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Reading Closely with Your Voice: Under Milk Wood on the Radio, in the Afterlife

2022; Wiley; Volume: 64; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/criq.12654

1467-8705

Imogen Cassels,

Narrative Theory and Analysis

Working backwards from its point of broadcast, on the BBC’s Third Programme on 25 January 1954, at 8:45 pm, the story of Under Milk Wood’s genesis and development has been well-accounted for by various critics.1 Trickier to solve or address than its history, though, has been the question of Under Milk Wood’s form. How we ought to define Under Milk Wood is a rhetorical point often raised, but rarely explored or answered satisfactorily. ‘Is it a play? Is it a poem?’, asks Gillian Clarke, who settles on defining it as a ‘long poem for voices, and radio its perfect medium’; I am grateful to an anonymous reader of William Moynihan’s The Craft and Art of Dylan Thomas (1966), who, in response to the dismissal that ‘Under Milk Wood is neither good poetry nor good drama’, pencilled in the question, ‘but brilliant radio drama?’2 Of the problems manifest in this equivocating, a few stand out: a lack of definition for the terms ‘play’ or ‘poem’; the significance of plumping for one term over another; why or whether a text’s form matters; how form might behave differently listened to rather than read; and how the idea of inhabitation by voice might be imagined differently in text for radio rather than prose or lyric poetry. This article aligns itself with Moynihan’s anonymous reader and contends that Under Milk Wood’s deliberate formal intractability is related to its origin as a ‘Play for Voices’. Under Milk Wood is made of voices, named and unnamed; they are its purpose and vehicle, as the animating and ambiguating force of Thomas’s diverse formalities. Questions as to Under Milk Wood’s form might be most excitingly answered – although not entirely resolved – through attention to its voices. Contextualising Under Milk Wood’s uncertain forms alongside contemporary broadcasting practices helps us better understand it as peculiarly radio-led, inheriting its fluidities from those already at work on the airwaves. So this study of voice in Under Milk Wood will involve recourse to the work and recent history of radio, the nature of Thomas’s prose-poetic and dialogic forms, and also a consideration of the work of memory. The rich intonations of his voice, the expressive recitation, brought a great illumination to the poems and stories that he read, and the conviction to the listener that Thomas’s poetry, more than any other kind of poetry, must be read aloud to be really appreciated.7 What’s in a voice? Beyond the resonance of a certain voice box, it is difficult to save any less literal answer from abstraction. The Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics begins its entry for ‘Voice’ with an acknowledgement of the impossible: ‘To define voice in written poetry immediately poses a problem, for there is no literal voice in a poem’.10 Accounting for Thomas’s literary voice may actually involve his stylistic tics – of form, syntax, phonemic play, and so on. What passes for voice could also, then, be approximated as habit, style, tone, or register (four words which are themselves distinct). So critical understandings of a writer’s ‘voice’ have often wound up referring to the kind of words a person tends to use, and that you recognise them by, rather than the sound that person made when they spoke. The word ‘idiolect’ might cover some ground in accounting for vocabulary, pronunciation, and idiosyncrasy, but it falls short of recognising voice’s function as a lodge for emotion and memory. This confusion around what we mean by voice coalesces around Thomas, since his style – his ‘poetic voice’ – and his spoken voice were idiosyncratic and well-known both during and after his lifetime. But it is not enough to set up ‘poetic’ and ‘spoken’ voice as binary, since the two co-inflect one another; Francis Berry, for instance, has speculated whether ‘Thomas would have composed the kind of poetry that he did but for the possession of a vocal instrument so exactly suitable for its rendering’.11 And yet, while Berry’s speculation is, I think, an intuitive one, it falters against the paradoxes of the printed voice. ‘No page displays a voice’s pace’, Eric Griffiths notes: ‘how some words come readily to it and others only with reluctance, the ever-varying timbres of allegiance, longing, shyness, or disdain which colour utterance and give character to a voice, give voice to a character’.12 Berry takes Thomas’s poetry as a self-fulfilling prophecy in the interest of his voice; what happens, then, when the voice that facilitates the writing of a text metamorphoses as that text is written down? Writing betrays a voice, doubly, in that it lets vocal complexity down, but it may also bear traces of it, giving it away. A written passage could never replicate a voice, but this does not