Under Milk Wood Read online

  The crucial part of that difference was the potent radio culture to which the play first belonged. What the TLS reviewer (5 March 1954) of the first printed edition appreciated was the fact that Thomas had 'developed a brisk comic style closely resembling that of Itma':

  A mogul catches Lily Smalls in the wash-house.

  LILY SMALLS

  Ooh, you old mogul!

  Mrs Rose-Cottage's eldest, Mae, peels off her pink-and-white skin in a furnace in a tower in a cave in a waterfall in a wood and waits there raw as an onion for Mister Right to leap up the burning tall hallow splashes of leaves like a brilliantined trout.

  MAE ROSE-COTTAGE

  [Very close and softly, drawing out the words.]

  Call me Dolores

  Like they do in the stories. (p. 16)

  The reviewer's reference to 'Itma' (It's that Man Again) helps us reconstruct the wider cultural moment. Tommy Handley's immensely popular comic series, which ran for 310 programmes from 1939 to 1949, epitomized the part which radio entertainment of the 1940s and early 1950s played in assuaging the cold realities of war and its aftermath. In many ways the great decade of radio was the 1930s. By the time radio had become the medium it was overtaken by the Second World War, which then gave it an applied role to play. The media heroes of the 1940s were the war-correspondents, who had to find equally swift routes to the listener's attention. In this sense Thomas knew what he was doing when he worked into his broadcasts self-referential points regarding the role of wireless itself. In 'The Londoner' in 1946, for example, Ted Jackson says that during the war he used to make wireless sets only in order to dismantle them, never listening for 'more than a couple of minutes'. But during the three years that Ted Jackson was a prisoner of war, says his wife Lily, 'I used to hear his voice in the silly old dance tunes they played on the wireless, but the words weren't silly any more' (Broadcasts, 85-6). The post-war period in which the wireless slowly came back into its own (though still reflecting a world in crisis) was a phase to which Thomas himself richly contributed. The slow growth of Under Milk Wood, however, meant that, but the time its example could have encouraged similar works, not only was Thomas dead, but wireless itself as a mass resource was giving way to television. But in that cultural moment just before television's final ascendance, the wireless still had a visionary if visionless confidence in its outreach.

  It is confidence that Under Milk Wood now recreates in us. Not just by telling us, in the age of satellites and e-mail, 'Only your eyes are unclosed, to see' and 'you alone can hear' (p. 3), and not just by making blind Captain Cat our sightless, alertly listening, proxy within the play. A radio drama is by its very nature synchronic, in the strict sense of everything coinciding in time but not in place. And therefore, just as within the work dreams are co-inhabited by villagers otherwise separated by streets, mistrust, class, respectability and even death, so we too as listeners cross a physical space closed only by voices. All the more solidly to fill that space, Thomas employs simple devices to give the material mass as well as speed. If certain details seem as if we have met them before, it's because we have. For example, when Mr Waldo dreams of gossiping neighbors accusing him of selling the pianola and the sewing machine (p. 10), we half remember the Fifth Drowned confessing to Captain Cat in his dream that 'it was me that pawned the ormolu clock' (p. 5). When the same neighbors accuse Mr Waldo as a boy of 'stealing currants' (p. 11), we half recall Evans the Death waking in a dream and stealing currants from his mother (p. 8). That very oddity of 'waking in a dream' returns when Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, too, wakes in a dream (p. 12) or when (a deft variation) Mr Pugh, 'fast asleep, pretends to be sleeping' (p. 17). These doublings and double-takes involve us in the dream psychology of that particular part of the play. But they also occur outside the dreams. The fact that Lily Smalls' breath 'clouds the shaving-glass' (p. 22) is somehow still there when Mrs Dai Bread Two's crystal ball also clouds over (p. 41). In this way, the 'play for voices' is closer to a lyric poem than to a play. Like a lyric, it plotlessly circles around an unstated centre, always husbanding its own best effects, always threatening to round back to where it started, then actually doing so. Thomas knew exactly what he was saying when he called it 'an entertainment out of the darkness' (Collected Letters, 813). In not completely finalizing itself in a plot, or externalizing itself on to page or stage or screen, the voices across the air create a kind of unattached, self-sustaining music. As you listen, all the play's resources are within you. In T. s. Eliot's words, 'you are the music while the music lasts'.29

