of all men to share, equally and impartially, every production of man from man and the sources of production at man’s disposal, for only through such an essentially revolutionary body can there be the possibility of a communal art.”
1940s
Dylan spent this period living between England and Wales. He was working as a film-maker during the war and observed the blitz in London and on his hometown, Swansea. He wrote poetry to try to comprehend what he had seen, while also producing nostalgic broadcasts about his childhood for the radio. Discover the lasting impact of the war on Dylan and why he was keen to permanently return home to Wales.
Click on the links below for further information.
Second World War
What have we got to fight for or against? To prevent Fascism coming here? It’s come? To stop shit by throwing it? To protect our incomes, bank balances, property, national reputations? I feel sick. All this flogged hate again.
(Dylan’s attitude at the start of the Second World War in a letter to Desmond Hawkins on 24th September 1939)
War had hung over Dylan’s childhood and youth, the Great War, the awful massacre in the mud. As he grew up he saw it through the eyes of the likes of Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon and then attempted to make sense of it through the intense themes of his adolescent poetry and stories.
This is one of the reasons; Dylan was profoundly affected by the announcement of war breaking out in Europe on September 3rd 1939. His friend Thomas Taig described Dylan as being like, “an animal caught in a trap”. Another friend Mably Owen said, “I think Dylan felt that killing people was an impossible thing, a thing one couldn’t do, and a situation into which one could not enter”.
Dylan was a true pacifist and the thought of killing another human being was intolerable to him. Despite trying to find ways to avoid joining up he was called to service in spring 1940, but following a medical at Llandeilo he was declared unfit to fight on health grounds. He was pronounced grade C3 because of his weak lungs, which effectively meant that it was very unlikely he would be required to fight.
Propaganda films
London Blitz
As we turned the corner there was in the sky a monstrous tower, looking like a giant puffball of smoke, away to the east…When darkness came, the smoke had turned to a red bank of flames..the ‘all clear’ sounded, and by then the sky was the colour of a blood orange, a seething flaming mass…the Luftwaffe sent wave after wave of bombers, until three o clock in the morning…places were bombed until they resembled desolate heaps of rubble, and at least a thousand people had been killed, many others trapped, wounded and made homeless. The planes flew up the Thames, which was lit up like a horrifying pantomime, past London Bridge, Victoria, Chelsea, dropping their deadly cargo indiscriminately…the winter of the bombs, or the blitz had begun.
Dylan, once again, observed, at first hand, the horrific consequences of the blitz while working as a Firewatcher, looking across London from the rooftop of the Strand offices in Golden Square. He wrote a number of war poems to try to comprehend what he had seen, including: ‘Among Those Killed in a Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred’, ‘Ceremony After a Fire Raid’ and ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’. A young poet, Jimmy Carter, later to be President Carter, read the poem ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’. Since then, Dylan Thomas has been his favourite poet. He even has a portrait of him in his private study.
Swansea Blitz
Escaping the bombs
Second flowering
Dylan understood that his unsatisfactory physical environment was responsible for his lack of output as while he may have been able to think of poems on the tube, he could not write them there. From summer 1944 until autumn 1945, he lived in two areas that allowed him the peace and tranquillity to focus on his craft. The sea town of New Quay in Ceredigion on the west coast of Wales and Blaen Cwm, his parent’s cottage in Llangain, a rural village in Carmarthenshire. This period at the end of the war was a second flowering, very much like the one in his teenage years. He finished ten poems, which are regarded as some of his finest. These include: ‘Poem in October’, ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’, ‘This Side of Truth’, ‘The Conversation of Prayer’, ‘A Winter’s Tale’, ‘Fern Hill’ and ‘In My Craft Or Sullen Art’. The poems of this time were usually much longer, more complex and polished. They were poems of his maturity, as were the other eight he was to write. They provided nearly half the poems for Deaths and Entrances, the publication that established his reputation as a major poet of the era.
