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Red Dylan
The social vision of Dylan Thomas
With the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Dylan Thomas
now being remembered in events and publications, his commitment to socialism
should be recognised, argues VICTOR PAANANEN.
This is a shorter version of an article by Victor Paananen
which appears in Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, Volume
8/2003 [£12.95/ISBN 0-70831-829-0], edited by Tony Brown, published by New Welsh
Review Ltd (tel: 01970 626230) and distributed by University of Wales Press (tel:
029-2049-6899). We would like to thank Tony Brown for permission to extract the
article and for providing us with the rare Vancouver photograph of Dylan Thomas.
The current issue of WWE has several articles on Dylan Thomas, including Victor
Golightly’s, ‘Writing with dreams and blood’: Dylan Thomas, Marxism and 1930s
Swansea.
"I take my stand with any revolutionary body that asserts
it to be the right of all men to share, equally and impartially, every
production of man… from the sources of production at man’s disposal". Dylan
Thomas, New Verse (1934).
THROUGHOUT THIS YEAR there will be events and publications
to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death, at the early age of 39, of Dylan
Thomas, Welsh poet, short-story writer, dramatist, and film writer. Interest in
Thomas remains high, and many of his poems (such as ‘Do Not Go Gentle’ and ‘Fern
Hill’) continue to have a wide popular appeal that few other 20th
century poems retain. Discussion of Dylan Thomas in this anniversary year must
acknowledge not only that Thomas was a poet of astonishing technical gifts but a
man fully conscious of social conditions, a thinker with a grounding in Marxism,
and a self-proclaimed revolutionary socialist.
Writing about Dylan Thomas got off to a bad start with a
book by Henry Treece (Dylan Thomas: ‘Dog Among the Fairies’) that asserted that
Thomas had outgrown the Marxism of his youth. Treece’s book is a confused
polemic against the practice of ‘left-wing poets and critics’, and when Thomas
was given chapters to read in manuscript, he wrote to Treece to say, "surely it
is evasive to say my poetry has no social awareness – no evidence of contact
with society", adding "actually, ‘seeking kinship’ with everything… is exactly
what I do do" (Thomas, Collected Letters, pp310-11). Thomas made his opinion of
Treece’s book even more clear when a friend asked him to inscribe a copy for
him, and Thomas wrote in it ‘to hell with this stinking book’.
With Treece as a forerunner, literary critics like ML
Rosenthal assigned Thomas a role as the poet of ‘introspective personalism’. It
was readily admitted by the critics that most of Thomas’s ideas and language
were already there in his adolescent notebooks, but they assumed that he had
jettisoned his Marxism and retained the poetic materials of this period. More
recently, however, the letters collected by Paul Ferris in 1985, the memoirs of
friends and acquaintances that have been published with some frequency, and
especially the film scripts unearthed and published by John Ackerman in 1995,
have provided powerful evidence for a consistent social – in fact, socialist –
vision in Thomas’s work and life.
A socialist to the end
JOHN MALCOLM BRINNIN, Thomas’s host and chronicler of his
visits to the USA, found him "actually more censorious of the status quo than
any of the other British poets". The less than sympathetic Brinnin says that
Thomas "expressed himself strongly on political matters and tended
indiscriminately to support the far left".
From these American visits, Professor William York Tindall
of Columbia University, offered an important report that has been ignored by
Thomas’s biographers. "Thomas told me (in 1952) that he was a Communist. My
disbelief was shaken, however, at a party a few days later. Here Thomas suddenly
arose, kicked the cat which turned and bit me and, to the embarrassment of our
hostess, called a distinguished and once radical American novelist, who was also
a guest, both ‘renegade’ and ‘prick’."
One must regret the unfortunate outcome that Thomas’s
explosion had for the cat, but the incident does point to convictions
passionately held by Thomas. No doubt Thomas had, as so often, been drinking,
but in vino veritas [there is truth in the wine].
The reports from Brinnin, Tindall and others all express
surprise that, at what proved to be the end of his life, Thomas had political
interests and convictions. His description of himself as a communist is greeted
with ‘disbelief’. Nevertheless Thomas’s support for a revolutionary party had
been publicly announced nearly twenty years before. Thomas’s statement in New
Verse in 1934 – "I take my stand with any revolutionary body that asserts it to
be the right of all men to share, equally and impartially, every production of
man… from the sources of production at man’s disposal" – was written during his
close association with AE (‘Bert’) Trick, a man twenty-five years older than
Thomas, and his political mentor. In letters from the time of his association
with this socialist grocer – identified as ‘a Communist’ by Thomas’s wife
Caitlin and others, but now known to be a revolutionary socialist who remained
in the Labour Party – Thomas’s politics can be seen taking shape.