  The evanescent of a 'play for voices' means that it has to be linguistically all the more vivid. And the very paradox of a vivid evanescence is written into the play in self-referential touches throughout, as through a stick of seaside rock. The very first word — 'Silence' — threatens the world of sound by which a 'play for voices' lives. In a playful awareness of its own form, the play then continues to threaten itself with words notionally on their way back towards silence — 'muffled', 'lulled', 'dumbfound', 'hushed', 'dumb', 'gloved', 'furred'. In one section at one stage Thomas considered teasing our very dependence on words, by evoking their opposite in the wordlessness of dreams:

  Mrs Rose-Cottage's eldest, Mae, is dreaming of dreaming of tall, tower, white, furnace, cave, flower, ferret, waterfall, sigh, without any words at all.

  But though radio is a good medium for the quick montage of dreams, Thomas must have recognized that those staccato words would have come through as mere words, not brisk pictures. He re-wrote the passage so that we are led through the discrete words into a delightfully indiscreet picture:

  Mrs Rose-Cottage's eldest, Mae, peels off her pink-and-white skin in a furnace in a tower in a cave in a waterfall in a wood and waits there raw as an onion for Mister Right to leap up the burning tall hollow splashes of leaves like a brilliantined trout. (p. 16)

  In these ways the act of seeing is never taken for granted. The very fact that this radio play starts and ends with night makes the medium the message. Beyond the words, there is, literally, only a non-seeing. As a friend of Richard Hughes, Thomas knew that the very first play specifically produced for radio was Hughes;s A Comedy of Danger (1924), set in the pitch black of a coal mine after an accident.30 Everything in such works depends, in Captain Cat's wonderful phrase, on 'the noise of the hush' (p. 33), on what Under Milk Wood also calls a 'calling dark' (p. 59). Using a clever inversion of the ordinary question, Can you hear me from there?, the play repeatedly tells us that 'From where you are you can hear …' — 'where you are', of course, being the only place where you can hear. When we are later momentarily threatened ('all too far away from him, or you, to hear', p. 29), we all the more alertly cling to our station. Our natural human curiosity wants that heard darkness to be a darkness visible. It is the instinct that makes John Wain's poem 'Blind Man Listening to Radio' and Philip Larkin's poem 'Broadcast' so true. In Larkin's poem a girlfriend is at a broadcast concert to which the poet is listening. He finds himself imagining, beyond the blind air-waves, her 'gloves unnoticed on the floor'. The applause at the end leaves him even.

  desperate to pick out

  Your hands, tiny in all that air, applauding.

  Our ability to reach through the heard word to the seen picture is what energizes the play. On the very first page we are asked to imagine a wood 'limping invisible down' to the sea. In the cliché, what woods normally do is run down to the sea. The change in the cliché revivifies it, tempting us for the first time to see it. On the very last page, we are told that a breeze 'sighs the streets' close under Milk Wood. We might not feel prompted overmuch to imagine the sound of a sigh, but that the breeze comes from 'the creased water' is something we suddenly visualize, as clearly as the 'tear-splashed blush' of the bullied boy in the children's forfeiting game (p. 45). Beyond these small touches, the language is all the while considering and leading us into the multiple angles from which things are visible in the first place. Hence Lily Smalls's view of her own face n Mr Beynon's shav
ing-glass (p. 21) or the view the airborne morning seagulls have of Dai Bread hurrying to the bakery (p. 23), reversed as it is later in Willy Nilly's view 'in sudden Springshine' of 'herring gulls hacking down to the harbor' (p. 38). These varying perspectives are shared out and interchanged between narrator and character like angles between different cameras:

  MRS PUGH

  …Has Mr Jenkins said his poetry?

  MR PUGH

  Yes, dear.

