Manchester, Dylan Thomas and a dark room

By THEA LENARDUZZI

Manchester Literature Festival is in full swing with a programme of events taking place in libraries, theatres, music halls and hotel rooms (in the Midland Hotel, to be specific – but more on that in a future post), dotted around the city centre. Arriving on Saturday at around midday, I knew I’d already missed plenty: the Spanish writer Andrés Neuman discussing his new novel; Lorna Goodison and Kei Miller reading their poems to the jazz-trumpeting of Matthew Halsall; Sebastian Barry and Colm Tóibín on the state of the Irish novel.

It was a twenty-minute walk from Manchester Piccadilly, down the main student thoroughfare of Oxford Road, to the Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama – a modern performance space set in the heart of the oldest part of the University’s campus. The sun was ablaze, eliciting a rich copper glow from the red bricks of Manchester.

Though the main concert hall has room for a full symphony orchestra, on Saturday it hosted just two men – the Dylan Thomas aficionado Jeff Towns and the artist Peter Blake – and a laptop, from whence was projected a sequence of Thomas- and specifically Under Milk Wood-related ephemera.

For at least thirty years, Blake explained, he has nurtured “an obsession” with the poet’s “play for voices” – ever since “John” chose Thomas for the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (you’ll find him propped up between Aldous Huxley and Terry Southern). This obsession – his others include Ian Dury memorabilia (Dury studied under Blake at the RCA) and dwarves (he owns a pair of boots worn by Tom Thumb, Queen Victoria’s favourite) – has taken the form of over 100 pencil portraits, watercolours, collages and found images conjuring Thomas’s “darkest-before-dawn” town and its characters.

These have now been published in a book alongside the definitive text to mark the centenary of the poet’s birth – of which Blake was apparently unaware until Towns mentioned it last year. Listening to the artist speak fervently about the endless, generally ribald, “layers” of his subject, however, one gets the sense that this collection – first exhibited at the National Museum Wales in Cardiff and now at Oriel y Parc in Pembrokeshire – is itself anything but definitive. For Blake continues to be drawn to the dream sequences and realities of the inhabitants of the fictional town of Llareggub (a composite of all the seaside towns Thomas had ever visited, Towns and Blake agreed).

Like Thomas, he began at the beginning, sketching First Voice and Second Voice – copied from photographs of Ted Hughes and Humphrey Bogart respectively – and continued until the entire cast had been set to paper, from the blind Captain Cat (see below: less the Peter O’Toole of the 1972 film adaptation, more Uncle Albert from Only Fools and Horses) and his beloved Rosie Probert, to Nogood Boyo (who, incidentally, looks nothing like David Jason, who took the role in the same film) – and every butcher and baker in between.

From Peter Blake, Under Milk Wood (London: Enitharmon Editions, 2013) (c) the artist.

Next, Blake turned his attentions to the poem’s imagery, “interpreting each one literally”. And so we have, “In Butcher Beynon's, Gossamer Beynon, daughter, schoolteacher, / dreaming deep, daintily ferrets under a fluttering hummock / of chicken's feathers in a slaughterhouse that has chintz / curtains and a three-pieced suite, and finds, with no surprise, / a small rough ready man with a bushy tail winking in a paper carrier”:

 
From Peter Blake, Under Milk Wood (London: Enitharmon Editions, 2013) (c) the artist.

And for “. . . titbits and topsyturvies, bobs and buttontops, bags and / bones, ash and rind and dandruff and nailparings, saliva / and snowflakes and moulted feathers of dreams, the wrecks / and sprats and shells and fishbones, whale-juice and moonshine / and small salt fry dished up by the hidden sea” (Blake’s personal favourite because of the technical challenge of illustrating dandruff), we have this:

From Peter Blake, Under Milk Wood (London: Enitharmon Editions, 2013) (c) the artist.

That’s what great radio can inspire, I suppose, yet I couldn’t help but lament the absence of Richard Burton’s honeyed tones (for, having played First Voice in three of the four radio productions as well as in the 1972 film, he seems inseparable from it).

That evening, Edgar Allan Poe – who appears just above Thomas on the Sgt. Pepper cover (sandwiched between Carl Gustav Jung and Fred Astaire) – played a part in one of the pieces comprising In the Dark, “a collaborative project between a new generation of radio producers and radio enthusiasts” that has the ultimate aim of bringing about a “mini-revolution” in spoken-word radio (the pieces were played, as you may have guessed, with the lights off). Where Thomas worked his biographical vignettes into a rich and steaming pat, In the Dark ran a sequence of discordant “audio explorations”, each one self-contained: in the Poe piece, the famous circumstances of the author’s death in Baltimore, Maryland, were reimagined; in “Thirteen Ways”, the radio producer Pejk Malinovski transported us to a class full of boisterous eleven-year-olds in Queens, New York, and set about teaching them Wallace Stevens's poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (the word “indecipherable” proves just that); in “Books”, a bibliophile sorted through his burgeoning collection (“The book of family games can go . . . they never come round anymore”); in “Remedial Theory”, the producer Benjamin Walker travelled from America to the Hague, where Slobodan Milošević was on trial for war crimes, to deliver his own selection of books to this “avid fiction reader” (the premiss being that, if reading literature encourages empathy, “Milosovic must be reading the wrong books”).

The lights came up and I set off back along Oxford Road, its buildings now a deep shade of aubergine; I felt I’d done a fair amount of travelling for one day.

 

Manchester Literature Festival runs until October 19.