[...]

What is the metre of the dictionary?
The size of genesis? The short spark’s gender?
Shade without shape? The shape of the Pharaohs echo?
(My shape of age nagging the wounded whisper.)

Thomas, ‘Alterwise by Owl Light’ (1946)

(Thomas, reading ‘In My Craft or Sullen Art,’ 1946.)


What happens when you lose something before you are ready to leave it? A form is stopped short; a life ends, ‘grotesquely’, at St Vincent’s hospital in New York; a Play for Voices is cut off before it is really finished; a few too many futures wink out of existence. 
        When the poet and professional enfant terrible Dylan Thomas died, aged 39, on the 9th November 1953, ‘a large number of people’—says Geoffrey Moore—‘discovered that they had a national poet.’ That they had had a national poet. And maybe preferred them dead. Sealed under the uncertain dignity of a death mask, Thomas’s Collected Poems was no longer an instalment but a promise. ‘Only with death does the writer cease to be an obstacle to himself,’ in Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s sombre phrase, and from that November 9th Thomas could at last be depended on for the fact of his death. For the first time in his life [death?] afterlife he could be relied upon, by all his friends, lovers, wives, employers, debtors, creditors, readers, and critics, to be dead, to stay still, and his brilliant, fireworkish body of work, with its staggeringly evasive genius, could be neatly plotted down onto the chart of tragedy. Finally it seemed so easy to explain. Comets burn themselves out with brightness. What a relief. 


*                *                *


This is how the last chapter of my PhD starts started. Or pretty much, with more footnotes, less exhaustion; still, then, with the vestiges of academic style. The bones are the same though—Thomas’s premature death, the notes from critics, the quotes forming the beginning of a great raggedy spine, the fossil layer along which I would lay the trail of my chapter. 
        I have been trying to write this essay—this one, now, the one you’re reading, and not the dead-end chapter of my deadened thesis—for nearly seven years. It started as a paper I gave at a symposium on Flotsam and Jetsam in July 2019 when I was the most hungover I have ever been, before or since, and was called ‘Lists, beginnings, kitsch, prose-rhymes, ghosts, drafts, mincemeat, and dead things in Under Milk Wood.’ Or maybe parts of it started before that, in the second-year dissertation I wrote as an undergraduate, on Dylan Thomas’s ‘sea-realism.’ 
        (And, really, it started when I read the first page and a half of Under Milk Wood, nine years old, suddenly delighted that this register of sentence could exist, outraged that no adult had thought to mention it before.) 
        After the symposium, I pushed the text of my paper out of sight to make room for more pressing or doable work. It would bob up in the holidays, eccentric and unmanageable. I was determined to make good on its madcap premise, to recover sunk costs, to recycle each scrap of waste, to exploit its capacious plasticity. I tried a few re-writes, each time abortively, always giving up halfway through. It was only last year I thought I had finally done it, hammering it into stern academic shape, put together as an article on ‘Nairn’s Llareggub: Under Milk Wood, reality, Mincemeat.’ I sent it to the most prestigious journal I knew and they didn’t want it, so I considered it a failure. The article was too stitched together, too full, too contradictory. An emblem of pure burn-out, ambitiously flambéed. They were right. Only now—last week, as I write this, in January—does it occur to me that I might write it how I want. An essay that won’t work within the bounds of an article shouldn’t keep within the bounds of academic style, either. So: one more time without footnotes. No fat little platform for the essay to tread its line on. No crawl space below the floorboards, ticking with Facts. No ocean floor.


*                *                *


It is a kind of cannibalism, this carving up of one’s old work in order to re-use it or resolve it into a ‘new’ piece. What a religion of leftovers: shameful, anxious, compulsive, and resourceful, hungry and unable to shift a certain critical appetite. I drag the same old ideas back together in a revised shape, and pray no-one will see the sutures, bleedingly obvious to their author; I dread falling into the ‘sober madness’ that William Hazlitt observes of ‘People with One Idea’ (1822), ‘teasing you to death’ with their singular subject, ‘wearing the Categories’ of my obsession ‘round his my neck like a pearl chain,’ worn beyond charm or lustre. 
        I have practiced this kind of cannibalism in my prose for a while now, flensing the bones of old essays for material, probably as a response to burn-out and exhaustion and an inability to summon the energy for Something New. It is a doomed enterprise, in this sense. How could I be new about something I have known for so long? ‘The thing about cannibalism,’ a friend reminds me, ‘is that it’s not productive.’ Or, it may not be productive, but it is perversely nourishing. Why, after all, do I call it cannibalism and not recycling? Aside from cannibalism’s uncomfortable sustenance, which distinguishes it from re-use, it’s taboo in a way which feels appropriate for re-purposing old work, this being something good researchers, or innovative thinkers, are not meant to do. Cannibalism is nihilistic at worst, destructive or at least deconstructive; then again, it could possess or exercise a symbolic function (ingesting a body for power or some kind of sympathetic affinity), and—to the optimist’s eye—looks rather thrifty. Maybe it is the bitter habit of a survivor, compelled to return to the corpse for a little bit more. Sometimes it seems the only newness available to me in cannibalising old work is the novelty of assemblage, of trying to make the thoughts work in this shape, now, rather than that. 


*                *                *


But cannibalism, I think, may be a poet’s habit in particular. I have practiced it in my poetry for as long as I can remember, finding new lodges for old lines. Thomas did it, cross-borrowing between his poems, stories, broadcasts, and letters, going back and back over the course of his life. So did Sylvia Plath, another meteoric poet of the 20th century whose legacy was perhaps permanently bulldozered by criticism about her tragedy rather than her work. Plath, to Ted Hughes’s knowledge, ‘never scrapped any of her poetic efforts […] she brought every piece she worked on to some final form acceptable to her.’ This poet’s cannibalism is also self-criticism, both hopeful and ascetic, ashamed of wastefulness. It is afraid of losing (and losing control of) the remains of past labours, repeatedly attempting to justify them by means of some long-awaited, final formulation. It makes me think, too, of Plath’s raised eyebrows at her own old poem, ‘The Lady and the Earthenware Head’ ... ‘it embarrasses me now—with its ten elaborate epithets for head in five verses.’ What is the use in new words when there are old ones to hand. The past work is already there waiting for its inevitable resurrection. 
       I did not exactly learn to be a writer by reading Thomas and Plath as a teenager, but certain things—Plath’s refusal to scrap and her embarrassment over a youthful excess of synonyms, in particular—have stuck. I still think about them whenever I think about writing as a craft. Their cannibalism has been in me longer than I have been aware of what it was. In Molly Brodak’s phrase, as she reasons with or for the cannibalistic desires of a figure from her poem, ‘Mary’ : ‘Why. He could not help himself.’ I cannot help it. I cannot help that it seems to suit me to be cannibalistic about Thomas, with method in kind. 


*                *                *

My cannibalism plainly is not literal; it is not, even, of other people—a kind of autocannibalism, then, which cannot help perpetuating a wound even as it aims to finally make that wound useful or good. It amounts, maybe, to a punitive optimism, looking to find nourishment or self-renewal from the most exhausted of sources. I’m grateful, here, to Joe Moshenska and Ayesha Ramachandran’s recent work in bringing the anthropological work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro to their reading of cannibalism in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590-1596). So, the cannibal, ‘rather than being merely a trope of primitivism and savagery produced by European discourses of encounter and colonisation, embodies an alternate ontological possibility,’ which is the ‘[also violent] desire for incorporation, “to absorb the other, and in the process, to change oneself.”’ ‘Folded into the literary text’ like this, ‘cannibalism becomes a motif and a trope, a potent sign of seeking relation in sometimes unexpected places.’ There is no simple way to defang the figure of the cannibal in racist colonial legacies; Moshenka and Ramachandran, however, offer a broader vision of the cannibal’s meaning and her work. She is not merely a trope of primitivism and savagery—though she is indelibly constructed by racist and colonial forces—but also has other things to say, do and become, speaking to desire, violence, incorporation and metamorphosis. These incorporated others, in my case, would be my past selves. So, as she seeks relation in sometimes unexpected places, we might ask the cannibal whether she is lonely; what, exactly, she is looking for, or needs. A pretty unorthodox sympathy, worked to the bone. The body, or the old body of work, being the only company you find you have left. 

