The poet as boor
George Gale Dylan Thomas Paul Ferris (Hodder and Stoughton £7.50)
My Friend Dylan Thomas Daniel Jones (Dent 23.95) bYlan Thomas was a thief, a braggart, a Welsh kind of lush, and a man who continu "Y Played the role of a poet. He also mandged (almost but not quite flukishly) to write
scune good poetry, particularly when very Y(3ilog, He was the actor-as-poet : that is, he wa. s more concerned with being a poet than with writing poetry. Asa clown, he succeed e. triumphantly ; he was almost everybody's ;clea of what a poet should be—drunk, that and scheming. 'Dylan Thomas,' Paul 'erns writes on the first page of the first le:11-lapter of a magnificent biography, 'made egging into a cottage industry in the last Years of his life, despite not inconsiderable As a schoolboy he had decided to a Poet, to be fed by the ravens, 'soft, white ,.1.1Y ravens.' It was Thomas who described benefacting ravens thus. w Apart from his poetry and his appalling ay of conducting his life, one other thing fne.eds to be constantly borne in mind : his rends, on the whole, stayed with him, put up i'rth him, kept him, and only started quarrel
ing with each other after he died. He was al
L.aYs good company, for those who liked the ^Ind of company he was and kept : boozy and bankrupted. There was great charm. Although he nether spoke nor read a word of Welsh, he amounted to a kind of Celtic caricature. All was forgiven him, the golden boy turned into a licensed buffoon who at the same time wrote verse which moved and moves successive generations of adolescents. His poetry, his wife Caitlin was in the habit of saying in her bitchy way, was a rehash of his adolescence ; and she, alas, was (as usual) right.
Caitlin is still very much alive; Dylan, had he not died in New York in November 1953, would now be sixty-three. It is a moot point whether, were he still alive, he would be half as celebrated, or his scanty output a quarter as lucrative, as his death has made him and it. It is nice and fitting, in a way, to think that he willed his death, aged thirty-nine, by drinking himself into it ; and it suited the New York medical people to sustain the myth. But it is more likely that he died as a result of medical error than of the alcoholic affront to the brain which is mentioned in his medical obituary. I
do not myself believe he deliberately drank himself to death. What happened was that he was given too much morphine, and this can now be said because the doctor who gave him the lethal dose is now himself dead.
His death undoubtedly fitted his life. So did his name. 'Dylan,' pronounced in Welsh Dullan but never by Dillan, was a fanciful effort of his father, D. J. Thomas, a schoola master who thought he deserved to be professor. Had he been christened Dai, say, it is doubtful whether his reputation and his royalties would have become as inflated as they have been: vast researches have been made into his life, and his posthumous earnings have benefited his widow and children, not to mention his Publishers and agent, most considerably. The copyrights now pull in well over £20,000 a year, which is not bad going for a poet who was always on the bum. 'Deary me,' Paul Ferris quotes him at the beginning, 'I'd rather be a poet any day and live on guile and beer.' This is precisely what he did and was. It is a measure of Ferris's triumph, and indeed of Dylan's also, that this portrait of the poet as beggar does not leave a sour taste in the mouth. The terrible fact, as Dylan well knew and traded upon, was that he was altogether too bloody endearing by half, bringing out the mother in all the women he met and the indulgent friend in almost all the men. Only his sister, Nancy, was immune, and some of her friends like Gwevril Dawkins, who would baby-sit for the child Dylan, `an absolute tartar, an appalling boy. I remember him grabbing for oranges. He never asked.' The first poem he had published was printed in the Western Mail in January 1927. It was called 'His Requiem' and was a competent piece. Unfortunately, when it was included in an edition of his poems prepared by his friend Dr Daniel Jones in 1971, someone recognised it as having first appeared in the Boy'sOwn Paper of November 1923, written by a Miss Lillian Gard. His first published work was filched. But it did the trick: he may not have written the poetry, but at least he could act the part of poet.
