Dec

12

A Reader’s Christmas In Wales.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

December 12, 2007 |

I have two very personal holiday traditions. The first is, on Christmas Eve, I always pull out and read my copy of A Child’s Christmas In Wales by Dylan Thomas. This particular copy is small, almost a pamphlet, with woodblock illustrations, and it’s extremely special to me because I bought it in a shop just a short distance away from Dylan Thomas’s grave.

It’s hard to explain the on-again, off-again relationship I’ve had with the work of Dylan Thomas for most of my life. When I was sixteen I showed my mother a poem I’d written, and she said, “That sounds like Dylan Thomas.” She then went to the library and checked out his Collected Poems and brought it home for me. In the front was a picture of Thomas, and I thought he was the saddest looking man I’d ever seen. I didn’t read any of his poetry until just before I went to college and bought my own copy of his Collected Poems. And I read a brief biography of him in a reference book and learned about his heavy drinking and early death. It is, of course, Thomas’s life that’s secured his reputation more than his work. He was a rock star of poetry: he drank heavily, acted outrageously at parties and in hotels, and beat up his wife. (She hit back, but that doesn’t make it right.) To hear John Malcolm Brinnin, who wrote Dylan Thomas In America, about his reading tours in the United States, it’s a wonder Thomas survived as long as he did. A short time after his thirty-ninth birthday, supposedly after downing eighteen whiskies, Thomas collapsed in his hotel room and went into a coma. The exact cause of his death, as with Edgar Allan Poe or even Mozart, has been a source of some speculation, with pneumonia and a fatty liver listed on his official post mortem. Thomas was almost certainly taking drugs, including getting regular shots of hydrocortisone. Diabetes has been suggested as a possible contributing factor, but Thomas was never diagnosed with the disease. It’s even been suggested that his doctor was a quack.

Originally written as a story for Harper’s Bazaar, there is a recording of Thomas reading A Child’s Christmas In Wales that we have by what might be called a lucky accident. It was made on February 22nd, 1952. Graduate students Barbara Holdridge and Marianne Roney asked Thomas if they could record him reading some of his poetry. The session was originally scheduled for February 15th, but Dylan Thomas was rarely on time, and didn’t show up for the session. It was rescheduled for a week later, and he filled one side of a vinyl disc with five poems: Fern Hill, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, In The White Giant’s Thigh, Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait, and Ceremony After A Fire Raid. Unaware previously that he’d need material to fill the other side, Thomas decided on the spot to record A Child’s Christmas In Wales. Holdridge and Roney were asked by the recording studio what their company was called, and, in another lucky accident, founded Caedmon Records (which later became Caedmon Audio), and made recordings of several other 20th Century poets and writers, including Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Eudora Welty, as well as other recordings of Thomas reading his own poetry. Caedmon Records also recorded the performance of Thomas’ “play for voices”, Under Milk Wood.

For a long time I loved his poetry. I loved the dazzling fireworks of poems like And Death Shall Have No Dominion, In The White Giant’s Thigh, The Force That Through The Green Fuse Drives The Flower, and, of course, Fern Hill. I thought Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night said, in nineteen lines, all that could be said about life and death. He was the first poet I knew intimately, and, no matter what our later experiences are, our firsts almost always have a special place. It doesn’t matter that I now think his poetry’s pretty simplistic and repetitive. I now see those same fireworks as being a few cheap parlor tricks he invented and used over and over again. He did write some extraordinarily beautiful and moving poems and his last poem, Elegy, shows signs of moving beyond the simplistic life and death dichotomy he used to prop up most of his work.

When my infatuation with the poetry of Dylan Thomas was at its strongest I made a special pilgrimage across England and into Wales to visit his home. Actually I made two. I knew he was born and spent his early years in Swansea, then moved around and finally settled in a little Welsh town called Laugharne. Since I couldn’t find Laugharne on any of the train schedules (I was setting out from Grantham, home of Sir Isaac Newton and Margaret Thatcher) I decided I’d go to Swansea. As with most trips I take I had no idea what I was going to do when I got there. Look for Mumbles Road and Mermaid Park, I thought, and let the rest take care of itself. I settled into my seat on the train and watched the green English countryside go by, briefly trying to count the little brown shacks in the middle of nowhere that must have been built around the same time as Hadrian’s wall. I changed trains in Cardiff and then, stepping off the train in Swansea, started to realize that I had no clue what I was doing there. So I did what any sensible person would do: I set off in a random direction, walking around Swansea late in a winter afternoon, purposely oblivious to the growing dark and the cold and the wind. I stepped into a travel agency thinking I might ask someone where I should go, but I was scared to speak to anyone and instead looked at a wall of brochures where, of all things, one advertising the Dylan Thomas Boat House And Museum jumped out at me. I checked the map on the back, and there was Laugharne, just a short way from Carmarthen, which was just a short way from Swansea. (Maps on the back of brochures, by the way, can be extremely misleading.) I headed back to the train station thinking the Welsh train system must go to Laugharne, and if it didn’t, well, maybe there was a bus, and if there wasn’t maybe I’d catch a lift with some complete stranger with a hook for a hand and an eyepatch and a scar. Laugharne still wasn’t on the train station map, so I decided to go for the next best thing and go to Carmarthen and maybe meet up with the hook-handed, one-eyed stranger, or possibly a bus, there.

