Dylan Thomas and John Arlott

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This may seem a bit OT some but I'm hoping that at least a few of you enjoy what you read, particularly fans of both these great men. John Arlott, an outstanding cricket commentator rated amonst the best ever and Dylan Thomas, tortured Welsh poet make an interesting pairing as great friends but I found this article fascinating.

I urge you all to check out the poetry of Thomas if you get a chance. You won't regret it, by my reckoning.

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/features/story.jsp?story=458858

My dear John... Yours ever, Dylan

They were an odd couple: Dylan Thomas, profligate poet, and John Arlott, pensive cricket commentator. Yet their correspondence reveals a friendship of true minds. David Rayvern Allen presents a selection - including an unpublished poem

31 October 2003


Villa del Beccaro, Mosciano,

Scandicci, Florence

11 June 1947

My dear John,

Thank you for writing. It was very good to hear from you. Though I hear your voice every day from Trent Bridge, at the moment. You're not only the best cricket commentator - far and away that; but the best sports commentator I've heard, ever; exact, enthusiastic, prejudiced, amazingly visual, authoritative, and friendly. A great pleasure to listen to you: I do look forward to it. Here, on the hills above Florence, I lead the quietest life I ever remember leading: it is sizzling hot, the hill to the nearest village is a spinebreaker, I am far too limp and lazy to go often to Florence, and I can work only in the early mornings and evenings: never my best time: I'm used to working from after lunch until pub-time, which in the country used to be about seven. Here I drink in the garden, alone or with Caitlin: we have no social life. I am a sun vegetable: I live on red wine, cheese, asparagus, artichokes, strawberries, etc. The etc. is usually more red wine. We have our own vineyard. The villa is enormous. So, probably, am I, after two months. I'm coming back in August: if the lire last till then. I was given some travelling money by the Authors' Society, otherwise I'd have been back long ago. And I'll be broke when I return, so any bits of booming - I heard Rape of Lucrece today; is Shakespeare over? and what is the next series? - narrating, etc., will be very welcome. Also, I'd love to write any programme you think I could do: and, scrupulously, on time.

Yes, of course I'd love some dollars, but I have so far, no poem. It would be useless giving you a chunk of the long one I'm twisting and gnarling: it's got to be read as a whole. If I do manage to write any short ones in between, I'll send them to you straightaway...

Yours, Dylan

One icon communicating with another. An unlikely alliance, some might think. Yet Dylan Thomas and John Arlott were close friends. "He was the only person other than family who would kiss me full on the lips when we met," John said. Quickly, it should be added that this was an overt demonstration of genuine affection rather than a revelation of homoerotic tendencies or a manifestation of a Sicilian code.

How was it that arguably the greatest sports commentator that ever lived and - another arguably - one of the 20th century's most potent poetic voices got together? The answer lies in a common background and shared experience.

As a young poetry producer at the BBC and a published poet himself, John Arlott directed around two-thirds of Dylan Thomas's broadcasts from 1945 to 1950 on literary programmes of every type. Having inherited his predecessor George Orwell's scruffy desk, rubbers and blunt pencils at the Overseas Service of the corporation, Arlott employed the literati of the day for his weekly production, Book of Verse. At the same time, he was establishing a separate career in the commentary box as "the voice of cricket". Which is where the letter from Florence came in.

Dylan had arrived at Broadcasting House by way of radio appearances for the Welsh Region, which began in 1937. Film scripts and engagements as a radio actor led to verse speaking. He brought to life the oral tradition in lines that moved perpetually on, a progression in shaped and measured form. The essence of his utterance lay in the hwl - the romantic climax of the chapel preacher. Dylan also brought more down-to-earth bardic traditions to London, and not all of them merited a place on his CV. But his life of relaxed debauchery has been documented enough.

