Dylan Thomas
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It is a timely reminder of ones own mortality when you suddenly
find yourself older than one of your heroes. I am now older
than Woody Guthrie was when he died Peter Sellers and also
James Dean probably Blind Blake definitely Jimmi Hendrix and
Dylan Thomas. Dylan died in New York on 9th November 1953
aged 39 years.
It was the realization of how young Dylan was, when the deadly
cocktail of morphine and booze combined with his suspected
diabetes sent him into the coma from which he never regained
consciousness, that began my thoughts about writing something.
It is my belief that it was not just the chemicals that killed
Dylan. His lack of strength to walk away from the dilemmas
of morality and his way of dealing with his guilt simply exhausted
him. The fight was knocked out of him. It was all too much,
he threw in the towel.
With hindsight the most earth shattering problems often pale
into insignificance, and yesterday’s intensities seem
trivial. People don’t always forget but they do forgive
and vice versa.
Poor young Dylan worked himself into a hole that many men
with less sensitivity are able to climb out of, walk away
from, or put behind them. Somehow I think his middle class
chapel upbringing held him in his “chains “ of
guilt and actively contributed to his demise. He was able
to break the little rules but the big ones he would never
be free.
Once I had the privilege of chatting to Sir John Betjeman
on my fairly simple grasp of poetry and the subject of rules
in poetic structure and Sir John said
“Of course one must have rules in order to break them”
Dylan did not so much break rules but he did break the petty
conventions and constraints he was born into. By many of todays
standards his behaviour was not that bad but you get the sense
that he delighted in snapping the threads that bound him to
his class, rather like a little boy blowing raspberries in
church.
His principle sufferings were with his guilt not his hangovers.
By any standards he was not a heavy drinker and seldom drank
spirits. I am willing to bet that his “eighteen straight
whiskies” claim was a lie. I certainly know people who
have survived more! Drink however oiled the locks on his prison
door and enabled him to wittily or whimperingly pick his way
out of the cell.
By all accounts he was a wonderful raconteur and it is easy
to imagine the young man holding fellow arty types in thrall,
glass in hand, standing in some Fitzrovian pub, taking the
mickey or delivering witty barbs or telling dirty jokes, absolutely
revelling in the boozey freedom some way away from Cwmdonkin
Drive in Swansea.
Drink enabled him to be simply naughty and rude at first,
and only later to require the same medicine to repair the
pain both mental and physical, of what the indulgences of
the night before had caused.
On reading the Constantine Fitzgibbon book about Dylan I found
myself constantly imploring him in my mind
“Get a grip of yourself!
It will be all right.
Just get to your forties and you will make it to your fifties
and from thence to whatever. It is survivable.”
The sort of thing you can only say when you have lived for
ten years longer than your hero subject. Whilst knowing that
your own art will always remain in the shadow of theirs, you
are nevertheless enabled to offer an opinion on life and art
based solely on the extra years by which you have survived
them.
Dylan came from a time that it was fashionable for artists
to appear to be on death’s door. It indicated an abstraction
from the world and taking care of oneself, living only for
the muse and a fleeting chance to grab at inspiration and
turn it into something tangible and beautiful. His affected
wracking cough only produced satisfaction when he was able
to produce a tiny speck of blood in his handkerchief. This
was to infer that he was suffering from the dreaded TB or
some other disease indicative of deprivation. His real disablement
was self-inflicted injury through hangovers and accidents
causing him to break his “chicken bones” as Caitlin
(his wife) called them. His unknown illness may have been
diabetes it is now conjectured.
My other empathising with him came from his solo performance
work and a glimpse of what the adulation he received must
have done to him, especially in America, which is where he
hoped principally to earn his fortune.
Bound by pre rock and roll conventions of politeness and etiquette,
it would have meant him having to be civil to his hosts no
matter how banal they may have appeared to him, or how bad
his guilt or hangover might have been.
Randy Newman once described foreign touring as “shaking
hands with thousands of teeth”. I am sure Dylan often
found it hard to show his own without gritting them, and of
course there was no one to blame for his condition but himself,
and he would have known this.
It does not get any harder.
I recalled my own early days in the USA and the warmth and
the friendliness of the people who speak the same language
but nevertheless regard you as some sort of non-threatening
alien on whose every word they hang. You adapt your humour
and pronunciation and yet they will still tell you how they
“love the way you talk” and the sound you make.
They must have adored Dylan for his mighty renditions of his
poetry alone. His ready and quick wit, and his rakish naughtiness
and ribaldry must have only added to his exoticness and risk
taking.
Dylan must have relished all this at first but his inability
to manage his “affaires” (both senses) must have
caused irritation on top of all the other burdens he was carrying.
Those darkest hours before the dawn and a very long way from
home.
Poor Caitlin, a true bohemian, with her highly dysfunctional
upbringing trying to bring up a family on “wishes and
dreams”. Constantly reminding Dylan of her own artistic
sacrifices and the need for money for essentials whist he
was being feted and admired in America. Her sense of outrage
at the hospital where Dylan died is wholly understandable.
Not only was she grief stricken, she was demented by the fact
that he could have gone without honouring the commitment to
her and the children.