The train to Carmarthen was smaller than the other trains I’d ridden, and rickety. It was seriously dark by this time and sometime before I got to Carmarthen a heavy rain had started. I stepped out and realized it was the end of the line, and I’d just ridden the last train. Whether I wanted to or not I was going to be spending the night in Carmarthen. I’m pretty sure I spent at least an hour wandering, afraid to set foot in any pub and wondering if I should find a comfortable ditch to sleep in. Finally I got up the nerve to ask a couple of guys coming out of a pub if there was a place I could get a room for a tenner. They were very friendly and tickled that an American was visiting Carmarthen and directed me to a place I never did find, mainly because I couldn’t understand half of what they were saying. I did end up spending the night in the Old Priory Guest House, in a room in the very back of the building, at the end of a dark hallway. When I woke up in the morning I was a little disturbed to look out the window and see a graveyard.

The next day was Sunday. I left the Guest House early and skipped the complimentary breakfast because I wanted to catch the first bus to Laugharne. There was a bus schedule at the train station so I was able to confirm absolutely that there was a bus that went to Laugharne. What the schedule didn’t tell me was that Wales completely shut down on Sunday. There were no buses to Laugharne, and the train back to Swansea didn’t leave until after one o’clock. So I spent a lot of time walking up and down the banks of the River Towy, and finally got back to school in Grantham very late that night, having to make the last leg from Nottingham in a taxi. I’d spent the night in the Nottingham train station once before and didn’t want to repeat the experience, especially not alone.

That was my first attempt to make a pilgrimage to the home of Dylan Thomas. The second time I was better equipped: I had the train schedule figured out, I had the bus schedule, and I wasn’t going to spend any time wandering around Swansea. This time I was on a mission, and headed straight to Laugharne.

It was late afternoon when I stepped off the bus in Laugharne, and the first thing I saw was a sign that said, “Dylan’s Walk”. Ah, I thought, they knew I was coming. I set off down Dylan’s walk which led me around to a steep cliff, past a cemetery, past the little blue shed where he spent his days writing, and right to the door of the Dylan Thomas Boat House And Museum. And it was closed. For the weekend. It had closed half an hour before I arrived.

In the Broadway play Dylan, by Sidney Michaels, someone asks Dylan, “Will you be telling jokes at your own funeral?” He replies, “Of course not. I’ll be late for it.”

I had a few hours in Laugharne before I had to catch the last bus to Carmarthen. I wandered around bookshops, and stopped in at a small convenience store across from the Brown’s Hotel Pub—the place where Dylan spent a lot of his days in Laugharne–where I bought my copy of A Child’s Christmas In Wales. The man behind the convenience store counter, guessing that I was a Dylan Thomas fan, insisted that I had to have a pint in Dylan’s old pub. I told him I was scared to go in, but he assured me that it would be all right.

Outside the pub I could hear what sounded like a pretty raucous, Friday night crowd, which reassured me. I thought I’d slip in unnoticed, have a pint of Double Dragon, and leave. I opened the door and stepped into dead silence. I’m pretty sure every person in Laugharne except the guy who worked in the convenience store was in that pub, and since they knew I wasn’t him they knew as soon as I opened the door that there was a stranger among them. I walked across the room to the bar with everyone staring at me, a short, long-haired guy in a hat and long coat with a backpack. Only the bartender, a bald, round-faced man who looked like he just might be old enough to have known Dylan Thomas, smiled at me and asked me what I wanted. I asked for a pint of Guinness, suddenly deciding that I needed the familiar, heavy stout. He poured one and I walked over to the only empty corner in the room. I sat down and pulled out my copy of Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems. And it was as though I’d flipped a switch. Everyone in the room turned away from me and started talking again, seemingly picking up their conversations right where they’d left off. I looked out the window, then looked at the wall to my right. There was a picture of Dylan Thomas and his wife Caitlin on the wall. Without realizing it I’d sat in his chair.

After finishing my pint I set off up a dark walk to the graveyard where Dylan Thomas still lies. A simple wooden cross marks his grave. I sat down in front of it and pulled out two cigarettes, one for him and one for me. I looked out over the lights of Laugharne and then talked to Dylan for a while. I returned to Carmarthen just in time to attend the lighting of the city Christmas tree.

All this comes back to me vividly every year when I read A Child’s Christmas In Wales. It doesn’t matter what I think of his poetry now. There will always be something special between me and Dylan Thomas.


Comments

2 Comments so far

  1. James on December 18, 2007 3:49 pm

    I have always loved this story. If it wasn’t for certain redhead at the time I would have been along for the ride. You tell it so wonderfully well and it is so poignant, that I feel I was right there with you.

  2. hadrian s wall on December 26, 2007 7:30 pm

    [...] A Reader??s Christmas In Wales. [...]

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