Dylan Thomas

• 1. Introduction

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  Dylan Thomas walked into his 39th birthday party in New York on the 27th of October 1953 and left after an hour, feeling too ill to stay. Within two weeks he was dead, and the world was already arguing about what had killed him. Was it the drink? Neglect? A botched diagnosis? Or simply the long deterioration of a body that had never been entirely well? Thomas had spent his life cultivating a reputation as a roistering, drunken and doomed poet, and in death that image threatened to swallow everything else: the notebooks crammed with over 200 poems, the BBC broadcasts that made him a household voice, the play for voices that was still being edited the day the actors put on their makeup. This documentary asks who Dylan Thomas really was, apart from the legend he helped build.

• 2. Swansea Roots

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  5 Cwmdonkin Drive, a red-brick semi-detached house in the Uplands area of Swansea, was purchased by Dylan's parents a few months before he was born on the 27th of October 1914. His father, David John Thomas, held a first-class honours degree in English from University College, Aberystwyth, and taught English literature at the local grammar school while nursing ambitions beyond it. His mother, Florence, was a seamstress, and the household was bilingual; a family relation later recalled that both parents always spoke Welsh at home.

  Thomas's father chose the name Dylan after Dylan ail Don, a character in The Mabinogion, meaning something like "son of the sea." His mother quietly worried the Welsh pronunciation might get the boy teased as the "dull one." His middle name, Marlais, honored a great-uncle, the Unitarian minister and poet known by his bardic name Gwilym Marles. The name carried a tradition of language made sacred.

  Summers on the Llansteffan peninsula opened a different Wales to the young Thomas. His maternal aunt Ann Jones and her husband Jim rented Fernhill, a dilapidated 15-acre farm, and young Dylan spent time riding a cart horse named Prince, chasing pheasants, and fishing for trout. At the 1921 census, 95% of residents in the parishes around Fernhill were Welsh speakers, and schoolboy friends later recalled that the children played entirely in Welsh. Thomas brought all of this sensory memory to the 1945 poem "Fern Hill".

  At Swansea Grammar School in June 1928, Thomas won the school's mile race at St. Helen's Ground and carried the newspaper photograph of his victory with him until he died. He was less devoted to the curriculum, preferring his own reading and the school magazine, which he eventually edited. Biographers have noted that he published plagiarised poems under his own name, including one in the nationally read Boy's Own Paper that had already appeared in the same magazine fifteen years earlier. His distinctively original notebooks, however, began in earnest during these final school years, the first poem dated the 27th of April 1930.

• 3. The Making of a Poet

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  In 1931, at sixteen, Thomas left school to become a reporter for the South Wales Daily Post, where he stayed about eighteen months. He continued adding to the notebooks that would eventually fill five books and contain over 200 poems written between 1930 and 1935. Half of the 90 poems he published over his lifetime came from these years.

  Thomas published his first poem in a national journal in May 1933: "And Death Shall Have No Dominion," in the New English Weekly. He was still a teenager. The poem appeared through the encouragement of Victor Neuburg, who edited a section called "The Poet's Corner" in the Sunday Referee and awarded weekly prizes to new talent. The Sunday Referee's publisher then sponsored the publication of Thomas's first book, 18 Poems, in December 1934. The volume came out through Fortune Press, partly a vanity publisher that neither paid its writers nor guaranteed distribution, yet 18 Poems drew immediate critical attention. Critic Desmond Hawkins wrote that the work was "the sort of bomb that bursts no more than once in three years." Edith Sitwell and Edwin Muir were among the admirers the book won him.

  In 1934, when "Light breaks where no sun shines" appeared in The Listener, it caught the attention of T. S. Eliot, Geoffrey Grigson, and Stephen Spender simultaneously. Two years later, Twenty-five Poems, published by J. M. Dent, received comparable praise. In 1938, Thomas won the Oscar Blumenthal Prize for Poetry. That same year, New Directions offered to publish him in the United States.

  The Kardomah Cafe on Castle Street in Swansea had been a gathering place for Thomas and his creative contemporaries, including the poet Vernon Watkins and the musician Daniel Jones. Together as teenagers Thomas and Jones had helped establish what they called the "Warmley Broadcasting Corporation." The group that met at the Kardomah came to be known simply as the Kardomah Gang. In February 1941, the Luftwaffe's Three Nights' Blitz destroyed Castle Street; Thomas walked through the ruined town centre with his friend Bert Trick and concluded: "Our Swansea has died."

