Dylan Thomas's Sullen Horrors
commentary by rbadac
There is a writer of weird fiction who may have escaped the notice of some of you; he certainly escaped mine until recently, when a browned Signet paperback from 1956 fell into my hands & fell apart not long after. It was a collection of short stories by a young man who was, at the time of their writing back in the early 1930s, already becoming famous for his poetry. In the wake of this, his prose ability was somewhat eclipsed, & it was not until some time later that the general public became aware of it, though even then it was on the basis of later writing, & these earlier works remained relatively obscure.
What is striking about these early stories is their close affinity with the poetry, coming as they did at a time when both poetry & prose sprang nearly indistinguishable from the same Muse. The subject matter is macabre & paganly fecund, the cadences charmlike; the images shift & boil in visceral, august pandemonium. They would never have won the favor of a very large readership the way his later work did, but they continue to appeal to a certain peculiar taste that would be enriched by their rediscovery.
They are tales of horror, of hallucinatory nightmares, of stubborn ghosts & full-blooded witchcraft, scarecrow women, burning babies, rawheaded Plague on a white horse, malevolent clergy, & thorny, brambled, primeval Sex intertwining among them like a poisonous vine; dark, babbling environs from which the traveler does not return unscarred, a landscape of echoes & eruptions where meaning belies itself & the truth, as close-mouthed as an egg, is yet more anxious than mountains.
Their author is the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.
Whether you lay waste to a poor, defenseless paperback of Adventures in the Skin Trade like I did, or choose the wiser course of perusing your library's copy of Dylan Thomas: The Collected Stories (New Directions; NY, 1984), you will come away with a renewed sense of the phantasmagoric. Imagine Virginia Woolf afraid of herself, James Joyce orating from an open grave, Dunsany in the madhouse; before Dylan Thomas settled into the vein of rich remembrance that informs justified classics like "A Child's Christmas In Wales" & his play Under Milk Wood, he was finding his voice in forbidden territories & flights of delirium.
The stories that had their genesis in the "Red Notebook," now at the Lockwood Memorial Library, the State University of New York at Buffalo, are representative of this early assertation of Dylan Thomas the fantasiste. This notebook contains the original manuscripts of nine stories, dated by Thomas; beginning with November 1933, there is "After The Fair," a short note of strangeness about a young girl in black, the Fat Man at a carnival, & the abandoned baby in the Astrologer's tent:
'"...I've always been a fat man," he said, "and now I'm the Fat Man; there's nobody to touch me for fatness..."'
"The Tree" (RN date Dec. 28, 1933) is our first introduction to the Jarvis hills, which, as landscape features in this particular haunted corner of Thomas" literary Wales, perform much the same function as Lovecraft's Miskatonic River, brooding in back of the narrative like threatening weather. The young boy is all ears to the devout tales of the gardener, but imposes his own interpretation upon them. He is an imaginative child:
"... Feeling blindly in front of him, he made his way to the top of the stairs; he looked down the dark stairs into the hall, seeing a host of shadows curve in & out of the corners, hearing their sinuous voices, imagining the pits of their eyes & their lean arms. But they would be little & secret & bloodless, not cased in invisible armour but wound around with cloths as thin as a web; they would whisper as he walked, touch him on the shoulder, & say S in his ear..."
When a wandering idiot comes down from the hills possessed of his own skewed mythology, the boy takes him in hand, & their congruent delusions fashion a terrible destiny.
"The True Story" (RN date Jan. 22, 1934) is grisly murder, the young girl & her plan to do away with the old woman upstairs for her money:
"... If there were hens to be killed she could cut their throats far more cleanly than the boy who let his knife stay in the wound & wiped the blood on the knife along his sleeve. She caught a hen & killed it, felt its warm blood, & saw it run headless up the path. Then she went in to wash her hands..."
In "The Enemies," we meet Mr & Mrs Owen, who live in a remote cottage in the Jarvis valley. Mr Owen has an understanding with the earth in which he works; Mrs Owen, a similar understanding with the powers of darkness. She has a crystal ball, & has seen the coming of the Reverend Mr Davies, who has lost his way. They are soon at table together, & their graces bear little resemblance to each other:
"... She did not eat, for the old powers were upon her, & she dared not lift up her head for the greenness of her eyes. She knew by the sound which way the wind blew in the valley; she knew the stage of the sun by the curve of the shadows on the cloth. Oh, that she could take her crystal, & see within it the stretches of darkness covering up this winter light. But there was a darkness gathering in her mind, drawing in the light around her. There was a ghost on her left; with all her strength she drew in the intangible light that moved around him, & mixed it in her dark brains..."