As country lads in the smoke, Arlott and Thomas drank together, argued together, aspired and conspired together. With Celtic wives and family back in distant Hampshire and Carmarthenshire, there were times when they even shared a house together. To help bridge his move from Southampton to London, Arlott took digs with the art critic of The Spectator and master of all trades, Michael Ayrton. Ayrton resided fifty yards from the entrance to Broadcasting House in All Souls' Place. No more appropriately named venue could have been sought for the mastications of London's artistic lions. On any one evening, around the supper table in the studio flat with an uninterrupted view of the stars through its sloping glass-topped roof, could be found Ayrton himself with his pointed beard wagging every time he spoke; the composer and conductor Constant Lambert, looking not unlike Randolph Churchill in appearance, sipping absinthe and with the smoke from his large cigar failing to observe his limericks; the composer and critic Cecil Gray, quick to assert unconventional views; the ballet master Frederick Ashton; the thespians Nigel Balchin and Robert Donat; John the new boy in situ; and the cheerfully intemperate Dylan on a stopover in town enjoying a free meal and much booze. And, on rare occasions, the prima ballerina Margot Fonteyn, with whom Lambert was conducting an intense affair, would come in late for a coffee, having just left the theatre after a performance.

Yet in the studio next day, having dispensed with his briefcase and homburg, "the roaring boyo from Wales" was right up to the mark. "He was a furious drinker. He mixed drinks. You felt he was drinking in order to get drunk," observed Arlott, "but I do want to stress that in all the time I worked with him he never let me down in any way at all... he was never late, he was never drunk and he never did a bad job."

Most other producers with whom Thomas worked had a love/hate relationship with the poet. The demands of keeping the dependent, tormented genius on an even keel were scalpelled into their memories. But probably they, too, would acknowledge that Dylan was never actually drunk at the microphone, except perhaps on one occasion when, deputising at very short notice, he treated listeners to an "Ode on Shaint Sheshilia's Day".

"I always thought that in his time he was the finest of all poetry readers," continued Arlott, whose admiration was unstinting. "He wasn't as flexible as some, he really only had the one style, but that style stung the words out almost as if they were made of cut glass, he was so sharp and so clear... There he was, with his sweaty ringlets hanging over his forehead and a cigarette hanging from his lower lip that had almost gone out and went up and down as he read. It was quite fascinating. Sometimes you could barely hear what he was saying for the fascination of seeing whether the cigarette would fall."

The fact that the cigarette Thomas was smoking was from Arlott's own packet of Passing Clouds no doubt added to his sense of fascination. Nicotine sustenance was not the only thing that Dylan managed to scrounge.

Blaen Cwm Llangain, near Carmarthen

22 August 1946

Dear John,

I tried to get hold of you as soon as I got back from Ireland but you were always out. I don't know if you'd written while I was away, because my letters haven't been forwarded yet: - I expect them tomorrow. I should anyway, have given you my Irish address. Ireland took all my money in the world - and some of other people's money, too - so I must get as much work now as I possibly can. Will you help? Any scripts and/or readings you can manage will be terribly welcome. I'll do you a script in a few days if you can get me one, or can come up to town for a reading at a day's notice - provided the BBC will pay expenses to & from Wales. I have to spend 10 days or a fortnight here with my mother, who is ill, and after that will go back to Oxford. Do your best for me, please, John: I'm in a real spot and simply must have a lot of work to do. Ireland was grand: I ate myself daft, but have now recovered. When do you go abroad? Hope to hear from you very soon. And any work: the bigger, of course, & the higher paid, the better.

Ever, Dylan

Besides frequently giving Thomas the green light for "a spot of booming", John Arlott also helped out when he was at the mercy of his means. "We were both hard up, very hard up," Arlott once told me. "He would sometimes write and say, 'It would be silly to, say, lend me five pounds because I don't suppose I shall ever pay it back, but if you had a fiver it would be a help,' and one lent this, oh, just because the world was a better place for having him around."

 

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The fiver turned into a tenner a week for a period, and on one occasion John ensured that Dylan would return to South Wales safely and not deviate to the nearest pub by getting his secretary to ****** him in a taxi to Paddington station. Years later, John burnt many of Dylan's begging letters because he thought they would prejudice posterity's view. He obviously disbelieved Mark Twain's dictum that "the holy passion of friendship is of so sweet and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime if not asked to lend money". Arlott enlarged on the theme in print. "He often and much wanted money. He was not covetous of gold for its own sake, nor did he ask for more than would house and feed himself, his wife Caitlin, and their three children, and leave enough to buy drink for himself and the friends he wanted to entertain.

"He was an essentially simple person. He liked cricket, rugby football and beer, jokes, idleness and other men's poetry. Generous but not extravagant, he was sadly harried by demands for income tax, which he never really understood and which in the end drove him near to desperation - without ever penetrating his contempt deeply enough to reach his hate. Yet even when 80 per cent of the first pound of his earnings went to the Inland Revenue, he would never debase for a moment the writing, which was the nearest matter in the world to his heart. He could have been one of the most highly-paid hacks. He could have spun stories out at speed and for high fees, but his respect for his craft would not allow that."

That craft was sometimes practised in unexpected places. Hampshire-born Arlott's love affair with Glamorgan sprang from the time in his youth when, with a natural affinity with the underdog, they were cricket's Cinderella county. His very first attempt at writing was to compile a manuscript of Glamorgan scores. Now, sitting with Thomas on the top of the pavilion at Swansea, they both were inspired to write poems on the game going on in front of them. Dylan's works, probably written on scraps of paper that came to hand, appear not to have survived, or if they have, could possibly be gathering dust in the archives of an American university. John's poem has endured and if, in the view of Kingsley Amis - himself no stranger to Swansea - it is a little sub-Betjemanesque, there is enough collectiveness and colour to paint an immediate picture.

CRICKET AT SWANSEA

(Glamorgan in the Field)

From the top of the hill top pavilion

The sea is a cheat to the eye.

Where it secretly seeps into coastline

Or fades in the fellow-grey sky;

But the crease-marks are sharp on

the green

As the axe's first taste of the tree,

And keen is the Welshmen's assault

As the freshening fret from the sea.

The ball is a withering weapon,

Fraught with a strong-fingered spin,

And the fieldsmen, with fingers

prehensile

Are the arms of attack moving in.

In the field of a new Cymric mission

With outcricket cruel as a cat

They pounce on the perilous snick

As it breaks from the spin-harried bat.

On this turf, the remembered of rugby

'The Invincibles' - came by their name,

And now in the calm of the clubhouse

Frown down from their

old-fashioned frame.

Their might has outlived their

moustaches,

For photos fade faster than fame;

And this cricket rekindles the temper

Of their high-tramping, scrummaging

game,

Intense as an Eisteddfod anthem

It burns down the day like a flame.

Aside from watching Wilf Wooller's boys triumph on the field, Dylan would delight in showing John his world: the Neo-Grecian façade of the Swansea Museum, "the museum that should have been in a museum" as he described it; The Three Lamps in Castle Square; the Singleton Hotel where he lunched as a young reporter; the makeshift stalls in the market; and "No Sign Bar", the oldest pub in Swansea situated in a Dickensian covered alleyway called Salubrious Passage. When cricket was taking place at Sophia Gardens in Cardiff the two would venture to a club in Tiger Bay. One night the pair were struck by the talent and potential of a young singer, and they told her so. The chanteuse was Shirley Bassey.

A lasting memory for Arlott happened during his second-ever commentary in the match between the 1946 Indian tourists and Oxford University. Having enjoyed a convivial stay with Thomas in his borrowed boathouse at Holywell Ford, he was sitting in a bomb crater on the edge of The Parks idly chatting with Dylan, Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day-Lewis - a poet's tea party, though it was not tea that was being drunk. In soporific sunshine, time stood still. Suddenly Dylan turned to John and said: "'Aren't you supposed to be on?" It was seven minutes past four. By 10 past the tyro commentator had circled the ground and was broadcasting live in breathless falsetto with much use of pregnant pause. Apparently, nobody noticed anything amiss.

The rhythms and contours of cricket appealed to Dylan. Dramatic deaths and theatrical entrances led to poetic impulse, most notably in the unpublished poem we print above.

