Showing posts with label Dylan Thomas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dylan Thomas. Show all posts

Saturday, November 25, 2017

Doubting Thomases (3): R. S. Thomas



R. S. Thomas (1913-2000)


When I was in the third form at school - I guess that would be Year 9 in the new nomenclature - we used to have our French lessons in a classroom shared with an English teacher.

There were a series of posters around the wall which had been created by that 'other' class (whom we never met, though I came to envy them intensely). What with one thing and another, I spent an awful lot of time in class staring at these posters. They contained a series of short pithy statements, written out with bright crayon illustrations. I never consciously memorised any of them, but I can still recall some of those inscriptions, as well as the pictures that accompanied them:

They said:
Take hold of the nettle
seize it with both hands
and I did
and it stung me.


I don't know where that comes from, and Google has provided me with no assistance. Perhaps it was the poster-maker's own inspiration. A bit dark, maybe, but certainly memorable. Then there was:

And I thought about books.
And for the first time I realized
that a man was behind each one of the books.
A man had to think them up.
A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper.
And I'd never even thought that thought before.


That one seemed a bit banal to me at the time (not to mention, now, a bit sexist). It wasn't till some time afterwards that I ran across it while reading Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and suddenly realised that it'd had been a quote from him all along. All at once that made it sound much more pithy to me, little snob that I was.



Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)


The other wonderful thing I discovered in that first reading of Bradbury's masterpiece was the page where the narrator reads out the last two stanzas of "Dover Beach" to his depressed, suicidal wife and a couple of her friends:
"Dover Beach.” His mouth was numb.

“Now read in a nice clear voice and go slow.”

The room was blazing hot, he was all fire, he was all coldness; they sat in the middle of an empty desert with three chairs and him standing, swaying, and him waiting for Mrs. Phelps to stop straightening her dress hem and Mrs. Bowles to take her fingers away from her hair. Then he began to read in a low, stumbling voice that grew firmer as he progressed from line to line, and his voice went out across the desert, into the whiteness, and around the three sitting women there in the great hot emptiness.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
The chairs creaked under the three women, Montag finished it out:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
That poem completely transfixed me at the time. I didn't know it was by Matthew Arnold, or even who Matthew Arnold was. I took good care to find out after that, though.



Matthew Arnold: Dover Beach (1851)


The last of the three sets of poster texts which have stayed with me from that classroom is the only one that was clearly attributed to an author: R. S. Thomas. Just a few phrases stayed with me from that rather fierce poem until I looked it up again just now. To give you an idea of the tricks memory plays, here are the few bits I remembered:
And he said I will make the poem and I will make it now ... so he took paper and pen, the mind's cartridge ... while the spent hearts smoked in its wake ...
And here's the poem itself, from the volume Tares (1961). I don't know if the title was included on the poster. I suspect not:
The Maker

So he said then: I will make the poem,
I will make it now. He took pencil,
The mind's cartridge, and blank paper,
And drilled his thoughts to the slow beat

Of the blood's drum, and there it formed,
On the white surface and went marching
Onward through time while the spent cities
And dry hearts smoked in its wake.


R. S Thomas: Collected Poems 1945-1990 (1993): 122.


I can't tell you how satisfying it is to see that poem again after all these years, and to correct all the mistakes my memory made in recalling it.

I didn't particularly care for the poem at the time, mind you. It didn't rhyme, which was a big deal to me then. The arrogance of it repelled me, as well as what seemed the impossible self-confidence of those opening lines: claiming to know what your poem will be before you've even written it down.

None of that really mattered, though. That was just mind-chatter. What mattered was the fact that I'd finally seen that a poem could repel you and transfix you at the same time: that it could work on you whether you wanted it to or not. I assumed its author, this 'R. S. Thomas' I knew nothing else about, must be a most fearsome person, and it wasn't till years afterwards that I ventured to read any more of his work.

What I read bore no resemblance to the poem I remembered from the classroom, though. To be honest, in its violence and single-mindedness, it sounded more like Ted Hughes than the mild-mannered Welsh clergyman R. S. Thomas turned out to be. Until I read his autobiography, that is.



