Under Milk Wood Page 4
A vein of sociological appraisal — a reaction against hypocritical puritan 'respectability', for example — was always part of Thomas's prose, even at its most fantastical. But Under Milk Wood aims more at suggesting universal human nature than at delivering local lessons. Indeed, it is through that universalizing of Welshness that it has run found of modern Wales. Like all alert societies, Wales rightly resents the sabotage of its real self in the short-cuts of caricature, and though an implicit truce regarding Under Milk Wood was signed even across the language-barrier in the form of James Jones's excellent translation of the work into Welsh as Dan y Wenallt (1968), objections to the play's 'stage-Welshness' will always be understandable. Even Thomas would not have found the satire possible in quite this form in the more confident Wales that emerged in the 1960s. Similar issues were once raised by John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World (1907), attacked not only for 'the brutishness and cowardice of its men and the coarseness of its women' but also because regional caricature lays national character open to ridicule. The same objections lie behind the counter-attacks on Caradoc Evans, defending Cardiganshire against the libel of his fiction.21 All such criticism is at base the one G. H. Lewes once made of Dickens — that his gallery of grotesques failed to evoke the complexity of an actual society.
But caricature is a time-honored art, and Thomas would never have felt really defensive about it. In 'Living in Wales,' a 1949 broadcast that uses many details that ultimately figured in Under Milk Wood, he pretends to distrust his caricatures of the English even as he writes them:
Let me be fair, however much I dislike it. The men and women, and the others, in that [railway] carriage were not England. I do not point to one group of people, however repellent, and say, 'That, to me, is England. Help, let me out!' I distrust the man who says, 'Now that is England', and shows me a tailwag of rich tweedy women babytalking to their poodles. That is no more England than a village cricket match is. (Broadcasts, 203)
But the choice of a cricket match barbs the disclaimer. Certain things are quintessentially Welsh or English or Mid-West. And Thomas knew well enough that to call something 'mere caricature' is our instinctive response to anything that hits off our private weaknesses. Of Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology he said that 'Many people read it in order to deny that it was true; many, discovering that in essence it was, denied it even more loudly. One of the chief reactions to these angry, sardonic, moving poems seemed to be: "Some of the inhabitants of small towns in Illinois may indeed be narrow-minded and corrupt, fanatically joyless, respectable to the point of insanity, malevolent and malcontent, but not in the Illinois towns in which we live"' (Broadcasts, 256). But the Reverend Eli Jenkins or Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, or even the hypocritical Jack Black the cobbler, would never prompt the degree of regional-cum-national defensiveness that met Caradoc Evans's assaults on Welsh Non-conformity in the stories of My People (1915) and Capel Sion (1916). Even that disfiguring vision sprang from Evans's tortured love for Wales, but Thomas's characters don't seem designed to put anyone down in the first place, inside or outside the play.
The same criticism in less defensive form argues that such characters, whether regional or not, are hopelessly superficial. But this, too, fails to acknowledge Under Milk Wood's real genre. Kenneth Tynan's insight, in his review of the 1956 Edinburgh Festival production, that the play is a 'true comedy of humors', involving only 'characters with one-track minds',22 got the genre right early and at a stroke. A 'comedy of humors' blocks expectations of complex realism from the very start. It recognizes instead something essentially formal, in which all is simplified foreground. But we have to remember that a simplified foreground can still carry a complex ground-tone. Sustained by narrator and character alike, the ground-tone in Under Milk Wood celebrates the simplest noises as if they were the Music of the Spheres —
There's the clip clop of horses on the sunhoneyed cobbles of the humming streets, hammering of horseshoes, gobble quack and cackle, tomtit twitter from the bird-ounced boughs, braying on Donkey Down. (p. 34)
Outside, the sun springs down on the rough and tumbling town. It runs through the hedges of Goosegog Lane, cuffing the birds to sing. Spring whips green down Cockle Row, and the shells rings out. Llareggub this snip of a morning is wildfruit and warm, the streets, fields, sands and waters springing the young sun. (p. 36)
