Villagers Keep Their Distance From Poet’s Memory : Dylan Thomas Home Shuns Profiteering

A few photos of Dylan Thomas, stuck on the wall of the bar in Brown’s Hotel, are all there is to tell the visitor he has stumbled into the poet’s adopted hometown.

Laugharne has always been in two minds about Thomas, torn between pride at being associated with a giant of 20th-Century poetry and the suspicion that he made the town a laughingstock.

So while they don’t disavow him, they certainly don’t exert themselves to publicize the connection either. That means no souvenir stores, not even a sign directing visitors to his house or grave.

“People are always surprised at this,” said Tommy Watts, who owns Brown’s Hotel where the poet used to tipple the evenings away. “They expect to find Dylan Thomas bookshops and Dylan Thomas teacups.”

Thomas spent his last four years in the little seaside town in South Wales, living with his wife, Caitlin, and their three children in the Boat House overlooking the bay.

On the edge of the cliff above the wooden house is the work shed--”my wordsplashed hut,” he called it--where he wrote such memorable poems as “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” “Poem on His Birthday” and the comic verse play “Under Milk Wood.”

Rumpled, impoverished and hard-drinking, Thomas embodied the legend of the romantic, self-destructive poet, dying in New York in 1953 during the last of his three U.S. poetry-reading tours. He was 39.

The Boat House--”My seashaken house on a breakneck of rock”--is a museum now. The hut, overlooking a forested slope that may have been Thomas’ fictional Milk Wood, is in danger of sliding off the cliff, and workmen are shoring up its foundations.

The path to the house was renamed Dylan’s Walk in 1976, which is the only way you’d guess who once lived there.

The living room is furnished with a tattered rug, an old radio and overstuffed 1950s chairs in which visitors are encouraged to relax and listen to recordings of Thomas reading his poems.

Lorraine Scourfield, the curator, doesn’t believe in the do-not-touch approach.

“We want people to have the feeling that they’re really coming into his room,” she said.

Thomas would lie in bed with a cold or a hangover, feasting on his children’s candy and bleating mournfully to Caitlin for milk and sugared bread. Most mornings he would amble over to the pubs, then to the shed where, Caitlin later wrote, it was “bang into intensive scribbling, muttering, whispering, intoning, bellowing and juggling of words.”

Thomas liked to stand on the veranda, tossing bread crumbs to the herons. After his death, his mother went through his clothes and found crumbs in the pockets.

As the tide went out one recent spring morning, a sand bank glittered like mother-of-pearl in the sunshine. The town of 1,500--”a timeless, mild, beguiling island”--looks scrubbed and tidy with its sun-bathing cats, lazy dogs and townfolk hurrying about their business with brisk “good mornings” to each other.

Dylan Thomas called Laugharne “the strangest town in Wales,” and it certainly is different. Laugharne’s name rhymes with barn, the mayor goes by the rare and ancient title of portreeve, and wears a ceremonial chain of gold cockle-shaped medallions, in tribute to what was once Laugharne’s main industry.

It is English-speaking in a predominantly Welsh-speaking region, and regards the nearest neighboring town as a foreign country.

Residents are generally reluctant to talk about Thomas.

Watts, 57, said he generally tells curious visitors to go away, but this day, he said, he’s in a good mood.

“I remember him all right,” he said. “We used to throw stones at him.”

Why?

“Because he was a foreigner.”

Thomas came from Swansea, 27 miles away.

“Dylan Thomas to local people doesn’t mean much,” said the portreeve, Terry Thomas. “They feel Laugharne was always here, always will be, always had its local characters, and Dylan was one of them.”

In a letter, the poet called Laugharne “the best town, the best house, the only castle, the mapped, measured, inhabited, drained, garaged, townhalled, pubbed and churched, shopped, gulled and estuaried one state of happiness!”

“Under Milk Wood” was a richly comic tribute to Laugharne’s eccentricities, and although the play is now performed in the town every three years, Laugharne was less enthusiastic at the outset.

“At first I was angry, yes,” said Watts. “I thought, who does this bloody man think he is, coming here and writing about us, all that stuff about webfoot cocklewomen.”

“One lady was up in arms because she thought one of the characters was her father. Now she’s turned around. Now she tells everybody, “ ‘Oh yes, that was my father.’

“You see, time immortalizes everything. We’re stuck with Dylan Thomas whether we like it or not.”

Thomas had been visiting Laugharne regularly since 1938, but only in 1949 did he move in permanently after a friend, Margaret Taylor, rented the Boat House to him. He wrote to her: “This is it: the place, the house, the workroom, the time. Here I am happy and writing.”

He moved his parents into Laugharne, and when his father was dying, it inspired his most famous poem:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light....

Young though he was, it could have been his own epitaph.

His drinking was becoming uncontrollable. He and Caitlin fought incessantly. Poverty, always his curse, was far more acute now with three children to feed.

“I can’t think. I’m cold, it’s raining on the sea, the herons are going home,” he wrote.

Nine days after his 39th birthday, he collapsed in a New York City hotel. Four days later, on Nov. 9, 1953, he was dead.

He lies now buried in Laugharne’s churchyard, under a simple wooden cross and a bed of wild primroses.