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Dylan Thomas: The Biography (New Edition) by Paul Ferris. J M Dent. UK £25 HB.
PAT BORAN (Sunday Business Post)
'Overpraised in his lifetime,' is how at least one well-known reference book describes Dylan Thomas, not just the best-known Welsh writer of all time, but one of the most popular writers and readers of poetry of this century. That a certain fall from grace seems to have occurred since his death cannot be denied, but it may be a good thing to have the two Thomases, the Poet and the Clown as Paul Ferris calls them, finally disentangled. The son of a doting mother and a schoolmaster father (who himself had a love of verse and read his son Shakespeare before he could speak), the young Dylan of Ferris' gripping biography is someone who desperately wants to be a poet (like his grand-uncle), even to the point of resorting, aged 12, to plagiarism for a local newspaper. Lying on his bed in 3 Cwmdonkin Drive, Swansea, in the room beside the boiler tourists now ask to see, the young Thomas may have been, as he is remembered, 'pretty, spoiled... the darling of the family' but, as Ferris has it, 'inwardly the odd process of becoming a poet was in progress'. This is Ferris determined to keep his eye on Thomas the Poet. For one of the great difficulties with the Dylan Thomas story is that it is so much just that, a story, a made thing; and the maker of most of it was Thomas himself. The wild drinking bouts and love affairs which would commence with his move to London aged 18, and last until his death 21 years later have to be watered down to reveal their truth: an 'appalling' cub reporter and later scriptwriter for wartime propaganda documentaries who was always working hard on building his life into something of interest. The lies seem to have been just another ingredient. Or, in Thomas' own words: 'It was exciting to have to keep wary all the time in case I contradicted myself'. In many ways, building himself up was something
which all his life preoccupied this self-consciously small man.
('Men pressed money on him, and women their bodies,' said A J
P Taylor elsewhere. 'Dylan took both with equal contempt.') Then
again, it was neither truth nor fiction he was addicted to, but
those little stepping stones they have in common: words. 'When
I experience anything,' he once famously said, 'I experience
it as a thing and a word at the same time,' though others, including
his friend Glyn Jones, believed Thomas may have complicated his
poems because 'he was conscious of some intellectual inadequacy
in them'. A good part of the problem, it seems, is personality. Thomas seized on the stereotype of the drunken, foul-mouthed poet and gave it the dimensions of archetype. But in the body of this giant, and his ever present friend 'Comrade Bottle', the little man was lost. By the time Caitlin Macnamara came along, it was two late. With two well-received books behind him, Thomas met Caitlin in April 1936, in a pub near Oxford Street. They slept together that first night and by July he was writing to say: 'I love you more than anybody in the world.' Shortly after sending a letter to his 'shocked' parents, from the house in Mousehole, Cornwall where the lovers were holed up, they were man and wife. But if Thomas was seeking encouragement and recognition, he wouldn't find it in Caitlin. (After the first edition of this book back in 1977, she wrote to Paul Ferris to confess her unfaithfulness, saying it was 'only a miracle that the children belonged to Dylan'.) A considerable amount of drinking, and heavy borrowing, followed (to balance 'the disorder outside and the order within'), steadily increasing after The Map of Love, his third book, was slammed. Around the same time, however, Thomas was already edging into radio. Regular talks, arguments and poems on the BBC even got him a few small drama parts where, according to Richard Burton, on one occasion a two-word part made 'centuries-gone atavistic hair' rise on the great actor's back. In retrospect it was all leading to 'Under Milk Wood', lines and fragments being scattered through the manuscripts for years already. 'Llareggub' Thomas called it, right up to its first performance on stage in Cambridge, Mass., on his third and final US visit in 1953, still delighting in the juvenile joke of the name spelled backwards. After fourteen curtain calls, however, drunk though he was and having vomited with nerves beforehand, he must have felt that he had found a new vehicle for his fragmented vision. That vehicle was not, however, to arrive in time. Though it's highly unlikely he drank anything like the 'eighteen straight whiskies' he boasted of, on 3 November of that year, he arrived back drunk to his lover Elizabeth Reitell at the Chelsea Hotel, went into a coma shortly afterwards and died in hospital 6 days later of 'alcoholic poisoning', likely complicated by a high level morphine injection administered by an incompetent doctor. With his death was born the legend, an industry that befits a rock star, and a one-woman war over royalties signed away, in an unthinking if possibly not grieving moment, into a trust fund for their children. Paul Ferris' biography, enlarged and with a new introduction, is at once tough and sympathetic, a moving and often funny account of the life of an archetype made man, a heavy-drinking poet who gave the expression DTs new meaning.
© copyright Pat Boran |