This harmony of the created and the man-made world merges in turn with the still sad music of humanity underlying it all. Any work that modulates so consistently between day and night, awake and asleep, youth and age, living and dead is bound to be, however comic, a memento mori. The play is a great celebration of 'creatures born to die' (p. 57), with the polarities of light and shadow balanced at every turn. The conflation of images of death with those of life has a particular frisson. An image obviously influenced by Stanley Spencer's resurrection paintings23 has 'the dead come out in their Sunday best' (p. 61). The dead Rosie Probert who speaks to Captain Cat 'from the bedroom of her dust' (p. 51) spoke at one stage 'from the short-time bedroom of her dust', conflating her grave with cheap one-night hotels. The duality is maintained even in the lower-keyed sections, by a wonderful inclusive use of language:
Dusk is drowned for ever until tomorrow. It is all at once night now. The windy town is a hill of windows, and from the larrupped waves, the lights of the lamps in the windows call back the day and the dead that have run away to the sea. All over the calling dark, babies and old men are bribed and lullabied to sleep. (p. 59)
'Drowned', 'forever' and 'tomorrow' in the same brief sentence, and 'All at once', 'night' and 'now' in an even briefer one. Then the energy of 'windy', 'larrupped' and 'lights' refusing to let the day go gentle into night. And the polarity of it all epitomized in 'babies and olde men', but given a lift by the witty inversion of having the babies 'bribed' and the old men 'lullabied'. It is brisk but capacious writing. And how poignant that metaphor for death as a running away to sea. It reminds us of our sea-town location, but also that it was youngsters who ran away to sea, and all too often died. Suddenly 'the dead that have run away to sea' ceases to be just a metaphor. At the same time, the lights calling back the dead remind us of the religious believe, now lost sight of in festivals such as Hallowe'en, that at certain times the souls of the dead return to their homes. It is in these rich resonances that we properly look for complexity. Otherwise, the only defense Under Milk Wood needs is T. S. Eliot's defense of Ben Jonson's comedy:
It is what it is; it does not pretend to be another thing. But it is so very conscious and deliberate that we must look with eye alert to the whole before we apprehend the significance of any part. We cannot call a man's work superficial when it is the creation of a world; a man cannot be accused of dealing superficially with the world which he himself has created; the superficies is the world. Jonson's characters conform to the logic of the emotions of their world. They are not fancy, because they have a logic of their own; and this logic illuminates the actual world, because it gives us a new point of view from which to inspect it.24
The moment the first stage-reading proved Under Milk Wood a popular success, Thomas started talking of writing another 'play for voices'. But this would be a 'proper-er play' (Collected Letters, 893). An ordinary boy and girl from neighbouring streets in a Welsh industrial town would meet only at the end of their lives, too late for love.25 It seems a desire to push the safety of Under Milk Wood out into a realer, a 'proper-er' world. In the meantime Llareggub was, quite properly, its own world.
Notes in Thomas's worksheets, emphasizing how innocuous is each character's effect on another, show how psychologically unclosing the play was meant to be from the start. The play's lovers can live neither with nor without each other, which both contradicts and confirms Marvell's claim in 'The Garden' that 'Two Paradises 'twere in one/To live in Paradise alone'. The love between Mog Edwards and Myfanwy Price, for example, depends on their never meeting, and the relationship between Mr and Mrs Cherry Owen relies on his
being two husbands, one for the daytime, another for the night. Such simplifying processes make Under Milk Wood a version of pastoral, Llareggub a comic paradise. The worksheets at Texas spell out the benign, closed-circuit effect of these relationships. The note on Mr and Mrs Pugh, for example: 'Both are satisfied. If he had married a woman who did not nag, he would have little justification to plot against her. And she, who knows well his thoughts, would be miserable too, having nothing to do.' Or the note on Willy Nilly the postman: 'Nobody minds him opening the letters and acting as [a] kind of town-crier. How else would they know the news?' Such blithe acceptance confirms a general 'blessing on the town' (p. 57) and in that sense Thomas really does speak through the Reverend Eli Jenkins. Similar worksheet blessings occur for Organ Morgan, Dai Bread and his two wives, Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, Jack Black, Mr Waldo, Nogood Boyo, and Butcher Beynon and his wife. One of them got into the final text as a specific apologia — the one stressing that Organ Morgan's mad night-time organ-playing is at least entertainment for 'anyone who will listen': lovers, revealers, the silent dead, tramps, and even sheep (p. 61). The mitigating pen-portraits in the worksheets, shamelessly cutting the tricky human corners of poisonous thoughts and opened letters, were Thomas's reminders to himself to keep the characters on course for forgiveness.
