![]() "I love you, but I'm alone." That was very Dylan. 'What did he say to that girlfriend in New York?. Pamela was also attracted by a certain helplessness. When my sister saw him once she said, "What awful teeth, they've got holes in them." I didn't think about what he looked like.' The thing that attracted me was his incredibly beautiful speaking voice. 'He was such a marvellous person to be with,' she says. Whether this reflects how it was, or is Pamela's way of gilding the story, doesn't emerge. It is beginning to sound more comfortable than romantic. He used to say, "Uncle Dylan is going to bed with his Auntie Babs." He had a thing about aunts.' He was at ease with me because I was Welsh. He liked women and he didn't like being alone. I wouldn't say Dylan was all that highly sexed. Pamela dismisses the thought that sex was paramount. He was unique.' It's the first time she has been interviewed about him. She begins by saying: 'You could never forget Dylan. The 'frightful' remark is rescinded or forgotten. Her conversation is unguarded, or made to appear so. With her son, she lives in the same house, a faded property near the sea on the south coast of England. I went to see her then, but not again until this summer. I had not heard of her until 1986, after my edition of Thomas's letters was published, and she wrote to say she found them disconcerting because 'they confirm the opinion of one of my closest friends that Dylan was a frightful man'. Her hair is wispy and she says her bones hurt. In between, she was married and bore children. The 'Glendower' was a postwar invention, taken from the name of a hotel where she happened to be living. They fumbled their way into a fire-watcher's camp-bed and an affair. The Dylan-Pamela team would not have gone in for heroics. Should incendiary bombs land on the building, there had to be someone to raise the alarm. One night soon after, she went with him to Strand Films, 1 Golden Square, where he was taking a turn at fire-watching. That, he told her, was 'the fucking cherub painting'. Her image of him was Augustus John's portrait of a youthful Dylan crowned with curls. At first, she didn't recognise the little man in the tight tweed suit. She was 19, a London-Welsh draper's daughter with literary ambitions, who had the nerve to visit pubs (after her day job editing Busy Bees News) in the hope of meeting writers. The lover, Pamela Glendower, met him early in 1943 at the Swiss Tavern in Old Compton Street, a Soho pub not far from the office in Golden Square where he worked on scripts for propaganda films. I tell myself he has been dead long enough to be recollected in tranquillity. This summer, I have talked to three women who knew him: a lover, a friend and a daughter. As Auden said dismissively: 'A shilling life will give you all the facts', and it was an arrangement of facts that I made use of, to try to bring him close. When I wrote Thomas's life a quarter of a century ago, I tried to get inside his head, as one does, but ended up feeling that neither I nor anyone else had quite managed it. Internet search engines offer 350,000 hits for 'Dylan Thomas' against 50,000 for 'Auden,' his longer-lived contemporary and a more productive poet. ![]() Thomas has become another of literature's cottage industries, an attractive bad-lad of sorts, vaguely Byronic, who boozed, chased women and told killingly funny anecdotes.Īgainst the current of critical taste, 'Do not go gentle,' 'Fern Hill' and the 'play for voices' - Under Milk Wood - remain popular favourites, in a modest output that includes fewer than 100 published poems. The man has been endlessly reconstructed by his biographers and we have all made money out of him.
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