This was not supposed to happen. They say those the Gods love
die young. However nothing convinces me that the gods wanted
Dylan. I think they took their eye off the ball. He might
have been only thirty-nine when he died but in all other aspects
he had accumulated a full three score and ten year burden.
Caitlin became totally unhinged temporarily and her account
in her book
“Left Over Life to Kill” is harrowing. Even though
she recovered and lived happily for many years afterward with
her Italian husband Guiseppe and new son in Italy, when she
died some forty years after Dylan, she was buried with him
in the graveyard in Laugharne, in accordance with her wishes.
In her memoirs, Caitlin revealed that Dylan loved the raciness
of detective fiction and Daniel Farson describes how Dylan
“borrowed” a magazine he was carrying for the
flight to the States on the one occasion they met. It contained
a short story by Raymond Chandler.
Here was my entry into Dylan’s world. I would be a “gum
shoe” detective and follow Dylan, slipping in and out
of doorways and writing notes to be delivered at the never-ending
inquest to his life and death. Armed with this device I could
go anywhere and not be seen whilst I accumulated the evidence.
I began by attempting to illustrate the character of the man
from the image of the fat boy in class wriggling out of games
lessons with a forged note from his “Mam”.
(In fact the young Dylan once won a race in school and carried
the local newspaper report with him for many years.) But “begging
to be excused” was central to the work. Starting with
begging to be excused games he begs to excused fame, blame,
and shame at various times in the narrative.
In the John Wayne school of manliness, a man never apologises,
it is viewed as a sign of weakness and so it only compounds
Dylan’s wretchedness by needing this constant mum’s
understanding and non catholic absolution through art, in
order that he can continue on his way.
I think fame corrupted him. All he really sought was recognition
and some small reward for his beautiful work.
In spite of what he sometimes said, I do really think he was
at his happiest in Wales. Probably in the bar at Browns Hotel
in Laugharne, discussing the village business in a parochial
way with his friends the Williamses. This I feel is reflected
in his most famous work “Under Milk Wood”
At the time of writing my piece I had not seen or read that
work. For me it is with his wonderful skill with words that
I am moved.
“It was my twentieth year to heaven”
Or
“In the mercy of his means
Or
The force with which the green fuse drives the flower
Or
I sang in my chains like the sea
Or…or… or…..
I am sure all the poems have deep significance for Dylan in
spite of his reluctance to discuss or analyse them. I am equally
sure he was prepared to sacrifice exact expression of meaning
for the delight of running words together. When asked to explain
or describe how to get more meaning from his work he often
replied
“Love the words” and so I do.
The songwriter’s craft is different to Dylan’s
“sullen art” but every now and then, I arrive
at a word construction or a particular chord voicing that
gives me an inward smile and although I know there are no
comparisons to be made with the high art of Poetry, the buzz
of getting something “right” is the same in all
creative processes. The first time I saw one of his work sheets
I was astounded that he listed all potential rhyming words
down the side of the page, as do I.
Often to accommodate the rhyme you have to alter the meaning
slightly and this in turn can change the tone of the piece.
In this building block approach the final satisfaction is
wonderful and I often think of him “Booming” triumphantly
(Caitlin’s word for Dylan’s reading) out his poems
from the little boathouse where he did much of his writing
in Laugharne.
Because I chose to write a narrative in poetic form, lines
emerged that would not have otherwise have occurred. Hence
“dreaming of long limbed summer girls” became
the song
“Summer Girls” and “Slip-Shod Tap Room Dance”
arrived for the same reasons.
I loved the work and as the songs came together I could hardly
wait to show somebody what was happening. My early demos were
sent to the BBC and Frances Line the then head of radio 2
commissioned it for a production for broadcast. My friend
Graham Preskett arranged all the orchestral parts and my early
collaborations with Maartin Allcock were the basis for the
final work. Another great friend Nerys Hughes read the poem
“No Grown Man’s Land”
I had written and the wonderful Bob Kingdom read
“A Certain Tide”
which was supposed to be Dylan’s solo ruminations about
a poem he might write. The late Michael Elphick was my detective
and read the narrative. I had hoped that I would be able to
release the finished work as a CD but for contractual reasons
we had to re record the whole thing again. This took place
at Woodworm Studios in Oxfordshire and Graham faithfully duplicated
all his parts again against out original demos from Raezor
studios. This time I read the detective part and found that
the poem sounds different when read aloud than it does off
the page. Nerys and Bob allowed me to use their original readings,
and I was glad to have the extra time to make small adjustments
to the earlier piece.
I loved my involvement in this whole work and was sort of
sorry when it ended.
Since the original recording I have performed the work in
part or whole at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea and read
some of Dylan’s own work at a celebration at the Chelsea
Hotel in New York.
Last year on the 50th anniversary of his death I played the
whole thing for BBC radio Ulster.
Several of the songs from this album have become regularly
featured in my live shows and I am bemused by how much this
man’s work and life has entered and enhanced my own.
Since that first Fitzgibbon biography I have read all available
memoirs, his poems short stories and of course seen several
versions of Under Milkwood. I have no wish to change any of
the writing of
“The Boy with the Note”
and I remain, touched by his frailty, moved by his guilt and
insecurity, reassured by his self-doubt and totally in awe
of his genius.
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