Twenty-five percent of the population of Thomas’s native
Swansea were chronically out of work and the letters reflect Thomas’s awareness
of the resulting conditions. In November 1933, writing to Pamela Hansford
Johnson, Thomas, just 19, speaks of "an outgrown and decaying system" in which
"light is being turned into darkness by the capitalists and industrialists...
There is only one thing you and I, who are of this generation, must look forward
to, must work for and pray for", writes Thomas. "And, because, as we fondly
hope, we are poets and voicers not only of our personal selves but of our social
selves, we must pray for it all the more vehemently. It is the Revolution.
Later, in another letter, I will give you a more reasoned outline of Revolution,
the hard facts of communism... and hope that you, too, may don your scarlet
tie... The precious seeds of revolution must not be wasted". (Letters, pp55-56)
The letter with the ‘more reasoned outline of Revolution’
was apparently not written, but Thomas does write to Trevor Hughes in January
1934 that "society to adjust itself has to break itself; society... has grown up
rotten with its capitalist child, and only revolutionary socialism can clean it
up". "Capitalism is a system made for a time of scarcity", observes Thomas, who
has reached the socialist insight that capitalism, because it seeks only profit
for the few, is not an efficient mechanism for satisfying the needs of the many.
With modern technology, it would, under socialism, be possible to make "the
truth of today the truth of fertility" (Letters, p92).
In a letter to Glyn Jones, Thomas labels himself a
‘socialist’ but on 2 May 1934 he tells Hansford Johnson, "I could go to Russia
with a Welsh Communist organisation" (Letters, p127). On 3 July 1934, when Harry
Pollitt, general secretary of the Communist Party (CP), and Tom Mann, another
well-known British Communist, were on trial for ‘seditious speeches in the South
Wales coalfield’ Swansea seemed "the centre of all revolutionary activities"
(Letters, p146). Thomas’s characterization of the moment is understandable:
thousands marched to the Swansea Assizes at which Pollitt and Mann were being
tried. "I have just left the Socialist Party [not the Socialist Party that
produces Socialism Today in 2003!]", Thomas tells Hansford Johnson, "and offered
my services to the Communists" (Letters, p146).
Later in July 1934, Thomas wrote to Hansford Johnson, "If it
can be forced home on the consciousness of the people that the present economic
system is ethically bad, the seed has been planted that may in time grow into a
fine revolutionary flower". He saw a society "composed, at top and bottom, of
financial careerists and a proletarian army of dispossessed. Out of the negation
of the negation", he said, "must rise the new synthesis". He expressed
impatience with parliamentary processes for the achievement of social ownership:
"Alternatively, there is the confiscation of property by force... If
constitutional government cannot, in the space of a year after the next general
election, fulfil their policies... the army and the police force must be
subdued, and property taken by force" (Letters, pp158-59). At a meeting of a
Swansea literary society in October of that year, Thomas was "introduced... as a
Young Revolutionary" and answered questions about "the Communist Erewhon"
[anagram of ‘nowhere’, meaning ‘utopia’] (Letters, p171-72).
Whether Thomas was actually a member of the CP is, in fact,
impossible to resolve with any sources now available. His frequent labelling of
himself as a C/communist in reported conversations in fact left it to the
transcriber to supply either a capital C or a small one. There were and are
communists, small c, who belong to other organizations. Bert Trick, whom Thomas
called a ‘communist grocer’, small c, was – as his son Kerith Trick said at the
Dylan Thomas Festival in Swansea in 2000 – "always a member of the Labour Party,
albeit on the extreme left". Until the era of Tony Blair, the Labour Party
included socialists, many of them Trotskyists, but now of course Clause Four
advocating public ownership has been dropped, and most socialists not expelled
from the Labour Party have left.
All the evidence points to Thomas’s holding revolutionary
convictions both before he moved from Wales to London in 1934 and throughout his
life. In 1944, for instance, Thomas wanted the Communist Party cultural journal
Our Time to publish ‘Ceremony after a Fire Raid’, ‘pressing’ the poem "upon
[Arnold] Rattenbury because, he said, he wanted to advertise that he remained a
socialist" (Hobday, p233). Thomas contributed not only to Our Time but to its
successor Communist Party periodicals Arena and Circus. On his 1952 visit to
America, he also agreed to do a poetry reading for the Socialist Party of the
USA without expecting his usual fee. And, as we have seen, Thomas called himself
a communist and relished opportunities for political discussion in the final
days in New York city.