Not that it was only poetry he stole: 'He was a bugger for wine gums,' for instance, and 'he had a better supply of filed farthings' (to use as sixpenny pieces in cigarette machines) 'than anyone else.' Since he went to Swansea Grammar School, where his bitter father taught and was feared, he was licensed to play truant and to idle. He considered himself thus licensed throughout his life. After school and an undistinguished few months as a reporter on a local newspaper, he had no settled occupation or income: 'Early in 1933, then, Thomas was a poet and writer living on his wits and his pen. His parents would have been dismayed to realise that apart from one period of three or four years in the 'forties, this state of affairs was to last for the rest of his life.' Paul Ferris was born only a mile or so from the Swansea suburban street where Dylan grew up. He knows his Swansea and his Welsh people. He knows his Dylan.
Ferris also makes clear two central facts about his subject. One is that, to all intents and purposes, all his work was done when he was in Wales at one time or another ; the other is that about half of his collected poems were finished or begun in his teens. When Dylan Thomas was twenty-six, he sold four notebooks which contain most of the raw material of his poetry. These notebooks were, by then, old things to Thomas. Ferris reminds us that Thomas's earlier biographer, Constantine FitzGibbon, had noted that when Thomas sold his notebooks he was almost the same age as Keats was when he died. For his teenage notebooks and two other pieces of manuscript, he received £41.50 from an American university library. He was already, by then, the subject of academic attention. When, aged thirty-nine, he eventually died, his widow, Caitlin, wrote a sloppy book called Leftover Life to Kill. Reading Ferris, and recollecting Thomas's poetry, it often is as if Dylan himself, once out of his adolescence, had a left-over life he was killing.
He is very much the poet of adolescence; this probably explains his popularity with students. He was not an educated man: his spoiled youth saw to that. His poetry is largely about himself as poet. The words themselves are their own subject, and the obscurity of his later verse, although explained by h imself as a consequence of his desire to compress and compact the verbal matter so that it became almost solid in itself, may well be the result of having nothing much worth saying. His total output is remarkably small, when it is compared with his reputation and his royalties. He said himself, in a letter in 1938, 'Much of the obscurity is due to rigorous compression; the last thing [my poems] do is to flow; they are much rather hewn.' But Glyn Jones has said, 'I scimetimes think Dylan did not speak out more clearly, and concealed the meaning of his poems, because he was conscious of some intellectual inadequacy in them.' if so, the intellectual inadequacy was in Dylan Thomas himself.
But he knew himself, and this was his saving grace. He was also very funny. Unfortunately he allowed a legend to grow up around him and ended up acting out the legend. He might have become a great poet ; but he was too busy being a poet to write poetry, and then he married Caitlin and had children. He was a Swansea boy with the gift of the gab, acting out the role of poet, pretending to be an artist living for art's sake. Caitlin it was who had the aristocrat's or artist's ' temperament (without the money of one or the talent of the other) and who scorned the bourgeois instincts of her husband. His indiscipline was the consequence of his spoiled childhood and of his pose as the artist as a young dog; but hers was wholly natural. She lives in Rome, on her share of the royalties which still flow in. The only weakness of Paul Ferris's biography is his treatment of Caitlin, who it seems to me was not good for Dylan-the-poet. Her effect on his output, or lack of it, and indeed on his entire adult life, is treated rudimentarily.
Dr Daniel Jones, who has a good claim to have been Dylan Thomas's closest and oldest friend, has written a slight memoir of that friendship, My Friend Dylan Thomas, whose chief interest is the detailing of the remarkable collaboration between the two friends when schoolboys which produced some tolerable verse, Jones writing the odd lines and Thomas the even ones. In those schoolboy days, it was Jones who was the senior— older, better read, living in a more cultivated house in a better bit of Swansea. Between his lines we glimpse the same Dylan whom Paul Ferris gives us straight. Dan Jones's piece appears at an unfortunate time, for it is unavoidably dwarfed by Ferris's work. There are still pieces of Dylan Thomas's life to be added, and some of these pieces will have to wait until other people are dead: but Ferris's book is stamped with authority and authenticity, and I shall be surprised if a better biography of anybody is produced this year, or of Dylan Thomas ever.
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