Under Milk Wood Read online

  Under Milk Wood

  A Play for Voices

  DYLAN THOMAS

  Edited by Walford Davies and Ralph Maud

  Introduction by Walford Davies

  A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK

  CONTENTS

  Brief Chronology

  Introduction

  UNDER MILK WOOD

  Explanatory Notes

  Textual Notes

  Acknowledgments

  BRIEF CHRONOLOGY

  27 Oct 1914 Dylan Marlais Thomas born in Swansea

  Sept 1925 Enters Swansea Grammar School, where his father was Senior English Master

  27 Apr 1930 Starts the first of the 'Notebooks' into which he copies his early poems. (The Notebooks continued until Apr 1934)

  Aug 1931 Leaves school. Employed as Reporter on the South Wales Evening Post (until Dec 1932)

  Mar 1933 First poem published in London ('And death shall have no dominion' in the New English Weekly)

  Aug 1933 First visit to London

  Sept 1933 First poem published in 'Poet's Corner' of the Sunday Referee ('That Sanity be Kept'). Correspondence with Pamela Hansford Johnson begins

  22 Apr 1934 Wins Book Prize of the 'Poet's Corner' – i.e., the Sunday Referee's sponsorship of his first collection of poems

  Feb-Nov 1934 Several visits to London

  10 Nov 1934 Moves to live in London

  18 Dec 1934 18 Poems published

  Apr 1936 Meets Caitlin Macnamara

  10 Sept 1936 Twenty-five Poems published

  21 Apr 1937 First radio broadcast ('Life and the Modern Poet')

  11 Jul 1937 Marries Caitlin Macnamara

  May 1938 First moved to live in Laugharne, Carmarthenshire

  30 Jan 1939 First son (Llewelyn) born, in Hampshire

  24 Aug 1939 The Map of Love (poems and stories) published

  20 Dec 1939 The World I Breathe (a selection of his poetry and prose) — his first volume publication in America

  July 1940 Leaves Laugharne for London

  Sept 1940 Begins work as script-writer for films with the Strand Film Company

  1940-2 Living party in London, partly in Wales

  Late 1942 Brings wife and son to live in Chelsea

  Feb 1943 New Poems (USA)

  3 Mar 1943 Daugher (Aeronwy) born

  1943 Continuous work as broadcaster begins

  Sept 1944 – summer 1945 Living at New Quay, Cardiganshire

  Summer 1945 - spring 1946 Living in London

  7 feb 1946 Deaths and Entrances published

  Mar 1946 - May 1949 Living in or near Oxford

  8 Nov 1946 Selected Writings (USA)

  Apr-Aug 1947 Visits Italy

  Sept 1947 Moves to live in South Leigh, Oxfordshire

  1948 Writing feature films for Gainsborough

  Mar 1949 Visits Prague as guest of Czechoslovak government

  May 1949 Laugharne again becomes his main home (The Boat House)

  24 Jul 1949 Second son (Colm) born

  Feb-Jun 1950 First American tour

  Jan 1951 In Iran, writing film script for the Anglo Iranian Oil Company

  Jan-May 1952 Second American tour

  Feb 1952 In Country Sleep (USA)

  10 Nov 1952 Collected Poems 1934–1952 published

  16 Dec 1952 The poet's father dies

  31 Mar 1953 Collected Poems (USA)

  Apr-Jun 1953 Third American tour

  14 May 1953 First performance of Under Milk Wood in New York

  14 May 1953 The Doctor and the Devils. The first of the film scripts to be published

  Oct 1953 Leaves on Final American tour

  9 Nov 1953 Dies in St Vincent's Hospital, New York City

  1 Mar 1982 Memorial stone unveiled in 'Poets' Corner', Westminster Abbey

  INTRODUCTION

  The Road to Milk Wood

  1

  During his last days in New York City in November 1953, while making cutes in the script of Under Milk Wood for its appearance in the stylish American periodical Mademoiselle, Dylan Thomas told Elizabeth Reitell that he looked forward to the time when he could prepare a 'literary version for trade publication.'1 Three years earlier he had made the same point in a letter to Marguerite Caetani: 'Now, I am writing a long radio play, which will, I am sure, come to life on the printed page as well'.2 The poet's untimely death left us with an Under Milk Wood cast strictly as a radio play commissioned by the BBC, and broadcast posthumously as such on 25 January 1954. In the same year, it was the broadcast script that was presented to the reading public under the editorship of Daniel Jones, with the subtitle 'A Play for Voices'. As the present editors proceeded with the task of examining Thomas's manuscripts of the play in order to confirm or adjust the previously standard Jones text, they could not help hearing the poet's references to a 'literary version' as a plea to be acted upon.

