Dylan Thomas: a new life
Andrew Lycett Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 434pp, £20
ISBN 0297607936
This is a disturbing and impressive book about a sad man, a tragic man, a drunkard, a lovable cad, a Welshman and a poetic genius, all subsumed in the endlessly equivocal person of Dylan Thomas. No poet of our time has been more thoroughly analysed than our Dylan, but Andrew Lycett approaches the exhausting task with thoroughness, scholarship and true humanity.
He never gives up in despair, as I would have done. Through all the hideous vicissitudes of Thomas's life (1914-53), he diligently paces his way, recording its repellent moments as sympathetically as he celebrates its triumphs, and leaving no bed unturned as he traces the poet's progress from one sexual imbroglio to the next. He has raked up memories and allusions from Cwmdonkin Drive in Swansea to the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street; he has talked to everybody; he has been everywhere that Thomas went. If his biography is really a narrative of several personalities, reviewing it is like reviewing five or six books at the same time.
It is the tragedy of Dylan Thomas that strikes one first. His story is almost a cliche of poetical legend - the bright youthful lyricist from the provinces, "young and easy under the apple boughs", already claiming to be doomed by tuberculosis, as all the best poets are, but inexorably sinking towards an early execution by alcohol. We foresee it almost from the start: much of the pathos of the tale is Thomas's own wilful disregard of the inevitable.
Undoubtedly, as his reputation grew, Thomas revel-led in what Lycett calls his "Dionysiac mayhem", flaunting his own thickening image, gloriously oblivious to the bourgeois values of his parents, pissing and vomiting in backstreets, picking up women at random, borrowing money and failing to repay it, sponging on susceptible older ladies, missing deadlines, abusing his wife, until the squalid end came in that old haven of the drunken litterateur, Manhattan.
Yet through it all there peers, like the Green Man peering through the foliage of medievalism, a maddeningly loveable figure. Time and again Thomas's acquaintances speak of his essential goodness - "a human quidditas of unclouded sweetness", as his American friend John Malcolm Brinnin put it. He was considerate to old people. He loved his children and his animals. Although he never felt close to his Anglicised schoolmaster father and once called his mother a vulgar humbug, he was tender to them both in later years. Even in his odious moments, most of his friends found it possible to forgive him.
But it clearly took patience. Thomas could be insufferable, not least in the company of his hardly less spectacular wife, Caitlin. Yet such was his appeal (not just sexual or artistic but in a curious way moral, too) that throughout his life men and women were ready to make sacrifices on his behalf. "I hold a beast, an angel and a madman in me," he once said, and against all odds people of many kinds caught glimpses of the angelic.
They realised no doubt that his was a troubled soul. He said himself that his professional purpose was to explore and master his own inner conflicts. For so much of his life in London and America, he was an exotic alien, sometimes glorying in the condition, sometimes confused and uncertain. Some people rejoiced in his fresh strangeness, some were fastidiously suspicious. Gushing female fans ("ardents", he preferred to call them) half turned his head, half incited his cynicism, and one gets the impression that the rather bloodless English intelligentsia of the times regarded him as something excitingly odd that the cat brought in.
They are all here, crowding and gossiping through the pages of this book, as they swarmed and stared around the pubs and salons of Thomas's young life - the Sitwells and the Audens, Constant Lambert and Lawrence Durrell, Betjeman, John Sparrow, coveys of BBC acolytes, decadent aristocrats and a multitude of minor artistic practitioners. It was heady company for a hypersensitive grammar school boy from Swansea.
It was demanding, too. Grotesque or artificial as many of these people were, they were seldom fools, and sometimes one senses the archetypal poet of instinct straining to live up to their intellectual or academic standards. Dan Davin of Oxford University Press thought that Thomas's brain was not of the first class and that he spent "a great deal of noise on perceptions which are either obvious or absurd". Stephen Spender once dismissed his art as "turned on like a tap . . . no beginning or end, shape or intelligent and intelligible control". Thomas spoke no foreign language, first went abroad when he was 32, and had a taste for westerns and cheap thrillers.
No wonder he sometimes felt inadequate and com-pensated with outrage and flamboyance. To an Anglo-Welsh reviewer like me, however, the real key to his behaviour was his transcultural condition - Welsh by race and inherited culture, English by language and often by residence.
The Anglo-Welsh condition is not easy in any of its meanings, but it can be exhilarating - to be both of the great world and out of it. For Thomas it was doubly exhilarating and doubly unsettling: he was the most famous Welshman in the world, living upon his Welshness, yet he spoke no Welsh and lived in London. He seems to have been at his happiest whenever he returned to his boathouse at Laugharne, a largely English enclave on the coast of Wales that he described as "a little Danzig".
Some Welsh nationalists to this day dismiss Thomas as a sort of stage Welshman who mocked, stereotyped and insulted the old mores of the country, and did it always in English. Yet even they must admit that he absorbed into his poetry some of the magical allure that is indigenous to Wales - or at least to the idea of Wales. Most of the great poets who are thought of as Anglo-Welsh have shared something of this mystique, from George Herbert to R S Thomas. They wrote in the English language, but they thought and expressed themselves in idioms insidiously, hauntingly Welsh.
So it was with Thomas, whose Carmarthenshire forebears could hardly have been more utterly Welsh, and most recognisably perhaps in his very last poem of all, the "Prologue" to his Collected Poems of 1952. This contains many Dylanesque trademarks - dancing hoofs, sing-song owls, haystacked farms and such - but there is also something incantatory to it, something arcane that seems to spring, at least to an ardent like me, from the very matter of Cymru.
It is written in a weirdly complex rhyme pattern, so obscure that most readers will never notice a pattern at all, and halfway through there is a sudden chill passage of prophecy. The poet is talking about distant cities, "cities of nine Days' night", and almost exactly 50 years before the tragedy of 9/11 he tells us that their
. . . towers will catch
In the religious wind
Like stalks of dry, tall straw . . .
Thus might have spake Merlin, himself a Carmarthenshire man, they say.
Jan Morris's latest book, A Writer's world: travels 1950-2000, is published by Faber & Faber
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