He had originally planned to quote each one of these simplifying verdicts as if it were a quotation from the Revered Eli Jenkins's own 'White Book of Llareggub'. In a note marked 'VERY important', he planned to 'Refer, towards the end, to the White Book of Llareggub (mentioning the Black Book of Llanstephan)' for references about the natural moral innocence of all the above inhabitants. The 'warm White Book of Llareggub' (with 'warm White' suggesting interior decorating rather than cold history) is the Reverend Eli Jenkins's 'Lifework' (pp. 54, 62). Though meant to be a book about 'the Population, Main Industry, Shipping, History, Topography, Flora and Fauna of the town he worships in', a book in which he 'tells only the truth', it is in face the opposite, a work the repersonalizes the depersonalized facts of Information Books and Guidebooks. In the upshot, the only characters actually cited as if from the pages of Eli Jenkins's book are Mog Edwards and Myfanwy Price, and the one literal innocent, the village idiot Bessie Bighead:
Look up Bessie Bighead in the White Book of Llareggub and you will find the few haggard rags and the one poor glittering thread of her history laid out in pages there with as much love and care as the lock of hair of a first lost love. (p.55)
Had Thomas carried out his plan of defending the others, too, by this mock appeal to Eli Jenkins's chronicle, the effect of summing-up would have helped rationalize the play's rather precipitate close. But it would also have made that close more apologetic than it needs to be. The diffused, contagious innocence of it all is by that stage already established. We are riding the ball by then.
But the play might well have turned out darker. Many unused ideas in the Texas manuscripts show Thomas contemplating certain shades and shadows not now associated with the work:
Bring in Tom [later Sinbad] the Sailor's hopeless love for Gossamer Beynon. Gossamer's erotic dreams. The tragedy behind Lord Cut Glass's life. The sadness of No-good boyo. The terrible jealousy of Mrs Cherry. Mrs Ogmor-Pritchard's terrible death-waiting loneliness. The poverty of the town, the idiocy, the incest. Look at the graveyard: remember the early mortality and fatalities. This all to show Llareggub no Utopia.
Immediately after this, Thomas wrote 'Huge donkeybray, close to mike' — so different from the present sound-effects of cockcrows, bell-notes, and organ-music. Sinbad Sailors' hopeless love and Gossamer Beynon's erotic dreams did get in, to good comic effect, as in the latter's dream of 'a small rough ready man with a bushy tail winking in a paper carrier' (p. 14). But 'the tragedy behind Lord Cut Glass's life' or 'Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard's terrible death-waiting loneliness' is hardly how those characters were developed. In connection with what Thomas calls 'the poverty of the town, the idiocy, the incest', it is interesting to see him asking on another worksheet 'What have I missed out?' and then listing 'Incest/Greed/Hate/Envy/Spite/Malice', followed again by the reminder in capital letters to 'STRESS THE FEAR OF SOME OF THE TOWN AFTER DARK'. In the same tone, an injunction to 'look at the graveyard' and 'remember the early mortality and fatalities' is a vestige of Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology, all spoken from such a graveyard, but in an infinitely kind of elegy — warm even when heartbreaking, closer to Thomas Hardy than to Edgar Lee Masters — is established by the very first characters to speak, the drowned sailors who nuzzle up to the sleeping Captain Cat. It is one of the very finest sections of the play, the one T. S. Eliot particularly admired,26 resonating memorably on deceptively simple details as the drowned sailors wonder 'How's it above?':
THIRD DROWNED
How's the tenors in Dowlais?
FOURTH DROWNED
Who milks the cows in Maesgwyn?
FIFTH DROWNED
When she smiles, is there dimples?
FIRST DROWNED
What's the smell of parsley (p. 4)
The old adage comes to mind — if a work is to end badly, it should end badly from the start. When darker 'suggestions' (Thomas's term in the worksheets) were not in harmony with the affirmative tenor quickly established by the play, they were finally kept at bay — for example, the suggestion that he 'Bring in, whenever [Evans] the Death is introduced, his mother' and give him a 'mother-love' song in a section planned for the evening in the pub. An obsessive link between death and the mother, though potent in the imagery of the poems, is not something the final play leaves with us. Evans the Death's dream of seeing, as a child, his mother 'making Welshcakes in the snow' (p. 8) is lyrical and visionary, not trapped and ruinous. Also unused was the following poignant but odd suggestion involved Eli Jenkins:
God is love, the Reverend Eli Jenkins tells a parishioner dying. Hod is Love? the old woman whispers. Yeah, Hod is Love, he says with reverence. And she flies from a hovel to a mansion, quick as a simple flash.