  Accordingly, the present edition is designed to be a more readable version of the play for the printed page. It became clear that the purpose of the division of the narration into a first Voice and a Second Voice was to alleviate the burden on the actors taking those parts and to achieve limited effects of variation through the different timbre of their voices. In a broadcast or a stage performance the audience might get some benefit from this device. But readers of the published Jones edition of Under Milk Wood are, by the very existence of this split in the narration, handed a problem — that of having to read the words 'First Voice' precisely 110 times and the words 'Second Voice' precisely 77 times. It is not as if Thomas had made the First and Second Voices distinguishable through traits of speech patterns, imagery, personality, or depth of soul.3 By relieving the reader of the 187 switches that the eye had formerly to pay attention to, the present edition frees the reading ear to hear what is in reality one narrative guide to the action of the play. It should also be noted that when the original BBC producer, Douglas Cleverdon, came to prepare an Acting Version for J. M. Dent in 1958 he decided on one narrator.

  Thomas actually began the play with the idea of a single narrator. When John Malcolm Brinnin visited Laugharne in the summer of 1951 and Thomas read him pats of what was then called 'Llareggub Hill', the work was to consist of 'an interweaving of many voices', but 'with the strong central voice of a narrator to supply the unities of time, place, and situation'.4 When Thomas had finished about half the play, he sent it for publication to the Italian journal Botteghe Oscure in October 1951, and wrote about it in a letter to the editor, Marguerite Caetani: 'As the piece goes on, two voices will be predominant: that of the preacher, who talks only in verse, and that of the anonymous exhibitor and chronicler called, simply, 1st Voice' (Collected Letters, 814). Even though the Second Voice was already in this 'piece for radio perhaps' that he was offering to Botteghe Oscure, Thomas chose to speak only of the First Voice, as of a single narrator: 'the 1st Voice, and the poet preacher, never judge nor condemn but explain and make strangely simple and simply strange'. The play confirms what we can here deduce from the poet's own words: that there is really no separate role for the Second Voice in the action or the significance of the work. This edition therefore employs a single-voice italicised narration as a format better suited to introduce, and lead us into and through, the various delights of the play.

  2

  Those delights were long in the making. Like all works that mark the end of a career, Under Milk Wood has a classic status as the expression of a late vision of life. And like that of so many artists, Thomas's late vision is a celebratory one, in which ripeness is all. But, like Chaucer in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Thomas is as intelligent about the gravity underlying comic celebration as about comic celebration itself. In describing Under Milk Wood's wonderful comedy, our language often needs to be dual, to
fall between light and shade, like Raymond Williams's description of the play as Thomas's 'adequate epilogue, his uproarious and singing lament'.5 We have to remember that the play's period of gestation was Thomas's whole career, and that the hinterland of poetry, prose, film and broadcasts from which the play emerged was often a dark one. In outlining the growth of the idea of writing the play itself, therefore, it will be useful to bear in mind this wider relationship to the rest of the career.

  Under Milk Wood is twenty-four hours in the life of a small Welsh seaside town. That basic idea went back as far as 1932 when Thomas and his Swansea friend Bert Trick began formulating very loosely a plan to write a Welsh Ulysses.6 In 1932, the relevance of James Joyce lay only in the use of a twenty-four your cycle in the town's life. But the Irishman's influence survived at a more important level twenty years later in the actual writing of the play. Apart from Joycean puns and verbal inventiveness in general, there is in Under Milk Wood the particular influence of the Circe nighttown episode in Ulysses, itself a kind of 'play for voices'. Most obvious is the crisp usefulness Thomas remembered from the way in which Joyce projected his speakers first of all through the filter of the narrator's description:

  BLOOM: (Barefoot, pigeonbreasted, in lascar's vest and trousers, apologetic toes turned in, opens his tiny mole's eyes and looks about him dazedly, passing a slow hand across his forehead. Then he hitches his belt sailor fashion and with a shrug of oriental obeisance salutes the court, pointing one thumb heavenward … )

  The sheer frequency of this formula in the nighttown of Ulysses made it memorable, but of course Thomas made his own, endlessly inventive use of it:

  Mister Waldo, rabbitcatcher, barber, herbalist, cat doctor, quack, his fat, pink hands, palms up, over the edge of the patchwork quilt, his black boots neat and tidy in the washing basin, his bowler on a nail above the bed … (p. 8)

  No wonder that in a High Court case in 1966 to settle a dispute regarding the ownership of the play's original manuscript, one of the parties took the oath describing himself as 'bookseller, writer, publisher, editor, extra-mural tutor, lecturer, wigmaker and examiner in Hairdressing for the City and Guilds'.7 Under Milk Wood had obviously made a mark by making such flourishes very much its own.