*                *                *


Everything, in Nora Ephron’s phrase, is copy. When you are poor and have a young family and need to sell a poem or go on the radio or tour a foreign country, you use what you know and already have. This is also, handily, the compulsion of writing, where—in Ella Risbridger’s phrase—‘we can’t help telling what happened to us.’ And still, at the same time, ‘the thing that brings us together—words, and the ordering of them—is the thing that keeps us apart.’ Art may hold a mirror up to life but we are ‘surprised when objects in the mirror may be smaller than they appear,’ when writers return to their pasts to pick over what is left there. What Thomas wrote involved the traces of his life and also had a profoundly functional relationship to the way he lived it, in that he was often strapped for cash and needed the writing to work. 
        This is a particularly alien concept to me, now, and to most other writers of my generation, for whom writing cannot be—and may never be—a vocation, offering no financial stability. Where for Thomas composing various radio broadcasts or selling poems had a strong practical application, coming back here to write this, to write anything, has a quality of futile excess, where the only reward I can hope for is my own satisfaction and consequent rest. Maybe, afterwards, the ability to start a new project, having put this one to bed. 
        What I write here is involved with the experience of finishing a thesis and finding nothing afterwards, various shades of heartbreak, a grief that shapes the world but no longer interferes with it. When I think about going back over this text again, trying to make it work, at last, because it is effort I cannot bear to let sink, I think of my own dermatillomaniac tendency to repeatedly re-open old wounds, on my body and sometimes in my life. Longing for the skin to be smooth, or for the words to be easy, steadfast against knowing better. 


*                *                *

From the moment of his death, Thomas criticism has had a weird relationship with biography. His life and correspondence are one great chain of anecdotes, too entertaining or pregnant or strange to exclude. The way Thomas’s writing resisted (and continues to successfully resist) categories—of Symbolism, Surrealism, Modernism, Apocalyptic Writing, and even of poetry, prose and drama—makes critical recourse to his biography all the more tempting, since it offers at least some kind of explanation for his general trickiness. That is, it was personal as well as professional. And Thomas’s cannibalism, for one, makes his biography particularly difficult to extricate from even fine-grained analyses of his work: names wander between short stories and various radio plays; new poems lift phrases from old ones, or do palimpsestic rewrites of the same subject. Biography (or some versions of it) seemed to offer a finality that the work itself refused to. 
        For example: Caitlin Macnamara, Thomas’s widow, travelled abroad in the wake of his death and was horrified that ‘not a soul knew, or was interested to know, about Dylan’s writing ... they knew only about his death in the newspapers, and that was the end of that.’ Her book, Leftover Life to Kill (1957), reckons with the personal reality of Thomas’s leftovers, and ‘the unforgettable arch of Dylan dwarfing us’ [his family]—and dwarfing himself with his own unwitting myth. Colleagues and critics soon helped, cleaving to the recognisable figure of the tragic poet in lieu of having to decide what to really make of him, or what he left behind. J.M. Brinnin’s Dylan Thomas in America (1955), mournful and shell-shocked, is an account of Thomas’s last American tours by the man who organised them for him. It’s a kind of aborted exorcism of guilty feeling as much as a processing of grief, where Brinnin treads determinedly around the possible admission of his responsibility for those last scenes in New York, or the acts that led to them. Jack Spicer put it more bluntly when as he recommended the book to his friend Allen Joyce: ‘Read if you haven’t Brinnen’s [sic] Dylan Thomas. The poor cat was in love with him and it’s the most painful and wonderful document written by an asshole that I’ve ever read.’ Spicer’s acerbic clear-sightedness and queer ontology skewer the strangeness of Brinnin’s book more satisfyingly than anything else I’ve read on it. In the end, Thomas’s death (like Spicer’s would be) was a horror but not quite a shock: ‘over-rehearsed and all too sudden,’ as Iain Sinclair puts it. Everyone had seen it coming, they just didn’t expect it then, or not yet. They never do.    
        In America and the afterlife, Thomas left a series of personal and cultural shocks in his wake. Elizabeth Hardwick turned her eye on him—and on Brinnin, ‘astonishing’ for his ‘wild and limitless’ devotion to Thomas, whose book ‘has, at times, almost the character of a hallucination.’ Grief is hallucinatory. Sometimes it approaches a psychotic misalignment with the world. There is a haze of cast-up, translucent veils—of regret, of horror, of denial, of tragedy, etc.—and it can become very difficult, for a while or for forever, to remember what the dead one was like. Hardwick says Thomas was ‘adored,’ ‘with a queer note of fantasy, with a baffled extravagance’ ... a poet ‘in the grand romantic style,’ ‘fantastically picturesque’ like a folly built to topple itself, and with ‘the unspoken admission that he was doomed, profoundly ill, living as a character in book.’ A character, as it would turn out, in Brinnin’s book, and in many others. Hardwick’s Thomas is so adjectival, so distractingly like something else—and then tragically, actually, not. ‘He died, grotesquely like Valentino’ is her opener (and, as Brian Dillon has pointed out, the grotesquerie is in the weird comparison rather than the death itself). She relocates her subject as soon as she looks at him. 
        ‘Like’ this, or ‘living as’ that, Thomas’s body is moved about: to the silver screen, the pages of a (cautionary?) fable, crumbling charmingly in the hollows of one of Capability Brown’s English country parks. Stupid, mindless and insensible, one question the living ask of the dead or gone is What were you like?, and none of this early biographical writing on Thomas gives us an answer. The enquiry is routed immediately by myth. Those are pearls that were his eyes… he’s over there, like this, like that. Perhaps embedding Thomas in legend seemed like a way of fixing him, or a version of him (D.G. Bridson says he ‘became as much a part of American folk-lore as the death of Billy the Kid or Jesse James’): the mourner’s doomed reflex to try to reanimate the dead.


*                *                *




(‘thgin doog taht otni eltneg og ton od’)  


‘A man who died at thirty-five thirty-nine will appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at the age of thirty-five thirty-nine’—so Walter Benjamin says. 
        From the moment he happened to die tragically or wantonly, Thomas was suddenly always doomed to do so; criticism and biography look backwards by necessity, and consequently death tints the glass they peer through. Ultimately, Thomas’s death was looming but not pre-determined, and as with many ordinary dyings he was merely subject to the un-fixed, un-fixing force of contingency. I want to think about contingency not by going over the details of Thomas’s death again, but by reviewing how we look at some of his last texts—Under Milk Wood, mainly—and the way they negotiate contingency, or how they establish a relationship (consciously or otherwise) with their own finality. ‘For us Under Milk Wood is complete; for Dylan Thomas it was not completed,’ Daniel Jones points out. The play for voices has both an is (complete, present tense) and a was (uncompleted, past tense); the reality of its having been finished off by Thomas’s death is rattled by history, when the text occasionally remembers how it wasn’t finished yet. 
        Under Milk Wood wasn’t finished, but it is made up—in part—of other, finished texts, or interwoven with concurrent projects of Thomas’s. It is cannibalised. An annotated copy of the text, pointing out every character or phrase-fragment or metrical/rhetorical tic Thomas shores up there, would be a good art project. Around the same time he was writing Under Milk Wood Thomas was also preparing a poetic ‘Prologue’ for the Collected Poems he put out with Dent in 1953. The ‘Prologue’ aimed to contain, he said, ‘references to my work, my aims, & the kind of poetry I want to write.’ It’s full of herons, speaking shells, king singsong owls moonbeaming, built ‘to the best of my love,’ and also sheltering a ‘crow black’ sea, a cast of ‘fishwife cross / Gulls, pipers, cockles, and sails.’ Where Under Milk Wood ends with ‘Milk waking Wood,’ ‘Prologue’ has the ‘world’s turning wood.’
        Thomas drags up the name of his fictional Welsh fishing village, Llareggub, from its previous lives as a recurrent preoccupation in two of his short stories from the 1930s, where, in ‘The Orchards,’ there are ‘stories of the reverend madmen in the Black Book of Llareggub’ (re-cast into a ‘White Book of Llareggub’ in Under Milk Wood) and a ‘sowfaced woman’ called Llareggub who teaches ‘the terrors of the flesh’ in ‘The Burning Baby.’ Names acquire new lives or applications, but carry the accretions of their past iterations with them, for the reader who knows Thomas too well. From one angle it seems as if the play for voices was chasing him his entire life. From the next it is a kind of fishing net, overfull from being dipped backwards into the past.
        Thomas does most of his cannibalising, though, from earlier radio plays and features, keeping a form in common. ‘Quite Early One Morning,’ written in 1945 and broadcast a year later, is what Ralph Maud calls an ‘imaginative description of New Quay,’ Thomas’s home at the time, another instance of text feeding off life and playing with the objects it places before the mirror. Objects floated in Thomas’s imagined New Quay, like ‘ferns in pots, fading photographs of the bearded censorious dead,’ bob up in Llareggub as ‘curtained fernpots’ and the ‘yellowing dickybird-watching pictures of the dead,’ handed down between texts or generations. 
        Cannibalism dovetails with resurrection here, for the characters sketched out in ‘Quite Early’ have a second life in Under Milk Wood. Among ‘miscellaneous retired sea captains’ in New Quay there is Tiny Evans, a precursor to Llareggub’s Captain Cat—they share the same old boat, the Kidwelly, and also the same dreamscape. Evans dreams of ‘dividends and bottled beer and onions,’ where Cat is haunted by the drowned, who ask after ‘fighting and onions.’ There are further resurrections: ‘The Cosy’ Miss May Hughes becomes Miss Myfanwy Price, but lends her name to Mae Rose Cottage; Parchedig Thomas Evans, ‘making morning tea,’ lends his name to Evans the Death, the undertaker, and is blent with Mr Griffiths, schoolteacher, to morph into the uxoricidal Mr Pugh. And Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, characteristically, steps orderly and fully formed between the two texts, wiping her shoes, and minding the sun does, too. 