• 4. Caitlin and a Peripatetic Life

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  In early 1936, Augustus John introduced Thomas to Caitlin Macnamara, a twenty-two-year-old dancer of Irish and French Quaker descent who had run away from home and joined the chorus line at the London Palladium at eighteen. They met at The Wheatsheaf pub on Rathbone Place in London's West End. Thomas, drunk, laid his head in her lap and proposed. They married at the register office in Penzance, Cornwall, on the 11th of July 1937.

  The years that followed were restless by any measure. Between leaving Laugharne in July 1940 and settling at the Boat House in May 1949, the couple lived in Marshfield, Bishopston, Chelsea, Talsarn, East Knoyle, Beaconsfield, Bosham, Blaencwm, New Quay, Oxford, and South Leigh, among other addresses. Margaret Taylor, wife of the historian A. J. P. Taylor, emerged as Thomas's most committed patron, at one point purchasing the Manor House in South Leigh and renting it to Thomas for one pound a week. In April 1949, she paid £2,500 for the Boat House at Laugharne, buying it on the Thomases' behalf.

  Caitlin Thomas later wrote that their relationship began with alcohol and depended on it: "Ours was not only a love story, it was a drink story, because without alcohol it would never had got on its rocking feet." Biographer Andrew Lycett describes a relationship of alcoholic co-dependency strained further by Thomas's numerous extramarital affairs. Their three children, Llewelyn, Aeronwy, and Colm, were born in 1939, 1943, and 1949 respectively.

  Through all of this, Thomas carried significant financial anxiety. Sales of both The Map of Love and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog were poor. He borrowed heavily from friends and was hounded by creditors. Writing to the BBC producer Philip Burton in the late 1940s, Thomas described himself as perpetually in need. His most reliable wartime income came from scripting propaganda and information films for the Strand Film Company, attached to the Ministry of Information, a working relationship he began in September 1941.

• 5. The BBC Years

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  On the 31st of August 1945, the BBC Home Service broadcast Quite Early One Morning, a sketch Thomas had written about a Welsh coastal town, and in the three years beginning in October 1945 Thomas made over a hundred broadcasts for the corporation. The piece had originally been recorded for the Welsh BBC in December 1944, produced by Aneirin Talfan Davies; BBC London initially rejected it for national broadcast.

  Thomas was employed not only for poetry readings but for discussions and critiques. Beginning in the second half of 1945, he read for the BBC Radio programme Book of Verse, broadcast weekly to the Far East. This brought him into regular contact with Louis MacNeice, a congenial drinking companion whose advice he valued. When the BBC launched its Third Programme high-culture network on the 29th of September 1946, Thomas appeared in the play Comus the following day. His rich, sonorous voice earned him character parts including the lead in Aeschylus's Agamemnon and Satan in an adaptation of Paradise Lost.

  BBC management viewed Thomas as a useful voice but never considered a staff position; drinking was cited as the obstacle. Despite this, within Britain he became, according to his biographers, "in every sense a celebrity." The publication of Deaths and Entrances in February 1946 reinforced his standing: poet and critic Walter J. Turner wrote in The Spectator that the book alone ranked Thomas as a major poet.

  Thomas produced a total of 28 film scripts during his career in the film industry, though not all reached production. His script for The Doctor and the Devils was written in 1944 but not produced until 1985; Rebecca's Daughters, written in 1948, did not reach the screen until 1992. When recession overtook the film industry in the late 1940s, Thomas lost what had been his most reliable income stream, making the BBC work yet more essential.

• 6. Under Milk Wood

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  In September 1944, the Thomas family rented Majoda, a wood and asbestos bungalow on cliffs above Cardigan Bay in New Quay. It was there that Thomas wrote Quite Early One Morning, a radio piece about the town that his first biographer, Constantine FitzGibbon, recognized as a sketch for what would become Under Milk Wood. FitzGibbon called the nine months in New Quay "a second flowering, a period of fertility that recalls the earliest days." Paul Ferris, his second biographer, agreed that "the bungalow deserves a plaque of its own."

  In March 1949, Thomas travelled to Prague at the invitation of the Czech government for the inauguration of the Czechoslovak Writers' Union. His guide and interpreter, Jiřina Hauková, recalled that at a Prague party Thomas narrated the first version of Under Milk Wood, outlining a town declared insane and mentioning an organist who played for sheep and goats and a baker with two wives. Seven months later, New Zealand poet Allen Curnow visited Thomas at the Boat House in Laugharne; Thomas showed him a draft then titled The Town That Was Mad.

