Below, a strange, roving, wonderful letter from Dylan Thomas to Kenneth Patchen, touching on everything from the charitable habits of the Welsh to Thomas’ desperate fear of being drafted into the British war effort. “As far as a country at war goes, I’m hermetic,” Thomas explains. “I want, among other things, to go on working, and I know I can work only in peace; I can’t do a Brooke in a trench; mud shells shit and glory will make me swear & vomit, not write.”
November 27, 1939
(12th week of the war to
end war to
save my democramatic Aunty Titty.)
Dear Kenneth Patchen: I’d have written before, long before, I’ve been meaning to write, everyday I sit down, etcetera, but my troubles as one of those who is always with us and as one who tries in a temper always to live up to a standard of comfort and pleasure I have never been used to—in my poorest and most ragged days it’s my only wealth to remember, with self-deception and envy, those rich days past which never were—have spoiled my natural politeness (another imagined quality of the unborn, never-forgotten past) and pinned me down, like a frog with ideas above his suction, on to a tableful of halfmade stories, semi white pages waiting for wheedle—“Dear—, I’m hoping that this may move you (though nothing will, I know, but the last dynamite trumpet) to help me, in my present desperate, with a small (big, big, damn your breath) which I will instantly, as soon as my ship (if it came home with a deck of poundnotes and a golden captain, I’d blow it up to the sky rather than let you put your Hongkong foot or Hottentot apron on the gangway”)—old poems, flies-by-night, hack-to-come.
With neither faith nor hope, and despising the charity I seek, I’m working quickly and mostly badly on a book of stories so that I may work slowly on poems, and, at the same time, whining, with my tongue in their cheeks, to a few old fashioned humbugs for enough money to live better than they do. I’m not angry because the large public does not support me; I give the large public very little, probably nothing, and there is every reason against them supporting me. As a public entertainer who entertains very few, I cannot grumble—or, rather, I either change my entertainment, take up some other occupation or be angrily content (which I am) with my present one. And I don’t want you to imagine me—thank God none of us knows how extremely little the other one ever thinks of him at all, let alone imagines him as this or that—as a whiner against people with money; I whine, among other noises, for their money, which is quite different. The Welsh have money under their skins and that’s all you see of it, their dried and stunted bodies rustle when they squat, their bad teeth chink when they bite on a pinched turnip, they piss a stream of coins which they at once suck down again. (This last cheapness is what I think the boiled string and lobster on my colonel school might say about the Welsh, or about anybody else, at length and with suet pictures. I remember somewhere in Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, a man pissing gold coins at a wall, but I’ve plenty of cracks to grind with Miller.)
They’re mean. This morning I asked a Welsh farmer to lend me half a crown for a lying purpose and my expectations were realized: I got nothing and a long lie back. He said he had no money, he was very poor. He has two large farms, no wife, no good habits to waste anything on, lorries, a motorcar, and thousands of crinklers in God’s hands (in the Bank.) His name, oddly or not oddly, was Henry James. I offered him a good lie for half a crown—not ‘a good lay’ as our American cousins put it, as they express themselves ‘over the pond’, and mind the inverted commas. Mrs. Ratface—and a good Welshman, that heavenly devil, should stump up readily. I could have told him the truth and he’d believed I was lying; we respect each other so much for our capacity for lying that we would never insult each other by imagining we were telling the truth. But the roguery, the wild eye (nearly always ingrowing), the sly and vicious tribalism, the imaginative deceits, the revivalist rhythms, the conscience—wallow, the occasional inverted miserdom (‘having a good spend’), the comic religious hysterical churning together of false thoughts and genuine emotions (the Welsh equivalent of Irish blarney) are very lovable.
