New Apocalypse?

The Map of Love, Thomas's third collection, was published on 24 August 1939. It contained sixteen poems and seven of the experimental short fictions written between 1933 and 1936. Like Twenty-five Poems, but in a rather different way, it was a transitional collection, containing poems from either side of the stylistic turn of 1938. The timing was not propitious. War broke out just ten days later on 3 September, completely displacing any notice the book might have attracted. It also sent Thomas into something of a tailspin; on 25 August, he wrote to Vernon Watkins confessing that ‘This war, trembling even on the edge of Laugharne fills me with such horror & terror & lassitude’ (CL, 453). The war, moreover, had the effect of weakening Thomas's tentative footing on the ladder of a literary career and financial security. Applications for funding from the Royal Literary Fund over the next year were turned down, and many of the journals which had provided an income from casual reviewing vanished, victims of wartime restrictions on paper use and a changed literary climate. With a wife and child to support, Thomas's attempts to borrow money and make a living became ever more desperate. As they sank into poverty, the Thomases were driven out of Laugharne in 1940 by lack of money and the debts they owed to local tradespeople. Finally, in September 1941, Thomas got a job writing scripts for propaganda films at Strand Films in London, earning a regular wage for the first time since his job as a teenage reporter.

Poor physical fitness, temperamental and ideological aversion to fighting, not to mention a sense of the absolute priority of his writing, helped Thomas avoid conscription. One result was that he and his family led a semi-nomadic wartime existence, often billeted on in-laws and friends, in Chelsea in London, as well as in Gloucestershire, Sussex, Talsarn, Llangain and New Quay in West Wales.