preclude the possibility of residual vocals lurking there. Griffiths cites Sigmund Freud’s ‘concise insight’: ‘“Writing was in its origin the voice of an absent person”’, adding that ‘this is an origin which has not been left behind; writing is still this “voice of an absent person”, re-originated as it is in the numerous writings of every day’.13 Both vocalisation and writing belong to a single person, and both suffer from that person’s absence, albeit differently. A text can be an excuse for absence but also derive its spirit or sense of play from absence; meanwhile, John Hollander points out, the echo of a voice or voices ‘can be so faint and fragmentary that they seem to enter a poem as tonal quality, or shading of voice’.14 Who this echo belongs to is uncertain, as a potential inflection from either reader or writer. A vocal ‘echo’ could be, for instance, the recollection of a specific instance of voicing; a familiarity with a writer’s register; or a familiarity with a speaker’s voice in general – these three definitions for ‘voice’ cross paths and intertwine, but they are still distinct, even as they condition a mutual possibility. like the noises their voices make. They find that the words of a poem they reel, familiar and pleasant, acquire a surprising pleasant strangeness when boomed, minced, Keened, crooned, Dyalled, or Wolfitted. Known words grow wings; print springs and shoots; the voice discovers the poet’s ear; it’s found that a poem on a page is only half a poem.16 This is particularly the case, Bridson has observed, with Thomas, for whom ‘creation is a continuous process: it does not end with the final draft of the poem upon the paper’, and ‘[w]hat the poet does with his work in voice can sometimes give one an indication of what he has done with the poem’s raw material in his imagination’.17 Voice’s creative force, in Bridson’s phrase, entangles a poem’s futures with its cognitive histories, offering a projection of futurity which might prompt recourse to T.S. Eliot’s reflections on verse and musicality. In an article for The Listener in 1930, Eliot identified ‘two kinds of “music” in verse’, one is ‘the lyrics of Shakespeare or Campion, which demand the kindred music of the lute or other instrument’; ‘Donne’s is the second kind of musical verse: the verse which suggests music, but which, so to speak, contains in itself all its possible music’.18 Unlike Shakespeare’s lyrics, which might want accompaniment, Donne’s verse seems almost to accompany itself. ‘All its possible music’, here, is also ‘all its possible futures’; for William Empson, in Thomas’s poems ‘all directions are possible and will presumably occur, as the hand goes round the clock’, and a reader can ‘assume on principle there is something there […] which I feel and can’t see, but could see’.19 Literature is habitually caught up in generating or imagining its own futures, but Thomas’s ambiguities seem to his readers to be especially promising. Voice’s work amongst these as-yet-unrealised futures, anticipated but never quite attained, is complex: voicing can realise a text, providing a closure which is different for each reader, but with the peripheral sense that the words could always have been said another way. Returning to Under Milk Wood’s voices, then, is a matter of going back in order to go forwards, playing and re-playing opportunities for establishing meaning. Ambiguity in voice, then, happens on a temporal axis, taking place both in the literal time of speaking and listening and also the accumulative historical time of different listeners and readers. Under Milk Wood, with its ram-jam of stylised narration, snatches of folksong, practices of listing, overhearing, and polyphony of voices ranging from a disparaging ‘guidebook’ to the idiomatic speech of the play’s ensemble, is a tumble of diverse formalities that also, at times, feels excitingly formless. Listening to it read aloud, without accompanying text – as original hearers would have – is an exercise in anticipation, patience, and a task of establishing and re-establishing the perceived shape of Thomas’s words as they stream through the air. Think, for instance, of the ‘titbits and topsyturvies, bombs and buttontops, bags and bones, ash and rind and dandruff and nailparings, saliva and snowflakes and moulted feathers of dreams’, which work not only through phonemic, but also associative multiplication.20 The ‘t’ that echoes through ‘titbits and topsyturvies’ is repeated in ‘buttontops’, just as ‘tops’, ‘bobs’ and ‘buttontops’ echo the same ‘o’ and ‘s’, while ‘b’ carries over the ‘bags and bones’. ‘[B]ags and bones’ corrupts ‘bag of bones’ and ‘rag and bone’; the rag-and-bone man collects detritus like ‘ash and rind’. ‘[B]obs’ comes out of ‘titbits’ (‘bits and bobs’), and ‘moulted’ blurs the associations of ‘snowflakes’ and ‘melted’, producing ‘feathers’. This characteristic chain of semantic and phonemic blurring makes Under Milk Wood susceptible to the work of voice, which enables ambiguity