Not surprisingly though, Thomas, who was ill-at-ease with
the university-educated and with academics, disliked the sort of communist
intellectual that was a characteristic product of the 1930s. As he said, he
disliked them precisely "as revolutionaries and as communists, for, born in
fairly wealthy middle-class homes, educated at expensive prep schools, public
schools, and universities, they have no idea at all of what they priggishly call
‘the class struggle’ and no contact at all with either any of the real motives
or the real protagonists of that class struggle" (Letters, p185). These were the
kind of people that Bert Trick had taught him to call ‘Parlour Pinks’. Thomas,
in his own "semi-proletarian, bourgeois, provincial upbringing" had seen in
Depression era-Wales the material basis for the class struggle that a Marxist
understands to be the motive force of history. In opposition to theoretical
Marxists, who would as poets try to versify theory, Thomas appealed to concrete
experience and to a perspective that embraces what Karl Marx would call the
totality of human life-activity. "The individual in the mass and the mass in the
individual", Thomas said, "can be made poetically important only when the status
and the position of both mass and individual are considered by that part of the
consciousness which is outside both" (Letters, p185).
In this often misunderstood rejection by Thomas of the
literary Marxists of the 1930s, one can in fact recognize the stance that he
would take in his own poetry, rejecting propagandizing for the search for that
authentic human being-in-the world that awaits humanity when alienation and
indeed class struggle ceases. Of course, as the language in the letters shows,
Dylan Thomas had some knowledge of Marx, gained, probably, under Trick’s
tutelage. And, as his prose writings and film scripts reveal, he understood
poverty and class consciousness and could describe them as experienced in Wales
and the world.
Dylan Thomas as social writer
BECAUSE THERE IS not room here for a close analysis of
Thomas’s socially conscious writing, a few examples must suffice. ‘The Peaches’,
one of Thomas’s finest and most often reprinted stories, is, for instance, a
story about class consciousness. Annie, based on Thomas’s beloved aunt, Ann
Jones, ‘brown-skinned, toothless, hunchbacked,’ forgetfully wearing her usual
tennis shoes, despite having changed into her best dress, tries to please her
wealthy relative, Mrs Williams, by serving a can of peaches she has saved for a
long time. Mrs Williams, whose physical uneasiness in a poor household has been
evident throughout, will not eat in Mrs Jones’s smelly parlour: ‘I can’t bear
peaches’. This refusal leads to a final break between these class-divided
relatives, with Mr Jones in his rage demanding, "Who does she think she is?
Aren’t peaches good enough for her? To hell with her bloody motor car and her
bloody son! Making us small". Because of the refusal of the peaches, Mrs
Williams’s son, Jack, and the young Dylan are, at the end of the story, on
opposite sides of the barrier of class: "The chauffeur came back. The car drove
off, scattering the hens. I ran out of the stable to wave to Jack. He sat still
and stiff by his mother’s side". There can be few demonstrations in literature
of how class consciousness is created more sensitive or more accurate than ‘The
Peaches’.
The film-scripts reveal a socialist understanding of the
cost to humanity of a failed economic system. Wales – Green Mountain, Black
Mountain was too political for the British Council to show overseas. One
memorable passage answers the early critics who said that Thomas ignored the
social reality of Depression-era Wales:
Remember the
procession of the old-young men
From dole queue to
corner and back again,
From the pinched,
packed streets to the peak of slag
In the bite of the
winters with shovel and bag,
With a drooping
fag and a turned up collar,
Stamping for the
cold at the ill lit corner
Dragging through
the squalor with their hearts like lead
Staring at the
hunger and the shut pit-head
Nothing in their
pockets, nothing home to eat,
Lagging from the
slag heap to the pinched, packed street.
Remember the
procession of the old-young men.
It shall never
happen again.
The ‘old-young men’ have been denied the opportunity for
free creative labour that humans require. Such lives are over before they have
begun: a point made again in the image of "the hunger born pit boy" that Thomas
uses to invoke Wales in Our Country, another of his documentary films.
Socialists demand a society "in which the free development of each is the
condition for the free development of all" (Marx), and Thomas, with his concern
for unlived lives, makes such a demand. In A City Re-born, which focuses on
Coventry in England, Thomas’s commentary asserts that "After the war there can
be no thinking of returning to the good old days, the days of cramped housing in
crippling streets". In the same film, the comment about war-time production is
that it "makes you think what a hell of a lot they can produce if it’s for use
and not for sale...". No wonder that, as John Ackerman writes, "there were
objections to some sections of the film" which had the appearance "of political
propaganda".