You have to put up with them all, and smile, too, smile, if you still want to weep over the Celtic onion. That because Henry James refused me halfacrown to waste carefully. Money again. I’m smoking a halfpenny, writing with twopence on a sixpence, sitting on three and six—the chair was bought at a sale; the Welsh like sales almost as much as funerals; in either case you’re getting something cheap, and in one case, brassbound, you’re getting a lot for nothing, even if you get nothing after all, which is a matter of opinion, and that, in my opinion, is precisely what the hereafter is. In Welsh sales, by the way, I’ve seen farmers buy dirty and warped junk at twice or three times its doubtful value; a Welshman will buy a bargain at any price. When I lived in London a few years ago, in the bedsitting-room with the scribbled card on the door, cultivating a number of voices and obtaining at considerable cost the clap and the itch, first at the bottleparty and last to go, paying for the rent and the kippers on the gasfire with a pound a week from my parents, determined to get there, not knowing where ‘there’ was but having a very good idea, covering with crabs and cracks and wild dirt, with eccentricities I had long possessed but had never, until that moment, been frightened enough to expose and expand, my confusion at the shockingly liberated behaviour of other young men and women two stages further, from the provinces into another conventional life, than myself, enviously scorning the well-poised manner of the intelligent well-to-do, racing against time as though time were another young writer with a suburban home address, but always, in myself, naturally and fortunately thick-skinned and stubborn, I decided never to forget the importance of money and to devote all my spare time to gathering it from other than literary sources, and never to live below the imagined standard I had set myself, and always to live within those luxuries I enjoyably deceive myself into thinking I was born to enjoy.
Although I have never forgotten the importance, the rest of my monetary decisions have come to little. Sometimes, indeed, I think I am living far above the standard I imagine myself to have been born to deserve; but that soon grows into an unworthy thought, and the wind again, blowing from penniless places, is thick with rich cigar smoke. Now I live only three times above my salary, & still badly, above, that is, what I earn through writing—an occasional drop of milk from life & letters To-Day, 10 shillings a poem from the New Curse, love and some stamps from the red monthlies—what I am fobbed off with by (as Charles Morgan would say) friendly conscience-smoothers, what I cajole, extract. I cannot, as Balzac wrote on the bare walls of his attic, write Rosewood Panels on the crumbling walls of this tall, then, nibbled & neglected, mousefull, sea-staring house, nor turn my water into wine, nor tear the invisible cigarbands off my Player’s Weights. Angrily satisfied with the shape of things as they should not be, a man used to riches but born poor, I continue to think of money as it moves about beautifully beyond my reach, money that burns and multiplies and smells of hot food.Interval for thinking of food and drink. Today it is indecently cold & I have no fire in this rotting room. Where are my London plans now? Gone up in smoke that should be going up the chimney. Now, through some dull work, I’m trying to move towards a respectable financial safety which I must immediately make perilous. I must be moving all the time, even if it’s down. But that’s more than enough of this. I’ve got some very thoughtful things to say about money, if I could only think of them.
I had a letter from you, dated Christ knows when, somebody tore off the top of the letter and I am the only one here who touches my papers—failing very very successfully to get enough money to live on (how am I living then? Anyone’s hand to my mouth) is my excuse for never having answered it, and so the embroidered money-talk—in which you said that it might be interesting for us to exchange perhaps fifty letters about work and living and then publish them. Yes, I think it would be interesting: at any rate, I’d like to read them. Let’s go on writing to each other for a bit and see what happens. When I read letters I nearly always whizz through the explanatory parts and the arguments and am really excited to know what the person writing has been doing with himself & with others lately, where he’s been to, who he’s met, what he feels like the moment he’s writing, and, if I don’t know him personally, what sort of person he actually is, what sort of face has he got, who he loves and doesn’t, is his Sex Life a mystery, has he got any money and if so does he want to share it, where he comes from, what sort of parents did he have, what does he do most evenings, does he know anything about the private lives of film stars, even what he had for breakfast so that I can compare. So if I was reading, in a book, this letter I’m just writing. I’d say to the devil with all the twisted sentences and why doesn’t he talk about the things that happened. Or an emotional gush is very nice too. It’s like wanting paragraphs and conversations and a lot of moving about in stories, rather than studied settings, atmosphere, and morals expressed without people. I don’t know what a reader of a letter like this could get out of it.
