2 May (1934): Dylan Thomas to Pamela Hansford Johnson

Dylan Thomas writes to the English writer Pamela Hansford Johnson, who eventually became his lover. In the letter below, Thomas has decided to spend the day in bed. He tells Johnson about his dreams, theorizes about the process of imagination, and pictures a happy life with Johnson, though he also admits he sadistically delights in a pessimistic view of their future.

To Pamela Hansford Johnson

May 2, 1934

Very Early

I have decided not to get up today, to lie serene in my bed and write of the things that go round me, the shapes of shadows on my mountainous knees, the curving of my immaculate breast and the life in my ever-scribbling fingers. I have put on nice new pajamas, so this is going to be a pleasant day, and perhaps I shall not think of worms at all but only of the sun that I’m sure is shining in the curious world outside, and of other equally lazy people who, too, from the white islands of their beds are writing to ones they love on the commercial sea. In peril on the commercial sea. What is this death, this birth and apparent pain, this glib love, this rush to the head of so many extraneous creatures of the air that crowd my words and never let me stop a sentence at a nice, rhythmic stop? Don’t tell me.

Which I think is about as nice an opening to a letter as any as I can think of. And having told you that I intend to spend the whole day in bed, I now contradict my own slothful intention and pull the sheets back. I shall go out immediately and commune with the sun—yes, I have established the fact: the sun is shining most strongly—or, on second thoughts, retire into a blowsy world of papers and pencils and write weak odes to a literary parhelion.

Now it’s very obvious that I shouldn’t begin to write so early. Half in, half out of sleep, I can’t possibly write anything but a lot of high-falutin nonsense. Most words are Boojums at eight o’clock. And I can never say, ‘Hark, hark the Snark’ until at least after breakfast.

Well, why am I writing now? You have already risen and are staring, not very intelligently, at the stories of sudden death in the Express. Or perhaps it may be later than I think, and you are buying cigarettes at the shop where the girl who thinks me jolly would be very much surprised if, tousled and red-eyed, livered and lachrymose, I was to walk in now. Or perhaps you are sitting in the bus, passing Chelsea or Kronsky, and wondering what the hell rhymes with piano. And here I lie, in a lukewarm bath of half-slumber, with the unpolished taps of words turned full on. Yes, why? I wanted to tell you the most remarkable dream I dreamed last night, in which I was climbing ladders all the time and waving to Pamela-faced horses on the top of asylum towers. But when I started to put the dream in order, it sounded Double Dutch, or, at least, Double Hatch, to me.

After Breakfast

It is still too early to be intelligent. Sometimes I think it always is, and that about fourteen o’clock I might really get up and say something brilliant. But anyway you wouldn’t like me if I did, and the hankering after cleverness is the hobby (wrong word introduced for the sake of the alliteration) that, theoretically, I most abhor. I should like to indulge in a rapid rifle rattle of Oscar wit—not necessarily concerning Oscardom (Pouff is the sweetest thing)—and say new clever things about sex and moths and hipbaths and all other luxuries in this breadandbutter world.

The mention of Oscar reminds me of Oscar Browning, that divinely blueblooded snob of the Oxford nineties. The last incident about him I read yesterday—I wish I could say I’d read it Gomorrah—in a book called ‘Swan’s Milk’ by Louis Marlow. I’ll repeat the very simple story, but first explain that Oscar was a little, very old, bald don, of the sort who always stops—in hopes—to read the writing on public lavatory walls. Oscar and another man were sitting on a mountain side, talking. ‘What is the difference between a bob and a shingle?’ the old don enquired. ‘There’s not much difference, only a shingled head looks like a boy’s, behind.’ ‘A boy’s behind,’ roared Oscar, ‘A boy’s behind. How can I sit here and listen to your obscure observation. A boy’s behind. I’ve never wanted to see a boy’s behind. Any other simile. But a boy’s….’ And in sheer joy he kicked a little dog who happened to be near them right over.

That’s all. And that’s enough for an hour. I want to read the crime page in the Telegraph. And I have, too, a violent desire to draw pin-men.

Noon

Or, at least, somewhere near noon. It’s the word that attracted me. Have I ever told you of the theory of how all writers either work towards or away from words? Even if I have, I’ll tell it to you again because it’s true. Any poet or novelist you like to think of—he either works out of words or in the direction of them. The realistic novelist—Bennett, for instance—sees things, hears things, imagines things, (& all things of the material world or the materially cerebral world), & then goes toward words as the most suitable medium through which to express these experiences. A romanticist like Shelley, on the other hand, is his medium first, & expresses out of his medium what he sees, hears, thinks, & imagines.

A nice, true chunk of dogmatism, superbly inapt on such a May morning.

I have noticed in my last few letters—you are guiltless, as usual—a tendency to write a lot of immaterial matter, and then lump in all the actual replies at the end. So that half of your pages go uncommented, though never, my darling, unread. Let me be a model letter-writer for once, & reply to your letter page by page in strict order.

Our Future

I believe with all my heart that we’ll live together one day as happily as two lobsters in a saucepan, two bugs on a muscle, one smile, though never to vanish, on the Cheshire face. But I will never exhaust my flow of pessimism, for, sadistically, it gives me a delight, or a pain and a delight mixed in one, to imagine the most dreadful things happening to us, to imagine a long future of bewilderment and disillusionment ending in Tax Collectors (I never want to hear their bloody names again) matchselling, and sterile periods of the production of cracker-rhymes that we, in our hopeless megalomania, will imagine as the disregarded fruits of genius. That one day you will vomit at the sight of my face, and I at the tones of your voice. That I go nuts and you go gaga. So let me occasionally chime in with a deep chord of misery, & throw myself over an abyss of hopeless and quite unnatural speculations as to the future of two small and harmless persons who, in accordance with everything god has said or has been said to say since the beginning of the world, love and want each other.