Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea
Swansea’s Dylan Thomas Centre, which I visited a couple of weekends ago and am recalling now in my New York hotel room, pays fitting homage to the unique talent of Wales’ greatest writer. While the exhibition space is modest in comparison to the depth of Thomas’ literary contribution, it is so wonderfully curated, with Thomas’ sonorous voice regaling visitors with excerpts of his poems, letters and plays at every turn, that a full afternoon was necessary for our visit.
Born in Swansea in 1914 and named after a minor character in the foundational Welsh language myth cycle, The Mabinogion, Thomas nevertheless wrote exclusively in English, despite having Welsh-speaking parents. He was, sadly, a product of an era where the British government was actively attempting to kill-off the Welsh language. Thomas’ father, a grammar school teacher, thus decided that Dylan and his sister would have better prospects in life if they learned only English.
Despite this, as the exhibition conveys in almost every section, Dylan became very much a Welsh writer, using the language of his country’s colonial master to give a distinct voice to Cymru.
Thomas, we learn, was prodigious with words from an early age. A well preserved letter to a relative he wrote aged only 12 forgoes the kind of “having fun at the beach” sentences one might expect of a pre-teen, in favour of an essay on the value of reading: “Books! Ah! Before I go on we must stop. Books! What fascination, what charm..”
Despite this love of literature and libraries, Dylan was never an academic. His greatest achievement at school, judging by the news clipping he carried with him for the rest of his life, was winning cross country races. Thus, by 16 Dylan had finished with education and started work as a journalist on the South Wales Post.
Here he developed a life-long commitment to progressive politics, courtesy of Bert Trick, the paper’s editor and a man Thomas affectionately called ‘the communist grocer’. Presumably local news journalism wasn’t a full-time occupation. Although never an activist himself, following Trick’s mentorship Thomas put his name and voice behind many anti-war and, particularly, anti-fascist causes over the rest of his life.
It would have been interesting to read some of Thomas’ output at the South Wales Post. It is hard to imagine his surrealist poetic style being utilised in service of court reports and missing dogs. Although the exhibition points to how in this early part of his career Thomas honed his skills of observation of the local, ordinary and otherwise mundane, and picked up on the peculiarities of phrases used in everyday conversation in his Swansea patch. Indeed, that is one of the things I most like about Thomas – his evident love and affection for the everyday people whose lives he makes extraordinary in his poems and plays.
How he achieved this was down to a tremendous diligence with language. Indeed, despite his dissolute reputation and the undoubted chaos of his later life, the exhibition reveals how Dylan put a huge amount of planning and craft into his poems and prose. In a recreation of his famous writing shed, we see the hand-written thesaurus he created for himself, plastered on his wall for when a poem demanded the assonance (“fierce tears) and alliteration (blaze – bland) he frequently employed. We also learn how he used repetition for emphasis, most famously with “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” in ‘Do not go gentle’.
Rightly, the Centre focuses on Dylan Thomas the poet, not the drinker (Thomas’ alcoholism killed him before he reached 40) and which has defined too much of the books, programmes and films about him ever since. Nevertheless, the photographic evidence on display is a reminder of just how much time Thomas spent in pubs, not least with his also heavy-drinking wife, Caitlin.
I was touched, however, to learn that Thomas’ daily visit to the bar of Brown’s Hotel, Laughrne, where he lived out his latter years, began by completing the crossword with his father. And, as we see and hear throughout the exhibition, while Thomas sadly drank himself to an early grave, his output was nevertheless prodigious. He never became one of those “fat poets with slim volumes” he lampooned in his younger years.
Moreover, as a poet possessed of a powerful, deep performing voice, Dylan Thomas left not only the written word as his legacy, but also hours of evocative recordings, many of which filled the Dylan Thomas Centre with aural joy throughout our visit. I don’t think I will ever tire of hearing Under Milk Wood, Fern Hill, or A Child’s Christmas in Wales, and this exhibition has inspired a desire to hear and read much, much more of Wales’ finest bard.
markontour 
One Response to “Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea”
I love those writings of Dylan Thomas. I could not never want Xmas Eve without you reading his story about A Child’s Xmas
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