*                *                *





But there’s another point of genesis for Under Milk Wood, in a different radio text, one that isn’t so obvious or mentioned so often. In ‘Return Journey’ (first broadcast 1947), a ‘Narrator’ Thomas returns to his native Swansea, bombed almost out of recognition, to ask after himself there, to see whether anyone remembers him. It is staggeringly melancholic, an uneasy cannibalism of biography to uncertain ends. He asks around for ‘Young Thomas,’ ‘about seventeen or eighteen’ ...

            

... and about medium height. Above medium height for Wales,
I mean, he’s five foot six and a half. Thick blubber lips; snub
nose; curly mousebrown hair; one front tooth broken after
playing a game called Cats and Dogs in the Mermaid.

There is no reason given for why the Narrator Thomas goes back to ask for himself. The double-sided reassurance of being remembered or being forgotten. As if to remind yourself that you were real, half your life ago, that other people have remembered you on your behalf, even if you yourself have forgotten. Or that you have faded from yourself, then, as the place you spent all those years has changed into a different thing entirely. And it, Swansea, has changed. ‘What’s the Three Lamps like now?’ ... the Narrator Thomas asks another customer in the hotel bar. ‘It isn’t like anything. It isn’t there. It’s nothing mun. You remember Ben Evans’s stores? It’s right next door to that. Ben Evans isn’t there either     …     [Fade].’ 
        Radio’s ease with transitions, switching places and disembodied voices, is particularly apt in this snowy landscape (it is ‘a cold white day’), where the Narrator Thomas is ‘just another snowman,’ and all purchase on geographical reference is lost, or has to be revised. The place that isn’t there anymore was next to that other place you remember, that isn’t there anymore. Thomas’s contractions are particularly rich: ‘It isn’t like anything. It isn’t there. It’s nothing’—then, ‘It’s right next door to that.’ The Three Lamps ‘isn’t’—it no longer has the present tense, not being there. But somehow, it keeps its presentness, still being ‘right next door’ to Ben Evans’s, which also isn’t there. The two exist in a state of mutual, present absence, geographies useful only to those who already remember.    
        And some people remember the Narrator Thomas—‘Lifting his ikkle elbow’ in the Three Lamps, ‘pale green’ at his first sight of a corpse, reading Ezra Pound at church ministers. A barmaid wonders, ‘what d’you want to find him for, wouldn’t touch him with a barge-pole,’ and his old schoolmaster ‘remembers him well,’ though wouldn’t recognise him now. Anecdotes, lived impressions, childhood, adolescence, and all the years are compressed into brief exchanges, with nonchalant verbal shrugs as much the matter of the Narrator Thomas’s remembrance as enthusiasm. 
        One of the longer passages of recollection comes from a Passer-By, ‘a man whose face I thought I recognised from a long time ago.’ He remembers Thomas—‘He owes me half a crown’—and recalls him ‘drinking coffee dashes and arguing the toss’ with his old, and lifelong friends, Charlie Fisher, Tom Warner and Fred Janes. 
        ‘What about?’ the Narrator Thomas asks, and then ‘And then?’—‘Is that all?’—and so on. 
        The Passer-By lists all the things he remembers young Thomas arguing about. 
        These are as follows—

...       Music    
+        poetry 
+        painting    
+        politics    
+        Einstein & Epstein    
+        Stravinsky & Greta Garbo    
+        death & religion    
+        Picasso & girls    
+        Communism    
+        symbolism    
+        Bradman    
+        Braque    
+        the Watch Committee    
+        free love    
+        free beer    
+        murder   
+        Michelangelo   
+        ping-pong   
+        ambition    
+        Sibelius    
+        girls    

+        Augustus John    
+        Emil Jannings   
+        Carnera   

+        Dracula  
+        Amy Johnson    
+        trial marriage    
+        pocket-money    
+        the Welsh sea    
+        London stars    
+        King Kong    
+        anarchy    
+        darts    
+        T.S. Eliot    
&        girls. 

It’s a list designed to be humorous, organised with a clever ear for alliterative, odd pairings: Australian cricket star Don Bradman and artist Georges Braque are unlikely bedfellows wedded through aural association, and boxer Primo Carnera is an opposite rather than apposite half-rhyme to sickly, deathly Dracula; if ‘free love’ isn’t possible, ‘free beer’ may be the next best thing. It moves me, in the way Thomas’s lists reliably do. It gives remnants a lodge, in language and maybe subsequently in memory; it creates the opportunity for narratives—all the points of origin for these things—to be reanimated from their listed traces. The list becomes a space not only where you can reverse-engineer a picture of the life or lives that left those things behind, but also establishes a future for those things as they combine in the form of the list itself, with further opportunities for new pattern-making. Who was the Thomas who talked about Garbo and Stravinsky in one breath, and where has he gone, if he ever went anywhere at all?    
        If we get an answer to this question—where young Thomas went—it does not give us much in the way of clarity, or futurity. The last person the Narrator Thomas speaks to is a Park-keeper, who ‘knew him well. I think he was happy all the time. I’ve known him by the thousands.’


*


Narrator              We had reached the last gate.
                                   Dusk drew around us and the town.
                                   I said: What has become of him now?

Park-keeper         Dead.

Narrator              The Park-keeper said ...

                                  [The park bell rings.]

Park-keeper         Dead … Dead … Dead … Dead … 
 

*


Suddenly there’s a pronounced parallel to the ending of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ (1914), with the ‘soul swoon[ing]’ and the ‘snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.’ There, Joyce’s Gabriel ‘had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead … was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence’ ... so, ‘His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.’ 
       Thomas makes a seaside snowscape of Swansea, his childhood town itself dissolved and dwindled not only by the passage of time but also by bombing; it is a post-war adjustment to Joyce’s abstracted world of memory. His repeated ‘Dead … Dead … Dead’ tolls a slow fade-out, in an echo or translation of the voice of the park bell, like Joyce’s zoom-out over all Ireland. Gabriel contemplates death, grief and forgetting, as the Narrator Thomas is confronted by his diminished or diminishing relevance to a town which no longer reliably recognises him, and whose new geography he himself does not entirely recognise, either. Thomas would have first read ‘The Dead’ in Swansea, counting ‘most of Joyce, with the exception of Ulysses’ as part of his book collection back when he was a nineteen-year-old. The effect of the parallel with Joyce—the snow, the dead—is to create a literary déja vu in the reader, which gets tangled in the déja vu which is Thomas’s engine across the entire broadcast. Of having already seen, or been seen, and only partially forgotten, before.
        There’s something so strange about the Narrator Thomas reporting the fact of his own speech, and the Park-keeper’s response (‘I said: What has become of him now?’). It furthers the forces of alienation Thomas reckons with in ‘Return Journey,’ alienated from his young self, alienated even from the self whose visit he recalls in his telling. He is recollecting the conversations that make up this radio journey backwards—the broadcast consisting only of speech and narration—even as it is a false recollection. That is, we know enough from correspondence and biography to know the Thomas remembered here by the imagined, or semi-imagined inhabitants of Swansea, is more or less the real Dylan Thomas. The subject is real, but the conversations about him are not—or, they never happened this way. Something strange, too, in the Park-keeper’s note that Thomas was ‘happy all the time’ (a cursory look through Thomas’s early letters—and his later ones—will persuade you otherwise, though I guess he may have seemed happy), and that he has ‘known him by the thousands.’ That is, between the vague attribution of happiness and the suggestion that the Park-keeper has known ‘thousands’ of Thomas—thousands of versions of a single Thomas throughout his youth, or thousands of young boys like Thomas—the impression we are left with is that, perhaps, young Thomas was not really memorable at all, or not memorable enough. When he died, all Thomas’s friends struggled to answer the question, ‘What was he like?’ but, in ‘Return Journey,’ Thomas actually reached that difficulty first; here are some imagined versions of answers, for a young version of Thomas. Where does he find himself? ‘Dead’ in memory already, or misremembered as dead, and certainly dead sooner or later—as he would be, as we will be—or indistinguishable from those already dead. 


