Pinks #6: The Remotest Miserable Duchy

How Dylan Thomas erased his girlfriend / How W.H. Auden was like weather

Anyone with £7-10,000 to spare this week has the opportunity to snap up a prime metaphor for how male writers have casually — and also, in this case, literally — erased their female peers.

Christie’s, the London auction house, is offering for sale a first edition of Dylan Thomas’s first book, 18 Poems (1934), from the rare book collection of the late Rolling Stones drummer, Charlie Watts.

The online description reads as follows:

An authorial inscription in ink on the front pastedown, crossed through in ink and pencil, presents this copy to Thomas’s first serious girlfriend, the writer Pamela Hansford Johnson, whom he came close to marrying: “To Pamela who knows very well the things I’ll suggest if she’s going to write on the front of this pawky book”. Another authorial inscription, in pencil, records this as “My Own Copy”, before a final pencil note, “Given to Emily in 1937”, points to its presentation to another of the poet’s romantic associations, the American writer Emily Homes Coleman.

Enough said, maybe. But it seems only fair to give Johnson — who admired and encouraged these early poems — the last word on what led to the return of the book. From her memoirs, Important to Me: Personalia (1974):

Dylan was often in London, and things seemed well between us. Then he and two friends acquired a one-room flat in Finborough Road, between Chelsea and Fulham. They begged whatever furniture I could spare and I did my best. Divans. The odd chair. A dozen yellow dusters. They would not let me see the result until they were thoroughly moved in.

Then I did go to see them. They had reached a peak of artistic romanticism. […] The dusters, for decorative purposes, adorned the walls. They greeted me uproariously; and at one I knew I was not wanted. I was no longer of their kind. That I had written a successful book made it, for Dylan, worse; like Scott Fitzgerald, I don’t think he wanted another writer in the family.

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This Friday, 29th September, is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of W.H. Auden. A touching account of the moment appears in the Recollections (1984) of Geoffrey Grigson, a writer of the same generation. Grigson was an early supporter of Dylan Thomas who later took against him, but he admired Auden to the end. His description of publishing Auden’s poems in his Thirties magazine, New Verse, is beautifully fresh:

They came on half sheets of notepaper, on long sheets of lined foolscap, in that writing an airborne daddy-longlegs might have managed with one dangling leg, sometimes in pencil, sometimes smudged and still less easy to decipher. They had to be typed before they went to the printer, and in the act of typing each poem established itself. It was rather like old-fashioned developing in the dark-room, but more certain, more exciting.

Here is the moment when he learned that there would be no more:

I pushed open a neighbour’s door, on a late September evening in 1973 and she said “You’ve heard the news — Auden is dead.” A cold wind blew in at that moment on the warmth that had been for me and so many others as well, part of the weather of a lifetime.

Late September is usually when, in England, the weather turns cold for the rest of the year. Grigson’s use of the actual weather as a metaphor, though, feels distinctly Audenesque.

Auden’s famous elegy for W.B. Yeats, who died on 28th January 1939, begins: “He disappeared in the dead of winter”, and elaborates, mock-scientifically:

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day

Less well-known is the elegy that Auden wrote for Sigmund Freud, who died on 23rd September 1939. For me, it is the more subtle and touching poem, perhaps because it is so admiring yet muted in its tone, paying tribute to a writer who was “like weather” in the sense that Grigson meant of his hero — an imaginative atmosphere, a way of seeing the world:

NOTES

You can read the whole of Auden’s elegy for Freud here: https://poets.org/poem/memory-sigmund-freud