The memory of man is astonishing and mysterious. How can one account for the fact that my old Aunt Anna, at the age of 92, could not recall what she had been told an hour before yet could delight one with a most joyfully and meticulously remembered account of a dance she had attended 76 years before, when she was 16, describing exactly the dress she wore that whirled around her ankles as she waltzed and the sip of wine she had from a glass embossed with cupids and the naval officer she danced with whose beard curled precisely so?
And how can one account for the tears or joy that come at just a snatch of music that in a split second brings back a thousand memories? A visit to a childhood scene, the glimpse of an old and fading photograph or flower-scent drifting through a window can each touch something in the mind that miraculously releases an overwhelming flood of memories. Marcel Proust, the great French writer, tasted a madeleine dipped in aromatic tea and wrote one of the greatest novels ever written, Remembrance of Things Past, around the memories that the taste of the tea-dipped cake brought back to him.
I have a memory vivid as yesterday of one weekend at Cambridge University when I met two of the most remarkable men of the age one after another.
I had been elected President of the University West Indian Society and one Saturday I was invited in a small group to meet Pandit Nehru, Prime Minister of India, who was visiting Cambridge. I shall never forget him. Like so many very famous people he was smaller in stature than one expected. He was beautifully dressed in white and charcoal grey with a red rose burning on the breast of his jacket. I also remember his grave and steady eyes. But these were outward things. What was most memorable, what I shall never forget as long as I live, was the strange and formidable strength that he conveyed as he spoke to us in the quietest, most gentle, of cultured voices – spoke of his experiences of England as a student, of his fight for India’s independence, of his memories of the Mahatma Gandhi, of his debates with Lord Mountbatten leading up to independence, of his trials and triumphs since independence, of the temptation that sometimes came to him to give up power, retire to just such a place of quiet, universal learning as Cambridge. I cannot remember exact phrases but the overall impression of a very great man speaking quietly and modestly about immense events will never leave me. And yet I am wrong: I do remember still one phrase he actually spoke, though it was not his own but a quotation, he said, from the Mahatma. It is a very simple phrase but I still remember it. Gandhi used to say to them as they fought for India’s independence: “No man is our enemy, only the evil in him.”
That was an amazing enough encounter. The very next day more astonishment overtook me. I attended a meeting of the Cambridge Poetry Society to which the great Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, had been invited to speak. He was an hour late and when he came in he was extremely drunk. I remember he looked terrible – clothes very dirty and disheveled, hair curly and wild, face fat and red as a bursting cherry, eyes faraway and lost. He looked like a doomed and dirty cherub. He was really drunk; rolling-about drunk. He made absolutely no sense talking to us – mumbling, slurring his words, throwing curses in, no logic in his sentences. It was pathetic, a little demeaning, almost disgusting to tell the truth. Then, purely and simply, what happened was a miracle, a transformation, an epiphany. He suddenly decided to recite some of his poetry to us. At once there was an utter and complete change that I shall never forget. The words rang out like purest bells. The coarseness that had gone before was all forgotten. No one who heard him, the drunken man turned golden poet, could ever forget it. I heard then poems I had not heard before but from then on could never again forget.
The lines from “And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” he said them so quietly in the dead silence:
“Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.”
The marvelous lines rang with defiance. And then there was “Poem in October” and “Fern Hill,” made so beautiful by his singing voice that they became like triumphant hymns sung by a whole choir:
“Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would
take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land,
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”
He read for an hour, two hours, I cannot remember exactly. And then he left, tumbling out, and no one said a word. We who had laughed behind our hands at the drunk who fell down like any drunk were speechless in the presence of the miracle of his poetry most purely given to us.
After Dylan Thomas had left that Sunday evening, I walked out of the room and went back to my lodgings, almost in a trance, overwhelmed by poetry. It was the end of one weekend in my life, a simple Saturday, a simple Sunday, sixty-five years ago which I shall never forget. Immaculate Pandit Nehru and his dream of India’s freedom; drunken Dylan Thomas and his perfect poetry: the two singers, in their strange and different guises, and their immortal songs.
