Under Milk Wood Read online

QUESTIONER: And what is Montrose Street? What does it look like?

  VOICE OF AN EXPERT: It is a grey-bricked street of one hundred houses. Built in 1890. Two bedrooms, a front room and a kitchen. Bathrooms were built into less than half of the houses in 1912. A scullery and a backyard. Rent 28 shillings. Too cold in the winter, too hot in the summer. Ugly, inconvenient, and infinitely depressing.

  VOICE OF AN OLD RESIDENT: No, no. You got it all wrong. It's a nice, lively street. There's all the shops you want at one end, and there's pubs at both ends. Mightn't be much to look at, but there's always things going on, there's always something to see, buses and trams and lorries and prams and kids and dogs and dogfights sometimes and … (Broadcasts, 76)

  The Old Resident's objection is of the kind so tragically ignored by those 'experts' who soon afterwards were building the high-rise blocks of our inner cities. The reduction of a community to statistics by outsiders who think only in cold orthodoxies is a vestige of the 'Town That Was Mad' scenario. Along with Captain Cat's plea for a 'community of individual people', it reminds us that Thomas had shared the 1930s with the Auden group, and shared Auden's focus on the 'average man … put through the statistician's hoop' ('New Year Letter') or the 'Unknown Citizen' who 'was found by the bureau of statistics to be/One against whom there was no official complaint'. Thomas's broadcasts are at the post-war, small-time, domestic end of a current of feeling that in the poetry of the 1930s produced 'heroic' anti-totalitarian allegories, a current still live in Orwell's anti-Stalinist Animal Farm (1945) and anti-political Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). The socialist credentials (or public-school confidence) of it all are not to be looked for in the Welsh fantasy of Under Milk Wood, but there is in the play an authentic 'popular' commitment that is not unrelated. Even the outsider impersonality of 'Voice of an Expert' and 'Voice of Information' survives in the play — in the Voice of a Guidebook, a softer parody of a softer target, but still an exquisite thrust at patronization of the regions:

  Less than five hundred souls inhabit the three quaint streets and the few narrow bylanes and scattered farmsteads that constitute this small, decaying watering-place which may, indeed, be called a 'backwater of life' without disrespect to its natives who possess, to this day, a salty individuality of their own … The one place of worship, with its neglected graveyard, is of no architectural interest. (p. 19)

  The words are wittily chosen: 'natives' as opposed to 'native inhabitants' and 'souls' as the unthinking cliché for merely counted heads. In such language, mention of the village's 'neglected graveyard', tucked in as it is with the point about the chapel's nondescript architecture, expresses merely antiquarian regret. One thing Under Milk Wood itself does not neglect is its graveyard.

  Before turning to 'Return Journey' (1947), which is the next in the chronology of radio features that anticipate Under Milk Wood, we should not forget smaller scripts such as 'How to Begin a Story', 'Holiday' Memory' and 'The Crumbs of One Man's Year' (all late 1946). They, too, are part of the picture, not least in revealing Thomas's knowledge of certain kinds of potential material. 'How to Begin a Story', for example, recognizes 'the kind of story set in a small, lunatic area of Wessex, full of saintly or reprehensible vicars, wanton maidens, biblical sextons, and old men called Parsnip or Dottle':

  Mr Beetroot, that cracked though cosmic symbol of something or other, will, in the nutty village, with dialect, oafs, and potted sermons, conduct his investigation into unreal rural life. Everyone, in this sophisticatedly contrived bucolic morality, has his or her obsession: Minnie Worzel wants only the vicar; the vicar, the Revere Nut, wants only the ghost of William Cowper to come into his brown study and read him 'The Task'; the Sexton wants worms; worms want the vicar. Lambkins, on those impossible hills, frolic, gambol, and are sheepish under the all-seeing eye of Uncle Teapot, the Celestial Tinker. Cruel farmers persecute old cowherds called Crumpet, who talk, all day long, to cows; cows, tired of vaccine-talk in which they can take no part, gore, in a female manner, the aged relatives of cruel farmers; it is all very cosy in Upper Story. (Broadcasts, 125)

  It is obviously a parody of T. F. Powys's fiction, with the talk of 'a small, lunatic area' and of 'the nutty village' carrying also a trace of the still latent 'Town That Was Mad' idea. It is material that Under Milk Wood recognizes and transcends. In particular, the idea of everyone having 'his or her obsession' helped sharpen the one-character-one-theme simplicity of the play for voices.

