This is a collection of radio material by Dylan Thomas (1914-53), published a year after his death.

I knew him from poems in a school anthology. I can't remember which. Probably Fern Hill, possibly Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.

And then we were in Swansea. And he was everywhere. You can visit his birthplace and family home at 5 Cymdonkin Drive. You can visit the Dylan Thomas Centre. You can play at spotting statues and commercial references.

Cue reading a bit more, then, and this anthology of prose pieces seemed a good beginning, especially as I could borrow a copy from Internet Archive.



Part I is reminiscence; Part II is criticism and commentary. I liked the latter; loved the former. So let's do the book back to front.

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Highlights from Part II

Thomas's tribute to Wilfred Owen (encountered recently in Pat Barker's Regeneration), is terribly moving: "Twenty-five years of age, he was the greatest poet of the first Great War... Now, at the beginning of what, in the future, may never be known to historians as the 'atomic age' -- for obvious reasons: there may be no historians -- we can see, rereading Owen, that he is poet of all times, all places, and all wars. There is only one War: that of men against men."

There's a tongue-in-cheek piece about Artists of Wales. It's funny, but it's also a good exposition of the way many emigrants struggle to relate to a dominant host culture: "Too many of the artists of Wales who go to live permanently in, for example, London, begin almost at once to anglicize themselves beyond recognition... By the condescending telling of comic apocryphal tales about Dai and Evan from the valleys, they earn, in the company of cultural lickspittles who condescend to them in their turn, sorry dinners and rounds of flat drinks... They set up, in grey, whining London, a little mock Wales of their own, an exile government of dispossessed intellectuals dispossessed not of their country but of their intellects."



His disquisition on A Dearth of Comic Writers inspires to me to read more W.W. Jacobs... I know him only from The Monkey's Paw, but Thomas has him down as "one of the trimmest, funniest, and most exact Edwardian writers, whose dialogue is as neat and sly and spare and taut as his mercenary and matrimonial plots".

Replies to an Enquiry is a defence of poetry, specifically narrative poetry: "Narrative is essential. Much of the flat, abstract poetry of the present has no narrative movement, no movement at all, and is consequently dead." He also attests to the influence of Sigmund Freud, affirming: "Whatever is hidden should be made naked. To be stripped of darkness is to be clean, to strip of darkness is to make clean... Freud cast light on a little of the darkness he had exposed. Benefiting by the sight of the light and the knowledge of the hidden nakedness, poetry must drag further into the clean nakedness of light more even of the hidden causes than Freud could realise."

He's really good at evoking an atmosphere (The Festival Exhibition 1951, for instance, or The International Eisteddfod), and he's also a sharp satirist (How To Be a Poet is a good example here, as is A Visit to America, where a British author is told: "You must go to the States and make a Personal Appearance. Your novel is KILLING them over there, and we're not surprised either. You must go round the States lecturing to women").


Early influences

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Highlights from Part I

It's in his reminiscences, however, that Thomas really touches the soul. Here are some of my favourites. And be warned, I'm going to quote A LOT, because you just can't paraphrase Dylan Thomas:

REMINISCENCES OF CHILDHOOD

"I was born in a large Welsh town at the beginning of the Great War -- an ugly, lovely town (or so it was and is to me), crawling, sprawling by a long and splendid curving shore where truant boys and sandfield boys and old men from nowhere, beach-combed, idled and paddled, watched the dock-bound ships or the ships steaming away into wonder and India, magic and China, countries bright with oranges and loud with lions."

He maps out for us a child's geography:

"This sea-town was my world; outside a strange Wales, coal-pitted, mountained, river-run, full, so far as I knew, of choirs and football teams and sheep and storybook tall hats and red flannel petticoats, moved about its business which was none of mine.

"Beyond that unknown Wales with its wild names like peals of bells in the darkness, and its mountain men clothed in the skins of animals perhaps and always singing, lay England which was London and the country called the Front, from which many of our neighbours never came back. It was a country to which only young men travelled."


The beautiful Swansea Bay

I appreciated his evocation of Cymdonkin Park all the more having seen it:

"And the park itself was a world within the world of the sea-town. Quite near where I lived, so near that on summer evenings I could listen in my bed to the voices of older children playing ball on the sloping paper-littered bank, the park was full of terrors and treasures. Though it was only a little park, it held within its borders of old tall trees, notched with our names and shabby from our climbing, as many secret places, caverns and forests, prairies and deserts, as a country somewhere at the end of the sea.

"And though we would explore it one day, armed and desperate, from end to end, from the robbers' den to the pirates' cabin, the highwayman's inn to the cattle ranch, or the hidden room in the undergrowth, where we held beetle races, and lit the wood fires and roasted potatoes and talked about Africa, and the makes of motor cars, yet still the next day, it remained as unexplored as the Poles -- a country just born and always changing."



I imagine that the "tram that shook like an iron jelly down to the gaunt pier" is the way he got to Mumbles.

"Never was there such a town as ours, I thought..."

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A CHILD'S CHRISTMAS IN WALES

-- Snow. There's lots of snow in Dylan Thomas's recollections:

"Years and years ago, when I was a boy... it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: 'It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.'

"'But that was not the same snow,' I say. 'Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunderstorm of white, torn Christmas cards.'

"'Were there postmen then, too?'"

