Watkins, Vernon / [Provenance: Constantine Fitzgibbon (Major Robert Louis Constantine Lee-Dillon)].

Affinities – Poems by Vernon Watkins [Inscribed Association-copy by Vernon Watkins to fellow writer, Constantine Fitzgibbon: “for Constantine from Vernon”].

First Edition. Norfolk (Connecticut), A New Directions Book, 1962. Octavo. 99 pages. Original Hardcover with illustrated dustjacket. Very good condition with only minor signs of wear. Rare Association !

Vernon Phillips Watkins (27 June 1906 – 8 October 1967) was a Welsh poet and translator. He was a close friend of fellow poet Dylan Thomas, who described him as “the most profound and greatly accomplished Welshman writing poems in English”.

Vernon Watkins was born in Maesteg in Glamorgan, and brought up mainly in Swansea. His birth coincided with slight earth tremors; another baby born that night was christened John Earthquake Jones. His parents were William Watkins, a manager for Lloyds Bank in Wind Street, Swansea, and Sarah (″Sally”), daughter of James Phillips and Esther Thomas of Sarnau, Meidrim. James Phillips was a Congregationalist, reputed to know most of the Welsh Bible by heart. Sarah had a love of poetry and literature; her headmistress arranged for her to spend two years as a pupil-teacher in Germany. William Watkins and Sarah Phillips married in 1902, and had three children, Vernon, Marjorie, and Dorothy. The family lived at “Redclliffe”, a large Victorian house about 4 miles (6.4 km) from Swansea, at Caswell Bay.

Watkins read fluently by the age of four, and at five announced that he would be a poet, although he did not wish to be published until after his death. He wrote poetry and read widely from eight or nine years of age and was especially fond of the works of John Keats and Shelley. He received his later education at a preparatory school in Sussex, Repton School in Derbyshire, and Magdalene College, Cambridge.

In his early years at Repton, Watkins’ quiet, gentle character provoked regular bullying from older boys, though in his last years he attained more popularity as he was able to show capacity in tennis and cricket. After he died, in 1968, the school wrote that he was “perhaps the best poet Repton has had”. His headmaster at Repton was Geoffrey Fisher, who became Archbishop of Canterbury. Despite his parents being Nonconformists, Watkins’ school experiences influenced him to join the Church of England. He read modern languages at Cambridge, but left before completing his degree.

Dylan Thomas and the Swansea Group

He met Dylan Thomas, who was to be a close friend, in 1935 when Watkins had returned to a job in a bank in Swansea. About once a week Thomas would come to Watkins’ parents’ house, situated on the very top of the cliffs of the Gower peninsula. Watkins was the only person from whom Thomas took advice when writing poetry and he was invariably the first to read his finished work. They remained lifelong friends, despite Thomas’s failure, in the capacity of best man, to turn up to the wedding of Vernon and Gwen in 1944. Watkins was godfather to Thomas’s son Llewelyn, the others being Richard Hughes and Augustus John.

Thomas used to laugh affectionately at his friend’s gossamer-like personality and extreme sensibility. A story is told that one evening in Chelsea, during the war time blackout, they were walking along and Vernon tripped over something and fell to the ground. Thomas looked with a torch to see what the offending object was and to his delight all that they could find was a small, black feather (FitzGibbon 1966).

With Thomas, Watkins was one of a group of Swansea artists known as the “Kardomah boys” (because they frequented the Kardomah Café in Castle Street). Others among this Swansea Group were the composer Daniel Jenkyn Jones, writer Charles Fisher and the artists Alfred Janes and Mervyn Levy.

Letters to Vernon Watkins by Dylan Thomas was published in 1957, four years after his death in New York. It proved to be the first in a number of books that linked Watkins and Thomas. The 1983 book Portrait of a Friend by Watkins’ wife Gwen (née Davies) deals with the relationship between the two poets, and in 2013 Parthian Books published Vernon Watkins on Dylan Thomas and Other Poets & Poetry, a collection of previously-unpublished critical work with a foreword by Rowan Williams. Poems for Dylan, a collection of poems written by Watkins to Thomas, appeared from Gomer Press in 2003. It opens with the obituary Watkins wrote for his friend, which was originally published in The Times on 10 November 1953. Poems for Dylan also contains two poems (‘At Cwmrhydyceirw Quarry’ and ‘Cwmrhydyceirw Elegaics’) centred upon the quarry in Cwmrhydyceirw where, in August 1963, Watkins and the sculptor Ron Cour picked out the stone that would be inscribed with lines from ‘Fern Hill’ and placed in Cwmdonkin Park as a permanent memorial to Thomas. ‘Cwmrhydyceirw Elegaics’ had first seen publication in the January 1968 issue of Poetry magazine.

Watkins’ ambitions were for his poetry; in critical terms they were not to be fulfilled. On the other hand, he became a major figure for the Anglo-Welsh poetry tradition, and his poems were included in major anthologies. During the war he was for a time associated with the New Apocalyptics group. With his first book Ballad of the Mari Llwyd (1941) accepted by Faber & Faber, he had a publisher with a policy of sticking by their authors. In his case this may be considered to have had an adverse long-term effect on his reputation, in that it is sometimes thought that he over-published. Of the book, the publisher said:

“Mr Vernon Watkins is a Welsh poet whose work hitherto has appeared only in periodicals and in recent anthologies. The only influence apparent upon his poetry is one he has thoroughly assimilated – that of W. B. Yeats. Otherwise his style differs radically from that of any of his older contemporaries, except for a racial quality which gives it something in common with that of Dylan Thomas. Mr Watkins is undoubtedly a poet with an uncommon sense of rhythm as well as of imagery.″

The British Library holds a manuscript draft of the poem with annotations by T. S. Eliot, showing Eliot at work as editor and board member at the publishing house Faber – his “day job” since 1925. The Library also holds the Watkins Papers which include autograph and typewritten poems chiefly from his seven published volumes, but also some unpublished poems. In 2016, another collection of Watkins’s draft poems was acquired from the widow of Watkins.

Watkins wrote poetry for several hours every night and by way of contrast, Caitlin, Dylan Thomas’s wife, could not recall her husband staying in even for one night during their whole married life. As well as Yeats Vernon was familiar with T. S. Eliot and Philip Larkin whose affectionate recollection of him can be found in his Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 (2012). He was awarded a University of Wales honorary Doctorate of Literature in 1966 after retiring from his job at the bank. He was being considered for Poet Laureate at the time of his death. (Wikipedia)

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Major Robert Louis Constantine Lee-Dillon FitzGibbon RSL (8 June 1919 – 25 March 1983) was an American-born Irish-British historian, translator and novelist.
FitzGibbon was born in the United States in 1919, the youngest of four surviving children. His father, Commander Robert Francis Lee-Dillon FitzGibbon (1884–1954), RN, was Irish, and his mother, Georgette Folsom (1883–1972), daughter of George Winthrop Folsom, was an American heiress from Lenox, Massachusetts. Before his parents divorced in 1923, they had four surviving children, Frances Geraldine (wife of Harry Morton Colvile), Fannie Hastings, Georgette Winifred (wife of Claude Mounsey), and Constantine. From his father’s later marriage to Kathleen Clare Aitchison, he was a half-brother of Louis FitzGibbon, author of a number of works about the Katyn massacre of Polish officers in 1940, by Soviet troops. In 1927, his mother married her second cousin, Bertram Winthrop (a nephew of Egerton Leigh Winthrop and cousin to Bronson Winthrop). They also divorced in 1931.

The family were descended from John “Black Jack” FitzGibbon, the 1st Earl of Clare, who was Lord Chancellor of Ireland and effected the Act of Union between Ireland and England in 1800, but in the following century the family faded into obscurity and the title died out. Constantine FitzGibbon’s grandmother, Louisa, was daughter of Richard Hobart FitzGibbon, the third and last Earl; her husband, Capt. Gerald Normanby Dillon (sixth son of Henry Dillon, 13th Viscount Dillon), changed his name to FitzGibbon so the name could continue. His maternal great-grandfather was George Folsom, the U.S. Chargé d’affaires to the Netherlands from 1850 to 1853.

He was brought up in the United States and France before moving to England with his mother, his parents having divorced when he was very young.

FitzGibbon was educated at Wellington College, Berkshire, a British public (i.e. private) school with military affiliations, which he detested. He left aged 16 and travelled independently in Europe, where he studied at the University of Munich and University of Paris, becoming fluent in French and German and acquiring a sound knowledge of their literatures.

He won a scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford to read modern languages in 1937, but left in May 1940, after the fall of France, to join the army. He did not complete his degree before the war and chose not to return to Oxford afterwards. One of his best novels, The Golden Age (1976), set in a post-apocalyptic future Oxford, is by turns wistful and sardonic about the university.

On being discharged in 1946, FitzGibbon was offered, but refused, a job with the successor to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Instead, he worked briefly as a schoolmaster at Saltus Grammar School in Bermuda from 1946 to 1947, before becoming a full-time independent writer. He lived in Italy for a time, where he tried and failed to write a biography of Norman Douglas, a distant kinsman. Between 1950 and 1965 he was resident in England.

FitzGibbon wrote prolifically, authoring over 30 books, including nine novels, historical works, memoirs, poetry, and biography. He made programmes for BBC radio, including documentaries about British fascism, the Blitz, and the 1930s hunger marches. He was a regular contributor to newspapers in the UK and Ireland, and for many years wrote for the magazine Encounter. His one stage venture, The Devil at Work (produced by the Abbey Theatre, Dublin in 1971) met with little success.

He translated numerous works from German and French.
One of his closest friends was the writer Manès Sperber, many of whose books he translated from French, and whose views about the dangers of both left-wing and right-wing tyranny were highly influential on him.

Politically, FitzGibbon identified himself as a strong anti-Communist, having been drawn to Communism as a young man. His credo, however, was that no political group that resorted to locking its opponents up in camps was any good. He refused to travel to Spain while Franco was alive. During the Troubles in Northern Ireland, he supported civil rights for Catholics but condemned the use of violence by all sides.

His 1960 novel When the Kissing Had to Stop caused controversy because of its explicit anti-CND theme; the book depicts the Soviet occupation of Britain after a left-wing government has removed its nuclear weapons. An ITV adaptation of When the Kissing Had to Stop caused even more controversy, and one writer called FitzGibbon a “fascist hyena”. This amused him greatly, and he responded by publishing a collection of essays called Random Thoughts of a Fascist Hyena (1963).

FitzGibbon was a member of the Council of the Irish Academy of Letters, an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Guggenheim Fellow. He later became an Irish citizen and lived in County Dublin.

Fitzgibbon’s first, brief, marriage was to Margaret Aye Moung, but during World War II he met Theodora Rosling. They married in 1944 and lived at Sacombs Ash, Hertfordshire, from 1951 to 1959. They had no children. Theodora wrote of their time together in her, partly fictional, memoirs With Love (1982), and Love Lies a Loss (1985). The union also ended in divorce in 1960.

He then married Marion Gutmann in 1960, with whom he had a son, Francis, born in 1961. Their marriage ended in 1965, and he moved to Ireland and married Marjorie Steele, a retired American actress, in 1967. They had a daughter, Oonagh (born 1968), for whom he wrote Teddy in the Tree (1977). He also adopted Marjorie’s son, Peter FitzGibbon, from her former marriage. After a short spell in west Cork, the family lived in Killiney, County Dublin, and then in the city. FitzGibbon died in Dublin on 25 March 1983.

(Source: Wikipedia)

• Keywords: Association Copies · Association Copy · Catalogue No.10 – International Literature · Inscribed · Poetry – Rare · Signed
• Language: English
• Inventory Number: 32065AB

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