and is capable of elucidating an ambiguity’s options, even as it also disambiguates in a single spoken utterance. Writing to his patron, the Princess Caetani, in 1951, Thomas had a sense that the ‘Play for Voices’ he was working on was formless, or formally indistinct: ‘it will be good’, he promised, ‘(of its own kind)’.21 Under Milk Wood will be ‘a piece, a play, an impression for voices, an entertainment out of the darkness, of the town I live in’, written ‘simply and warmly & comically with lots of movement and varieties of moods, so that, at many levels, through sight and speech, description & dialogue, evocation and parody you come to know the town as an inhabitant of it’.22 Thomas is promiscuous with his terms, from the more specific ‘play’ to a vague ‘piece’ or ‘entertainment’, but his definition of Under Milk Wood as an ‘impression’ or series of impressions, coming ‘out of the darkness’, indicates a particular sensitivity to the opportunities radio offers. In this way, Under Milk Wood epitomises what Melissa Chia has termed the ‘radiogenic’ (as in ‘photogenic’), a characteristic which is ‘particularly suited to radio broadcasting’, but which can also be present in works not made for radio.23 Henry Treece, writing in 1954, observed that ‘Under Milk Wood is an ant-hill, which is quite static from a distance of ten yards and only comes to life when observed from ten inches. It is a pointillistic technique too refined for the theatre’.24 Pointillism is an artistic movement which branches from Impressionism, and while Treece’s claim for Llareggub’s ‘static’-ness at a distance is odd, he articulates the way in which Under Milk Wood might require a different medium – radio – to realise its potential. It is the piece of impressionism Thomas promised to Caetani: it does impressions of stock figures but is impressionistic, too, in its combination of intricate detail with its sense of scale. Radio broadcast can facilitate this impressionistic fluidity and scope, moving between persons and types of speech without the distraction of bodies in space or the interruption of set-dressing. And impressionism affords Under Milk Wood its formal variety, shifting between the Reverend Jenkins’s verse-sermons, the prose-poetic monologues of the first and second voices, the dialogues between living and dead, the folksongs of Polly Garter or drinking-songs of the pub, and the free-indirect narration of characters overlooking and eavesdropping on the town. Enmeshing voice with form, Under Milk Wood derives its spirit, pathos, and joy from the play of voices in radio darkness. Radio’s phenomenology, its effects and opportunities, have been the subject of study since its inception, and its relationship with modernist writing and writers has been the source of several more recent studies. Jane Lewty points out that ‘[t]he creative process of any writer during [the modernist period] was affected by the surround-sound of context, or, rather, the colonisation of daily life by radio’, reminding us that Thomas had already listened to and been influenced by radio all his life, before he may have even considered writing for it.25 Radio facilitated huge and invisible communities of listeners and acted as a guide through darkness as it metaphysically transcended distance. As early as 1929, Todd Avery notes, the Listener recognised radio programmes as ‘something new and strange’: listeners ‘stood astounded to hear intelligible sound transmitted apparently from a great distance’; Adrienne Munich has also articulated this paradox that a listener ‘experiences the radio voice as both far away (in that it issues from some invisible location, a place not here) and very close (in that one can see he place from which the voice emanates)’.26 For Marshall McLuhan, radio constitutes an ‘immense extensio[n] of ourselves’, ‘enabl[ing] us to participate in one another’s lives’; dealing in ‘auditory space […] that sphere of simultaneous relations created by the act of hearing’, radio allows us to ‘hear from all directions at once; this creates a unique, unvisualisable space’.27 ‘Radio is provided with its cloak of invisibility’, coming to us ‘ostensibly with person-to-person directness that is private and intimate’, and also as a ‘subliminal echo chamber of magical power to touch remote and forgotten chords’.28 This is work Matthew Feldman, Erik Tonning, and Henry Mead draw on when they observe how ‘the radio began to be conceived as a kind of collective consciousness, a nervous system or potential form of spiritual union for the community’ and also informs Susan Douglas’s note that ‘radio conveyed a powerful sense of “liveness” – it was, from the beginning, “an account of what is happening, rather than a record of what has happened”’.29 These conceptions of radio’s potential for establishing community even for listeners in solitude, its sense of aural action, and its access into echo chambers of the un- or sub-conscious are relevant to Under Milk Wood’s aural pointillism; it is a text about a community overhearing (and sometimes over-reading), living in one another’s dreams and pockets as they also remain just out of mutual reach. informational listening, which was more flat and less imaginative as people took in brief, factual reports, and dimensional listening, as people were compelled to conjure up maps, topographies, street scenes in London after a bombing, a warship being dive-bombed by the Luftwaffe.31 Taking Under Milk Wood as the ‘brilliant radio drama’ that certain readers have identified, we might think more carefully about the category of ‘drama’ on the BBC during this period – and whether it is entirely accurate. Under Milk Wood was never really a radio play, but a radio feature. Douglas Cleverdon, himself an ‘important features producer’, who collaborated with Thomas on developing the text, and subsequently produced it in 1954, notes that ‘[n]obody outside the B.B.C. (and, indeed, comparatively few inside) can be expected to distinguish between a radio play and a radio feature’ (the two departments having split in 1945–46).32 A radio play is a ‘dramatic work deriving from the tradition of the theatre’, conceived and rendered for radio; a feature is ‘any constructed programme […] that derives from the technical apparatus of radio (microphone, control-panel, recording gear, loud-speaker)’.33 The feature can combine ‘any sound elements – words, music, sound effects – in any form or mixture of forms – documentary, actuality, dramatised, poetic, musico-dramatic’; it has ‘no rules determining what can or cannot be done’ and ‘no need of a dramatic plot’ – so, he concludes, ‘it was natural that Dylan should turn to the more fluid form of the feature’.34 In an unpublished monograph, ‘The Art of Radio 1922–1966’, Cleverdon surveyed the feature as, variously, an ‘arrangement of sounds which has a theme but no plot’ or ‘the kaleidoscopic use of multiple studios, music and poetry being employed as protagonists’.35 Under Milk Wood’s mélange of voices combined in and through a single place, speaking from who-knows-where, can border on the (auditorily) kaleidoscopic; it is an arrangement of sounds which are ‘theme[d]’ in sharing a situation – a Llareggub day – but are diverse in reflecting the daily patterns of individual lives. The technical and formal expansiveness of the ‘feature’ was both formative of, and receptive to, Thomas’s vision of a ‘Play for Voices’. What the words stood for, symbolised, or meant, was of very secondary importance; what mattered was the sound of them as I heard them for the first time […] And these words were, to me, as the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments, the noises of wind, sea, and rain, the rattle of milkcarts, the clopping of hooves on cobbles, the fingering of branches on a window pane […]38 the clip clop of horses on the sunhoneyed cobbles of the humming streets, hammering of horse-shoes [ … ] tomtit twitter from the bird-ounced boughs […] Bread is baking, pigs are grunting, chop goes the butcher, milk-churns bell, tills ring, sheep cough, dogs shout […] the women scratch and babble in Mrs Organ Morgan’s general shop where everything is sold: custard, buckets, henna, rat-traps, shrimp-nets, sugar, stamps, confetti, paraffin, hatchets, whistles. (41) Thomas reflected on the placement of words in a line, in a sentence, when he replied to Harry Klopper, a young poet who had sent him some work and asked for feedback. He advised Klopper to ‘feel and weigh the shape, sound, content of each word in relation to the shape, sound, content of each word in relation to the shape, sound, content etcetera of the words surround’, with a play on the words around, and the note that ‘[i]t isn’t only the meaning of the words that must develop harmonically, each syllable adding to the single existence of the next’ but also ‘that which informs the words with their own particular life; the noise […] they make in the air and the ear, the contours in which they lie on the page and the mind’.40 Settling words in an order, for Thomas, is also to leave them somewhat unsettled or open to unsettling, subject to grammatical sleights of hand or noisy independence; this is an unsettledness which derives from an approach to writing which holds both musical harmony and vocalisation’s implications for meaning as equally important. ‘Words are seen as already in a grammar rather as letters are seen as already in a word, but one is much more prepared to have been wrong about the grammar than about the word’, Empson notes; so, ‘a plausible grammar is picked up at the same time as the words it orders, but with a probability attached to it, and the less probable alternatives, ready, if necessary, to take its place, are in some way present at the back of your mind’.41 Thomas’s fluid syntax exposes the grammatical probabilities which would otherwise lurk as residue, bringing them into play, and this serial replacement and reconsideration of options takes place in time; it is also sensitive