DYLAN

The "Audio CD of the Commute" last week was "The Essential Dylan Thomas", a four CD collection bought for me one Christmas a few years ago after we'd spent a damp autumnal evening watching A.N. Actor performing some of the great Welsh poet's works during his tour with a one-man show.

I'd listened to one or two of my favourite pieces at the time and then put the box on a shelf to gather dust, as these things do, and, having never played it through in its entirely, decided that it wasn't a bad starting point in my search to fill the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle shaped hole in my journeys to work.

Coincidentally, when I finally put the first disc into the machine and pressed "play", it was a little over sixty years and three weeks since the main work recorded on these discs, the now rather legendary play for voices that is called "Under Milk Wood" was first performed by Richard Burton and the rest of the cast, way back in January 1954.

It's a bit of a smutty old piece really, at least it is on the quiet and if you listen between the lines. I don't know whether some of the expressions being used have become ruder since it was first broadcast, or whether Thomas was just trying to slip a few things past the censors because that's just the way he was, but it's definitely chock-full of innuendo for the modern listener. Although, seeing as most generations think that they were the ones who first discovered sex, perhaps it comes as some surprise to discover how much it remained on the minds of those living in those impoverished communities way back before even our parents were twinkles in somebody's roving eye.

The words Thomas uses are mostly very bleak and cynical, born as they were in the pitiable poverty of South Wales between the two World Wars. This seems especially true on the first two CDs which seem to be made up of the more melancholy works and end with a collection of poems which include the famous titles "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" and "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night", phrases which both sent something over a shiver down my spine as I drove homewards across the bleak hill tops on that recent midwinter evening.

The language really is very doom-laden on the whole, maybe because of being born from the fire and brimstone of regular attendance at Chapel, and brewed in the crucible of war, but given that Thomas died at the age of thirty-nine back in 1953, it's just plausible that his own mortality was very much on his mind as he went about his work, perhaps most noticeably in pieces like "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog" and the exceptional "Return Journey to Swansea".

Things brighten up when the subject of his stories turn to Thomas's childhood in Wales, although often still laced with a melancholy streak, although my favourite piece, the one which stuck with me long after that evening watching and listening to that lone actor, was "The Outing" a hilarious take upon Welsh Life involving a boozy day out in a charabanc…

Dylan Marlais Thomas was born almost a hundred years ago in Swansea on the 27th of October, 1914 (So I suppose there'll be some sort of centenary celebrations later on this year), and he died the death of a "Roistering, drunken and doomed poet" in New York, just over thirty-nine years later, having become a popular writer, performer and broadcaster during his tragically brief and somewhat turbulent life.

Since his death he has been acknowledged as being one of the most important Welsh poets of the last century, despite his work being originally written in English, and his works are much studied in schools across the world and yet, despite this air of respectability and association with the more formal end of the educational spectrum, aspects of which might have surprised the old Welsh Dog himself, he remains one of the more popular and well-known of the modern poets.

I had a friend who claimed a, perhaps illegitimate, connection to this great modern Welsh poet and, given that she came from the Mumbles, an area much name-checked in his works, and shared a surname which played a large part in his personal history, who am I to doubt it…?

To be honest, I've always struggled a little in appreciating written poetry, but I do rather like the sound of Thomas's works, both for  the rhythm and the original imagery, and I do love the sound of voices reading it. Perhaps this is also because the sound of these readings, especially when being read in those dour Welsh tones, have triggered something very evocative, something that is perhaps a little nostalgic, and reminded me of something very personal which is buried deep within me. Perhaps a sense of "home" (if that's not too pretentious), but certainly not least, I imagine, because they remind me in some ways of how my own father, the lay preacher, used to speak, although he was born ten years later than Thomas, in a different part of South Wales, and lived a very different, and possibly far more God-fearing, life.

I'm sure that Thomas's writings are not for everyone. The emphasis on the fleeting nature of happiness and the impermanence of life are probably not the most uplifting of themes, and, despite the fact that aspects of such thinking can still be seen in the people and towns he was describing, nor is the abject poverty being talked about in much of his work likely to resonate as much as it once did with our modern materialistic, narcissistic and hedonistic culture.

But I bloody love it…

MILESTONES

It’s been a rather momentous week for this small but significant country of ours in one way or another, with not one but two anniversaries for two of our our great national figures landing on consecutive days. On Monday came the anniversary of the succession of Queen Elizabeth II to the throne sixty years ago, and then the very next day came the 200th anniversary of the birth of one of the greatest writers that these islands has ever produced, a certain Mr Charles Dickens, an author that, I like to imagine at least, pretty much everyone has heard of, even if they’ve never actually read any of his books.

