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Discovering Dylan Thomas
00 Prelims DylanThomas 2017_3_13.indd 1 13-Mar-17 11:05:40 AMthis page has ben left intentionaly blankDiscovering Dylan Tomas
A Companion to the Collected Poems
and Notebook Poems
John Goodby
University of Wales Press
2017
00 Prelims DylanThomas 2017_3_13.indd 3 13-Mar-17 11:05:40 AM© John Goodby, 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material
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British Library CIP Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78316-963-4
eISBN 978-1-78316-964-1
Te right of John Goodby to be identifed as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
Typeset by Eira Fenn Gaunt, Cardif
Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Melksham
00 Prelims DylanThomas 2017_3_13.indd 4 13-Mar-17 11:05:40 AMi.m. Kenneth Goodby
(1932–2016)
Te rivers of the dead
Veined his poor hand I held, and I saw
Trough his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea.
‘Elegy’, Dylan Tomas
00 Prelims DylanThomas 2017_3_13.indd 5 13-Mar-17 11:05:40 AMthis page has ben left intentionaly blankContents
Acknowledgements ix
Abbreviationsxi
Introduction1
Supplementary poems 27
Annotations, versions and drafts 45
Appendices 237
Bibliography257
Index267
00 Prelims DylanThomas 2017_3_13.indd 7 13-Mar-17 11:05:40 AMthis page has ben left intentionaly blankAcknowledgements
As usual, my main thanks and gratitude go to my family: Nicola,
Kate and George.
Tanks are also due to Swansea University for their purchase of
Dylan Tomas’s ffth notebook in December 2014, and granting me
a research sabbatical at the end of 2014. For their support of Dylan
Tomas-related activities in 2014 I would particularly like to thank
Kirsti Bohata of CREW (Centre for Research into the English
Literature and Language of Wales), and the staf of Swansea University’s
Research Institute for the Arts and Humanities (RIAH).
As with the Collected Poems, I acknowledge, too, a debt of gratitude
to Siân Bowyer and staf at the Manuscripts Collection at the National
Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, Mike Basinski and the staf at the
Special Collection Library of the State University of New York at
Bufalo, Rick Watson and staf at the Research Library at the Harry
Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the Department
of Manuscripts at the British Library in London, and staf at Swansea
University Library.
One of the benefts of working on Dylan Tomas is that it is
unusually productive of new friendships, and the refurbishing of
old ones. I would like to take this chance to thank the many friends
and encouragers who supported my work in various ways during the
Dylan Tomas centenary, when this book was conceived, planned and
part-written – Hannah Ellis, Dylan Tomas’s grand-daughter, and
her father, Trefor Ellis; Hilly Janes; Andrew Dally, editor of the Dylan
Tomas blog; Matt Hughes of the Dylan Tomas Birthplace; Branwen
and Julie Kavanagh of Twin Headed Wolf; James Keery; Toni Grifths
and Fred Jarvis; Ned Allen, Leo Mellor, and members of the Cambridge
00 Prelims DylanThomas 2017_3_13.indd 9 13-Mar-17 11:05:40 AMAcknowledgements
University English Faculty; Jef Towns; Dai Smith; Charles Mundye
and Chris Wigginton of Shefeld Hallam University; Gabriel Heaton
and Toby Skegg of Sotheby’s; Lyndon Davies and Penny Hallam;
Allan and Helen Wilcox; Wu Fu-sheng and Graham Hartill; Dan
Llywelyn Hall; Martin Smith-Wales and Nick Andrews of BBC Wales;
Peter Stead; Nerys Williams of University College Dublin.
Finally, special thanks are due to my postgraduate students and
colleagues, several of whom who gave advice and support during the
sometimes difcult birth of this volume: Rhian Bubear, Ade Osbourne,
Rob Penhallurick, and Steve Vine.
For permission to quote from Dylan Tomas’s poetry thanks are
due to the Dylan Tomas Estate, David Higham and Co. and New
Directions Press.
x
00 Prelims DylanThomas 2017_3_13.indd 10 13-Mar-17 11:05:40 AMAbbreviations of titles of books by Dylan Thomas
N1, N2, N3, N4 and N5 = the poetry notebooks kept by Dylan
Tomas between April 1930 and August 1935 (N1–N4 are collected
in Maud, 1989; see below).
18P 18 Poems.
25P Twenty-fve Poems.
DE Deaths and Entrances.
ICS In Country Sleep.
CP52 Collected Poems 1934-1952 (London: Dent, 1952).
QEOM Quite Early One Morning, ed. Aneurin Talfan Davies
(London: Dent, 1954).
LVW Letters to Vernon Watkins, intro. Vernon Watkins ent/Faber, 1957).
TML Te Map of Love.