Eli Jenkins's refusal to be worried at such a time by mere semantics is true to his character, and to the general forgiving tenor of the play, whose concern is with what a Thomas poem calls 'unjudging love'. And yet Eli Jenkins's 'Yeah, Hod is Love' would still have jarred the tone of the Under Milk Wood we now know. It suggest an existentialist, inconsequential world very different from the simple inconsequence of having 'God is Love' hang above the bigamous bed of Dai Bread and his two wives (p. 40). Thomas's note to himself that these darker suggestions are 'all to show Llareggub no Utopia' is on worksheets where he also considered a final night sequence ('Midnight/ the dead come out …') in which 'Llareggub is buggerall now'. But the optimistic logic of the work was too powerful Llareggub is a Utopia, an Eden, an Arcadia — a sexual and satiric one, yes, but with a moral force that does not depend on having its air of fun and unreality darkly sabotaged.
The copious worksheets show the rich inventiveness out of which the play was finally distilled. Only a richly talented writer can afford to leave unused a phrase like the one describing Mrs Organ Morgan snoring 'soft and silent as a needle drawn through water': in fact, only a writer with the talent to describe, instead, Mr Organ Morgan snoring 'no louder than a spider' (p. 17). Also important were plans to extend the final evening section. Sending his literary agent a copy of the version used in the May 1953 performance in New York, Thomas said that 'it will be seen that dusk arrives too sharply and suddenly and that the whole of the day up to the dusk much overbalances, in emphasis and bulk, the day after dusk' (Collected Letters, 904). The main plan for extending the evening of the play was to expand the section in the Sailors Arms by writing songs for Nogood Boyo, Mary Ann the Sailors, Evans the Death and Lily Smalls.27 Thomas's death means that the late pub scene resounds only with Mr Waldo's sturdy ballad 'In Pembroke City when I was young', an excellent example of the play's sharp and varied use of song:
Did you ever hear of a growing boy
To live so cruel cheap
; On grub that has no flesh and bones
And liquor that makes you weep? (p. 60)
But we should not assume that the additional songs would definitely have been used, or that they were structurally necessary. The vivid gusto of the parts, the burst of human color, might even have been dulled and diluted by a concern for abstract proportions. The very freshness of the piece may depend on its having turned out, in that respect, 'no better than it should be' (p. 24). Thomas realized that extending the close was certainly not something demanded by the play in performance: it was already 'about as much as, in my opinion, an audience could be expected to take' (Collected Letters, 904). From summer 1953 onwards, plans to add to the close were stimulated more than anything by thoughts about the play as a text to be read: 'I am now adding quite a lot to this, and changing quite a bit which is more effective on the stage, I think, than it would be on the printed page … It can be made to look quite a nice book, I think'. For stage-reading or radio, adjusting the balance between morning, afternoon and evening would have meant sacrificing some of the morning and afternoon material. Simply extending the final third was only feasible if one thought of the play as a text to be read.
5
It is of course as readers that we most frequently experience the play. But our reading is richer if it also hears the work, as a 'play for voices'. It has by now been projected through many different media — from early intimations in the prose and poetry and the radio features through to the radio play itself; from two classic early recordings and endless stage-readings through to a big-screen film in 1971 and an EMI celebrity recording in 1988. The most recent of its extended forms was perhaps the most inevitable — the S4C animated-film version, which mates the 'cartoon' simplicity on which the play itself so thrives. But it is its radio-ness we should keep in mind or, better still, its wireless-ness. Like 'skyscraper', the word 'wireless' takes us back to the creative period itself. Just as with buildings scraping the sky, the idea of mankind speaking on the air without wires still retained some wonder. In one of his broadcasts, Thomas could wittily still affect surprise at 'this, to me, unbelievable lack of wires' (Broadcasts, 225) that was at that very moment carrying his words. The myriad sophistications described in the 'Technical Details' of the EMI celebrity recording of 198828 seem positively futuristic compared with the simplicity of the BBC's 'Rehearsals' memo for the original broadcast of 1954. On the BBC file-copy of the latter, a technician has written 'For ethereal echo get Control Room to insert a basefilter on output of microphone to feed to echo chamber (as in Manchester Children's Hour)'. Though technically relatively straightforward, the original 1954 broadcast of Under Milk Wood still seemed most wonderful. It was a different world.