  But what the play capitalized on more than anything was an idea that in the broadcast 'Holiday Memory' was only a quick thought — 'if you could have listened at some of the open doors of some of the houses in the street you might have heard …' (Broadcasts, 139). Under Milk Wood is ultimately about private worlds. And this innocent voyeurism was in turn what the broadcasts had inherited from techniques already exercised elsewhere in the prose and poetry. The formula of the onlooker or eavesdropper occurs in places where we don't even think of it as a formula. In 'Poem of October' (1944), for example:

  Myself to set foot

  That second

  In the still sleeping town…

  Or in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940):

  I was a lonely night walker and a steady stander-at-corners. I liked to walk through the wet town after midnight, when the streets were deserted and the window lights out, alone under the moon, gigantically sad in damp streets by ghostly Ebenezer Chapel.

  This self-conscious observer went back to Thomas's earliest mature prose. In 'The Orchards' (1936) the fact that the viewing artist is viewed is the main interest of the story: 'poor Marlais's morning, turning to evening, spins before you'. This interest in vantage-points was of course made more sophisticated by techniques Thomas later learned in writing for film. Camera-directions such as 'From our distance', 'Closer now', 'Closer still' and 'Coming closer to him' in the film script The Doctor and the Devils (1944) are precursors of Under Milk Wood's 'Come closer now' and 'From where you are'. It now seems as if the darker material of the early stories could be at any moment transformed by the kindlier eye of the later artist — the following picture from 'The Horse's Ha' (1936),16 for example:

  Butcher and baker fell asleep that night, their women sleeping at their sides — Over the shops, the cold eggs that had life, the box where the rats works all night on the high meat, the shopkeepers gave no thought of death.

  On the road to Milk Wood, a stage in the transformation of such material was the comedy of the unfinished novel, Adventures in the Skin Trade (1941). This, for example, is surely already close to the spirit of Under Milk Wood:

  Mrs Probert next door, disguised as a she-goat in a night gown, butting the air with her Kirby grips; her dapper, commercial son, with a watch chain tattooed across his rising belly; the buercular lodger, with his neat umbrella up and his basin in his hand.

  But, whether comic or not, where the omniscient spectator ab extra (seeing everything) merged most completely with the omniscient auditor ab extra (hearing everything) was in the particular medium of radio — where hearing is seeing.

  Thomas would have read Edward Sackville-West's review of 'Holiday Memory' in the New Statesman (2 November 1946) which wondered 'why this remarkable poet has never attempted a poetic drama for broadcasting: he would seem to have all the qualities needed'. Thomas's first real move in that direction was 'Return Journey' (1947), his finest radio feature apart from Under Milk Wood. For one thing, 'Return Journey' opted for the extended use of a narrator, a feature of Thomas's play for radio that Raymond Williams, punning unconsciously, called 'a sound instinct'.17 The dramatic advantage of a narrator was as a means of managing the interaction of a large range of characters on the stage of the listener's mind. But at the same time 'Return Journey' highlighted an important choice facing the author in the use of such an all-witnessing narrator. To what degree should the narrator become a character in his own right? The choice made in 'Return Journey' is clear. Its first person Narrator is to all intents and purposes Thomas himself, se
arching for his Swansea childhood, buried under time and the rubble of the Blitz. The role of the narrator in Under Milk Wood is very different. The point can be made by way of the problem Andrew Sinclair found in producing his large-screen film version of the play in 1971, the problem of needing to ask —

  Who are the two voices? Why do they ride into town? Who are they looking for? Why do they leave town? What is their power of conjuring up dreams and the dead? This was never explained by Thomas, and it doesn't really matter when you're dealing with a form of incantation by voice, which it is as a radio play. But the moment you translate it into visual terms you are faced with a terrible choice. Now Dylan was writing in the forties style, and I think he was seduced by all those marvelous documentaries by Grierson and Jennings, when you had some terrific voice-over, and then you had a lot of beautiful picture postcards or views. But it's much later now — thirty years on — and it's no good doing a bloody travelogue of Wales, with pretty pictures and lovely voices over.18

