Escapades on the D Train: Welshman in New York
On the 81st anniversary of Dylan Thomas' death, Dylan Moore follows in the footsteps of both his namesakes through the bars of Greenwich Village
You’re in the wrong place my friend,
you’d better leave.
‘Desolation Row’, Bob Dylan
Arriving in New York is a central conceit not only in American culture, but in the imagination of the world.
Think of all those ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore’, Emma Lazarus’ words at the base of Liberty Enlightening the World.
Think of Israel Zangwill’s original Melting Pot: ‘the roaring and the bubbling… the harbour where a thousand mammoth feeders come from the ends of the world to pour in their human freight. Ah, what a stirring and a seething! Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian, black and yellow… Jew and Gentile… East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross—how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame!’
Think of Walt Whitman’s visions of the crowd in ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’, and the poet’s direct address to the future: ‘you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, / and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.’
Think too of Bob Dylan, arriving fresh-faced from an obscure iron-ore town in Minnesota, guitar slung over his shoulder, and in cinema of Vito Corleone as a child, passing through Ellis Island. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere – that’s what they say. Big lights will inspire you. Make you feel brand new. You’ll want to be a part of it, your little town blues melted away.Â
And yet when Dylan Thomas turned up here, blazing a trail of poetry and self-destruction through the bars of Greenwich Village and the campuses of Ivy League colleges, Wales’ most famous arrival in the city that never sleeps was entering a death spiral.Â
Being a Welsh writer – and what’s more a Welsh writer named Dylan, mostly after Bob, but a little after Thomas too – it’s impossible, arriving in New York, not to feel foreshadowed.Â
The very name of Ellis Island, synonymous with immigration through New York harbour, the Statue of Liberty and the American Dream, derives from Wales. Samuel Ellis, from Wrexham, bought what was then called Oyster Island in 1774, intending to turn it into a spot for picnicking. After his death, his family sold it to the United States Government and it was transformed into the famous immigration station, which processed nearly 12 million people between 1892 and 1924. Today more than 100 million Americans, more than 40 per cent of the country, can trace their roots through an ancestor who arrived via Samuel Ellis’ picnic spot.Â
Look up Welsh connections with New York and you’ll find strong stories expressed through place names, especially upstate. There you will find a county called Montgomery, a Bangor, Franklin County – and Cardiff, a tiny hamlet in Onondaga County. In 1795, four large Welsh families settled as dairy farmers in Remsen; by 1848 it was possible for the lexicographer John Russell Bartlett to write that: ‘one may travel for miles [across Oneida County] and hear nothing but the Welsh language’.
And given the importance of built heritage to New York’s projection of power around the world, it is fascinating to learn that Cardiff-born architect John Belle worked on some of the city’s most famous preservation projects including historically sensitive renovations of Ellis Island’s Main Building and the $400 million redevelopment of the world-famous Grand Central Terminal, which Belle himself called Gateway to a Million Lives.Â
There is even a Welsh claim to ownership of one of New York City’s most prized pieces of real estate. Descendants of Robert Edwards, a buccaneer from Pontypridd, claim they own the land on which the Wall Street stock exchange was built. According to an unverifiable story that has nevertheless persisted since 1778, a tract of land in downtown Manhattan now worth $680 billion was leased by Edwards to Trinity Church for just 99 years, and has failed to revert to the family.Â
But of all the millions of lives and billions of dollars that have crossed the Atlantic Ocean between Wales and America since we apparently discovered the place more than 300 years before Columbus (when Prince Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd landed in Mobile Bay, Alabama), the singular story that always rises to the top is best illustrated by a picture of a man from Swansea sitting in a pub.Â
Bunny Adler’s photograph of Dylan Thomas at the White Horse Tavern in 1952 forms something of a counterpoint to Edward Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks’, painted ten years earlier and reputed to have been based on a diner just seven minutes walk away on Mulry Square, at the other end of West 11th Street.
Hopper’s painting famously captures what the artist himself called ‘the [unconscious] loneliness of a large city’. And while the patrons of the White Horse Tavern in the background of Bunny Adler’s photo are, unlike the four lonely figures in Hopper’s diner, busily engaged in conversation, the poet’s thousand-yard stare firmly suggests the unravelling that infamously ended with the dubious claim to have downed eighteen straight whiskies at this same bar near the end of the following year was underway.
Today the West Village retains only a bougie version of its previous bohemian charm, and although the White Horse Tavern trades heavily on its history, its upmarket ambience, tables heavy-laden with napkins and cutlery, and eye-watering price list ensure there is little succour for a contemporary Welsh writer in New York. Ten dollars plus tax and tip for a solitary pint of Guinness puts paid to any notion of falling out of here in the manner of the pub’s most celebrated patron. If he were alive today I don’t think Dylan would give the place a second look, except to marvel at how it has become a miniature mausoleum to his memory.
