TRIBUTE
"I Dreamed My Genesis": Fifty years he is a-dying
|
The public image of Dylan Thomas as the quintessential Romantic poet dying tragically young has been of greater fascination to the public than an understanding of his prose and poetry. HAVOVI ANKLESARIA looks back on the man and his work.
|
DYLAN THOMAS died on November 9,1953 in a New York hospital after lying in a coma for five days. He had just turned 39. For his closest friends and family his demise was shockingly adventitious. Others, including fellow poets, journalists and biographers, claimed to have anticipated it, and a desire for self-destruction was equated with his lifestyle and characteristic mode of expression. Rumours were rife in literary New York circles. He was supposed to have fallen at a party and banged his head, an eyeball scratched on a rose thorn proved in some mysterious way to be fatal. John Malcolm Brinnin, his agent in New York, was accused of not looking after him properly. There were whispers about morphine and diabetes. And of course there was the alcohol.
Subsequent accounts of the final days portray Thomas as a buffoon and a drunkard. Brinnin, and Rob Gittins, claimed that alcohol poisoning was the sole cause of his collapse. There was probably some alcohol in his blood stream — Thomas himself boasted that he had drunk 18 straight whiskies before going into a coma — but on further investigation this proved to be a gross exaggeration. It has since been established by his biographer Paul Ferris that the true circumstances of Thomas's death had not been highlighted in 1953. He had gastritis, which had caused him great suffering in the past and was causing him pain and nausea. He was given an overdose of morphine sulphate by Dr. Feltenstein, which proved to be fatal. For whatever its worth, 50 years after his death, one can assert with some degree of certainty that Thomas did not succumb to long-term alcohol abuse. But the public image of Thomas as the quintessential Romantic poet dying tragically young, in an alcoholic delirium ("an insult to the brain" according to popular myth) persists. Medical accidents after all are not the stuff of martyrdom.
During his lifetime Thomas helped to create that image. This rambunctious, Rimbaud-like figure played the part of poet almost to perfection. No modern writer so effectively stage-managed the life he led. Unlike Rimbaud, his mentor, who rejected poetry in favour of a life of action, Thomas rejected the cumbersome task of arming himself with an income for the elevated pursuit of writing. To aspire to the life of a poet to the exclusion of all else is every teenage fantasist's dream, but it was the absolute nature of that endeavour that marked Thomas out. Apart from two periods of work, he lived on his wits and the sale of poems, short stories, articles and book reviews. This was at the expense of family, friends, patrons and even the occasional mistress who were expected to bail him out. He contrived to make "the begging letter" into an art form.
Details surrounding Thomas's lifestyle, usually scurrilous, have been of greater fascination to the public than an understanding of the prose and poetry. There are more than a dozen biographies, including two official ones and three accounts by his wife Caitlin. His life was no more a seamless whole than any other poet of the 20th Century, yet every biographer, with the exception of Constantine Fitzgibbon and Paul Ferris, has sought to make the connection between the drunkenness from alcohol and the drunkenness of poetry. Everyone from Calgary to Kolkata has an opinion about Dylan Thomas the man, a little knowledge about Thomas the writer of Under Milk Wood and A Child's Christmas in Wales and almost no awareness of Thomas the poet. Yet it was the poet who, in 1934, made his mark on London's literary elite with verses that seemed so rich in symbolic evocation that that they could be mistaken for the incoherencies of alcoholic stupor. The heightened resonance of the verse, so obviously influenced by the rhythms of Welsh spoken on the streets and in the home, was however, the product of intense attention to vocabulary and syntax. Walford Davies has suggested that the explosive quality of the verse had something to do with an urge to break out from the conformities of Welsh middle-class respectability, both in language and social convention. English critics like Geoffrey Grigson described his early poems as "psychopathological nonsense", and for Scrutiny it was sterile, undisciplined and intellectually debilitating, but his hyperbolic, grandiloquent style fascinated the Americans. Unlike the British who regarded him as a latter-day Romantic, somewhat retrograde in his achievements, the Americans identified him with the visionary strand of Modernism represented by Rilke, Apollinaire, Eluard, Baudelaire and Rimbaud.