It is also when he began work on Under Milk Wood. Arguments have been made that “without New Quay, there would be no Milk Wood”, because within months of arriving there, Dylan had written a radio script about the town called, ‘Quite Early One Morning’, which has many early versions of characters that appear in his later play-for-voices. It introduces the cleanliness fanatic Mrs. Ogmore Pritchard who is heard to comment, “And before you let the sun in, mind he wipes his shoes”.
Shooting incident
One evening, there was a dispute at the Black Lion pub between Killick and Dylan’s work colleagues, including a Russian secretary who happened to be Jewish. Killick insulted her and he was thrown out of the pub. Later that night, he fired a sten gun into Majoda with the bullets going straight through its thin walls. He then kicked in the door and produced a hand grenade from his pocket and announced he would blow them all into smithereens. Eventually, he departed, and fortunately, no one was physically hurt. William Killick was prosecuted for attempted murder, but was found innocent on the grounds that provocation had been such as to deprive him temporarily of his reason.
The film The Edge of Love, released in 2008, reportedly documents this event. However, David N Thomas, whose book they claimed the film was based on, has challenged it. Read his findings here.
Impact of war
“He talked about a school teacher, I think in Germany – I think she was an English teacher – who had gone to the gas ovens with her charges, saying quite simply that was her job, to be with those she looked after. He had tremendous admiration for that sort of courage in the face of all this horror.”
The holocaust left a deep and haunting mark on Dylan as we see in his original plans for Under Milk Wood that he discussed with his friend, and later biographer Constantine Fitzgibbon. The play was initially called ‘The Town That Was Mad’.
“A year or so later, after the revelations of the German concentration camps, Dylan outlined the idea to me one afternoon in an underground drinking club in Chelsea called the Gateways. The village was declared insane, anti-social, dangerous. Barbed wire was strung about it and patrolled by sentries, lest its dotty inhabitants infect the rest of the world with their feckless and futile view of life. They do not mind at all, though they grumble about the disappearance of the buses. The village is the only place that is left free in the whole world, for the authorities have got it wrong. This is not the concentration camp; the rest of the globe is the camp, is mad, and only this little place is sane and happy”.
Other film work
In these films we see early signs of Under Milk Wood. The Doctor and the Devils, which was based on a historically factual incident of the body snatchers Burke and Hare, uses a technique of descriptive visual writing. While Twenty Years A Growing is prose-poetry and the script’s opening picture is of the market town of Dingle with a school bell ringing. It has the freshness and humour of Under Milk Wood especially when ‘a large pig crosses the road slowly, and enters a cottage.’ And in The Three Weird Sisters, Dylan Thomas observes life and parodies it as he goes along. The names of the villagers include Polly Probert and Daddy Waldo.
Broadcasting
Patrons
Margaret Taylor, for example, allowed Dylan and Caitlin to stay in her home in Oxford and then acquired a house for them in the village of South Leigh, Oxfordshire, as well as providing a gypsy caravan so Dylan could work in the garden undisturbed. Realising Dylan’s desire to return to the peace and quiet of his native Wales, she paid three thousand pounds for the Boat House in Laugharne and allowed him to live there for a peppercorn rent and she helped to pay Llewelyn’s (Dylan’s oldest son) school fees. It’s very difficult to judge the lasting impact of Margaret Taylor’s generosity but it was certainly something Dylan’s daughter, Aeronwy Thomas was always very grateful for. She talked fondly of playing games with Margaret’s children, swimming in the river at their home in Oxford and reading stories together. Margaret offered her a stability that was missing elsewhere. As a result, Aeronwy remained friends with Margaret’s daughters throughout her life. In Aeronwy’s memoirs, My Father’s Places, she says, “I liked Margaret for her boundlessly positive attitude. She made the best of everything and made everything more fun for children”.
Dylan’s latest biographer Andrew Lycett, also mentions two other patrons, Marged Howard-Stepney and Princess Marguerite Caetani. There is little known about Marged, except that she recognised Dylan’s genius and wanted to support his literary achievements. Her death in early 1953 affected Dylan hugely. Princess Marguerite Caetani was a cultured and modern woman who ensured Under Milk Wood reached a stage of completion, with her patient guidance.
