Books: The Legend of Dylan Thomas

ADVENTURES IN THE SKIN TRADE AND OTHER STORIES (275 pp.) — DylanThomas —New Directions ($3.50).

SEVEN LETTERS TO OSCAR WILLIAMS (13 pp.) — Dylan Thomas — in New World Writing #7 — New American Library (50¢)

Modern poetry often seems a pretty dreary cocktail party. In a quiet corner, of course, perches the aged eagle, T. S. Eliot, 66, still far and away the No. 1 living poet of the 20th century, sipping his extra-dry sherry of resignation. His old white magic still works, but it no longer holds any surprises. Eliot’s lesser poetic cousins—Auden, Spender, Stevens—sip the highballs that somehow fail to intoxicate, that are diluted by too much intellectual ice. There are such grand old but long-familiar individualists as Martini-clever e. e. cummings (with lemon peel) and hard-cider-happy Robert Frost. The younger men frantically mix their drinks, from opaque Bloody Marys to phony-bucolic applejack. Mostly they are reduced to talking to each other.

But one strikingly different figure dominates the whole party: a thick little man, in a dirty, rumpled suit, with tousled hair on a bulging gnome’s head, who is swigging boilermakers. He is also roaring out stories, laughing, pinching the girls, charming all who push into range of his eloquence.

For 18 months the picture of this guest has existed only in memory, for Dylan Thomas died in Manhattan in the fall of 1953, at 39. But he is still the life of the party.

The Return of Joy. His 90 poems, collected in a single volume in 1953, have gone through a spectacular seven printings. Records of his booming readings have become bestsellers (TIME, May 2). Now more scraps of Thomas’ vivid prose have been put together and issued in a single volume called Adventures in the Skin Trade and Other Stories, and his letters are finding their way into print. Dylan Thomas is more alive today than any living poet now writing verse.

The reasons are not hard to find. Thomas returned to poetry what people used to expect of it: joy. His work was sometimes tortured and anguished. It could be obscure—not obscure in a deliberate, cultish manner, but in the sense that an excess of color can produce darkness. But far the larger part of his verse is ebullient, drenched with sight and sound, rich in haunting new language fed from old and sparkling springs.

There is another reason for Dylan Thomas’ soaring popularity. Not only his verse but his life fitted in with what people always secretly expect of poets. It was boisterous, dissolute, sometimes repellent, often appealing, both tragic and gay: a mixture easily labeled “romantic.” As much as his work, his life—and death —contributed to the burgeoning Dylan Thomas legend.

This death was a drama whose details are still being hotly debated. In its sordidness it recalled, among other sad and disorderly exits, the death of Edgar Allan Poe.* But it proves something about Dylan Thomas, and about the typical kibitzers of greatness who flocked to him. The hangers-on are still fighting, figuratively, over his body. Some stick to the story that Thomas died of a cerebral injury caused by a fall at a drinking party. Another group hints that Thomas was fatally dosed with morphine by a doctor whom a rival clique had summoned to treat the poet’s alcoholic miseries. Dame Edith Sitwell, rising disdainfully over such partisan bickering, has said that Thomas died of an infection caught when he scratched an eyeball on a rose thorn.

Like Louis Armstrong. The facts are somewhat different. The New York City medical examiner’s record shows that he died of acute and chronic alcoholism, complicated by pneumonia. An attending physician called it “alcoholic insult to the brain.” When Thomas arrived in the U.S.

for his last visit in October 1953, he planned to go to Hollywood and write an opera with Igor Stravinsky. But first he stopped in New York to make some money by repeating his enormously successful readings of his “play for voices,” Under Milk Wood, at Manhattan’s Y.M.H.A.

Poetry Center. He was adrift in the baffling city, childishly delighted by its riches but really not caring what happened to him. That week Thomas called an old friend and said: “I’m tired of all the goddam writers around here. Why don’t you give me a party with no writers, only beautiful women?” Late that Saturday night, after the party, Thomas showed up at his favorite tavern, the White Horse, a dark-paneled, homey bar on the western outskirts of Greenwich Village. His eyes were glazed, bloodshot, heavy-lidded.

