Pearl of Great Price, A - The Love Letters of Dylan Thomas to Pearl Kazin

New York, May, 1950.

A warm Spring day and a short, and portly, thirty-five year old Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, pushes through the plush revolving doors of Harper's Bazaar, in the heart of bustling downtown Manhattan. He was taking a chance on offering 'A Child's Christmas in Wales', a prose piece that had already served him well, but Harper's were not to know that.

There, he meets Miss Pearl Kazin, Fiction Editor, highly-educated and out to make her own mark on New York; a woman, vastly different in manner, substance and background to his other New York 'lady-friends', with whom he fell in love, with consequences that were to disturb him profoundly for more than a year.

An intense and passionate relationship began on that day. One side of their correspondence has survived, six 'love letters', never before published, sent from Dylan to Pearl. Until these letters came to light Pearl had remained something of a ghost; now, they offer part of Dylan's side of the story.

-- Publisher: Parthian Books
In May 1950, on his first reading tour to America, Dylan Thomas visited the office of Harpers Bazaar in New York, met their junior literary editor Pearl Kazin, and sold her his ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’, which appeared in the December issue. Thus began a friendship which blossomed into a passionate affair. A Pearl of Great Price reproduces and puts in context six surviving love letters from Thomas, written between June that year and the following February. There is a short note on how the editor acquired the letters, a sketch of Kazin’s life and family, and an early short story by her called ‘The Jester’. The story of the affair which emerges indicates that their involvement was considerably more serious than has been suggested in some biographies, and its disruption (or destruction) was at the hands of ‘the grey lady’ (Margaret Taylor, his patron). Other letters quoted from Thomas’s friends John Brinnin and John Berryman are very revealing of Kazin’s deep continuing attachment, persisting up to Thomas’s death. The letters themselves are as passionate, quirky and chaotic as one might expect. The last two become positively surreal – especially in describing Thomas's hallucinations during pneumonia and his surroundings in Persia (where he was working for an oil company). Kazin’s short story was published in 1952 in the same periodical in which ‘Llareggub – A Piece for Radio’ first appeared. It revolves around Kuney – a New York literary figure – quixotic, gossipy, grandiloquent and self-destructive, to whom, ‘Discipline was … the dirtiest word of all’. While differing from Thomas in several ways (for example, he didn’t drink much), he is a type she clearly found fascinating, and her description of New York parties gives us a good idea of the febrile atmosphere they both inhabited at the time. Happily, Kazin later married an academic (Daniel Bell) in 1960, had a successful career as a literary critic and survived until 2011. Thomas was perhaps as much a footnote in her life as she has tended to be in other accounts of his. However, during those few crazy years she was indeed his ‘Pearl of great price’, whom he lost and without whom he felt ‘there wasn’t any meaning in the world going round’. -- Caroline Clark @ www.gwales