Showing posts with label Dylan Thomas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dylan Thomas. Show all posts

Sunday 29 December 2019

Juvenilia . . . A Teenage Notebook . . .


A grief ago*

A grief ago
the fire burned itself out
where this small dog now
dares to paw the ashes.
I shall not shout
at one too meagre
to tempt my
 injustices.




In the Manner of Walter Savage Landor.

  O prosper not the past
that we may eat upon
a harvest lost, laid waste
    by our own carrion.**



*A coherent line from a word-salad-poem by Dylan Thomas.

** A reference to overpopulated London and the Thames, polluted since the early 19th Century.
The prince destined to be King Henry IX died, aged 18, from typhoid fever from a swim in the Thames
near Richmond in October 1612.

Wednesday 28 October 2015

Take One Home for the Kiddies: More Palimpsestic Wordplay? (Part 3.)

As an archivist or – more grandly – a conservator I am quite hopeless.

In the poetry cuttings book I compiled in my early teens, mould grows on the petroleum gum I foolishly used to tack down clippings from literary periodicals, which in many cases I recognise as the first published appearance of what anthologists would regard as classic English poems of the mid to late twentieth century.

Thus, my once cherished pages are more than ‘slightly foxed’ (to borrow an antiquarian bookseller’s term). 

Despite this, these pock-marked pages never seem to lose their appeal.  The texts, of course, are perforce of a certain vintage yet they continue to stimulate closer study.


A Nagging Sense of a Familiar Echo.

For instance, thumbing once more through my collection the other night, I was struck once again by the ‘palimpsestic effect’ of a number of them; distinctive poems, which – like Dylan Thomas’s Hunchback in the Park – appear to give rise to unsettling resonances . . . a nagging sense of a familiar echo just barely heard . . . see my earlier foray into this phenomenon . . .
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/the-humbert-in-park-more-palimpsestic.html

Am I misguided to detect concordances between the following popular Victorian verses for a child’s recitation and a well known squib by Philip Larkin? Folk memory . . . an oral tradition . . . the Connective Unconscious . . . call it what you will, the similarities of these morbid drolleries that subvert the Age of Innocence certainly suggest a perseveration of a creative impulse spanning two centuries, and one that measures infant mortality by the spit of a spade.


The Doll’s Funeral

When my dolly died, when my dolly died, 

I sat on the step and I cried and cried;
And I couldn’t eat any jam and bread, 

’Cause it didn’t seem right when my doll was dead. 
And Bridget was sorry as she could be, 

For she patted my head, and ‘O,’ said she, 

‘To think that the pretty has gone and died!’ 

Then I broke out afresh and I cried and cried.

We dug her a grave in the violet bed, 

And planted violets at her head; 

And we raised a stone and wrote quite plain, 

‘Here lies a dear doll who died of pain.’ 

And then my brother, said he, ‘Amen,’ 

And we all went back to the house again, 

But all the same I cried and cried, 

Because I’d a right when my doll had died.

And then we had more jam and bread, 

But I didn’t eat, ’cause my doll was dead. 

But I tied some crape on my doll house door, 

And then I stood and cried some more. 

I couldn’t be happy, don’t you see! 

Because the funeral belonged to me. 

And then the others went home, and then 

I went out and dug up my doll again.


On the other hand, perhaps it’s only the patina of age now disfiguring my keepsake book that prompts me to suggest, hereinabove, that the pungency of the English Cautionary Verse tradition is a taste indistinguishable even when savoured a century apart.


Take One Home for the Kiddies

                                         On shallow straw, in shadeless glass,
                                         Huddled by empty bowls, they sleep:
                                         No dark, no dam, no earth, no grass —
                                         Mam, get us one of them to keep.

                                         Living toys are something novel,
                                         But it soon wears off somehow.
                                         Fetch the shoebox, fetch the shovel —
                                         Mam, we’re playing funerals now. 


Two cuttings of Philip Larkin’s verse
as they first appeared in literary periodicals.

For further musings on palimpsestic texts and the versifying impulse see also: 


Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)

Monday 9 December 2013

A Roundelay for Archducal Dylan.

I wonder whether you’ve noticed that the centenary next June (28 June 1914) of the cataclysmic death of an archduke (Franz Ferdinand of Austria) will be concurrent with the centennial of the birth of another notable honouree of an arch dukedom, namely Dylan Thomas*, Duke of Gweno … an arch ennoblement indeed.

But by whom so archly ennobled? If you have not heard of the King of Redonda, then I should explain it is an invention of M. P. Shiel (1865-1947), celebrated author of The Purple Cloud, a landmark of early British dystopian science fiction.

