Dylan Thomas’ work on Under Milk Wood in South Leigh, Oxfordshire, has a history. He had been thinking about writing a community portrait since the late 1930s, and had begun to develop his ideas more concretely when he lived in New Quay, Cardiganshire, in 1944-45, and in Italy in 1947.
His idea for the play was of a village/town that had been declared insane; it was to be put on trial and, if guilty, punished. The Mad Town plot, as it became known, was the basis of Dylan’s thinking almost up to Milk Wood’s first performance in May 1953. You can read about these early stages at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Milk_Wood
In April 1947, Dylan and family went to Italy. He intended to write a radio play there, as his letters home make clear. Several words and phrases that appear in the play can be found in some of Dylan's letters from the island of Elba, where he stayed for three weeks. They mention the "fishers and miners" and "webfooted waterboys" who we later find as the "fishers" and "webfoot cocklewomen" of the first page of Under Milk Wood. The "sunblack" and "fly-black" adjectives of Elba would be re-worked as the "crowblack" and "bible-black" descriptions of Llareggub. And, in time, the island’s "blister-biting blimp-blue bakehouse sea" would re-appear as Llareggub's "slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea."
Dylan continued to work on Under Milk Wood in South Leigh, as he told his parents he would in his letter of July 19 1947: “I want very much to write a full-length - hour to hour & a half - broadcast play; & hope to do it, in South Leigh, this autumn.” The BBC producer, Philip Burton, has recalled a meeting in the Café Royal in the autumn of 1947, just after Dylan had moved to South Leigh:
"…he was telling me an idea he had 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.…" [1]
Dylan continued with the play in 1948, as he mentioned in a letter to John Ormond from South Leigh: "A radio play I am writing has Laugharne, though not by name, as its setting." John Davenport has confirmed that Dylan worked on the play at South Leigh, observing that Milk Wood "took six years to make."[2] In an interview in the 1960s, Harry Locke, a good friend of Dylan's and a neighbour in the village, comments that Dylan wrote a substantial part of the first half at South Leigh.[3]
Bill Green also describes the way in which Dylan would pub crawl around the Cotswolds, making notes on village life and villagers as he went, expeditions which presumably drip-fed his thoughts about community portraiture in general and the people of Llareggub in particular (see the interview with Green on this site).
A few miles from South Leigh was a German POW camp, whose inmates were waiting to be re-settled. They chopped wood for Caitlin, looked after the garden and worked on the neighbouring farms. Perhaps the camp was, for Dylan, a daily reminder of the plot about the mad village, which he described to his biographer, Constantine Fitzgibbon, as having barbed wire "strung about it and patrolled by sentries."
The time at South Leigh was thus a key period in the writing of Milk Wood, building on the work that had been done at New Quay in 1944-45. Distractions were few in early 1948; there were no poems on the go, only a handful of radio scripts to write, and the new round of film scripts had only just begun. In one of these South Leigh films (Three Weird Sisters), we find the familiar Llareggub names of Daddy Waldo and Polly Probert.
Dylan travelled from South Leigh to Prague in March 1949 to a Congress of the Writers' Union. In her memoir, Jiřina Hauková, who was Dylan's guide and interpreter, recalls that Dylan attended a party where he "narrated the first version of his radio play Under Milk Wood." She describes how he outlined the plot about a town that was declared insane, and then talked about an eccentric organist and the baker with two wives.[4]
Also at the party was Jan Grossman who recalled that Dylan "spoke about Milk Wood, the radio play, and he quoted some parts of it…." And Josef Nesvadba who, like Grossman, had been educated at the English school in Prague, was another at the party who remembered Dylan referring to the mad town plot, as well as the Voices in the play.[5]
This testimony from Prague, when taken with that of Philip Burton about the meeting in the Café Royal in 1947, indicates that many of the characters of the play were already in place by March 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.
In May 1949, Dylan and family left South Leigh, and returned to live in Laugharne at the Boat House.
But what happened to Under Milk Wood after South Leigh………?
There is nothing in Dylan’s letters, or in any documentary or biographical source, to suggest that Dylan was working on the play in his first few months in Laugharne. Most writers stress the other things on Dylan's mind, including writing Living in Wales and Over Sir John's hill, and making a start on Vanity Fair. There was, too, the birth of Colm, as well as broadcasts, debts, illnesses and a summons to contend with. He was also busy preparing himself for his forthcoming, and first, American trip (February 21-May 31 1950), choosing and rehearsing poems for his readings on tour.
The first known sighting of a script for the play was its first half, titled The Town that was Mad, which Dylan showed to the poet Allen Curnow in October 1949 at the Boat House.
A draft first half of the play was delivered to the BBC in October 1950; it consisted of thirty-five handwritten pages that contained 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. By the end of that year, Dylan had been in Laugharne for just over three years, but his half-play had made little progress since his South Leigh days. On November 6 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"
Dylan arrived in America in April 1953 to give the first readings of the play, even though he had not yet written its second half. He gave a solo reading of the first half on May 3 at the Fogg Museum, Harvard. Rehearsals for the play’s premiere on May 14 had already started but with only half the play, and with Dylan unavailable as he left to carry out a series of poetry readings and other engagements. He was up at dawn on May 14 to work on the second half, and he continued writing on the train between Boston and New York, as he travelled to the Poetry Centre there for the premiere.
With the performance just ninety minutes away, the “final third of the play was still unorganised and but partially written.” The play’s producer, Liz Reitell, locked Dylan 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. Dylan subsequently added some forty new lines to the second half for the play’s next reading in New York on May 28.
Death in America
On his return to Laugharne, Thomas worked in a desultory fashion on Under Milk Wood throughout the summer. He gave readings of the play in Porthcawl and Tenby, before travelling to London to catch his plane to New York for another tour, including two readings of Under Milk Wood. He stayed with Harry Locke in London 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. On October 15 1953, he 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." On his arrival in New York on October 20 1953, Thomas added a further thirty-eight lines to the second half, for the two performances on October 24 and 25.
After the first performance on October 24, 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.” At the next performance, the actors realised that Thomas was “desperately ill” and had lost his voice. After a cortisone injection, he recovered sufficiently to go on stage.
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 November 13. He collapsed in the early hours of November 5 and, after a long delay, he was taken in a coma to St. Vincent’s Hospital and died there on November 9 1953.
Negligence on the part of both his New York doctor, Milton Feltenstein, and his American literary agent, John Brinnin, is implicated in his death. Thomas was already ill when he arrived in America, and using an inhaler to help his breathing. A course of penicillin would have taken care of his developing chest disease but Feltenstein injected morphine, sending Thomas into a coma from which he never recovered.
John Brinnin, deeply in debt and desperate for money, failed in his duty of care. He knew Thomas was very ill, but did not cancel or curtail his programme, 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.[6]
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Books
D. N Thomas (2004) Dylan Remembered 1935-1953, vol 2., Seren and also at https://sites.google.com/site/dylanthomasandnewquay/birth-of-under-milk-wood
Notes
[1] Café Royal: Burton interview at (1) Burton, P. (1953) untitled, Dylan Thomas Memorial Number in Adam International Review. (2) Tape recorded interview in the Jeff Towns Collection. (3) Letters to Douglas Cleverdon, October 9 1967 and February 26 1968 .
[2] (1) Letter to Ormond, March 6 1948. (2) John Davenport's comment was in his pre-broadcast interview for Dylan Thomas, BBC Third Programme, 9/11/1963. He makes the same point in an article amongst his papers in the National Library of Wales.
[3] Locke interviewed by Colin Edwards. To read the interview, see D. N. Thomas (2004) Dylan Remembered 1935-1953, vol.2. pp134-139, Seren.
[4] Jiřina Hauková: a memoir, in D.N. Thomas (2004) op.cit. p163 and at https://sites.google.com/site/dylanthomasandnewquay/birth-of-under-milk-wood
[5] Grossman in D. N. Thomas (2004) op. cit. pp169-170. Nesvadba in letters to D. N. Thomas.
[6] For more on Dylan's death and Under Milk Wood, see D.N. Thomas (2008) Fatal Neglect: Who Killed Dylan Thomas?", Seren, with summaries at https://sites.google.com/site/dylanthomasandnewquay/did-umw-play-a-part-in-dylan-s-death