The Introduction to John Ackerman’s 1995 edition of Thomas’s
film scripts announces a changed view of Thomas’s political commitment from the
opinions that had been usual since Treece. Ackerman writes, "Instinctively on
the left, [Dylan Thomas] was one of the few poets of the 1930s who remained
steadfast in his political allegiance throughout his life". The British
documentary film movement was from the days of John Grierson onwards leftwing in
its orientation and, as Ackerman says, "Dylan Thomas was comfortably at home
with the political ethos of those working on the documentary propaganda films".
Quoting Thomas’s statement that "writers should keep their opinions for their
prose", Ackerman says that Thomas’s "work on these documentary films encouraged
him to articulate political and social views".
The Marxist poet: beyond propaganda
THOMAS’S SOCIAL VISION is one that longs for an outcome in
which alienated existence ends and humanity assumes its place in natural
process. But Thomas would not write ‘propaganda’ poetry, or rather he would not
‘publish’ such poetry except as it would be heard as commentary in the
film-scripts. A study of his notebooks supports Ralph Maud’s recognition that
"Thomas could write about ‘the century’, ‘the state’, ‘civilization’, and ‘man’s
man-made spare time’ (ie unemployment) with the rest of the thirties poets". The
differences between the notebooks and the collected poems reveal a conscious
decision, however, not to include direct social commentary in his published
work. Thomas, with his revolutionary outlook, saw through bourgeois social
arrangements – of which he offered a critique in his letters, his published
prose, and the film-scripts – to the more fundamental and enduring processes of
nature.
Thomas chose, in his poetry, not to write propaganda within
bourgeois society, but to write for the timeless realm that comes with the
removal of classes. This approach appears in one of Thomas’s earliest poems:
And death shall
have no dominion.
Dead men naked
they shall be one
With the man in
the wind and the west moon;
When their bones
are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have
stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad
they shall be sane,
Though they sink
through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be
lost love shall not;
And death shall
have no dominion.
Here Thomas speaks out of the freedom that is the
consciousness of necessity. He is not tied to a self-absorbed ego, but he loses
self in common humanity and in process. When Thomas writes, ‘Though lovers be
lost love shall not;/ And death shall have no dominion’, he recognizes that the
individual passes but that what his fellow poet and critic Christopher Caudwell
calls "desires as ancient and punctual as the stars" endure.
Perhaps Dylan Thomas should have written propaganda poetry
as did his less radical contemporaries; but what he did write gives him a
stronger claim to readers in the more fully human world of the socialist future
in which social conflict and inequality will no longer inhibit human development
and self-knowledge.
Works cited
Baldanza, Frank. Iris Murdoch. New York: Twayne, 1974.
Brinnin, John Malcolm. Dylan Thomas in America. Boston:
Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1955.
Caudwell, Christopher. Illusion and Reality[1937]. New York:
International Publishers, 1973.
Cox, Idris. The Fight for Socialism in Wales. Cardiff: Welsh
Committee of the Communist Party, 1948.
Croft, Andy. ‘Authors Take Sides: Writers and the Communist
Party 1929-56’. Opening the Books: Essays on the Social and Cultural History of
British Communism, ed. Geoff Andrews, Nina Fishman, and Kevin Morgan. London:
Pluto Press, 1995.
Hawkins, Desmond. When I Was: A Memoir of the Years between
the Wars. London: Macmillan, 1989.
Hobday, Charles. Edgell Rickward: A Poet at War. Manchester:
Carcanet, 1989.
Lindsay, Jack. Meetings with Poets. London: Frederick
Muller, 1968.
Marx, Karl, Manifesto of the Communist Party (with Friedrich
Engels).
Maud, Ralph, ed. Poet in the Making: The Notebooks of Dylan
Thomas. London: Dent, 1968.
Rosenthal, ML. The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction.
New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1960.
Thomas, Caitlin, with George Tremlett. Caitlin: Life with
Dylan Thomas. New York: Holt, 1987.
Thomas, Dylan. The Collected Poems, ed. Walford Davies and
Ralph Maud. London: Dent, 1988
- The Collected Stories. New York: New Directions, 1984.
- The Collected Letters, edited by Paul Ferris. London:
Dent, 1985.
- The Film-scripts, ed. John Ackerman. London: Dent, 1995.
Tindall, William York. A Reader’s Guide to Dylan Thomas.
London: Thames and Hudson, 1962.
Treece, Henry. Dylan Thomas: ‘Dog Among the Fairies’.
London: Lindsay Drummond, 1949. (Second edition: London: Benn, 1956.)
Trick, Bert, ‘The Young Dylan Thomas’. Texas Quarterly 9
(1966).
Trick, Kerith. ‘Bert Trick – The Original Marx Brother’. New
Welsh Review 54 (Autumn 2001). |