Remember my poetry not the White Horse nights .
If you live long enough you become a witness to some small bits of history and so it was that in 1953, I, sitting with my two fifteen-dollar-a-month apartment mates, the undiscovered painter, John Ireland Collins and Colorado born would-be sculpture, Chuck Littler, downing fifty cents a mug Porters in the back room of the White Horse when we became aware of a rising theatrical voice with a plaintive vibrato. It was the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas who stood to recite his poetry, not for us, his unexpected and delighted audience but for his inner ego washed clean of inhibitions by a night of convivial drinking. So it was with delight that I got an email from a publicist for the Government of Wales to meet the First Minister of that country at the White Horse to mark the 100-year Anniversary of Dylan’s birth in 1917 and so I did and even had lunch with him. He jumped when I asked if the Welsh Language was dying. He assured me that it was not and that is was still being taught in schools but Dylan Thomas could not speak it even though his father an English schoolteacher taught it. I was surprised to read Thomas left school at 16 and went to work on a newspaper and indeed he made an off and on career of reporting and really got known as a narrator for the BBC (those Welsh tones).
Then I got an e-mail from David Drake from Cardiff Wales who was coming to New York to (as I learned later) make a video counteracting an image of Dylan as a drunk and womanizer, which evidently was the theme of the BBC anniversary acknowledgements “No, no, I can’t say American’s were aware of his drinking and certainly not his womanizing, no. He was simply a Welsh poet who had a provocative style with words and a mellifluous tremble bassoon delivery,” I offered. Then added, “Shakespeare is accused of marrying an older women for her money but who cares today.” Drake looked at me seriously. He had evidently sold his video on the theme of redeeming Thomas and could not let it go. He had planned to recreate the White Horse in the UK and use actors to bring alive the scene I witnessed more than half a century ago but I pleaded they do it at the real White Horse and David Drake gazed inward at the temptation and, I am sure, the financial obstacles.
It was around this time in the early 50s that Dick Brummer and I created the Independent Filmmakers Association to bring together all of the very few “experimental filmmakers most of whom lived in the West Village so it was with an “oh wow” that I read that Dylan spoke at the Poetry and Film Symposium at Cinema 16 on Christopher Street with Amos Vogel, Arthur Miller, Maya Deren, Parker Tyler and Willard Maas. All but Miller and Amos Vogel were members of the Independent Filmmakers.
I was amused to find Drake asking me, the “old timer”, about how the Village has changed in half a century but as I write this I realize that I don’t know the new people who inhabit the Village today. David Porat our restaurant critique took me to a very new hot restaurant on Hudson packed elbow to elbow with my age 50 years ago all talking at once well above my audio pain level, sipping $16 wine from a very small glasses and I thought could a new Dylan Thomas catch their attention, stand and intone – “do not go gentle into that good night.”
HISTORIC NOTE As those of you who read WestView know, the White Horse is very important in my life because my wife to be on the very first day we met said to her date, latter that same evening sitting at the White Horse table by the door “Today I met the man I am going to marry,” as I walked in that very same door with my very first love, a tall blond, and 3 months later we were married (Andromache, Maggie that is) and stayed so for 55 years.