Andrew Lycett makes an acute observation, that as well as financial help, “these women provided the kind of emotional support that Dylan needed as much as any cheque in the post”.
Trip to Prague
As the only Englishman present at this meeting I must say, by way of introduction, that I am Welsh. As a Welshman, I repeat, I am by choice a poet. A Welsh poet who has no other wish than to write poems, but unfortunately I must work to live
(Opening to Dylan’s address)
The full text of Dylan’s address can be found in The Life of Dylan Thomas by Constantine Fitzgibbon.
While there he made friends with Vitezslav Nezval, a Czech poet and novelist. He was fourteen years older than Dylan and had lived in Paris and the Soviet Union. He had returned to Czechoslovakia and became an advocate of Breton and Apollinaire, Surrealism and Futurism. He wrote a book called ‘The Smaller Rose Garden'(1927). (1927) He wrote Marxist propaganda and in 1945 became head of the Czech Ministry of Information. Nezval fell into political disgrace with the organisers of the meeting and was not allowed to give his speech in the final session, which upset Dylan.
…But Prague is so beautiful. And bitingly savagely cold; you; would die of it. Tomorrow, I shall buy a small fut hat here.
(From a letter to Caitlin)
Dylan was not a member of the communist party, despite suggestions made by Augustus John and others, though he made friends with members of the communist party or those close to it including: Jack Lindsay, Edgell Rickword, John Sommerfield, and Randall Swingler.
Return to Wales
1950s & beyond
The last few years of Dylan’s life were mainly spent completing his play-for-voices, Under Milk Wood and taking part in four reading tours of America. Discover the fatal impact of these trips abroad, and that how over sixty years since his death, we still remember Dylan.
Click the links below for further information.
Dylan acting in the theatre
In February 1950 Dylan acted in ‘Desire Caught by the Tail’ and ‘Island in the Moon’ both produced by Eric Capon, and appeared in Humphrey Searle’s adaptation of Edith Sitwell’s ‘The Shadow of Cain’ at the Palace Theatre, London, on November 16th 1952, and again at the Royal Albert Hall on January 13th 1953.
Of course, it was during the 1950s that Dylan performed as the narrator in, Under Milk Wood.
Under Milk Wood
“…looking as I always thought a poet should look. Perhaps a bit plumper than a poet should look…with a marvellous scarf thrown around his neck, and came in with a wonderful grin on his face and his hair all tousled, and he was round and marvellous. He was very shy. You had a feeling that he was as shy with us as we were with him.”
That evening Dylan gave his actors just one stage direction, “Love the words, love the words”. Dylan took on the role of First Voice and received a standing ovation.
A list of readings of Under Milk Wood that Dylan performed in.
1) The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, May 1952.
2) The English Society, University College, Cardiff, March 10th 1953.
3) The Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass, May 3rd 1953.
4) The Poetry Center, New York, May 14th 1953.
5) The Poetry Center, New York, May 28th 1953.
6) Summer Drama School, Porthcawl, August 5th 1953.
7) Tenby and District Arts Club, October 2nd 1953.
8) The Poetry Center, New York, October 24th 1953.
9) The Poetry Center, New York, October 25th 1953.
Reading 1 – performances with Bill McAlpine and Harry Locke of the unfinished play.
Readings 2 and 3 – solo performances of unfinished play.
Readings 4 and 5 – performances with a small cast of actors.
Readings 6 and 7 – solo performances.
Readings 8 and 9 – with a small cast of actors.
Trip to Iran
However, Dylan was horrified at the condition under which Persian people were living, which was in stark in contrast to what he called the “horrible oil men” and the “horrible government men that sit in the lounges of posh guest houses” or “a man worth 30,000,000 pounds from rents of peasants all over Iran, and from a thousand crooked deals.” He came home writhing with indignation.
