Bad bard of Laugharne

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 5, 2001 | by Colin Walters

The poet Dylan Thomas seemed to have a split personality, writing inspired verse while playing the besotted knave, leaving behind him high art and tales of low behavior.

One of my English mother's more memorable verdicts -- she was a woman who knew what she thought -- was on the poet Dylan Thomas when he died in 1953 at age 39. He was, she said, a silly young fool who might have made something of himself if he hadn't been killed by drink. My mum, who would have found common cause with Thomas' Welsh one on the other side of the Bristol Channel, had her puritanical lower-middle-class point, but she was wrong.

One cannot imagine Thomas -- no more than his American near contemporary, Actress Marilyn Monroe -- growing old; and anyway, much of his best work, starting with 18 Poems (1936) and adding up to arguably the greatest lyric poetry written by a Briton in the last century, was done in his adolescent years. His reckoning of himself "the Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive" in the Welsh seaside town of Swansea was not all youthful braggadocio.

There are very good pictures of Cwmdonkin Drive, with its suburban semidetached houses looking down-hill to the town and the sea, and of the neighboring Cwymdonkin Park, where Dylan played and daydreamed as a child, in Andrew Sinclair's 1975 picture-book biography Dylan Thomas: Poet of His People. It's interesting to compare it with Sinclair's rewrite, Dylan the Bard: A Life of Dylan Thomas (St. Martin's Press, $23.95, 251 pp, illustrated).

Though the new book is not a picture book, it has some good photographs of the poet and his places, his friends and family, leading with his Irish wife Caitlin Mcnamara, a spectacular creature in her own right and her husband's long-suffering and unflinching (if not always faithful in the technical sense) caretaker, until she finally lost him to the lionizing and overindulgence of Americans, among whom he died in New York after slipping into a coma at the Chelsea Hotel.

His death came during the fourth of his U.S. reading tours, each designed to make badly needed money -- though most of the dollars were spent before the poet -- and, on one occasion, Caitlin, too -- got back to Wales and their boathouse at Laugharne on the Taft estuary. The first performance of Thomas' play for voices, Under Milk Wood, took place in the United States, and in an appendix to the new version of his book Sinclair recalls his own direction of the film version with Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Peter O'Toole and Glynis Johns. Sinclair also adapted for the stage Adventures in the Skin Trade, Thomas' early unpublished novel about running away from family, Swansea and Wales to London.

A devoted Thomas man, Sinclair has done his book over again to include new material relating to the poet's London years before, during and after World War II. This includes his ventures into screenwriting, for he was a passionate film fan and was for a time willing to give up poetry to work in the cinema. (His screenplays are available in an edition edited by John Ackerman and published by Applause Books.) The war years -- though Thomas' selfish pacifism does him no Credit -- were a golden age for writers and other arty types hanging about the Wheatsheaf and other pubs now famous for the association.

Sinclair also had the benefit this time around of Ralph Maud's collection On the Air With Dylan Thomas: The Broadcasts, published in 1992. Prominent in those pages is the prose piece, "Return Journey" in which the poet revisits Swansea after the devastation of its town center by three days of German bombing in the blitz. Otherwise, the text of the new book is, with minor variations, a repeat of the earlier one.

Sinclair ends his rewrite with the closing lines of Thomas' "Poem on His Birthday" a mediation that alternately "celebrates and spurns / His driftwood thirty-fifth wind-turned age." This tension between affirmation and resignation goes to the heart of Thomas' never-resolved relation to the religion of his Welsh forefathers and to the Celtic past. In the vast Thomas literature, one hears much about the poet's bardic link, and Sinclair writes eloquently on it. The story's appeal for present-day minds is considerable, for it is that of Wales versus England, colonized versus colonizing and a young poetic voice of surpassing sensibility struggling to synthesize an ancient culture with the new.

There were two sorts of bard in Wales: Those of me courts, constrained in their verse forms and choices of theme, and those who wandered from place to place subsisting on the goodness of the villagers with whom they sat down to read or sing. The legacies of both endure in poetry written in Welsh and in Welsh religious sermonizing. The waves of invading English culminate in the industrialization that brought villagers to the towns; by the outbreak of World War I, they had imposed a straight-laced, English-speaking culture upon South Wales.

The young Dylan was raised in a self-consciously "respectable" household in which his parents spoke Welsh but wouldn't teach it to him. Still, the rhythms and lilt of the language ricocheted around him, and this is in some measure how his poetry, written in English, came to be the way it is. In his life, the same tension was lived out in a chronic cycle. Thomas would run away from Wales to cosmopolitan London, only to collapse physically or nervously from his dissipation there, then return home where he wrote his best work but almost expired from tedium and claustrophobia.