According to the current pretender to the Redondan throne, eminent Spanish novelist and translator Javier Marías, Redonda [is]:

… a minuscule island in the Antilles of which, at the age of fifteen, Shiel himself (a native of the neighbouring and much larger island of Montserrat) had been crowned king in a festive naval ceremony in 1880, at the express desire of the previous monarch, his father, a local Methodist preacher who was also a shipowner and had bought the island years before, though no one knows from whom, given that its only inhabitants at the time were the boobies that populated it and a dozen men who gathered the birds’ excrement to make guano.
It was within the gift of the past kings of Redonda, Marías affirms, to make ‘…dukes or admirals of various writers who were his friends or whom he admired…’, a patronage that included the elevation of Dylan Thomas to Duke of Gweno in 1947 (he proclaimed his fealty in drunken doggerel), a lineage of patronage that extends up to the present day, with a number of contemporary literary luminaries receiving preferment to aristocratic titles from King Xavier, Marías himself. 



An Awful Solitude. A Vagrant King.

But this minuscule account of mine of a minuscule micronation (named Redonda by Columbus for its roundness) is no more than a prelude, I confess, to a minor footnote I wish to add to the Redondan myth, which Shielian scholars may have overlooked; I cannot be sure.

I can be sure, though, of the fact that from my great-uncle I inherited a number of his bound volumes of the Strand Magazine, which in my childhood I read avidly for the Sherlock Holmes stories first published there in the 1890s, read also by my great-uncle when in his early teens at the time of publication. (His wife, my great-aunt, is presently in good health at the venerable age of one-hundred-and-seven).


So that is how, in my own early teens, I stumbled across a remote island resembling Redonda ... The Eagle’s Crag, described by M P Shiel in Volume 8, published in 1894.

Written when Shiel was 29 years old, it’s a more romantic conception of Redonda, I think. Significantly, Shiel also mentions in this story an ‘old Babylonish king, wet with the dew of Heaven’.  He means Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 5:21). I note that The Great King: The Madness of Nebuchadnezzar was a story of his published seventeen years later in 1911. So it was a leitmotif of a vagrant king he sustained well into the 20th Century.

So is this fictional isle of 1894 an evocation of Shiel’s island kingdom? Judge for yourself from this extract from The Eagle’s Crag

… the Eagle's Crag ! This rock stands some miles from the mainland. The old fishermen of Liguria and Etruria in the palmy days of the Roman Republic called it Rupes Aquilina, because of the curious configuration of the summit, which resembles an eagle’s head and beak. And the old name still clings to it. lt rises in awful solitude sheer out of the sea to a height of near two thousand feet. It is shaped somewhat like one half of a cone slit down the middle – quite flat on one side, the other forming a convex surface. On the convex side, the south, not only is life possible, but a few poor men and women actually exist there. This south side has a regular steep incline upward to the very summit, and a bold and skilful climber may even reach the top; but once there, the brain grows dizzy to look down, on the north side, on a smooth wall of rock, falling away from the feet, not perpendicularly, but with a marked inward slant. Those who have so climbed and looked down, by stretching far out over the flat eagle’s beak, will tell you that it is a sight full of terror, making the heart sick. In all this wall of rock there is one break, and only one – a horizontal ledge, three feet broad, which runs right across it at a height of rather more than three-quarters of the rock’s height from the bottom. Quite near the end of the beak on that side a few shrubs grow.
In my personal view, this description is a psychical projection of the island Shiel once knew in his youth, transplanted by a fictionist to the coastal waters of the Ligurian Sea, some way offshore from the province of La Spezia.  

The illustration in the Strand of 1894 by A. Pearse perfectly captures the sombre mood of the vertiginous cliffs that rise on Rodonda’s leeward flank.


The Last Man and Woman in the World.

