[lit-ideas] Re: The Dylan Thomas Songbook
- From: "" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx" for DMARC)
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 07:43:41 -0400
He used to sing drinking songs (along with others) while at the Dreaming
Spires...
In a message dated 10/29/2014 3:20:13 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
_donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxx.uk_ (mailto:donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx) writes:
This person, loaded with string bags full of shopping, was still there
when I went to Cornmarket on busy Saturday mornings in the late 80s, when
Thomas had long passed, so Thomas should perhaps not be confused with this
rather shambling and confused looking figure. Though an easy mistake to make.
Indeed. The person was invariably seen, as one eye-witness puts it, “
staggering along loaded down with string bags, behind his striding,
empty-handed
Viking Irish wife”, a familiar figure in the Cornmarket on Saturday
afternoons.
“The very seaside postcard of a booze-flushed snub-nosed, ox-eyed,
hen-pecked slave husband, aching to slide off into a pub and lose wife,
shopping
and consciousness”.
But the truth is that a fascination for Oxford held Dylan Thomas poet
enthralled.
A jotted reminder in a notebook - 'Find exact modern duties of Proctors and
Bulldogs compared with 19th century' - is hardly the sort of penny-plain
line we might expect from a major lyrical poet.
But in 1946 Dylan Thomas was researching a radio talk about Oxford.
“What do you mean, ‘talk ABOUT Oxford’?”, the producer asked.
“Yes, to make Oxford the _topic_ of it,” Thomas replied.
Thomas was living in the grounds of Magdalen College. And he was fascinated
by the dreaming spires, which played a background role in the unfolding of
his career, and indeed Grice’s.
Thomas's creativity held him back from the undergraduate career that his
schoolmaster father wanted for him, but which Thomas _fils_ didn’t perhaps
want for his self.
Indeed, Thomas père, as some of you may not know, was a prickly alumnus of
the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth, which is the closest Wales
can get to Oxford.
Having gained a first-class degree, he would have liked to proceed to
Oxford. Instead, he ended up teaching English at Swansea Grammar School.
On the other hand, Grice _fils_, the son of Grice père, an industrialist (‘
and cello player’, as the _fils_ hastens to add), went straight from
Clifton to Corpus Christi (“A Midlands scholarship boy”, his aristocratic
classmates would later recall).
For Dylan Thomas Oxford was always, figuratively, a chimera.
Perhaps literally so, so. Recall that a chimera, for the Greeks, was
literally, a "year-old she-goat" (the masculine, hardly used, is “khimaros”),
from kheima "winter season" (Poets use metaphors as a rule).
In the 1930s, Thomas is said to have visited the city to talk about James
Joyce, although we have found no evidence of this.
It might have been the same ‘familiar figure’ the Welsh poet is often
confused with.
In 1937 Thomas did write an enthusiastic review of Djuna Barnes's novel
Nightwood for a short-lived undergraduate publication, Light and Dark.
He gave him three stars out of five.
Thomas clearly had admirers in Oxford, for he suggested the English don,
Lord David Cecil, as a subscriber to a 1938 edition of his poems.
(“In fact I wasn’t a lord,” David Cecil would later recall, “but Thomas
called me so as a token of courtesy, me being a younger son of a marches”)
At the start of the Second World War, while Grice was seriously thinking
(and acting) against ‘the Enemy’, Oxford poets such as Sidney Keyes regarded
Dylan Thomas as a welcome antidote to Auden and his circle.
As a disgression, it should be pointed out that Grice’s cat, Wystan, was so
named after he (Grice, not the cat) attended Auden’s inaugural lecture at
Oxford where he claimed: “The real test of imagination lies in the ability
to name your cat”.
Sidney Keyes invited Thomas to address the University English Club, an
undergraduate society, in November 1941, while Grice was seriously involved in
action in the “Mid-Atlantic theatre” as he called it.
Thomas had been working with John Davenport on a novel, The Death of the
King's Canary, a sequel to “The Life of the King’s Canary”.
“The Death of the King’s Canary” interweaves a story about the murder of
the poet laureate with brilliant parodies of contemporary poets.
Davenport later recalled, “It was so realistically written, before Truman
Capote had engaged in this sort of thing, that many in Oxford did think he
HAD murdered the poet laureate, and I would not be surprised to learn if it
was not after US that the practice of prefacing novels with “Characters are
fictional” is an end-result of our publication”.
Philip Larkin (of St John's, like Grice) notes appreciatively not of Grice
but Thomas:
'Hell of a man: little, snubby, hopelessly pissed bloke who made hundreds
of cracks and read parodies of everybody in inappropriate voices. He
remarked, "I'd like to have talked about a book of poems I've been given to
review, a young poet called Rupert Brooke - it's surprising how he has been
influenced by Stephen Spender ...". There was a moment of baffled surprise,
then
a boo. Then he read a parody of Spender entitled The Parachutist.”
