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For Thomas, the way began in the Welsh seaport of Swansea. He grew up the son of a genteel, ineffectual little schoolmaster who had thrown away the declamatory, bardic Welsh heritage in favor of English-language conformity. But Dylan absorbed all the Celtic mysteries and humors. At 16 he quit school and for a year tried reporting for a Swansea newspaper.
"A penguin in a duckpond," said an old staffer.
Having won a poetry contest in 1933, he headed for the capital. He did not exactly wow T. S. Eliot and the polite publishers, but he could not be ignored. Tousled, pink-cheeked and tweedbare, he slept on friends' floors, jumped in bed with friends' wives, won a reputation as a pub orator with a golden voice and an infinite capacity for beer.
"He stood at the bar, this little, thick man with the gooseberry eyes starting out of his head," a friend recalls, "telling wonderful stories and a crowd gathering around him." For a while he and another down-and-outer lived on a porridge made from oats bought by the half-sack from a stable-supply dealer. When there was no one left to touch for a quid, he would retreat to Swansea, where he would sit in the Kardomah café and hold the customers spellbound with tales of London ("As I was saying to Sacheverell . . ."). In London he spun the legend that he was a country boy. Actually, Thomas, who has written pastorales as convincing and sweet as a haystack, probably never shot a bird, rode a horse, caught a fish. If he ever made hay, it was in mighty desultory fashion.
"I'm an Exploiter." While Thomas was yarning and clowning, he kept sternly to his poet's vocation. When he worked on his lines, crosshatching, chiseling and chivvying for the right word, a bottle might stand untouched all day at his elbow. Says British Critic John Davenport of these years: "After some terrible drunk, he would come to, somewhere out in the country. Utterly exhausted, nervous, there he would be, suddenly stuttering, diffident, fumbling in his pocket—T don't know if you'd mind—of course you haven't the time'—and dragging out a poem for you to read. There he was, with his dirty, curly hair, probably wearing someone else's trousers, those nail-bitten fingers as if they were stretched out for a five-pound note—then he produced some beautiful thing like this." Shortly before the war, Dylan met and married Caitlin Macnamara, daughter of a bankrupt Irish landed gentleman. They were, says a poetic friend, "two wild ones," living wherever they could, either in squalor or with friends. "Lack of money still pours in," wrote the moody family man during a spell at his mother-in-law's. He once said that his lifelong ambition was "living off a rich woman," and women often helped him.