…women wear these wrappings, not only of black but grey, earth brown, filthy-white – and they wear them to cover their rags. They huddle their horrible poverty inside these chadurs as they slipslop through the foul main streets or the shouting, barging aisles of the bazaar. Often there are babies huddled in with the poverty. And beautiful dirty children in little chadurs slip-slop behind them.
(Letter to his wife, Caitlin Thomas, January 1951)
The film was never made although Dylan later used some of the material he gathered for a broadcast on Persia for the BBC.
Trips to America
As a result, Dylan was becoming an international celebrity. In his broadcast ‘A Visit to America’ he said,
“I went all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, who the week before had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.”
Dylan is being slightly modest about the impact his ‘electrifying’ lecture tours had on the American public. His exhilarating performances during these tours, contrasted between ‘tender and lyrical’ to ‘powerful and oratorical’. He read the work of many poets including Yeats, Hardy, Auden, Lawrence, MacNeice, Alun Lewis and Edith Sitwell, and he usually concluded the performance with a selection from his own works. Fellow poet, E. E.Cummings was so moved by Dylan’s performances that he walked the streets for hours afterwards.
Even though at the time he was one of the most famous poets in the English speaking world, in a letter to Caitlin on February 25th 1950, Dylan described his fear of reading to audiences of about a thousand people.
I have done two readings this week, to the poetry Centre of New York: each time there was an audience of about a thousand. I felt a very lonely, foreign midget orating up there, in a huge hall, before all those faces; the readings went well.
I’ve been to a few parties, lots of American poets, writers, critics, hangers on, some very pleasant, all furiously polite and hospitable. But apart from on one occasion, I’ve stuck nearly all the time to American beer, which, though thin, I like a lot and is ice cold.
I’ve been, too, to lots of famous places: up to the top of the Empire State Building, the tallest there is, which terrified me so much, I had to come down at once;
And now it must look to you, my cat, as though I am enjoying myself here. I’m not. It’s a nightmare, night and day; there never was such a place: I would never get used to the speed, the noise, the utter indifference of the crowds, the frightening politeness of the intellectuals, and, most of all, these huge phallic towers, up and up and up, hundreds of floors, into the impossible sky.
Difficult times
“…spells of coughing that racked the whole length of his body, brought tears to his eyes and left him momentarily speechless”.
While his daughter Aeronwy remembered her father,
“always huffing and puffing up the steep path to the cliff walk…”
By his spring visit to America in 1953, he was using an inhaler to help his breathing. He was also described as having ‘chicken bones’ and he was once again sporting a broken arm in June 1953.
The strains of the rigours of four American tours were causing Dylan to become very depressed. Alcohol was one of the ways he was dealing with his anxieties. Money was also an issue because it simply went out more rapidly than it came in. Dylan’s financial irresponsibility was compounded by Caitlin’s spendthrift ways. Although thousands of dollars were earned during the second visit to America, all but a few hundred had disappeared before they were ready to sail home in May. He also had tax problems and at one point ninety percent of every pound he earned went to Inland Revenue. This caused severe anxiety; often making him physically sick at times and he suffered sleepless nights. Dylan regularly sent pleading letters to friends and patrons. In a letter to the Royal Literacy Fund in December 1950, he wrote, “I am extremely badly in debt; these debts are pressing, and daily and horribly becoming more so; and it seems I cannot think of anything else at all.” To make matters worse he had been given a payment for a proposed travel book, A Bard’s Eye View of the U.S.A, which had not been written, and the publishers had threatened the law on him if the book was not produced by a certain date. He did not appear to be able to find a way out of his financial difficulties and Aeronwy Thomas points out that her mother insisted on privately educating her children. “She had grand ideas about what she wanted for her children, and there was nothing to deter her. Nothing, no reasonable argument”.
Caitlin too was struggling as she was living in an isolated part of west Wales with few of today’s conveniences while Dylan frequently went away. She was frustrated, lonely and living in relative poverty. So by the time of Dylan’s final tour of America in October and November 1953, he was ill, exhausted, grieving the loss of his father, concerned about the state of his marriage, struggling to write, broke and depressed.
