Under Milk Wood Read online

  I wish New Quay had had more sun for you, though Jack Pat loves it as it is for then he has his guests all trapped and cozy in his godly grot. Time has stopped, says the Black Lion clock, and Eternity has begun. I'm so glad you met and like Dai Fred who bottled your ship. Did you come across Dewi, the battery-man? Evan Joshua of the Bluebell? The Norman you know is New Quay's noisiest and least successful fighter; every summer he starts a fight, and every summer some tiny little ape-man knocks him yards over the harbour-wall or bang through the chemist's window. Did Mrs Evans the Lion twitch, wink, and sip? Did Pat bring his horse in the bar? Jack the Post is an old friend: he once married a pretty widow in London and everything was fine, he said, except that wherever they went they were followed by men in bowler hats. After the honeymoon, Mrs Jack was arrested for double bigamy. And all the husbands appeared in the court and gave evidence as to her good character … Did you meet Taffy Jones, the stuttering ace? He's not very nice. Or Alistair Graham, the thin-vowelled laird? (Collected Letters, 603)

  'Quite Early One Morning' was too short a piece in which to exercise the 'mad town' idea in any structured way, but the idea seems hinted at in embryo in a joke regarding one unpopular inhabitant of the village of that 1944 broadcast, a 'retired male nurse who had come to live in Wales after many years' successful wrestling with the mad rich of Souther England':

  He measured you for a strait-jacket carefully with his eye; he saw you bounce from rubber walls like a sorb ball. No behavior surprised him. Many people of the town found it hard to resist leering at him suddenly around the corner, or convulsively dancing, or pointing with laughter and devilish good humor at invisible dog-fights merely to prove to him that they were normal. (Broadcasts,13)

  More importantly, 'Quite Early One Morning' was a veritable store-house of phrases, rhythms and details later resurrected or modified for Under Milk Wood: 'deeper waves than ever tossed', 'bombazine-black', 'the knitted text and the done-by-hand watercolors', and the 'big seas of dreams'. The success of the broadcast prompted Thomas to discuss with friends whether any extension of the basic material should take the form of a stage comedy in verse or a radio play whose central character was a blind narrator. That last point in particular shows that we are definitely on the road to Captain Cat's Milk Wood.

  There are other milestones on the road, to which we shall return. At this point it is worth leaping ahead to late 1950 when Thomas decided that the 'Town That Was Mad' idea (now seen as a potential radio play for the BBC) was, in that form, a false destination. In this respect, a thirty-nine page holograph fair-copy of roughly the first half of the play, now at Texas, is crucial. It is a manuscript abandoned at exactly the point at which Thomas had started actually to implement the 'Town That Was Mad' scenario. Up to that point, the manuscript was completely in the manne of the play as we now know it, without a hint of any stricter 'plot' of any kind. After some changes and rearrangements, it was the text sent to Botteghe Oscure in October 1951 and published there as 'Llareggub, A Piece for the Radio Perhaps' in April 1952. That material ended with Captain Cat listening to the gossiping women ('who's dead, who's dying, the cost of soap flakes …') and joining in the children's chanting against the background of chapel organ music — the kind of stuff we now normally associate with the play. But in the manuscript this led into the following, very different scene:

  Noise of Powerful Motor-Car Roars into

  Organ-Music. Car pulls up near.

  Captain Cat (Softly, to himself)

  Foreigners!

  A nasty, powerful new motor.

  What's it doing here?

  Hum and babble of voices near, Organ in background.

  1st voice

  Blow the horn, Freddie …

  2nd Voice

  Scratch your name on the mudguard, Freddie …

  3rd Voice

  The man in the bowler's getting out …

  1st Voice

  Now you can blow the horn, Freddie …

  Official

  Where does Captain Tudor live?

  3rd Voice

  He doesn't live here …

  4th Voice

  We got no Captain Tudor …

  2nd Voice

  Captain Cat's the only Captain.

  3rd Voice

  And he's blind.

  4th Voice

  We call him Captain Cat because he can see in the dark.

  Captain Cat (loudly)

  Who wants me?

  Official

  Are you Captain Tudor?

  Captain Cat

  I was.

  Official Letter [sic]

  I am to deliver an important sealed letter to you personally.

  Captain Cat

  Bring it to the gangway then.

  Noise of Feet on Cobbles

  Loud Note on Motor Horn

  1st Voice

  Good old Freddie.

  Captain Cat

  What's the letter?

  Official

  My instructions were to deliver it to you without comment or explanation.

  Captain Cat

  Put it in my good hand then. The one with four fingers.

  Noise of Car Driving Off

  Organ Music

  Captain Cat (softly, to himself)

  Letters with seals from men with voices like puddings are important. I must call a meeting.

  Feet Crossing Room

  Noise of Ship's Hooter

  The Organ Music finishes on an unresolved chord.

  Fade Out

  Fade In

  Murmur of Voices Outside in Background

  One Knock on Door

  Captain Cat

  Come in, Organ Morgan

  Two Knocks

  Captain Cat

  Come in, Mr. Pugh.