And what great books they were: “Oliver Twist”, “David Copperfield”, “Great Expectations”, “Nicholas Nickelby”, “The Old Curiosity Shop”, “A Tale of Two Cities”, “Our Mutual Friend”, “Bleak House” (a personal favourite), and the sheer brilliance that is the festive favourite “A Christmas Carol”, to name but a few, giving us some of the most memorable characters in English Literature from Little Nell, to Ebenezer Scrooge by way of Wilkins Micawber and the forerunner of so many literary detectives, Inspector Bucket, who incidentally gives us the stylistic roots of much modern detective fiction. But then, Dickens gave us so many themes and characters and stories that have become so very familiar that it would leave our heritage feeling so much more threadbare without them.

Dickens, of course, was far more than a mere writer, because he was also something of what we might now think of as being an “activist” when it came to raising the profile of the needs and the struggles of the poor in Victorian society, a whole substrata that was tolerated but all but ignored by the people living in better circumstances, and whilst it was with his writing that brought attention to the problems which poverty brought to the Victorian slums, he also put his money where his mouth was and did his very best to make a difference.

But despite all the brutality and poverty that he was writing about, some cultures still like to think of Dickens’ England as being a rather twee and idyllic place, with images of the pretty dresses, the horses, the country houses and the carriages that they carry in their heads from tales by other authors and movies depicting those times as optimistic and clean and bright, and never the “Hard Times” depicted in his literature. I always think of “A Christmas Carol”, for example, depicting a very “cruel” world, but the Muppets managed to make it a cosy one. This, of course, is forgivable in a Muppet movie, but less so when people start to believe that the society being depicted was just like that only without the cute, furry animals. I think I mentioned to someone a few weeks ago about how I really feel disappointed by film adaptations of most of Dickens, because for me Dickens works best on the printed page, leaving me to make up the images, but that’s another rant for another day.

If we choose to ignore the brutality and horrific reality of the poverty that Dickens was usually writing about in his social commentary upon the age he was living in, we are truly missing a great deal of what he was trying to tell us about the world he was living in. Sadly it’s all recently become part of this idealised “Merrie Olde Englande” theme park thing that we do far too little to dispel these days because it brings the tourists in. I often wonder how disappointed those tourists are when they go home having had their eyes opened to the fact that modern Britain really isn’t much like it was (it it ever really was) in the films they have seen and the books they have read, and that the men don’t all walk around in our top hats and frock coats, the ladies are not swooning under layers upon layers of dresses with bustles and we do not have to hail a hansom cab to go about the business of the day. Sadly, the squallor and the urban poverty does stay with us, but, even as Merry New England prepares to spend a year in the international spotlight, those images of the pitched battles in the streets last August are far more likely to give an accurate snapshot of many of our streets, although, such is the strength of Dickens’ imagery that perhaps it will prevail and keep on drawing people here despite their inevitable disappointment when they see the litter and the fast food outlets and what scruffy herberts we really are nowadays.

So it is now 200 years since Dickens was born, and yet, somehow, it feels like it should have been much, much longer ago, as his books feel like they’ve been around forever. It’s a bit like finding out that Tower Bridge was only built at the back end of the nineteenth century or that the Houses of Parliament are only about 150 years old. You feel like it really should be more somehow, like these buildings so beloved of tourists and sightseers, should have had their corridors and passageways trodden by the earliest Norman Kings, or that Henry VIII should have let his gaze rest upon them as he contemplated quite what to do with his latest wife, but I suppose that that is  one of the great mysteries of historical significance; that everything that was around before you were born is somehow ancient and feels as if it has always been there, and everything new is, almost by definition, temporary and a little bit rubbish and probably won’t last. I’m sure that the Parisians thought that about the Eiffel Tower, just as I’m sure that the “temporary structures” of the London Eye or Millennium Dome will have people slapping preservation orders on them just as soon as they begin to look just a little bit worn out.

One of the outcomes of the tangled web that history has woven into the tale that is the succession to the throne of the English Monarchy is that, against all the odds, a young girl of twenty five years old would become Queen of England and Head of the Commonwealth way back in 1952, and yet here we are, sixty years later, and we now live in a country where the vast majority of its citizens have never known what it was like to have any other head of state and will probably be quite confused at having to come to terms with it as and when it inevitably occurs, and will certainly struggle to imagine what a difference it will make to them when it does.

60 years of having the same Queen on our banknotes and coins, the same letters on our pillar boxes, the same terminology for those letters marked O.H.M.S., and the same lyrics in our national anthem. It’s something to celebrate, and will no doubt bring even more of those lucrative tourists in this year, and send them away again, laden down with those souvenirs of their trip to England and Union Jack trinkets, pretty much all of them made in China of course, but it’s going to come as one heck of a shock to those of us living here, even, I imagine the most cynical of us about such matters, when the dreadful darkest of days that brings the greatest of changes finally dawns, a day, of course, we will no doubt celebrate the anniversary of later on, such is the perverse nature of these things.

Still, for the time being, and because we all love an anniversary, let’s make the most of the opportunity to celebrate the lives of these two great figures of British history before returning our noses to the grindstone and face up to the misery of the reality of living and working in this great nation at the start of this millennium. We don’t have it so bad, but then, it’s not really all that “great” any more, either...