8 - Trouble at the Explosive Plant: Ceri Richards and Dylan Thomas
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 June 2021
Summary
In the late summer of 1940 Dylan Thomas travelled from Laugharne to London – and was caught in one of the first major bombing attacks from the Luftwaffe. He reported the experience, and the psychic shock-waves it sent out, in a letter to his friend Vernon Watkins:
I had to go up to London last week to see about a BBC job, & left at the beginning of the big Saturday raid. The Hyde Park guns were booming. Guns on the top of Selfridges. A ‘plane brought down in Tottenham Court Road. White-faced taxis still trembling through the streets, though, & buses going, & even people being shaved. Are you frightened these nights? When I wake out of burning birdman dreams – they were frying aviators one night in a huge frying pan: it sounds whimsical now, it was appalling then – and hear the sound of bombs & gunfire only a little way away, I’m so relieved I could laugh or cry. […] But I haven't settled down to a poem for a long time. I want to, & will soon, but it mustn't be nightmarish.
This is an initial and partial report from a city undergoing bombing – but also a self-examination of the fears that bombing brought in the 1940s. It combines touches of popular surrealism (the animated taxis with fearful faces) with real faces being shaved (signs of apparent normality). Moreover, it marks the start of Thomas's engagement with the war as brute actuality rather than a dreaded future, and the difficulties inherent in thus writing of and from such destruction. He did ‘settle down’ to writing poems again before too long. They were, in their different ways, both ‘nightmarish’ and yet replete with possibilities of how lyric poetry could engage with the specifics of industrialised warfare. This chapter situates these Second World War works in a comparative context, reading them alongside the art of one of Thomas's contemporaries. Such a move shows the multiple analogies between both aesthetic fields, but also reveals that a different model of understanding this specific visual and literary relationship might be possible.
The artist Ceri Geraldus Richards was born in Dunvant, a small village on the Gower Peninsula 5 miles west of Swansea, in 1903.
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- Information
- Reading Dylan Thomas , pp. 157 - 178Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018