Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia - Paul Willetts

 Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912-64) was a gifted but prodigal writer across most genres who could never keep hold of a pound note and who drank himself to an early death in the postwar pubs of northern Soho or, the catchier version, Fitzrovia.   He was close to Dylan Thomas when they worked together for a documentary film company in the later years of WW2.   He knew and drank with Nina Hamnett (see my review of her Laughing Torso), collaborated on a movie script with my favourite forgotten British sci-fi writer Charles Eric Maine, and is remembered chiefly for his posthumously published Memoirs of the Forties (also reviewed here), which is the key text for any student of British arts in the Twentieth Century. 

This, by Paul Willetts, is the only full-length biography.   The research is impressive - the cover is very good - the editing is not.   Whilst it is clear that JML led a peripatetic life and tried to hide his whereabouts from his legion of creditors, there is far too much made of his ever-changing address and, in the final chapters, when either Willetts or his editors were running out of vigilance, it is way too often accompanied by terms like 'about November' which is a nonsensical phrase, easily improved.   As it is, it hits like a cracked church bell striking midnight - over and over and over in the final chapters.   I would also suggest there are insufficient examples of our hero's writing to justify the claims made for his talent (which I agree with, by the way, having read his Memoirs more than once).

So, could have been better, but nevertheless Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia is worth having and well worth reading.   A genuine window into a vanished world.

The Life of Dylan Thomas - Constantine Fitzgibbon

 The first and probably the most illuminating life of Thomas is this, by Fitzgibbon, who knew him, drank with him, and even put him up from time to time.   It was written in 1965, just over a decade after Dylan's death.   It's worth remembering that Dylan, had he lived, would only just have turned fifty.   Even so, many myths had already sprung up and it's one of Fitzgibbon's aims to debunk as many as he can.

Fitzgibbon was an American anglophile living in London.   He is therefore especially good on Fitrovia, before, during and after the war, and on Dylan's obsessession with America.   Fitzgibbon's position, which presumably stems from discussions with the man himself, is that both Thomas and his wife Caitlin envisaged their future in  America.   Dylan's four tours, which ended up killing him, were laying the groundwork for emigration.

The book is extremely readable.   The problem is the lack of quoted sources.   There are no foot or end notes, no appendix dealing with sources, and those which Fitzgibbon does cite in the text don't seem to exist, at least not in the form he references.

Dylan the Bard - Andrew Sinclair

 Sinclair's thesis is that Dylan Thomas, despite speaking no Welsh, is in the bardic tradition, both a court and public bard.   This works well: Thomas's succeeds best when he personally recites his work, be it the poems or the drama (and Sinclair is especially good on the other Thomas radio play, Return Journey, in which Thomas is the Narrator in search of his younger self).

Sinclair works with the accepted three-part life of Thomas - childhood in Swansea, young adulthood in London, maturity in Laugharne.   As those of us familiar with Sinclair, he is in his element discussing the dissolute life of Fitzrovia, where Thomas lodged with the painters Alfred Janes and Marvyn Levy.  One of Sinclair's other books is War Like a Wasp: The Lost Decade of the Forties (1989).   He also wrote an earlier study of Dylan Thomas, subtitled Poet of His People (1975).  He says this, in 1999, is a rewrite of the earlier work.   To what extent it is a rewrite, to what extent new material, I do not know.   Caitlin Thomas liked his 1975 portrayal of Dylan.   She died in 1994 and Sinclair certainly seeks to assess her role in the story here.

It's a fascinating book, full of insights, and useful to both the general reader and the scholar.   The writing itself is exemplary, every sentence has rhythm and poise.   I loved Sinclair's debut novel, The Breaking of Bumbo [reviewed on this blog, October 2023) and eagerly laid hands on his Gog, which I absolutely hated, so much so that I threw it in the bin.   Perhaps I will stick henceforth to his non-fiction.

