 Dylan Thomas' grave (above); Dylan Thomas in America (right); a beached marina at Tenby in South Wales (right) |
 You don't have to go searching for Dylan Thomas in Old South Wales. Quite the contrary - Dylan Thomas will come looking for YOU. Through exhibitions, museums, festivals, statues, cafes, pubs, street names, paintings, posters and snatches of words still hanging in the salty air.
Good Celts them all, the Welsh share the Irish bent for tale telling and, around Swansea, so many of the best ones concern the man Hollywood legend Shelley Winters dubbed "The Horny Welshman'. In 1950 she took him home for dinner where he drank pitchers of gin martinis served up in milk bottles by flatmate Marilyn Monroe while singing Welsh songs; the sort of ditties he'd learned at The Mermaid and The Antelope, his Swansea pubs of choice when "this sea town was my world."
I came late to the Welsh bard. Before Under Milkwood and Do Not Go Gentle, at least for me, it was Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Thomas is there on the front cover of the 1967 Beatles album, in Peter Blake's esoteric collage above Marlon Brando, beside Aldous Huxley, nearly clipped by cowboy Tom Mix' hat. Blake has confirmed that John Lennon - who is said to have sometimes carried a battered volume of Thomas on his person during his Hamburg and Liverpool leather years - was insistent on the inclusion.
As I leave Swansea and wind around its bay to Mumbles and the Gower Peninsula, on the pilgrimage trail to the Dylan Thomas boathouse and writing shack at Loughnarne, there's a copy of his Selected Poems on the car seat beside me. The back cover blurb is the right length for a traffic light stop. "Most notable for his verbal inventiveness, image-making power and almost pagan metaphysics, Dylan Thomas celebrated the glorious particulars of inner and outer landscapes in the face of weakness, mortality and decay." Not hard to see why Lennon liked him.
|