TP71 Te Poems, ed. and intro. Daniel Jones (London: Dent,
1971).
EPW Early Prose Writings, ed. Walford Davies (London: Dent,
1971).
CP88 Collected Poems 1934–1953, eds Walford Davies and
Ralph Maud (London: Dent, 1988).
NP Te Notebook Poems, ed. Ralph Maud (London: Dent,
1989).
CS Collected Stories, ed. Walford Davies, intro. Leslie Norris
(London: Dent, 1993).
UMW Under Milk Wood, ed. Ralph Maud and Walford Davies,
intro. Walford Davies (London: Dent, 1995).
CL Te Collected Letters, ed. Paul Ferris, 2nd edn (London:
Dent, 2000).
CP14 Collected Poems: Te New Centenary Edition, ed. John
Goodby (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014; pbk
repr. 2016).
00 Prelims DylanThomas 2017_3_13.indd 11 13-Mar-17 11:05:40 AMthis page has ben left intentionaly blankIntroduction: After ‘DT–100’
Discovering Dylan Tomas fulfls the promise I made in my 2014
centenary annotated edition of the Collected Poems of Dylan Tomas.
Given Tomas’s continued popularity with the general reading public,
and the commercial imperatives this entailed for his estate, his agents
and his publishers, the Collected Poems was always going to take the
form of a trade edition for a mass market, whatever my preferences,
as an academic, might be. Tus, while Weidenfeld & Nicolson gener­
ously allowed me almost two hundred pages for annotations, the need
for readerly accessibility nevertheless played a rather larger role in
deter mining the extent of the critical apparatus than would have been
1the case for the collected poems of a less marketable poet. As a result,
as I explained in the Introduction to the Collected Poems, I gave priority
in the edition to maximising the number of poems it contained, and
this meant that I had to exclude from it ‘variant passages and poems’.
Tese I said I would publish in ‘a future Guide’, and Discovering Dylan
Tomas is that guide.
However, as the word ‘guide’ suggests, this book is more than just
a gathering of material which could not be ftted into the Collected
2Poems. It includes such material, of course – poems, additional anno­
tations, and the ‘variant passages’ I mentioned – and also a list of the
glitches which crept into the text of the poems in 2014, since corrected
3in the 2016 paperback edition (these are listed in Appendix 3). But
Discovering Dylan Tomas has a very diferent rationale to the Collected
Poems and is not merely a supplement to it, for all that it gathers together
my director’s cuts and will beneft substantially from being read along­
side CP14. Tat rationale is primarily a critical and scholarly one, un­
shaped by commercial criteria, even though I hope this book will appeal
01 Intro DylanThomas 2017_3_13.indd 1 13-Mar-17 11:04:30 AM­
­
Discovering Dylan Thomas
to some nonacademic lovers of Tomas’s poetry too. A coherent work
in its own right, it ofers, for example, critical histories for most of the
poems, at a level of detail which would never have been tolerated in
the edition, as well as material which has come to light in the two years
since the edition was published. Tis material includes the rediscovered
poem ‘A dream of winter’, reprinted just once (in the USA) since its
4appearance in the journal Lilliput in January 1942. Most crucially of
all, it includes the results of my study of a ffth Tomas notebook (N5),
hitherto unknown, a successor to the four covering the period April
1930 – April 1934. Te fourth notebook ends with ‘If I were tickled by
the rub of love’, dated 30 April 1934; poems ‘One’, ‘Two’ and ‘Tree’
in the ffth notebook are undated, the frst with a date being ‘Four’
(‘Especially when the October wind’), which is dated 1 October 1934.
Tis suggests strongly that it is a direct continuation of the fourth
note book, with the frst three poems having been entered in it between
May and September 1934. In all, the ffth notebook contains a total of
sixteen poems (six of which were destined for 18 Poems, ten for
Twentyfve Poems), including several of Tomas’s fnest and most original.
As with so much relating to Dylan Tomas, the story of the discovery
of the notebook is both entertaining and intriguing. As homeless
newlyweds, Dylan and Caitlin Tomas stayed at the home of Yvonne
Macnamara, Caitlin’s mother, in Blashford, Hampshire, often for
extended periods, in the late 1930s. We know that during these stays
Tomas wrote poetry; we know, moreover, that he often took his
poetry notebooks with him on his travels in order to do so, and was
prone to mislay them. Tis was evidently what happened in the case
of N5; a note discovered with the notebook, in the hand of Louie
King, one of Mrs Macnamara’s domestic servants of the time, tells us
that she was given it with other scrap paper from the house with an
instruction to burn it in the kitchen boiler. She saved it from de­
struction, however, and from then until her death in 1984 the note­
book lay hidden in a drawer. It was presumably inherited by Louie
King’s family, but