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- Herausgeber: The Robson Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Dylan Thomas was one of the most extraordinary poetic talents of the twentieth century. Poems such as 'Do not go gentle into that good night' regularly top polls of the nation's favourites and his much-loved play Under Milk Wood has never been out of print. Thomas lived a life that was rarely without incident and died a death that has gone down in legend as the epitome of Bohemian dissoluteness. In The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas, journalist Hilly Janes explores that life and its extraordinary legacy through the eyes of her father, the artist Alfred Janes, who was a member of Thomas's inner circle and painted the poet at three key moments: in 1934, 1953 and, posthumously, 1964. Using these portraits as focal points, and drawing on a personal archive that includes drawings, diaries, letters and new interviews with omas's friends and descendants, The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas plots the poet's tempestuous journey from his birthplace in Swansea to his early death in a New York hospital in 1953. In this innovative and powerful narrative, Hilly Janes paints her own portrait: one that ventures beneath Thomas's reputation as a feckless, disloyal, boozy Welsh bard to reveal a much more complex character.
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To Andrew, Suzi, Ali and Ross
‘Dylan Thomas was a most lovable fellow and I shall always count the hours spent in his company as the most precious gift from the gods, when one’s sense of being alive was increased tenfold. I am profoundly grateful of having been one of his countless friends.’
– Alfred Janes
‘Love the words.’
– Dylan Thomas
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My aim has been to tell Dylan’s story through his voice and in the words of those closest to him. Books by the following authors have therefore been vital resources: John Malcolm Brinnin, Dylan Thomas in America; Daniel Jones, My Friend Dylan Thomas; Caitlin Thomas with George Tremlett, Caitlin: A Warring Absence; Aeronwy Thomas, My Father’s Places; Gwen Watkins, Portrait of a Friend and Cracking the Luftwaffe Codes.
In addition to these, I have found Andrew Lycett’s Dylan Thomas: A New Life to be the most scholarly biography on which to rely for factual information and to fill in the gaps. Also valuable have been Heather Holt’s Dylan Thomas the Actor; David N. Thomas’s two volumes of edited transcripts of interviews by Colin Edwards and Constantine Fitzgibbon, Dylan Remembered Volumes 1 and 2; The Life of Dylan Thomas by Constantine Fitzgibbon; Dylan Thomas, the Collected Letters, edited by Paul Ferris, and his biography Caitlin; and archive material from the Dylan Thomas Society (thedylanthomassocietyofgb.co.uk). Dylan’s agents, David Higham Associates, have been very kind in allowing me to reproduce so much of his writing. I have used the following editions: Collected Poems 1934-1953, 2000; Collected Stories, 2003; Under Milk Wood, Definitive Edition, 2000, all by Orion Books; and Miscellany, 1963, Dent & Sons for the BBC broadcasts Return Journey and Reminiscences of Childhood.
I am very grateful to all the people closely associated with Dylan and his friends who granted me interviews and/or provided me with source material, especially Hannah Ellis, his granddaughter, and Trefor Ellis, his son-in-law; also Glenys Cour, Valerie Dawson, Mel and Rhiannon Gooding, Andrew Gordon of David Higham Associates, Fiona Green, Bruce Hunter, Ceri Levy, Desmond Morris, Cathy and Rob Roberts, Michael Rush of the Dylan Thomas Trust, Jeff Towns and Gwen Watkins and her family who kindly also gave permission to reproduce work by Vernon Watkins.
I am also grateful for access to interviews with my late father by Professor Tony Curtis in Planet magazine and Welsh Artists Talking, and by Dr Ceri Thomas in Cambria magazine.
Other sources include the BBC, the Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, poemhunter.com, The Poetry Foundation, South Wales Evening Post, Swansea City Archive (and Dr David Morris in particular), Texas Quarterly, The Times and yorku.ca/caitlin/kardomah/ (for Charles Fisher).
