A PRIG’S COPY OF A BUM’S BOOK
THOMAS, Dylan.
Under Milk Wood. A Play for Voices …
London, J. M. Dent & Sons, 1954.
8vo, pp. ix, [1], 101, [1]; a fine copy in a near-fine, unclipped dust-jacket, short tear to head of rear cover; ticket of Bourne & Hollingsworth Ltd., bookplate of the poet and broadcaster D. G. Bridson; laid in loose are a programme for the New Theatre production of Under Milk Wood in 1956, and a stereotype copy of a three-page typed letter from John Berryman to Vernon Watkins, 19 November 1953, about the last days and death of Dylan Thomas.
£1500
US $1959 €1796
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First edition, first impression. Bridson and Thomas had first met in 1933, but they did not get on; their tastes in poetry clashed and Thomas dumped a pot of tea over the eiderdown while staying with the Bridsons in Manchester. So Bridson passed the Welshman on to the radio producer Rowland Hughes, and thus began the germ that would result in Under Milk Wood. ‘Though we were never particularly close, over the twenty years I knew him, I have no doubt at all that for more was done by Dylan Thomas to revive interest in poetry speaking than by anyone else of his time’. They met for the last time at a pub in September 1953: ‘After the fifth pint, conversation was getting a lot more cordial. “You’ve improved,” he said to me: “you used to be an unutterable prig.” “You’ve improved yourself,” I conceded: “You used to be an intolerable bum.” We both guffawed …’ (Bridson, Prospero and Ariel).
Berryman’s letter, written shortly after Thomas’s death, is heavy with shock and grief. ‘He had been working too hard at rehearsals, was depressed, and of course drinking. He was talking about the Garden of Eden. The last time I saw him conscious (not very) was Saturday at Harvey Breit’s: he was loaded & hardly able to speak … Wednesday night he was having mild DT’s in his room, here in the Chelsea, and went into a coma … By a piece of the worst luck in the world … I was the only one there when he died’. Bridson met Berryman in Washington DC in 1964, and the topic of conversation was Dylan Thomas – see next item – perhaps Berryman gave the copy letter to Bridson as evidence of his closeness of Thomas?
