Two Minutes to Midnight

" In late October 1952, the United States proclaimed the successful test of a hydrogen bomb, a weapon far more destructive than the atomic bombs that had ended the war in the Pacific.  Then in July 1953, the Soviet Union unexpectedly exploded its first hydrogen bomb...The Doomsday Clock, a chilling metaphor whose image appears on the cover of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, reached two minutes before midnight. The hands would not come as close to midnight again for the rest of the twentieth century."
 -  Jonathan R. Eller, from The Story of Fahrenheit 451.


And if we last the night or no
I'm sure is always touch and go.


Under Milk Wood was written at approximately the same time,  and belongs very much to the same period as George Orwell's 1984 or Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. It might be stretching a point to see the structure of the play, the period of light between two darknesses, as a response to the horrors of the Blitz, of Hiroshima and the images of the concentration camps which had been shown in British cinema newsreels in April 1945,  the widespread fear of the atomic bomb and the anticipated Third World War; and yet these themes were very much in Dylan Thomas's mind - and everyone elses's - as he wrote the play.

While he worked in the daytime writing propaganda films for the BBC, Dylan had spent nights as a fire-watcher during the Blitz on London, and so had undoubtedly lived through this. He was also deeply affected by the destruction of the centre of Swansea, his home town, in a three-night blitz which killed 233 people in February 1941. His friend the communist grocer Bert Trick, an ARP warden, recorded meeting Dylan : " As I stood on the corner facing where the office had been the night before, there was nothing but a heaving mass of smouldering buildings. Oxford Street and the Market - all that had been flattened, and there were firemen's hoses snaking all over the mounds. And when I stood there, who should come round the corner but Dylan and Caitlin...he said "Bert, our Swansea has died. Our Swansea has died. " And by God, he was right. The Swansea we knew, the pubs , the places, were gone, and gone for all time."

One product of this was Return Journey, a semi-autobiographical radio play in which a shadowy narrator-figure returns to the devastated post-Blitz Swansea in search of  "Young Thomas". Although it aims to mix humour in with nostalgia, there's none of the chirpy "Britain can take it" attitude on display here, or the deep humour and melancholy late afternoon sun of UMW  - it's a dark, depressed thing, so gloomy it's a miracle it was ever broadcast.

 He wrote little poetry directly concerned with war, but that little included the mighty "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London". More about this in a later post, but this poem sees Dylan imagining Doomsday, wondering how that last moment might be, on the banks of the River Thames, and responding with a type of democratization of an ancient Welsh poetic tradition of elegaic praise-poetry, written for a child he never knew.

It points to a  developing interest in Dylan's poetry in the theme of innocence : the innocence of childhood, linked to the innocence of the countryside as an Edenic state of nature, often the Carmarthenshire countryside of his childhood holidays. Innocence as a positive value,  protection in the face of horror.

Although Fern Hill is perhaps the best-loved of these later poems, I think the twin themes of the countryside and childhood as a place of innocence, a refuge from the horrors of twentieth-century life, is best represented by the beautiful opening to "In Country Sleep", a tender late poem recalling the bedtime story-telling which was his "shared time" with his daughter Aeronwy :

"Never and never , my girl riding far and near
In the land of the hearthstone tales, and spelled asleep,
Fear or believe that the wolf in a sheepwhite hood
Loping and bleating roughly and blithely shall leap,
                              My dear, my dear,
out of a lair in the flocked leaves in the dew dipped year
To eat your heart in the house in the rosy wood.

Sleep , good, for ever, slow and deep, spelled rare and wise..."

And later :

" The country is holy : O bide in that country kind,
                                 Know the green good,
Under the prayer wheeling moon in the rosy wood
be shielded by chant and flower and gay may you

Lie in grace." 