"The Dress" (RN date March 1934) is a vignette of a madman fleeing his pursuers, seeking a place to sleep in safety. "... He had married a lady. They said he had cut off her lips because she smiled at men..." The Jarvis valley is gradually becoming peopled with a select group of characters. Peter is the bedridden man awaiting "The Visitor" (RN April 1934), who will take him on an unprecedented journey. "The Vest" (RN July 20, 1934) is a furtive peek into the heart of obsession.
Then we have a story which begins like this:
"... They said that Rhys was burning his baby when a gorse bush broke into fire on the summit of the hill. The bush, burning merrily, assumed to them the sad white features & the ricketty limbs of the vicar's burning baby. What the wind had not blown away of the baby's ashes, Rhys Rhys had sealed in a stone jar. With his own dust lay the baby's dust, & near him the dust of his daughter in a coffin of white wood.
" They heard his son howl in the wind. They saw him walking over the hill, holding a dead animal up to the light of the stars. They saw him in the valley shadows as he moved, with the motion of a man cutting wheat, over the brows of the fields. In a sanitorium he coughed his lung into a basin, stirring his fingers delightedly in the blood. What moved with invisible scythe through the valley was a shadow & a handful of shadows cast by the grave sun..."
A tale of incest & insanity, "The Burning Baby" (RN Sept. 1934) glowers with images of unrelenting horror. The narrative enthralls & appalls, the last line is bone-chilling.
The Red Notebook, as you can see, is an organic progression, & though its pages run out with "The Orchards" (RN Oct. 1934), the theme continues through the next seven chronological stories. If they still exist in a notebook somewhere, it is probably Black. But "The Orchards" is a pivotal story, introducing a couple more details pertinent to Thomas" malevolent Welsh uplands (including a Necronomicon of sorts, the "Black Book of Llareggub"), while relating a subjective vision of the writer Marlais, who dreams of trees aflame & a scarecrow lover, in a style that, more than anything up to this point, recalls the poetry which made Dylan Thomas immortal:
"... The world was the saddest in the turning world, & the stars in the north, where the shadow of a mock moon spun until a wind put out the shadow, were the ravaged south faces. Only the fork-tree breast of the woman's scarecrow could bear his head like an apple on the white wood where no worm would enter, & her barbed breast alone pierce the worm in the dream under her sweetheart's eyelid..."
"The End of The River" is an interlude, darkly comic, in which Sir Peregrine, reading the family Chronicles, suddenly realizes that he is the last of the line, & the book is over.
But now that interlude is over, & "The Lemon" begins:
"... Early one morning, under the arc of a lamp, carefully, silently, in smock & rubber gloves, the doctor grafted a cat's head onto a chicken's trunk..."
and we're back in nightmare without having slept. This story indeed could have been credited to Thomas Ligotti, & most people would never have suspected otherwise-- except Ligotti himself, who would have dreamed a jealous dream.
Plague enters the village in "The Horse's Ha," baleful as Bergman, inscrutable as Ionesco. "Go home & die," says the undertaker, eager to measure them all, but loath to die himself, & the spell in his mother's grimoire will render him immune. But what of the dead who tire of waiting for him to come?
Cader Peak is as good as Sentinel Hill in "The School For Witches," where the doctor's daughter teaches the seven girls the unholy cradle, the devil's pin, the rise & fall of the satanic seasons. Here, Mrs Price the midwife seeks their aid in the deliverance of the black girl's child "with the eyes of a kitten & a stain at the corner of its mouth," & here, too, come the three tinkers, one of which is the father, & the father something more.
"The Mouse & The Woman" is like A.E. Coppard collaborating with Oliver Onions, then the two being attacked with a pair of scissors by a mad editor who is just sane enough to number the pieces. Set in an asylum, it is a lovely & terrible reflection of a writer & the woman of his creation, & the fate which befalls them.
"A Prospect Of The Sea" is another interlude, this time romantic; but by now nothing is as it seems, & fantasy sprouts from it without warning, if ever it were not present.
Finally, "The Holy Six" are examined, dark churchmen summoned to the cottage of the Owen couple from "The Enemies," to witness, Magi-like, the impending birth of Amabel Owen's child. This story is a fitting culmination of what has gone before, & its portentious events will not easily be dismissed from memory.
There are other stories of like interest in Dylan Thomas" oeuvre: "The Followers" is a ghost story, more straightforwardly so than the others; "Jarley's" takes place in a haunted museum. His script The Doctor & The Devils has a similar resonance, the play Under Milk Wood almost a comic Our Town. Needless to say, his poetry is quintessential, & full of its own shadowed corners. Dylan Thomas died in New York on November 9, 1953, after an unfortunate episode with the alcohol that blighted his life (His last words were, "I've drunk eighteen straight whiskies -- I think that's the record."), though the "severe insult to the brain" it caused was probably due to a pre-existing condition, the number eighteen probably an exaggeration.