My thanks are due to Graham Matthews for use of his excellent photographs of my father’s work, and also to the staff of the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, National Museum and Art Gallery of Wales, National Library of Wales, the Dylan Thomas Centre Archive, Bernard Mitchell, Gabriel and Leonie Summers for their co-operation in sourcing images. Kirstin Sinclair took the photograph of me on the jacket.
No modern biographer can go without thanking all the creators and users of digital platforms and social media, often strangers, but who lead to new information, resources and news. Andrew Dally of @DylanThomasNews is essential reading in this respect (how wonderful Dylan Thomas would have been on Twitter). And finally, for their encouragement, patience and professionalism, heartfelt thanks to everyone at the Robson Press and especially Jeremy Robson; and to my family and friends – Andrew, Alex and Suzi Pozniak, Ross Janes, Cat Brown, Professor Anne Murcott.
Hilly Janes
London, March 2014
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Dylan Thomas had many faces, but few people knew them as well as the artist Alfred Janes, my late father – Fred as he was known to family and friends. Over the course of the poet’s short 39-year life, Fred painted his portrait three times – hence the title of this book. The first was made in 1934 when Dylan’s first book of poems was about to be published, the second nearly twenty years later in 1953, the year that he died in a New York hospital. Ten years later Fred made a posthumous drawing of his friend to coincide with the first full-length biography of the poet, whose reputation was by then legendary, and not always for the right reasons.
With these three portraits as its anchor, The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas tells the story of three very different stages of Dylan’s life and afterlife, from the 1930s, when he was a highly promising teenage poet, to his rock star-like status as a performer in the 1950s. Finally, and unlike most other accounts of his life, it reveals what he left behind – not just his tremendous literary output and its financial rewards, but the impact of his early death on his family and friends. Sixty years after Dylan Thomas died, his ghost is still a powerful presence in the lives of many people.
He was a drunken, hell-raising, womanising sponger. The description has been repeated so many times by countless associates and acquaintances that he has become a mythical creature. Readers who are looking to put flesh on the bones of that Dylan Thomas may be disappointed by this book. It aims, in the centenary of his birth, to put forward a different point of view through the words and images of the people who were closest to him – the writers, artists and musicians that he grew up with in his hometown, Swansea, and his close relatives. And of course of Dylan himself, not only in his poetry, but his short stories, plays, broadcasts and letters. No one would deny that Dylan drank too much and that he could be a troublesome drunk, or that he slept with a lot of women and was a charming flirt. But Dylan was rarely the seducer, as even his wife Caitlin pointed out. He relied heavily on the generosity of these close friends, but they understood the difficulties of making a living from the arts, especially in an industrial town in south Wales ruined first by the Great Depression and then by Hitler’s bombs. Dylan rarely, if ever, took advantage of people who were as badly or worse off than he was.
Fred recognised the ugly side of Dylan Thomas of course; they were close friends for more than twenty years. But he also saw many other faces of the poet at close quarters. There was the sixteen-year-old dropout with a masterly knowledge of English literature thanks to his father, an English teacher who taught both boys and whose study at home was lined with books that Dylan devoured. At the house of a mutual school friend, Daniel Jones, a brilliant student of English and music, Fred discovered Dylan’s gift for wordplay, sense of rhythm and appetite for making mischief, as well as a flair for acting and mimicry – the qualities that made him such sought-after company in the pubs and clubs of London’s Fitzrovia. When Fred went to study portraiture at the Royal Academy Schools in London and Dylan later moved in with him, they shared digs with Mervyn Levy, another artist from Swansea who first met Dylan at junior school. Fred witnessed their shared love of creating hilarious fantasy characters and surreal stories that could go on for days. He also appreciated Dylan’s compassion for down-and-outs and the victims of the burgeoning fascist movement in 1930s London. And he saw what many people missed – how tremendously hard Dylan worked, writing and rewriting with enormous dedication and craftsmanship.