  A writer open to stylistic models of this kind, and in search of material, could have found plenty of color and character in Thomas's native Swansea, which he once described as 'marble-town, city of laughter, little Dublin' (Collected Letters, 435) and where certainly Under Milk Wood's satire on bourgeois hypocrisy first took root. But his Swansea experiences found their appropriate, and still Joycean, form in the autobiographical short stories of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940), which were written in 1938 and 1939. In moving to live in Laugharne in Carmarthenshire in 1938, a village he had first visited with Glyn Jones in 1934, thinking it even then 'the strangest town in Wales' (Collected Letters, 135), the poet found another, more encompassable, community that kept shady eccentricity and idyllic atmosphere in optimum balance. Laugharne's character stemmed from its position between two cultures which was the result of its Teutonic settlement in the twelfth century when English displaced Welsh, but without obliteration its signatures — its dialect and place-names, for example. The village's odd separateness was a subject in a major History of Carmarthenshire published at this time, in which T. Gwynn Jones wrote of Laugharne:

  The outlook of the people through the centuries was seaward. Their maritime actives established contacts for the purposes of trade and commerce with English and foreign ports. Such an intercourse must have had its influence on the life of this foreign colony, though its does not appear to have produced at any period a strong stimulus to mental or spiritual awakening. Intellectually and culturally, these settlements remained largely in isolation, whilst their life was separated from that of the neighboring Welsh by an artificial boundary, resulting from a deep consciousness of wide national differences.8

  But Thomas immediately recognized Laugharne's uniqueness for himself. While predictably relishing the local color ('It's a sociable place too, and I like that, with good pubs and little law and no respect', Collected Letters, 294), he also divined, with rare instinct, the underlying source of Laugharne's precise chemistry: 'The people speak with a broad English accent, although on all sides they are surrounded by hundreds of miles of Welsh county. The neutral sea lies at the foot of the town' (Collected Letters, 135).

  It took many years for these impressions to mature artistically, but even in 1939 he recognized their literary potential. In December that year, at a 'Laugharne Entertainment' organized in aid of the Red Cross, Dylan Thomas, Frances Hughes (wife of the novelist Richard Hughes) and Mr Gleed the local butcher took the leading parts in Ernest Goodwin's one-act farce, The Devil Among the Skins. 'What Laugharne really needs,' Thomas told Richard Hughes and the others afterwards, 'is a play about well-known Laugharne characters — and get them all to play themselves'.9 It is an interesting concept. At its first night in 1634, Milton's Comus had the advantage of having the children whom the masque was designed to praise play themselves. At the other end of the social spectrum, and in such different times, one cannot any long imagine a work of universal appeal arising from such total, local fusion of acted and actor. And yet there was something oddly prophetic about it. During the war years that followed, several patriotic films celebrating the role of small communities in withstanding German might — the Welsh community of The Silent Village (1943), for example — had the villagers playing themselves. Even in the first broadcast of Under Milk Wood on the brand-new Third Programme of the BBC in January 1954 it was considered crucial that the playful singing children should be the actual children of Laugharne. And in 1988, producers of the star-studded EMI recording decided that even the actual silences and bell-notes of Laugharne — what their sound-recordists called the 'ambience' of Laugharne — should 'play themselves.' This general feel of uniqueness, of a sweet especial rural scene, is a clear tribute to place and play alike. It is in that context that the particular contribution of Laugharne's inhabitants remains important. Under Milk Wood is not a roman a clef, but models for a good number of its eccentrics must have been available early for Thomas to have made that point to Richard Hughes about the possibility of villagers playing themselves. On this central importance of Laugharne, Caitlin Thomas's first-hand testimony is unequivocal:

  Dylan loved all that small-town pom and the nonsense gossip that he lapped up every morning in Ivy Williams' kitchen at Brown's Hotel … Dylan found it very cosy, and it was there that the picked up all the character vignettes which he moulded into Under Milk Wood. The folk of Laugharne were engaged in an endless wrangle of feuds, affairs, fights, frauds and practical jokes … Dylan captured all that, and the lives of the more respectable people behind their blinds who wouldn't come to the pub anyway, who wore their best Sunday suits, and walked to church with a bible under their arms: he saw it all.10

  Part of the authentic gusto of the play, its feel for the atmosphere and detail of a small town — the cobbles and sea-fry as well as the human foibles — came from the fact that its material wasn't completely invented. The place which gave it a local habitation and a name was already strange enough.

  Probably the idea of a Laugharne play occurred to Thomas at just that time because of an invitation from the Welsh novelist T. Rowland Hughes, then a BBC Welsh Region producer in Cardiff, to contribute to a plan 'to develop Verse Features, that is, long dramatic programmes in verse'.11 Thomas showed interest, but doubted his talent in that direction: 'I take such a long time writing anything, and the result, dramatically, is too often like a man shouting under the sea' (Collected Letters, 337). But the detailed vividness of Laugharnian material would have struck him as just the stuff to compensate for the absence of any more orthodox 'dramatic' powers. At the same time, we should remember that 1938 was very much a transitional year for Thomas, in which his art was already changing direction. A poem of that year, 'After the funeral (In Memory of
Ann Jones)', shows him turning outwards to a more varied Welsh world. The need to develop towards more objective material came from a feeling of deadlock in his writing of poetry, and the 1938 open 'On no work of words', in notebook lines later discarded, associated the feeling with the easy-going indolence of Laugharne itself:

  For three lean months now, no work done

  In summer Laugharne among the cockle boats

  And by the castle with the boat like birds.12

  At the same time, 1938 was the year in which Thomas started energetically writing the ten short stories that were to comprise Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, published in 1940. It was these stories above all else that started training the vivid comic eye that later made Under Milk Wood possible.

  The Second World War had its own sinister contribution to make. As early as 1934 Thomas had volunteered the proposition that 'artists, as far as I can gather, have set out, however unconsciously, to prove one of two things: either that they are made in a sane world, or that they are sane in a mad world' (Collected Letters, 90). In 1943 Thomas outlined (again to Richard Hughes) an idea that shows that his need to start thinking of a structure for his play was taking him in some strange directions. A whole village is certified as made by an Inspector send down from London, and this despite the fact that, as the villagers' own testimony proves, they are a veritable island of sanity in a mad world. A year or so later, Thomas developed the idea further in conversation with Constantine FitzGibbon. The village was now to be declared not only mad but dangerous: 'Barbed wire was strong about it and patrolled by sentries, lest its dotty inhabitants infect the rest of the world'.13 FitzGibbon makes it clear that Thomas now had in mind not only the mad world of arbitrary detention and POW camps but also the obscenity of the Nazi concentration camps, by then nightmare reality, not mere rumor.

  What made further thought about such plans worthwhile was the sudden burgeoning of Thomas's career as a radio broadcaster. He had been reading poetry and acting on radio on an occasional basis since 1939. But from 1943 onwards the frequency of his contributions grew enormously. If we include readings, in the ten years left to him he was to record no feet than 156 broadcasts or contributions to broadcasts — of which, most importantly, 28 were creative scripts of his own. The script most relevant to our story at this point is 'Quite Early One Morning', a radio feature recorded for the Welsh Home Service in December 1944, and the first attempt at portraying a sleeping community, the very basis of Under Milk Wood. 'Quite Early One Morning' sprang from Thomas's experience of living, between September 1944 and July 1945, at New Quay, a seaside village on the Cardiganshire coast. The broadcast portrays the still-sleeping community and its dreams as a visitor moves through its streets on an early morning in winter, 'like a stranger come out of the sea'.14 At the end, prototypes for characters such as Captain Cat, Eli Jenkins and Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard speak in quatrains. The narrator, however, is as good as being Thomas himself, the idiom of the work being essentially that of a short story or essay. But New Quay, so similar in many ways to Laugharne, was crucial in supplementing the gallery of characters Thomas had to hand for writing Under Milk Wood. New Quay's role as an extra source is also clear from letters. An August 1946 letter to Margaret Taylor, for example, who visited New Quay a year after the Thomases' period there: