Origins and development
Background
In 1931, the 17-year-old Thomas created a piece for the Swansea Grammar School magazine that included a conversation of Milk Wood stylings, between Mussolini and Wife, similar to those between Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard and her two husbands that would later be found in Under Milk Wood. [1]
In 1933, Thomas talked at length with his mentor and friend, Bert Trick, [2] about creating a play about a Welsh town:
He read it to Nell and me in our bungalow at Caswell around the old Dover stove, with the paraffin lamps lit at night ... the story was then called Llareggub, which was a mythical village in South Wales, a typical village, with terraced houses with one ty bach to about five cottages and the various characters coming out and emptying the slops and exchanging greetings and so on; that was the germ of the idea which ... developed into Under Milk Wood. [3]
In February 1937, Thomas outlined his plans for a Welsh Journey, following a route that would "be decided by what incidents arose, what people told me stories, what pleasant or unpleasant or curious things...I encountered in the little-known villages among the lesser-known people." [4]
A year later, in March 1938, Thomas suggested that a group of Welsh writers should prepare a verse-report of their "own particular town, village, or district." [5]
Laugharne
In May 1938, the Thomas family moved to Laugharne, a small town on the estuary of the river Tâf in Carmarthenshire, Wales. They lived there intermittently [6] for just under two years until July 1941. They did not return to live there until 1949. [7]
The author Richard Hughes, who lived in Laugharne, has recalled that Thomas spoke to him in 1939 about writing a play about Laugharne in which the townsfolk would play themselves, [8] an idea pioneered on the radio by Cornish villagers in the 1930s. [9] Four years later, in 1943, Thomas again met Hughes, and this time outlined a play about a Welsh village certified as 'mad' by government inspectors. [10]
Hughes believed that when Thomas "came to write Under Milk Wood, he did not use actual Laugharne characters." [11] Nevertheless, some elements of Laugharne are discernible in the play. A girl, age 14, named Rosie Probert ("Rosie Probert, thirty three Duck Lane. Come on up, boys, I'm dead.") was living in Horsepool Road in Laugharne at the 1921 census. [12] Although there is no-one of that name in Laugharne in the 1939 War Register, [13] nor anyone named Rosie, Laugharne resident, Jane Dark, has described how she told Thomas about her. [14] Dark has also described telling Thomas about the ducks of Horsepool Road ("Duck Lane") and the drowning of the girl who went in search of them. [15]
Both Laugharne and Llareggub have a castle, [16] and, like Laugharne, Llareggub is on an estuary ("boat-bobbing river and sea"), with cockles, cocklers and Cockle Row. Laugharne also provides the clock tower of Myfanwy Price's dreams, [17] as well as Salt House Farm which may have inspired the name of Llareggub's Salt Lake Farm. [18] Llareggub's Butcher Beynon almost certainly draws on butcher and publican Carl Eynon, though he was not in Laugharne but in nearby St Clears. [19]
New Quay
In September 1944, the Thomas family moved to a bungalow called Majoda on the cliffs outside New Quay, Cardiganshire (Ceredigion), Wales, and left in July the following year. Thomas had previously visited New Quay whilst living in nearby Talsarn in 1942–1943, [20] and had an aunt and cousins living in New Quay. [21] He had written a New Quay pub poem, Sooner than you can water milk, in 1943, [22] which has several words and ideas that would later re-appear in Under Milk Wood. [23] Thomas' bawdy letter-poem from New Quay to T. W. Earp, written just days after moving into Majoda, [24] contains the name "No-good", anticipating Nogood Boyo of Under Milk Wood.
Thomas's wife, Caitlin, has described the year at Majoda as "one of the most important creative periods of his life...New Quay was just exactly his kind of background, with the ocean in front of him ... and a pub [25] where he felt at home in the evenings." [26] Thomas' biographers have taken a similar view. His time there, recalled Constantine FitzGibbon, his first biographer, was "a second flowering, a period of fertility that recalls the earliest days … [with a] great outpouring of poems", as well as a good deal of other material. [27] Biographer Paul Ferris agreed: "On the grounds of output, the bungalow deserves a plaque of its own." [28] Thomas' third biographer, George Tremlett, concurred, describing the time in New Quay as "one of the most creative periods of Thomas's life." [29]
Some of those who knew him well, including FitzGibbon, have said that Thomas began writing Under Milk Wood in New Quay. [30] The play's first producer, Douglas Cleverdon, agreed, noting that Thomas "wrote the first half within a few months; then his inspiration seemed to fail him when he left New Quay." [31] One of Thomas' closest friends and confidantes, Ivy Williams of Brown's Hotel, Laugharne, has said "Of course, it wasn't really written in Laugharne at all. It was written in New Quay, most of it." [32]
The writer and puppeteer, Walter Wilkinson, visited New Quay in 1947, and his essay on the town captures its character and atmosphere as Thomas would have found it two years earlier. [33] Photos of New Quay in Thomas' day, as well as a 1959 television programme about the town, can be found here. [34]
There were many milestones [35] on the road to Llareggub, and these have been detailed by Professor Walford Davies in his Introduction to the definitive edition of Under Milk Wood. [36] The most important of these was Quite Early One Morning, [37] Thomas' description of a walk around New Quay, broadcast by the BBC in 1945, and described by Davies as a "veritable storehouse of phrases, rhythms and details later resurrected or modified for Under Milk Wood." [38] For example, the "done-by-hand water colours" of Quite Early One Morning appear later as the "watercolours done by hand" of Under Milk Wood. [39]
Another striking example from the 1945 broadcast is Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard who later appears as a major character in Under Milk Wood:
- Open the curtains, light the fire, what are servants for?
- I am Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard and I want another snooze.
- Dust the china, feed the canary, sweep the drawing-room floor;
- And before you let the sun in, mind he wipes his shoes.
Mrs Ogmore Davies [40] and Mrs Pritchard-Jones [41] both lived on Church Street in New Quay. [42] Mrs Pritchard-Jones was constantly cleaning, recalled one of her neighbours, "a real matron-type, very strait-laced, house-proud, ran the house like a hospital ward." [43] In her book on New Quay, Mrs Pritchard-Jones' daughter notes that her mother had been a Queen's Nurse before her marriage and afterwards "devoted much of her time to cleaning and dusting our home ... sliding a small mat under our feet so we would not bring in any dirt from the road." [44]
Jack Lloyd, a New Quay postman and the Town Crier, also lived on Church Street. [45] He provided the character of Llareggub's postman Willy Nilly, whose practice of opening letters, and spreading the news, reflects Lloyd's role as Town Crier, as Thomas himself noted on a work sheet for the play: "Nobody minds him opening the letters and acting as [a] kind of town-crier. How else could they know the news?" [46] It is this note, together with our knowledge that Thomas knew Jack Lloyd ("an old friend"), [47] that establish the link between Willy Nilly and Lloyd. [48]
There were also other New Quay residents in Under Milk Wood. Dai Fred Davies the donkeyman on board the fishing vessel, the Alpha, appears in the play as Tom-Fred the donkeyman. [49] Local builder, Dan Cherry Jones, [50] appears as Cherry Owen in the play, as Cherry Jones in Thomas' sketch of Llareggub, [51] and as Cherry Jones in one of Thomas' work sheets for the play, where Thomas describes him as a plumber and carpenter. [52]
The time-obsessed, "thin-vowelled laird", as Thomas described him, [53] New Quay's reclusive English aristocrat, Alastair Hugh Graham, lover of fish, fishing and cooking, and author of Twenty Different Ways of Cooking New Quay Mackerel, [54] is considered to be the inspiration for "Lord Cut-Glass … that lordly fish-head nibbler … in his fish-slimy kitchen ... [who] scampers from clock to clock". [55]
Third Drowned's question at the beginning of the play, "How's the tenors in Dowlais?", reflects the special relationship that once existed between New Quay and Dowlais, an industrial town in South Wales. Its workers traditionally holidayed in New Quay and often sang on the pier on summer evenings. [56] Such was the relationship between the two towns that when St Mair's church in Dowlais was demolished in 1963, [57] its bell was given to New Quay's parish church. [58]
Other names and features from New Quay in the play include Maesgwyn farm [59] the Sailor's Home Arms, [60] the river Dewi, [61] the quarry, [62] the harbour, [63] Manchester House, [64] the hill of windows [65] and the Downs. [66] The Fourth Drowned's line "Buttermilk and whippets" also comes from New Quay, [67] as does the stopped clock in the bar of the Sailors' Arms. [68] [69]
Walford Davies has concluded that New Quay "was crucial in supplementing the gallery of characters Thomas had to hand for writing Under Milk Wood. [70] FitzGibbon had come to a similar conclusion many years earlier, noting that Llareggub "resembles New Quay more closely [than Laugharne] and many of the characters derive from that seaside village in Cardiganshire..." [71] John Ackerman has also suggested that the story of the drowned village and graveyard of Llanina, that lay in the sea below Majoda, "is the literal truth that inspired the imaginative and poetic truth" of Under Milk Wood. [72] Another part of that literal truth were the 60 acres of cliff between New Quay and Majoda, including Maesgwyn farm, that collapsed into the sea in the early 1940s. [73]
Elba, South Leigh and Prague
In April 1947, Thomas and family went to Italy. He intended to write a radio play there, as his letters home make clear. [74] Several words and phrases that appear in Under Milk Wood can be found in some of Thomas' letters from the island of Elba, where he stayed for three weeks. The "fishers and miners" and "webfooted waterboys" [75] of the letters become the "fishers" and "webfoot cocklewomen" of the first page of Under Milk Wood. [76] The "sunblack" and "fly-black" adjectives of Elba anticipate the "crowblack" and "bible-black" descriptions of Llareggub. The play's Fourth Drowned, Alfred Pomeroy Jones, "died of blisters", and so, almost, did Thomas, as he vividly describes in a letter home. [75] And, in time, the island's "blister-biting blimp-blue bakehouse sea" would re-appear as Llareggub's "slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea." [77]
On their return from Italy in August 1947, the Thomases moved to South Leigh, near Witney in Oxfordshire, where Thomas declared his intent to work further on the play. [78] It was here that he knocked the play into shape, as one biographer described it. [79] There are various accounts of his work on the play at South Leigh, where he lived until May 1949. [80] He also worked on filmscripts here, including The Three Weird Sisters , which includes the familiar Llareggub names of Daddy Waldo and Polly Probert.