to the modulations of different voices. To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows’ weeds. (1) You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing. Only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep. And you alone can hear the invisible starfall, the darkest-before-dawn minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea where the Arethusa, the Curlew and the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover, the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales tilt and ride […] Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night […] Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movement and countries and mazes and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams. From where you are, you can hear their dreams. (2–3) The construction of Under Milk Wood’s form through voice is contingent on voice’s history – how you remember a voice sounding, but also the forms you might expect a voice to inhabit. Eliot’s argument for the ‘auditory imagination’ is pertinent here, articulating ‘a feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word […] returning to the origin and bringing something back’.47 The concept of a voice is co-involved with familiarity, and therefore also with recollection; this ‘auditory imagination’, not always consciously active, but continually reactivating and retrieving moments of ‘thought and feeling’, also involves auditory memory. ‘Time passes’, again and again, throughout Under Milk Wood, a refrain that stitches itself back to itself as it also makes narrative progress, constituting a structure. Sound’s work in Under Milk Wood is temporal at least in part because it conditions the possibility of remembering. So, when Thomas laces his text with the phonemic slippages over which voice must always make a choice (whether consciously or not), and from which a listener can unravel latent ambiguities, he makes of these ruffles instances for remembering. Now the town is dusk. Each cobble, donkey, goose and gooseberry street is a thoroughfare of dusk; and dusk and ceremonial dust, and night’s first darkening snow, and the sleep of birds, drift under and through the live dusk of this place of love. Llareggub is the capital of dusk. (71) Adam Piette has identified the effects of what he calls ‘prose-rhymes’, dense patterning of assonance in prose texts; these ‘break the silence of skim-read prose and impose other patterns, other modulations, create a listening attention, a peculiar form of reading-memory’.48 Prose-rhymes are signs of ‘linguistic peculiarity, accent’ – indicating a voice – ‘material minutiae pointing towards something else; sound-repetitions signalling the fetishistic mood of an emotional listener’.49 Repetition may gesture towards the ineffable, but it is in Thomas’s case also sticky; his sentences, with their shifty noise and shifty grammar, stage their own disorder, refusing to quite delineate into separate sounds or meanings; everything seems to recall something else. This is sound indicating or inviting listening. Prose-rhymes are ‘miniature acts of memory’, both generating cognitive associations and bearing them out, rewarding a listener’s attention with an accumulative familiarity (of sound, of sense), and – in the case of Under Milk Wood – making use of a text’s formal fluidity in order to orient it towards readerly and auditory futures.50 Under Milk Wood’s futurity matters, is worth arguing for, since Thomas’s ‘Play for Voices’ is still, sometimes, the subject of raised eyebrows, which wonder whether the text has earned a future at all. Reviewing the National Theatre’s 2021 revival of Under Milk Wood, the Guardian’s Arifa Akbar questioned ‘why a drama that is so consciously retreating into the past [has been] revived now […] Thomas draws a picture of a place steeped in stasis and saturated in nostalgia’.51 But even critiquing Thomas’s ‘bygone’ world, the echo of his characteristic assonance lurks in Akbar’s phrase (‘steeped in stasis’, ‘saturated in nostalgia’), an instance of Under Milk Wood’s linguistic infectiousness making its temptations and pleasures known, as Thomas’s voice generates itself in the words of others. The problems and politics of present-day theatre programming is doubtless a matter for broad and considered discussion, but Akbar’s reflections on Under Milk Wood’s supposed relevance trip into literal or plot-based critique, passing over the workings of Thomas’s language – and the workings of voice – as an end in themselves. for a speaker, his words are unique; they occur in a moment and then are gone for ever, they must be passed over to reach what comes next; in urgent or in fluid forward motion, speech is irreversible. But the written word remains; the eye encompasses the past as it abides on the page, while, at the same time, it takes notice of what is to come – a fact we take advantage of when we read aloud.53 I am indebted to Deborah Bowman, Leo Mellor, and Louis Klee for their words on this article.