A New Life of Dylan Thomas

Contemporary Review, June, 2004 by Tony Thomas

Dylan Thomas: A New Life. Andrew Lycett. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. [pounds sterling]20.00. xiv 434 pages. ISBN 0-297-60793-6.

The historian, A. J. P. Taylor, succinctly summed up the case for the prosecution against Dylan Thomas. The Welsh poet was, he said, not just a fraud. 'He was cruel. He was a sponger even when he had money of his own. He went out of his way to hurt those who had helped him'. The poet's latest biographer presents the case for the defence or, rather, a plea for mitigation, since Andrew Lycett more or less admits that friends and relatives of Dylan and his tempestuous wife, Caitlin, knew what they were talking about when they called the Thomases 'the Visigoths from Wales'.

Hard experience had taught the Thomases' friends what they were in for when the couple came to stay. Ugly, sometimes violent, marital quarrels were likely to occur. A drunken Dylan might urinate against the living room wall, defecate on the carpet or steal shillings set aside to feed the gas meter. There would also be incessant pleas for loans that would never be repaid. Even when he was rich and famous, the poet claimed to be as hard up as he was when his poetry 'would not keep a goldfish alive'. Such were his excesses that he suffered severe writer's block for several years before he died, in New York, at the age of thirty-nine, from chronic alcoholic poisoning, exacerbated by an overdose of morphine.

Yet, as Mr Lycett's account of Dylan Thomas' life shows, far more people loved him than loathed him. His boyhood pals in Swansea were loyal to the end, and some of the friends he made in later life were just as firm. Not all were dissolute drunks. Edith Sitwell, and Margaret Taylor, A.J.P.'s wife, were among his most steadfast supporters.

How did such an extravagant buffoon win such loyalty? Through being so vulnerable, so open, so charming and such good fun, is Mr Lycett's answer. As he tells it, Thomas often started out an evening quietly in a pub. When the alcohol took effect, he sprang to life and could be side-splittingly funny. He was seldom malicious and never a literary, intellectual or any other sort of snob. Despite the plummy accent ('the rich, fruity old port wine of '06 voice', Pamela Hansford-Johnson called it) he had acquired from the elocution lessons he was subjected to as a boy in Swansea, he identified with the common man. In consequence, as one surly critic grudgingly conceded, 'when he disappeared, it was a relief; when he reappeared, a pleasure'.

Above all, in Mr Lycett's book, the lives of Dylan and Caitlin were redeemed by their deep love for each other. But that did not stop them from sleeping around. Both were notoriously randy drunkards. Salacious accounts of their affairs, and of their constant boozing, take up much of a biography that Thomas himself would have dismissed as one of those books aimed at people who 'prefer to read about poets rather than read what those bleeders write'.

Those more interested in the poetry would do better to turn to Paul Ferris's Dylan Thomas published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1977. Like Thomas, Mr Ferris was born and raised in Swansea and has a marvellous feel for the Welshness of Thomas's work. 'Many of his poems have the rich dark melancholy and the flamboyant imagery that go with the Celtic character ... the temperature of the language is above normal by English standards. The poems are songs about mysteries without solutions'. Mr Ferris also notes how Thomas's poetry is influenced by the complex and obligatory system of alliteration and internal rhyme within each line that is a classic device in Welsh-language verse.

As important, Mr Ferris's biography has a feel, and a sympathy, for Thomas's spirituality that Andrew Lycett's lacks. The poet, famously, claimed that he wrote his poems for the love of man and the praise of God. His faith was more pagan than Christian, though the images and cadences of the King James Bible run through his poetry and his short stories. All this is beyond Mr Lycett's ken. He has written a more than competent biography of Rudyard Kipling, but when he tries to understand Dylan Thomas he is not in the same league as Paul Ferris.