Last week it transpired that Dylan Thomas’s mother-in-law tried to have a notebook of his draft poems burned, but did not succeed, because one of her household staff secreted it away in a Tesco bag. The superstore may just see what a real profit looks like next month when the bag of papers goes up for auction at Sotheby’s.
Some will scorn poor old Yvonne Macnamara for what might have been an innocent mistake – did she know that her son-in-law’s book was full of poetry and among the papers marked for burning? I reckon she did, but that doesn’t stop me from feeling sorry for her. Why, if I had a son-in-law like Dylan Thomas, I’d bloody well want his work on the fire, too.
No ordinary hearth would suffice for this conflagration. Macnamara, whose daughter Caitlin married the perpetually sozzled Thomas in 1937, intended the papers for the kitchen boiler. Could there have been a more appropriate final destination for verse fuelled by booze and contempt for dull domesticity? Had her house servant remembered to burn the papers, Macnamara would have saved the poet the ignominy of having his drafts and notes dissected by scholars, which was perhaps her intention, though somehow I doubt it.
Indeed, the 49-page book, which contains 19 poems, hand-written edits, and vigorous rubbings-out, is a dream find for critics. Thomas’s corrections will help to explain many of his notoriously obscure references. Personally, though, I couldn’t think of anything more embarrassing than having my drafts put before discerning eyes. I don’t imagine Thomas would have felt differently.
‘I sit and hate my mother-in-law, glowering at her from corners and grumbling about her in the sad, sticky, quiet of the lavatory’, he wrote in a letter included in the forthcoming sale. He wasn’t in the best of spirits at the time. With little money and a worsening alcohol problem, he had moved in to his mother-in-law’s house with his pregnant wife. The relationship between Dylan Thomas and Yvonne Macnamara, who had always had high ambitions for her daughter, could be strained, but these don’t feel like the words of someone who hated her. More, they’re the frustrations of a man who couldn’t cope. As with Thomas’s most obtuse poetry, I relish that ambiguity.
The forthcoming auction of his book recalls the release of Sylvia Plath’s work after her death. One particularly notable decision saw Ted Hughes and his mother-in-law agree to the publication of The Bell Jar in Sylvia Plath’s name. Plath, Hughes’s estranged wife, had released her semi-autobiographical novel under a pseudonym shortly before committing suicide at the age of 30. The re-release of the book (which features a particularly disagreeable character as the protagonist’s mother) under the author’s name has often been viewed as contrary to Plath’s intentions.
What to do with a meddling mother-in-law, or a disobedient house servant, for that matter? Being neither married nor a stranger to Mr Muscle I haven’t lost much sleep over this until now. The emergence of hidden Dylan has set me thinking, though. If writers can’t control all aspects of how their work is presented to the world, there is at least reason for them to ensure that it’s nicely hidden in a Waitrose bag for life.
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