Under Milk Wood: O my dead dears!

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It is human to lose a manuscript. To lose the same manuscript twice is possibly super-human. To lose the same manuscript three times shows a positively heroic dedication to the art of lost manuscripts.

Dylan Marlais Thomas, a Welsh writer who wrote in English, is now often remembered for his poems, including the defiant villanelle for his dying father, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night. He is also remembered for his legendary speaking of verse as well as his legendary alcoholism. But he is also fondly remembered for what he called his “play for voices”: Under Milk Wood. In this hypnotic play, we listen to the dreams and thoughts of the inhabitants of an imaginary Welsh village in a “starless and bible black” night.

Thomas lost the manuscript of Under Milk Wood first in Cardiff, then in America, and then in London (where it turned up in a pub).

Conwy in Wales, looking a little like Llarreggub

Conwy in Wales, looking a little like Llarreggub

To begin at the beginning. Thomas was staying in the west Wales town of New Quay in the winter of 1944. One dawn, perhaps when the sky was starless, he went out walking and imagined the thoughts of those still sleeping. This became “Quite Early One Morning”, a story recorded for radio in 1945. Thomas continued to work on the idea, though, for the next eight years.

Under Milk Wood had actually been commissioned by the BBC, but Thomas found it difficult to complete that “infernally eternally unfinished play”. It was scribbled here and there, rewritten, revised, recalcitrant. In March 1953, Dylan read a “chunk” of the play in Cardiff, and then lost the manuscript, which was in a briefcase. He wrote to his host, Charles Elliott, of University College Cardiff, to ask him to find it. “I left the briefcase somewhere. I think it must be in the Park Hotel. I’ve written to the manager but could you possibly, when and if passing by, drop in and see if it is there? It’s very urgent to me: the only copy in the world of that kind-of-a-play of mine, from which I read bits, is in that battered, strapless briefcase whose handle is tied together with string.”

Charles Elliott duly sent the briefcase back to Mr Thomas. Manuscript One: Saved.

On 14 May 1953, the play had its first reading on stage at The Poetry Center in New York. The experience was not wholly successful. Thomas read an unfinished version, for which no script or recording has ever surfaced.

Manuscript Two: Lost.

On Monday 19 October 1953, at Victoria Station in London, Thomas handed over three copies of Under Milk Wood to his BBC producer Donald Cleverdon. Thomas was leaving for the US to promote the play. Thomas told Cleverdon that he could keep the original manuscript of the play — if he could lay his hands on it. Thomas had actually lost the manuscript in a pub when out drinking the night before. He couldn’t be certain which one, although he made a few suggestions. It turned up at The French House, in Soho. Manuscript Three: Found.

Thomas died in New York on 9 November 1953, surrounded by alcohol and debts. He was taken from the Chelsea Hotel where he was staying to St Vincent’s hospital, where he failed to come out of a coma. He was 39. Pneumonia was the cause, although there were rumours that he drank himself to death. Thomas’s wife, Caitlin, claimed back the French-House manuscript of which Cleverdon was now in possession, but was unsuccessful. (See Thomas v Times Book Company [1966] 1 WLR 911.)

Under Milk Wood refused to die, to be a lost manuscript despite its author’s best efforts. It lives on today in new productions, but also the mesmerising recording, first broadcast by the BBC on 25 January 1954, with Richard Burton as the narrator. You can hear this recording here.

“O my dead dears!” The manuscripts may be found or lost, but the words live on.

* The photograph is not of Llareggub, the imaginary Welsh town of Under Milk Wood, but of Conwy. But it is a little how I imagine LLareggub to be.

On The Road, with dog

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On 22 April 1951, Jack Kerouac finished typing the first draft of On the Road, the novel that would eventually be published in 1957 and distil the generation that Kerouac himself had already defined as “beat”. On The Road is a story of Kerouac’s true-life friendship with Neal Cassady and their four trips across the United States; it is one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century, despite the fact that its has its critics. Truman Capote dismissed it as “typing, not writing”.

Kerouac did not type the draft on ordinary sheets of paper, but on a scroll. Before sitting down to type, Kerouac made the scroll by cutting 20-inch-wide lengths of tracing paper into narrower 9-inch strips that fitted into his typewriter. He then pasted them together into 12-foot-long reels of paper so that once he had started, he did not have to stop, just type. The spontaneous outburst of creativity and unrevised rhythm was fuelled only, Kerouac said, by coffee.

Kerouac typed fast. He said he “went fast because the road is fast“. 100-plus words a minute. He finished the draft in 20 days. On the first day he typed 12,000 words, and, on the last, 15,000.

The original scroll of On The Road

The original Kerouac scroll

In the published novel, there are paragraph breaks. In the scroll, there are none. The writer could not stop to press the key, would not risk slowing his breathless prose. The scroll contains the real names of the author’s friends, not the names used later in the published book; Cassady became Dean Moriarty, the poet Allen Ginsberg is Carlo Marx, and Kerouac himself was reborn as Sal Paradise.

The scroll is almost 120 feet long. It looks like a road and a journey in itself. However, the end of the scroll, containing Kerouac’s original ending, is missing. At the current end is a handwritten note from Kerouac that says: “DOG ATE [Potchky-a dog]“. Potchky was a cocker spaniel owned by Kerouac’s friend Lucien Carr. Nobody knows how much longer the scroll was before Potchky sank his teeth into it.

If indeed he did.

Some say that Kerouac disliked his original conclusion and tore off the end of the scroll. Some say he didn’t have an ending. Allen Ginsberg wrote a letter to Neal Cassady on 7 May 1951, less than two weeks after Kerouac completed the scroll: “The writing is dewlike, everything happens as it really did, with the same juvenescent feel of spring: the hero is you, you are the hero, beginning with appearance on scene 1946. Jack needs, however, an ending.”

The ending we now have is elegiac, with a profound sense of the irretrievability of times past. “Nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty, I think of Dean Moriarty.” (You can hear Kerouac himself read the ending of On The Road here.)

The scroll, now a little brittle round the edges, was sold at Christie’s in May 2001, fifty years after it was typed. The seller was the nephew of Kerouac’s third wife, Stella, to pay inheritance taxes. The buyer, James Irsay, the owner of the Indianapolis Colts, paid $2.43m for one of the most iconic, but partially lost, manuscripts of the twentieth century.

* Photo used courtesy of a creative commons licence from Thomas Hawk.

The real Lowry lost manuscript

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Malcolm Lowry was born in 1909, in New Brighton, a small town for which I have a soft spot, just “over the water”, as we say, from Liverpool. He was a restless spirit who wanted to write, and did not want to follow his three older brothers into the family cotton-broking business. At the age of 18, he set sail from Liverpool as a deck-hand on a freighter bound for Yokohama.

Lowry’s first novel, Ultramarine, appeared in 1933 when he was 24 years old. Contrary to popular belief, Lowry did not leave the manuscript of this first novel in a taxi. The manuscript was stolen, yes, but it was in a briefcase taken from the convertible car of the publisher’s editor, Ian Parsons. Lowry alleged that he was forced to re-write the entire work in a matter of weeks because of this loss, but a carbon copy existed, supplied by his friend, Martin Case, who had typed the final manuscript then kept the carbon copy which Lowry had chucked in the bin.

Ultramarine tells the story of a young man growing up during a voyage to the Far East — so far, so autobiographical. Ultramarine was not a commercial success; Lowry was accused of plagiarism* and he spent much of the rest of his life trying to suppress the book.

After Ultramarine appeared, Lowry began travelling through Europe with his friend and mentor Conrad Aiken, got married to the writer Jan Gabrial in Paris, and, in 1935, began a novel called In Ballast to the White Sea.

Albert Finney as the consul in Under the Volcano

Albert Finney as Geoffrey Firmin in the 1984 film of Under the Volcano

Also in 1935, Lowry moved to New York. He had begun a deep and meaningful relationship with alcohol at an early age, and this relationship continued while he and Jan moved to Los Angeles, then Mexico. In Mexico, Lowry began what would turn out to be his masterpiece, Under the Volcano — the work of genius that he sobered up long enough to write.