The book also contains Sinclair's 1971 account of the making of the film, Under Milk Wood, which he adapted and directed.   No other biographer of Dylan Thomas can offer that.

Dylan Thomas - C B Cox (ed)

 This is a collection of critical essays put together, roughly a decade after Dylan's death, by the senior lecturer in English at one of my old alma maters (even before my time).   It makes for an essential primer for the great swathe of critical literature that sprang up after the fatal collapse in New York in November 1953.   Indeed, several of the contributors comment on that event which, of course, they all remembered.

There are no dud essays here.   Robert M Adams is the least interesting contributor for me, because he compares Dylan with an earlier poet (Richard Crashaw) whom I confess I have never heard of.  He died in 1649, apprently.   The most interesting is the final entrant, the American critic Karl Shapiro, who is irreverent and challenging and, to my mind, comes closest to the mind of the man himself.   I shall definitely look out for the work from which his chapter is extracted, In Defense of Ignorance.   Even the title appeals.

From the first four essays - and Cox's introduction = I was quickly able to establish the tripartite map which overlays all criticism of Thomas's work: the early, semi-surrealist poems, mostly about childhood and sex; the second period of seemingly intentional obscurity; and the late, mature period of clarity, the era of Fern Hill, Do not go gently and, obviously, Under Milk Wood.

Still relevant after more than half a century, I commend Cox's book to all new entrants into the work and myth of the most unique British poet of the 20th century.

One Moonlit Night - Caradog Prichard

 One Moonlit Night is possibly the only Welsh literary work that has come close to Under Milk Wood, both in terms of prestige and literary attainment.   Given that Under Milk Wood was a radio feature, One Moonlit Night stands alone as the Great Welsh Novel of the Twentieth Century.   It was written in Welsh and though Prichard was a Fleet Street journalist who lived in London, he did not do the translation (this one, for Canongate, is by Philip Mitchell).

It came out in 1961, when Prichard was 57.   It is the story of a boyhood in the North Wales during and just after the First World War.   The boy, our narrator, is never named but we are clearly meant to assume it is the author.   This lulls us into a false sense of security for the shattering ending, which clearly does not relate to Prichard.   The writing is modernist, more so, in my opinion, than Thomas's dramatic feature.   For example, where Thomas resorts to the Voice of the Guide Book, Prichard's Voice seems to be that of a prehistoric goddess associated with the Black Lake.

On one level we have the everyday chitchat of ordinary people going about their business.   But that is regularly skewered with madness, suicide and death.   One Moonlit Night is light and very dark at the same time, which gives it a unique charm.   Yet Under Milk Wood is infinitely better known and loved.   Partly this is because Under Milk Wood came first, largely because Thomas was famously dead when it premiered (otherwise he would have exploited producer Douglas Cleverdon's gullibility for years to come).   Mainly, though, it's because Thomas wrote in English and Prichard didn't.   There have been radio productions of his sole novel in English and Welsh (Un Nos Ola Leuad), including one this year, but they have never really caught the public imagination.   It's a shame.   I was fascinated, enthralled, and highly impressed.

Adventures in the Skin Trade - Dylan Thomas

 Thomas intended Adventures in the Skin Trade as the successor to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.  The latter was a fictional rendering of his childhood in Cwmdonkin Drive, Swansea, the former as a version of his first attempt to break free by going to London in 1933.  In real life the key element of his first London life was participation in the Surrealist Exhibition at the Burlington Galleries in 1936.  The fictional version never gets that far.  The discontinued fragment that came out in 1955 - this Aldine paperback - is limited to three chapters covering the day of departure, arrival, and immediate descent into dissolution.

Dylan's fictional alter ego is Sam Bennett, intended to be a passive character whom things happen to.  Thus he stays in the station cafeteria until someone offers to take him home.  The someone is Donald Allingham, a dealer in secondhand furniture, who takes Sam to his three rooms in Praed Street, every room of which is crammed with furniture, thus making rooms within rooms.  There is no water or cooking facility so Allingham takes Sam to Mrs Dacey's informal cafe, where Sam ends up naked in the bath without the company of Mrs Dacey's amorous daughter Polly.  Then it's everybody off to the progressively seedier nightspots - "the Gayspot first, then the Cheerio, then the Neptune."

