'SO MANY PLANS MADE AND BROKEN'

THOMAS (DYLAN, 1914-1953, poet) REMARKABLE AND HIGHLY DETAILED ELEVEN-PAGE AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED ('Dylan'), TO HIS PARENTS, a wide-ranging report on his work and activities, including: a commission to work with Walton and Ayrton on 'the biggest English operatic event of the century' ('...A very modern tragic opera, in the bombed slums of wharfland...A whole Covent Garden season in 1949 is contemplated...'); responses to his Selected Works in America and his radio talk The Crumbs of One Man's Year ('...half of it enthusiastic, the other half calling me anything from obscurantist to poseur, surrealist comedian to Bedlamite...'); broadcast readings of Richard III and Titus Andronicus ('...which I'd never read and probably never will read again...') and of his story A Visit to Grandpa's; the forthcoming radio programmes Return Journey and Poet and Critic, 'the Critic being T. W. Earp'; and Margaret Taylor's promise to finance a holiday for his 'very pale and frail' son Llewelyn, 'a great reader' ('...he reads everything, except poetry which he "hates"...'); house-sharing in Oxford and Richmond; and a lively account of their 'gay and noisy' Christmas in A. J. P. Taylor's 'snug summerhouse' in Oxford ('quite a lot of presents...dolls and bears daily parties...a little mangle...a golliwog, and a stocking full of nonsense and tangerines...'); Thomas also gives a fine description of the Chelsea Arts Ball at the Albert Hall ('...all the boxes round the great hall packed with pierrots, ballerinas, costermongers, Elizabethans, pirates, courtesans, tigers, Dutch Dolls, empresses, clowns, and the huge floor rainbowed with dancers...'), and mentions the Veals, the Stahls, Valentine Dyall and lunch with Edith Sitwell, 11 pages, quarto, on lined notebook paper, perforations down the left edges, Holywell Ford, Oxford, 12 January 1947

Letters from Dylan Thomas to his parents are notably rare: Paul Ferris prints only thirteen in The Collected Letters including the present one and George Tremlett, Dylan Thomas, 1991, p. 72, comments on their limited survival. It was David John Thomas who first inspired his son's love of poetry and who was later immortalised by his poem 'Do not go gentle into that good night'.

Consisting of over 1,600 words, the present letter is the second longest by Dylan Thomas to his parents that has survived, and, true to the persona he adopted in writing to them, the very detail of it often conceals the realities of his situation, including the real nature of his relationship with A. J. P. Taylor and his wife Margaret, who not only supported Dylan and Caitlin's lifestyle in Oxford, but told Dylan that 'to sleep with you would be like sleeping with a god' (Caitlin Thomas with George Tremlett, Caitlin, 1986, p. 99).

Thomas's enthusiasm to write for Walton's opera is also deceptive; according to Ayrton, his final contribution was limited to two lines on a postcard: 'With a sound like thunder-claps / The little mouse comes out, perhaps.'

The text of this letter printed by Paul Ferris (pp. 614-617) tactfully omitted Thomas's remark about the expected child of the Taylors' cook, a 'black-and-white baby'. In general, the letter is the major source for the Thomases' life at this time, when their disordered lifestyle in the summerhouse dampened Thomas's opportunities to write ('...without a headquarters I find it hard, even impossible, to settle down at borrowed desk or friend's table to write...').

£3,250††