Grice would later remark, “Doubly inappropriate, in that Spender’s
Parachutist, to be honest, sounds like its own parody.”
Later in the war, Thomas and his Irish Viking wife Caitlin were back in
Oxford, staying with the historian A J P Taylor and his wife Margaret.
Thomas was careful to pronounce “Taylor” with a capital “T” (“We’re
staying with the [T]aylors”), perhaps to disimplicate that they were staying
with the town’s clothes-makers.
It was an unexpected encounter, that of Thomas with the [T]aylors,
engineered by pianist Natasha Litvin.
She used to play a rather off-key pianola at lunchtime concerts in Oxford
organised by Margaret Taylor, who one day asked her to bring “some guest or
two” along for the weekend.
In all innocence, Litvin (who was married to Stephen Spender, of “The
Parachutist” fame – but he always kept his bachelor name) invited the Thomases.
Little did Natasha and Stephen know that Thomas had already met the
[T]aylors, and had not endeared himself to them.
That was in April 1935, six months after reaching London from Swansea.
During that time, Thomas had befriended the poet Norman Cameron, an Oriel
graduate who had been a key figure in Oxford's English Society in the late
1920s.
Anxious because the sparkling poet was over-indulging in the pubs of
Fitzrovia and Soho, Cameron arranged for him to take time off for what was
essentially a rest cure with his former Oriel friend A J P Taylor, then
teaching
history at (of all places) Manchester.
Recently married, Taylor was not impressed by Thomas who, invited for a
week, contrived to stay a month.
“I was never told that ‘a week is a week is a week’ is tautologous”, the
Welsh poet later remarked.
In his memoir, entitled, “A Personal History”, Taylor records how he had
to ration access to his beer barrel, since his guest drank 'fifteen or
twenty pints' each day.
Taylor, to amuse Grice, is using the disjunction ‘or’
non-truth-functionally (“What he implicated,” Grice notes, “is that Thomas
would drink FROM
fifteen TO twenty pints each day (of the week)”).
As Thomas was leaving, he announced he had lost his return ticket and asked
to borrow two pounds.
The historian reluctantly agreed, hoping never again to see a personwhom he
describes as 'cruel' and 'a sponger'.
A decade later, the dynamics of the Taylor marriage had changed and the
[T]aylor wife, bored with academic life, was ready to be impressed by the
romantic poet.
Taylor notes with regret, “I am surprised the wife thought that Oxford was
_less_ than an ‘academic life’ sort of town.”
After Thomas advised the [T]aylor wife on her own verse, she took pity when
in March 1946 he was having difficulty finding accommodation for his
family and three pit-bulls.
She invited them to stay at Holywell, the cottage where she and her husband
lived in the grounds of Magdalen, where Thomas slept in a one-room
summerhouse beside the river Cherwell “or in a gypsy caravan”, she recalls
(Here
the ‘implicature’ of ‘or’ is still not truth-functional but accountable
in terms of her cognitive states, “for all I cared”).
So began one of the great acts of modern literary patronage.
For eight years, until his death in New York in November 1953, Thomas
looked to the [T]aylor wife to bail him out of financial difficulties.
She was besotted by him and he exploited her.
After allowing him to stay at Holywell Ford, she bought him a dwelling in
South Leigh (1947-9) and arranged for his son, Llewelyn, to attend Magdalen
College School.
(She knew the pit bulls had no chance).
The [T]aylor wife always referred to Llewelyn’s alma mater as “the
Magdalen College School”, where Grice would have just _SAID_ “Magdalen” and
implicated the rest.
The [T]aylor wife may be described (as she was) as as 'a sort of
middle-class Lady Ottoline Morrell', whereas to describe Lady Ottoline as a
high-class [T]aylor wife can only, admittedly, misimplicate.
At the [T]aylors’ Holywell literay salon one might meet authors Louis
MacNeice and Graham Greene or the composer Elisabeth Lutyens.
Dylan Thomas would appear as a poetic turn – sometimes as a double act with
the Viking wife.
Meanwhile, Grice, who preferred the outdoors, was fishing on the Cherwell.
John Betjeman, then secretary of the Oxford Preservation Trust, expressed
amusement at Thomas’s reading of Thomas Hardy's 'To Lizbee Brown'.
“He kept using a Dorsetshire accent that was pretty realistic – coming
from *him*”.
But all too often Thomas was tired and emotional after a day at the BBC in
London. Sometimes, he was even emotional and tired.
The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper recalled how Thomas 'overturned a full
decanter of claret - good claret too - drenching the fastidious Lord David
(Cecil).