It is surreal in its way, and colossal fun, but how I wish Thomas had been able to take us to exhibition and finding the spanner to get Dali free of his diving helmet.  Nevertheless, Adventures in the Skin Trade is an essential for anyone interested in the Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive.

Dylan Thomas - Paul Ferris

 Originally published in 1977 and revised several times since, Ferris's biography has become definitive.  He has seen the original documents and was able to talk to many of the key players, most notably Dylan's wife Caitlin, of whom he also wrote a biography.  More than a decade on from the biography of Caitlin, this 2006 edition is likely to be Ferris's final word on the subject.

He quashes many myths whilst accepting that Dylan himself was a master myth-maker.  Dylan, he says, didn't die of eighteen straight whiskeys but of a morphine overdose administered by a fashionable New York quack.  Dylan, he recognises, was a terrible scrounger, but at least he gave attention to some of the rather hopeless people he scrounged off.  Ferris excels in the New York trips, which seem to be his main interest from the off.  He is especially thorough in establishing who was a reliable witness and who wasn't - and he gives his reasons.  The childhood is also very well done, albeit the only potentially reliable witnesses to what went on inside 5 Cymdonkin Drive - Thomas's father and sister - left no testimony, dying before Dylan did.

What I missed, and what Ferris was presumably denied, was any clues into Dylan's relationship with his three children.  They seem to have chosen to say nothing, which is of course their absolute right.

The commentary on the poetry and prose are well considered and the amount quoted is well judged.  Personal letters are quoted rather more than I felt necessary, because they tend to be much the same; however, these are always subjective judgments.

I haven't yet read the 'official' biography of Thomas by Constantine FitzGibbon.  Other than that, I have read most of the key texts and can therefore state with confidence that Ferris is by far the best.

The Blaze of Noon - Rayner Heppenstall

Rayner Heppenstall... Where to start? Well, the only reason I bought this book was because Heppenstall is relevant to two of my radio drama research subjects, Eric Linklater (whom he hated) and Dylan Thomas (whom he claimed to be closer to than he was and who quite probably hated him). I have read some of Heppenstall's lesser works. His Imaginary Conversations are rubbish, his Four Absentees is a bit snooty but essential to the study of Fitzrovia in and after World War II.

I knew The Blaze of Noon had been a bit scandalous when it came out in 1939 because Heppenstall tells us so at least twice in every book. What makes it scandalous is the sex. One would think, twenty years after Lady Chatterley, with Henry Miller in full flow attitudes might have been more advanced in 1939. Not so. There is a good deal of sex and immorality here; the descriptions are accurate, almost clinical; and mutual masturbation features. But what makes it shocking or distasteful is the contempt with which the process is depicted. Neither partner cares two hoots about the other or indeed other partners who may be effected.


In other senses the novel is even more daring. Our narrator - I hesitate to call him 'hero' or even 'protagonist' - is Louis Dunkel and Louis Dunkel is blind. He used to be prominent doctor but sight loss has reduced him to the role of masseur, in which capacity he is to spend the spring and summer in Cornwall with the slightly invalid Mrs Nance and her niece and nephew, Sophie and John Madron. Louis describes how he gathers first impressions. He is disturbed and intrigued because Sophie withholds all the usual clues from him. Louis becomes obsessed with Sophie, John becomes slightly obsessed with Louis. Mrs Nance has plans for Louis. She has another niece, Amity Nance, living not too far away. Amity is blind and deaf and is cared for by a permanent nurse. Amity's possible arrival is both a prospect and a threat for Louis. When she does finally arrive in the closing sequences of the book things get really distasteful.