There were moments of tranquillity at Oxford. An excursion on a pleasure-boat with two companions, Michael Ayrton and Hugh Metcalfe, the manager of the Crazy Gang, was a particularly Jerome-ish jaunt, with such copious quantities of wine being drunk that someone remarked that there was more liquid inside the boat than in the river. Ayrton's charcoal sketch of Dylan contentedly awash adorned John's wall for ever.

In London, the friends' bibulous outings after work centred on The George, known as "The Gluepot", around the corner from Broadcasting House, or further afield to The Mother Redcap in Camden Town, where would be found a lugubrious ****ney undertaker. Macabre shaggy-dog stories about coffin lids that could not be shut in the funeral parlour because of the corpses' maintained erections found an appreciative audience of at least two.

The bawdy humour was much to Thomas's taste, and he put it to use on lecture tours of the USA, which he enjoyed parodying with coruscating wit as one of what he called the catarrhal troubadours: "(coughs) I'd like to read a very English poem by William Plomer called 'The Flying Bum'. I should explain that bum to an Englishman does not mean what it means to an American. Bum means fanny and fanny does not mean to an American what it means to an Englishman - though geographically it's quite close (nervous laughter from the audience)."

"He undoubtedly exploited people who lionised him," explained Arlott. "He had great contempt, he said, for these women's clubs where he went to lecture. He felt himself compelled to shock them. He had to see this look of alarm and revulsion on their faces and he couldn't live if he didn't get it."

The Americans got their revenge in early. Time magazine sent a woman journalist to write an in-depth article on the poet. She took her assignment rather literally. Weeks went by, and Dylan waited with increasing apprehension for the piece to appear. Eventually it did. John noticed his downcast demeanour. "What's the matter?" he asked. "Damn it, look at this man," exploded Dylan, opening the magazine. "Gooseberry-eyed, blubber-lipped Welsh poet, Thomas. Bloody 'ell, and she said she loved me!" The lookalike Tintoretto urchin-cherub with the famous organ voice furnished by an uneven supply of wind like a faulty bellows, and the master wordsmith whose apt imagery was delivered in a burr redolent of a lawnmower on a summer's day, duetted together in perfect harmony.

The coda to Dylan's life was tragic. Once more in the US in November 1953, he was surrounded by people. But none could help during those dark moments alone when the dregs drained away and the empty glass was filled with demons. The "alcoholic insult to the brain" which supposedly killed him left John back in London bereft and grief-stricken.

"I worshipped Dylan, I thought he was a great poet and a great reader. I thought he was a lovely man and when he died - I wept. Those years when he was hard up. People talk about him not paying debts. Every farthing he ever borrowed off me he paid back and no cheque he ever drew me bounced. I did get a letter from him not long before the end saying, 'Dear John, I need a lot of money. I don't want it all from you. I was going to say twenty pounds but send me ten pounds. I'm not going to promise to send it back, because I never shall and if you don't want to send it you needn't.' Thank God, I sent it..."

Boat House, Laugharne, Carmarthenshire

6 February 1953

John...

Did I ever thank you for that bit of practical help you sent along so kind and so quick? If not, I should have very much indeed, and if so, I do it again.

Dylan

"... It was the last time I ever heard from him and - if ever I thought a man had a touch of divinity - it was Dylan."

David Rayvern Allen is John Arlott's biographer. He is presenting a programme on Arlott and Dylan Thomas on Radio 4 tomorrow at 3.30pm


THE UNPUBLISHED POEM

Out of the don-draped greenery of Magdalen grounds

This day I sing of spring and her attendant hounds;

Under the rook-gowned trees, aloud in the plush park,

The scholar's life I lift from a converted ark,

Chalet or potting shed, ratcatchers' lounge or home

Of the academic owl and graduate gnome,

Refuges of bats, pendant and cricketing, wax fruit

And nibbled blazer, tandem pump and riding boot,

A haven now for Me, far from the gastric throng,

Where only the ousted mouse pricks to my spring song,

His nasty ears, and the river rat, dispossessed,

Shivers outside the window in his Flea-loud vest