  MRS PUGH

  Then it's time to get up. Give me my glasses. No, no my reading glasses, I want to look out. I want to see

  Lily Smalls the treasure down on her red knees washing the front step. (pp. 22-3)

  Lily Smalls is only the first of main characters whom Mrs Pugh then 'sees', like a camera, on our behalf. Radio is reminding us of film. Like Mrs Pugh, we too must be careful not to keep only our 'reading glasses' on. When we read on the first page that 'Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, brisemaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organ playing wood', we should remember that Thomas was a keen film fan. Glow-worms as bridesmaids and trees like a cartoon version of organ-pipes — everything no doubt swaying and bulging musically — it is pure Walt Disney.

  But these effects are only possible because the words on the page have already the heart of the matter in them. One of the things about Under Milk Wood is the sheer number of expressions which, though quietly at home when we read or hear them, have a memorability that makes them also return singly to the mind. On reflection, we can identify the kink in their logic that makes each one memorable. We can even grade the degree of their logical off-centredness. The description of night, for example, going through the graveyard 'with winds gloved and folded' (p. 4) is by simple analogy with the folded wings of the carved angels there. Slightly more puzzling might be Mog Edwards's boast that he will take Myfanwy Price away to his Emporium on the hill 'where the change hums on wires' (p. 7), an image that memorializes a feature of the posh shops of an era that was coming to an end with the play itself. But what of Eli Jenkins's sudden plea, 'Oh, angels be careful there with your knives and forks'? It is a one-liner whose connections to its immediate context seem positively surrealistic. Eli Jenkins is writing before a photograph of his late mother:

  His mother, propped against a pot in a palm, with her wedding-ring waist and bust like a backcloth dining table, suffers in her stays.

  REV. ELI JENKINS

  Oh, angels be careful there with your knives and forks,

  he prays. There is no known likeness of his father Esau, who, undogcollared because of his little weakness, was scythed to the bone one harvest by mistake when sleeping with his weakness in the corn. (pp. 54-5)

  Is the sudden 'Oh, angels be careful there with your knives and forks' prompted by the 'dining table', by the mother's piercing corsets, or by the memory of the father's unfortunate encounter with the scythe? The line surely galvanizes all there. The baseline for such brilliant strokes is the vivid life invested in even the simplest phrases throughout the play: in Gossamer Beynon's not caring if Sinbad Sailors is common 'so long as he's all cucumber and hooves' (p. 46), for example, or Captain Cat's memory of 'Lazy early Rosie with the flaxen thatch' (p. 51).

  Thomas's only direction to the five nervous but resourceful American actors who joined him in the first stage-readings in New York in May and October 1953 was 'Love the words, love the words'. He would himself have relished a particular touch in John Malcolm Brinnin's description of the play's premiere in May 1953 at the Poetry Center in New York.31 In an image appropriately tinged by the play's marriage of hearing and seeing, Brinnin unconsciously merged 'breath', the source of words, with 'light', the means of sight:

  The stage was dim until a soft breath of light showed Dylan's face: 'To begin at the beginning.'

  WALFORD DAVIES

  References

  1 Elizabeth Reitell was John Malcolm Brinnin's assistant at the Poetry Center of the Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association in New York. Thomas's comment was quoted by her in a letter to Daniel Jones (20 July 1954) now in the possession of the Trustees of the Dylan Thomas estate.

  2 Dylan Thomas, The Collected Letters, ed. Paul Ferrs, Dent 1985, p. 772. Hereafter cited as Collected Letters within the text.

  3 Cynthia Davis, 'The Voices of "Under Milk Wood"', Criticism, 17 (1975) 74-89 does not make a convincing case for distinct qualities in the voices.

  4 John Malcolm Brinnin, Dylan Thomas in America, Dent 1956, p. 103.

  5 'Dylan Thomas's Play for Voices', The Critical Quarterly I (Spring 1959) p. 26.

  6 Kent Thompson, Dylan Thomas in Swansea (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Wales, Swansea, 1965) p. 299.

  7 See Introduction by Douglas Cleverdon to J. Stevens Cox (ed.), Under Milk Wood: Account of an Action to Recover the Original Manuscript, The Toucan Press, Guernsey, C.I., 1969.