Heppenstall is remembered by many as a world-class hater. He claimed to have been a socialist when young but made no bones about being the most reactionary of Tories in later years. He worked for the BBC for twenty years in the Forties, Fifties and early Sixties, so Telegraph Toryism would have been expected. Although he was in his late twenties and married when he wrote The Blaze of Noon, the opinions reflected here are juvenile and sometimes downright nasty. He wears his learning like a teenage boy wearing his father's coat. He seems to have learnt an enormous amount of things with neither the personal depth to understand them or the wisdom to evaluate them.


He was a strange, unpleasant man. This is a strange, unpleasant novel. It is well written, beautifully constructed (in that sense you would not think it was his first novel), and I cannot imagine the world as discovered by a blind man being better done. Otherwise these are characters you meet everywhere in fiction of the period albeit they reveal shortcomings you will rarely find elsewhere. Yes, Heppenstall is critical of their behaviour - but Heppenstall was critical of everyone and everything all his life. These are quintessentially Heppenstall-type people.

The Growth of Milk Wood - Douglas Cleverdon

There are several things we all need to know about Under Milk Wood. Let's be clear, I am of the opinion that everybody needs to know Under Milk Wood as a towering slice of mid Twentieth Century verse. That said, there are a couple of factors we should always bear in mind when enjoying it.

First off, it is not a play. It has none of the hallmarks of a play, even experimental plays, which in English-speaking drama it predated. It is, specifically, a dramatic feature for radio, a form invented by the BBC in the 1930s and exported all around the world as the standard audio drama form during and shortly after World War II. American radio drama is in fact drama features. Radio drama in every Commonwealth country is likewise drama features. In every country they took as their model - often, indeed, as the first proper radio drama broadcast - The March of the '45 by D G (Geoffrey) Bridson. Bridson was a features man. He wrote and produced features. The March of the '45 is a feature. Confusingly, he also wrote plays, but that's another story.

Douglas Cleverdon was also a features man. He produced and put together features. He is the man who put together the first script for Under Milk Wood, broadcast in January 1954, two months after the death of its creator Dylan Thomas. Cleverdon also put together other versions for various stage productions. Thomas himself had written other material for Under Milk Wood, which Cleverdon chose not to use but which others have used since, notably the so-called 'Guide Book' section, which featured in the most recent radio revival I know of, directed by Alison Hindell in 2003.

Cleverdon was very much the champion of Under Milk Wood, the standard-bearer, but he was never the final arbiter. Thomas made Dr Daniel Jones his literary executor. Jones wrote the music for the songs but also ruled out some of the bawdier elements that Cleverdon wanted to include and which Thomas himself had included in the readings he gave in America, immediately prior to drinking himself to death. Recordings of the American sessions exist. A version of the BBC broadcast was released by Argos in 1954. A complete recording of that broadcast is available from the BBC itself. Other recordings exist. Dent put out a script which differed from the broadcast, also in 1954. Thomas himself had published extracts before he died.

The point is, Under Milk Wood was never finished. It is my firm conviction that Thomas would never have finished it. It was his drink-ticket (rather than his meal ticket) and even if he had lived to be a well-pickled centenarian he would have continued churning out variants so long as anyone was willing to pay for them. As it is, there are dozens of alternatives in existence - and that is what Cleverdon sets out to describe here.

It is a book for the specialist, granted, but given the status Under Milk Wood enjoys across various aspects of contemporary culture, I believe it is a book every specialist should have in their collection. And most don't - thus we get the ill-informed pontificating about the purity of Thomas's vision which diminishes the sheer generosity of what he actually wrote.

Thomas is the only modern writer for whom, like Shakespeare, we have variants, all of them (unlike Shakespeare) written by Thomas himself and intended to form part of the emerging whole. There is no canonical version - and if anything gets anywhere near a canonical version, I contend it should be the US recordings made after he gave Cleverdon the script upon which the first broadcast was based. Thereafter it is simply a question of personal taste.