O.K. : so what's all this got to do with Under Milk Wood, and producing/directing it ?  Well, the first half of UMW was originally sold to the BBC under the title "The Town That Was Mad.", along with notes outlining the intended development. This section ends with Willy Nilly the Postman wandering through Llareggub delivering the mail to the townsfolk; Dylan's plan outlines that he was intending a letter to be delivered to Captain Cat, as the senior member of the community : it was to be a communication from a government ministry ( the "Ministry of Sanity" , perhaps ), indicating that, owing to complaints received that all the inhabitants of Llareggub were completely mad, an Inspector was coming down to investigate. It might be necessary to quarantine the inhabitants of the village, to stop the madness spreading to the surrounding area.

Dylan's planned ending was to have a meeting at the town hall, in which the Sanity Inspector was to pronounce his findings. The villagers of Llareggub, initially outraged at the slur on their reputation, would have demanded that the Inspector offer a description of a perfectly sane town from the outside world, against which they could be judged. Halfway through the description of sanity as it stood in the 1940s, Captain Cat would have interrupted, and the villagers would have demanded unanimously to be declared insane and quarantined.

"The Town That Was Mad" was never completed, and the second half, written at speed in 1953, went in a very different direction. But I think knowing Dylan's original intention casts useful light on the early, pre-dawn dreams of the villagers. In Llareggub, every human being is precious, and it is their dreams that make them so. It also helps to find the the tone of the piece : there is satire at the expense of characters like Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard, the Pughs or the Reverend Eli Jenkins, but it's never dark or biting, and  always a warm, understanding irony. All the characters are strange, and all slightly crazy : but they are all sympathetic, and however flawed are all fundamentally and deeply innocent.

Written too much, one last thing to share.

In November 1950, Dylan sent the poem "In the White Giant's Thigh" to the magazine Botteghe Oscure, together with a note about outlining a poem he was planning to write about the end of the world, to be called "In Country Heaven."  I've transposed his plan underneath, retaining his punctuation and paragraphing.

This synopsis was in my head for the 3 months we worked on UMW, and although I kept it away from the cast ( Apologies : if we'd started by reading this, you'd have thought I was even more crazy than in fact you did.), I think it's somewhere there in the very beginning and end of the play. ( I did, I think, once mention to Eva that I wanted Suo Gan to sound like "the love of God", which might not have been the most helpful direction.)

Enough babbling : over to Dylan.

"The plan of this long poem-to-be is grand and simple, though the grandeur will seem, to many, to be grandiose, and the simplicity crude and sentimental.

The godhead, the author, the first cause, architect, lamp-lighter, the beginning word, the anthropomorphic bawler-out and black-baller, the quintessence, scapegoat, martyr, maker - He, on top of a hill in Heaven, weeps whenever, outside that state of being called His country, one of His worlds drops dead, vanishes screaming, shrivels, explodes, murders itself. And when He weeps, Light and His tears glide down together, hand in hand. So, at the beginning of the poem-to-be, He weeps, and Country Heaven is suddenly dark. Bushes and owls blow out like candles. And the countrymen of heaven crouch all together under the hedges, and, among themselves, in the tear-salt darkness, surmise which world, which star, which of their late, turning homes in the skies has gone for ever. And this time, spreads the heavenly hedge-row rumour, it is the Earth. The Earth has killed itself. It is black, petrified, wizened, poisoned, burst; insanity has blown it rotten : and no creatures at all, joyful, despairing, cruel, kind, dumb, afire, loving, dull, shortly and brutishly hunt their days down like enemies on that corrupted face. And, one by one, these heavenly hedgerow men who were once of the Earth, tell one another, through the long night, Light and his tears falling, what they remember, what they sense in the submerged wilderness and on the exposed hairs-breadth of the mind, of that self-killed place. They remember places, fears, loves, exultation, misery, animal joy, ignorance and mysteries, all you and I know and do not know. The poem-to-be is made of these tellings.

And the poem becomes, at last, an affirmation of the beautiful and terrible worth of the earth.

It grows into a praise of what is and what could be on this lump in the skies.

It is a poem about happiness."