Books: Pintpot Pan

THE LIFE OF DYLAN THOMAS by Constantihe FitzGibbon. 370 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $7.95.

“Is the bloody man dead yet?” cried the distraught wife of Dylan Thomas as she rushed into a Manhattan hospital where the poet lay stricken with a “massive alcoholic insult to the brain.” The answer is no. Twelve years after his death, even people who think poetry is what appears on greeting cards have heard the legend that the wild Welsh wonderboy was the greatest lush, lecher, and lyric poet produced in this century by the English-speaking world.

In this careful and eloquent biography, the first full-length portrait of Poet Thomas ever published, Author Constantine FitzGibbon demonstrates with vivid detail that the reality sometimes outdid the legend. As a longtime friend of Dylan’s, FitzGibbon is painfully aware of the flaws in his subject’s character. Dylan, he says flatly, was a slob, a liar, a moocher, a thief, a two-fisted boozefighter, a puffy Priapus who regularly assaulted the wives of his best friends, an icy little hedonist who indifferently lived it up while his children went hungry. Yet at the same time, says Friend FitzGibbon, Dylan was generous, kind, charming and stupendously witty, a genius who failed to become a great poet only because he became a great clown.

The Brat. A badly spoiled boy was father to this alarmingly mixed-up man. Dylan was a sickly lad—weak lungs, brittle bones—and FitzGibbon reports that his mother nursed every minor symptom into a major illness. In bed or out, he soon became a brat. He stole candy from the corner store, smoked cigars in the local cinema, spied on the nursemaid while she washed her breasts in a handbasin. However, he was a precocious brat. His father, an English teacher, bellowed scenes from Shakespeare at the huge-eyed child while he was still in swaddlings, and when he was eight or nine he began to write poems of his own.

At 16, with his father’s consent, Dylan quit school to become a practicing poet, and at 19 he sold his first lines to the London weeklies. Many of them vibrated with a grand organic energy that had not been present in English verse since the Elizabethans.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

Is my destroyer.

Roly-ProleyMarxist.Unhappily,Dylan had histrionic as well as poetic gifts, and they urged him not only to be but to play the poet. Since the poetic image was proletarian at the time (1934), Dylan promptly plunged into the slums of Soho and there tried terribly hard to be a roly-proley Marxist. Though he looked like a choirboy, he argued like a Bolshevik, dressed like a bum, drank like a culvert, smoked like an ad for cancer, bragged that he was addicted to onanism and had committed an indecency with a member of Parliament. He slept with any woman who was willing, subsisted largely on a diet of ice cream sodas mixed with ale instead of seltzer, and all the while belabored the general ear with wild and wonderful hwyl, as the Welsh call eloquence:

“Silence is a needle passing through water.”

“An alcoholic is somebody you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.”

“There, all about me, chastely dropping Saccharine tablets into their cups of stewed Thameswater, or poising their cigarette holders like blowpipes, or daintily raising a currant bun to the snapping flash of their long, strong teeth, tall and terrible women neighed: women inaccessible as goat crags, their knitted pastel stockings full of old hockey-muscles.”

Home to Mother. “Instant Dylan,” his friends called such stuff, and Dylan reveled in it. But after a month or two of “the capital punishment,” he invariably fell apart and the pieces had to be shipped home to Mother. Back in Wales, he invariably began to write again, and he wrote poems of a formal precision that contrasted almost grotesquely with the formlessness of his private life. In the fall of 1936 he published his second book (Twenty-five Poems), and by Christmas he was the most famous young poet in England. By Christmas he was also eloquently in love with Caitlin Macnamara, a husky, musky young dancer who was living with Painter Augustus John at the time.

Though they hadn’t a penny to their wild Celtic names, Dylan and Caitlin were married in 1937, and proceeded to live violently ever after. At first they were violently happy. And why not? Supported entirely by friends and relations, they could afford to go boozing every night and spend several hours the next day patching up their quarrels of the night before. This left Dylan very little time to write, but that seemed to suit him just fine. In 1939 they had a baby, but Caitlin seemed quite willing to leave the child for months at a time with her mother, and Dylan hardly knew it was there. “I suppose,” he once murmured vaguely, “it’ll grow up to be a homosexual,” and went right on enjoying the privileges of genius.

War Change. These were abruptly abridged by the outbreak of war, which Dylan considered an intolerable inconvenience. Since his friends could not support a poet and a war at the same time, Dylan at 27 was forced for the first time in his adult life to take a job. From 1942 to 1945 he wrote documentary-film scripts for the Ministry of Information, and the work involved him in a larger experience of life.

As a poet, Dylan profited from the experience. He abandoned forever his adolescent preference for the arbitrary adjective, the idiosyncratic image and obscurity at all costs. In this period he wrote, in A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London, a magnificient war poem (“Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter . . . After the first death, there is no other”). In 1945, when his father seemed close to death, he composed a resounding defiance of finality:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And in 1947, returning enriched to the themes of his youth, he began to work on the poems that became his masterpieces: a convulsive hymn to sensuality called In the White Giant’s Thigh, and an almost impossibly beautiful song of innocence and death entitled Fern Hill.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay

Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air

And playing, lovely and watery

And fire green as grass . . .

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

The Last Act. As a man, however, Dylan failed disastrously to mature. He sucked at his bottle as hard as ever, treated his children like sibling rivals and Caitlin like a mother—whereupon Caitlin, who by this time had decided that Dylan was frustrating her literary talents as well as her womanly instincts, screamed like a baby. The house became a bedlam, and tempers did not improve when the wolf once more turned up at the door—in the grim guise of the Treasury, which firmly demanded that Dylan deliver the income taxes he had dodged for years. Something drastic had to be done, and Dylan unfortunately did it. He arranged for the first of his four famous and ultimately fatal lecture tours in the U.S.

Biographer FitzGibbon tactfully underplays the vulgar melodrama that embarrasses the last act in the tragedy of Dylan Thomas: the sniggery arrival in the U.S. (“I am here in pursuit of my lifelong quest for naked women in wet mackintoshes”) and the staggery progress from bottle to bottle, bed to bed, that exhausted his forces and the funds his family so desperately needed. FitzGibbon suggests instead what most clucking literati have chosen to ignore: that in the last years of his life this pintpot Pan with the archangelic voice may have done as much for poetry by reciting it as he did by writing it. He was a grubby little man with a beery bulge, a doorknob nose and puppy-dog eyes, but he was visited by grace. His words, his voice kindled fires where no fires were. He renewed the ancient truth that poems are significant not as acrostics but as celebrations. He celebrated always the fundamental experiences: birth, copulation and death. And in his greatest lines he entered the mystery of existence itself and evoked the ecstasy of dissolution in the source of life. He was a matriarchal mystic who delivered verse from the tyranny of the intellect and created a modern poetry of the heart.