Thomas's early years were unremarkable. It was not an unusual childhood and, from all accounts, a happy one. His world was circumscribed — the dame school, the park, the house, occasional visits to the country, to Fern Hill and Aunt Annie. There were no great tragedies in the Thomas family and few excesses. His mother's family became the source for his short stories and longer prose pieces — the aunts and uncles of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, and A Child's Christmas in Wales, and Aunt Annie of "Fern Hill" and the "Peaches". He was later to parody this world in Reminiscences:
I was born in a large Welsh industrial town at the beginning of the Great War: an ugly, lovely town (or so it was, and is, to me), crawling, sprawling, slummed, unplanned, jerry-villa'd, and smug-suburbed by the side of a long and splendid-curving shore where truant boys and sandfield boys and old anonymous men, in the tatters and hangovers of a hundred charity suits beachcombed, idled, and paddled, watched the dock-bound boats, threw stones into the sea for the barking, outcast dogs, and, on Saturday summer afternoons, listened to the militant music of salvation and hell-fire preached from a soap-box.
K.B. JAWAHARR
In this heaving, teaming chorus of affectionate detail is a hint of the darker side of his parents' prosperous, cosseted, middle class world. It suggests an understanding of social inequalities that Thomas was never given credit for. He lived in a town where class division was distinct, in which a quarter of the working class population were chronically unemployed and fascism had pervaded the streets. This is not to suggest that he had a deep empathy for Marx as some biographers have claimed. Naturally subversive, he was incapable of abiding by orthodoxy of any sort. Like most of his contemporaries he believed in some form of social justice but was largely ignorant of political ideology, and his approach to experience was more his own than anything to do with dialectical materialism. Nor was he deeply religious, as others have tried to establish. His attitude to institutionalised Christianity remained ambivalent. He disliked the Christian presentation of God but felt the need to believe. He used nature to embody these uncertainties, and for him "nature" was holy — we come from nature to return to it.
His first contribution to the school magazine "Song of a Mischievous Dog", published when Thomas was only 11, reveals something of his exceptional abilities:
But my greatest delight is to take a good bite
At a calf that is plump and delicious;
And if I indulge in a bite at a bulge,
Let's hope you won't think me too vicious.
The light lyric was natural to his talent as was humour and self-deprecation which, in these early years, was not an escape as it was to become in the final years of his life. But these schoolboy verses, remarkable as they are, show little indication of the extraordinary style of 18 Poems. By1930 he was filling the red notebooks that were drafts for the poems included in 18 Poems, 25 Poems and The Map of Love. These verses demonstrate an enormous sea-change in sensibility. The mischievous, anecdotal verse gives way to dark, incandescent, contemplations of death, disease and mortality. Several things had happened to him during this period — he had left school and was uncertain of his future, his newspaper job involved visits to mortuaries. Thomas had always enjoyed talking expansively about his bad lungs and bad liver. The poems written in the 1930s are overwhelmed with metaphor and imagery derived from bodily functions and fluids.
But most importantly, Thomas was moving away from Yeats, an obvious presence in the early poems, to embrace Eliot. Eliot was the catalyst that transformed Thomas's poetry from a stale and static Romanticism to a dynamic Modernism: "Remember Eliot: `When I experience anything I experience it as a thing and a word at the same time, both equally amazing.' " says Thomas in a letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson. The poems confront the relationship of art to life, and the problems of creating an idiom that remains faithful to the shape and texture of experience without incarcerating the experience in the formalities of language: "How shall my animal/Whose wizard shape I trace in the cavernous skull...Endure burial under the spelling wall...?"
Shape is of intense significance in this world of linguistic texture and imagery, and Thomas's early poems ascribe external shapes and properties to the inner world of man's consciousness. He imposed intricate patterns on his verse — diamonds and wings in "Vision and Prayer" and provided a backward-rhyming "Prologue" for Collected Poems. At one level he was a great traditionalist, using the sonnet form extensively and experimenting with the ballad and the villanelle. He placed great emphasis on narrative structure — the inner movement of his thoughts and the colour of his emotions are treated as a subterranean saga. "I, in my intricate image" treats the creative process as a series of adventures — his images "stalk trees", "mount on man's footfall" and "roar and rise on heaven's hill." Experience realised through narrative structure rather than argument and imagery was Thomas's search for what Eliot so inelegantly described as the "objective correlative" — "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of [a] particular emotion". He was to question these preoccupations in The Map of Love: "The gentle seaslides of saying I must undo", he advises himself in "Once it was the colour of saying". But a change of direction came a few years later with Deaths and Entrances and the crisis of the war years. Thomas said little about the war except to state that the writing of Deaths and Entrances was his war. Most of its 24 poems were written between 1939-1941 and April 1944-October 1945, of which six were war elegies. The book also included the much anthologised "Fern Hill" and "Poem in October".
