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A Child's Christmas in Wales: searching for Dylan in New York
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Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
Welsh poet Dylan Thomas was the bad boy from Swansea who never grew up. To the end of his short life, he loved smutty jokes and talked of sex with the fascination, awe and terror of a ten-year-old. In his late thirties, he was still getting instant messages from his boyhood self: Give the girl another poke, Dylan! Smoke another fag, why don’t you, boy? Have another whiskey…or four or five.
Fueled by alcohol and id, his party antics during his last tour of America in 1953 became the stuff of legend. On meeting a beautiful woman at a New York soiree, he threw himself on his knees and thrust his head up her dress. Dylan’s uncensored pipeline to the infantile was his personal tragedy and—finally—his downfall, but it let him write about childhood in a way that was funny, gritty, real and forever fresh.
When he wrote the essay, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” for Harpers Bazaar three year before his death, he poured his childhood memories of Swansea into the modest format until the pages seemed to explode with his one-of-a-kind poetic voice.
“One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear for a moment before sleep, that I never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six,” he began his homage to childhood.
The little boy in Dylan’s Welsh town wonders things like, “Can the fish see it’s snowing?” and he divides Christmas gifts into two categories: the Useful presents and the Useless ones.
Among the Useful, he includes “engulfing mufflers of the old coach days, and mittens made for giant sloths, zebra scarfs of a substance like silky gum that could be tug-o’warred down to the galoshes.”
The Useless Presents are things like “bags of moist and many-colored jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a tram-conductor’s cap and a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell.” Dylan doesn’t have to say which kind is best. Can there be any doubt?
When he describes the snow of his childhood he says “it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees: snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely white-ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunderstorm of white, torn Christmas cards.”
Glossy magazines actually printed inspired writing like this in 1952. And people really read it. In fact they’re reading it still. “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” remains a poplar stocking stuffer, available as a book in several illustrated editions, and as a CD, with Dylan himself reading it.
The Irish Repertory Theatre evidently hoped to capitalize on this popularity when they mounted a musical show called “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” at their little theater in Chelsea. Sadly, they’ve caught neither the charm, the subversive humor nor the word-drunk exuberance of Dylan’s voice. From the set, which looks like the living room of a TV talk show, to the costumes—tasteful velvet dresses for the women, black three-piece suits for the men—to the music, a medley of Christmas songs, many of them way too brassy for a Welsh childhood, this show is tone-deaf to the poetry and blind to the spirit of Dylan Thomas.
Director-designer Charlotte Moore has sliced up Dylan’s text into dozens of little fragments that serve more as filler between the songs than as meaningful narrative. Gone is the lyrical flow, the sense of wonder and the sly humor of Dylan’s artfully crafted prose. The actor-singers work hard, and they are game enough. But they are miscast and—worse—misdirected, as if for a Broadway-size spectacle, instead of an intimate chamber work.
I have seen Dylan’s prose adapted for the stage—once at a pub in London, once at the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia—and, in deft hands, it can be delightful. But the Irish Repertory Theatre’s production does a disservice both to Dylan and to the audience.
After the show was over on Friday night, my husband and I walked down to the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street for a nightcap. Fifty-some years ago, the White Horse was Dylan’s stomping grounds when he was in New York. A sooty old portrait of him still hangs on the wall in the back room.
But at the tavern on Friday night, there wasn’t a table to be had in the back, and the bar was four-deep with shouting patrons. We nabbed a table by the window, where we nursed a stout and a hot toddy. But the din was insurmountable, and Dylan’s spirit was nowhere to be found.
More than half a century after Dylan’s last visit there, I should have known better. And here is a lesson any reader can understand. A poet’s spirit doesn’t live in architecture but in his words.
Find yourself a copy of “A Child’s Chirstmas in Wales” and read it aloud to your friends. Or put on the CD and let Dylan read it to you. Slip into his radio play, “Under Milkwood,” his fiction—“Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog,” “Adventures in the Skin Trade”—and his short stories.
Last but not least, lose yourself in his collected poems, most of which he wrote before he was twenty-five. If you are looking for Dylan Thomas, that is where you will find him.
You can buy Dylan Thomas's books and CDs on the web of course, or at some of the big chains. But if you want to support New York's independent bookstores, here are some places where you can find "A Child's Christmas in Wales" and other work by Thomas.
St. Mark’s Bookshop
31 Third Avenue
New York City
212-260-7853
Shakespeare & Co.
939 Lexington Avenue
New York Ctiy
212-570-0201
Shakespeare & Co.
716 Broadway at Washington Place
New York City
212-529-1330
Book Culture
536 West 112th Street
New York City
212-865-1588
Bank Street Bookstore
Broadway & 112 Street
New York City
212-678-1654
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