At Dylan’s home in Cwmdonkin Drive in Swansea’s genteel suburbs, Fred discovered the power the young poet could wield over an audience when he read his work aloud, and he listened, spellbound. Sometimes they would be in the company of another young Swansea poet whom Dylan had got to know, Vernon Watkins. These friends and their wider circle in Swansea discussed their ideas, stimulating and nurturing each other in a town that was more interested in chapel and commerce than paintings and poems. They were all successful on their own terms, producing poetry, stories, plays, radio and TV broadcasts, orchestral music, paintings and books on art that were underpinned by technical mastery and a fiercely independent mindset. Their achievements were recognised far beyond provincial Wales, and while none of them became as famous as Dylan Thomas, they became painfully aware of how his rackety celebrity lifestyle ruined his health, wrecked his family life and contributed to his early death.
Close to Dylan too, of course, were his family. Most biographies of Dylan have been written by men of an older generation, but as a wife and mother I hope to bring fresh perspective to the story of his personal life. The self-styled Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive never lived very far away from the conventional comforts of his parents and was particularly close to his mother. Florence Thomas has usually been disparaged as a mere housewife and molly-coddler. She certainly turned a blind eye to the less attractive aspects of her son’s character, but in doing so Florence offered a safe haven not just to her son but to his children, when his tempestuous marriage to Caitlin hit stormy waters. After Dylan’s death Florence was often a guest at our home on the Gower peninsula and I hope to shed new light on the important role she played in his life, right until the end, based on hitherto unpublished letters and accounts of her visits.
Dylan left three young children when he died. It fell to his only daughter, Aeronwy, to pick up the mantle of her famous father. Only ten at the time of his death, it took her a long time to come to terms with her turbulent upbringing, but through her friendship in adult life with family friends such as Fred and his wife Mary, she found affection and consistency. Though she grew to love her father’s work and became a writer herself, being Dylan’s daughter was not always easy. There were bitter and costly legal battles over the children’s share of his estate. The steady growth in Dylan’s posthumous income over the years is probably unprecedented for a poet, but how wisely it has been spent is an interesting question.
And what of Caitlin, Dylan’s wife and the mother of his children? She wrote at least four accounts of their relationship, and while they are not factually reliable – she was a self-confessed alcoholic who often deluded herself about her motives and actions – her fierce spirit and passion for her husband, or at least the pure poet she wanted him to be, are unmistakable. Seeing her from a 21st-century, feminist standpoint and informed by modern ideas about parenting and the safeguarding of children casts her in a new light. Today, Caitlin would be perceived as a child raised by dysfunctional parents and the adolescent victim of a sexually predatory family friend. Her father abandoned his wife and young daughters for other women and Caitlin grew up with her mother and sisters in the truly Bohemian world of Augustus John and his promiscuous entourage. It left her craving love and attention, which she was beautiful and talented enough to deserve, but it was Dylan who got it all, and that enraged her. To paraphrase another twentieth-century poet, they fucked her up, her mum and dad.
And then of course there is the voice of Dylan himself. Poems like ‘Fern Hill’ and ‘Do not go gentle’ are much loved poetic bookends to his own life. When read aloud in his rich booming voice and recorded on vinyl, they changed the meaning of poetry for a whole generation. But there is so much more. Short stories like ‘The Peaches’ and ‘The Outing’ vividly and affectionately evoke the south-west Wales of his youth, while ‘Reminiscences of Childhood’ and ‘Return Journey’, just two of two hundred BBC broadcasts that he made or wrote, did the same for radio listeners. The countless letters he wrote demonstrate his incredible grip of tone and register, from briskly businesslike to passionate and pleading, as well as his beguiling ability to talk his way out of almost any tricky situation.
There are voices in the background too – the sing-song intonation of Swansea chatter in pubs and cafes, the incantatory ‘hwyl’ of Welsh preachers, the crescendo and diminuendo of male voice choirs. You can hear them all in Dylan’s work, as you can hear the barking of farm dogs, the cry of seagulls and the flow of wind and water. You can see them too – Dylan’s ability to conjure up visual images from the written and spoken word was second to none. These sights and sounds of the landscape of Swansea, Gower and rural west Wales – those of my own childhood – were equally loved by Fred and Dylan’s other creative friends. Their motifs and images appear over and over again in their work.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and the singingbirds.
