John Goodby - Discovering Dylan Thomas: A Companion to the Collected Poems and Notebook Poems

D ISCOVERING D YLAN T HOMAS

Discovering Dylan Thomas

A Companion to the Collected Poems
and Notebook Poems

John Goodby

University of Wales Press
2017

John Goodby, 2017

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British Library CIP Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78316-963-4
eISBN 978-1-78316-965-8

The right of John Goodby to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover image: Dan Llywelyn Hall, A Dream of Winter (2015), by permission.

i.m. Kenneth Goodby

(19322016)

The rivers of the dead

Veined his poor hand I held, and I saw Through his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea. Elegy, Dylan Thomas

As usual, my main thanks and gratitude go to my family: Nicola, Kate and George.

Thanks are also due to Swansea University for their purchase of Dylan Thomass fifth notebook in December 2014, and granting me a research sabbatical at the end of 2014. For their support of Dylan Thomas-related activities in 2014 I would particularly like to thank Kirsti Bohata of CREW (Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales), and the staff of Swansea Universitys Research Institute for the Arts and Humanities (RIAH).

As with the Collected Poems , I acknowledge, too, a debt of gratitude to Sin Bowyer and staff at the Manuscripts Collection at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, Mike Basinski and the staff at the Special Collection Library of the State University of New York at Buffalo, Rick Watson and staff at the Research Library at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the Department of Manuscripts at the British Library in London, and staff at Swansea University Library.

One of the benefits of working on Dylan Thomas is that it is unusually productive of new friendships, and the refurbishing of old ones. I would like to take this chance to thank the many friends and encouragers who supported my work in various ways during the Dylan Thomas centenary, when this book was conceived, planned and part-written Hannah Ellis, Dylan Thomass grand-daughter, and her father, Trefor Ellis; Hilly Janes; Andrew Dally, editor of the Dylan Thomas blog; Matt Hughes of the Dylan Thomas Birthplace; Branwen and Julie Kavanagh of Twin Headed Wolf; James Keery; Toni Griffiths and Fred Jarvis; Ned Allen, Leo Mellor, and members of the Cambridge University English Faculty; Jeff Towns; Dai Smith; Charles Mundye and Chris Wigginton of Sheffield Hallam University; Gabriel Heaton and Toby Skegg of Sothebys; Lyndon Davies and Penny Hallam; Allan and Helen Wilcox; Wu Fu-sheng and Graham Hartill; Dan Llywelyn Hall; Martin Smith-Wales and Nick Andrews of BBC Wales; Peter Stead; Nerys Williams of University College Dublin.

Finally, special thanks are due to my postgraduate students and colleagues, several of whom who gave advice and support during the sometimes difficult birth of this volume: Rhian Bubear, Ade Osbourne, Rob Penhallurick, and Steve Vine.

For permission to quote from Dylan Thomass poetry thanks are due to the Dylan Thomas Estate, David Higham and Co. and New Directions Press.

N1 , N2 , N3 , N4 and N5 = the poetry notebooks kept by Dylan Thomas between April 1930 and August 1935 ( N1N4 are collected in Maud, 1989; see below).

Discovering Dylan Thomas fulfils the promise I made in my 2014 centenary annotated edition of the Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas. Given Thomass continued popularity with the general reading public, and the commercial imperatives this entailed for his estate, his agents and his publishers, the Collected Poems was always going to take the form of a trade edition for a mass market, whatever my preferences, as an academic, might be. Thus, while Weidenfeld & Nicolson generously allowed me almost two hundred pages for annotations, the need for readerly accessibility nevertheless played a rather larger role in determining the extent of the critical apparatus than would have been the case for the collected poems of a less marketable poet. As a result, as I explained in the Introduction to the Collected Poems , I gave priority in the edition to maximising the number of poems it contained, and this meant that I had to exclude from it variant passages and poems. These I said I would publish in a future Guide , and Discovering Dylan Thomas is that guide.

However, as the word guide suggests, this book is more than just a gathering of material which could not be fitted into the Collected Poems . Most crucially of all, it includes the results of my study of a fifth Thomas notebook ( N5 ), hitherto unknown, a successor to the four covering the period April 1930 April 1934. The fourth notebook ends with If I were tickled by the rub of love, dated 30 April 1934; poems One, Two and Three in the fifth notebook are undated, the first with a date being Four (Especially when the October wind), which is dated 1 October 1934. This suggests strongly that it is a direct continuation of the fourth notebook, with the first three poems having been entered in it between May and September 1934. In all, the fifth notebook contains a total of sixteen poems (six of which were destined for 18 Poems , ten for Twenty-five Poems ), including several of Thomass finest and most original.