  8 T. Gwynn Jones, 'Dialects' in A History of Carmarthenshire, ed. Sir J. E. Lloyd for the London Carmarthenshire Society, two vols. 1935, vol. I, p. 20. The character of Laugharne, especially its own sense of uniqueness, is even more vividly evoked in Mary Curtis's The Antiquities of Laugharne, Pendine, and their Neighborhoods (1880, expanded from a shorter volume of 1871), published in a facsimile reprint by Dyfed County Council's Cultural Services Department in 1991.

  9 Contribution by Richard Hughes to Portrait of Dylan Thomas, a BBC Third Programme tribute on 9 November 1963.

  10 Caitlin Thomas with George Tremlett, Caitlin: Life with Dylan Thomas, Secker and Warburg 1986, pp. 118-21.

  11 BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham.

  12 Dylan Thomas, The Notebook Poems 1930-34, ed. Ralph Maud, Dent 1989, p. 254.

  13 Constantine FitzGibbon, The Life of Dylan Thomas, Dent 1965, p. 269.

  14 Dylan Thomas, The Broadcasts, ed. Ralph Maud, Dent 1991, p. 11. Hereafter cited as Broadcasts within the text.

  15 Douglas Cleverdon, The Growth of Milk Wood, Dent 1969, p. 19. Hereafter cited as Cleverdon within the text.

  16 Dylan Thomas, Early Prose Writings, ed. Walford Davies, Dent 1971, p. 37; Dylan Thomas: The Collected Stories, ed. Walford Davies, Dent 1983, p. 63.

  17 'Dylan Thomas's Play for Voices', p. 20.

  18 John Hall, 'The Magic of Milk Wood' [based on an interview with Andrew Sinclair], Guardian Weekly, 29 May 1971, p. 20.

  19 The Legend and the Poet, ed. E. W. Tedlock, Heineman (and Mercury Books) 1963, pp. 69-70.

  20 'Stravinsky and Dylan Thomas', chapter 4 of Robert Craft, Stravinsky: Glimpse of a Life, Limetree 1992, p. 55.

  21 The best responses, even by native inhabitants of the same area as Caradoc Evans, are by no means simple cases of taking unbrage. They explore, instead, the cultural richness and complexity of the actual community that fell prey to Evans's caricature. See, for example, David Jenskins, 'Community and Kin: Caradoc Evans "At Home"', The Anglo-Welsh Review, vol. 24, no. 53 (Winter 1974), pp. 43-57.

  22 Kenneth Tynan, 'Welsh Wizardry', The Observer, 26 August 1956, p. 10.

  23 The most obvious is The Resurrection: Port Glasgow (1950), now in the Tate Gallery, London.

  24 T. S. Eliot, 'Ben Jonson' in Selected Essays, 1932, p. 156.

  25 As told to John Malcolm Brinnin — Dylan Thomas in America, pp. 176 — 77; as told to Philip Burton — Dylan Thomas: The Legend and the Poet, ed. E. W. Tedlock, pp. 68-9.

  26 Vernon Watkins, in conversation with Walford Davies.

  27 The Texas worksheets also show that, elsewhere, poems were contemplated for Lord Cut-Glass and Gossamer Beynon.

  28 'Technical Details' in the comprehensive (untitled) brochure accompanying the launch of the recording in 1988. In the same brochure, see Jon Jacobs's 'The Engineer's Soundings'.

  29 T. S. Eliot, 'The Dry Salvages', Four Quartets.

  30 Richard Hughes, 'The Birth of Radio Drama', The Atlantic Monthly, December 1957. Reprinted in Fiction as Truth: Selected Literary Writings by Richard Hughes, ed. Richard Poole, Poetry Wales Pr
ess, Bridgend, 1983, pp. 32-7.

  31 Dylan Thomas in America, p. 174.

  UNDER MILK WOOD

  A PLAY FOR VOICES

  [Silence]

  FIRST VOICE [Very softly]

  To begin at the beginning:

  It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows’ weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.

  Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glowworms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wet-nosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.