Some pals bought him drinks, and he downed three or four boilermakers in 15 minutes. Later, he went on to another bar, then retired to his hotel room for a warm beer and whisky nightcap with a friend.

Three days and several parties later, New York Times Critic Harvey Breit telephoned him at his hotel. “He seemed bad,” Breit recalls. “I wanted to say, ‘You sound as though from the tomb.’ I didn’t.

I heard myself say instead: ‘You sound like Louis Armstrong.’ ” That afternoon a girl assistant from the Poetry Center went to visit Thomas, who was in bad shape.

Towards evening his doctor came and gave him a sedative, and left. The last words his visitor remembers were those of any man who is ill, questions like: “What time is it?” Around midnight Thomas suddenly went into coma. An ambulance rushed him to nearby St. Vincent’s Hospital. During the next few days distraught poets, painters, sculptors and assorted hangers-on crowded into the hospital lobby, sometimes 40 deep. Thomas’ wife Caitlin flew in from London, proved so distraught herself that she had to be put temporarily into a hospital at Astoria, L.I. That is where she was when Dylan Thomas died, without regaining consciousness.

The Way from Wales. Dylan Thomas had lurched straight for his fate, trusting in the survival of his poetry, which he had once called statements made on the way to the grave.

For Thomas, the way began in the Welsh seaport of Swansea. He grew up the son of a genteel, ineffectual little schoolmaster who had thrown away the declamatory, bardic Welsh heritage in favor of English-language conformity. But Dylan absorbed all the Celtic mysteries and humors. At 16 he quit school and for a year tried reporting for a Swansea newspaper.

“A penguin in a duckpond,” said an old staffer.

Having won a poetry contest in 1933, he headed for the capital. He did not exactly wow T. S. Eliot and the polite publishers, but he could not be ignored. Tousled, pink-cheeked and tweedbare, he slept on friends’ floors, jumped in bed with friends’ wives, won a reputation as a pub orator with a golden voice and an infinite capacity for beer.

“He stood at the bar, this little, thick man with the gooseberry eyes starting out of his head,” a friend recalls, “telling wonderful stories and a crowd gathering around him.” For a while he and another down-and-outer lived on a porridge made from oats bought by the half-sack from a stable-supply dealer. When there was no one left to touch for a quid, he would retreat to Swansea, where he would sit in the Kardomah café and hold the customers spellbound with tales of London (“As I was saying to Sacheverell . . .”). In London he spun the legend that he was a country boy. Actually, Thomas, who has written pastorales as convincing and sweet as a haystack, probably never shot a bird, rode a horse, caught a fish. If he ever made hay, it was in mighty desultory fashion.

“I’m an Exploiter.” While Thomas was yarning and clowning, he kept sternly to his poet’s vocation. When he worked on his lines, crosshatching, chiseling and chivvying for the right word, a bottle might stand untouched all day at his elbow. Says British Critic John Davenport of these years: “After some terrible drunk, he would come to, somewhere out in the country. Utterly exhausted, nervous, there he would be, suddenly stuttering, diffident, fumbling in his pocket—T don’t know if you’d mind—of course you haven’t the time’—and dragging out a poem for you to read. There he was, with his dirty, curly hair, probably wearing someone else’s trousers, those nail-bitten fingers as if they were stretched out for a five-pound note—then he produced some beautiful thing like this.” Shortly before the war, Dylan met and married Caitlin Macnamara, daughter of a bankrupt Irish landed gentleman. They were, says a poetic friend, “two wild ones,” living wherever they could, either in squalor or with friends. “Lack of money still pours in,” wrote the moody family man during a spell at his mother-in-law’s. He once said that his lifelong ambition was “living off a rich woman,” and women often helped him.

