A Literary Introduction. Ernest Hemingway, Dylan Thomas, D. H…
By: Steve Newman Writer (Medium)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
My discovery of Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, and Dylan Thomas, came about as a result of a new English teacher — a fresh-faced young Welshman called Mr Jones — who, in 1960, had been parachuted into Hugh Clopton Secondary Modern School in Stratford-upon-Avon to teach the town’s ignorant young plebs the joys of literature.
Until the arrival of Mr Jones the teaching of English literature in what is now the High School revolved wholly around Shakespeare and was done very badly by an old grouch of a teacher who — once we’d started to read a play aloud, with each pupil reading half a page— would fill and ignite his pipe before settling down to read The Times spread out untidily across his desk.
On one now memorable occasion our enthusiasm for reading Shakespeare dipped into silence bringing a pipe-clenched fanatical rebuttal from the teacher which resulted in one brave fellow pupil throwing his copy of the Oxford Collected Plays and Poetry of Shakespeare at said teacher, which dislodged his pipe onto his newspaper which very quickly burst into flames. The commotion that followed brought the headmaster (a brave member of the SOE during WWII) running into the room, dousing the flames with the contents of a tea-cup he’d brought with him as if clutching a hand-grenade. After some garbled comments the Headmaster led the now bewildered teacher out of the classroom never to be seen again.
A couple of days later the blessed Mr Jones floated down with a suitcase full of books.
Mr Jones was very young indeed (straight from college) and slightly hesitant, but with an accent close enough to Richard Burton’s to make us take notice as, thankfully, he read to us. Shakespeare went out of the window and out of that battered old suitcase came Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond, Ian Fleming, and then, after Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Dylan Thomas, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence. It was a revelation.
Jonesy read Thomas’s Under Milk Wood and sections from Joyce’s Ulysses, and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, using the newly published 1960 unexpurgated Penguin edition, which was even more of a revelation.
Mr Jones filled generations of Stratford boys with his love of literature, which did eventually include Shakespeare, helped hugely by several daytime visits to the local cinema to see Laurence Olivier as Hamlet and Henry V, which we re-enacted back in the classroom. Jonesy (as he was by the time I left) stayed on in Stratford for the rest of his teaching career, retiring in the 1990s.
What that young Welshman gave us was his enthusiasm and permission if you will, to read whatever we pleased, but to look at the lives and work of Lawrence, Hemingway, Thomas, and Joyce — and legions of others — and to try and see, and understand, what might have turned them into the writers they became.
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