The words are from ‘Poem in October’, which, for Fred, was one of those that best expressed the man. Dylan was not always an easy person to love, and some of his poetry is hard to understand, but a hundred years after his birth it is time to remember the best of Dylan Thomas.
PART ONE
LONDON CALLING
Dylan Thomas by Alfred Janes, 1934
CHAPTER ONE
A HAPPY SHAMBLES
The room in Earls Court had been let unfurnished, but the two young men who are sharing it have got hold of a couple of camp beds, a table and an oven which looks like a biscuit tin, placed over the solitary gas ring. The only chair has been modified for use as an easel, and on it one of the young men, Alfred Janes, is painting a portrait of his room-mate, a poet. His name is Dylan Thomas, he is twenty years old and the portrait is the first of three that Janes will make over the course of a friendship that lasts a lifetime.
The floor is scattered with beer bottles, fag ends and large pieces of cardboard covered in the poet’s writing. As Janes works, Dylan explains the use of rhythm by the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, his mouth stuffed full of jelly babies. While the finished portrait shows Dylan neatly, if unconventionally, dressed in a dark jacket and shirt and bright yellow tie, the unheated room is so cold on this winter day in 1934 that he is sitting in bed wearing a large checked overcoat and a pork pie hat to keep warm. Fred, as he is known to family and friends, is a meticulous painter who works slowly. He is developing a new technique of incising a grid-like pattern with a penknife over the finished work to give it a slightly raised, jewel-like quality. You can see it in the checks on the jacket in the portrait. But he knows he must make the most of his friend’s presence – Dylan never stays put for long and will be in and out of their digs ‘like a cat in a tripe shop’.
Fred had been living in London since 1931, moving up from their hometown of Swansea when he won a scholarship from the art school there to study portraiture at the Royal Academy Schools in Piccadilly. It was also the year that he had met Dylan through another mutual friend, Daniel Jones, a brilliant young musician and composer. All three had been pupils at the grammar school in Swansea, where Dylan’s father was a formidable English teacher. Fred had kept in touch when he went home for the summer holidays, or when Dylan began to make his first forays to London. Literary society in Swansea in the 1930s was somewhat limited, but in the capital the teenage poet could try to cultivate his contacts on the newspapers and magazines that were beginning to publish his work. The appearance of his first volume of poetry, 18 Poems, at the end of 1934, was a golden opportunity to raise his profile.
At the Royal Academy Fred was surrounded by rare beings. Fellow student Peter Scott constructed models of birds – he was later to be knighted for his work as a wildlife conservationist and founder of bird sanctuaries. Another, Mervyn Peake, could transform a perfectly normal model in the life class into a prototype character from Gormenghast, the fantastical trilogy he would later write. ‘Outside it was bleaker,’ Fred recalled. ‘It was soon after the Great Depression, money was scarce and the art students were all broke.’ His parents, who owned a fruit and flower shop in Swansea, gave him £1 a week (a fraction of average earnings at the time), and Dylan’s parents followed suit. They moved around in various combinations from one set of grotty digs to the next, which Fred described as an ‘unfurnished but happy shambles’.
At one stage he and his fellow academy student William Scott moved into an unfurnished flat in Redcliffe Street in Earls Court, a rundown area of west London. It was some time before they acquired any furniture, and quite a while before they were to be seen carrying mattresses, picked up at knock-down sales on Fulham Road. On one occasion the landlady made an equally-broke fellow student a stew which he took in an iron saucepan on the bus from his digs in St John’s Wood and carried down Bond Street to heat up and share in the academy’s common room.
The painter William Scott by Alfred Janes, 1933. A fellow Royal Academy Schools student, they shared digs in London
Another student who was better off and lived upstairs from Fred and William in some style preferred their happy shambles to his well-appointed isolation, and soon moved in with a few luxuries including, much to Fred’s delight, a collection of records: ‘Schnabel playing Beethoven piano concertos; Mozart symphonies; that wonderful Bach double violin concerto and perhaps for us, even more revelatory, a broad introduction to more modern composers such as Ravel, Debussy, Scriabin, Prokofiev and Stravinsky. It was an intensely formative time, one of endless discussion,’ Fred recalled. ‘We were all immensely stimulated by the great artists of the period, from Picasso to Klee, from Gabo to Epstein.’
