We had just driven along the course of the River Tâf, along the “heron/ priested shore” that Dylan Thomas celebrated in his memorable ‘Poem in October’. And there we were in Laugharne, in the writing shed where the poet worked during the last four years of his life, preserved almost exactly as he had left it, part museum, part shrine. It was the summer of 2015, and a group of us, Indian and Welsh poets, were travelling across Wales, doing public readings, collaborating on translations, reading to one another, and immersing ourselves in the worlds of colleagues separated from us in space and time yet deeply and richly alive to us through their cadences. Sitting on the first floor of the Boat House, which had been home to Dylan and Caitlin Thomas in the early 1950s, we read to one another, spoke of why this long-dead literary ancestor’s work still captivated us, and looked out at the views of the Tâf estuary that opened on all sides.
Thespian and child
Thomas, who was born in Swansea, Wales, in 1914, was brought up on a diet of Shakespeare. His father, a schoolteacher and poet who aspired to rise beyond his provincial environment, read to his son from the Bard’s plays and poetry even before the boy could read. Meeting him in America in 1950, the writer and psychotherapist Eileen Simpson observed how, while reading in public, he “had the self-possession and stance of a Shakespearean actor”. In a piquant detail, she noted that his “deep, rolling theatrical voice” was accompanied by a surprising lisp, which emphasised itself in alliterative passages rich in ‘s’ sounds, bringing thespian and child into surprising sonic adjacency. As more than one biographer has remarked, Thomas remained childlike in his need to be “mollycoddled” all his life, a behavioural pattern established in infancy by his doting mother.
Thomas’ first book, Eighteen Poems , was published in 1934, when he was 20. By then, he had opted out of an academic trajectory, reported for TheSouth Wales Daily Post briefly, and acted in various productions on the local stage. He had also done some work for the BBC. He had become part of a set of writers, artists and musicians who met at Swansea’s Kardomah Café. Among them were the musician Daniel Jones and the painter-poet Vernon Watkins. His first book would be followed, in quick succession, by Twenty-five Poems (1936) and The Map of Love (1939). Disqualified from military service due to his medical problems, including asthma, he spent World War II writing film scripts for Strand Films, a company that produced films for the U.K. Ministry of Information.
Imagine the poet working on documentaries devoted to the British dyeing industry, the need for post-war housing, and the constant struggle between epidemics and antibiotics research. During the war, too, he published an autobiography, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog , its title an irreverent riff on Joyce. He was only 26; we look back in wonder at a century when very young men, Robert Graves and Dom Moraes among them, wrote autobiographies. After the war came two more books, Deaths and Entrances (1946) and, in 1952, Collected Poems .
It was the radio, rather than publishing, that turned Thomas into a celebrity. That resonant voice gave him a recognisable and charismatic personality on the air. Between 1945 and 1949, he recorded more than a hundred broadcasts for the BBC, ranging from readings of his own work to reviews and discussions.
Case history
What this account of serial successes leaves out is the spiral of alcoholism and self-destructive behaviour into which the poet fell during the 1940s. An insight into this descent into hell may be gleaned from Eileen Simpson’s empathetic 1982 memoir of her first husband, the poet and editor John Berryman, and his circle of friends, Poets in Their Youth . She describes Thomas — a key member of this circle, with Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell and Delmore Schwartz — as he came to the U.S. “at the beginning of his fatal career as the ace performer in the game... of poetical chairs — in which writers move from campus to campus”. In these years, Thomas became enshrined — or trapped — in the image of the poet given to drunken binges and public misbehaviour, falling into reckless affairs, being a difficult guest, exasperating his wife and friends, alienating his hosts and patrons. In 1953, he died in New York City, aged 39. The death certificate noted that the amount of whisky he had imbibed had brought about an “insult to the brain”.
Scandal is easier to assimilate and discuss than verse. As Seamus Heaney once said in a lecture, “Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry”. It is a shame that Thomas should be remembered more for his boisterous and bohemian way of life than for his poetry, apart from a handful of classics such as the villanelle, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’. It is also intriguing that his place in the pantheon remains precarious, unlike his equally difficult contemporaries and friends Robert Lowell or John Berryman, whose achievements seem more securely canonised.
Vital life force
Part of the reason could be the seeming obscurity of his poetry. The resonant rhetoric can circle around the reader, insisting too forcefully on translating all experience into images of language. The ability to pull sound, colour and touch together into a synaesthetic unity might suffocate the unwary. The repeated collision between Eros, the power of desire, and Thanatos, the certainty of death, can turn into a set piece. As Michael Schmidt, poet, critic and publisher, notes in his monumental Lives of the Poets (1998): “Images in Thomas are connected less by syntax or narrative structure than by rhythm. Each phrase and fragment makes sense, but when the reader stands back from the poem, its many meanings collapse like a house of cards.”
And yet, Dylan Thomas remains relevant to us. Despite the tendency towards verbal acrobatics, his innovations with rhythm and syntax, his magical metaphors of the vital life force compel attention nearly seven decades after his passing. I think, here, of “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower”. Especially to Anglophone Indian poets, his practice is marked by the dilemmas, choices, and fruits of working through a colonial predicament. As the Welsh are quick to point out to Indians who wear their postcolonial credentials on their sleeve, Wales was England’s first colony. The centuries-long battle between Welsh and English has gone through many phases, including the repression and resurgence of Welsh, the ascendancy and diminution of English, and the struggle of Anglophone Welsh poets like Thomas to define the ground of their linguistic and cultural belonging. He insisted on being regarded as an English-language poet and claimed to have little knowledge of Welsh; he insisted, also, that his Welsh given name be pronounced, English-style, as ‘Dill-un’, rather than as ‘Dull-AN’.
And yet, his sonorous poetry, a cascade of magical clauses, acts like a bardic spell, reaching back into the oral literary traditions of his country. “Wales [is] the land of my fathers,” Thomas once said, “and my fathers can have it.” His desire to belong in a larger linguistic and cultural ecumene need not have come at the expense of negating his regional ethos; his fathers, it appears, have had the last laugh.
The writer is a poet, whose latest book is Jonahwhale.
