Puking Abadan: Dylan Thomas in Iran
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In the winter of 1951, lost and far from home, Dylan Thomas wrote a despairing letter to his lover, the American journalist Pearl Kazin:
I am writing this in a tasty, stifflipped, liverish, British Guest House in puking Abadan on, as you bloody well know, the foul blue boiling Persian buggering Gulf.
What he was doing there in the Persian buggering Gulf he hardly seemed to know. He had ostensibly accepted a commission from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) to write a script for a promotional film. In other words, a puff piece. He wasn’t really up for the trip. At home, his life was a mess, beset by debts and marital calamities, but the pay proved irresistible: £250, with expenses on top.
Thomas’s Iranian journey is by no means an unknown episode in his life. It’s the subject of an exceptional short documentary by the filmmaker Nariman Massoumi, and his biographers almost always mention the visit, if only briefly, treating it as a curious footnote to his fabled American tours, or else placing it in the context of his disintegrating marriage. He spends much of his letters from Iran begging his wife Caitlin Thomas to forgive his various infidelities, of which the relationship with Kazin was the most damaging. (The dispatch from the ‘liverish’ guesthouse, the last known letter between them, was Dylan’s attempt to break off the affair for good.) What’s sometimes lost in this personal story is that he had arrived in Iran at an extraordinary time, a period of high intrigue not only in the country’s history but in the wider drama of the twentieth century. Mohammad Mosaddegh, the popular Iranian prime minister, was preparing to nationalise the oil industry, wresting it from British control. The reaction in London was one of plum-faced fury. A two-year crisis followed, marked by sabotage, assassinations, economic embargoes, covert operations, influence campaigns and threats against the Mosaddegh government, culminating in a joint MI6-CIA coup d’état in August 1953 to depose him.
Iran is no more than the backdrop to his private pain.
Thomas turns up in this crucible, largely oblivious, just as it’s about to crack. His journey begins in Tehran, but he’s too lovesick, in his first letter to Caitlin, to express much interest in the capital, ‘which, at a quick look, seems depressing and half-made’. His second impression doesn’t much improve. He wants to ‘know nothing of ugly, dirty, dinning Tehran with mosques and sores and disease and Cadillacs’. He is bored and distracted and disconsolate. There is nothing to do, he tells Caitlin, except to wake up every day before dawn ‘in this great undersea bedroom under snow-mountains, and turn the echoes of your voice over and over in the dark’. Iran is no more than the backdrop to his private pain. Only the Grand Bazaar impresses him, ‘smelling of incense and carpets and food and poverty’, a place straight out of books and films, busy with merchants ‘haggling and cursing and grinning’ while veiled women trawl the passageways ‘with only their eyes showing through tattered, dirty, cobble-trailing thin black sack-wraps’.
These are stock visions from the Middle East of the mind – he admits as much – but I’m not one to begrudge a traveller the thrill of oriental fantasy, especially not a romantic like Thomas, a poet of image and sound and lyrical shock, scavenging everywhere for enchantment. Besides, if he’s struggling to get through his days, if he’s struggling to perceive much beyond the surface of things, it’s because the legendary drinker was not only heartbroken but missing his fix. ‘In four days I have had eight pints of beer: all lager. I love you, I love you in this dry city. I love you everywhere.’ (Defensive on Thomas’s behalf, I had set out to write this entire essay without mentioning his drinking, but the natural comedy of that sentence thwarted me early on. It contains what Rowan Williams called his ‘genius for self-parody’, an endearing counterweight to his melodrama.) He writes Caitlin a third consecutive letter, unsure if the others have arrived. From Tehran he travels to Abadan on the Persian Gulf, a gruesome day-and-night rail journey in the heat, but if only she would love him again, he would ‘travel a thousand hours on the roof of the train’. He’s desperate, he’s grovelling, he’s panting at her feet – these are the terroristic last days of a fading love. If you leave me, he tells her, ‘I shall not kill myself: I shall die.’
