...I have roamed the border between prose and poetry,
even when - as happened for fifteen years - I was sure I could never
write - didn't want to write - prose. My poems were strongly narrative;
and the poets I loved best were those who kept to a narrative line,
had something positive to write about: Frost, Donne, Yeats,
Emily Dickinson, Anne Sexton; and increasingly and almost
obsessively the Russians, Akhmatova and Pushkin above all.
I translated, and learnt from, both. An inspiration closer to home
was Charles Causley, Corrnish and of working-class origins like
myself, with a pure lyricism I could not begin to match...

- excerpt from A Writer's Alphabet -
Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Vol. II

 

PROLOGUE

A half-serious game I sometimes play, over a drink with some new acquaintance, is to invite him or her to run through the alphabet, specifying things he or she likes. And after that, the dislikes. It's a quick way of finding out if there are any shared enthusiasms or antipathies. It has its limitations, of course - it is hard to believe that he or she really cares strongly about xylophones, Xenophon, or Xerxes; but by the time x is reached I've usually discovered whether we're going to have much in common.

Since the intention of this present piece is to allow the reader - who has probably read only one or two of my books - to gain some impression of my life and personality, I though I could do worse than play the alphabet game for him, in a slightly more sophisticated form. Each entry represents something that is or has been important to me, has influenced me for better or worse.

- excerpts -

(AUNTS)

Carnkie, the Cornish tin-mining village where I was born, was rich with aunts. Shrunken, white-haired, often arthritic from the drizzle that swept in off the Atlantic, they coiled up small in deep armchairs, surrounded by stuffy plants and furniture and photos of dead husbands. They would smile at me, say to my mother how much I'd grown, and press sixpence into my hand. They were honorific aunts, though I guess I was distantly linked to them all, through the inbreeding of a tight community.

Auntie Perry, moon-faced, surprised to learn there was the same moon shining on America, lived away from the village in the tiny white-washed cottage where she and mother had been born. Perry was a genuine aunt. When her husband died she refused to budge from her cottage except once a week to pick up shopping: committing a slow, deliberate suttee. Auntie Susan-Jane was more sociable after her husband - my mother's brother - died of miner's silicosis; yet maybe Auntie Perry's way was better, becaue one night Auntie Susan-Jane stripped off her clothes in front of the Methodist chapel and started singing hymns.

I suppose she was taken "up Bodmin." Bodmin housed the mental hospital. Quite a few people from the village had at least a spell "up Bodmin": perhaps it was a genetic effect of a century's radiation from the tin-mines, long since derelict, that ringed the village. If you were not taken "up Bodmin" you might be sent "down Tehidy," where there was a sanatorium for TB sufferers; though TB was in decline, fortunately.

I had little contact with the aunts on my mother's side; but the paternal aunts were part of the intimate family-circle, and are woven deep into my life. Auntie Nellie, her fiancé killed in the First World War, ran a sweet-shop and retired early into severe arthritis. She was genteel and gracious; recited with impeccable elocution "Our England Is a Garden" at concerts; dressed up as a gypsy-woman, with loose false teeth, every Christmas, and came calling at our door; invited in, spun us yarns which didn't vary from year to year but still had us laughing. She also scared me a bit, till I was old enough to be sure the crazy, yabbering crone was actually my gentle aunt.

Auntie Ethel didn't laugh much; she could not have been expected to, having lost her husband, her two beautiful daughters, and a grandchild from TB. She was accepted back into the family-house at Carnkie in the spirit of Frost's words: "... when you have to go there, / They have to take you in." But she was too long-faced, and too slow-moving for my favourite auntie, Cecie, who scurried from morning to night, bearing chamber-pots or pasties, blackberries from the lanes or cups of tea (maddeningly never quite full), her stockings flapping at half-mast, her face and hands grubby as an urchin's. A couple of hairs jutted from her chin; you couldn't see her for steam as she churned the mangle for the washing; the lawnmower she propelled frenziedly was taller than she. She never stopped. I've never stopped loving her.

(INTIMATIONS - a poem, 1961) They are working quietly now, heads bent, pens scratching away, their heels lifted abstractedly out of flat shoes, and I have time to think, and look down. I look down at myself furtively and see it was not I that had caused their   laughter, the ripples of lewd-eyed mockery that raced --as if one were suddenly naked-- up the row from swarthy Susan's dirty chuckle... Oh well, whatever the   cause, not I, at least... I feel the flush dying and I hate Susan a little less perhaps, though I still hate her, for that laugh. Yes, they are quietly at work now, puzzling over a difficult piece, and I remember Lawrence and his troubles and momentary consolations. An October   sunlight leans on them through the window, and I am alone out here, looking at them, beginning to love them again as a peace leans on me like sunlight. My gaze runs up and down the rows of bent heads and stops at Penny, in the front seat, her tall and gawky and graceful frame twisted sideways out of the desk in concentration, as at that moment a look of dislike, sheer dislike of the passage, born of exasperated incomprehension, baffles her face. She looks up, and sees my eyes aware of her, divining my feelings, and she smiles, shyly and confidingly, her brooding dark face lighting up in friendliness. And I'm aware, sharing, so suddenly with them, aware of their beauty and their life. A faint belch disturbs the class into spurting   giggles; it is Susan of course, her dumpy face wreathed   in blushes, and I love her. None of them suspects I am so close, concerned and intimate, or that the warm, quiescent body of their life is flowing to me as I stand stiff in my gown. I have suddenly seen them, not as children, but as all-but-women; I watch, not the ties and crumpled childish collars, but   the laps, which are womanly curved and almost   maternal. Cross-legged, they might be women beside a   cradle, waiting patiently for their baby to sleep, so warm and womanly the crossed thighs,   suspender nuggeted faintly against the navy skirt; and I feel in sharp intuition how strange and frightening their new bodies are to them, how wonderful and exquisite with sharp sexual feeling. And then I look at the boys, decently apart on the other side of the room-- and I don't feel anything of this about them. Guiltily I walk between the rows of boys, suggesting a word here, hinting, cajoling, pretending to get annoyed over a smudge. ~ D.M. Thomas, 1961 ~

My mother, outside a mining cottage in Carnkie, c.1921             My parents, third and fourth from the left, on their honeymoon voyage to the USA, 1923: a potent image for me - the voyage of discovery, the quest.

 

(NOVELS)

I'm not addicted to reading novels. If my doctor advised me to cut out reading novels for a year, I would not be perturbed. There is a puritanical streak in me which makes me think, even after a novel I've enjoyed, "But it didn't really happen."

I feel this less, and often not at all, with Russian novels; partly perhaps because Russia herself is so fictional and surreal. When I first read Anna Karenina and War and Peace, my actual existence seemed less real, and infinitely trivial, compared with the events and characters in the novels. I lived like a sleepwalker between the periods of reading. Turgenev's Nest of Gentlefolk brought tears to my eyes at the end -- not only the first time I read it, but the second, years later. Since we never step into the same river twice, this was a rare experience. Even more extraordinary were my reactions to Turgenev's novella First Love, in which a youth finds that his father is his secret rival for the love of a beautiful girl. Reading it at twenty, I identified totally with the youth's emotions. Rereading it in my forties -- totally with his father!

Doctor Zhivago overwhelmed me with its poetic beauty and changed my way of viewing the world. Nor was I the same person after reading Ulysses. Madame Bovary disappointed me when I first read it; but when, inspiried by Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot, I tried it again last year I felt it was one of the greatest novels I had read.

Hardy's novels became a part of me early on; Lawrence's too, but I don't care to reread him. I can't get beyond a few pages of Proust. I struggle with Dostoievsky, Dickens, Conrad, Henry James, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes, Nabokov -- though I love his autobiography, Speak, Memory.

After twenty years of writing verse, I had an impulse to try a novel. Two Russian novels that I happened to read at that time helped me to overcome my aversion to the laborious build-up of plot and characterisation: Torrents of Spring (Turgenev again) and Bulgakov's Master and Margarita. The first flowed with a flawless, lyrical simplicity; the second dazzled with its mixture of tragedy and comedy and its apparent indifference to logic.

 

Aunts - Intimations - pages 368-9, Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Vol II
Intimations, page 373, ibid.
Novels - page 376, ibid.