That the influence of Shiel’s last-man-last-woman fantasy, The Purple Cloud (admired by H. P. Lovecraft), continues to pervade the works of 21st Century writers of fiction is evidenced by my own barely perceptible nod to its meta-ethical survivalist message in my fiction, Lovesong in Invisible Ink, published in Listen Close to Me (2011, Salt), in which the narrator relates key episodes from her on-off love affair with Vivian, an army intelligence officer:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 
About this time, Vivian was sent by the Rhine Army on a language course at the Intelligence School at Oberammergau in the Bavarian Alps and then transferred to the Special Weapons Training Centre in the same town, in the shadow of Kofelberg’s crags, to learn how to fight in an atomic war.
    ‘How strange to think,’ Vivian once remarked, ‘that, as we rode the perilous cable cars high above Oberammergau, below us my fellow pupils were playing air-to-ground atomic war games.’
    He’d then paused and mused awhile and said, not so inconsequentially: ‘Of course, directly after the war, the Oberammergau passion play was still unregenerate religious bigotry. The crowds were still shouting the Jews were accursed, with blood on their hands and on the hands of their children’s children. Rather small beer, y’know,’ he drawled, ‘in the scale of things, when you’re in your host’s backyard learning how to attack the enemy with tactical atomic weapons for the total annihilation of entire continents.’
    Vivian’s unique meta-ethical viewpoint had been demonstrated to me very memorably at the height of the Cold War.
    We’d been sailing the Solent in his ketch off Cowes one July when, in the blink of an eye, Portsmouth’s naval dockyard exploded in a vast mushroom cloud that grew rapidly into a gigantic pillar of rolling white smoke, and small shards of metal and wood rained down on us.
    I truly thought World War Three had broken out.
    ‘Well,’ Vivian murmured imperturbably at the helm, turning his back on this apocalyptic vision to examine the glowing tip of his cigar, ‘when the balloon goes up I believe it’s incumbent on the last man and woman in the world to mate.’ 
    Then the ash of his cigar broke and fell, and he trimmed the sails and lashed the tiller to a course he’d set for Deauville.
    So we sailed calmly on; he the new Adam and I the new Eve, and we did not leave that tiny double berth forecabin until hours later when the skyline had darkened and the horizon was quite empty.
    We sensed the sea rather than saw it. Gazing into the firmament, we lay on the deck in each other’s arms, and lost all sense of time as slowly the sky seemed to draw us up into it; and so we drifted out in a state of drowsy contemplation towards morning.
    Only much later did Vivian learn that eight ammunition barges at the Royal Naval Armament Depot had been blown up by saboteurs.
That last (factual) ‘reveal’ only goes to point up the methodological maxim I have adopted as a fictionist: A dutiful writer of suspense does not invent; a dutiful writer of suspense just makes surprising connections.


*Hit-or-Miss Scattergun Methodology a Wasteful Virtue.

My earlier postings on Dylan Thomas make clear, I trust, my high regard for his true lyric tongue, a god-given free-flowing crystal fount that few poets – in their youth – can lay claim to. 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/the-humbert-in-park-more-palimpsestic.html 
However, his ‘free verse’ methodology as an eighteen-year-old poet is considered suspect by perhaps the greatest scholar of his work, Professor Ralph Maud, who quotes Thomas's advice to a schoolfellow:
Why not, for a change, fire off round after round of ammunition from any old gun you can get hold of. You'll miss hundreds of times, but you’re bound to get a bull’s eye a lot of times, too. You'll find the hit-or-miss, the writing with no plot, technique will help you considerably in loosening your mind and in getting rid of those stifling memories which may, unless you are careful, get in the way of your literary progress. (February 1933.)
As Professor Maud cautions the impulsive, who may be inclined to emulate this method, ‘There is no other time when he seems more to have exhibited this kind of wasteful virtue, to have obeyed his instinct to “write, write, regardless of everything.” ’

Monday 14 October 2013

The Humbert in the Park: More Palimpsestic Wordplay? (Part 2.)

I have no doubt they’ll be many who’ll regard a niggling footnote to that schoolroom classic, The Hunchback in the Park (1941), as the depths of bad taste in Dylan Thomas’s centennial year.

Sorry. Profoundly sorry. But it’s that very centenary that’s prompted my rereading of Kensington Gardens in War-Time (1939-1940) by Humbert Wolfe to be again struck (after more than thirty years) by the significant concordances one can draw between the earlier poem sequence and Thomas’s published poem revised in the year that followed (1941) from a tentative outline first sketched in 1932. 


The English, who as a rule disdain ungovernable emotion stirred when the red mist is behind the eyes, are wary of the hwyl of portentous sonorities. (For instance, ‘the heydays of his eyes’ in Fern Hill is more soggy journalese than fresh coinage, in my view, and has a slackness that diminishes tauter lines.) On balance, we English cleave towards Miltonic cut glass in diction.

That same native wariness I confess must have bothered me three decades ago for I find in my copy of Kensington Gardens in War-Time certain pencilled underlinings that point to eerie correlations in Thomas’s later text with the power to disturb me even today. 

Lest we forget, it should be remarked that both poems were completed in the foreshadowing of Britain’s Darkest Hour, so a mood of national crisis – quickened by martial energy – unsurprisingly pervades (in varying degrees) the texture of both works, with neither shrinking from the light cast by the ‘perverted science’ of Nazism.