Just a month or so after moving to South Leigh, Thomas met the BBC producer, Philip Burton, in the Café Royal in London, where he outlined his ideas for "The Village of the Mad…a coastal town in south Wales which was on trial because they felt it was a disaster to have a community living in that way… For instance, the organist in the choir in the church played with only the dog to listen to him…A man and a woman were in love with each other but they never met… they wrote to each other every day…And he had the idea that the narrator should be like the listener, blind.…" [81] Burton's friendship with Thomas, and his influence on the play, has been set within the context of the work done by Burton and T. Rowland Hughes in developing community portraiture on the radio. [82]
Thomas went to Prague in March 1949 for a writers' conference. His guide and interpreter, Jiřina Hauková, has recalled that, at a party, Thomas "narrated the first version of his radio play Under Milk Wood". She mentions that he talked about the organist who played to goats and sheep, as well as a baker with two wives. [83] Another at the party remembered that Thomas also talked about the two Voices. [84]
The testimony from Prague, when taken with that of Burton about the meeting in the Café Royal in 1947, indicates that several of the characters of the play were already in place by the time Thomas had moved to the Boat House in Laugharne in May 1949: the organist, the two lovers who never met but wrote to each other, the baker with two wives, the blind narrator and the Voices.
The first known sighting of a script for the play was its first half, titled The Town that was Mad, which Thomas showed to the poet Allen Curnow in October 1949 at the Boat House. [85]
A draft first half of the play was delivered to the BBC in late October 1950. [86] It consisted of thirty-five handwritten pages containing most of the places, people and topography of Llareggub, and which ended with the line "Organ Morgan's at it early…" A shortened version of this first half was published in Botteghe Oscure in May 1952 with the title Llareggub. A Piece for Radio Perhaps. By the end of that year, Thomas had been in Laugharne for just over three years, but his half-play had made little progress since his South Leigh days. On 6 November 1952, he wrote to the editor of Botteghe Oscure to explain why he hadn't been able to "finish the second half of my piece for you." He had failed shamefully, he said, to add to "my lonely half of a looney maybe-play". [87]
America
Thomas gave a reading of the unfinished play to students at Cardiff University in March 1953. [88] He travelled to the United States in April to give the first public readings of the play, even though he had not yet written its second half. He gave a solo reading of the first half on 3 May at the Fogg Museum, Harvard, sponsored by The Poets' Theatre, where the audience responded enthusiastically. [89] [90]
Rehearsals for the play's official premiere on 14 May in New York City had already started but with only half the play, and with Thomas unavailable as he left to carry out a series of poetry readings and other engagements. He was up at dawn on 14 May to work on the second half, and he continued writing on the train between Boston and New York, as he travelled to the 92nd Street Y's Poetry Center for the premiere. With the performance just 90 minutes away, the "final third of the play was still unorganised and but partially written." [91] The play's producer, Liz Reitell, locked Thomas in a room to continue work on the script, the last few lines of which were handed to the actors as they were preparing to go on stage. [92] Thomas subsequently added some 40 new lines to the second half for the play's next reading in New York on 28 May.
On his return to Laugharne, Thomas worked in a desultory fashion on Under Milk Wood throughout the summer. [93] His daughter, Aeronwy, noticed that his health had "visibly deteriorated. ... I could hear his racking cough. Every morning he had a prolonged coughing attack. ... The coughing was nothing new but it seemed worse than before." [94] She also noted that the blackouts that Thomas was experiencing were "a constant source of comment" amongst his Laugharne friends. [95]
Thomas gave readings of the play in Porthcawl and Tenby, [96] before travelling to London to catch his plane to New York for another tour, including three readings of Under Milk Wood. He stayed with the comedian Harry Locke, and worked on the play, re-writing parts of the first half, and writing Eli Jenkins' sunset poem and Waldo's chimney sweep song for the second half. [97] Locke noticed that Thomas was very chesty, with "terrible" coughing fits that made him go purple in the face. [98]
On 15 October 1953, Thomas delivered another draft of the play to the BBC, a draft that his producer, Douglas Cleverdon, described as being in "an extremely disordered state...it was clearly not in its final form." [99] On his arrival in New York on 20 October 1953, Thomas added a further 38 lines to the second half, for the two performances on 24 and 25 October.
