Mercoledi Muscicale

Back in my high school days I was fortunate to have several teachers who encouraged my interest in music, theatre and literature.  Doug Livingstone was our music and drama teacher - yes boys and girls we had music and drama classes.  He desperately attempted to teach me how to read music but had the good sense not to allow me any where near an instrument.  But he did allow me to try my hand at acting - the annual school play, assembly appearances and, just for the joy of it, exploring plays in Drama Club.

One year a drama club exercise was a reading of Under Milk Wood,  that remarkable evocation of life in Llareggub*, a fictional seaside town in Wales by Dylan Thomas.   Being a bit pompous - a bit? - I had started to read the introduction in my best poetic manner when Mr Livingstone stopped me and said,  "Just read the words in your normal voice".   Being a brash little bastard I probably sniffed with that "what does he know" adolescent sniff.  But as I simply read it in my natural voice I found that the rhythm of the lines, the portmanteau words,  the alliteration and the simple beauty of the language produced a voice of it's own that was almost like singing.  

To this day I dare anyone to read that passage out loud and not end up sounding like they are singing:

To begin at the beginning:
It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and- rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.

Though Thomas's words provide music of their own a chance mention by a friend of one of the characters in Under Milk Wood led me to this lovely Anglican chant setting of the Reverend Eli Jenkins' Morning Prayer.

Every morning when I wake,
Dear Lord, a little prayer I make,
O please do keep Thy lovely eye
On all poor creatures born to die

And every evening at sun-down
I ask a blessing on the town,
For whether we last the night or no
I’m sure is always touch-and-go.

We are not wholly bad or good
Who live our lives under Milk Wood,
And Thou, I know, wilt be the first
To see our best side, not our worst.

O let us see another day!
Bless us all this night, I pray,
And to the sun we all will bow
And say, good-bye – but just for now!

In this frightening age of absolute  I find that third verse reassuring that there is a middle ground and, God willing, not just in Llareggub.


* Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru (the National Library of Wales) has a map that Thomas sketched of his fictional town.   By the way Llareggub has no special meaning other than being "bugger all" spelled backwards.

05 November - 1872: In defiance of the law, suffragist Susan B. Anthony votes for the first time, and is later fined $100.

Christmas Memories - Dylan Thomas

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 a moment before sleep, that I can 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.

With that glorious run-on sentence Dylan Thomas begins his reminiscences of A Child's Christmas in Wales - his rich memory book of childhood Christmases mangled and magnified through the lens of passing time.   The language  sings on the page without a musical stave in sight.  And if it sings in your mind as you read it, it sings even more on the recording Thomas made in 1952 for the newly created Caedmon Records.  Thomas has been contracted by Barbara Holdridge and Marianne Mantall-Roney to record several of his poems but Thomas also wanted to read a story and suggested that a piece he had sold to Harper's Bazaar Magazine in 1950 would be a good one.  Apparently he showed up for the recording - possibly drunk according to Mantall-Roney - without a copy of the text.  A frantic scramble produced a copy of the magazine and the text of  'A Child's Memories of a Christmas in Wales'.  It was the first of the many spoken-word recordings that this company was to produce and though its initial release met with only modest success it is still in the catalogues today.

As the Aunties have their tea (and perhaps some parsnip wine) young Dylan manfully tests his skills as
a "little engineer" in Fritz Eichenberg's woodblock for the 1959 reissue of A Child's Christmas in Wales.

The story was first published in book form in 1954, two years after Thomas's death, and has since been republished in several editions.  Many of them feature illustrations by well known graphic artists including the 1959 edition with woodcuts by Fritz Eichenberg.  Many Christmas's ago Laurent gave me a lovely little miniature facsimile printing of that edition and each Yuletide it take pride of place on our tree.  Thomas's memories are set amongst our own mementos  of Christmases in Ottawa, Montreal, New York, Cairo, Mexico City, Warsaw, Chicago, Hong Kong, Beijing and Rome. Christmases that much like those of Thomas's childhood have become mangled and magnified by the lens of passing time.

" ...when out of a snow-clogged side lane would come a boy the spit of myself, with a pink-tipped cigarette
and the violet past of a black eye and cocky as a bullfinch, leering all to himself." For some reason
I always thought the young narrator was seeing his own reflection in a shop window
- obviously Eichenberg, and perhaps Thomas, saw it differently.

If nothing quite matches the magic of Thomas reading his own words  a lovely version was filmed for TV with Denholm Elliot in 1987 comes very close.  Though adapted and expanded it remains faithful to the loving nostalgia of the original, never ignoring the humour that Thomas also saw in those memories.  And it includes a lovely performance by Elliot as the grandfather recounting the stories of the time when it snowed for six days and six nights when he was twelve.  Or was it for twelve days and twelve nights when he was six?

.

Both Grandfather and Thomas wish for snow for Christmas;
the one to recapture the memories the other to created them.

I've always wondered that it hasn't become a Christmas classic amongst all the annual drivel that shows up but it seemed to have disappeared.  However I found it available on DVD last year and immediately ordered it.  Watching it is now a Christmas tradition in our household along with listening to the original recording.  

Here is Thomas in the last passage of that reading made more than 60 years ago that still touches to the heart of the Season.

And then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

25 December - 800: Coronation of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor, in Rome.