*                *                *


But things don’t stay dead in Under Milk Wood. Or, they are found unexpectedly alive there. Under Milk Wood actually makes its start with the dead, viewed as they are from the dreams of the living. It is a text which uses resurrection (of names, characters, set-dressings, even phrase-objects) as a writerly resource, but which also makes a feature of the dead and their haunting. The effect is, in Clive Scott’s phrase, of a ‘perceptual loosening of the world,’ between dreamers and wakers, the quick and the dead, the characters who have wandered over from the last radio piece Thomas wrote, maybe leaving their old lives and selves behind there, or maybe now living in two places—two texts—at once. This makes Under Milk Wood simultaneously quite spooky—how long has that thing been there?—and cosily familiar or lived-in, as histories coagulate into surprise familiarity. 
        The first few pages of Under Milk Wood outline the sleeping village, then the dreams of its inhabitants. Captain Cat’s get the most attention, he is in the ‘Davy dark where the fish come biting out and nibble him down to his wishbone, and the long drowned nuzzle up to him.’ The dead are numbered as First Drowned, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, though they remember their names, too, and re-introduce themselves to the Captain as: Dancing Williams, Tom-Fred the donkeyman, Jonah Jarvis, Alfred Pomeroy Jones, Curley Bevan. Cat wouldn’t recognise them otherwise; Tom-Fred the donkeyman is just a ‘white bone talking,’ Curly Bevan is ‘This skull at your earhole.’ ‘This’ and ‘your’ makes him present both to Cat and to the listener-reader, who shares the Captain’s ‘you’ as she listens in her own Davy dark. And the Captain is transfigured in his sleep to join the object-remnants of his old crew, nibbled down to his ‘wishbone.’ 
        I think it is through objects that Thomas suggests we might commune with the dead; this is because we do our living through or with objects, and those objects outlast or outlive us, bearing the traces of our living, and sometimes of our subsequent deaths. These are also the things we miss when we’re dead. The drowned in Under Milk Wood ask ...


               First Drowned. How’s it above?
               Second Drowned. Is there rum and laverbread?
               Third Drowned. Bosoms and robins?
               Fourth Drowned. Concertinas?
               Fifth Drowned. Ebenezer’s bell?
               First Drowned. Fighting and onions?
               Second Drowned. And sparrows and daisies?
               Third Drowned. Tiddlers in a jamjar?
               Fourth Drowned. Buttermilk and whippets?
               Fifth Drowned. Rock-a-bye baby?
               First Drowned. Washing on the line?
               Second Drowned. And old girls in the snug?
               Third Drowned. How’s the tenors in Dowlais?
               Fourth Drowned. Who milks the cows in Maesgwyn?
               Fifth Drowned. When she smiles, is there dimples?
               First Drowned. What’s the smell of parsley?


They wonder whether what they miss so much still exists in the world of the living, and in so doing charge these everyday items with an affective, melancholic metonymy. The dead are out of time, remain out of time, and time’s passage is inscribed into these ordinary objects as they are conjured up; parsley’s sharp and irreproducible scent is longed-for enough for a lost soul to ask after it over a thousand other more conventionally emotive things. Who could forget the smell of parsley? Only the dead. I’m reminded of the list, high- and low-brow, that the Passer-By recollects of all the things young Thomas used to talk of in the pub: Stravinsky, Garbo, free love and/or beer, murder, Michelangelo, ping-pong, ambition, Sibelius, girls, pocket-money, the Welsh sea, and so on. Young Thomas is remembered via these things, and he is the organising principle behind their combination, and the memory of their being spoken about trails behind him long after he is gone. Without obvious emotional weight, the things the dead ask after make up the grain of life; contingent, fleeting or taken for granted, they become the dead’s leftovers. They are the first and last things we have, as readers, to characterise them; Curley Bevan, First Drowned, we learn, who did pawn the Ormolu clock, misses fighting, onions, washing on the line, and parsley. The Fifth Drowned wonders ‘who brings coconuts and shawls and parrots to my Gwen now?’ and asks after Ebenezer’s bell, rock-a-bye baby, and the (dimpled, un-dimpled) smiles of Gwen, or another unknown woman. 
        Thomas’s thumbnails are metonymic, combining sensory impression with skeletons for narrative: the names or nameless pronouns of the beloveds who are left behind or who move on, or the steady erosion of sense-memories which can’t be experienced again. These objects bob up in the Captain’s dreams, and then continually sink down again as questions which cannot be answered—the Captain unable to say something back to the dead, the dead unable to give these objects their proper histories—and so have no hope of retrieval. These objects are also, like Under Milk Wood itself, and the other texts Thomas left unfinished, last things by accident. Gathered from lives cut short at sea, the dead’s things are a constellation of unfinished businesses. Meanwhile the dead themselves are simultaneously reduced to things (a skull, a white bone), and characterised by the things they now lack, and which would perhaps have made them recognisable to the still-living. 


*                *                *





For it’s difficult, often, to keep up with who the drowned were. After four or six weeks at sea, Clair Wills says, ‘much of [a corpse’s] exposed flesh would have fallen away or been devoured, and the extremities are often missing […] washed by the tide against rocks, the hands, feet and head […] tend to become detached.’ In The Text of Shelley’s Death (1995), Alan Halsey’s kaleidoscopic re-tellings of Percy Shelley’s drowning, one impression of the poet’s corpse notes that ‘both the face and hands and those parts of the body not protected by the clothes had been eaten away by the fish,’ leaving him unrecognisable. Were it not for the vestiges of the ‘tall slight figure, the schoolboy double-breasted jacket of mixed cloth and nankeen trousers from Malta, and a pair of boots with white silk socks underneath.’ Ultimately Shelley’s body, Halsey writes, ‘had been completely identified by a book in one pocket, Keats’s last volume, doubled back at the Eve of St. Agnes [var. the Poem of Lamia and Isabella open in his jackett Pocket].’ The variation in Halsey’s telling as to what text, exactly, Shelley was reading last makes history flicker, but the item—the book by Keats—is what does the identifying work. Shelley’s also-drowned friend, Edward Williams, has remains ‘better dressed than the others,’ with ‘a watch and some money’ ...


... a black silk handkerchief knotted around the throat, some
shreds of linen [var. of a shirt pulled over the head as if the 
wearer had been in the act of taking it off], a sock, a boot with 
the bone of the leg and the foot in it, a shapeless mass of bones
and flesh. The limbs separated from the trunk on being touched.


At first, this corpse is ‘less certain … not known, nor recognised as that of Williams,’ until Edward Trelawney brings ‘a boot belonging to Williams. It matched.’ The body is meaningfully recovered by its still-living effects and residues, paired back against it. Halsey’s variations make room for alternate lives, and a linen shirt is animated by false, or unknown memories: of its wearer stripping, leisurely or in a panic, readying for swimming, or drowning. 
       My friend likes Keats, and knows a lot about him. I send him a photo of the paragraph I’ve just written, the one above, and he replies saying it makes the end of Shelley’s ‘Adonais’ all the more uncanny. I didn’t know ‘Adonais’ before. Looking it up, this is the part where Shelley, come to the end of his elegy on Keats, finds himself in deep water.


The breath whose might I have invok’d in song
Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar …


Shelley, my friend says, predicts his own death—and, does so while eulogising Keats, whose book he would have on his person when he died, and which would later be used to identify his corpse. Shelley’s spirit is a ‘bark,’ caught in a ‘tempest’ far from land and safety, ‘borne darkly, fearfully, afar.’ It is the myth again, of one’s death being both so loaded with circumstance it seems pre-destined, and so full of uncanny, humming contingencies it could not possibly have been planned for, or anticipated. Halsey’s book makes a project of chasing every filigreed detail of this particular myth. ‘Everybody knows the text of Shelley’s death’, he starts: ‘The painful story has been so often told and is so familiar, that it will be best narrated with the utmost brevity.’ As if. There is always room for further variation, in storytelling, and the uncertain lives of objects which can never exactly voice their own story like we can; in Shelley’s jacket, in fact, was Keats’s last volume and ‘a volume of Sophocles,’ or ... 


var. the volume of Aeschylus in one pocket and the 
copy of Keats’s poems, borrowed from Leigh Hunt and
hastily turned back at Lamia.

*

var. a small edition of Sophocles in one pocket, and Keats’ 
last volume folded back at a page of Hyperion: as if the reader, 
in the act of reading, had hastily thrust it away, so sudden was 
the squall.


Halsey’s details are impossibly fine—between Keats’ and Keats’s—and the ‘as if’ is persistent (cf. Williams’/ s ‘as if’ of stripping, above), a non-committal navigation of the instinct or urge to commit. Then, ‘Firmly clasped in the hand of Shelley when the boat went down was a copy of Aeschylus (not Keats’s poems)’, or, no, ‘Aeschylus was in his left pocket, and Keats’s last poem in his right.’ What is it for, this obsessive re-negotiation of the remains of truth, the organisation of surely sea-rotted and unidentifiable objects on the dead body of the mourned and beloved? It is as if by knowing the facts of a person, comprehensively, or knowing—even speculatively—just one more thing about them, it might generate a pathway to someone who is gone, who can no longer otherwise be reached. 


