Dylan Thomas and Cormoran Strike: Three Thoughts on the ... - Hogwarts Professor

Like you, I hope, I watched the 2014 video 'Dylan Thomas: A Poet's Guide' yesterday, one I posted with Chris Calderon's thoughts. I was struck by three things during its run in light of the idea that Strike7 will be somehow the finale of the series' first set of novels, all in correspondence with their analog numbers in the Harry Potter series. If Rowling, per this hypothesis, has written the series to climax in some fashion at the seventh instalment, why would she choose the poetry of Dylan Thomas as her epigraph source? 

Join me after the jump for three thoughts inspired by the introductory critical-biography-video, thoughts about the congruence of pube-haired Thomas' life and the themes of his poetry with Rowling's life and work.

(1) The Lake and the Shed

Rowling in 2019 shared that the metaphor of her creative process that she had taken as her own years before was that that of 'the Lake and the Shed.' The Lake was her symbolic representation of what she explained in 2019 was her "unconscious" mind, elsewhere and earlier as her "Muse," a super-conscious source for her inspiration. The Shed was her depiction of an alocal place or space to which she retreated to work on this glass-like inspired blob of story-substance to work her artistry magic to turn it into a proper book.

She said nothing then about the origin of this metaphor, as essential as it is to her self-understanding as artisan and craftsman. It was hard to miss, though, in the Owen Shears video, the Lake and the Shed moment in Dylan Thomas' life, the writing shed of his Boathouse home in Laugharne, Wales, with its view over the estuary of the River Taf. The video below is cued to that section of the documentary.

This is, of course, as likely as not only a coincidence, though the credible possibility of the young Jo Rowling, as a comprehensive student or Exeter undergraduate visiting Wales and West England's most famous writer's haunts makes it a fascinating "coincidence." That Rowling may have begun the Strike series with the seventh book as her "end in mind," as the ring evidence strongly suggests she did, and that she may have had Dylan Thomas as her target epigraph source for this novel, makes the Lake and Shed congruence that much more interesting. (See 'My Grandfather Dylan' for more views of the River Taf estuary  from Thomas' Shed.)

Have the epigraphs of Dylan Thomas been guiding the writing of the Strike series as Rowling claimed the Aeschylus and Penn epigraphs she chose for Deathly Hallows after writing Chamber of Secrets did the Harry Potter series?

(2) "Mortality and Morality"

To both Ian Parker and Charlie Rose in 2012 Rowling explained in answer to questions about Casual Vacancy that she was obsessed with "mortality and morality." Watching the Owen Shears critical review of selected poems from Dylan Thomas, it was hard not to be struck by the depth and consistent focus of the Welsh poet's musing about death. While Strike fandom has been meditating on 'When, Like a Running Grave' for obvious reasons, it seems more than likely that we will be reading epigraph selections taken from 'And Death Shall Have No Dominion,' 'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,' and 'A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.'

There are few modern poems known by casual readers of poetry as well as these, with their signature lines of 'Though lovers be lost, love shall not/ And death shall have no dominion,' 'Rage, rage against the dying of the light' and 'After the first death, there is no other.' Rowling once admitted in an interview that she was not a great reader of poetry, someone who retreated to her garden for meditation on a collection of sonnets. I suspect, given the "bombshell" that went off in her life at her mother's demise and her consequent "obsession" with death, that she may, despite her preference for prose, have spent some time by her inner Lake with the poems of Dylan Thomas.

(3) The White Horse Tavern

Kurt Schreyer noted on twitter last month that Dylan Thomas died in New York City after an epic binge at the White Horse Tavern, one of the few Thomas pilgrimage sites that Owen Shears neglected in his documentary critical biography. The Wikipedia page for the White Horse includes this bon mot about the poet's demise:

The whiskey was a good start. I got the idea from Dylan Thomas. He's this poet who drank twenty-one straight whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern in New York and then died on the spot from alcohol poisoning. I've always wanted to hear the bartender's side of the story. What was it like watching this guy drink himself out of here? How did it feel handing him number twenty-one and watching his face crumple up before the fall of the stool? And did he already have number twenty-two poured, waiting for this big fat tip, and then have to drink it himself after whoever came took the body away? (Michael Thomas Ford, Suicide Notes) 

I'm obliged to note that the inebriated Thomas only claimed to have had 18 shots, almost certainly an exaggeration, and that he didn't die "on the spot." Still, The White Horse Tavern is an excellent place to commit suicide by fluid, as Cormoran Strike readers know, because of the white horses in Ibsen's Rosmersholm that appear at the death of those who throw themselves into the mill-race. This play is the epigraphical backdrop to the fourth and pivotal Strike novel, Lethal White, one that, if the 1-4-7 ring axis completes the way the 1-4 books link up (see here, here, and here), means that we will see white horses again, perhaps in connection with the resolution of the Leda Strike suicide mystery. (For the white horses of Lethal White, see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here; this is not something I'm blowing up into a big deal just because of the possible Dylan Thomas connection. There is even a post about 'White Horse Taverns' here because of the two in Lethal White.)

Serious Strikers, too, when reading of Thomas' death by drink as likely as not recall the two times that our heroes tried to drown their sorrows with alcohol, occasions in which the other arrives as a guardian angel to see them home safely. In Cuckoo's Calling, it is Strike who attempts to drink himself into oblivion after learning that Charlotte Campbell was engaged to marry Jago Ross only weeks after their break-up. Robin appears ex machina to steer him to a ka-bob shop and then home to Denmark Street. Cormoran returns the favor in Career of Evil by finding the drunk Robin, broken after the discovery of her husband's infidelity, and seeing her safely to a local B&B for the night. He ups her 'save' in Cuckoo by preventing her murder by the Shacklewell Ripper who was trailing her that night.

Are these lovers-suicide-in-grief-by-drink adumbrations for scenes to come in Running Grave? If the epigraphs of Strike7 are all from Dylan Thomas in addition to the title, his death, supposedly from alcohol poisoning consequent to his shot-record at The White Horse Tavern, that may well be. Especially as, unlike the binges of our heroes in Strikes 1 and 3, there is a great deal of mystery that surrounds Dylan Thomas' death, which is to say, few of those who have read his autopsy and are aware of his various health challenges believe the drink was what did him in.

Conclusion

Two quick notes before I wrap this up —

First, was anyone else struck in Chris Calderon's post by the use of Thomas' initials? 'DT' is more often used as a shorthand for delerium tremens, a side effect of drinking too much alcohol. If you're thinking, "So what?" please read this Guardian piece on Thomas' death and how the misdiagnosis of delerium tremens is a more likely cause of his death than alcohol poisoning.

Second, I confess to being struck by another coincidence in my relation to Rowling's work, a personal thing. When I'm asked how I saw the literary alchemy, esoteric Christian content, and chiastic rings of Rowling's work before anyone else, I cannot claim any special genius or discovery consequent to intense study. I recognized these things because, like Rowling, I was aware of them due to my interest in those subjects. The ghosts find was consequent to reading Nabokov critical literature and recognizing the Psyche and Cupid mythological backdrop to reading Jungian analysis of folk tales, but the big finds were happy accidents or coincidences of my background interests and life experience with Rowling's.

The Dylan Thomas piece, though, is just weird. I knew nothing about Thomas or his poetry until I was accepted as a PhD candidate by Swansea University in 2016 and traveled there to meet my thesis advisers. Swansea was Dylan Thomas' birthplace and longtime residence; the town is filled with blue markers on buildings with associations to him and the University has expert faculty dedicated to study of his work. One of them, John Goodby, who acted as the lead consultant on Shears' film and appears several times in it, was my first 'thesis secondary adviser.' I want to think his retirement soon after was not due to my first year's work, but I cannot rule that out.

I look forward, consequently, to learning more about Dylan Thomas in the run-up to the publication of Running Grave. Should DV my thesis pass muster, I will be attending the Swansea University convocation this spring or summer to pick up a diploma. If the stars align and my thesis readers give my last chance effort a thumbs up, I hope Nick Jeffrey and I can make a side trip to Laugharne, Wales, to take a look into Thomas' Shed and out onto his 'Lake.'