R. S. Thomas: Autobiographies (1997)


Perhaps I should say "Autobiographies": there are four such works collected in the volume above, all of them written in the Welsh he so painstakingly learned as an adult, but was - much to his chagrin - never able to compose poems in:
For me, being a poet is a full-time job, and although the muse may languish as one grows older, there is a kind of duty upon you to persevere in perfecting your craft, and to secure an answer, though poetry, to some of the great questions of life. Some are still surprised that I write my poems in English, as if it were a matter of choice. I have said many times that I was thirty before I started learning Welsh in earnest. English (my mother tongue, remember) was long since rooted in me, and it is from the depth of his being that poet draws his poetry. If I believed that I could satisfy myself by composing poetry in Welsh, I would so so. But I learned many years ago, with sorrow, that it was not possible. ... But be that as it may, Llŷn is not an escape, but a peninsula where I can be inward with all the tension of our age.
[Blwyddyn yn Llŷn / A Year in Llyn (1990): 151]
I hadn't really thought about that experience of staring at those texts and wishing that I was in that class, where you might be encouraged to create your own poster for your own quotation for quite a few years. A couple of months ago I was talking to Graham Lindsay, though, and he told me about an experience he had as a schoolboy when a relieving teacher gave their class Dylan Thomas's "Poem in October" (plus, I think, "Fern Hill" - which was also extensively excerpted from in the wall texts in my own classroom).

Reading Thomas for the first time was an extraordinary experience for him, and yet he was far too tongue-tied to tell the teacher about it when back at school. No doubt that teacher presumed that his little poetry experiment had been a complete failure. You never know, though. I'm sure that the teacher who got his or her class to create all those posters had no idea that anyone besides them actually read them, let alone was moved, intrigued, provoked by them to such a degree.

It must have been shortly after that that I started to write my own first painfully derivative, clumsily rhymed poems, full of archaic diction and mythological references, just like the nineteenth-century poets who were my models.

There are a lot of striking passages in R. S. Thomas's autobiography:
Today, when I was out in Pen-y-cil and Parwyd, as I was looking down the precipice, there came the old urge to leap down. Almost everyone has experienced it. There is a psychological explanation most probably, but not everyone has a steady enough head to be able to look down, let alone climb down.
[Blwyddyn yn Llŷn / A Year in Llyn (1990): 123]
That one certainly struck a chord. Someone once asked me why I wrote poetry, and I replied: 'To come up with reasons for wanting to stay alive." That must have sounded like a piece of pretentious posing to her, but I'm afraid it was nothing but the strictest truth. It runs in the family, I'm sorry to say.

Then there's this bit:
In 1938 came the awakening .. to a boy with ideals to uphold, the situation was clear enough: Christ was a pacifist, but not so the Church established in his name ... Meanwhile ... under the influence of the beautiful and exciting country to the west he continued to write poetry - tender, innocent lyrics in the manner of the Georgian poets, because that was the background to his reading among the poets. Edward Thomas was one of his favourites and because the latter had written about the countryside, the budding poet tried to imitate him. The more 'modern ' English poets had not yet broken though to his inner world to shatter the unreal dreams that dwelled there. And, alas, the Welsh poets did not exist for him. Who was to blame? The desire to write was within him, but because of the nature of his education and his background, he could only think in terms of the English language.
[Neb /No-one (1985): 44-45].
Those early religious struggles were more quickly resolved in my case, but those problems with 'modernity' took a long time to filter through into my writing, too. For his 1938, put my 1975. I can now see that that poem of his was one of the vehicles of transformation, but I wasn't really aware of it until just now.

Here's a list of the books of his I own:



R. S. Thomas: Collected Later Poems: 1988-2000 (2003)

    Ronald Stuart Thomas (1913-2000)

Poetry:

  • Thomas, R. S. Selected Poems, 1946-1968. 1973. Hart-Davis, MacGibbon Ltd. London: Granada Publishing Limited, 1974.
  • Thomas, R. S. Between Here and Now: Poems. London: Macmillan London Limited, 1981.
  • Thomas, R. S. Collected Poems 1945-1990. 1993. London: Phoenix Giant, 1996.
  • Thomas, R. S. Collected Later Poems 1988-2000. 2003. Highgreen: Bloodaxe Books, 2004.
  • Thomas, R. S. Uncollected Poems. Ed. Tony Brown & Jason Walford Davies. Highgreen: Bloodaxe Books Ltd., 2013.

  • Prose:

  • Thomas, R. S. Autobiographies: Former Paths / The Creative Writer's Suicide / No-one / A Year in Llŷn. 1972, 1977, 1985, 1990. Trans. Jason Walford Davies. 1997. A Phoenix Paperback. London: Orion Books Ltd., 1998.



  • R. S. Thomas: Uncollected Poems (2013)


    Few possessions: a chair,
    a table, a bed
    to say my prayers by,
    and, gathered from the shore,
    the bone-like, crossed sticks
    proving that nature
    acknowledges the Crucifixion.
    All night I am at
    a window not too small
    to be frame to the stars
    that are no further off
    than the city lights
    I have rejected. ...

    "At the End"




    Saturday, May 25, 2013

    Doubting Thomases (2): Dylan Thomas



    [Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)]


    I've always had rather an uneasy relationship with Dylan Thomas's poetry. On the one hand, it's certainly full of memorable, resonant phrases: "I see the boys of summer in their ruin" - "Do not go gentle into that good night" - "The hunchback in the park, a solitary mister" ... On the other hand, it's pretty difficult to construe it into sense much of the time.

    I've always had a bias towards the plain and understated. My favourite poets when I was a kid were A. E. Housman and W. H. Auden. My brother Ken, by contrast, preferred Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas ...



    [Dylan Thomas: The Caedmon Collection (2002)]


    I did undergo a partial conversion when I bought a copy of the complete Caedmon recordings of his work a few years ago:
    Thomas, Dylan. The Caedmon Collection. Read by the Author. 1952-53. Set of 11 CDs (complete). Introduced by Billy Collins. London: HarperCollins, 2002.
    1. from Dylan Thomas Reading A Child's Christmas in Wales and Five Poems / from Dylan Thomas Reading Over Sir John's Hill and Other Poems / from Dylan Thomas Reading from His Works [12 poems]
    2. from Dylan Thomas Reading Poem on His Birthday, And Death Shall Have No Dominion, Lament and Other Poems Volume 2 / from Dylan Thomas Reading Complete Recorded Poetry / from Dylan Thomas Reading Over Sir John's Hill and Other Poems [20 poems]
    3. from Dylan Thomas Reading Quite Early One Morning and Other Memories / from Dylan Thomas Reading from His Works [5 stories]
    4. from Dylan Thomas: In Country Heaven - The Evolution of a Poem / from Dylan Thomas and Edith Sitwell Read and Discuss Her Poetry [5 poems / 7 ES poems]
    5. from Dylan Thomas Reading A Visit to America and Poems / from An Evening with Dylan Thomas [3 poems / 25 poems by other authors]
    6. from Dylan Thomas Reads the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Others / from Dylan Thomas Reading from His Works [18 poems by other authors]
    7. from Dylan Thomas Reads: A Personal Anthology / from Dylan Thomas: Return Journey to Swansea [22 poems by other authors]
    8. from Dylan Thomas Reading from King Lear and the Duchess of Malfi / from Dylan Thomas Reads: A Personal Anthology / from Dylan Thomas Reads the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Others [17 excerpts by other authors]
    9. from Under Milk Wood [parts 1-3]
    10. from Under Milk Wood [part 4] / from Dylan Thomas: Return Journey to Swansea / from An Evening with Dylan Thomas / from Adventures in the Skin Trade [5 poems / 2 talks]
    11. from Dylan Thomas Reads from His Adventures in the Skin Trade and Two Poems [chapters I-II]

    I have to say that his prose, in particular, was a revelation to me. It was so funny, so witty and unpretentious, so lacking in the portentous solemnity of much of his poetry. Possibly this is the best way to experience it, though - through its own author's readings.

    Another attraction of this series is a full recording of the original version of Under Milk Wood, recorded almost by accident one evening in New York shortly before Thomas's death, with the Welsh wizard himself in the cast.



    [Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems 1934-1953 (1998)]


    More recently, though, I bit the bullet and bought the latest edition of the collected poems, with full annotations and quite a few additions, subtractions and revisions to the canon. In particular, the last poem of all was scarcely recognizable to me in its new version.

    Here is his unfinished poem "Elegy," as edited by fellow-poet Vernon Watkins, from the later reprints of Thomas's Collected Poems 1934-1952:
    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

    Which was rest and dust, and in the kind ground
    The darkest justice of death, blind and unblessed.
    Let him find no rest but be fathered and found,

    I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed,
    In the muted house, one minute before
    Noon, and night, and light. The rivers of the dead

    Veined his poor hand I held, and I saw
    Through his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea.
    (An old tormented man three-quarters blind,

    I am not too proud to cry that He and he
    Will never never go out of my mind.
    All his bones crying, and poor in all but pain,

    Being innocent, he dreaded that he died
    Hating his God, but what he was was plain:
    An old kind man brave in his burning pride.

    The sticks of the house were his; his books he owned.
    Even as a baby he had never cried;
    Nor did he now, save to his secret wound.

    Out of his eyes I saw the last light glide.
    Here among the light of the lording sky
    An old blind man is with me where I go

    Walking in the meadows of his son's eye
    On whom a world of ills came down like snow.
    He cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres'

    Last sound, the world going out without a breath:
    Too proud to cry, too frail to check the tears,
    And caught between two nights, blindness and death.