*                *                *


I have been blown off course, like Shelley. But then, so is Halsey by his own telling, in his attention to The Myth The Text of Shelley’s Death. The singularity of Halsey’s title is provocative; ‘The text of Shelley’s death,’ he notes in some concluding ‘Reversions on the Text’ (revisions on the text?), ‘unfolds out of almost at the moment it enfolds into its own contradictions,’ and the text is actually ‘the texts of Trelawney: there are eight or ten.’ Trelawney’s accounts were picked up by later tellers, among them George Barnett Smith:


Smith to whom the text owes the detail of the copy of Aeschylus
still in Shelley’s hand after eight (eight? let’s say eight) days in
the sea. Even Trelawney didn’t dare say as much—and indeed
mocked Smith for it. The detail was nevertheless entered in the
Bodleian catalogue, albeit for a copy of Sophocles.


Unlikely, we want to say after reading Wills on the state of drowned corpses, that Shelley could have been holding Aeschylus however much he loved him and possible that what remained of Shelley no longer had hands at all. 
        ‘The text,’ in other words, ‘becomes a kaleidoscope.’ One whose proliferating lens is registered at the level of Halsey’s sentences. ‘Unfolding out of almost at the moment it enfolds into its own contradictions’ plays on a text’s expansion and contraction as it lives its afterlives through its readers, flickering between different reversions. Halsey’s syntax should not work as well as it does here, and really meaning does not ‘work’ in a singular, conventional sense, but nor is the phrase broken. It is as if, in Halsey’s phrase, ‘almost’ is a place or state of being that things—the text, in this case—come out of, in order to enfold or incorporate other things; the pronoun ‘its’ floats, rendered less solid or reliable by the way the syntax throws us. The ‘its’ could be the text, but also, conceivably, the ‘almost,’ impossible to quantify but dragging spare meaning into itself, like a whirlpool. Altogether the impression is also that Halsey has forgotten to amend his own reversions, re-writing a sentence about managing the texts of Shelley’s death and leaving the sentence over-full, with both its original and revised components. Ultimately, the teller is as doomed as Shelley always is in the re-telling; the boat ‘can be salvaged but must again be wrecked,’ and ‘The teller is bound to the endless repetition of an ever-shifting story: on the afternoon of Monday, the 8th of July, Shelley and Williams, with the boy [Charles] Vivian, set sail from Leghorn.’


*                *                *


Don’t you get tired? Of waiting for the next last thing—and it will always be the real last thing, this time, I promise—dredging the sea for more dead, holding out for one last message from the departed. It is exhausting and horribly animating: the idea that the dead might still have something left to give, which might then change, even slightly, the world of the living as it goes on turning. The after-effects of Thomas’s sea-dead, the trinkets and details they ask after, are ambiguous in terms of how much weight they hold, confined as they are to dreams. In Halsey’s project, he floats the consequences of uncertainty with regards to the most minor details, as if they might also be huge. Who is to say whether or not it matters what Shelley was reading when he died. It might do. The issue of what the dead carry, and what their after effects reveal, cannot accurately be confined to pure abstraction. It has a real impact in the world. 
        1953 was the year Under Milk Wood was first performed, and Thomas died; it also saw the publication of a book called The Man Who Never Was, detailing a Second World War British military plot, Operation Mincemeat, and written by Ewen Montagu, one of its architects. With the intention of distracting Axis attention from the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943, Montagu and his colleagues co-opted the corpse of a homeless man, Glyndwr Michael, gave him a name and rank—Captain William ‘Bill’ Martin—and supplied him with false papers teasing a British invasion of Greece and Sardinia instead. They took him out to sea, and cast him just off the shores of Spain, where they knew the body would be recovered and the papers shared with German intelligence. It worked.    
        But Bill needed more than the right wrong papers; he was also carefully decorated with pieces of a life. These ‘corroborative details’ included keys, matches, bus tickets, a pencil stub, used theatre tickets, a watch, a pack of Players, a wallet, an invitation to a cabaret club, and love letters from a fiancée, Pamela, along with a bill for her engagement ring, ‘unpaid of course.’ Ben McIntyre says Bill’s staging ‘was the product of minds that had read too many romantic novels’, but I think it really demonstrates an empathetic understanding of what our lives look like and how they leave traces, and also a playful enthusiasm for reverse-engineering a certain kind of 1940s male life. Besides, you can choose to lead your life as if it were an opportunity to live out a romantic novel or two in real time; then as now, many do. 


*                *                *

     Which is not to say that minds that may have read too many romantic novels were therefore capable of writing them. Montagu admitted that ‘none of us felt up to writing the love letters,’ and instead asked ‘a girl working in one of the offices whether she could get some girl to do it.’ McIntyre reckons this was Hester Leggett, head of MI5’s secretarial unit. As if this military exercise, of making fiction happen in real life, and look like non-fiction, required a kind of method-writing. A woman’s handwriting and syntax and imagination and habits of romantic letter-writing, ingrained by gender and experience, all shored-up on a piece of paper made for drowning. A man who never was, but with a real, unconsenting dead man’s body, and the memory and labour of real women.

*                *                *

*                *                *



And doesn’t it all get rather morbid? The devotion to Thomas’s death rather than to his life and work, the sheen and fame of a corpse cleverly planted or a corpse miraculously retrieved. Death has such a draw. This may be for the reason that Michael Taussig unravels in his pilgrimage not-pilgrimage (‘I am not making a pilgrimage,’ he says) to Port Bou, where Walter Benjamin killed himself: ‘Didn’t Benjamin himself in that famous essay on the storyteller spend a good deal of time propounding the thesis that it is death that gives authority to the storyteller?’ Well, yes: ‘A man who died at thirty-five thirty-nine will appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at the age of thirty-five thirty-nine.’ Death is the proof of hand-over; the point at which it is definitely up to us to carry on, to wind up the story, and perhaps according to our own, rather than the deceased’s, wishes. 
        The aftermath of Benjamin’s death (the handling of his body and possessions) forms a weird inversion, in ways, to the organisation of Operation Mincemeat. Going through the records of the Walter Benjamin Museum in Port Bou, Taussig discovers that, upon his death, Benjamin was recorded ‘not as a Jew but as a Roman Catholic with the name of Benjamin Walter.’ Sorry. ‘Doctor Benjamin Walter, to be precise.’ Benjamin was buried as ‘a fake Christian and a body with a fake name,’ a real person faked in death, we assume accidentally. Glyndwr Michael was faked in death as Bill Martin, on purpose. And eventually buried, with full military honours, as Major William Martin, in Spain, ‘Dulce et Decorum est pro Patria Mori,’ et cetera. Except, if you’re being pedantic, the man was already dead before he could die for his country. In 1998, they added an inscription to the headstone: ‘Glyndwr Michael Served as Major William Martin,’ that ‘served’ making an uneasy pun, of both ‘undertook military service’ and ‘was used as.’ That is, we never had Major William Martin, but we made do with Glyndwr Michael instead.      
        The items retrieved from or with Bill’s body were physically real but effectively made up; Benjamin’s weren’t. Apart, that is, from the thing that wasn’t there at all: a real thing that got lost and was never found, a fabled briefcase containing a manuscript that Benjamin said ‘must be saved. It is more important than I am.’ The briefcase was never located, the nature of the manuscript unknown, so (Taussig), ‘the idea of the briefcase, the image of the briefcase—had become a stupendous relic made all the more potent by its disappearance.’ I think we are haunted either way; by the things the dead leave, and which they can’t return to, and by what they fail to leave us. In Benjamin’s case, and for Taussig, what he did leave piles up into frustration:


We note the presence of a pocket watch and chain, his nickel-
framed glasses and his pipe with its amber mouthpiece. But
what about the actual things, especially that mysterious and
irritating briefcase that seems not only more important than his
dead body but also a substitute for it, circulating lost in some
mysterious mistake of memory or in an underground archive in
Port Bou or the regional capital? We cling to the written list as if
to those actual physical things, when all around us we have
something infinitely more worthwhile; his wonderful essays
and the essays those essays have generated.


‘Worthwhile’ is the loaded word here, with its implication of longevity and capacity for generating further thought—maybe there really is only so much thinking you can do about an amber-mouthpieced pipe, and yes, it would pale in comparison anyway to Benjamin’s meditations on language, history, art, cities and people. But the briefcase, or rather the manuscript it contains, gives us pause in particular because a.) we can’t find it and b.) whatever it was, it almost certainly wasn’t finished. I wonder, then, about the unfinished text and how we categorise it according to Taussig’s binary, of Benjamin’s possessions and his thoughts. The unknown manuscript is a problem because it is both, and both absent.


