Writing in the Sunday Times in 1973, Alan Brien (Jesus) recalled the familiar figure of Thomas in the Cornmarket on Saturday afternoons, 'staggering along loaded down with string bags, behind his striding, empty-handed Viking Irish wife - 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'.
Thomas untutored
Volume 16 Number 2, Hilary 2004
Oxford Today
A fascination for Oxford briefly held the Welsh poet enthralled, says his biographer Andrew Lycett.
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 late 1946 Dylan Thomas was researching a radio talk about Oxford. He was living in the grounds of Magdalen College. And he was fascinated by the University, which played a background role in the unfolding of his career.
Most of his notebooks were crammed with his own poems. The State University of New York at Buffalo possesses four exercise books with fair copies of all Thomas's teenage verse. Later, he would draw on this early material, which provided models for half his published output.
Thomas's youthful creativity held him back from the undergraduate career that his schoolmaster father wanted for him. Thomas père was a prickly alumnus of the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth. Having gained a first-class degree, he would have liked to proceed to Oxford. Instead, he ended up teaching English at Swansea Grammar School. His son Dylan, born in 1914, went to the same establishment. But clever though he was, his temperament was unsuited to sustained academic effort and, at the age of 15, he rejected the classroom for the 'craft or sullen art' of poetry.
Nevertheless, for Dylan Thomas Oxford was always a chimera. In the 1930s, he is said to have visited the city to talk about James Joyce, although I have found no evidence of this. In 1937 he wrote an enthusiastic review of Djuna Barnes's novel Nightwood for a short-lived undergraduate publication, Light and Dark. He clearly had admirers in Oxford, for he suggested the English don, Lord David Cecil, as a subscriber to a 1938 edition of his poems.
At the start of the Second World War, Oxford poets such as Sidney Keyes regarded Dylan Thomas as a welcome antidote to Auden and his circle. They invited him to address the University English Club, an undergraduate society, in November 1941. Thomas had been working with John Davenport on a novel, The Death of the King's Canary, which interwove an unlikely story about the murder of the poet laureate with brilliant parodies of contemporary poets. Philip Larkin (St John's) noted appreciatively: 'Hell of a fine man: little, snubby, hopelessly pissed bloke who made hundreds of cracks and read parodies of everybody in appropriate 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 delighted surprise, then a roar of laughter. Then he read a parody of Spender entitled The Parachutist which had people rolling on the floor.'
Later in the war, Thomas and his wife Caitlin were back in Oxford, staying with the historian A J P Taylor and his wife Margaret. It was an unexpected encounter, unwittingly engineered by pianist Natasha Litvin. She used to play at lunchtime concerts in Oxford organised by Margaret Taylor, who one day asked her to bring some guests along for the weekend. In all innocence, Litvin and her husband Stephen Spender invited the Thomases.
They did not know that Thomas had already met the Taylors, and had not endeared himself to them. That was in April 1935, six months after reaching London from Swansea. During that short 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 young 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 Manchester University.
Recently married, Taylor was not impressed by the poet who, invited for a week, contrived to stay a month. In his memoir, A Personal History, Taylor recorded how he had to ration access to his beer barrel, since his guest drank 'fifteen or twenty pints' each day. 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 man whom he described as 'cruel' and 'a sponger'.
A decade later, the dynamics of the Taylor marriage had changed and Margaret, bored with academic life, was ready to be impressed by the romantic young poet. After Thomas advised her on her own verse, she took pity when in March 1946 he was having difficulty finding accommodation for his young family. She invited them to stay at Holywell Ford, the house 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. 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 Margaret Taylor 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 series of dwellings in South Leigh, Oxfordshire (1947-9), Laugharne, South Wales (from 1949) and in Camden Town, London (a short-lived bolt-hole in 1951-2). She also arranged for his son, Llewelyn, to attend Magdalen College School.
Taylor's biographer Adam Sisman described Margaret as 'a sort of middle-class Lady Ottoline Morrell'. At her Holywell Ford salon one might meet authors Louis MacNeice and Graham Greene or the composer Elisabeth Lutyens. Dylan Thomas would appear as a poetic turn; John Betjeman, then secretary of the Oxford Preservation Trust, expressed delight at his reading of Thomas Hardy's 'To Lizbee Brown'.
But all too often the Welshman was tired and emotional after a day at the BBC in London. 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.' And Thomas could be embarrassingly rude about his patroness: after she had laboured over a dish of jugged hare, he wavered before condescending to 'eat the hare of the bitch that dogs me.'
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. With Caitlin or Margaret Taylor in tow, he drank with friends, such as John Veale, a young composer whose father was University Registrar; 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. Although dismissive of his education, she loved his conversation, declaring she would have been happy if he 'had read the telephone directory'.
Writing in the Sunday Times in 1973, Alan Brien (Jesus) recalled the familiar figure of Thomas in the Cornmarket on Saturday afternoons, 'staggering along loaded down with string bags, behind his striding, empty-handed Viking Irish wife - 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'.
Intrigued by the University, Thomas adopted it as a subject for his radio talk in late 1946. This was part of an exchange with an American station, which provided a piece about Princeton, but sadly neither Thomas's script nor the tape survives.
Along with the memo about proctors and bulldogs, Thomas inscribed gobbets about the University and its lore - potted biographies of luminaries including Benjamin Jowett and Charles Dodgson; 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 as the last man in Oxford to wear a wig, who died in 1854 in his 100th year. Although not formally involved in the University, he did participate in literary events, particularly at the Poetry Society.
After moving to South Leigh, near Witney, in August 1947, Thomas became less prominent, but whenever he returned to Oxford, he made up for lost time. As he informed the Scots writer Hector McIver in February 1949, '[Hugh] MacDiarmid is coming to lecture to the Oxford Poetry Society next month. A party is being arranged.' Seeing Thomas swaying down the High Street, Kenneth Tynan (Magdalen) asked if he could help. 'Get me some more bloody crème de menthe', Thomas screamed.
The poet Michael Hamburger (Christ Church) welcomed Thomas's authentic Bohemianism in grim post-war Oxford and novelist Francis King (Balliol) wrote of the Welshman's 'voluble, dangerous charm'. However, younger undergraduates were sceptical of his wordy lyricism in an age of austerity and the atom bomb. John Wain and Kingsley Amis (both St John's), for example, wanted a more robust, ironic style, as was later associated with the Movement group of poets.
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 America. In South Leigh in 1948, he first began to knock some shape into his 'play for voices', Under Milk Wood.
Soon his Welsh yearning for home, or hiraeth, began to tug at him. A year later, he went to live in Laugharne, though another longing - for academic respectability - remained evident in the contract he signed with the Oxford University Press in early 1953 for a book about Welsh fairy tales. Although these two desires struggled within him, there was no doubting which was the stronger. Walking along Broad Street, Martin Starkie once asked him if he would like to have been at the University. Thomas replied: 'In some ways, yes; in most ways, no.'
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