    O deepest wound of all that he should die
    On that darkest day. Oh, he could hide
    The tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.

    Until I die he will not leave my side.)

    Watkins remarks of his favourite among the two "most complete" surviving drafts of the poem that it "extends to the seventeenth line, ending 'to the roots of the sea,' after which there is a line which is deleted." Of the rest of the reconstructed poem (the part in parentheses) he explains: "The lines are all found there, except that two or three have been adjusted to fit the rhyming scheme ... Of the added lines sixteen are exactly as Dylan Thomas wrote them, and the remainder are only altered to the extent of an inversion of one or two words. He ends, rather disarmingly:
    Their order might well have been different. The poem might also have been made much longer. [pp.171-72].
    Somewhat predictably, the casual nature of this reconstruction has not been allowed to stand unchallenged in the new edition, Collected Poems 1934-1953 (1998), edited by Walford Davies and Ralph Maud. Their text reads as follows:
    Too proud to die, broken and blind he died
    The darkest way, and did not turn away,
    A cold, kind man brave in his burning pride

    On that darkest day. Oh, forever may
    He live lightly, at last, on the last, crossed
    Hill, and there grow young, under the grass, in love,

    Among the long flocks, and never lie lost
    Or still all the days of his death, though above
    All he longed all dark for his mother's breast

    Which was rest and dust, and in the kind ground
    The darkest justice of death, blind and unblessed.
    Let him find no rest but be fathered and found,

    I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed.
    In the muted house, one minute before
    Noon, and night, and light. The rivers of the dead

    Moved in his poor hand I held, and I saw
    Through his faded eyes to the roots of the sea.
    Go calm to your crucifixed hill, I told

    The air that drew away from him.

    At first sight the main difference between these two different versions of "Elegy" is simply their length. Davies and Maud have not extended the poem beyond the end of the surviving manuscript version they reprint. Nor have they made unauthorised alterations to its wording. In order to assess the full effect of Watkin's revisions and additions, though, it's probably necessary to conflate the two texts, as I've done below (italicised words and lines are Watkins' revisions to Thomas's ms. text):
    Too proud to die, broken and blind he died
    The darkest way, and did not turn away,
    A cold, kind man brave in his burning [narrow] pride

    On that darkest day. Oh, forever may
    He live lightly, at last, on the last, crossed
    Hill, and there grow young, 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
    [Above] All he longed all dark for his mother's breast

    Which was rest and dust, and in the kind ground
    The darkest justice of death, blind and unblessed.
    Let him find no rest but be fathered and found,

    I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed.
    In the muted house, one minute before
    Noon, and night, and light. The rivers of the dead

    [Veined] Moved in his poor hand I held, and I saw
    Through his faded [unseeing] eyes to the roots of the sea.
    [Go calm to your crucifixed hill, I told

    The air that drew away from him.]

    [(An old tormented man three-quarters blind,

    I am not too proud to cry that He and he
    Will never never go out of my mind.
    All his bones crying, and poor in all but pain,

    Being innocent, he dreaded that he died
    Hating his God, but what he was was plain:
    An old kind man brave in his burning pride.

    The sticks of the house were his; his books he owned.
    Even as a baby he had never cried;
    Nor did he now, save to his secret wound.

    Out of his eyes I saw the last light glide.
    Here among the light of the lording sky
    An old man is with me where I go

    Walking in the meadows of his son's eye
    On whom a world of ills came down like snow.
    He cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres'

    Last sound, the world going out without a breath:
    Too proud to cry, too frail to check the tears,
    And caught between two nights, blindness and death.

    O deepest wound of all that he should die
    On that darkest day. oh, he could hide
    The tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.

    Until I die he will not leave my side.)
    ]

    Poetically, I guess there's quite a lot to be said for dumping the 23 extra lines Watkins has added to Thomas's surviving nineteen (he also cut a couple of the end of the poem as it stands). It's also a little difficult to understand why he thought it necessary to change "burning" to "narrow" pride in line three. He himself explains:
    ... 'burning' occurs more often than 'narrow' in the transcripts; but it was 'narrow' in that line that he quoted to me from memory when I last saw him.
    Against such testimony it's hard to argue. He was there; we weren't (and neither were Davies and Maud). What does fascinate me about the whole thing is how a poet's text - even one as obsessively attentive to detail as Dylan Thomas - can still be morphing and changing fifty years after his death. As for the immense expansions of the canon in Daniel Jones' 1971 edition of The Poems,they now appear to be in disfavour. All that we are now encouraged to read of his uncollected verse are the early Notebook Poems (1930-34), available in two quite different versions, both edited by Ralph Maud: the more "scholarly" text of 1967 and the more "readerly" one of 1989.