Cleverdon also addresses the key question of what differentiates a radio feature from a radio play. It is a question I have to expound on every time I write about classic radio plays and now I can add the producer of the best-known feature to my repertoire.

Nobody outside the BBC (and, indeed, comparatively few inside) can be expected to distinguish between a radio play and a radio feature. A radio play is a dramatic work deriving from the tradition of the theatre, but conceived in terms of radio. A radio feature is, roughly, any constructed programme (that is, other than news bulletins, racing commentaries, and so forth) that derives from the technical apparatus of radio (microphone, control-panel, recording gear, loud-speaker). It can combine any sound elements - words, music, sound effects - in any form or mixture of forms - documentary, actuality, dramatized, poetic, musico-dramatic. It has no rules governing what can or cannot be done. And though it may be in dramatic form, it has no need of a dramatic plot.

In short, Cleverdon maintains that Under Milk Wood began as a radio play called The Village of the Mad but became a feature because Thomas couldn't devise a satisfactory plot.

I should also point out, in closing, that Cleverdon discusses the variants up to 1969, the date of publication. Other variants have arisen since.

Four Absentees - Rayner Heppenstall

Another oddity this, not dissimilar to the memoirs of Julian MacLaren-Ross which I read and reviewed here earlier this month.  Indeed, it was the mention of Heppenstall in the MacLaren-Ross book that made me wonder if Heppenstall had written anything in a similar vein.  The answer is yes, quite a bit, of which this is just one.

Heppenstall was a bit of a poet, an experimental novelist, a writer of at least one book on ballet.  A peripheral figure on the London literary scene of the 1930s but not an absolute soak like MacLaren-Ross and Dylan Thomas.  This is a memoir of four absent friends, and what an ill-assorted bunch they are.  From left to right in the spiffy cover art by Natacha Ledwidge: John Middleton-Murry, much married critic, socialist utopian, best known for having married Katherine Mansfield; then Dylan Thomas himself; then George Orwell; and finally the incestuous sculptor, graphic designer and self-made monk Eric Gill - all of whom were dead by the time Heppenstall wrote this in 1960.

Heppenstall would seem to be the sole link between them - but how well did he really know the much older men, Murry and Gill?  Not very well would seem to be the answer.  Dylan he knew reasonably well, and a highlight of the book for me is Heppenstall's two-page dissertation on the subject of Dylan's death - suicide or accident?  Orwell he knows best of all, having shared accommodation with him until Orwell drove him out one night with his shooting stick.  It's annoying that Heppenstall insists on calling him Eric Blair and always putting inverted commas round 'George Orwell'.  Yes, it's accurate because Blair didn't become Orwell until after he and Heppenstall went their separate ways, but we know him as Orwell and we are only interested because of his Orwell fame.

After the war Heppenstall joined the BBC (radio, naturally) and became a producer.  As such he was able to offer his friends work.  Gill had long since died, but the always impecunious Murry did one of Heppenstall's "Imaginary Conversations" between Keats and Coleridge.  Orwell was offered one between Pilate and Lenin, which would have been interesting, but didn't do it.  He did, however, provide a dramatization of Animal Farm for his former flatmate.

It's odd the sort of thing people used to be able to publish.  We certainly wouldn't get away with something this flimsy nowadays.  Heppenstall is a pedantic writer (the commas are wildly out of control) and there is far too much of Heppenstall in a book that professes to be about the other four.  Still, it throws an interesting light on the literary scene before and immediately after World War II.  There are lots of authoritative studies of Thomas and Orwell that seem to me not to know it.  As it happens, I have Dylan's letters on my desk and there is a mention there of the shooting stick incident which the editor has been unable to place.

Memoirs of the Forties - Julian MacLaren-Ross

Julian MacLaren-Ross was a character, a hand-to-mouth writer hanging round Soho and Fitzrovia between the late 1930s and his death in 1964.  His writing seems, on the basis of this, the first incomplete volume of his projected four-part memoirs, to have been heavily based on his life.  The short stories included here certainly give that impression, as does the helpful introduction by his friend and publisher Alan Ross (no relation).