Thomas had been met at the airport by Liz Reitell, who was shocked at his appearance: "He was very ill when he got here." [100] Thomas's agent John Brinnin, deeply in debt and desperate for money, also knew Thomas was very ill, but did not cancel or curtail his programme. He had a punishing schedule of four rehearsals and two performances of Under Milk Wood in just five days, as well as two sessions of revising the play. [101] After the first performance on 24 October, Thomas was close to collapse, standing in his dressing room, clinging to the back of a chair. The play, he said, "has taken the life out of me for now." [102]
At the next performance, the actors realised that Thomas was very ill and had lost his voice: "He was desperately ill … we didn't think that he would be able to do the last performance because he was so ill … Dylan literally couldn't speak he was so ill … still my greatest memory of it is that he had no voice." [103] After a cortisone injection, he recovered sufficiently to go on stage. The play's cast noticed Thomas's worsening illness during the first three rehearsals, during one of which he collapsed. Brinnin was at the fourth and was shocked by Thomas' appearance: "I could barely stop myself from gasping aloud. His face was lime-white, his lips loose and twisted, his eyes dulled, gelid, and sunk in his head." [104]
Through the following week, Thomas continued to work on the script for the version that was to appear in Mademoiselle , and for the performance in Chicago on 13 November. However, he collapsed in the early hours of 5 November and died in hospital on 9 November 1953.
Inspiration
The sources for the play have generated intense debate. Thomas himself declared on two occasions that his play was based on Laugharne, [105] but this has not gone unquestioned. The towns of Llansteffan, Ferryside and particularly New Quay also have made their claims. An examination of these respective claims was published in 2004. [106] Surprisingly little scholarship has been devoted to Thomas and Laugharne, and about the town's influence on the writing of Under Milk Wood. [107] Thomas's four years at the Boat House were amongst his least productive, and he was away for much of the time. As his daughter, Aeronwy, has recalled, "he sought any pretext to escape." [108]
Douglas Cleverdon has suggested that the topography of Llareggub "is based not so much on Laugharne, which lies on the mouth of an estuary, but rather on New Quay, a seaside town...with a steep street running down to the harbour." [109] The various topographical references in the play to the 'top of the town,' and to its 'top and sea-end' are also suggestive of New Quay, as are Llareggub's terraced streets and hill of windows. [110] The play is true to even the minor topographical details of New Quay. For example, Llareggub's lazy fishermen walk uphill from the harbour to the Sailors' Arms.
Thomas drew a sketch map of the fictional town, which is now held by the National Library of Wales and can be viewed online. [111] The Dylan Thomas scholar, James Davies, has written that "Thomas's drawing of Llareggub is... based on New Quay" [112] and there has been very little disagreement, if any, with this view. An examination of the sketch has revealed some interesting features: Thomas uses the name of an actual New Quay resident, Dan Cherry Jones, for one of the people living in Cockle Street. The Rev. Eli Jenkins is not in the sketch, however, and there are also three characters in the sketch who do not appear in the draft of the play given by Thomas to the BBC in October 1950. [113]
Thomas seems to have drawn on New Quay in developing Llareggub's profile as an ocean-going, schooner and harbour town, as he once described it. [114] Captain Cat lives in Schooner House. He and his sailors have sailed the clippered seas, as First Voice puts it. They have been to San Francisco, Nantucket and more, bringing back coconuts and parrots for their families. The Rev. Eli Jenkins' White Book of Llareggub has a chapter on shipping and another on industry, all of which reflect New Quay's history of both producing master mariners [115] and building ocean-going ships, including schooners. [116] In his 1947 visit to New Quay, Walter Wilkinson noted that the town "abounds" in sea captains [117] The following year, another writer visiting New Quay noted that there were "dozens of lads who knew intimately the life and ways of all the great maritime cities of the world." [118]
Llareggub's occupational profile as a town of seafarers, fishermen, cockle gatherers and farmers has also been examined through an analysis of the returns in the 1939 War Register for New Quay, Laugharne, Ferryside and Llansteffan. This analysis also draws upon census returns and the Welsh Merchant Mariners Index. It shows that New Quay and Ferryside provide by far the best fit with Llareggub's occupational profile. [119]
Thomas is reported to have commented that Under Milk Wood was developed in response to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, as a way of reasserting the evidence of beauty in the world. [120] It is also thought that the play was a response by Thomas both to the Nazi concentration camps, and to the internment camps that had been created around Britain during World War II. [121]