Death of Dylan's father
Dylan was devastated by his father’s death. His wife Caitlin said that Dylan had always written poetry not only to please himself but also his father. In the summer of 1953 he began a poem ‘Elegy‘ about his father’s death, though he did not finish it because Dylan himself died just a few months later.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at the end know dark is right,Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night
Good men, the last wave by, crying how brightTheir frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
(Extract from ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’)
Too proud to die; broken and blind he died
The darkest way, and did not turn away,
A cold kind man brave in his narrow pride
On that darkest day, Oh, forever may
He lie lightly, at last, on the last, crossed
Hill, under the grass, in love, and there grow
Young among the long flocks, and never lie lost
Or still all the numberless days of his death, though
Above all he longed for his mother’s breast(Extract from ‘Elegy’).
Dylan's final trip to America
His wife Caitlin was vehemently against the trip, as she understood the negative impact America could have on him. She had consulted the local Laugharne doctor who reported that,
“She was very worried about Dylan’s blackouts, and persistent headaches. And she was very concerned about it because he was going to America.”
He advised them to visit him that night for a check up but…
“they never turned up…so unfortunately I never had the opportunity to examine Dylan at a time which might have revealed something before that disastrous last visit to America.”
A letter from Dylan’s close friend Vernon Watkins to Colin Edwards gives further insight to why the trip was not advisory.
“It is a great tragedy that Dylan who had been drinking much less before he left for America, was allowed to drink so much when he go there. He was not well before he went, and had had several short black outs, and had even written for a diet sheet; he was anxious to give up drinking. But I am sure he did not tell anyone he was ill, and I know how difficult it was to stop Dylan. Yet if one did stop him he was grateful, because he didn’t like it, except for beer.”
Ironically, he nearly did not make the ill-fated journey to America as he missed his original flight on Tuesday 13th October but it was rearranged for Monday 19th and this one, ominously, he did make. Dylan died in St Vincent’s hospital, New York on November 9th, 1953.
Dylan's death
There have been many theories about the cause of Dylan’s death; including alcohol poisoning (though this is largely disputed now) and many people believe he was an un-diagnosed diabetic. What is certainly clear is that when Dylan died he had a badly impaired respiratory system. He arrived in New York with bronchitis, which was further exacerbated by Dylan’s own self-neglect as he continued to drink too much, eat and sleep very little and smoke. The record smog levels in the city certainly did not help.
No biographer has been allowed access to Dylan’s hospital data. Dr William B Murphy was given access in 1964 and wrote a memorandum, which summarised his findings. David N Thomas and Dr Simon Barton had access to this and a medical summary completed on November 9th by Dr McVeigh for the purposes of the post-mortem, which they were able to refer to. Their findings were published in the book Fatal Neglect highlighting a series of mistakes in the medical treatment given to Dylan in his final few weeks. Bronchitis and pneumonia went undiagnosed and untreated, despite regular checks by a private New York doctor. He was repeatedly given cortisone to relieve breathing problems and as a general tonic, and then, on the day he went to hospital, morphine. Within half an hour of the third injection of morphine, Dylan stopped breathing properly and fell into a coma around midnight on November 4th/5th. A course of injections in one day can lead to a build up of morphine in the system. It can also cause respiratory depression, which can lead to hypoxia (insufficient oxygen in the blood stream), especially with someone with a pre existing lung disease, and cause permanent brain damage and death.
Following Dylan’s sudden deterioration, it was over an hour later that an ambulance was summoned and it did not arrive at the emergency room of St Vincent’s Hospital until 1.58 a.m, despite it being a very short journey. There were then issues with the reduced number of nighttime and weekend staff, having been admitted on Thursday and died on Monday.
The first specialist Dylan saw was on the afternoon of November 6th, thirty-seven hours after admission. Initially two-second year medicine residents saw him and they started treatment (incorrectly) for ‘acute alcoholic encephalopathy’ – assuming that his brain had been damaged directly from alcohol. They were working under the instruction of the private New York doctor that had administered the morphine injection instead of the chief medical resident who should have been on duty with them. They do not appear to have checked for alcohol in Dylan’s blood stream and it is unclear if he was given penicillin to treat the pneumonia.