*                *                *


Is Taussig implying that when it is finished, a piece of writing—a manuscript—stops being a thing and becomes an idea? An incomplete text is a discomfiting reminder of the contingency of the writer’s body, and how much depends on it still being there, or maybe just being in the right place. Dead, Douglas-Fairhurst said, the writer is ‘no longer an obstacle to himself,’ the troublesome body and its bad habits out of the way, but it was the fact of the still-living, breathing body which made that work possible, too. When we are confronted with work an author never got the chance to finish, it is a caution that writers are not just abstract, floating mental networks of poetry or philosophy. In this way, unfinished texts (like Under Milk Wood, for all we may forget it is one, like Benjamin’s lost manuscript) are counterintuitively vivid signs of life. Someone was alive here and then they weren’t. But they were alive once! The unfinished text is itself an obstacle, fleshly—or at the mercy of its author’s doomed fleshliness—and possibly messy or half-scaffolded, exposing for those who encounter it the material necessities of language, taking up ink and pages and crossings-out and re-drafts, as the text-in-progress makes its way to completion and a perceived graduation towards pure communicated thought. No, it was never just that to start with. Someone had to write it first, and we don’t always get to finish all the things we want.      
        When we encounter an unfinished text we do not always know what we are looking at; it’s not always obviously incomplete. This is true of Under Milk Wood in its published form. It’s certainly lopsided, especially when you know Thomas had further to go with it, its beginning far richer than its end, but its arc is intact, following the passage of twenty-four hours in Llareggub. But not everything Thomas left had such a completed structure, with beginning, middle and end. These texts are last things which offer a particularly stark vision of mortality, and one in particular offers an object-lesson in grief, desperation, and readerly response. Of the poems Thomas was working on when he died, one was an elegy for his father, and the irony of its remaining incomplete due to Thomas’s own death is wasted on the poet himself but not on us. In rough terza rima, it’s a poem in the wake of his famous villanelle, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night.’ The printed versions we have of it start, ‘Too proud to die, broken and blind he died / The darkest way, and did not turn away, / A cold, kind man brave in his burning pride.’ Where John Goodby includes it in his centenary edition of the collected poems, ‘Elegy’ is nineteen lines long, in six full stanzas with a spare line hanging on at the end. Except, this isn’t the only version available to readers; look in the modern New Directions edition of Thomas’s 1953 Collected Poems and you will find, as if by some bad magic, a ‘finished’ version of the poem.


*                *                *


In 1956 Thomas’s close and bereaved friend, Vernon Watkins, made an attempt to complete ‘Elegy’, composing or organising a further twenty-one lines to add to what existed of it. He had the gist of the form, after all, which projected like infinite scaffolding beyond what Thomas had managed to leave. In a note, Watkins tries to explain himself and his method: ‘Of the added lines sixteen are exactly as Dylan Thomas wrote them, and the remainder are altered only to the extent of an inversion of one or two words,’ though this is complicated by his report that Thomas ‘left sixty pages of manuscript towards the poem.’ On a practical level, then, these were last things that no sixteen lines could contain, something Watkins acknowledges but cannot fix: the lines’ order ‘might well have been different. The poem might also have been made much longer.’ Watkins moves to put an end on to something that could not naturally find one, less a suture than a cauterisation to a wound that might otherwise threaten to bleed out in ‘what ifs,’ or ‘if onlys.’
        Watkins’s extension of ‘Elegy’ poses two problems: on a practical level, he could exercise little to no certainty as to whether his organisation of Thomas’s notes was accurate or representative of what the completed poem would have been, if it could only have existed. And, on an emotional and poetical level, arranging the vestiges of notes into a form, however meticulously, cannot sample a feeling that never did or would belong to Watkins. The grief one writer feels for his parent and distils into a poem cannot be distributed to another writer for completion; it is unreproducible. Really, ‘Elegy’ in this reconstituted version becomes a sublimated elegy by Watkins for Thomas himself, an uncomfortable resurrection of a text which was cut off along with its author. 
        There is an obvious question here. Why did Watkins do this, or feel able to do this? It has an obvious answer: he was grieving. Bereavement is a condition in which you feel regularly compelled to act out: erect monuments, enact rituals. Do something real in the world to remind yourself, to remind everyone, that the loved one was real, that they were real, and now they’re dead and you still really have to deal with that. There’s another answer though, too, which answers why Watkins chose to do this with ‘Elegy’ in particular. Thomas left other incomplete poems (a variant fragment of ‘In Country Heaven’ is also included in the New Directions edition of the 1953 Collected, for instance), but this was the one Watkins fixed up. The temptation is two-fold; how darkly apt the elegiac mode is for posthumous completion, and the fact of the form. Lines of ten or eleven syllables, arranged in three-line stanzas, and in what I described earlier as ‘rough terza rima.’ The rhyme is inexact, and lacy. Excluding any internal rhymes, whose dense tapestry of noise would be impossible to spell out as simply, Thomas’s end rhymes run like this: ABA / BCD / CDE / FEF / GHG / HI ...
        Then Watkins takes over: J / IJK / AKA / LAL / AMN / MNO / POP / MAM / A. Occasionally Thomas and Watkins behave and lace their rhymes according to how it’s sort of meant to be: ABA / BCB / CDC, and so on. But generally both are messier than that, Watkins in particular wheeling back to scoop up old rhymes, organising Thomas’s lines to double-back and re-tread the same noise. Rhyme is, in its purest form, a mnemonic. I think we forget this in modern critical treatment, focusing instead on the way rhyme uses sound to establish a relation between two semantic units. But from time to time I spend an evening or a weekend or week trying to get the words of a song by heart, an activity which has made plain to me the oldest function of rhyme, which is that (at the end of a line, behaving, not repeating too often) it tells you what is coming next; the word you have to land on in a few moments’ time, and—hopefully—triggering all the other words you have to cover to get there.
        ‘Elegy’ is an act of commemoration, in that it is a sad, strange monument, and a piece of editorial effort, but it also uses—or is subject to—the memory tides of form. In that moment of handover, Watkins is able to continue threading the ends of rhyme that Thomas had left loose, finding a match for ‘before’ in ‘saw,’ and ‘sea’ in ‘he,’ keeping the weird loom weaving. Sound and rhythm lodge in the mind and pre-empt the language they are arranged into. Writing or editing it may have been a way for Watkins to remember Thomas, but also a way of trying to make a form or language remember its lost author—even filling out a form—as if it might reanimate him. If we have a form for Thomas, it seems to say, surely we won’t forget him? Or, perhaps: this is where he was, or where he was going. This is what he was like, and this is what he would have been like. 


*                *                *


And what are we like, that remember the dead? We hope they remember us, too, wherever they may be. The sea-dead of Captain Cat’s dreams recall the living well enough to ask after life’s trappings (parsley, pawned clocks, her dimples), but can find no solace in—or maybe simply cannot hear—our response. They are still dead, and the living are powerless to fix their lost wants. Towards the end of Under Milk Wood, as it was left, the dead Rosie Probert, ‘the one love of [Cat’s] sea-life that was sardined with women,’ exchanges a series of free verse addresses with Cat, ‘My honey my daddy.’ They have a sexuality that is caught up with mortality; ‘Lie down, lie easy,’ he says, ‘Let me shipwreck in your thighs.’ Cat’s desire is for coming’s little death and life’s big one, doubly figured as a shipwreck, one which would re-unite him with his ‘dead dears,’ Rosie and the shipmates and all the rest. But if Rosie remembers enough to talk with the Captain in his dreams, she is doomed to forget again:


Remember her.
She is forgetting.
The earth which filled her mouth
Is vanishing from her.
Remember me.
I have forgotten you.
I am going into the darkness of the darkness for ever.
I have forgotten that I was ever born.


This is Rosie’s speech, delivered by Rosie, but her pronouns for herself shift from third back to first person. Her body in its grave is unable to possess its own soil as she dissipates and is dispersed into dream and fragmented recollection. There’s even a shadow of ‘Elegy,’ but a different version of it this time: the one Goodby includes in his centenary edition of Thomas’s poems. There, the last two lines are: ‘Go calm to your crucifixed hill, I told // The air that drew away from him.’ The air abandons Thomas’s dying father in his last breaths as earth vanishes, like a strange inverted last breath, from Rosie’s mouth.     
        Animate in the Captain’s dreams, the dead are still fixed in a prism, able perhaps to ask questions but never to meaningfully receive answers to them. In the last minutes of the play for voices, Cat sleeps once more and meets again with Dancing Williams (‘Still dancing’), Jonah Jarvis (‘Still’), Curly Bevan’s skull, and Rosie, who ‘has forgotten dying.’ Thomas puns on still, to mean both continuous and motionless, making ‘still dancing’ eerie in its frozen tableau. And Rosie, forgetting the living, has forgotten death too, in a paradise of no knowledge at all. ‘Look,’ says a child to her mother as they pass by below his window: ‘Captain Cat is crying.’ 


