A Dubious Thomas

...A Dubious Thomas The Poems of Dylan Thomas Edited by Daniel Jones New Du ections 291 pp $6 00 Reviewed by George Woodcock Author, "Mohandas Gandhi" LAST SPRING, at a small arts theater on the banks of the Thames, I attended a curious celebration of the double faces of Dylan Thomas The first part of the program was dominated by a frayed and rather frenetic BBC man who had been one of his radio producers, he played a variety of tapes tracing Thomas' career as a minor actor and a public reader of his own and other people's verse The latter part consisted of a discussion of his merits and methods as a poet by a group of his contemporaries, including Roy Fuller, Julian Symons, Jack Lindsay, and Ruthven Todd The effect was interesting to anyone who remembered how 20 years ago people would gather in hundreds merely to listen to the booming, fruitcake voice that issued so incongruously from Thomas' small and scruffy body The audience on this occasion was mixed old friends and nostalgic contemporaries, and about an equal number of young people As the readings went on, it became obvious that nobody was impressed with the oratorical magic of the past The program, building up from Thomas' first small acting jobs to his more famous recordings, projected not so much the evolution of a personality as the bbc's relentless promotion of a totally synthetic histri-onic persona behind which the poet slowly withered away into almost complete unproductivity The younger spectators 'ensed this no less than those who had known him (and who had always dismissed his public pertormances as commercial activities) and, as The Voice bellowed and throbbed, their restive-ness increased But they immediately became quiet and attentive when the recordings ended and the writers who had been young with Thomas appeared on the platform to talk about the modest and exacting craftsman who was behind the artificially created romantic mask The incident revealed to me how much attitudes toward Thomas have changed in the 18 years since his death His public self, like that of any other stage figure, has been superseded by other actors who represent the rapidly changing fashions in the arts His life has lost most of its romantic appeal, and now we tend to see it for the shoddy tragedy it was Yet the best of his poetry still retains its power for any reader not enslaved to literary modishness It is this narrowing of one's vision toward the reality of his achievement that makes Daniel Jones' new collection...

...The Poetry of Dylan Thomas, a somewhat ambivalent gift At first sight, mdeed, it appears to be a necessary work Jones, a Swansea schoolmate who collaborated with him m writing joint verses during their adolescence, has rummaged painstakingly through the periodicals of the '30s and studied Thomas' manuscript notebooks at the University of Buffalo As a result, he has added 102 poems to the 90 that Thomas himself picked for the Collected Poems published in 1952 Only two unfinished pieces postdate the poet's own selection The rest Thomas decided not to include, or in many cases not to publish at all, even when editors' demands were insistent, their offers lucrative, and his needs compelling One is immediately impressed by the restraint that this betokens, for by the standards that prevailed when most of these poems were written, those Thomas rejected were certainly pubhshable He was not merely a superb and careful craftsman, as his last, mature work indicates, but an admirable self-critic who did not pass even a well-made poem if he was not convinced of its originality, its inspiration Reading through Jones' collection one is constantly aware of the poet's excellent judgment The pieces he finally picked to represent him m the 1952 volume stand out quite sharply from the journeyman efforts he left out Along with the 20 or so well-known anthology favorites are 60-odd less celebrated works in which poets and lovers of poetry can still see a writer handling often difficult themes at the height of his powers, hardly one of the 90 poems Thomas himself chose seems out of place On the other hand, not one smgle example among the 102 hitherto uncollected verses Jones presents is m-contestably good enough to add to the poet's own collection Why should this extraordinary gap in quality separate the two sets of poems'' We have no actual explanation, but I suggest the reason is quite simple Thomas must have recognized a true impulse when it came, working extremely hard on the poems he decided to publish and leaving the others in their more or less original form In other words, as his friends knew long ago, he was far from the romantic poet of sudden and fiery inspiration his admirers sometimes make him Rather, he was a writer with a classical sense of form who elaborated with conscious artifice whatever gifts his inspiration presented him Jones' failure to give us anything new that is representative of Thomas at his best raises the question of whether this expanded collection was really worth preparing The general reader is better off with the poet's own selection For students and fellow poets Jones' book has some interest because the items are arranged in order of composition, and, by studying the rejected poems in relation to the ones Thomas gathered 19 years ago, an idea can be gained of the influences that were working on him and being thoroughly assimilated in his best verse (Among the obvious ones are not only Donne and Hopkins but Wdde and Housman ) Nonetheless, the real scholar will remain unsatisfied, since Jones has merely made a partial compilation—substituting his judgment for the author's—and other poems are still waiting to be published It is unfortunate that, having decided to reorder Thomas, he did not go all the way and give us a complete variorum edition The Poetry of Dylan Thomas is, in fact, a compromise between quality and quantity, and compromises work no better in poetry than in politics...