Dylan had been put into a large, general ward. Oscar Williams explains, “… the result was that he was virtually on display and hundreds of people came, all wanting to see him, and there was no defence…I think that was one of the most terrible things that happened to Dylan, the fact that he was not protected at all from the rabble, or the consequences of being so famous.”
Caitlin describes the scene,
“I talked to him, but he didn’t respond and I felt so embarrassed with all those people gazing at me through the glass; I felt as though I were on stage.”
When Caitlin arrived in New York, she was terribly distressed and took to drink resulting in very erratic behavior. Shockingly, she was sectioned (by the same private doctor who gave Dylan the morphine injections) and had little chance to spend time with her dying husband.
David N Thomas and Dr Simon Barton’s final conclusions were as follows: “Our investigations lead us to conclude that Dylan’s death was brought about by a serious chest infection in which chronic bronchitis developed into terminal pneumonia before his admission to hospital. Death was also a consequence of cerebral hypoxia – i.e. – insufficient oxygen being delivered to the brain cells, causing them to die. This caused cerebral oedema – swelling of the brain tissue and cells.”
Effect of Dylan's death on his family
Caitlin was in a very distressed state and she was still responsible for three young children. A trust was swiftly set up to control Dylan’s work of which she was to be a beneficiary, but not a participant. She moved to Italy, joined Alcoholics Anonymous and became sober. She had a fourth child, a son, at the age of forty-nine. She died in 1994 and her body was returned to Wales and she is buried with Dylan in Laugharne. His daughter Aeronwy also had her ashes scattered at the boathouse in Laugharne after she died in 2009.
In just twelve months, Dylan’s mother Florence Thomas lost her husband D.J., her daughter Nancy, and her son Dylan; and then Caitlin moved the family to Italy. Florence moved into the Boathouse, but she never truly recovered and she died in 1958.
The legend of Dylan Thomas
The version of Dylan Thomas that the tabloid newspapers often draw your attention to was partly a creation by Dylan himself. His friend Mervyn Levy said,
“I think it’s the misfortune of people who come to be legendary figures that they’re turned into legends in their own time. And Dylan suddenly found himself in a legend and had to live up to that legend, particularly in America. The idea of the tremendous, boisterous, wonderful, drunken poet, immaculately funny always, terribly brilliant and clever and amusing and witty and outrageous and daring. This was something he suddenly found was expected of him; he had to live up to it”.
Another friend Oscar Williams suggests,
“that people tried to associate themselves with a poet and enlarge their reminiscences completely out of reality. They distort. People claim to be friends of Dylan who only saw him once. And will tell you stories or repeat stories they have heard from others, and here’s nobody to stop them, so they go on and on”.
The poet Ruthven Todd was asked to write the first biography of Dylan Thomas but refused because he could not find a clear image of him.
“I had all these notebooks, about thirty-eight of them, filled with several hundred different Dylan’s’… If there was an event reported by, say, six people, I found it was impossible to combine the six to recreate one occasion… All the time, however, I tried to pull myself together by remembering the Dylan whom I had known for nearly twenty years. I compared him with the mythological figures which were being offered to me, and when one day I found I was beginning to doubt my own memories of Dylan and supplant them with a mythological figure, I decided it was time to give up.”
According to David N Thomas, “Within months of Dylan’s funeral, his reputation was being shredded, and the caricature of Dylan the drunken, cadging buffoon was being defined”.
The book 'Dylan Thomas in America'
A friend of Dylan’s, Ruth Witt Diamant describes his mother Florence Thomas’s reaction to the book. “She was horrified at his book. Her comment to me was “I thought he loved my son…”
A statement from Dylan’s widow Caitlin appears at the start of the book, at her request:
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 quarrelling 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 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 I hope 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.
Following the publication of this book Colin Edwards created an archive of testimonies from close family and friends that now reside at the National Library of Wales and have been edited and put into two books – Dylan Remembered Volume 1 and Volume 2, edited by David N Thomas. These need to be taken into account to obtain a more rounded understanding of Dylan Thomas.