Unthinkable traducement? Not so! Because it is my belief that these sorrowing war-time poems by Wolfe (his last, for he died in January 1940) and the Hunchback by Thomas share a common thread and, more than that, an affinity with the victims of Hitler’s genocidal policies ... Juden, Kommunisten, Behinderte ... the Handicapped.

Examination of the post-1940 additions and enhancements to Thomas’s Hunchback draft from his 1932 Notebook (first composed when he was aged eighteen) demonstrate uncanny similarities of figurations, which derive it is my belief from harrowing Press reports of the oppressed Untermenschen when refracted through the lens of imagist poets who had come to regard the urban Park as a sinister microcosm of Europe at war.



Dylan Thomas’s Significant Afterthoughts.

Note : the lines by Thomas quoted below are post-1940 additions (i.e. added after the publication of Kensington Gardens in War-Time).

Page 4 (Kensington Gardens 1940) : ‘The ships that sail/the Round Pond are ..
Line 10 (Hunchback 1941) :  In the fountain basin where I sailed my ship

Page 10 (Kensington Gardens 1940) : … and Sealyhams/tugging their leads/until they nearly/strangle.
Lines 11/12 (Hunchback 1941) : Slept at night in a dog kennel/But nobody chained him up.

Pages 19 and 24 (Kensington Gardens 1940) : Between the oak-tree and the elm … the power/to make the ash/a single flower,
Lines 32/33 (Hunchback 1941) : Made … a woman figure without fault/Straight as a young elm


There are other figurations of a similar concordance too numerous to cite here in this modest conspectus.

Yet, to me, the most ominous affinities between these two works, separated by a year in composition (re. Thomas’s amendments) are to be found on page 14 of Kensington Gardens in War-Time where Wolfe, a Jew by birth, points to an émigré, a woman seated in the park, to make explicit the transformation of gardens from pleasure grounds into a place of torment for the Untermenschen ...
Nobody thought the
worse of her …
although she sat
all day and read
a German paper,
where it said …
how they killed her
children in the dark
corner of a Berlin
Park.
Compare, then, lines 21 and 22 of Hunchback in the Park 1941 …
[Boys] Laughing when he shook his paper
Hunchbacked in mockery
In my opinion, in any scholarly consideration of Dylan Thomas’s beefed up adjustments to a poem drafted a decade earlier, the Zeitgeist swirling above London in 1941 is not fully reckoned with.  Thomas’s introduction of martial elements (‘the groves were blue with sailors’) and images of captivity (‘After the locks and chains’) were never present in his original draft, although Wolfe makes plain, in countless examples of new ways of seeing, that the familiar urban landscape of the park is to be regarded as a potential prison, or martial compound threatened by enemy occupation or evacuation (‘All along the Broad Walk/listen how the soldiers talk’).   

Palimpsestic precursor?

I darkly suspect there is an unconscious absorption of many of Wolfe’s themes into the rejigged Hunchback of 1941. For Thomas, these emanate from a prescient cycle of poems composed by a dying Jew (albeit a naturalised Englishman and convert to the Church of England). In Wolfe’s foresight so early in WW2, sensible to the shock waves of the Holocaust when many were deaf to the warnings, he resembles a fellow assimilated Jew, Brian Howard, a precocious poet, who foresaw, long before most of his contemporaries, the dangers of fascism and was one of the first to denounce Hitler’s Nazism as organised barbarism of the vilest kind.

As Wolfe writes on the final page of his Kensington Gardens in War-Time, his beloved park in the blackout closes its gates on a requiem for lost innocence …

Here, for example, is a Park
clearly intended for the dark.
This foreboding mood with its inevitable rhyme-scheme is irresistible … and one that Thomas was to discover only AFTER Wolfe’s Kensington Gardens in War-Time had been published.   


Footnote 16 October 2014

I forgot to mention that, according to a recent correspondent of mine, Thomas wrote a pastiche of a Humbert Wolfe poem in his comic novel The Death of the King’s Canary (written circa 1940), which certainly is additional evidence that Thomas was intimately acquainted with Wolfe’s work. Further examination of Thomas’s correspondence also reveals that in 1933, in a letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson, he wrote, ‘. . . I have the collected poems of Manley Hopkins, Stephen Crane, Yeats, de la Mare, Osbert Sitwell, Wilfred Owen, W. H. Auden, & T. S. Eliot; volumes of poetry by Aldous Huxley, Sacheverell & Edith Sitwell,  Edna St. Vincent Millay, D. H. Lawrence, Humbert Wolfe . . .