  Three Knocks

  Captain Cat

  Come in, Mr Eli Jenkins.

  This scene, abandoned at that point, proves that the manuscript is the one that Thomas sent to Douglas Cleverdon, radio producer at the BBC, in late 1950, calling it 'the first thirty-nine pages of the provisionally title "The Town That Was made"' (Collected Letters, 773). Also at Texas are eight pages of Savage Club notepaper — numbered 40-47, clearly to lead on from this thirty-nine page manuscript — on which Thomas describes the turn that the play was now going to take. The 'Town That Was Mad' idea has been so often paraphrased at several removes by friends who remembered Thomas describing it that it is useful to have it for once in Thomas's own words:

  Now follows a scene between Captain Cat, Eli Jenkins, Organ Morgan, and Mr Pugh. Captain Cat asks Eli Jenkins if he will read aloud the important letter which has just arrived. Eli Jenkins, finding that the letter is not in verse, confesses his inability to do so. Organ Morgan can, of course, read only music. Captain Cat is blind. And so Mr Pugh has to read the letter. It is a statement from the department of the New Government of Wales. The statement says, in effect: There appears to be no reason why this town should not be declared an Insane Area. As it is not expedient to commit the whole population of the town to a lunatic asylum, we now declare this town itself to be a lunatic asylum. It will be cordoned off as such. Traffic that used to pass through it will be diverted. no goods will be allowed to come into it. The asylum must live upon the fish it can get from the sea and the crops it can get from the land. It is the intention of the Government to allow this town to fall redundant. Etc etc etc.

  There is consternation in Captain Cat's cabin. This lovely town of theirs is an Insane Area? The idea is preposterous. The place is, as much as any place can be, sane and happy. Captain Cat decides that the town must know immediately the terrible slur that has been cast upon it. And Eli Jenkins, Organ Morgan, and Mr Pugh rush out to spread the news. Captain Cat, after hooting the siren, goes out to pull the townhall bell. The school bell also rings. Clocks chime. The organ plays. We hear snatches of startled talk, indignation, and conjecture from all over the town as the inhabitants hurry to meet in the Town Hall Square. There, Captain Cat addre
sses them from his window. He tells them the great insulting news. There is a pandemonium of protest. We are not mad, cry the people of the town. And, after the turbulent meeting, Cat, Jenkins, Morgan and Pugh draft a letter to the Government denying the town's insanity and insisting that the town's defense of its sanity be heard.

  A Trial is arranged, a Trial in which the defendant is the sanity of the whole community.

  The Trial is held in the Town Hall. The Government has sent down an official prosecution. The town's defending counsel is Captain Cat. The witnesses are the people of the town.

  One by one the principal inhabitants of the town step forward (these are the characters whom we have already briefly met) and give evidence. The Government Prosecution details the eccentricity of each witness. The witness[es], admitting the facts, deny they prove eccentricity. And Captain Cat shows how each case of eccentricity, or near-madness, is, in reality, only an [in]stance of the right of the individual to lead his own life in his own way. Relentlessly, the Prosecution shows up the insanity of each individual witness. And relentlessly, but with fun and feeling, Captain Cat defends, approves, and even, sometimes, glorifies it. The Prosecution sums up. He posits an ideally sane town. By its standards, this town is mad as a hatter.

  Captain Cat sums up. He decries the ideal town, but says that, by its standards, this town is, indeed, insane. And thank God for it.

  With the approval of the whole population, Captain Cat accepts the Government's jurisdiction. Yes, we are mad, he says. This town is mad. We are content to be so. Cordon us off. Declare us an Insane Area. We will continue to live as long as we can, alone, a community of individual people.

  If any further parts of this scheme were actually written, they do not seem to have survived. Some friends (Vernon Watkins, for example) seemed to remember Thomas 'quoting' such parts, but these were probably memories of Thomas vividly paraphrasing or improvising potential ideas. Douglas Cleverdon, eagerly waiting for the long-protracted work to arrive in any final form at all, recalls Thomas's relief when he suggested, in late 1950, that the only way ahead was to drop the 'Mad Town' plot altogether.15 Though Thomas told Marguerite Caetani that he did so reluctantly and only temporarily, and though one of the play's best critics, Raymond Williams, regrets the abandonment of the plot, it is in more ways than one a sound decision on Thomas's part. The transitional section quoted above has one or two things that might be effective in a radio medium. The car noise breaking harshly into the children's chanting, for example, and leaving the organ music on 'an unresolved chord,' reminds us suddenly of an outside world. It makes us realize for the first time how unrealistically absorbed we have been in this precarious 'place of love' (p. 56), as if it were itself the whole world. It works like a pale version of the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth — with the negative world being this time the intruder. But the functionalism of this more direct 'drama' was clearly uncongenial to Thomas. That much is clear in the hopelessly attenuated verbal texture that the suddenly implemented 'plot' now called for ('The man in the bowler's getting out', and so on). In the outline of the remainder of the plot even the nature of the comedy changes: in Eli Jenkins's inability to read anything but verse, or Organ Morgan's to read anything but music, eccentricity is in danger of crossing over into idiocy.