By 1937, Lowry’s drinking caused Jan to leave him, and he was jailed, then deported from Mexico in July 1938. In Los Angeles, he met Margerie Bonner, an aspiring writer and former silent-film child star. When Lowry moved to Canada after his American visa expired, Bonner followed him. They were married in December 1940. For the next 14 years, they lived as squatters in a cabin without plumbing or electricity at Dollarton, up-inlet from Vancouver.

The cabin was an isolated place. The Lowrys had little money, apart from Lowry’s life-long allowance from his father. In 1944, their house burned down, immolating almost everything they owned, including what had become a 1,000-page draft of In Ballast to the White Sea, nine years of literary labour, which Lowry never re-wrote.

In February 1956, Lowry and Margie came to live in another seaside town: Ripe, on the south coast of England. They were not happy. When Lowry threatened Margerie with a broken bottle (she said), she fled. She returned to the house on the morning of 27 June 1957 to find Lowry dead from an overdose of sleeping pills.

In a nice twist on the planet of lost manuscripts, before T. E. Lawrence burned his personal library, he saved the books he liked. One of these was a relatively unknown seafaring novel called Ultramarine. What would T.E. have made of the truly disappeared In Ballast to the White Sea? An early draft of the novel has turned up in Jan Gabrial’s papers since her death, but the Dollarton manuscript has gone forever.

* Lowry was accused of plagiarising Nordahl Grieg’s The Ship Sails On, published by Knopf in translation from the original Norwegian in 1927. Lowry actually admitted in a letter to Grieg in 1938 that “Much of Ultramarine is paraphrase, plagiarism, or pastiche from you.” See: Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry (Eds.) The Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, London, 1967, p16.

I’ll eat my words

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In the annals of lost manuscripts, possibly far too few have been lost to posterity through devourment. (Some say the world might be a better place if authors were more often compelled to perform this operation literally, rather than leaving the activity solely the preserve of bookworms and mice.)

An heroic exception is the Danish author Theodore Reinking. In 1644, Theodore wrote a political tract entitled Dania ad exteros de perfidia Suecorum (From the Danes to the world on the treachery of the Swedes — you have to remember that people expected to read important documents in Latin in those days.)

At that particular point, just after the Thirty Years’ War, Denmark was a shadow of its former power, and in sway to the strength of its neighbour, Sweden. Reinking’s tract blamed the Swedes roundly for this appalling situation. Whatever the literary merits of Reinking’s work, or its accuracy, the Swedes took agin it. The tetchy Scandinavians cast Reinking into a dark prison, where he mouldered for many years. At last, he was offered a stark choice: to lose his head or eat his book. (An early variation on Izzard’s cake or death, obviously.) A politician through and through, Reinking preferred the culinary challenge. We don’t know whether his tract was weighty enough to provide an entire meal or merely an amuse-bouche, or whether he acted alone or with kitchen accomplices, but he boiled his manuscript up into a broth and ate it that way.

Ezekiel by Raphael

Ezekiel by Raphael

We can’t be certain what the manuscript tasted like, but previous reports from this little-explored gastronomical field sound promising. The Lord once gave Ezekiel a scroll of a book written within and without with lamentations, and mourning, and woe, and obliged him to eat it. Reports the prophet: “It was in my mouth as honey for sweetness.” (Ezekiel, 3:3)

Honey or wormwood, the manuscript-eating experience dissuaded Reinking completely from pursuing politics, penmanship or cookery as a career.

The French Revolution

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In 1834, the philosopher John Stuart Mill discovered that, although he had signed a contract with his publisher to produce a general history of the French revolution, he was actually too busy with other commitments to come up with the promised work. So he proposed to his friend Thomas Carlyle that Carlyle write it instead. Carlyle, struggling to make ends meet, and unwilling to stoop to mere journalism, took on the project with a fury — it was, he hoped, the work that would make his literary reputation.

Throughout 1834, Carlyle slaved over his history of the French Revolution with passion late into the night. When he had completed Volume One, he sent it to Mill to for his review.