That dinner party was not a success – at least for Lord (as he wasn’t)
David Cecil.
What appalled most was how embarrassingly rude Thomas could be about his
darling patroness.
Once, after she had laboured over a dish of jugged hare, he wavered before
condescending to 'eat the hare of the bitch that dogs me.'
(“Something that in the presence of Lady Ottoline could not even be
_implicated_”).
Nevertheless, Thomas enjoyed life in Oxford.
Undergraduates used to see him in the Turf, Gloucester Arms or White's, a
club near St Aldate's, along with other people. Non undergraduates also used
to see him there, too, oddly.
(Whereas Grice’s haunts were The Lamb & Flag and the more literary Bird &
Baby).
With Caitlin or Margaret Taylor in tow, Thomas drank with friends, such as
John Veale, a composer whose father was University Registrar, and whose
mother enjoyed gardening.
Thomas also socialized with Ernest Stahl, a German don at Christ Church;
Dan Davin, an energetic New Zealander at the University Press; and Enid
Starkie, who taught French at Somerville and with whom he discussed Rimbaud.
Meanwhile, Grice was creating his theory of conversational implicature to
account for all this sort of non-sequitur conversational exchanges (“There’
s logic to conversation, even if it’s a _queer_ one”).
Although dismissive of his education, Starkie loved her conversations with
Thomas, declaring she would have been happy if he 'had read the telephone
directory _in French_’.
(She meant, “with a French accent”).
Intrigued by the dreaming spires, Thomas indeed adopted it as a subject for
one radio talk in 1946. He called it “The dreaming spires”, playing on
the implicature of ‘dreaming’ (“a favourite verb with Malcolm”).
This was part of an exchange with an American station, which provided a
piece about Princeton.
Thomas abusively noted that “Oxford can’t compare with Princeton, and
vice versa”, when the fact is that EVERYTHING _is_ comparable to ANYTHING else.
Along with the memo about proctors and bulldogs, Thomas inscribed gobbets
about the dreaming spires and its lore - potted biographies of luminaries
including Benjamin Jowett (the translator of Plato for those who unlike Grice
could not read Greek) and C. L. Dodgson (a.k.a. Humpty Dumpty in Oxford);
a list of quotations about the place from Wordsworth, Swinburne and others;
even a section devoted to 'eccentric figures' such as Martin Routh,
President of Magdalen, described, hyperbolically, as “the last man in Oxford
to
wear a wig”.
Although not formally involved in the dreaming spires, Thomas did
participate in literary events, particularly at the Poetry Society (He would
have
participated in the Philosophical Society, but that wasn’t his thing, as was
Grice’s).
After moving to South Leigh Thomas became less prominent, but whenever he
turned up at Oxford, he made up for it.
As he informed Hector McIver: “Hugh MacDiarmid is coming to lecture to the
Oxford Poetry Society next month. A party is being arranged. What are YOU
bringing?”.
Seeing Thomas swaying down the High Street, Kenneth Tynan (of Magdalen)
asked if he could help. 'Get me some more bloody crème de menthe', Thomas
whispered – and he did use ‘a French accent’.
The poet Michael Hamburger (of Christ Church), if not Grice, who was just
returning from the front line, did welcom Thomas's Bohemianism in grim
post-war Oxford and novelist Francis King (of Balliol) wrote of the Thomas’s
'voluble, dangerous’ personality.
However, undergraduates were sceptical of his wordy lyricism in an age of
austerity and the atom bomb. They didn’t think much of his drinking songs,
either.
John Wain and Kingsley Amis (both St John's, like Grice), for example,
wanted a more robust, ironic style, as was later associated with the Movement
group of poets (“We call ourselves “Movement” poets, as we ‘move’ from one
poetic style to another”, Wain remarks).
By this time, Thomas was experiencing a difficult, even barren, period as a
poet.
His recognition of this change of mood spurred him into looking, during his
last few years, for new artistic challenges in radio and in the United
States of America. (Oddly, Grice would end up in the United States of America,
too, even if the West Coast – “Westward the course of empire takes its way
”).
In South Leigh in 1948, Thomas began to knock some shape into his 'play for
voices', Under Milk Wood.
But his longing - for academic respectability - remains evident in the
contract he signed with the Oxford University Press in early 1953 for a book
about Welsh fairy tales.
Oddly Grice would later sign with the Clarendon Press which is “the branch
of OUP that matters”, he would say
Walking along Broad Street, Martin Starkie once asked Thomas if he would
like to have been at the University. Thomas replied: 'In some ways, yes; in
most ways, no.'
As Grice remarked, “It’s not clear if some sort of truth-value gap is
being implicated there” (He is relying on Quine’s defense of ‘the tertium
exclusum’).
Cheers,
Speranza
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