Dylan Thomas as a child with his mother (right), sister Nancy (left) and a friend of the family.

Dylan Thomas and what went on inside

By Webster Schott

He looked like a sofa awaiting repair. He stole shirts from his friends' closets and tried to get their wives into bed. He sponged money all his in life from other writers, camped the houses of his patrons, ridiculed his benefactors. He was a liar, a drunk, a buffoon, and incompetent at the ordinary maneuvers of life.

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He held a regular job only once, as a newspaper reporter in Wales, and then only for about a year. He forgot to pay his income taxes and dodged the British draft. Two of his earliest published poems he had wholly plagiarized. He was badly educated and intellectually stunted. He finished grammar school at 16, at the bottom in everything except English, and never pursued schooling again.

But he was celebrated more than he was pitied. He was loved more than he was repulsed. His charm took him to the center of any gathering. His conversation possessed his listeners. His verse and his speech made Dylan Thomas the most famous poet of his lifetime. His death during an American tour at the age of 39, in New York City in 1953, left a space in Anglo-American poetry that is still vacant.

He wrote about death, sexuality, fear, duplicity of affection and the spontaneity of nature as if he were a man on fire with words. And when Thomas read his poems in a voice that seemed to echo the English language all the way back to the Elizabethans we knew we were. in

the presence of a poet because our bones told us so.

Now there are two biographies of Dylan Thomas that must be read. The first is the authorized Life of Dylan Thomas by Constantine FitzGibbon (1965), a London friend in whose guest room Thomas occasionally wrote and from whom he once tried to steal a sewing machine. It said so much that another biography seemed unnecessary ever.

Take, for example, the matter of Thomas's death in St. Vincent Hospital. FitzGibbon says the autopsy reported the cause of death as "insult to the brain." Untrue. Fake romantics. Those words came from a physician pal of John Malcolm Brinnen, who arranged Thomas's several American road shows through the Hebrew Association Poetry Center in New York City. Really, according to the autopsy, Thomas died of "acute and chronic ethylism" and "hypostatic bronchopneumonia": alcoholism and pneumonia,

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A novelist and social historian born in Swansea 15 years after Thomas and a mile from his house, Ferris seems to want only two things: to get the facts straight and to tell us what they may mean. He corrects. legends, distortions, gossip, lies, rumors, errors by using the Woodward and Bernstein crosscheck method. Two sources for everything. Determined to be a poet since childhood, skewered on the Celtic imagination and hocked on the fabulous, Thomas cloaked his life under the veil of the bizarre and the mythical.

He planted and cultivated lies about himself. Why not? Fiction is a lie parading as truth. Poetry is emotion'. rearranged. Thomas wrote both.

Ferris works like a detective to unravel the network of Thomas fabrications. It turns out he wasn't, after all, a stud with women. Mostly talk. Bold ones especially frightened him. He may have had a couple of homosexual experiences as an adult in London. Contrary to his complaints and his mother's protestations,. Thomas's health was all right. Claims of sickliness were cover for sloth and booze.

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Ferris presses Thomas's life until there seems nothing, left and one wants to know no more. Year by year, month by month he lays before us the swift ascent from spoiled, glib brat chosen to fulfill his schoolmaster father's own frustrated literary ambitions to a poet of international reputation. With the same fastidiousness for detail and fact Ferris gives us the meteoric burnout. By the time he was 22 Thomas had published 43 of the 90 poems in Collected Poems. All but a handful of those remaining were written before he was 30 and came from notebooks he kept in his teens. He wrote little after then.

Thomas thought death much of the time. Poets often do. He pursued it with alcohol. He kept. having accidents. By the time he was 35 he actually seemed to look forward to death. He drank instead of wrote, begged instead of worked, clowned

instead of thought for 15 years before. he died.

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He set up disasters for himself through marriage to a woman, Caitlin Macnamara, as ill-equipped to cope as he was and through exhaus tive American tours his alcohol-in fested body couldn't sustain. When he finally began to make money, he misplaced it, gave it to hangers-on, or blew it on high living. His life was gone, but not because he couldn't handle money.

Ferris supports FitzGibbon's con" · tention that Thomas simply never grew up. But he gives us more, think, of what went on inside this word-intoxicated navigator of the emotions and, by inference, what goes on in most poets whose workswe come to value. The most important feelings Thomas ever had were feelings about himself: his sexuality, his mortality, his struggle to know what those feeling were. When he had mined them out, he gave up. There was nothing left to write about. That meant there was nothing to live for.

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His emotions became the poems. themselves. At that point his life was... over. Dylan Thomas was a most extreme case. We've known that.poetry is a dangerous occupation. Ferris's... biography shows precisely. why the casualties occur. How one wishes, reading this book, for a world made safe for sensibility.

Webster Schott has edited three books of poetry, including Imagina tions, a collection of William Carlos Williams's earliest works: