Dylan Thomas

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Monday
(Envelope dated April 20^th, 1936)
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Perhaps it’s a bit late to say Sorry for not having let you know I couldn’t come to see you that particular Sunday—whenever it was—and to tell you how much I missed you and the unwonted walk and the toasted things for tea and the poetry after it; but I want to say Sorry, and I hope you’ll forgive me, and I hope, though that’s the wrong way of putting it, that you missed your hearty, Britain-chested, cliff-striding companion as much as I did. I had crowds of silly, important things to do: pack, write formal letters, gather papers, and catch the Sunday night train; and I didn’t get out of bed until all those things had to be scamped through. Now in a hundred ways I wish I hadn’t come away; I’m full of nostalgia and a frightful cold; here the out-of-doors is very beautiful, but it’s a strange country to me, all scenery and landscape, and I’d rather the bound slope of a suburban hill, the Elms, the Acacias, Rookery Nook, Curlew Avenue, to all these miles of green fields and flowery cliffs and dull sea going on and on, and cows lying down and down. I’m not a country man; I stand for, if anything, the aspidistra, the provincial drive, the morning cafe, the evening pub; I’d like to believe in the wide open spaces as the wrapping around walls, the windy boredom between house and house, hotel and cinema, bookshop and tube-station; man made his house to keep the world and the weather out, making his own weathery world inside; that’s the trouble with the country: there’s too much public world between private ones. And living in your own private, four-walled world as exclusively as possible isn’t escapism, I’m sure; it isn’t the Ivory Tower, and, even if it were, you secluded in your Tower know and learn more of the world outside than the outside-man who is mixed up so personally and inextricably with the mud and the unlovely people – (sorry, old Christian) – and the four bloody muddy winds.

I was in London for just over a week, and the same things happened there that always happen: I kept roughly a half of my appointments, met half the people I wanted to, met lots of other people, desirable and otherwise, and fully lived up to the conventions of Life No. 13: promiscuity, booze, coloured shirts, too much talk, too little work. I had Nights Out with those I always have Nights Out with: Porteous, Cameron, Blakeston, Grigson, and old Bill Empson and all – (Empson, by the way, has been very kind to me in print, in a review of the Faber anthology, saying, quite incorrectly, though than which etc, there could be nothing nicer for my momentary vanity, that little or nothing of importance, except for Owen and Eliot, comes between Eliot and ME. Ho! Ha!) Also I had lunch with Pope Eliot, as I said I would have; he was charming, a great man, I think, utterly unaffected; I had a spot of rheumatism that day, and nearly the whole time was spent in discussing various methods of curing it, (‘I think it was in 1927 I had my worst bout, and I tried Easu Ointment’ etc). I left London with Life No. Thirteen’s headache, liver, and general seediness, and have by this time thoroughly recovered.

Polgigga is a tiny place two miles or less from Land’s End and very near Penzance and Mousehole (really the loveliest village in England). We live here in a cottage in a field, with a garden full of ferrets and bees. Every time you go to the garden lavatory you are in danger of being stung or bitten. My hostess, or what you like, has unfortunately read too many books of psychology, and talks about my ego over breakfast; her conversation is littered with phrases like narcissist fixation and homosexual transference; she is a very simple person who tries to cure her simplicity by a science which, in its turn, tries to cure the disease it suffers from. I don’t think that’s my phrase, but here in this Freudian house, it’s truer than hell. One day, though never in a letter, I must tell you the whole silly, strange story behind all this — this most irregular, unequal Cornwall partner-ship. I don’t think for a moment that you’ll enjoy it, and I know that you’ll agree with me how wrong, if there can be any values here, I was to begin it. But I shall tell you, probably when I see you in the summer — a summer I’m looking forward to a lot. The one thing that’s saving me, I mean, not from any melodramatic issues, but just from sheer unhappiness — is lots and lots of work. I’m half way through another story, and have more or less finished a poem which I want to send you when I’m better pleased with it. But here again I’m not free; perhaps, as you said once, I should stop writing altogether for some time; now I’m almost afraid of all the once-necessary artifices and obscurities, and can’t, for the life or the death of me, get any real liberation, any diffusion or dilution or anything, into the churning bulk of the words; I seem, more than ever, to be tightly packing away everything I have and know into a mad-doctor’s bag, and then locking it up; all you can see is the bag, all you can know is that it’s full to the clasp, all you have to trust is that the invisible and intangible things packed away are—if they could only be seen and touched—worth quite a lot. I don’t really know why I should be unloading any of this on you, and probably boring you — no, that’s wrong, you couldn’t be one of the bored ones of the world — at the same time. But you are— even if only momentarily—the one happy person I know, the one who, contrary to facts and, in a certain way, to circumstances seems to be almost entirely uncomplicated: not, either, the uncomplication of a beginning person, but that of a person who has worked through all the beginnings and finds himself a new beginning in the middle— I hope, for your today’s happiness, — a beginning at the end. That’s not clear, of course. You might, and would, I know, if you could, help me by talking to me. I don’t fear— we talked about it, do you remember—any sudden cessation or drying-up, any coming to the end, any (sentimentally speaking) putting out of the fires; what I do fear is an ingrowing, the impulse growing like a toenail into the artifice. Talk to me about it will you— it’s probably a terrible task I’m trying to drag you into — in any way, any words. And tell me what you’re doing and writing.

I’ll write you again soon, a clearer letter, less face-in-the-earth, less eye-in-a-sling.

Yours always,

Dylan
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Dylan Thomas was a Welsh writer and poet.