MacLaren-Ross was born in 1912, of Anglo-Raj stock.  He spent much of his childhood and youth in the more glamorous reaches of France but by his twenties was flogging vacuum cleaners in a seaside town on the South Coast of England.  He was called up in 1939-40 but discharged from the army for reasons unstated in 1943.  His short stories based on his military experiences were his first moderate successes.  Before the war his most successful stories were set in Madras, a city in a country he had never visited.

For the remainder of the war he collaborated briefly with Dylan Thomas on the notorious Home Guard documentary that was never made, and after the war largely subsisted on radio scripts.  These memoirs capture the flavour of Fitzrovia better than any other I have encountered, even those of the much more successful Patrick Hamilton (Hangover Square, for example).  I especially enjoyed his description of BBC Drama Head Val Gielgud as "a man with two beards, one sprouting from each corner of his chin."  I also enjoyed the half-dozen short stories included, my favourite being the one that first attracted the attention of Cyril Connolly, then the editor of Horizon, "A Bit of a Smash in Madras."

MacLaren-Ross lived far too dissolute a social life to build a literary career, thus he will only ever be a footnote in the work of greater artists.  But that shouldn't detract from the fact that he writes like a dream, effortless yet stylish and controlled.  I loved reading this book.

Dylan Thomas in America - John Malcolm Brinnin

The classic account of the poet's last days, written by the American poet who organised his US reading tours and produced the first live performances of Under Milk Wood a year before British audiences heard it.  It adds adds several layers to the standard impression of the roistering Welsh bard.  For a start it is in no sense hagiographic; even though it was published in the US in 1955, barely a year after Thomas succumbed to alcohol poisoning in New York in November 1953, Brinnin offers a study of a man at war with himself, conflicted between art and self-indulgence, who often behaved appallingly but who was also appallingly treated by those closest to him.  What brings the book startling to life is the realisation that Brinnin has fallen in love with Thomas, hence the enmity of Dylan's legendary wife Caitlin, who is not gently depicted but who nevertheless endorses the book with a foreword.  The final, unflinching account of Dylan's last days, comatose in St Vincent's hopsital whilst Caitlin trashes the waiting room and brawls with nuns in the throes of a drunken mental collapse which soon sees her banned from the hospital and voluntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital, is truly eye-watering.

The book's greatest strength is that Brinnin confines himself solely to what he witnessed or uncovered.  There is no mention of anything before February 1950 when, as the newly-appointed Director of the New York Poetry Centre, Brinnin invited his idol to visit the Big Apple.  What particularly interested me was the alternative account of the creation of Under Milk Wood.  Brinnin encounters the work already part-written but still has to pressure Thomas into making it ready to be read publicly and subsequently acted.  At the same time, of course, though Brinnin knows nothing of it, the BBC was having exactly the same problem.  In a sense Brinnin and America win because they get to see Thomas read his own work and perform it with actors.  Brinnin also tells us that Thomas was still making changes and writing new material until his health finally collapsed.  Thus what Brinnin saw in New York in October 1953 was almost certainly different to what the BBC broadcast in January 1954, neither version was a finished work and neither was entirely what the poet had envisaged.

This classic Aldine paperback from 1956 is a companion piece to the February 1954 Aldine edition of Under Milk Wood on which I have based all my scholarly writing about the work.

I do this because we can pretty sure this is text that Douglas Cleverdon put together for the BBC production.  (My research has demonstrated that other published texts, even those published after the broadcast, differ significantly from the performed texts.) Others - including Cleverdon - have since re-edited and generally tinkered, usually making it less impactful in my view.  Surely the only text better than this - or, more precisely, closer to Dylan's last view of what it should be - would be the text performed in New York at the end of October 1953.  I wonder if that exists anywhere?

Odd, isn't it, that the publishers only seemed to have the one photo of Dylan?