On one wall, the poet stares down from a large print of Bunny Adler’s photo, positioned so that you can see through an adjacent doorway the exact spot where it was taken; opposite, a large mirror is etched with the text of ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’, the world’s most famous villanelle, published the year before the photo was taken. Around the rest of the dining room are framed further pieces of Dylan memorabilia, including the cover of a first edition of Dylan Thomas’ New York by Tryntje Van Ness Seymour, a book that documents ‘the last haunts of the Welsh poet… preserved in mood-evoking photographs’. Its blurb says that Dylan came to New York three times and that ‘Twice he left alive. Finding Greenwich Village to his taste, he made it his habitat, and in a short time became one of its more celebrated denizens.’ There is pathos in the following line: ‘What his life would have been like if he had never found New York and the Village we cannot know.’
The streets of New York have long had a hold on my imagination. I am hardly alone in this, such is the global cultural power exerted by the ‘Big Apple’. Indeed, there can be few people on the planet for whom the two monosyllables of the city’s name do not conjure visions of gleaming towers and great glass elevators, as well as grime, graffiti and steaming grilles.Â
First, it was four bright green ninja turtles who crawled out of the sewer and into my boyhood dreams. Then as a younger teenager it was Michael Keaton’s Batman. Later I was transfixed by Robert De Niro’s mission to clean the scum off the streets in Taxi Driver. What these disparate visions of New York had in common was their depiction of the city as a place of vice and crime, where evil lurked under every manhole cover, behind every neon restaurant sign and in the shady foyer of every seedy cinema. It was a city of comic book villains, bullies, pimps, thieves, and gangs of ninjas; a nocturnal dystopia populated by real-life lowlives and made-up mutant goons.
Perhaps the particular appeal of this New York in my youthful imagination – whether as a ten-year-old Turtles-head, a teenage Batman fan or a sixth-former discovering Scorsese – was because it could not have been more different from the only place I knew. A tiny hamlet in the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park, overlooked by both the Brecon Beacons and the Black Mountains, could not be any further from the mean streets haunted by the Joker, Travis Bickle, and the Evil Shredder. Â
The closest we got was a single alleyway in the nearby town of Brecon that – if only for me – contained ‘the streets of New York’ aesthetic I had begun to romanticise. Between the old town library and a pub called the Punchbowl, L-shaped Bell Lane consisted of loading bays, fire escapes, basements and backdoors, manhole covers, gutters and grilles. There was even a pizza and burger joint, now called Little Italy, that opened late, bathing the alley in ethereal light.
Between the fabled towers that stretch into the sky like something from science fiction and their comic book counterpoint underground is a real city with a deep and meaningful history. But so thick are the layers of myth-making, in movies and songs that make us all feel like we know the place before we get there, that it’s nigh on impossible to separate fact from fiction.
Paul Theroux’s classic essay ‘Subterranean Gothic’ (Granta, 1982) explored the city’s Rapid Transport System in the days when citizens and visitors alike feared to ‘go into the dark’. Although Jack Kerouac’s novel The Subterraneans, which finds its loudest echo in the title of Bob Dylan’s song, was set in San Francisco, it too had its genesis in Greenwich Village, rooted in the author’s brief romantic relationship with Alene Lee, an African-American woman who typed manuscripts for both Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. When Dylan stands on the pavement thinking about the government in the opening lines of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, it’s hard to imagine that sidewalk being anywhere else.
In the mid-1960s, Dylan’s lyrics were often infused with the influence of the Beats. Dylan himself said later: ‘I came out of the wilderness and just naturally fell in with the Beat scene, the bohemian, bebop crowd, it was all pretty much connected. It was Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti… I got in at the tail end of that and it was magic.’
The titles, and to some extent the lyrics of some of Dylan’s greatest songs arise from this period, when the singer-songwriter lived at the Chelsea Hotel, where his Welsh namesake and inspiration had stayed just twelve years earlier, right up until the time of his death. ‘Visions of Johanna’ (1965) drew on Kerouac’s Visions of Gerard (1963) and ‘Desolation Row’ on Desolation Angels (both 1965). Both songs are suffused with sometimes surreal and often ethereal imagery that is nevertheless absolutely rooted in the New York of the period. In Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s, Mike Marqusee calls ‘Johanna’ a ‘flickering, electric, ghostly cityscape’; the narrator’s heat-pipe dream takes him through lofts, a museum, empty lots and out on the D-train, where snippets of overheard conversation become like Edward Hopper’s domestic scenes glimpsed through windows.
Another Welsh writer who captured New York in its mid-century pomp, albeit from a very different vantage point, was Jan Morris. Manhattan ‘45 is a slim volume that zeroes in on the period at the end of the second world war. It was the year New York City and the island at its heart definitively emerged as custodian of a global dream of better. Hiroshima and the Holocaust had changed the world forever, and it was America’s heady mix of ambition and armoury, idealism and ideology, cocktails and capitalism that led the world, for good and for ill, into the new post-war order.
Morris wrote Manhattan ‘45 in 1987, reimagining and reconstructing the city as it had been four decades earlier. Now another four decades have elapsed and along the East River, 193 flags continue to proclaim this idea: New York City as capital of the world. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of Manhattan, near its southern tip at West Street, the One World Trade Center announces itself as the world’s financial hub. And all over the five boroughs’ urban sprawl – from Harlem to Greenwich Village and from Tin Pan Alley to BedStuy, Brooklyn, the streets express their own hold on the subcultures of the world. Jazz, disco and Hip Hop all had their genesis here, along with Beat poetry, abstract expressionist painting, salsa, breakdance and tap.
At street corner souvenir stands, Trump and Kamala hats sit side by side in non-partisan stacks; the hustlers don’t give a damn about your politics as long as you are parting with your dollars. New York Mets baseball caps and I ♡ NY t-shirts have become ubiquitous not just here but around the world, expressing a global acquiescence to an American dream and an empire state of mind. Your local place is your local place, but New York, somehow, belongs to us all.
For all of human history we have been drawn to the watering hole. The village green, the town square; the park, the pub, the beach. The NYC megalopolis is simply the Grand Central Terminus of civilisation, the world’s watering hole, the village green for the Global Village, the town square for a barely united nations. Its Times Square is the biggest and the brightest. Its Park is Central. But often it is only the scale of the city that sets it apart. It is a surprise that Manhattan hasn’t sunk into the Hudson river under the weight of the world’s expectations.
Every arrival at Ellis Island – or LaGuardia, or JFK International – comes with their own baggage, their own idea of how the city will help them to ‘make it’. We come escaping pogroms and poverty, or simply the boredom of small town, small country lives. We step off planes and platforms believing this is it; everything is here, everywhere we look, within a few short blocks.
The Empire State Building! The Chrysler! The Flatiron! Macy’s! Tiffany’s! Bloomingdale’s! Madison Square Garden! Trump Tower! Brooklyn Bridge! The Statue of Liberty! MOMA! The Guggenheim! One World Trade Center! Wall Street! Broadway! Fifth Avenue! Sixth Avenue! The United Nations! The Apollo! Radio City Music Hall! Carnegie Hall! Union Square! Washington Square! Cafe Wha?
But once your head stops spinning and you approach the bar at the White Horse Tavern, here you sense, truly, what it is to be a Welshman in New York. A ten dollar Guinness tastes only of loneliness, and the mirror on the wall reminds you only that ‘Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight… learn, too late, they grieved it on its way’.
These words from Wales only serve to remind you of every one of the 3,300 miles you have travelled from the places where you really belong.
Places are, after all, just places, imbued with meaning only through experiences we have in them. In these sites of secular pilgrimage, the disappointment can be crushing. So give me the Hayes over Times Square, Roath Park over Central Park, Cardiff Central over Grand Central, Clwb Ifor Bach over CBGB, Barry Island over Coney Island. Pub of my namesake, my namesake can keep it.
Maybe Dylan felt that way too. The White Horse was a haven not a destination, the poet’s sanctuary from the big city. Its long curved wooden bar and the bottles stashed behind were a one-way runway, an attempt at escape from himself. It was a home from home for a poet who was – despite his talent and no shortage of people seeking to celebrate and indulge it – lonely, depressed, physically ill and adrift in a foreign land. Outside was an alien cityscape of skyscrapers, life on a scale unknown in London, let alone in Wales; inside, here was Brown’s in Laugharne again, a comfort zone of loosened tongues, loose women and a loss of inhibition and control.
New York was and is a study in how we gather, how we move, how we dream big or go home, or dream big and get washed up elsewhere. It is the world screwed up into a ball. For some, it’s the bravest experiment humanity has ever known, the ultimate melting pot, its skyscrapers physical and metaphorical pinnacles of human achievement. Its Babel-towers cannot help but evoke feelings of hope and wonder.
For others, it’s where dreams go to die. What was Dylan looking for at the bottom of his glass? If he’d come back to the Village just twelve years later, he would have heard the voice of a man with whom the two of us share a name, the advice he probably needed to hear buried in the middle of a song about the city’s seedier side: You’re in the wrong place my friend, you’d better leave.
Dylan Moore is co-editor of Cwlwm.