Dylan Thomas: Flavor of the Man

...It took the whole of one of his last years to compose a single indifferent piece of verse, the Prologue to his Collected Poems...

...There are walks, and boats, and nets to pull, and colossal liars to listen to...

...The index is miserable, a mere two pages listing only the recipients of the letters and giving no reference to the many other personalities contemporary with Thomas whose names are strewn thickly through the pages of the book...

...He might have found many of them willing to accept an unfair judgment from what is now a relatively distant past...

...they are not turned on like a tap at all...

...to excise considerable portions of them is to run the risk of misrepresenting the author's preoccupations at the time of writing...

...There are cuts of another kind which stir equal misgivings...

...He suggests that Thomas Burke, the Georgian novelist who wrote about the East End of London, was one of the notorious Edinburgh body-snatchers, Burke and Hare...

...In the end, the pattern of easy spending and relatively easy getting (for Thomas in his last years earned far more than most English poets) defeated the original intent of his poetic predation...

...I remember enough of my own conversations with Thomas to know the kind of comment FitzGibbon means—intolerant, sometimes highly personal, occasionally offensive, and often made to please a particular audience...

...and, in FitzGibbon's own fulsome words, "to give, as far as possible, the flavor of the man, of his complex, enchanting, maddening and ultimately tragic personality...

...He has only one limitation, and that is the widest of all: the limitation of form...

...they are much rather hewn...

...The suspicion lingers that FitzGibbon, although a biographer and editor of Dylan Thomas, really knows very little about the literary world in which his subject moved...

...Yet, for all the manifold flaws in editing, Selected Letters provides an invaluable addition to the available Thomas texts...

...The editing of the Selected Letters is in some respects an example of the wretched treatment Thomas has received from those who would present him to the world...

...When Treece's volume actually appeared, Thomas—who seemed to sense intuitively my critical attitude—remarked to me that he thought it really rather presumptuous for one young man in his middle 20s to write a book about another young man in his middle 20s...

...Fortunately, as revealed in his letters, Thomas assists us in this task...

...any time, for any time...

...Yet the Gothic settings of self-display contain occasional gems of insight and imagination...

...George Woodcock, a frequent contributor, is the author of The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell...

...Finally, there are the notes of a careful, austere craftsman who worked painfully hard on his poems when he was away from the Bohemian temptations of London...

...I warn you that our cottage is pokey and ugly, four rooms like stained boxes in a workman's and fisherman's row, with a garden leading down to mud and sea, that our living and cooking is rough, that you bathe or go dirty...

...A letter from his first house at Laugharne to Henry Treece in 1938 shows him in his best period, when he was still young, rising to the height of his poetic abilities, and as happy as it lay in his power to be: "I'm so glad that you both will come and spend some time with us in the summer...

...we can begin to see him and his work once again, as we did when he first appeared in the 1930s, with a clear and judicious eye...

...You will find my wife extremely nice...

...they are 'watertight compartments.' Much of the obscurity is due to rigorous compression...

...I would sooner smarm like a fart-licking spaniel than starve in a world of fat bones," he said...

...Thomas shows himself, in his relations with other people, as often calculating, sometimes cringing, and always adroitly flexible in suiting his tone and even his words to the person he is addressing...

...Yet despite all Thomas' weaknesses, the smarming and the whining and the pomposity (which at certain periods became as insufferable in his correspondence as it often was in his conversation), there are long passages of the Selected Letters which are wholly pleasing for the insights they give into his ideas on writing, for their outbursts of free fantasy, and, perhaps most of all, for the sheer dedication to his craft that remained uppermost until those last ridden years when he turned from a poet into a peripatetic literary personality...

...to select other examples which show him as a good prose writer...

...Some of his comments on poets still alive are cruel and on occasion unfair," says the editor, "and these I have omitted, where I could not simply leave out the name of the poet condemned...

...FitzGibbon reprints miserably little from this very important volume...

...He is a law unto himself and his greatness or smallness rises or falls by that...

...It is a good thing...

...There are offguard moments, particularly before adulation and the need for money spoiled him, when he reveals the faculty for self-mockery and the warmth of fellowship that were his most agreeable characteristics...

...Everyone who knew Thomas in the 1940s also knew or at least knew of J. F. Hendry, one of the most active poets of the "New Apocalypse" group...

...Thomas shows off least of all when he is talking about poetry, and since he and Miss Johnson started their friendship because they both contributed poems to Victor Neuberg's "Poets' Corner" in the Sunday Referee, it was natural that many of his comments should concern the verses she sent to him...

...For it is no romantic hero that emerges...

...Almost a third of the Selected Letters is devoted to Thomas' early correspondence with Pamela Hansford Johnson...

...Twenty years later, in 1953, the necessities that gripped Thomas were all too evident...

...Constantine FitzGibbon has selected, trimmed and annotated, and in none of these tasks has he shown himself the best of editors...

...As for the notes which piously accompany each letter, they are so uninformative as to be almost useless to the reader who wishes to place Thomas within the literary world of his time...

...I hope you like drinking, because I do very much and when I have money I don't stop...

...And he tells us that "Anna WicJcnam was renowned for the violence of her poetry," evidently confounding the mild verse of that sad and quarrelsome woman with her uncomfortable personality...