The response, finally, was devastating. Caitlin dismissed his ‘slop bucket douche’ of a letter and told a friend she was done with him forever. When Dylan hears this, the physical and social reality of Iran recedes even further from view. ‘I am only alone in an unknown room in a strange town in a benighted country, without any pretences and crying like a fool.’ If you’ve experienced something similar in your own life, you might be tempted to forgive how little he seems to grasp of the grand-historical moment he finds himself in. But on the streets outside his window, the ground was shifting. Only weeks later, Mosaddegh delivered on his ambitions to nationalise the Oil Company, and the ghosts at MI6 drew up their battle plans. It was a matter of resisting ‘the law of gangsters’, wrote the Daily Express. ‘If Britain gives in to the Persians, then the time is near when we give in to the Egyptians and hand to them the Suez Canal – and Sudan. If we bow to Tehran, we bow to Baghdad later.’
Until then, the government and its business partners had been accustomed to astronomical economic concessions in their favour. There was, for example, the short-lived Reuter concession of 1872, which granted almost total control of Iran’s industrial and mineral resources to a single British banker. According to Lord Curzon, the soon-to-be viceroy of India who knew one or two things about the art of imperial looting, the agreement was the ‘most complete and extraordinary surrender […] that has probably ever been dreamed of’ by one nation to another. Thirty years later, in 1901, the two countries signed a new deal entitling Britain to 84 per cent of Iran’s oil profits, though in reality the share was even greater, thanks to a crude bit of semantic trickery. Profit – what does the word really mean, anyway? How does one calculate it? That was up to the accountants at the Oil Company and their colleagues in Whitehall, who shifted millions of barrels to the Royal Navy at little more than wholesale prices and therefore, strictly speaking, at very little profit. It was effective; during the First World War, Iran received less than a third of what it was officially owed, and it wasn’t owed an awful lot. In 1933, determined to tear up the concession, Reza Shah Pahlavi fought to lower the British cut to 80 per cent – still the lion’s share of the lion’s share – based this time not on profit but on total tonnage, a metric not quite so vulnerable to philosophical speculation. The price of this minor improvement was a thirty-two-year extension of Iran’s contractual servitude. Still, many in London considered the new agreement unnecessarily charitable. ‘I felt we had been pretty well-plucked,’ complained the chief British negotiator.
There is no mention of Mosaddegh’s name in the poet’s correspondence, before or after his winter in Iran.
This was less than twenty years before Mosaddegh’s dream of total national sovereignty. So you can imagine the collective scoff in Britain in 1951, aggravated this time by the fear of imperial decline. With India newly independent, the crown jewel of the shrinking empire was now the vast glimmering oil refinery in Abadan. The gas flares burning in the fields were the flickering torches of Britain’s global power, and the life support of its fragile postwar economy. Neither Clement Attlee’s government nor the aggressive Conservative one that followed felt they could afford to lose it. A raging Herbert Morrison, the Labour foreign secretary, had to be talked down from a full-scale invasion of southern Iran. Churchill considered Mosaddegh to be actually insane; there was no clearer sign of madness, he thought, than to confront British interests so brazenly. More than anything, Churchill was anxious at the idea of another Gandhi emerging in the Third World, a man to whom Mosaddegh was often compared. During the crisis, as the Iranian prime minister pressed his country’s cause at the UN, he had become one of the most famous men on earth, an anti colonial hero, a hypochondriac with seemingly limitless energy, whose long, sallow, gaunt face haunted the halls of British officialdom the world over. What might that face inspire elsewhere in the restless colonies? What might be done in his name?
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Thomas shows no awareness of these tensions when writing to Caitlin. Of course this doesn’t tell us much in itself. A love letter – a pleading one, no less – is hardly the place for a report on the fraught state of oil commodities in the Persian Gulf. But there is no mention of Mosaddegh’s name elsewhere in the poet’s correspondence, before or after his winter in Iran.