*                *                *


Most of Under Milk Wood is not about the dead. It is about the living, and what they fill their lives with, in a day, in the small fictional fishing village of Llareggub. But the function of Thomas’s fluid prose is to incorporate the voices and wants of the dead into the tapestry of the still-living, flickering between dreams, songs, dialogue and narration. The text is a place where the dead are still remembered, and can still speak, even if they can’t always be answered. And, peopled by the restless dead, Under Milk Wood is a play-text animated by its own author’s death, left warped and rushed and populated by a host of what-ifs. What further dreams or visitations by the dead could have been elaborated on, what other drinking or love songs, what other gossip, what other daydreams of young girls, what other corner shops humming with things. It is an extraordinarily open play. Open to one or innumerable voices, varied stagings, simple on its surface but melancholic and distorted in its depths, suitable for practically all ages and most reading abilities, and also open I think in the sense that it was not, is not finished. 
        But the play for voices has another power, besides moving or enchanting you or weaving the living and the dead; it feels real. It is vivid in the way a very, very bright day is vivid, when perhaps you are by some body of water and can actually perceive every angle produced by the surface of the river glittering and see and hear each individual leaf of the willow tree on the opposite bank flickering silver and green as it turns, and perhaps there is a bird (a blackbird?) singing somewhere nearby, but in a way where you can actually anticipate in the split-second before it begins that it is about to sing. This is what Under Milk Wood feels like. It seems to be alive, and even out there, living. 
        We have reached my last thing now, or maybe my next-to-last, the final fragment cannibalised or transplanted or soldered from an earlier essay. Ah. To begin at the end, with what once formed a different kind of beginning to an older version of this essay... When he toured Britain’s Changing Towns in the 1960s, the architectural critic Ian Nairn found one place apparently un-changed, amidst the tides of modernity. This was Llanidloes in Powys. Llanidloes stands out amongst Nairn’s other subjects—which include Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield, Norwich, Brighton, and Glasgow—for its relative slightness. He calls it ‘the Pocket Metropolis.’


Llanidloes is a town of 2,500 people in a remote part of mid-
Wales, yet one which holds more lessons and delights than 
many cities. The whole place is a delight,  but not because it is
fossilised, or sophisticated in a Portmeirion way: it is simply that
in it the 20th century has not turned its back on the other
nineteen. Llanidloes has got television, motor-cars, and small
industries, but none of these has got Llanidloes. This is true of
many English country towns, but they are without the benefit of
 Welsh intelligence and liveliness and expressiveness. The
mixture is electric and unforgettable, and every few months I
start to feel a westward tug which I know will land me eventually
in Newcastle Emlyn or Llandovery or the Rhondda, where I stand
alien but utterly sympathetic and wonder how on earth people
ever thought of Dylan Thomas as an overblown romantic.
The fact is that he told the literal truth, and we have become so
pallid that we cannot recognise a true community—a community
that is strong enough to allow extremes and opposites to
coexist—when we see one.


Llanidloes is only seventy miles or so off Laugharne, and forty off New Quay—the two places that Thomas used as blueprints for Llareggub. In Llanidloes, Llareggub crops up as a figment of reality, a hallucination almost exactly where you might expect it. And it’s not actually that Llanidloes reminds you of Under Milk Wood, but that Under Milk Wood succeeds in reminding you of Llanidloes and all its Welsh intelligence and liveliness and expressiveness; in his strange play for voices, full of dreams and the dead and the trappings of everyday life, Thomas manages to build a realistic portrait of a life and place that really exists.
        Nairn wrote about Llanidloes in 1960, just six years after Under Milk Wood was first broadcast and published, and his reference to Thomas indicates the cultural impact of the play; it almost seems to form a lens for encounter, and Thomas’s language also inflects Nairn’s phrasing. The arcade, for example, ‘is a lovely piece, like a day of early Spring preserved in stone,’ with an echo of Under Milk Wood’s ‘one Spring day.’ You get attached to language, too.
        The attraction of Llanidloes—and, by extension, of Llareggub—is its quality of accumulation, the 20th century not turning its back on the past, but instead suspending history in lived and still-living time. Time is not ‘fossilised,’ but is instead an animating force, the past driving the present and the future forward. Not everyone understands this; there are those who would accuse of Thomas of being an ‘overblown romantic,’ making too much of nothing. And there are others, epitomised by Under Milk Wood’s own Voice of a Guidebook, who only see nothing or little in the first place:


Less than five hundred souls inhabit the three quaint streets and
the few narrow by-lanes and scattered farmsteads that constitute
this small, decaying watering-place which may, indeed, be called
a ‘backwater of life’ without disrespect to its natives who possess,
to this day, a salty individuality of their own. The main street,
Coronation Street, consists, for the most part, of humble, two-storied
houses many of which attempt to achieve some measure of gaiety
by prinking themselves out in crude colours and by the liberal use of
pinkwash, though there are remaining a few eighteenth-century
houses of more pretension, if, on the whole, in a sad state of
disrepair. Though there is little to attract the hillclimber, the
healthseeker, the sportsman, or the weekending motorist, the
contemplative may, if sufficiently attracted to spare it some leisurely
hours, find, in its cobbled streets and its little fishing harbour, in its
several curious customs, and in the conversation of its local
‘characters,’ some of that picturesque sense of the past so frequently
lacking in towns and villages which have kept more abreast of the
times. The one place of worship, with its neglected graveyard, is of
no architectural interest. The River Dewi is said to abound in trout,
but is much poached.


Everything comes with a caveat: the streets are quaint but add up only to ‘decay’ or, no offence, a ‘backwater.’ The houses on the little high street are ‘humble’ rather than grand, attempting a gaiety but tacitly falling short of it. And the older, more interesting houses are in ‘disrepair.’ There is nothing, apparently, for anyone—no hills, spas or health resorts, athletic opportunities or good stretch of road. Even the fisherman finds the river bare. Thomas buries the Guidebook’s compliment in his longest sentence, winding and ‘cobbled’ itself; in Llareggub there persists ‘some of that picturesque sense of the past so frequently lacking in towns and villages which have kept more abreast of the times.’ ‘Some,’ inexact, and ‘that,’ gesturing offstage to a vague, ‘picturesque’ quantity, speak to a writer who understands what he means but has little regard for whether the reader or tourist does too. But we do get an echo of Nairn here (or rather, Nairn’s non-fictional assessment of Llanidloes offers a variant echo of Thomas’s own assessment of the fictional Llareggub), in identifying the living past at tranquil, unassuming work in a small Welsh town or village. Where the Guidebook, pompous and comically misguided, believes Llareggub to be effectively cut-off from the present, Nairn sees how the 20th century need not ‘turn its back on the other nineteen.’ 
        There was something very affirming about reading Nairn’s essay on Llanidloes, some time after I’d finished the bulk of work on my thesis, and maybe after I’d handed the thing in. His thought, clearly, is inflected by Thomas’s work in constructing and considering the active role of social and personal history insofar as it persists and is implicated in the concrete world of buildings and possessions, lost and found and washed up and remembered or dreamed of. But I do not think that Nairn’s identification of living history in Llanidloes is therefore romantic or faulty, and instead I find it incredibly sympathetic. All this time, the hunch I’d had about the curious realism of Thomas’s world-building in Under Milk Wood had actually been verified by an architectural critic, decades earlier. 


*                *                *


Seven years straight of studying literature at university, then four years or so wondering and tearing myself up about it all after, have taught me that this affirmation is what readers fear, and what they want. 
        We want texts to confirm what we believe about the world, or reflect it; we also fear they will, giving them the power to frighten us by proving us right. No, the dead will not come back, but yes, it might really prove impossible to throw their possessions away. Yes, those possessions really are sea-changed into signifiers of deep grief, and they will never again revert to their previous, more innocent selves. Yes, the dead will fade or shift in your fallible, human memory as the years go, but no, you will never completely forget them if you don’t want to. Of course a text can change your mind or your way of thinking, as Thomas’s began to, all those years ago, for me, but we will also always gravitate to moments in writing which seem to tell us what we suspect we already know, or wanted to say ourselves. In Alan Bennett’s self-reflexive gesture, when we come across these thoughts or feelings or ways of looking in texts, ‘set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead,’ ‘it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.’ Articulating this recognition, where our reading, poring hands are taken up by the hands of other writers (who are themselves also other readers), Bennett ends up creating an instance of the feeling himself. When I first heard these words performed out loud, the encounter they described was not new to me, nor somehow was the way they put it, in the metaphor of the outstretched hand; I’d thought it all before. 
        Is it at this point that I am meant to decide what this essay is really about? Bereavement, cannibalism, the dead, the writers who change our lives and the things we measure our lives in too, the texts people write and how we are meant to read them. What happens to things lost at sea, and to those who lose them. I’m disinclined to pick, or straighten it out much further. You can join the dots meaningfully and still not have them figure into an elegant line. I say. If I have to be honest about what drives this essay, it is the force of contingency as much as willpower. I wouldn’t have written it, or never like this, had I got any of the academic jobs I wanted, and do still want. And I couldn’t have written it this way if I hadn’t spent the last three or four years mostly not writing and wondering what was wrong with me for it, my brain balled up in the cradle of my skull in exhaustion. Or if my friend hadn’t pointed out that I could write about Operation Mincemeat side-by-side with Under Milk Wood. Or if my mother hadn’t died, a long time ago now. Contingency is another thing the analytical reader fears, as if she might be exposed for trying to connect points in literary or cultural space that are in fact meaningless or random. Anyone could do that, and it wouldn’t mean anything, this fear cries, or simply, you’re making it all up. Our task, then, is to weigh the significance of our construction as we make it. If I make it up anyway, where do I get to with it? And what am I do to with all these amassed encounters, of dovetailing thought or of language with itself, other than note them down?


