Cursed and blessed

National Review, Sept 13, 2004 by Algis Valiunas

Dylan Thomas: A New Life, by Andrew Lycett (Overlook, 434 pp., $35)

MODERN poets all too often live lives that, but for their poetry, differ little from those of common stewbums, wastrels, lunatics, or brutes. Dylan Thomas (1914-1953), a writer of superb gifts, hit the pathological jackpot: He was an alcoholic who squandered his talent, hallucinated on occasion, and alternately beat and betrayed his wife. Andrew Lycett's new biography tends to scant the loveliness Thomas had in him--his poems and stories get only perfunctory mention--and to dwell relentlessly on the undeniable beastliness. Such is the inevitable fate of the poete maudit, the cursed poet, at a time when the critical biography, which attends properly to the works as well as the days, has largely given way to the life plain and simple and quite separate from the very literature that made the biography worth writing in the first place. Lycett recounts the sad business with deft narrative pace and an eye for the memorable detail, but one cannot help thinking how the book might have been improved by 50 pages devoted to a serious consideration of Thomas's writings.

Of course, the hellion's life does have a certain appeal, like that of a 100-m.p.h. joyride in a stolen car, topped off by a fiery crash--provided that one can go along for the ride but witness the conflagration from a safe distance. Thomas was famously drunk and disorderly everywhere from his native Wales to London to the length and breadth of the United States, and his antics were entertaining for a while, to him and his friends and the reader of his life story. In the wild sensual onslaught of simple beer Thomas even discovered a rare beauty, as described in his story "Old Garbo": "I liked the taste of beer, its live, white lather, its brass-bright depths, the sudden world through the wet brown walls of the glass, the tilted rush to the lips and the slow swallowing down to the lapping belly, the salt on the tongue, the foam at the corners." But the delights of being luminously sozzled fatally dragged Thomas under, into the drunkard's hapless inanition. Vomiting, bedwetting, and defecating in the living room of disagreeable relatives lacked the charm of public-house conviviality and boozy eloquence. Drunken promiscuity sooner or later landed him in the beds of "a Jewess with thighs like boiled string" (in Thomas's inimitable words), an older woman who urinated standing up (the sex wizard Havelock Ellis taught her), and a male friend with whom he really did not wish to become so intimate.

Love and marriage did not help: One miscreant bound himself to another. From the age of twelve, Caitlin Macnamara was, according to her sister, "a honey pot for men," and Thomas tumbled in head over heels, fighting off her lover, the priapic painter Augustus John, to get at the sweets. Thomas liked his women, when he was serious about them, untamed and remarkable, and Caitlin was certainly "crazy-Bohemian enough for him," in the words of a rival whom Thomas spurned. He did not have sole possession for long, if at all; nor did she. Their courtship was interrupted by bouts of gonorrhea; their marriage soon descended into tit-for-tat adultery and caterwauling rages. Lycett ascribes more of the blame to Caitlin than Thomas's earlier biographer Paul Ferris did, and Lycett seems to be right. When the aforementioned upstanding woman proposed a threesome to the young married couple, Thomas turned her down, but Caitlin pronounced herself game. Thomas would be game for adventures of his own soon enough. The poison of drunken waywardness took hold early, and ravaged them both.

On a lucrative and sexually freewheeling poetry-reading tour of America, at the age of 39, in New York, Thomas died of alcoholic poisoning, complicated by an ill-advised dose of morphine administered by a fashionable doctor. Caitlin flew in from London to see her comatose husband, went berserk at the sight, and was committed to a mental hospital; she would later attempt suicide by throwing herself from a third-story window.

But for Dylan there was the poetry; and there is a rich tradition of broken souls holding themselves together with string, clothespins, Elmer's glue, and the exaltation of high art. Baudelaire, dying of syphilis; Mallarme, thinking daily of suicide; Hart Crane, drinking his way toward the fatal plunge from a steamship off the Florida coast--all revered the doomed Edgar Allan Poe as a patron saint who would help them gain admittance to poets' heaven. Thomas would serve a similar purpose for John Berryman, who was the only person present when Dylan died, and who would number his friend among the ruined giants in his tear-streaked literary pantheon.

For Thomas, poetry was a refuge of spiritual purity, and he could not bear its being contaminated by politics, as in the widely lionized work of Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, and C. Day Lewis--MacSpaunday to their enemies. Thomas's bumbling political innocence sometimes fell far short of winsomeness. In July 1938 he wrote to a friend, "I think a squirrel stumbling at least of equal importance as Hitler's invasions." Shortly after the war began, he declared, "My little body ... I don't intend to waste for the mysterious ends of others. If there's any profiteering to be done, I in my fashion wish to be in on it." Thomas worked for the BBC during the war, and earned more money than he had ever seen before. Lycett pretty well ignores Thomas's peaceable follies, which Ferris, from whose book the damning quotations above are taken, treats more fully, and with iron disdain.