Was Dylan a drunk?
“Part of Dylan the actor’s charm and success lay in his ability to give his audience what they wanted. When they wanted him witty, he was. When they wanted him outrageous, he was that too. Increasingly they wanted him drunk”.
In terms of Dylan’s drinking there is no doubt that he often drank to excess and later in life there was increased alcohol consumption associated with depression, money and family issues, and the strains caused by the rigours of four American tours. There were also psychological explanations for his drinking with references from friends to his shyness, his need for company and his dislike of being alone. His friend Gwen Watkins (who called Dylan’s public face ‘instant Dylan’) described that,
“If he was at ease in his company, liked and admired, (not flattered) he rarely seemed to drink to excess, and certainly he never showed in these circumstances the uneasy urgency of the true alcoholic for more and stronger drink… But any pressure, any anxiety, any uncertainty – and respites from all of these were rare in Dylan’s life – drove him to alcohol as a child turns to its mother’s breast for comfort.”
His feeling of inadequacy was never truer than when he found himself in what he considered ‘distinguished company’, he would find defence in drink, as he felt intimidated, as they considered him an uneducated man because of his lack of a university education.
There were periods of abstinence, displays of moderation, and Dylan had a preference for beer over wine and spirits. He enjoyed the atmosphere of pubs and clubs where he could socialise, and he appreciated the taste of good beer. Interestingly in his post-mortem, though there was evidence of the effects of a life long drinker, there was no alcoholic hepatitis or cirrhosis of the liver.
Was Dylan a womaniser?
The book Dylan Thomas in America written by John Malcolm Brinnin and published in 1955, two years after Dylan’s death only reinforced Dylan’s embellishments. Dylan’s biographer Paul Ferris has trawled through the evidence in Brinnin’s book and concluded that Dylan’s supposed lechery amounted to little more than obscene ditties, bum pinching, risqué remarks and lewd propositions, designed largely to enliven dull academic gatherings.
There were infidelities, which have been widely documented, but according to a friend Anthony Burgess, these were partly his need for companionship as he was lonely, especially when he was in America.
“…to go to bed with Dylan was to offer little more than maternal comfort… All he really wanted was female warmth and a protective cuddle.”
There is nothing in the Colin Edwards interviews to suggest that Dylan was a sexual predator, or that he had a strong sexual appetite.
Remembering Dylan
Dylan’s work, all of which was written before he was forty, has been enjoyed by and inspired poets, writers, musicians, artists and performers alike, as well as being translated into over forty major and minor European languages, Arabic, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese, which is more than any other modern British poet.
In 2014, to mark his centenary, there was a year-long festival, Dylan Thomas 100 that showcased his work to new audiences. Each year on May 14th, the date Under Milk Wood was first performed in New York, there will be an International Dylan Thomas Day – an annual celebration to remember his life and work.
1954
January 24th 1954 – The Sunday Times staged a ‘Homage to Dylan Thomas’ at The Globe Theatre. A recording was released on LP.
January 1954 – A Broadcast of Under Milk Wood with Richard Burton playing first voice.
February 2nd 1954 – A memorial recital took place at the Royal Festival Hall
February 28th 1954 – The first complete UK stage reading of Under Milk Wood took place at the Old Vic, featuring Richard Burton.
November 4th 1954 – Eight of Dylan’s autobiographical essays for radio and other work published under the title Quite Early One Morning.
Late 1950s
July 28th 1955 – A Prospect of the Sea published in the UK.
September 12th 1955 – Adventures in the Skin Trade published in the UK
February 1956 – Caitlin received approval to have Dylan’s body re-buried within the garden of the Boathouse. The plan is not carried out.
August 13th 1956 – The first full theatrical production of Under Milk Wood opens and travels the UK.
May 9th 1957 – The first TV production of Under Milk Wood was broadcast
October 15th 1957 – Under Milk Wood opened on Broadway for the first time, at the Henry Miller Theatre.