...The poetry remains, and these letters illuminate it...

...it is impossible to believe that he was so frequently and so sensationally down to his literal last penny as these letters suggest...

...I was particularly reminded of this flexibility when I read the long letters in which he encouraged Henry Treece to write the short book on his poetry that appeared in the early 1940s...

...One regrets, of course, that the letters had to be selected at all...

...The other I knew in his particular Bohemian age, but that age and the man who belonged to it are both dead and gone...

...Another note, for example, reads: "I do not know who Hendry was...

...In fact, we are told only what could be guessed from the contents of the letter...

...His insistence on form should shape our approach to his poetry now that the romantic legend is shrinking into proportion: "My poems are formed...

...From the burgeoning poetic prodigy, who had already written a great part of his best poems by the time he was 20, to the tired and harried hack, with barely a verse in him from one year's end to the next, who lapsed into death before he was 40, the Selected Letters of Dylan Thomas (New Directions, 448 pp., $8.50) provides the best chart yet of Thomas' life and achievements...

...They are wordy, self-conscious letters, the kind that talented and nervous young men write when they are anxious to impress...

...Here is a sample trio which prefaces a letter written to Henry Treece in 1938: "Michael Roberts was a poet and critic, influential in the literary world of that time...

...So Dylan Thomas, a youth of 19, wrote to Pamela Hansford Johnson in 1933...

...There are three good pubs here, the best bottled mild in England, and no prohibitive drinking hours...

...I don't know how I'm going to see you at all this year," he wrote to the American poet Oscar Williams, "with the commissioned book yapping at me, the house being pinched, and all my depression at the thought of ever moving again except into my long and dirty home...

...In the mid-'60s the hectic flush has vanished from Thomas' legend and from his poetry...

...This is the Thomas who interests me now...

...No such qualms appear in his letters to Treece...

...The man emerges, not always pleasantly, but far more convincingly than he does in response to the incantations of those lesser writers who have in various ways attempted to biographize him, while his discussions of his poetic intentions are infinitely more illuminating than the efforts of those para-scholars who, since the Thomas boom of the 1950s, have spent so much time in the "explication" (appalling word for an appalling task) of his work...

...Yet it is precisely such passages that FitzGibbon has chosen to cut extensively, with the excuse that the "poems when published are long out of print, when not published are lost...

...It is the editorial apparatus by which FitzGibbon seeks to illuminate the letters that I find not only inadequate, but, all too often, inaccurate as well...

...The most interesting of all Thomas' letters about his own poetry are those he wrote to Vernon Watkins, which have already been published separately...

...Surely this is no excuse for failing to include references at least to those poems that have survived and could have been reproduced in an appendix...

...But once this task was assumed necessary, one cannot object to the guiding principles FitzGibbon tells us he used: to provide as many letters as possible setting down Thomas' views on poetry...

...In practice, though, FitzGibbon has not sustained his principles...

...Clifford Dyment was a young poet who contributed to Geoffrey Grigson's New Verse, among other publications...

...David Gascoyne was a surrealist poet, slightly younger than Dylan...

...Fortunately, his work is durable enough to await more perceptive criticism than it has encountered up to now...

...actually he was a Ceylonese Tamil, which is quite different...

...But he cried wolf too often and too loudly...

...We are not told what these poets wrote, why Michael Roberts was influential, when they were born or, in the case of Roberts, died...

...And smarm he did, developing to an astonishing degree the craft of writing begging letters...

...FitzGibbon tells us that Seven was edited by Denys Val Baker, when it was actually edited by Sydney Treymayne...

...But these comments were frequently perceptive...

...the last thing they do is to flow...

...There are even times when ignorance gives place to sheer misinformation...

...me small, argumentative, good-tempered, lazy, fumbling, boozy as possible, 'lower middle class' in attitude and reaction, a dirty tongue, a silly young man...

...His excuse that Dylan Thomas: Letters to Vernon Watkins is "readily available to scholars interested in the minutiae of his methods of composition" is not sufficient...

...Before omitting them, FitzGibbon should at least have consulted the victims...

...Less than a year later, in the churchyard of the Welsh village of Laugharne, the long and dirty home received him...

...The questions of selection and cutting, however, are mainly matters of taste and judgment...

...He asserts that Tam-bimuttu, the editor of Poetry London, was "a young Sinhalese...

...But Thomas' less pleasing qualities were, in the beginning at least, subordinated in service to his poetry...

...A Selected Letters should include the best letters, whether previously published or not, since the principal justification for such a volume is that it is representative...

...There is a double bed in one room, two single beds in the other...

...He became so involved in money-earning hackwork and in the lecture tours which hastened his end that, eventually, the writing of poetry became as impossible as it was necessary...

...It was Thomas' misfortune that his style of life attracted the sensational and second-rate among other writers, those more concerned with the glamour of literary life than with literature itself, and that these have pre-empted the task of commemorating him...

...Realizing that FitzGibbon's announced principles of selection are not carried out in practice, one immediately begins to doubt the principles he has followed in trimming the letters...

...you can sleep in the double bed, or in the two beds, or sandwiched in a single one...

...To select letters that will stand in their entirety is one thing...

...they revealed a great deal about Thomas himself, and in memory they shed light on the poetic life of the times...