Life at the stuffy RA Schools was rather dull by comparison – students went there to work and then went home again, but fun and games were to be had at the unmissable Friday night hops at the Royal College of Art in Kensington, where other friends from Swansea and William’s native Northern Ireland were studying. The glamorous annual Chelsea Arts Ball, held at the Royal Albert Hall, was not so easily accessible or affordable, however – until someone heard that its doors were not locked but held shut by powerful springs allowing exit but not entry, unless enough fingers could prise them open. Six students, including Fred and William, having practised first on similar doors, pulled off the feat and pelted up the stairs. ‘It was a glorious night,’ Fred said, ‘but I have a strong feeling that for all of us, the climax was at the beginning and not the end.’
One weekend, a friend suggested that, if the tidal current was right, it was possible to row down the Thames from Richmond in Surrey to Limehouse in east London. A boat was duly hired and four of them, including Fred and William, made fair time until, near Tower Bridge, they met a series of barges moored side by side that blocked their progress. Unable to change direction in time, the hapless crew members were swept against them and had to force their way along to the end of the row by standing up and pushing above their heads against the barges. The more they pushed, the more they rocked and a long struggle ensued until they reached the last barge ‘exhausted by a combination of effort, panic and hysterical laughter’. They managed to reach Limehouse, but missed the return tide and did not get back to the boathouse until the early hours of the following morning, where, Fred recalled, they were ‘met with greetings entirely lacking in warmth’.
It was into this student world of art, music, crazy adventures and financial hardship that Dylan arrived in November 1934. Fred had decided to leave the academy by then, but he stayed on with the others for a short period painting in the flat. ‘I was something of a factotum preparing our evening meals of vegetable stews etc. and wondering what on earth to do next. One was now highly trained, but not to earn one’s living.’ He returned to Swansea for a summer break and then took the flat in Redcliffe in Earls Court. ‘I remember the journey up from Swansea well,’ Fred recalled later. ‘My parents drove us up, Dylan with one huge case, the pork pie hat and check overcoat like a marquee over his slight frame.
A postcard sent from Dylan to a friend announcing his arrival at Fred’s digs in London, November 1934
‘Our room – or studio as it had become since I had left the academy and was painting on my own – seemed quite ordinary at the time, but when I thought back on it I was not surprised that it filled our parents – when they could steel themselves to visit – with utter dismay.’ An iron bedstead which they had found made an admirable wardrobe when placed up on end against the wall, castors facing out and covered with a sort of curtain. As Fred was using the only chair as an easel, they sat on the camp beds. ‘I remember one of these collapsing completely under Dylan’s father on one of his visits. This horrified me. After all, to me Mr Thomas was still my erstwhile English master at the old school.’
Dylan had spent all morning tidying up his room and it was in apple-pie order, according to his mother, Florence, with his books lined up neatly on the shelves. But they had to take it in turns to have a cup of tea in the sitting room and, she said, ‘if there was one empty milk bottle, there were twenty’. They were at last able to all sit down at the same time when other odds and ends of furniture were lent to them by Pamela Hansford Johnson and her mother. Pamela, a young secretary and promising poet, was Dylan’s first girlfriend. She lived across the Thames in Battersea and Dylan started corresponding with her in 1933 when one of his poems was published for the first time in the Sunday Referee, a London-based paper which had also published some of Pamela’s work.
