BOOKS
Thomas the Rhymer
BY KINGSLEY AMIS APROSPECT of the Sea* stands a good chance of being the last volume of Dylan Thomas's previously un- collected work to appear. It includes, to be sure, some or all of the prose pieces from The Map of Love (now out of print), but there seem to be others from the same period which are here reprinted for the first time, and undoubtedly the last four pieces in the book, dating from 1947-53, are new to hard covers. I should explain that the small patches of uncertainty in that last sentence result firstly from my not having thought to bring my copy of The Map of Love abroad with me (and if I were ever to look for it on my return I doubt if I should find it): and secondly there is the mysterious failure of Dr. Daniel Jones, the editor and arranger of the volume, to indicate which of the earlier stories here reprinted originally appeared in The Map of Love. Just what Dr. Daniel Jones's editorship and arrangership can have entailed is indeed a fascinating ques- tion : I can hardly believe that he would have tinkered with the texts, he clearly wasted little time over correcting the proofs, and yet, Thomas himself having chosen—`before his death,' we learn—what stories and essays he wanted preserved, the only task left to Dr. Daniel Jones would seem to have been that of tearing the stories out of The Map of Love, Picture Post and so on, and sending them off to the printer, which hardly seems to merit the nametof editorship, does it? But perhaps it was the toil of arranging the stories in order which earned Dr. Daniel Jones his place on the title page. After all, if my maths is correct, there were more than 1012 combinations to choose from.
With this out of the way, it can be asserted with utter finality that here is a volume which every admirer of Thomas's poems will want to possess, for most of the qualities of the poems are to be found in it. In spite of this, the boa seems to me to be worth having. Two or three of the pieces in it echo that other Thomas—not ranting, canting Thomas the Rhymer, but com- paratively disciplined, responsible Thomas : the Thomas of the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. The stories in that volume, with their humour and truth to fact, are in my view by far the most interesting and re-readable things that their author ever wrote. The last piece, particularly, in the present collection, a most energetic and amusing account of an outing to Porthcawl which never got there, is slightly tainted with the Rhymer's fancifulness and yet succeeds in confirming the suspicion that it was as social chronicler, not as `bard,' of his native South Wales that Thomas really excelled. Another piece, 'How to be a Poet' (1950), full of shrewdness and revealing a remarkable gift for parody, gives some hint of the skill with which, if he had lived and had the inclination, he might have chronicled certain aspects of London life. A third effort, `Conversation about Christmas' (1947), recalls Under Milk Wood, which will recommend it to some; and a fourth, dating from 1952, has at any rate a clearly drawn setting and a detectable narrative.
These latter entities, together with many others, are more or • A Paospwr OF THE SEA. By Dylan Thomas. (Dent, 10s. 6d.) less completely missing from the eleven earlier stories which make up nearly three-quarters of this short book. Their typiCal vein is the near- or quasi-surrealist, 'apocalyptic' one common in their period and, I should say, rejected in most of their author's later verse. Reading them in bulk is not an easy task. To begin with, the characters and situations, so far as these words arc applicable, are not among those which many people in full possession of their faculties will find interesting or important. What we mainly get arc nightmares, or nightmarish reveries, or nightmarish 'experiences' (the distinptions are often exceedingly difficult to draw) of fools, madmen, the dying, and creatures which are called children but behave like nothing on earth. Even this fairly tenuous connection with reality or with anything recognisable is frequently dropped, giving place to a sort of verbal free-for-all in which anything whatever may or may not be mentioned or seem to be mentioned. For long stretches very little can be extricated beyond a general air of bustling wildness allied to a vague sexiness or religiosity of subject-matter—if, again, `subject-matter' is the proper term. The style is that blend of answerless riddle, outworn poeticism and careful linguistic folly which those immune to the spell of the Rhymer will salute with a groan of recognition.
It is sometimes nice to follow up the denunciatory with the mildly analytic. Here is a reasonably representative quotation (`the story so far' is that Marlais, a poet, has had a dream in which some orchards caught fire and he met a couple of female scarecrows who are sisters. When he wakes up he knows that they are his lovers. Now read on): Put a two-coloured ring of two women's hair round the blue world, white and coal-black against the summer-coloured boundaries of sky and grass, four-breasted stems at the poles of the summer sea-ends, eyes in the sea-shells, two fruit-trees out of a coal-hill : poor Marlais's morning, turning to even- ing, spins before you. Under the eyelids, where the inward night drove backwards, through the skull's base, into the wide, first world on the far-away eye, two love-trees smoul- dered like sisters. Have an orchard sprout in the night, an enchanted woman with a spine like a railing burn her hand in the leaves, man-on-fire a mile from a sea have a wind put out your heart : Marlais's death in life in the circular going down of the day that had taken no time blows again in the wind for you.
A number of queries eventually present themselves. As far as points of detail are concerned, what are fog-breasted stems and where are the poles of the summer sea-ends? What eyes are to go in what sea-shells and where are the two fruit-trees to be put? What are the nature and location of the wide, first world and whose is the far-away eye? What is a love-tree? Under what circumstances can a going down be said to be circular? And so on. More generally and perhaps more rele- vantly, what is the significance of the procedures recommended in the first and last sentences and to what order of events can they be attached?
A reader who finds he must ask such questions will not get very far with poor Marlais or his biographer. The fact that any answers to the questions must be either highly fanciful or highly debatable (or both) appears to me to dispose of the passage quoted and, by implication, of a great deal of the Rhymer's method—if, yet again, 'method' is the name for multiplied whimsy. Of course, this line of attack, like all anti- Rhymer inquiries, lays itself open to the charge of being purblind, cold, narrowly intellectual and even anti-poetic. This objection may diminish in force when an attempt is made to demonstrate how the passage can be read without bafflement and with positive pleasure. Whaf is required of the reader is to permit a response, without ever getting too near identifying its sources, to such matters as the vague love-token romanticness of the women's hair, the vague Picassoan outre-ness of the
four-breasted stems, the vague Daliesque thrill of eyes in sea- shells, the vague beauty-in-pit-dirt, How Green Was My Valley aura of the fruit-trees out of the coal-hill, and above all the very emphatic suggestions of wondrousness and oddity in which the parcel is wrapped up. It might be observed that syntax as much as vocabulary gives this last effect, but that would not be a suitable kind of observation in this kind of reading. I think that it is reading in this way which is really anti-poetic and that it would commend itself only to those who hanker after something sublimer than thinking. That something Thomas wasted his talent and integrity in trying to provide. No ode to his memory could distil a more sombre meditation than that.
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