The best evidence for his general ignorance of the country lies in the memoirs of Ebrahim Golestan, the prominent Iranian filmmaker and writer, who remembers meeting Thomas at the AIOC headquarters in Abadan. It’s an awkward encounter, full of stilted silence and mutual suspicion. ‘The guest was in another world,’ Golestan wrote of the ‘beer-bloated’ Welshman. ‘He might not at that moment have known what corner of the world he was in, or was he thirsty, or hot.’ Over a meal at the company restaurant, the conversation turns to wine, the Norman Conquest, Chaucer, Hafez. ‘Hafez?’ Thomas asks. ‘I haven’t heard of him.’ Nor, apparently, was he familiar with Shiraz, the sumptuous city in southern Iran where the poet lived and died. Now it’s always been part of Thomas’s popular appeal that he wears his erudition lightly on the page, rarely scholastic in his allusions; one needs no classical education to love his songfulness, his difficulty, the sheer sonic charge of his lovelorn voice. But it’s nonetheless surprising that he had never heard of Hafez or his famous city, the diamond heart of the Persianate world. The news certainly confounds a cosmopolitan like Golestan, who only annoys his guest by quoting Shakespeare and reciting fragments of Thomas’s own poems back at him:
The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.
Golestan delivers these lines off the cuff, in English, when they first meet. Thomas appears so embarrassed by this, almost hurt, that Golestan feels compelled to say sorry. ‘What was I apologizing for? That I had, with his poetry, surprised him in a strange land?’ Truth be told, Thomas had never been comfortable around intellectuals. He sometimes played a winking game of onedownmanship with them, feigning ignorance about important literary figures and movements, especially those that might have influenced him (Gerard Manley Hopkins, say, or surrealism). The point was to feed the mill of his own legend – the genius who left school at sixteen and burst onto the scene ready-made. Whether he was doing it with Golestan on this occasion, dumbing himself down for effect, I can’t say. In any case, Thomas cuts a nervous and insular figure in Golestan’s eyes, and their encounter burnishes the claim that the visitor had, at best, a limited understanding of the emergent crisis in Iran at the time.
A broader question: how political was Thomas – the poet, the man? It’s noteworthy that Golestan had memorised ‘The hand that signed the paper’, a rare example of an explicitly political Thomas poem. Written in 1933 when he was still in his teens, it was dedicated to his mentor, a Marxist by the wonderfully Pynchonesque name of Bert Trick. Their relationship was a formative one for the young Dylan. Years later, wandering the snow-tossed ruins of Swansea after the Blitz, he would think back warmly on his old friend Bert ranting in the back of his grocer’s shop, where he ‘threatened the annihilation of the ruling classes over sandwiches and jelly and blancmange.’ Thomas emerged from this kitchen-counter education as a fierce anti-Fascist and an unambiguous socialist, advocating in one letter for the confiscation of private property by force, should peaceful revolution fail at the ballot box. But he never joined the Communist Party, and unlike many poets of his generation, he didn’t get the appeal of walking in the unlit and increasingly mildewed reaches of Auden’s political shadow.
I’ve never bought the idea that Thomas was naïve, or that he lost interest in politics.
This sketch of his youth is undisputed. There are two main views, however, of Thomas’s politics as a whole. The first acknowledges his baptism in the radical waters of Depression-era Swansea – which included a fracas with Oswald Mosley’s thugs when the British Union of Fascists swept into town for a rally – but insists that his interest in revolutionary politics faded in the forties, especially after the war, leaving almost no trace in his work. The second is more patronising, allowing this time that Thomas was a left winger until the end, but that he was the smallest of small-c communists, sentimental and high-minded, vibes-based, naïve, resistant to a serious theory of change. His American promoter John Malcolm Brinnin put it in these mortifying terms: ‘His socialism was basically Tolstoyan, the attempt of the spiritual aristocrat to hold in one embrace the good heart of mankind, a gesture and a purpose uncontaminated by the realpolitik of the twentieth century.’