Dylan’s first visits to London were ostensibly to stay with his married sister Nancy and look for work on one of the publications that was taking an interest in him. But they were also to visit Pamela – and not only to share thoughts on writing poetry. Dylan had arrived on the 21-year-old Pamela’s doorstep for the first time in February 1934, his slender body enveloped in a mackintosh whose pockets were crammed with papers and poems, as well as a quarter bottle of brandy. Her description reveals how well Fred’s portrait captures his boyish, but penetrating gaze – and how attractive Dylan was to her:
When he took off his pork pie hat (which he also told me later was what he had 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. His brow was very broad, not very high: his eyes the colour and opacity of caramels when he was solemn, the colour and transparency of sherry when he was lively, were very large and fine, and the lower rims rather heavily pigmented. His nose was a blob; his thick lips had a chapped appearance; a fleck of cigarette paper was stuck to the lower one. His chin was small and the disparity between the breadth of the lower and upper parts of his face gave an impression at the same time comic and beautiful. He looked like a brilliant, audacious child, and at once my family loved and fussed over him as if he were one.
Her reaction was probably already familiar to Dylan – and it was one that he was to arouse over and over again in many different women. When he returned to Swansea a few days later, he wrote and told Pamela that he loved her. There were more visits to London that year, and they enjoyed what Pamela described as ‘a nice little affair’, spending a holiday in Swansea, chaperoned by her mother, enjoying the spectacular scenery of the nearby Gower peninsula. The amount he drank sometimes worried her, and she was puzzled by the way that he would pretend in company to be much drunker than she knew he was. But soon after that first visit Dylan, still only nineteen, was to win the Sunday Referee’s ‘Poet’s Corner’ prize, which guaranteed the publication of a volume of his poetry at the paper’s expense. Pamela had won it the year before. It was the appearance of Dylan’s 18 Poems in December that year that had helped convince his parents that he should move to London, the respectable Mr Janes senior at the wheel, with the older, more sensible Fred to keep an eye on him in the big city.
Another young Swansea artist lived with them at 5 Redcliffe Street, Mervyn Levy. He was Dylan’s oldest Swansea friend; they had met as seven-year-old pupils at Mrs Hole’s, a little private junior school near their homes in the Swansea suburbs. Later, Mervyn had also attended the grammar school and then the art school. Here he met Fred, whose 1931 portrait of Mervyn helped him to win his scholarship to the RA Schools. He was now studying at the Royal College of Art. These three members of ‘Swansea’s Bohemia in exile’, Dylan thought, were going to ‘ring the bells of London and paint it like a tart’.
‘We had some wonderful times together that have merged into a sort of kaleidoscopic image of laughter, arguments, experiments, quarrels and more laughter,’ Fred wrote. ‘Both Dylan and Mervyn could be enormously funny. We all took each other’s work completely for granted. Although during this period, 18 Poems was published with great success, I don’t remember it making any difference to him or his endless comings and goings at all.’
Fred and Mervyn Levy washing up in the outdoor ‘kitchen’ at their digs in London, c.1933
Mervyn would often visit Dylan, who habitually slept fully clothed, at about nine in the morning. ‘I would shake Dylan awake, hand him a cigarette and a light and wait for the first low rumble of coughing to build up to a shattering, purple-faced crescendo,’ he recounted in a BBC broadcast. ‘He always got the most out of his coughing fits … which he really enjoyed in a curious, perverse way. He liked to spread around the entirely romantic idea that he was dying of TB. The breakfast cigarette was a great help here…’ Occasionally Dylan would vary the morning routine by reciting fragments of his poetry, such as these lines from ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’, one of his 18 Poems. Mervyn and Fred didn’t know at the time that the power of its imagery was going to inspire many other artists and writers in years to come.
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the root of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
Dylan and Mervyn also loved to indulge in ‘breakfast time fantasy weaving’. One morning Dylan started conjuring up an ‘oilyverse’ – a world where everything was dripping in oil. Mervyn visualised everyone slipping about all over the place. Not only that, Dylan pointed out – it would be horribly difficult to remain upright at all and everyone would have to address the Pope as ‘His oiliness’. The number of mice required to pull the Royal Scot train from Edinburgh to London at 100 mph was the subject of another conundrum, and it was agreed that dwarfs with whips might be needed to keep them all galloping in line.