  This is to reap, with a vengeance, the dangers of too literally visualizing the play. Any externalization beyond the magic-lantern of the mind or the barest stage-reading pushes us into giving the two Voices distinct characters, something they just do not have or need in the actual text. To solve his problem, Sinclair merged the play with two earlier works, the broadcast 'Return Journey' and the Portrait short story 'Just like Little Dogs', making the narrators two dead men returning to the town where they had loved the same girl. From as early as 'Brember' (1931), the tale of a man reclaiming his family history, the idea of a 'return journey' expressed something deep in Thomas's psychology. It is there in 'Quite Early One Morning', the work that otherwise most obviously resembles Under Milk Wood:

  Who lived in these cottages? I was a stranger to the sea town, fresh or stale from the city where I worked for my bread and butter wishing it were laver-bread and country salty butter yolk-yellow. (Broadcasts, 12)

  The narrator of 'Quite Early One Morning' is clearly Dylan Thomas himself, tired of London ('the city of the restless dead') and beginning to recognize New Quay as one of those characterful islands his soul always needed to return to.

  But the delightful thing about Under Milk Wood's narration is exactly how motiveless it is and can afford to be. We don't for a moment wonder why we are being shown these things. We don't need a background to the foreground. The play depersonalizes what had previously come through as the author's personal yearning to recall and reclaim. And yet the narration of Under Milk Wood isn't mere watching, mere listening, like the narrative of, say, 'The Londoner'. The play's narration is 'dramatic' in a specific sense: it exuberantly lives its way into the lives of others; it takes delight in what George Eliot called 'a superadded life in the life of others'; and takes, in Keats's phrase about the poetical character, 'as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen' — having itself 'no identity'. This offers an interesting comparison with an American work that Thomas greatly admired, Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology (1915). This sequence of free-verse poems, each an epitaph spoken from the grave by former inhabitants of a small Mid-West town, reveals the complex interpenetration of public and private lives within a community. In late 1950, Thomas himself chose the book as the subject for a radio feature. Though the feature was not actually written until 1952, the choice of Masters's book in 1950 was significant because Thomas was at that time deciding on a plotless form for his own small-town portrait. There is not even a narrator in Spoon River Anthology and its author's motivating theme — what Thomas calls Masters's 'detestation of the bitter and crippling puritanism in which he struggled and simmered up' (Broadcasts, 257) — is allowed to emerge at a tangent from the monologues themselves. Though the theme of psychological repression is common to both works, Thomas's vision is of course tonally completely different. Affectionate rather than disaffected, it is closer to that of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), which Thomas quotes as a counter-balance to Masters's Spoon River, Anderson's work being 'more detailed and more gentle, in spite of its terrors' (Broadcasts, 257). But Thomas's vision in Under Milk Wood remains a vision, not a statement. As in Spoon River Anthology, the author's presence is communicated, not through narration, but through the emotive resonance of the work as a whole.

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  That is why we should remember the shadow of war in which Milk Wood grew. Thomas's delight at finally resettling in Laugharne in spring 1949 was in a class literary-pastoral lineage, sad and escapist at one and the same time. Small Welsh places by the sea always tempered his fears without removing them; his laughter there was never thoughtless. Along with providing again character and atmosphere, post-war Laugharne prefigured the play's central paradox, that a place of doubtful repute can still be a 'place of love.' At heart, this search for innocence was in reaction to the Second World War, a fact that mainstreams the play with most of Thomas's poetry after 1939. Poems about innocent deaths in the London air-raids — in which the Luftwaffe claimed over 40,000 civilian lives, and in which thomas was a fire-watcher — are among the poet's strongest utterances, made personally more painful by the bombing devastation of Swansea, a tragedy Thomas saw as the destruction of his very childhood. The deep sense of moral outrage in the war poems had often been linked to the death of children or the newly born:

  A child of a few hours

  With its kneading mouth

  Charred on the black breast of the grave

  The mother dug, and its arms full of fires.