But let’s see what happens, write as we like, about anything or anybody, and if after some time we get letters together and find someone to sell them to the public—then let’s hope he sells them well and we can buy another yacht. In that letter of yours you said too that if you get a renewal of your Guggenheim fellowship you’ll be able to send me something for bread and potatoes, beer and cigarettes, bus-rides & cinemas, all the essentials, and thank you, thank you, and if I catch a rich widow or write a book in a trance and the Book Societies recommend it then I’ll send you something that matters—I’ve never felt more worldly than today; I want to go on with a poem some time, but it will be all stocks and shares, even if it looks just zoological about bears & bulls; Anna Wickham, a large, frenzied poetess I used to know sold her little poems, & some of them were fine, as she wrote them, for a shilling each to a young relic called John Gawsworth, and once she rebelled and wrote a long, indignant poem about love entitled “Advance to 1/3d.”—and you send me some cigarettes in a letter and I’ll send you some cockles.
But what I need right now is a lump of money to pay my fare and the fares of my family to Corfu where we want to live for a while with the Durrells and, if he remains there, Miller. I’ve got to get out of England before I’m called upon to join the army and see the next world or—and that’s much more likely—before I object to fighting & having to fight and am sent either to jail or to a working camp (concentration camp, but run on British lines) with a lot of other jesusing, vegetarian, socialist, mother-stuck nancies and fanatics. I want to get out of the war: to America best of all but nobody, possibly quite rightly, will help me to.
A man I wrote to recently about objections to fighting answered that, though he was, by nature & conviction, a coward and a pacifist, as I am, he would probably join up & fight—bayonetting included—because he believed that a writer should undergo contemporary experience to the uttermost. This seemed to me hysterical and pernicious misreasoning. To undergo contemporary experience to the uttermost, he would have to be bayonetted, he would have to starve to death, and as a dead man what use could he possibly be, either as a man or writer. He’s a young man, and what’s the good of dying for your writing before you’ve begun? And to call me an escapist is no insult. As far as a country at war goes, I’m hermetic. I want, among other things, to go on working, and I know I can work only in peace; I can’t do a Brooke in a trench; mud shells shit and glory will make me swear & vomit, not write. So I want to be where there still is peace, peace at least from the propagating of hate, the enforcements of military discipline, the extraordinarily rapid growth of dictatorship all around me, and the immediate prospect of a noble death ha ha or ignoble detention ho ho as an antisocial shirker and—worse still—unrepentant individualist. At a recent London tribunal for conscientious objectors, the presiding Judge refused to register one man as an objector because he refused to fight “only on moral & ethical grounds.” The only two men they totally exempted were: one “mentally retarded”, and one who is already working in an aeroplane factory. Tribunals, in South Wales anyway, still ask: “What would you do if you saw a German…rape…kill…mother…sister?” If you come across, or can think of, any would-be patron who’d like to aid a poet’s flight from war to work, mention (without success) my name. Wouldn’t American Societies like me to come over, at their expense, and read poems to them in my passionate voice? I can’t think why they should.
Now I know what you look like. I don’t mean I know what you resemble: you look like a young man with a big nose and an open resemble: you look like a young man with a big nose and an open shirt, suspicious, broad, and rather angry, to me. I’m thanking you for the photograph. The only likenesses of me that I can find are tucked away, scowling, in groups. So, until someone appears with a camera, I’ll just send on a photograph that was printed in some newspaper; I’ve lost the original, though not of myself: I wake up with that, with delight and repugnance, every morning or afternoon.
I’d like you to have this silly letter before Christmas; though again I don’t know why. So I’ll send it off now—without a word about your grand, exciting book which I liked more than any new book of poems for years. I want to write a lot to you about it, but it’ll keep. Thank you for the copy. More, lots more, again.
Yours,
Dylan Thomas.
+
Four months later, Dylan Thomas wrote to James Laughlin:
“…Did Patchen ever get the long over-literary letter I sent him? I’d like to hear from him again. Is he still with you? I shall be conscripted in about a month now, and am worried. I won’t fight, and I don’t want to object. Wish I was well out of it.”