Should we believe him? It’s not unusual for promoters and agents and managers to think of their artist clients as essentially idiots. Sometimes they are right, at least when it comes to moneymaking. Indeed Dylan’s bank account was a sieve from beginning to end; that’s why he was in Iran in the first place carrying out less-than-noble work for the AIOC. But I’ve never bought the idea that Thomas was naïve, or that he lost interest in politics. Read his prose work, especially his scripts for television and film, and you’ll discover a consistently social writer with a much more sophisticated grasp of political theory than he is given credit for. Besides, if there was something untutored about his worldview (to use a softer word), it was a quality that worked to his advantage as an artist. It spared him the self-consciousness that has troubled many Welsh writers in English before and since – the need to prove or justify yourself to your Welsh-speaking compatriots, the discomfort with hybridity. I find Thomas to be delightfully unbothered by these issues. Given his notorious excess and early death, he is rarely invoked as a model for living, even among poets, but if there is one way we might wish to emulate him today, it’s the ease, the elegance, with which he resisted the traps of identity. He never agonised over his Welshness, the tedious am I-this-or-am-I-that see-saw of the self. (I say this not in glib contempt of that question but as someone who, despite my every effort, has failed to transcend it in my own life.) He made no apologies for his lack of Welsh, nor for his love of English, which for him was less the language of Shakespeare than the language of Joyce. His anti-nationalism made no exception for Wales, even as he treasured the landscapes of his childhood and the hills around his home in Laugharne. At the same time he never sought to conform to the university-educated tastes of literary London, whose lesser green-eyed talents sometimes sneered at the provincial Swansea Jack behind his back. He admired Auden, yes, but not without qualification, and he never abandoned the bardic flair of the Welsh poetic tradition, or its disciplined attention to form. The result was a singular mixed style that electrified the general public but often irritated the intellectuals either side of the border. Plaid Cymru’s co-founder Saunders Lewis said of the ‘Anglo-Welsh’ Thomas that ‘there is nothing hyphenated about him – he belongs to the English.’ By the fifties, the ‘Movement’ poets in England had developed a bubonic aversion to the romantic and the abstract, and could only read a poem like ‘Fern Hill’ by holding their noses. Larkin was an exception, a crypto-admirer, but this was not something he could easily admit in the company of his peers, especially not his friend Kingsley Amis, who was, in the words of John Goodby, ‘an obsessive and life-long Thomas-hater’.
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In his letters from Iran, Thomas shows his many faces. There is the mushy-hearted spiritual aristocrat Brinnin saw in him, a poet whose political attitudes were ‘unsupported by knowledge, almost in defiance of knowledge’. His general disinterest in Iran corroborates this, marital distress notwithstanding, and it’s hard to deny that his pitying descriptions of the poor have a lordish European condescension about them. But there is also the Anglo-Welsh outsider, the astute social observer with a profound sympathy for the Iranian workers exploited by the Oil Company. His disdain for the ‘horrible oil-men’ was genuine and visceral, as was his indignant judgement on the emptiness of British life in Abadan. The AIOC had hoped Thomas would give them a fantasy of eternal Albion – Burns suppers, Welsh festivals, cricket on the green. Instead, he wrote of seething and repressed young bachelors who ‘snap in the heat of their ingrowing sex’ and age at double-speed under the sun as they ‘chainsmoke damp hanging fags, scream blue on arak, toss themselves trembly all sleepless night’. They lust after ‘wetmouthed Persian girls from the bazaar’ until they are shipped back to Britain, ‘packed full with shame and penicillin’. Those who stay dream of ‘gay wonderful London so white-skinned and willing’. Meanwhile, looming over them is the largest refinery anywhere on earth:
Now there is a huge, tubed town, streamlined and reeking new: a kind of cinema organ of a town, with its petrified refinery pipes playing, all oily day, on the bank of the boiling river. […] The waste oil burns, night and day, at the top of thin chimneys: little flags of smelly fire.
At night, Abadan Refinery is beautiful: lost, violet souls float and crackle in a bubble and green-hot hubbub; puce, ectoplastic clouds go sultry over the boilers, and suddenly the sky’s on fire like a dry blue bush.
This is writing up there with the very best cyberpunk nightmares. The dystopia, for Thomas, is the corrupting, hollow life of the colonial extractor – isolated, laying siege to oneself, degraded in the alien heat, fearful and alone and oversexed, so divorced from the gut-centre of the human good that the main hobby on offer involves ‘running down the Persian wops’ who live in shantytowns either side of the tubed fortress. ‘A community lives at the end of a pipe-line,’ Thomas sneers. I don’t think it’s anachronistic to say he is pre-empting here how suspect ‘community’ sounds to us today, a pet buzzword for many a glacier-blasting corporation on the S&P 500. British Abadan is simply not a real place. ‘People are there because oil is. Oil is first. Oil is all. People, exiled, come a long way afterwards in this dusty sun-fry.’
