‘LOVELY BOOK. THANK YOU VERY MUCH. I AM READING IT FROM THE BEGINNING, SOME EVERY NIGHT, SLOW & LIGHT & LIFTED’
(DYLAN THOMAS ON THE LADY WITH THE UNICORN)
WATKINS, Vernon Phillips. The Lady with the Unicorn. London: The Bowring Press for Faber and Faber, 1948.
Octavo (219 x 136mm), pp. 104. (Occasional small light spots, some possibly caused by imperfections in the paper, offsetting onto free endpapers and first and last ll. from pastedowns.) Original green cloth, spine lettered in gilt, blue dustwrapper printed in red and black, not price-clipped. (Extremities very slightly rubbed and faded, dustwrapper with light offsetting on verso, slightly creased at edges and faded on spine.) A very good copy in the dustwrapper of an uncommon work. Provenance: D.A.R.H. Webster, 5 October 1955 (pencilled ownership inscription on front free endpaper; loosely inserted poems by Watkins removed from periodicals, dated 15 March 1945 to 24 May 1951, some dated in pencil by Webster).
First edition. The Welsh poet Vernon Watkins (1906-1967) was the son of a bank manager, who moved around Wales as his employment required, before settling in Swansea in c. 1912-1913. In 1916, at the age of ten, Vernon Watkins entered Swansea Grammar School, before moving to a preparatory school in Sussex the following year, and then to Repton School in 1920, where he remained until 1924. In October 1924 Watkins matriculated at Magdalene College, Cambridge to read modern languages, but ‘although his academic results at the end of his first year were satisfactory, he found the college a grave disappointment, particularly in its emphasis on language and criticism at the expense of literature. In a heated interview he told the master, A.C. Benson, that his only interest was in writing poetry; when Benson expressed his scorn for this declaration, Watkins immediately left the college’ (ODNB).
Watkins’s father found his son employment with Lloyds Bank in Cardiff in the autumn of 1925 and, following a nervous breakdown two years later and his subsequent convalescence, Vernon Watkins transferred to the Lloyds Bank branch in Swansea. Watkins continued to write during the pre-war years and met Dylan Thomas, who became ‘the most important person in his life’ (ODNB), in 1935. The Ballad of the Mari Lwyd was Watkins’s first published collection of poetry and appeared in 1941, after the author had joined the RAF police. Presumably due to his interest in modern languages, Watkins then took up a role with RAF Intelligence at Bletchley Park, where he met Gwendoline Mary Davies, whom he married in London on 2 October 1944 (Dylan Thomas, the groom’s appointed best man, failed to appear at the ceremony). Watkins published further poems in periodicals and a second volume of poems, The Lamp and the Veil appeared in 1945.
The Lady with the Unicorn was Watkins’s third collection and was first published in this edition in October 1948. Dylan Thomas wrote to Watkins on 13 December 1948, ‘[l]ovely book. Thank you very much. I am reading it from the beginning, some every night, slow & light & lifted. I saw the review in the Times Literary Supplement & liked its praise but not all its detail […]. I’ll write again when I’ve read all the (to me) new beautiful poems’ (Dylan Thomas,Letters to Vernon Watkins. Edited with an Introduction by Vernon Watkins (New York, 1957), p. 139). Although it was Watkins’s third published collection, The Lady with the Unicorn is an uncommon work, possibly due to the postwar paper shortages which significantly affected many British publishers, causing publication dates to be delayed and print-runs reduced.
A number of the poems collected in The Lady with the Unicorn had previously appeared in periodicals, and D.A.R.H. Webster, the previous owner of this copy, has inserted ten poems by Watkins, which have been excised from periodical publications. Among these are four which were collected in The Lady with the Unicorn: ‘The Song of the Good Samaritan’, ‘Ophelia’, ‘Fidelity to the Dead’, and ‘Sonnet: Blake’.
£37.50
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