Deaths and Entrances was regarded as Thomas's finest achievement and the most important volume of the decade after Four Quartets. The war had to some degree clarified Thomas's style and externalised his interests. Religious in orientation, it presented a personal vision through the reassurances provided by an established faith, but, unlike the distinctively meditative poetry of the war years, it did not struggle towards a religious conviction; questions of good and evil were not debated. Most significantly, Deaths and Entrances in England and Selected Writings in America, endorsed and subverted in crucial ways T.S. Eliot's vision expounded in Four Quartets. Eliot's meditations on time as preserver and destroyer, were not substantially different from Thomas's vision of life as cycles of destruction and renewal, growth, maturity and decay. For Eliot, man's spiritual condition was barren, his advice to readers was to "Descend lower, descend only/ Into the world of perpetual solitude..." in which "hope", "love" and "faith" were consecrated in the "waiting". Thomas's sense of the world was one in which the awesomeness of the universe seemed to override its suffering and horror. The war poems reflect the general belief that even in the midst of burning buildings, twisted metal, and shell-shocked children, it is still possible to acknowledge the staggering, starry wonder of this world:
The morning is flying on the wings of his age
And a hundred storks perch on the sun's right hand. ("Among those killed in the dawn raid was a man aged a hundred")
But the volume does not offer a foolishly optimistic message as this account might suggest. Although the poems seem at one level to be unequivocal celebrations of life they are closest in spirit to the poems of John Donne in which consolations are conjured up to negate the fear of death.
Thomas reputation increased dramatically during the war years and by the 1950s he had become a media personality, devoting much of his energy to radio and stage performances. During this period, he produced over a hundred broadcasts, mainly for John Arlott for the BBC Eastern Service, and completed A Child's Christmas in Wales and his radio play Under Milk Wood, which did much to consolidate his reputation with a wider public. After the publication of Collected Poems 1934-1952 in 1952, Thomas did not complete another poem. After his death, his reputation was to some extent eclipsed by the Movement Poets. The Movement regarded Romantic and Modernist poets as escapist — "Raging to discard real time and place" or "Raging to build a better time and place". Thomas's high emotionalism was for Amis "nightmarish reveries" aspiring to "something more sublime than thinking."
Traditionalists have generally found it difficult to accommodate Thomas, and the Movement were traditionalists of a sort. Thomas himself never spawned a literary tradition but he has, since his death, been claimed by almost everybody — poets, pamphleteers, polygamists, Welsh nationalists, English denigrators, members of the counter-culture, the Beats and their successors in the 1960s. Kenneth Rexroth's most significant Beat poem, "Thou shalt not kill", a memorial for Thomas, blamed a rapacious capitalist society for the death of a generation of poet-prophets. In the world of popular culture Thomas continued to be the iconic figure of Modernist Romantic angst. He influenced the Beatles and appeared in Peter Blake's design for the Sgt. Pepper album cover, and Robert Zimmerman adopted "Dylan" as a second name for its popularity in the 1960s and its bohemian associations.
Although he died in debt as befits a poet, posthumous "Dylan" became part of a multi-million dollar industry. Collected Poems was a best seller, as was Under Milk Wood. The tapes and records of his reading have been sold in millions and the copyright continues to produce a six-figure turnover. The Boat House in Laugharn where the Thomas family lived from 1949 till his death has become a tourist attraction for the public and remains a place of pilgrimage for the few. Years after his death, street vendors in Laugharn were reportedly selling scraps of cloth as relics from the Boat House and vials of liquid said to contain Thomas's sweat. Swansea has elected to name a close, a road, a night-club, a theatre and a few bars after him. A statue has also been erected in the city's marina.
He was that unique individual, an obscure poet and a popular writer. But popular Thomas is the writer of Under Milk Wood, A Child's Christmas in Wales and the frequently anthologised poems "Fern Hill" and "Poem in October". And popular Thomas has to some extent obfuscated the more inaccessible early poems of self-doubt and self-reflection, which battle to push the boundaries of language and to articulate the reality of an unaccommodated, somewhat muted self that makes no concessions to linguistic niceties and no overtures to logical truth. These early poems are intense concentrations of energy and work best at the level of suggestibility. They say nothing in particular and everything in general. They are an expression of the age of Modernist experimentation of which Thomas was one of its great practitioners.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
