Dylan Thomas
Welsh poet Dylan Thomas packed an awful lot of living into his thirty-nine years of life. The son of a Swansea teacher, Thomas’s was brought up in a shell of middle-class respectability from which he ultimately rebelled. He began his writing career as a reporter on the South Wales Evening Post. However, in 1934, the publication of his first anthology, Eighteen Poem allowed him to give up his day job and concentrate on his poetry.
Thomas was a drinker, so it was no surprise that the place where he first set eyes on his future wife, Caitlin McNamara was in a public house. The pub in question was The Wheatsheaf in London. The undoubtedly inebriated Thomas spotted Caitlin, a blond-haired, blue-eyed blond who was then working as dancer across the bar and was instantly smitten. Despite never having spoken to her, he went over, put his head in her lap and proposed. It was the start of a turbulent love affair that would end with Thomas’s death from alcohol abuse in 1953.
Thomas and Caitlin forged their relationship in a series of letters written over the course of 1936 after this first meeting in The Wheatsheaf. Initially, Caitlin was still involved with her original lover, Augustus John. However, by the summer, she had ditched him to be with Thomas, who she married in Penzance registry office in July 1937. Thomas’s letters to her are prose full of poetry. They speak of both Thomas and Caitlin’s unconventional nature- and the all-consuming nature of this early love:
“I love you more than anybody in the world…” Thomas wrote to Caitlin on July 17, 1936, when he was in Swansea and she in London.” I love you for millions and millions of things, clocks and vampires and dirty nails and squiggly paintings and lovely hair and being dizzy and falling dreams…I want you to be with me….we’ll have a bed in a bar, as we said we would, and we shan’t have any money at all….which they won’t like a bit. The room is full of they now, but I don’t care, I don’t care about anybody. I want to be with you because I love you.”
The letters, with their images of chaos, booze, and cash shortages are also a foreshadowing of Thomas and Caitlin’s future relationship. For their marriage was filled with infidelity, alcohol abuse, fights and poverty, which led Caitlin to later describe the relationship as “raw, red, bleeding meat,” and “a drink story.” However, she also referred to herself and Thomas as “twin souls.” Thomas’s early love letters to his future wife certainly make it clear that he too, believed he had met his female equivalent.
Thomas and Caitlin’s relationship may have been fuelled by drink. However, surprisingly, love letters from an eminent nineteenth psychiatrist, which reveal his love of cocaine.