Discovering Dylan Thomas , livre ebook

D ISCOVERING D YLAN T HOMAS
Discovering Dylan Thomas
A Companion to the Collected Poems and Notebook Poems
John Goodby -->

University of Wales Press 2017
© John Goodby, 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.
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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 978-1-78316-965-8
The right of John Goodby to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Cover image: Dan Llywelyn Hall, A Dream of Winter (2015), by permission.
i.m. Kenneth Goodby
(1932-2016)
The rivers of the dead
Veined his poor hand I held, and I saw Through his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea. Elegy , Dylan Thomas
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
Supplementary poems
Annotations, versions and drafts
Appendices
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
As usual, my main thanks and gratitude go to my family: Nicola, Kate and George.
Thanks are also due to Swansea University for their purchase of Dylan Thomas s fifth notebook in December 2014, and granting me a research sabbatical at the end of 2014. For their support of Dylan Thomas-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 staff 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 staff at the Manuscripts Collection at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, Mike Basinski and the staff at the Special Collection Library of the State University of New York at Buffalo, Rick Watson and staff 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 staff at Swansea University Library.
One of the benefits of working on Dylan Thomas 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 Thomas centenary, when this book was conceived, planned and part-written - Hannah Ellis, Dylan Thomas s grand-daughter, and her father, Trefor Ellis; Hilly Janes; Andrew Dally, editor of the Dylan Thomas blog; Matt Hughes of the Dylan Thomas Birthplace; Branwen and Julie Kavanagh of Twin Headed Wolf; James Keery; Toni Griffiths and Fred Jarvis; Ned Allen, Leo Mellor, and members of the Cambridge University English Faculty; Jeff Towns; Dai Smith; Charles Mundye and Chris Wigginton of Sheffield 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 difficult birth of this volume: Rhian Bubear, Ade Osbourne, Rob Penhallurick, and Steve Vine.
For permission to quote from Dylan Thomas s poetry thanks are due to the Dylan Thomas Estate, David Higham and Co. and New Directions Press.
Abbreviations of titles of books by Dylan Thomas
N1 , N2 , N3 , N4 and N5 = the poetry notebooks kept by Dylan Thomas between April 1930 and August 1935 ( N1-N4 are collected in Maud, 1989; see below).
18P
18 Poems .
25P
Twenty-five 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 (London: Dent/Faber, 1957).
TML
The Map of Love.
TP71
The 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
The 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). The Collected Letters , ed. Paul Ferris, 2nd edn (London: Dent, 2000).
CP14
Collected Poems: The New Centenary Edition , ed. John Goodby (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014; pbk repr. 2016).
Introduction: After DT-100
Discovering Dylan Thomas fulfils the promise I made in my 2014 centenary annotated edition of the Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas. Given Thomas 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. Thus, while Weidenfeld & Nicolson generously allowed me almost two hundred pages for annotations, the need for readerly accessibility nevertheless played a rather larger role in determining the extent of the critical apparatus than would have been the case for the collected poems of a less marketable poet. 1 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 . These I said I would publish in a future Guide , and Discovering Dylan Thomas is that guide.
However, as the word guide suggests, this book is more than just a gathering of material which could not be fitted into the Collected Poems . 2 It includes such material, of course - poems, additional annotations, 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 in the 2016 paperback edition (these are listed in Appendix 3). 3 But Discovering Dylan Thomas has a very different 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 benefit substantially from being read along-side CP14 . That rationale is primarily a critical and scholarly one, unshaped by commercial criteria, even though I hope this book will appeal to some non-academic lovers of Thomas s poetry too. A coherent work in its own right, it offers, 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. This material includes the rediscovered poem A dream of winter , reprinted just once (in the USA) since its appearance in the journal Lilliput in January 1942. 4 Most crucially of all, it includes the results of my study of a fifth Thomas notebook ( N5 ), hitherto unknown, a successor to the four covering the period April 1930 - April 1934. The fourth notebook ends with If I were tickled by the rub of love , dated 30 April 1934; poems One , Two and Three in the fifth notebook are undated, the first with a date being Four ( Especially when the October wind ), which is dated 1 October 1934. This suggests strongly that it is a direct continuation of the fourth notebook, with the first three poems having been entered in it between May and September 1934. In all, the fifth notebook contains a total of sixteen poems (six of which were destined for 18 Poems , ten for Twenty-five Poems ), including several of Thomas s finest and most original.
As with so much relating to Dylan Thomas, the story of the discovery of the notebook is both entertaining and intriguing. As homeless newly-weds, Dylan and Caitlin Thomas 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 Thomas 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. This 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 destruction, 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 its existence remained secret until late 2014. It had no impact, therefore, on the 1971, 1988 or 2014 editions of the poems, or on Ralph Maud s editions of the collected notebook poems of 1967-8 and 1989. It is undeniably, and by some way, the most significant addition to the corpus of Thomas s work to have appeared since 1941 - and, since Swansea University decided, with admirable determination, to acquire it when it came up at Sotheby s in December 2014, I was lucky enough to be the first Thomas scholar to examine it, in January 2015. The results of these initial labours are incorporated in what follows
Without pre-empting research which is still ongoing, it can be said that the new notebook changes our understanding of Thomas s work in at least