*                *                *


Contemplating his library in storage, Ian Patterson thinks of Benjamin’s observation, unpacking a different library, that ‘ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have with things’ ... ‘not because they come alive in their owners but because their owners come alive in them.’ Cat’s shipmates spring back into life, that one Spring night, because of the things they ask after, possessions and hopes. Death, you could say, severs the possibility of proper ownership, leaving things adrift; then again, the case of Operation Mincemeat would seem to complicate this. A corpse which apparently belonged to no-one (Michael no longer being alive to lay claim to his own body, and with no apparent family to claim it for him), given ‘ownership’ of a new name and status, was nonetheless able to ‘own’ a set of belongings through death, not in spite of it. And therefore did work that altered the course of many lives. It is not purely materialistic to dwell on things, because they not only make our lives what they are, but also identify us and even re-animate us in death. I look around my bedroom, for instance, and find it full of readymade afterlives; only some of them my own. 
       When I started writing this essay I left myself notes, up at the top of it, to return to and keep me on some kind of course, or to slip into it at some later point. Instructions, for instance, to be slapdash in my method but accurate in style, or the reminder—in my friend’s phrase—that these thoughts on Thomas do not fit into logical, ordered, stately forms. Rather, my feelings for him are concerned with origins, cannibalism, love, grief, and what gets left behind, the doggedly fragmentary. You cannot make it neat; in fact, it is important not to. It is difficult, even—or obviously—to finish this piece on Thomas, which uses up almost all the last scraps and traces of work I have to write about him, for now. Which therefore means I must put him down, and leave him behind myself, in the past. 
        I don’t know: the critical writing I am most interested in does not tend to know its arguments or objects when it starts, but acquires them by the method of its own process. Whether I have managed this kind of acquisition myself is entirely opaque to me now, writing these lines in my local café, and may remain opaque to me for some time; what it has proved, though, is that my hunch—that all these last thoughts and feelings about Thomas could be synthesised, albeit in a peculiarly drifting, strung-out way—was right. Introducing his collection of essays, Walter Benjamin’s Grave (2006), Taussig acknowledges that the thing that unites his writings there (and, I would suggest, the spirit of his work more broadly), ‘is a love of muted and even defective storytelling as a form of analysis. Strange love indeed, love of the wounded, love of the last gasp.’ That is how he makes his beginning; this is how I am making my end. I am not, or no longer naïve enough to believe that this strange love for the defective or wounded or the dying might result in a fix, healing or resurrection, but I know it is a conviction of seeing difficulty through, to wherever it may lead.   


*                *                *


Tomorrow, as I write this, it will be October, Thomas’s birthday month, and the point around which several of his poems circle. Like me, he kept returning to the same places, re-tracing the same bodies, words and steps. Doing all my own re-tracing, here, has taken me almost exactly nine months. One of the birthday poems, ‘Poem in October’, was written for Thomas’s ‘thirtieth year to heaven,’ by his native Welsh coast. I am a Spring baby, but this year is my thirtieth to heaven, too. I will leave you, then, with the last six lines of his thirtieth birthday poem, and with his hope, which is mine too.


[...]

     It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
     O may my heart’s truth
          Still be sung
On this high hill in a year’s turning.



*


*


*



¶        Works Cited,
in order of Appearance disappearance ...


•        E.W. Tedlock (ed.)    
Dylan Thomas: The Legend & the Poet;
A Collection of Biographical Essays 
(London: Heinemann, 1960)
•        Robert Douglas Fairhurst  
Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence
in Nineteenth-Century Literature
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
•        Imogen CasselS
‘Dylan Thomas & the Experiences of Reading’ 
[unpublished doctoral thesis] / 
(University of Cambridge, 2022)
•        Imogen CasselS
‘Lists, Beginnings, Kitsch, Prose-rhymes, Ghosts, 
Drafts, Mincemeat & Dead Things in Under Milk Wood’
[unpublished doctoral thesis] / 
(University of Cambridge, 2019)
•        Imogen CasselS    
‘Dylan Thomas’s Sea-realism’      
[unpublished undergraduate dissertation] / 
(University of Cambridge, 2016)
•        Imogen CasselS    
‘Nairn’s Llareggub: Under Milk Wood, Reality, Mincemeat’ 
[unpublished paper, 2024]
•        William HazlitT
Table-Talk: Essays on Men and Manners 
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925)
•        Sylvia Plath /
Ted Hughes (ed.)      
Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1991)
•        Molly Brodak 
‘Mary,’ Jewish Currents  (April, 2021 / See here.) 
•        Joe Moshenska & Ayesha Ramachandran  
‘Faerieland’s Cannibal Metaphysics: Spenser with Eduardo 
Viveiros de Castro,’ Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry
Annual, 37. (2023), 119-144.
•        Ella Risbridger  
‘The Pain-Writing-Money Trifecta: On Nora Ephron 
& Grief as Copy,’ Literary Hub (August, 2022 / See here.)
•        Caitlin Macnamara [Thomas]
Leftover Life to Kill (London: Putnam, 1957)
•        John Malcolm Brinnin
Dylan Thomas in America (London: J.M. Dent, 1957)
•        Jack Spicer /
(eds.) Kevin Killian, Kelly Holt & Daniel Benjamin
Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack
Spicer (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2025)
•        Iain Sinclair
Black Apples of Gower: Stone-Footing in Memory Fields 
(Dorset: Little Toller, 2015)
•        Elizabeth Hardwick
A View of My Own: Essays in Literature and Society 
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1962)
•        Brian Dillon
Essayism, (London: Fitzcarraldo, 2017) / 2nd edn. 
•        D.G. Bridson
Prospero and Ariel: The Rise and Fall of Radio, A Personal
Recollection (London: Gollancz, 1971)
•        Walter Benjamin /
Hannah Arendt (ed.) & Harry Zorn (tr.)
Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999)
•        Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices 
(London: J.M. Dent, 1979)
•        Dylan Thomas /
John Goodby (ed.)
The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: Centenary Edition
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016) / 2nd edn. 
•        Dylan Thomas /
Walford Davies (ed.)
The Collected Stories (London: Phoenix, 2014)
•        Dylan Thomas /
Ralph Maud (ed.)
The Broadcasts (London: J.M. Dent, 1991)
•        James Joyce
Dubliners (London: Penguin, 2012)
•        Dylan Thomas, Paul Ferris (ed.)
The Collected Letters (London: J.M. Dent, 2000) / 2nd edn.
•        Clive Scott
Literary Translation and the Rediscovery of Reading 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)
•        Denise Riley
Say Something Back (London: Picador, 2016)
•        Clair Wills
That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland During
the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007)
•        Alan Halsey
The Text of Shelley’s Death (Sheffield: West House, 2001)
•        Percy Bysshe Shelley 
‘Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats’
Poetry Foundation, (See here.)
•        Ewen Montagu
The Man Who Never Was (New York: Scholastic, 1953)
•        Ben McIntyre
Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story that Changed
the Course of World War II (London: Bloomsbury, 2010)
•        Eric Griffiths /
Freya Johnston (ed.)
If Not Critical (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) 
•        Michel Foucault
The Order of Things: An archaeology of the human sciences 
(London: Routledge, 2002)
•        Jess Payn
‘dark side of’, Still Point, 6. (February 2023), 47-49
•        Michael Taussig
Walter Benjamin’s Grave (Chicago: University of Chicago 
Press, 2006)
•        Dylan Thomas
The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: Original Edition 
(New York: New Directions, 2010)
•        Robert Macfarlane
Original Copy: Plagiarism & Originality in Nineteenth-Century
Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
•        Ian Nairn /
Owen Hatherley (ed.)
Nairn’s Towns (London: Notting Hill, 2013)
•        Alan Bennett
The History Boys (London: Faber and Faber, 2004)
•        Ian Patterson
Books: A Manifesto; or, How to Build a Library 
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2025)



*


*


*



Thank you to Rob Newton, who first suggested 
I bring the two originating sparks of this stupid, 
impossible essay together. To Deborah Bowman, 
Leo Mellor, Myko Balbuena, Louis Klee, Anna
Parker, Max Fletcher and James Waddell who 
have all been generous readers to its different
versions. 

---

Imogen Cassels is the author of Silk Work (Prototype, 2025), Hares on the mountain (Tenement Press, forthcoming) and the pamphlets Peach machine (The Last Books, 2025), Chesapeake (Distance No Object, 2021), voss (Legitimate Snack / Broken Sleep, 2020), Arcades (Sad Press, 2018) and Mother, beautiful things (Face Press, 2017). Having written various papers on Thomas, B.S. Johnson, British surrealism, and literary translation, Cassels completed a PhD on Dylan Thomas between 2019 and 2022. She lives in London.


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