On the evening of the 6th of March, 1835, Mill turned up at Carlyle’s house in Cheyne Walk, looking, Carlyle later wrote, “the very picture of desperation”.

Mill had left the manuscript at the house of his friend, Mrs Taylor. Her servant, who could not read, had used it to light the fire. All that was left of Carlyle’s passion and fury were a few charred leaves. Mill brought the leaves, as confirmation.

While most of us would greet this circumstance with hysteria and retribution, Carlyle was the epitome of politeness. Mill was beside himself with grief and self-recrimination. Carlyle probably offered him some tea. Mill offered to pay Carlyle for the damage, but Carlyle refused, saying that he could simply start again. Mill stayed very late, meaning that Carlyle, and his wife, Jane, had to stay up late, too, to comfort him.

Title page of Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution

Title page from the 1837 first edition

When Mill left, Carlyle’s first words to Jane were: “Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up. We must endeavour to hide from him how very serious this business is for us.” And it was serious. The Carlyles had no money, and Thomas knew he could never write that book again. He had destroyed his notes and could not remember what he had written: “I remember and can still remember less of it than of anything I ever wrote with such toil. It is gone.” He would have to tell Mill he couldn’t carry on.

That night, however, he had a dream. His father and brother rose from the grave and begged him not to abandon the work. The next morning, Carlyle told Mill that he would take the money after all. He used it to buy paper, and started writing again.

First, he wrote volumes two and three. Then, he recreated volume one. Carlyle wrote the entire manuscript from memory, words that came “direct and flamingly from the heart”.

The three-volume work — a heroic undertaking which charts the course of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1795 — was completed and published in 1837. It has never been out of print and is still in print nearly 200 years later.

Carlyle kept the charred leaves in his study for the rest of his life.

The Ghost of Plath’s Double Exposure

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Sylvia Plath is famous for her poetry and for one novel, The Bell Jar, published in the UK in 1963 but not in the US until 1971. Plath did begin another novel. Her husband told us so. In 1977, in the introduction to Johnny Panic and The Bible of Dreams, a collection of Plath’s journals and stories, Ted Hughes wrote that she had “typed some 130 pages of another novel, provisionally titled Double Exposure. That manuscript disappeared somewhere around 1970.”

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath

We know how the life, if not the novel, ended. In December 1962, after her marriage with Hughes had broken down, Plath moved herself and their children from the family house in Devon back to London. She moved into a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road, a house once occupied by W. B. Yeats. In the early morning of 11 February 1963, Plath put some bread and milk in the bedroom of their children, Frieda and Nicholas, opened their window to let in a small breath of air, then sealed their door with damp cloths. Plath went downstairs and sealed herself similarly in the kitchen. She put her head in the oven, turned on the gas, and killed herself.

During the last months of her life, Plath found her Ariel voice and wrote the poems that confirmed her reputation, including Lady Lazarus, Daddy, and Edge. She also, as she had done since she was a child, kept her journal. One volume of these journals, like the novel, “disappeared“. Another volume was destroyed. Of the disappeared journals, Hughes wrote: “Two more notebooks survived for a while… The last of these contained entries for several months, and I destroyed it because I did not want her children to have to read it… The other disappeared.”

The 1962 notebook and a typescript. Both “disappeared”. What does that mean? As Plath and Hughes were still married at the time of her death, and she died without a will, Hughes became the heir to Plath’s estate, and all her belongings. Over the years, he was often accused of withholding certain papers, just as he had burned the journal.

Ronald Hayman, in The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath, says that Judith Kroll saw an outline of the novel, titled Doubletake and later, Double Exposure. Like so much of Plath’s work, the writing had its origins in biography. Hughes had begun an affair with Assia Wevill while Plath was in Devon, and his infidelity hurt her bitterly. Plath wrote to a friend that the novel was “semi-autobiographical about a wife whose husband turns out to be a deserter and philanderer”.

There are rumours about the disappeared manuscript. It’s been said that Esther Greenwood, the protagonist of Plath’s much-loved novel, The Bell Jar, turns up again in Double Exposure. It’s been said that the rare books department at Smith College in Massachusetts, where Plath studied, has a secret copy of the typescript under seal. Plath’s mother, Aurelia, also claimed that her daughter had told her about the book, while Plath’s husband accused Aurelia (after Aurelia was safely dead) of stealing it: “Her mother said she saw a whole novel, but I never knew about it. What I was aware of was sixty, seventy pages which disappeared. And to tell you the truth, I always assumed her mother took them all.”

Missing Plath novels do turn up occasionally. In 1999, a team working in special collections at Emory University in Georgia, which acquired the library of Ted Hughes, discovered two chapters of an early novel called Falcon Yard. Falcon Yard is the place in Cambridge where, in 1956, Plath met (and, famously, bit) Hughes. The novel would have fictionalised their life together. It was never completed.

The draft of Double Exposure may have been destroyed; it may have been stolen; it may have been lost. It might lie unfound in a university archive. Certainly, some of the files at Emory are closed until 2022, but that is probably to protect the privacy of Carol Hughes, the Poet Laureate’s second wife.

The disappeared typescript was a draft of a novel, not a finished work. Would Sylvia herself wish us to read Double Exposure in its raw state?

She burned many manuscripts. But not this one. Or that missing journal. “Her blacks crackle and drag.”

Hemingway’s lost suitcase

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In December 1922, Ernest Hemingway was in Switzerland, on assignment as a correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star, covering the Lausanne Peace Conference. The journalist and editor Lincoln Steffens, whom Hemingway had met in Genoa, was also there. Apparently, Steffens was impressed with Hemingway’s writing and asked to see more. Hemingway’s wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson, always known as Hadley, was in Paris, where they were living at the time. She packed up all of Hemingway’s papers in a suitcase, to take them to him in Switzerland. She packed everything she could find.

While the train was still standing in the Gare de Lyon, Hadley went to buy a bottle of Evian water for the trip. She left the suitcase unattended on the train while she did so. When she came back, it was gone.

Hadley and Ernest Hemingway

Hadley and Ernest Hemingway

At that point, nothing of Hemingway’s fiction had been published. In Paris, there was nothing left. With touching thoroughness, Hadley had packed both the originals and their carbons. Only two short stories survived the disaster. “Up in Michigan”, which he had buried in a drawer because Gertrude Stein had said it was unpublishable, while “My Old Man” was out with an editor at a magazine.

In a letter to Ezra Pound, in January 1923, Hemingway wrote: “I suppose you heard about the loss of my Juvenalia? I went up to Paris last week to see what was left and found that Hadley had made the job complete by including all carbons, duplicates, etc. All that remains of my complete works are three pencil drafts of a bum poem which was later scrapped, some correspondence between John McClure and me, and some journalistic carbons. You, naturally, would say, ‘Good’ etc. But don’t say it to me. I ain’t yet reached that mood.”

But maybe he did reach that mood. “The first and most important thing of all, for writers today,” Hemingway later said, “is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone.” Juvenilia (or Juvenalia in Hemingway’s misspelling) are often just that – rambling, unstructured, wayward pieces of adolescent hopes and dreams. Which of us would gladly publish our teenage love poetry?

Hemingway had his language stripped clean all right. Indeed, with the loss of the manuscripts, and with time pressing to replace those vanished words in his bid to become a respected writer, Hemingway may have adopted and adapted the lean prose style for which he became famous.

(It is often said that he used the style guide of the Kansas City Star, where he had been a cub reporter, as his rule-book: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English.”)

Hemingway never bothered to run a newspaper advertisement seeking the return of the manuscripts. When he considered one, he thought of offering a reward of 150 francs. About ten dollars. Grace under pressure? Or a sign that the manuscripts were not so valuable?

They would be valuable today, of course. If they survived. If they ever turned up.

What did the thief do, on realising that the stolen suitcase contained paper, worthless paper with the juvenile scribblings of an unknown writer? No gold, no diamonds, no lucrative passports to be traded on the black market. Throw them in the Seine? Burn them? Bury them in an attic?

Of course, if they do turn up in an attic, these lost manuscripts of a Nobel prize-winning author, they will be worth more than their weight in gold.