  There is no permanent criticism. There are manuscripts and outlines. Thomas would have recognized and largely mitigated their dangers. But he decided instead not to continue on that road at all. He knew better than anyone that his strengths did not lie in extended 'plots' of any kind. The only firm frameworks that were ever congenial to him were the intricate verse-forms of his poetry. In all other respects his genius was essentially lyrical, capitalizing on the vividness of parts within loose structures. His early scheme for a 'novel of the Jarvis Valley', for example, was planned only as a collection of short stories with a common setting; his prose works regularly took advantage of the simple framework of events over the course of one day; his nearest attempt at autobiography, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, again took the form of short stories; and arguably his most ambitious pome, 'Altarwise by owl-light' is significantly a sonnet sequence. In the same way, his late poetic masterwork was to be 'In Country Heaven', only sixteen lines of whose frame was finished, and whose contents were mainly individual poems already completed. In the case of the play, Thomas, always conscientious in this respect, had probably thought that a contract for a sixty- or ninety-minute script made an orthodox plot compulsory. But given the kind of writer he was, any 'structure', grafted onto more congenial parts, always ran the risk of tissue rejection.

  3

  The problem was solved when the job in hand was seen as a radio 'feature' not as a radio play. Douglas Cleverdon has crystallized the distinction:

  A radio play is a dramatic work deriving from the tradition of theater, but conceived in terms of radio. A radio feature is, roughly, any constructed program me (that is, other than news bulletins, racing commentaries, and so forth) that derives from the technical apparatus of radio … It can combine any sound elements — words, music, sound effects — in any form or mixture of forms — documentary, actuality, dramatized, poetic, musico-dramatic. It has no rules determining what can or cannot be done. And though it may be in dramatic form, it has no need of a dramatic plot. (Cleverdon, 17)

  Thomas was at home with the idea of the 'radio feature' as the proper form. He had already done several of them, most significantly 'The Londoner', broadcast in 1946. Springing from an aborted idea for a book about the streets of London that had planned 'to take the life of the streets from twelve noon to twelve midnight' (Collected Letters, 537), 'The Londoner' in fact covers a twenty-four-hour span in the lives of an ordinary post-war London family of four. It opens and closes with night and dreams. The big step forward from 'Quite Early One Morning' came in activating a greater number of characters, sympathetically compered by an omniscient Narrator. Even while fulfilling the sociological aim of the documentary series in which it figured (This Is London, for the Overseas Service), 'The Londoner' makes room for a good deal of comic effect, much more than would have been allowed to another writer. Under Milk Wood's use of gossiping women, of low-keyed poetry, of interrupted or misunderstood dialogues are all here in embryo, along with the basic effect of fantasy:

  NARRATOR: It's nearly half past six on a summer morning. Montrose Street is awake.

  [Noise of Cars and Lorries]

  NARRATOR: But most of the houses are still sleeping. In number 49, all is quiet. Lily Jackson is dreaming.

  [Music]

  LILY: Ooh what a beautiful dress … like the one Ingrid Bergman was wearing in what-was-the-name … And the music! Lovelier than oh-I-can't-remember, the one with the violin and the big sad eyes. Look, they're walking down the aisle, white as Christmas. There's lights all over the place like victory night. Oh, it's all changing. They're dancing in a kind of palace now … Look, there's Mrs Cooley next door with a dust cap on … They're singing … I'm there too … I'm dancing on the falling snow … Where's Ted … where's Ted? (Broadcasts, 77)

  Praise for 'The Londoner' by Laurence Gilliam, BBC Head of Features, led to an invitation to write another feature immediately. The result was 'Margate — Past and Present' (1946), recorded for transmission on a New York station in exchange for an American feature on New York's Coney Island. Again the structure is simply the passage of one day, though not from dreaming night to dreaming night. Framing the piece, rather too much like book-ends, are two exchanges between a First Voice and a Second Voice, who have no part at all to play in the body of the piece itself. The aim is essentially documentary — an evocation of Margate being considered a fair exchange for one of Coney Island, and a good focus for a view of post-war British life. Thomas makes intelligent, inventive use of a return visit by an American ex-serviceman from Coney Island to marry the English girl he left behind a year before. But the dialogue shows the strain of having to fulfill also the function of description and narrative — as wh
en the American tells his girlfriend 'See this giggle of girls coming towards us with cellophane hats? "Kiss Me Quick" "I'll Have to Ask Me Dad" "I'm no Angel" …' (Broadcasts, 108)

  A more desperate contingency in that respect was the introduction of the Voice of an Information Book about Margate, communicating the raw details of its population, tourist industry and history. This particular device however is in a lineage of some relevance to Under Milk Wood. In 'The Town That Was Mad' the accusation against the community was very much that of outsiders. In 'Quite Early One Morning' there was the male nurse (a newcomer) who wanted the villagers to appear madder than they were. In 'The Londoner' the 'Voice of an Expert' prompted a more realistic insight into this gap between outside perception and inner reality: