BOOKS

Windy Boy and a Bit

By DAVID REES

His wisdom was the perception of joy,' John Malcolm Brinnin has written of his subject in Dylan Thomas in America, '—an insight so comprehensive and instantaneous that the mean- ing of joy is defined not as a relative state of human emotion but as another name for life itself.' There can be little doubt that Thomas himself--if one may refer to him by his surname —would have assented to that remark. Yet such are the problems posed by his work that over a decade after his death there still exists a virtual deadlock in Thomas criticism. On the one hand, there is the rather narrow, almost doctrinaire dis- approval best exemplified in Mr. David Hol- brook's Llareggub Revisited, a mirror-image perhaps of the genial contempt that Thomas felt for some academics as persons who not only were not able to face the living experience from which his poetry sprang, but any vital experience at all.

Then, on the other hand, we have the fascinat- ing works of Professors Elder Olson, York Tindall and Clark Emery, who, in their re- markable paraphrases of Thomas's work, ascribe to him a detailed knowledge of astronomy, astrology and other sciences. Yet it seems that these studies confuse the reader anxious to know more about Thomas's work while in- discriminately presenting everything he wrote as having equal significance. It is as if these critics of the School of Olson fail to see that Thomas's work is impressive not because he synthesised vast areas of knowledge outside his poetry, but because he was able to fuse so distinctively his own experiences into new images and metaphors inside his poetry. A good example of this approach is Professor Kleinman's recent book* on the ten religious sonnets in 25 Poems, where with much ingenuity the author shows Thomas's poetry as reflecting images and themes drawn from mediaeval pageant plays, Egyptian funerary customs and marine biology. One remains in- credulous, and convinced that such scholarly ingenuity tells us far more about Professor Klein- man's library than about Thomas's poetry.

Yet again, there is the pervasive influence of the Dylanists, ranging from the literary pil- grims and carpet-baggers who assiduously visit Brown's Hotel in Langhorne and that 'Heron- priested shore' lying under Sir John's Hill to those keening revellers in a decade-long mass- media wake. They see their hero as a fertility myth, an Adonis, a Charlie Yardbird of poetry who, in an age of annihilation, sang so glori- ously of life itself, a vegetable god who sprang from the coast of West Wales, flowered in Soho and who perished, appropriately enough, in the concrete jungle of Manhattan. It may well be that the influence of the Dylanists has been largely responsible for the unprecedented public ac- ceptance of Thomas as The Last Romantic. But it is also arguable that the backlash from the hagiographers has been partly responsible for the hostility shown to Thomas by some younger com- mentators, and thus for the present critical impasse about his work. Unfortunately in this free-for-all, some of Thomas's prose work has been neglected. Moreover, Under Milk Wood, that 'play for voices' with its cast of stock folksy eccentrics, has been over-rated as against A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, which, with its wonderful vitality and humour, gives a vivid impression of Thomas's early years in Swansea and Gower. Often forgotten, too, is the fact that Thomas had a minor but successful career as a script- writer; between 1941 and 1944 he wrote at least five scripts and again in 1948, when living outside Oxford, he scripted R. L. Stevenson's The Beach of Falesa.t It's incorrect, as the publishers claim, that this screen play appears 'in print for the first time'; it was published in. the US edition of Harper's Bazaar for August, 1959. But as an interesting footnote to Thomas's other work the script does show his verbal and dramatic gifts.

Inevitably, most of Thomas's critics, whatever their assessment, have rightly tended to focus their attention on the way in which he fused sexual and Biblical themes to produce his 'per- ception of joy.' Yet two new books have broken out of the critical impasse noted above and are quite valuable in clarifying some of Thomas's techniques and in charting the religious themes in his work. Professor Maud,t who is currently editing the Notebooks from 1930 to 1934, has attempted, with a great deal of success, to estab- lish from close reading first principles for inter- pretation: 'our, main concern will be the pre- cise nature of Thomas's obscurity.' In addition to the texts, the writer has used MS sources, biographical and other critical material and in two interesting appendices gives a composition chronology of Thomas's work and the textual cruxes in the Collected Poems.

Professor Maud's no-nonsense approach as an explicator is refreshing. He remarks in his intro- duction that the 'boys of summer' in the famous first poem in 18 Poems, 'I see the boys of summer in their ruin' aren't 'fisher princes in the Grail Legend or a Swansea boys' club,' but Thomas's original conception. He goes on to explain in a monumental twenty-page dissection, that the poem is not even about any particular group of boys, but about abstract processes like growth and decay:. • Once the larger themes are established—as here by the two key words `summer' and 'ruin' in the first line—the symbolic images of the rest of the poem fall into place. The boys take 'gold tithings' (summer) and 'lay them barren' (ruin). They 'set no store' (ruin) by `harvest' (summer). . . .

THE RELIGIOUS SONNETS OF DYLAN THOMAS.

By H. H. Kleinman. (C.U.P., 30s.) t THE BEACH OF FALESA. By Dylan Thomas. Based on a story by Robert Louis Stevenson. (Cape, 15s.) ENTRANCES TO DYLAN THOMAS' POETRY. By Ralph Maud. (Scorpion Press, 25s.) § DYLAN: DRUID OF THE BROKEN BODY. By Aneirin Talfan Davies. (Dent, 12s. 6d.)

Those boys of light (+) are curdlers in their fatly (—), Sour (—) the boiling honey (+); The jacks of frost (—) they finger in their hives (+); There in the sun (-I-) the frigid threads

Of doubt and dark (—) they feed their nerves; The signal moon (+) is zero in their voids (—)... .

By extension Professor Maud goes on to see a whole group of the earlier poems—and possibly some later ones like 'Fern Hill' or 'Poem in October'—as 'process poems' using images which give a sense of the interplay beneath the ordinary events of life. From here he proceeds to unlock Thomas's use of the distancing sexual image to increase the aesthetic effectiveness of his verse. Finally, moving away from technique to content, there is a last chapter which interprets the metaphysical themes of the last poems Of In Country Sleep, written after 1946, and in par- ticular of 'Over Sir John's Hill.' Here 'universal mortality is symbolised in the actual scene from the poet's window . . . [Thomas] is in these last poems responding perhaps as fully as any writer of our time to the basic problem facing man- kind in the atomic age, the problem of total annihilation. . .

There seems a natural correspondence between Professor Maud's last chapter and Mr. Davies's assessment of Thomas the religious poet§ Despite his bizarre title confirming the worst sus- picions of the anti-Dylanists---`the broken body' is a reference to the Eucharist—Mr. Davies, who knows the Welsh background, does handle his complex subject with some intuitive assurance, He is good in discussing an early" poem, 'After the Funeral' (1939), in terms of Thomas's reac- tion against a sterile, Puritan national background (although as a convert to Anglicanism from Nonconformity, Mr. Davies's occasional. homilY on the 'chapel' should not presumably, be taken as the last authoritative word). Here in this poem is the image of love welling from the 'hooded, fountain heart' of the Protestant saint, Ann Jones, and contrasted dramatically with the lifeless creed around her, symbolised by the farmhouse stuffed fox and the potted fern:

Storm me forever over her grave until

The stuffed lung of the fox twitch and cry Love And the strutting fern lay seeds on the black, sill. . . .

The very rhythms suggest, almost hypnotically' the hwyl of the pregethwr in his pulpit; but henceforward, Mr. Davies shows, the preacher was replaced by the priest in Thomas's imagerY. Moreover, he sees Hopkins's influence reaching down to 'the deeper levels' 'of Thomas's thought. This development towards a sacramental vi' of sexual relations, for example, is shown in the changes. between . the first version Of `Unluckily For Death' (1939) and that published in Deaths and Entrances (1946). One may see this progression in the same collection with `The Conversation of Prayer,' for here is a non- Protestant emphasis on good works; and also in `Ceremony After a Fire Raid,' where, compared with 'After the Funeral,' there is a much more profound attitude towards death, one which implies its acceptance. This attitude, as Professor Maud also sees, finds its consummation in the last poems, where Thomas, as in 'Poem on his Birthday,' 'faces with apparent equanimity the void where . . . love unbolts the dark

And freely he goes lost

In the unknown, famous light of great And fabulous, dear God . . . Although Mr. Davies concedes that it would be 'foolish to claim that Thomas had made a conscious acceptance of orthodox Christian dogma,' one still feels that he has overstated a good case for assuming that by the end of his life Thomas had come to accept a great deal of traditional Christian imagery and ethos. More- over, in spite of the 'note' to the Collected Poems telling us that they were written 'for the love of Man and in praise of God,' one also remem- bers Thomas's remark to Brinnin that they were poems 'in praise of God's world by a man who doesn't believe in God.' Perhaps the truth is that Thomas's increasing use of orthodox religious imagery was a way of creating his own myth, an offering to a personal pantheistic deity Who had made life more splendid for him and might make death less terrible.

Interestingly enough, both Maud and Davies seem to assume that Thomas was a major poet. Of course, we can now see in perspective that despite all the Bohemian ballyhoo he was an extremely hard-working craftsman who wrote, as Professor Maud says, poems that were 'new and unique . . . no one ever wrote poems like these before. . . .' But a major poet? Mr. Davies implies a comparison with Yeats when he rightly tells us that both poets in an age of unbelief had to create their own poetic symbols. But surely Yeats with the heroic realistic images of his 'later style' communicates more of the human dilemma than Thomas does? It may be that when some of the problems raised by Maud and Davies are fully resolved, when we have Mr. Constantine FitzGibbon's forthcoming biography and his edi- tion of the letters, we shall see that Thomas'4 gifts were essentially lyrical ones. Certainly in his last great poems he was not only coming to terms with mortality, but singing an elegy for his lost youth. Already in 'Deaths and Entrances' he had left a farewell against that time of departure When one at the great least of your best loved And always known must leave Lions and fires of his flying breath . . .