  Progress was torturous. Thomas had been in Laugharne for nearly three years when a shortened version appeared in the journal Botteghe Oscure in May 1952 under the title Llareggub. A Piece for Radio Perhaps. His American agent John Brinnin had the title changed to Under Milk Wood because he feared Llareggub would not attract American audiences. On the 6th of November 1952, Thomas wrote to the Botteghe Oscure editor explaining why he had failed to finish the second half, calling his half-play a "lonely half of a looney maybe-play."

  Thomas performed a work-in-progress version at Harvard University on the 3rd of May 1953, solo, and a full cast performance followed at the Poetry Centre in New York a week later. He met the deadline only after being locked in a room; the last lines were handed to the actors as they applied their makeup. He sent the original manuscript to the BBC's Douglas Cleverdon on the 15th of October 1953, lost a copy of it in a London pub, and had to take a duplicate to New York. He died before the BBC could record it. Richard Burton starred in the first broadcast in 1954, and the play won the Prix Italia for literary or dramatic programmes that same year.

• 7. Death in New York

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  Thomas arrived at Idlewild Airport on the 20th of October 1953 for what would be his fourth and final tour of America. Liz Reitell, assistant to his agent John Brinnin, met him at the airport and was immediately alarmed: "He was very ill when he got here." She checked him into the Chelsea Hotel, and that evening they went to the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village.

  On the 23rd of October, at the third rehearsal of Under Milk Wood, Thomas collapsed on the stage with a fever. Reitell's doctor, Milton Feltenstein, administered cortisone injections the next day, and Thomas made it through the first performance, only to collapse immediately afterwards. "This circus out there," he told a friend backstage, "has taken the life out of me for now." His fellow actors at the 25th of October performance later recalled that "Dylan literally couldn't speak he was so ill."

  After returning to the hotel late on the night of the 3rd of November, Thomas declared: "I've had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that's the record!" The barman and the pub owner who had served him later stated he could not have drunk more than half that amount. The following day, Feltenstein visited three times. On the third visit he administered half a grain (32.4 milligrams) of morphine sulphate, three times more than was medically appropriate. Researchers have concluded this dosage affected Thomas's breathing and cut oxygen to his brain, causing the coma from which he never woke.

  Thomas was admitted to St. Vincent's Hospital at 1:58 am on the 5th of November, comatose. Hospital notes recorded the initial impression as acute alcoholic encephalopathy. The hospital's senior brain specialist, C. G. Gutierrez-Mahoney, was not called to examine Thomas until the afternoon of the 6th of November, more than 36 hours after admission. Thomas died at noon on the 9th of November 1953. Forensic pathologist Bernard Knight, reviewing the post-mortem, concluded that death was clearly due to severe bronchopneumonia; the lung infection showed signs of having begun before hospital admission.

  His body was returned to Wales. On the 25th of November, he was interred at St. Martin's churchyard in Laugharne, six friends from the village carrying the coffin. Thomas had died intestate, with assets worth £100; a trust was established to administer the estate, with trustees that eventually included, in an unlikely arrangement, the novelist Kingsley Amis, appointed at the request of the family solicitor.

• 8. The Work That Remains

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  The publication of John Brinnin's 1955 biography Dylan Thomas in America fixed the image of the roistering, drunken and doomed poet for a generation, focusing on Thomas's last few years and offering a portrait that later biographers found distorting. Ferris's 1989 biography was more critical of those around Thomas in his final days than of Thomas himself. Constantine FitzGibbon, Thomas's first biographer and a personal friend, noted lengthy periods of relative abstinence alongside the well-documented episodes of excess.

  Thomas himself explained his relationship with language in a 1951 response to a student's question: "I fell in love, that is the only expression I can think of, at once, and am still at the mercy of words." He traced that love back to nursery rhymes his parents taught him before he could read, and to the words themselves before he had any idea what they meant. He described writing a poem as an act of construction "as a sculptor works at stone."

  Critics have examined that poetic through many lenses. Some noted the influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins in Thomas's early use of alliteration, sprung rhythm, and internal rhyme, though Thomas himself denied any significant debt. When Seamus Heaney gave an Oxford lecture on Thomas, he opened by noting that Thomas had become "as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry," and asked when listeners would remember that being a poet was one of Thomas's attributes.

  When Thomas recorded A Child's Christmas in Wales during his second American tour in 1952, a recording that Caedmon Records released that same year, neither he nor anyone around him could have known that the original 1952 recording would be selected in 2008 for the United States National Recording Registry and credited with launching the audiobook industry in the United States. That fact sits at some distance from the myth of the doomed poet, and rather closer to the range of what Thomas actually made.