Paradise of Words

...Later on "the poet became overshadowed by Fitzthe brassy orator," and "instant Dylan" the boon pub companion and mercurial performer took over his personality to the despair of his wife Caitlin and his friends...

...Nevertheless, spendthrift that he was, Thomas protected his poetic gifts...

...Poem after poem celebrates exhuberantly and poignantly the imminence of death, the procreative forces of life being identical with death: The hawk afire above the hills hangs ready to strike the blithely frolicking children...

...Near the end of his life Thomas was planning to collaborate with Igor Stravinsky on an opera...

...The pointless lies, the hypochondria, the thefts of friends' shirts and property (he always disarmed their anger by his boyish meekness), his hatred of the war as a personal affront, and his lifelong love for the magical sounds of words-all these point to an infantilism that never left him...

...But the grinding poverty wore him down and contributed heavily to his downfall...

...Insult to the brain" was the doctors' epitaph for Dylan Thomas...

...It was taken for granted in the casual London Bohemia of the 1930s that Dylan must be allowed to go on writing his poems...

...Fitzthe Gibbon relates one detail of the story: "The tree in the new Garden of Eden was to bear leaves on each of which there would be a single letter of the alphabet...

...At 26 he burned the notebooks, a gesture that probably meant renouncing his prococious past...

...He was, for one, as improvident as Micawber...

...I think the exquisite image of a paradise of words I have just quoted should stand as the poet's final epitaph...

...Eros and thanatos, this was his grand single theme and the source of his cosmic praise and dirges, a theme deepened and humanized in his las t poems . It is because of this narrowness, this failure to relate the instinctual life to history, morality, or society, that, pristine and virile as the poems are in expression, Thomas was, as he realized, only "captain of the second eleven...

...Yet his dedication to his "craft and sullen art" never flagged, his passion for words and the music of their combinations never waned although his output dwindled to a mere handful...

...Then, when the fresh winds blew and the Tree of Knowledge shed its leaves, the second Adam would re-create, for the second Eve, all words and languages...

...FitzGibbon tells this story wisely, carefully, and movingly...

...All the rest scarcely matters...

...FitzGibbon skillfully lets the poet's own words describe the nightmare, the harpies, the frightened actor desperately impersonating the poet and holding court and struggling to keep some shred of self-respect...

...And when the innocence is rambunctious and feckless, as in the case of Dylan Thomas, the destiny is almost preordained...

...Thomas' style and theme were essentially fixed at the age of 17...

...Reviewed by HERBERT LEIBOWITZ Department of English Columbia University The untidy, tragic, barmy life of Dylan Thomas has been set down with fine sympathy and disinterestedness by Constantine FitzGibbon, novelist and friend of Thomas, in what should be the definitive biography...

...Thomas never grew up, never really left Wales...

...The world of the poems is Wales and childhood as it has seldom been sung by poets, a childhood innocent and shadowed by death and the threshings of time...

...Thomas himself helped create the image of the Romantic wunderkind, dogged by disease and premature death, the cherubic poet tumbling girls and words and downing uncountable tankards of beer...

...So when FitzGibbon reaches the last notorious chapter of Dylan Thomas' life, the hectic tours of America culminating in his death in a Greenwich Village hospital, we see it not as myth, as a series of appalling and uproarious scenes, but as a sad and wearying journey through hell...

...Forced constantly to grub and beg for money to eke out a living to support his family, he could not master bourgeois routines 'Or handle money and the simplest daily affairs...

...It is all there: the heedless ways, the raffish charm, the loving labor over the poems, and above all, the innocence...

...His friends bailed him out repeatedly and willingly shared their own often meager funds because they respected his talent...

...His own vulnerability and warm conviviality and his genius as a fantasist destroy him, and he ironically fulfills his father's prophecy that he would die before 40...

...And as Richard Hughes, the noted English novelist put it, "He may have sponged on us economically but spiritually it was more the other way about...

...The stories of Thomas' sexual exploits and his drinking bouts are put in perspective, stripped of sensationalism and untruth...

...The reality and the motives were quite different, as FitzGibbon shows...

...He associated both his personal freedom and his best self with poetry, and he worked hard and with radiant earnestness over a line, rewriting it a hundred times if necessary to get it right...

...Thomas' cyclonic relationship with Caitlin, for instance, about which so much has been written, is presented with calm objectivity: Dylan's dependency and tender loyalty in spite of his unfaithfulness, and her remarkable, doughty endurance of poverty and neglect, her singleminded devotion to his writing poems and her bitterness at what she thought was the corruption of the later years...

...In his laconic and sensible way, FitzGibbon makes short shrift of the legends that have sprung up like toadstools to obscure the figure of Dylan Thomas...

...FitzGibbon brilliantly sums up this side of Thomas' character: "From the very earliest age he expected, and usually got, the treatment that was to be his throughout his life: there were always people to "look after" Dylan, to be delighted and astounded by him, to pick him up and dust him off, to accept him at his own idiosyncratic value...

...The poetry is related root and branch to his life, especially to his childhood days in Wales, but in the poems he does not play-act...

...for almost a decade he mined the rich lode of his notebooks and his "astonishingly fecund adolescence" for the lyrics that make up the bulk of his collected poems...

...Miraculously and obstinately, he kept his poetic self shy and inviolable- at least until he became the public lion Thomas' nature was his nemesis...

...His vivid and fertile imagination yielded the harvest of great poems and what Theodore Roethke called Thomas' lovely recklessness caused the early death...

...Thomas was a timid person, whose boisterous antics were done for companionship and for relief from the lonely vigils of writing poems...

...yet his irresponsibility was the obverse of his generosity as a man...

...Innocence can be the undoing of a man and the making of a poet, for what the muse tolerates and even welcomes often conflicts with the needs of the social self...