August 8th 1958 – Dylan’s Walk is dedicated at Laugharne.
Late 1960s and beyond
November 9th 1963 – ‘Fern Hill‘ memorial was unveiled in Cwmdonkin Park, Swansea, to mark the tenth anniversary of Dylan’s death. On the same day a blue plaque is unveiled at Dylan’s birthplace, 5 Cwmdonkin Drive.
May 8th 1965 – Stan Tracey’s Under Milk Wood Jazz Suite was recorded at Landsdowne Studios
January 27th 1972 – Film version of Under Milk Wood directed by Andrew Sinclair was released in the UK
November 9th 1977 – Inaugural meeting of the Dylan Thomas Society took place in Swansea
February 28th 1982 – Dylan Thomas – A Celebration took place at the Duke of York’s Theatre to raise funds for a plaque in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey.
March 1st 1982 – Plaque unveiled in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey
August 5th 1984 – Death of Richard Burton in Switzerland. He was buried with a copy of Dylan’s Collected Poems.
October 4th 1985 – Film version of Doctor and the Devils was released in the UK.
July 31st 1994 – Death of Caitlin Thomas in Italy. She was buried alongside Dylan at St Martin’s Church in Laugharne
March 2nd 1995 – Dylan Thomas Society of Australia was founded
July 8th 2003 – Dylan’s daughter Aeronwy opened the Dylan Thomas Trail in New Quay, Ceredigion
August 12th 2012 – Dylan’s words featured in the closing ceremony for the London Olympics
2013 – Celebrations for the centenary of the birth of Dylan Thomas are launched at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea. The same day Sir Peter Blake’s Llareggub exhibition of illustrations for Under Milk Wood opens at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff
December 9th 2014 – Swansea University acquired the ‘lost’ Dylan Thomas notebook at Sotheby’s in London.
December 11th 2014 – Literature Wales announced that May 14th 2015 will be the first International Dylan Thomas Day
May 14th 2015 – First International Dylan Thomas Day
Dylan’s Family Tree
Could you be related to Dylan? It’s certainly possible! He came from a very large family – his grandparents and great-grandparents, for example, had more than thirty siblings between them.
Both Dylan’s maternal and paternal ancestors came from Carmarthenshire in west Wales. His mother’s family were from the Llansteffan peninsula, farming in the countryside around Llangain and Llanybri. His father’s family came mostly from Brechfa and its hinterland and they, too, were farmers.
The most useful starting point in understanding Dylan’s family tree is chapter one in the book Dylan Remembered 1914-1934. It provides basic genealogical information on family members from Dylan’s great-grandparents onwards, for both sides of his family eg dates of births, marriages and deaths, names of children and occupations.
Dylan Remembered 1914-1934 was published in 2003, and since then a good deal more work has been done on his mother’s side of the family. Two sets of Dylan’s maternal great-great grandparents have now been identified, as well as three sets of his great-great-great grandparents, and this has produced a large volume of new genealogical data. You can find this material, together with family trees, at https://sites.google.com/site/dylanthomaspeninsularity/home
You should also go to this link if you think you might be related to Dylan’s family through marriage. For example, it has a number of pages on the family tree of Jim Jones Fernhill, who married Dylan’s aunt Annie.
The pages on this link will also help if one of the clues to your family’s history is the name of a farm. There’s a map at the link that shows the main farms in which Dylan’s maternal relatives lived. You can also use the search function to search for the names of these farms in the various papers at the link.
The census returns for most of the family farms are given at the following two links: https://sites.google.com/site/dylanthomasandhisaunties/returns-of-the-census-for-the-family-farms
Information on Dylan’s Ferryside, Llandyfaelog, Pontardulais and Port Talbot relatives can be found at https://sites.google.com/site/dylanthomasandhisaunties/home
Dylan also had relatives in New Quay, who had moved there from St Thomas in Swansea; information on these is available in The Dylan Thomas Trail (Y Lolfa, 2002), pp105-109 with photos on pp112-115.