-- Presents. We all remember Useful Presents...:

"There were the Useful Presents: engulfing mufflers of the old coach days, and mittens made for giant sloths; zebra scarfs of a substance like silky gum that could be tug-o'-warred down to the galoshes; blinding tam-o'-shanters like patchwork tea cozies and bunny-suited busbies and balaclavas for victims of head-shrinking tribes; from aunts who always wore wool next to the skin there were mustached and rasping vests that made you wonder why the aunts had any skin left at all; and once I had a little crocheted nose bag from an aunt now, alas, no longer whinnying with us. And pictureless books in which small boys, though warned with quotations not to, would skate on Farmer Giles's pond and did and drowned; and books that told me everything about the wasp, except why."


The parlour at Thomas's home, where everyone would have gathered

-- Uncles

"There are always Uncles at Christmas. The same Uncles...

"For dinner we had turkey and blazing pudding, and after dinner the Uncles sat in front of the fire, loosened all buttons, put their large moist hands over their watch chains, groaned a little and slept... I would blow up balloons to see how big they would blow up to; and, then when they burst, which they all did, the Uncles jumped and rumbled. In the rich and heavy afternoon, the Uncles breathing like dolphins and the snow descending, I would sit among festoons and Chinese lanterns and nibble dates and try to make a model man-o'-war, following the Instructions for Little Engineers, and produce what might be mistaken for a sea-going tramcar... And then, at tea the recovered Uncles would be jolly; and the ice cake loomed in the center of the table like a marble grave. Auntie Hannah laced her tea with rum, because it was only once a year."

-- Inside

"Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight bubbled like a diver. Ghosts whooed like owls in the long nights when I dared not look over my shoulder; animals lurked in the cubbyhole under the stairs where the gas meter ticked...

"Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang Cherry Ripe, and another uncle sang Drake's Drum. It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird's Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept."


The bathroom at No. 5

*

HOLIDAY MEMORY

"August Bank Holiday -- a tune on an ice-cream cornet. A slap of sea and a tickle of sand. A fanfare of sunshades opening. A wince and whinny of bathers dancing into deceptive water. A tuck of dresses. A rolling of trousers. A compromise of paddlers. A sunburn of girls and a lark of boys. A silent hullabaloo of balloons...

"And the trams that hissed like ganders took us all to the beautiful beach.

"There was cricket on the sand, and sand in the spongecake, sandflies in the watercress, and foolish, mulish, religious donkeys on the unwilling trot...

"I remember the patient, laborious, and enamouring hobby, or profession, of burying relatives in sand...

"I remember the smell of sea and seaweed, wet flesh, wet hair, wet bathing-dresses, the warm smell as of a rabbity field after rain, the smell of pop and splashed sunshades and toffee...

"'If it could only just be like this for ever and ever amen.' August Monday all over the earth..."

Yes, indeed. Wouldn't that be wonderful...?



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A STORY

This is wonderful. It tells us about a men's group's annual outing to Porthcawl in a charabanc. The expedition becomes a pub crawl of epic proportions: "And dusk came down warm and gentle on thirty wild, wet, pickled, splashing men without a care in the world at the end of the world in the west of Wales."

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THE CRUMBS OF ONE MAN'S YEAR

Here Thomas looks back, as the old year wanes, at the snippets he recalls. I particularly liked this evocation of mindfulness:

"I was walking, one afternoon in August, along a river bank, thinking the same thoughts that I always think when I walk along a river-bank in August. As I was walking, I was thinking -- now it is August and I am walking along a river-bank. I do not think I was thinking of anything else. I should have been thinking of what I should have been doing, but I was thinking only of what I was doing then and it was all right: it was good, and ordinary, and slow, and idle, and old, and sure, and what I was doing I could have been doing a thousand years before, had I been alive then and myself or any other man."

*

LAUGHARNE

Quite Early One Morning, the story that gives us the title, is also set here: "Quite early one morning in the winter in Wales, by the sea that was lying down still and green as grass after a night of tar-black howling and rolling, I went out of the house... to see if it was raining still..." Must go to Laugharne one day... We looked at doing a day trip from Swansea, but it would have taken for ever to get there and back. Next time...

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RETURN JOURNEY

We listened to the original radio broadcast, sitting in the parlour of the house where Dylan Thomas was born, eating Welsh cakes, drinking tea, listening to his beautiful voice, with its very pukka accent. Aneirin Talfan Davies, in his Preface to an earlier edition of Quite Early, refers to Thomas's skill as a broadcaster and poetry reader: "To hear Dylan Thomas read poetry or deliver one of his talks was an unforgettable experience." True, that.



In this poignant dramatization, the narrator returns to Swansea after 14 years, and walks through its snow-bound streets, looking for his younger selves, and trying to reconstitute, after the ravages of the Three Nights' Blitz in 1941, the city he once knew.

It's unbearably sad: "All the shops bombed and vanished..."; his school "shattered, the echoing corridors charred where he scribbled and smudged and yawned in the long green days..."

Saddest of all is the list of names of those killed in the war. Asked if he knew the boy the narrator is seeking, the park-keeper says: "Oh yes, I knew him well... I've known him by the thousands... Dead..."

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There's so much about this book that's just so resonant... A wonderful reading experience.