  ('Ceremony after a Fire Raid')

  But the war poems had also about them a Churchillian resilience, a refusal to mourn. Ordinary people's convictions that prolonged conventional bombing would be unendurable — a fear common from as far back as H. G. Wells's The War in the Air (1908) but vividly driven home by propaganda in the 1930s — was in the upshot dispelled by Britain's brave, resilient survival in the Blitz. But the actual writing of Under Milk Wood was in a later phase of horror, in which the very perception of atrocity changed. A much deeper human insult was carried in news of the Nazi concentration camps, and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 inaugurated a new dimension of horror. The Second World War was ended only by threatening an even more obscene Third, which not only renewed the concept of unlimitable deaths but made cosmic destruction feasible. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

  The legend of the irresponsible 'bohemian' surrounding Thomas has obscured the sense of moral shock at the heart of his later work. Virtually everything he wrote after the war expresses, directly or indirectly, a search for innocence. In 1945, in poems such as 'Fern Hill' and 'Poem in October' or the broadcast 'Memories of Christmas', he went back down the track of his own life to reclaim the basic optimism of childhood through the powers of art. This traditional remembrance of things past has often been criticized as regressive. But a concern for childhood is no less adult for being classic; in George Eliot's words, 'We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.' But now the childhood of the very earth itself might be at hazard. Thomas's unfinished scheme for the large composite poem 'In Country Heaven' had as its premise that 'The Earth has killed itself. It is black, petrified, wizened, poisoned, burst; insanity has blown it rotten; and no creatures at all, joyful, despairing, cruel, kind, dumb, afire, loving, dull, no creatures at all shortly and brutishly hunt their days down like enemies on that corrupted face … And the poem becomes, at last, an affirmation of the beautiful and terrible worth of the Earth' (Broadcasts, 225). The plot involved people having to re-imagine the simple joys of the earth from the other side of the holocaust. It was the same loss-of-Eden theme that Philip Burton recognized when Thomas outlined to him the opera libretto he planned, on Aldous Huxley's recommendation, to write for Stravinsky.19 To Stravinsky himself, Thomas outlined a plot in which humanity was faced with rediscovering not only love but language itself.20 The collaboration with Stravinsky was to have started on the last fatal American visit of autumn 1953, a visit that al
so left the final part of Under Milk Wood incompletely realised.

  The need to hang on to a concept of basic innocence in a hell-bent world is the background against which the warm humanity of the play has its profile. Thomas was already living in Laugharne when the Second World War — 'this war, trembling even on the edge of Laugharne' (Collected Letters, 401) — broke out. The congruence of place and time was crucial. 'When I Woke,' a poem written in Laugharne on the very eve of war, had asked only for freedom to live and create:

  I heard, this morning, waking,

  Crossly out of the town noises

  A voice in the erected air

  No prophet-progeny of mine,

  Cry my sea town was breaking

  It is through its very vulnerability that Laugharne, 'my sea town', became Llareggub, 'this place of love'. It is a place we know only in burgeoning springtime, which makes the play's prototype, 'Quite Early One Morning', in its cold winter setting, ultimately so dissimilar and, on its own, an inadequate forecast of the play's full resonance.

  But the warm defense of human foibles in the face of greater evils is also what triggers in some quarters critical resistance to the play's appeal and quality, a resistance that makes it necessary to be clear about its exact genre. That the play's qualities as 'drama' are of a limited kind is something we should expect from its development out of the relaxed mode of the radio feature. But it is important to relax also any expectations regarding the work as 'sociology'. Even allowing for the importance of Laugharne as a model, Llareggub is not meant to be a community we could identify as an actual place, whose ethos we could imagine living by or worrying about. For that kind of equivalence, we look to different genres, the autobiographical novel for example. But it is worth noting that the greatest Welsh-language novel of the century — Caradog Richard's autobiographical Un Nos Ola Leuad (One Moonlit Night, 1961), a painful picture of an actual north Wales slate-quarrying community losing its grip on outside reality — was first intended as a radio play in the manner of Under Milk Wood. It is uncannily as if Caradog Prichard had picked up the scent of the 'Town That Was Mad' idea even in the finished play. Beyond the 'play for voices' as a form, perhaps even the material has an authenticity that is adaptable in parts.