There were darker moments for Mervyn, who was Jewish. The years 1934 and 1935 were a period of great tension, already foreshadowing the Second World War. Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, the ‘Blackshirts’, were making their presence felt on the streets of London, holding rallies which often ended in violent confrontations with communists and Jews. One evening Mervyn, Fred and William were to experience it first-hand. Mervyn enjoyed dressing in somewhat bizarre fashion – on this occasion in trousers slashed to the knee and one half of his face clean shaven, the other half bearded.
They were returning at night by tube from the West End to Earls Court, when a group of black-shirted youths began to taunt Mervyn. At the entrance to the tube station they met with a group of some thirty or forty Blackshirts – obviously on their way to a rally. ‘They immediately surrounded us jostling and threatening,’ recalled Fred. Fortunately the students’ propensity for ‘endless discussion’ came to their aid. ‘It took what seemed an age to convince them that we were not “Trotsky’s best friends!” Mollified, eventually they went their way. That kind of confrontation was sadly all too frequent at the time.’
When they weren’t indulging in banter or risky behaviour, work was a serious matter. ‘In the flat Dylan did much of his writing and it was there above all that one learned how meticulous a craftsman he was,’ Fred noted. None of them had enough money to buy anything apart from a little beer, and Dylan never drank when he was working. ‘He would revise tirelessly and the room could be inundated with papers, gradually to be organised and collated and resulting frequently in a poem appearing complete and written out in his inimitable hand on a large sheet of card to be “seen” as well as read.’
One poem that particularly caught Fred’s artist’s eye was ‘Vision and Prayer’, although it wasn’t published till much later. It forms a lozenge shape by starting off with one word in line one, then adding a word to each line until there are eight words, and then reversing the process until the last line consists of one word. Dylan’s penchant, Fred believed, for experimenting with writing out his poems as word-shape compositions on these sheets of cardboard stemmed directly from his developed visual sense. Certainly, his ability to conjure up vivid pictures in the mind’s eye of his readers was one of his most compelling skills.
This sensory connection to words was mirrored by Fred’s tactile appreciation of his medium. ‘Paint has weight, it has substance. You buy it by the pound or by the tube. It has all sorts of aspects to it – its fluidity, its viscousness, its wateriness, its oiliness. It’s a love of making things.’
And perhaps only an artist would make this observation:
In some early poems, Dylan’s delight in mixing – deliberately – pure sound patterns with verbal clues and leaving the reader to ‘get on with’ the meaning was very akin, I feel, to Picasso’s device of placing an eye here and a nose there and forcing the looker to get on with the face, which – being provided with these bits and pieces – the brain will not let him avoid.
Fred even suspected, controversially, that in his early work, Dylan was sometimes mischievously presenting the reader with a superbly constructed puzzle with no solution, ‘knowing, diabolically, that it will be finally solved and that books will be written about the solution’.
The furious bursts of work that produced such poems would be interspersed with a complete disappearance from view, after which Dylan would often turn up with some new friend: a down-and-out from the Embankment, a broken-down American boxer, a communist in hiding from the fascists. They would stay for a while, maybe hours, days or weeks, then disappear for good. ‘There must have been a strange contrast between our habits,’ Fred remarked. ‘Whereas I was glued to my easel-cum-chair experimenting away day after day, Dylan would disappear for days – perhaps weeks on end; on one occasion he went out to get a haircut and the next time I saw him was in Swansea.’
Dylan had always been restless, but perhaps this tendency to disappear was because, despite his eagerness to live in London, he liked neither the discomfort nor the cold of his digs. He was used to being molly-coddled by his mother and writing in the solitude of his suburban Swansea home, not with all the distractions of living at such close quarters with messy artists. Only a month after arriving he wrote to a Swansea friend complaining about the ‘little maggots’ he was living with and how boring and provincial he found them.
I find it difficult to concentrate in a room as muddled and messy as ours is nearly all the time. For yards around me I see nothing but poems, poems, poems, mashed potatoes, mashed among my stories and Janes’ canvasses. One day we shall have to wash up, and then perhaps I can really begin to work.
Fred Janes and Dylan Thomas sunbathing on the roof of 5 Redcliffe Street in London, c.1935 photographed by William Scott