These are hardly the insights of a peace-and-love ditz, a proto-hippie, as Brinnin styled him. Thomas was also perfectly aware of his ambivalent role as a propagandist. After all, he had accepted the pay day from the AIOC. On his return to Wales, he acknowledged that he had been sent to puking Abadan ‘to show how beautiful Persia is and how little as a mouse and gentle is the influence there of that Company: my job was to help pour water on troubled oil.’ And he understood that, with Britain now pressing its nose to the glass on the wrong side of the Petroleum shop window, any further assignments would require him ‘to show now, suddenly, how beastly Persia is and how grandly irreplaceable is that thundering Company.’
Some readers might be surprised to know that across Iran it is Britain and not the United States that provokes the most acid resentment.
Not that there was any chance of a second gig. He never delivered the initial filmscript, and the only public work that came of his Iranian travels was the short BBC radio broadcast Persian Oil. Heavily adapted from his letters, it’s a blurry, guilt-ridden, wounded vision of poverty and disgraced wealth. Here and there his lyricism overheats in the late February sun of the Persian Gulf, already more intense than most Swansea summers. He is breaking down and anticipating, correctly, that his marriage will never recover. But he sees Abadan clearly through the mist of his foul mood, so plainly contemptuous of the British claim on Iran that the BBC censored what he could say. Still, the broadcast ends with the most direct political language Thomas ever delivered on air. ‘The rich are rich. The oil’s oily. And the poor are waiting.’
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Some readers might be surprised to know that across Iran it is Britain and not the United States that provokes the most acid resentment. In the Iranian collective imagination, the UK government is the Little Satan in size only, but in reach, ambition and cunning much greater than its American cousin. Iranians are among the last people on earth, alongside a dwindling number of Russians, who still believe in British power and competency, in spite of all recent evidence otherwise. It’s the British neck that turns the American head, or so the saying goes. Throughout his reign, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was himself convinced that Britain could depose him at any moment, just as they had done with his father in the forties. (Indeed he implied as much in his memoirs after the 1979 revolution, claiming that British intelligence had orchestrated Khomeini’s rise, a theory widely shared by Iranian monarchists today.) That Britain is itself barely sovereign now, that its foreign policy takes shape not in London but in Washington, that Britain has reduced itself to a state of abject vassalage before the whims of the White House and the might of American finance – would it almost sadden Iranians to know it? Would they lament Britain’s enfeeblement like a nostalgic hero who, having triumphed over his nemesis at last, begins to miss him?
The answer is obviously no, given that the UK is an active participant in the ongoing illegal war of aggression against Iran today, with RAF Fairford acting as an indispensable forward base for American bombing raids. A friend of mine in Wiltshire told me that, in March, B-1 Lancers were flying over her house every day. And unlike France or Spain, we are apparently powerless to say no. Keir Starmer’s attempt to stop the US military using the base lasted less than a full weekend. Andy Burnham dropped the pretence entirely and granted permission before he’d even unpacked his bags in Downing Street. It’s as if our leaders are intent on validating Gore Vidal’s quip that this green and pleasant land is in fact little more than a giant American aircraft carrier in the North Atlantic.
The ‘special relationship’ wasn’t quite so one-sided when Dylan Thomas visited the Persian Gulf, but so much else remains the same: the immiserating sanctions, the naval blockade, the threat of invasion from the south, the fight for oil and the timeless claim that Iranians are irrational for objecting. ‘They’re cuckoo. There’s something wrong with these people,’ said Donald Trump at a recent NATO summit. In 1951, in more ornate style, The Observer called Mosaddegh ‘impervious to common sense’ and ‘a confused, bewildered and desperately short-sighted man with only one political idea in his gigantic head’. That one idea was national independence. It’s an idea that Iranians have refused to give up.
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Kasra Lang is a writer from London. His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books and other publications.
Image credit: New Directions Publishing Corp.
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