“Dylan,” said the late Poet Norman Cameron, “you’re in danger of being widely regarded as a sponge.” Replied Thomas indignantly: “I’m not a sponge. I’m an exploiter.” Reprobate Innocent. He began to get assignments writing and reading for the BBC. He also wrote documentary films, though producers sometimes had to lock him in a hotel room to wring a finished script out of him. People loved him as a sort of raffish reproach to the world of respectability, a reprobate innocent. He got away with almost anything. The story goes that as an honored guest for an Oxford poetry society which served only select wines, Thomas asked for a jug of beer at the outset, cheerfully poured each successive vintage wine into the same jug and mixed it up with his teaspoon.

Between London pub rounds, he lived in Laugharne, a silted-up old South Wales cockle port, bright with pink-washed cottages, near where he used to visit his grandfather as a boy. Life at Laugharne seemed to suit him. He played with his three children, visited his parents, who lived in the same village, cut his daily beer intake to ten pints. “It’s lovely, on the sea,” he said. “You can spit right into the sea from our window, and we frequently do — all the time, in fact. I potter in the morning. I’m a very good potterer. I shop, I go to the village, and speak to people.

It’s a short street, and it takes hours to get from one end to the other. I stop at the pub and get back for lunch. In the after noon there’s nothing to do, so I work.” About Danny Boy. The Thomas legend will be enhanced by the three chapters from Adventures in the Skin Trade, and the 20 stories published with them. Many a poet, when he writes prose, sounds as stodgy as a beached carp, but Thomas easily swam through prose, with a flashing of fins and a show of unexpected twists that could have made him famous as a prose writer if he had never so much as rhymed hell and seashell. Some of the stories sing of the same Welsh town he saluted in Under Milk Wood; others are rambling, obscurely symbolic excursions into weirder regions. In Skin Trade it was Thomas’ sardonic intention to tell how a youngster from the provinces lands in London, much as he himself did. Before the boy sets out for the big city, he daydreams about what it will be like. He sees himself knocking at a rooming house and an Irish girl appearing at the door.

“Good morning, madam, have you a cheap room?” asks the boy. “Cheaper than sunlight to you, Danny Boy,” says the girl.

“Has it got bugs?” “All over the walls, praise be to God.” “I’ll take it.” But twelve hours after his actual arrival (according to Thomas’ plan for the book), the boy was to be arrested in the raw at a railway station—”a kind of Strip-Jack-Naked. He’s parted with everything, or they’ve taken it.” In the 82 slaphappy and possibly autobiographical pages Thomas finished, the kid slides from one loony scrape to another, encumbered much of the way with a Bass ale bottle that has unaccountably got stuck fast on his finger.

Even knocking out a clowning letter to New York Poet Oscar Williams, Thomas could not help writing vivid prose. On a plane trip back from New York: “It was stormy and dangerous, and only my iron will kept the big bird up; lightning looked wonderful through the little eyeholes in its underbelly; the bar was open all the way from Newfoundland; and the woman next to me was stone-deaf so I spoke to her all the way, more wildly and more wildly as the plane lurched on through dark and lion-thunder and the firewater yelled through my blood like Sioux, and she unheard all my delirium with a smile; and then the Red Indians scalped me; and then it was London; and my iron will brought the bird down safely . . .” The Dying Light. Of himself Thomas once said: “I am first class of second class.” It was no deprecatory assessment—still leaving the top for Shakespeare, Dante, Milton et al. He was a wild, generous, flamboyant, unpredictable, panurgent, ribald and thirsty man who loved the company of his fellow human beings.

He was also a lonely misanthrope who saw the world and himself with intolerable clarity. After one three-day binge he groaned to a friend: “To be able to tear off my flesh, to get rid of this awful, horrifying skin we have . . .” He once wrote, melodramatically but perhaps not inaccurately: “I hold a beast, an angel and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, downthrow and upheaval . . .” In the poems that will remain long after the last alcoholic insult to that skin he loathed, there are many victories for the angelic of the three Dylan Thomases: Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

* An excessive drinker, on and off, for years, Poe was found in a Baltimore tavern on election day in 1849. He was taken unconscious to the hospital, and died, at the age of 40, after three days of violent delirium.