    All in all, there appear to be quite a few different Dylan Thomases to choose from. It may seem absurd to own so many books by and about him, including overlapping editions of the same poems, stories and broadcasts, but it's very difficult otherwise to feel confident exactly which version of his texts one is reading. That's not to say that the stories over, either. There are lots more books out there to collect before I can regard the question of just what should and what shouldn't be included in his canon as in any way settled:

      Dylan Marlais Thomas (1914-1953)

      Prose (including Screenplays & Broadcasts):

    1. Thomas, Dylan. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. 1940. London: Guild Books, 1956.
    2. Thomas, Dylan. The Doctor and the Devils: From the Story by Donald Taylor. 1953. London: J. M. Dent, 1969.
    3. Thomas, Dylan. Quite Early One Morning: Broadcasts. Preface by Aneirin Talfan Davies. 1954. An Aldine Paperback. London: J. M. Dent, 1968.
    4. Thomas, Dylan. Adventures in the Skin Trade. 1955. London: Ace Books, 1961.
    5. Thomas, Dylan. A Prospect of the Sea and Other Stories and Prose Poems. Ed. Daniel Jones. 1955. London: J. M. Dent, 1957.
    6. Thomas, Dylan. The Beach of Falesá: Based on a Story by Robert Louis Stevenson. 1964. London: Panther, 1966.
    7. Thomas, Dylan. Two Tales: Me and My Bike, Rebecca's Daughters. Ed. Sydney Box. Illustrations by Rebecca Box. 1965 & 1965. London: Sphere Books Limited, 1968.
    8. Thomas, Dylan. Early Prose Writings. Ed. Walford Davies. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1971.
    9. Thomas, Dylan, & John Davenport. The Death of the King’s Canary. Introduction by Constantine FitzGibbon. 1976. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
    10. Thomas, Dylan. The Collected Stories. Foreword by Leslie Norris. Everyman Fiction. London: J. M. Dent, 1983.

    11. Poetry (including Drama):

    12. Thomas, Dylan. Deaths and Entrances: Poems. 1946. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1947.
    13. Thomas, Dylan. Collected Poems 1934-1952. 1952. An Aldine Paperback. London: J. M. Dent, 1974.
    14. Thomas, Dylan. Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices. Preface by Daniel Jones. 1954. London: J. M. Dent, 1954.
    15. Maud, Ralph, ed. Poet in the Making: the Notebooks of Dylan Thomas. 1967. London: J. M. Dent, 1968.
    16. Thomas, Dylan. The Poems. Ed. Daniel Jones. 1971. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1978.
    17. Thomas, Dylan. The Notebook Poems: 1930-1934. Ed. Ralph Maud. 1989. Everyman’s Library. London: J. M. Dent, 1990.
    18. Thomas, Dylan. Collected Poems 1934-1953. Ed. Walford Davies & Ralph Maud. 1998. A Phoenix Paperback. London: Orion Books Ltd., 2000.

    19. Collected Works:

    20. Thomas, Dylan. The Dylan Thomas Omnibus: Under Milk Wood, Poems, Stories and Broadcasts. Ed. Walford Davies & Ralph Maud. A Phoenix Giant Paperback. London: Orion Books Ltd., 1995.

    21. Biography & Letters:

    22. Brinnin, John Malcolm. Dylan Thomas in America. 1956. An Aldine Paperback. London: J. M. Dent, 1965.
    23. Thomas, Dylan. Letters to Vernon Watkins. Ed. Vernon Watkins. 1957. An Aldine Paperback. London: J. M. Dent & Faber, 1967.
    24. Tedlock, E. W. ed. Dylan Thomas: The Legend and the Poet. A Symposium. 1960. London: Mercury Books, 1963.
    25. Ferris, Paul. Dylan Thomas. 1977. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
    26. Thomas, Dylan. The Collected Letters. Ed. Paul Ferris. 1985. London: Paladin, 1987.
    27. Ackerman, John. A Dylan Thomas Companion: Life, Poetry and Prose. 1991. Macmillan. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1994.

    Please let me know if you see something obvious there that I've missed. There must have been a time in the 50s and 60s when virtually any book - broadcasts, old film scripts, anthologies - with the name "Dylan Thomas" on the cover was assured of a ready sale.



    [Richard Knights: Dylan Thomas's writing shed (Laugharne, Wales)]