Making Sense of Nature
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry Making Sense of Nature By Phoebe Pettingell During the 1960s the works of Dylan Thomas were taught in schools as if they were literature's latest model. Had the Welshpoetnot...
...Merwin ambles along, observing and recording what may soon pass from the world...
...Still, he produced musical phrases that have entered the poetic tradition...
...Ironically, the future poet acquired little of the native tongue both parents knew...
...The depth of Merwin's compassion emerges in The Ends of the Earth as he ardently protests the destruction of our fragile ecologies...
...Despite that lapse and a few other peculiar judgments, Lycett fascinates with details about encounters between Thomas and literary figures major and minor on our shores...
...The often retold drama of his death from alcohol poisoning at St...
...Writers like Theodore Roethke and Delmore Schwartz were far from staid—not to mention the young John Berryman or the Robert Lowell of Lord Weary's Castle...
...His memoir of George Kirstein is an understated account of how Merwin came to better understand himself through the love of sailing he shared with the older man...
...The isolation, quietude and traditions that make Mount Athos fascinating are being ruined by the daytrippers who flock there...
...Much gets uncovered, including fürther details about his acute substance abuse, compulsive womanizing and boorish behavior, not to mention family feuds over the Thomas literary estate...
...It must be added that he had grown ambivalent about living...
...Incapable of earning enough to support his children, he was too indecisive to leave a violent marriage he knew to be untenable, even dangerous, for both parties...
...Lycett's discussion of Thomas' poetry is limited to the likes of locating the original site that inspired "Fern Hill," or insisting that Thomas' verse betrays a rudimentary knowledge of the Welsh language he claimed not to know...
...Time held me green and dying/Though I sang in my chains like the sea...
...In itself it is an act of appropriation, an annexation, and the moment of such naming of the flora and fauna of the South Pacific coincided with the final and most pervasive era of European imperialism, the 19th century...
...It's taken for granted that Thomas is an "enduring" poet and that we care about him because of what he produced...
...A succession of colonial plantation owners cultivated sugar cane, pineapples and other crops, destroying much of the native growth and in turn populations of animals and birds that had evolved to feed or take shelter under the original foliage...
...Kingsley Amis sourly described Thomas as "looking like a dissolute but very amiable frog...
...In Merwin's view, Banks was a callous, high-handed figure who displayed the troubling tendencies of his era...
...Over the years I have heard many people who knew him to varying degrees speak glowingly of his conversational prowess...
...Instead of mounting a green soap box, he paints those young educated Englishmen and Frenchmen who embarked on grueling trips with sensitivity...
...These budding scientific "gentlemen' were in quest of lands as untouched as Eden at the dawn of creation, teeming with uncategorized wonders...
...As an author of descriptive prose, he has grown into one of the most eloquent nature writers...
...Husband and wife fought physically and verbally and had numerous affairs, though each bitterly resented the other's infidelities...
...for another, he ignores contemporaries of Thomas whose voices were developed long before they encountered his...
...Dramatic careers with tragic endings attract admirers who memorize the myths without reading the books...
...The other five focus on landscapes in Hawaii, Mount Athos in Greece, the winter refuge of Monarch butterflies in Mexico, a Neanderthal gravesite, plus other spots in France...
...their labeling a godlike act of name-giving that asserted mastery over the known world...
...Inevitably, the last third of the biography is the most colorful section...
...Merwin published his first collection of verse a year before the death of Dylan Thomas...
...But revelation is not the purpose here...
...Of greater interest to the biographer than providing fresh insights about his subject's "craft and sullen art" is finding out what made him tick...
...and the now forgotten explorer, Jean Francois Galaup de La Pérouse...
...The sentimental story "A Child's Christmas in Wales" became a holiday staple upon its appearance in 1945...
...Gradually, the young poet shifted from a virtuoso formalist style to the pared down language that garnered praise for The Lice (1967) and a Pulitzer Prize for The Carrier of Ladders (1970...
...For his rare powers of sympathy, this volume ranks with Robert Louis Stevenson's classic Travels with a Donkey...
...Linnaeus' system of classification provided "a bright new instrument that filled the natural scientist with hopes of giving every living thing its true name and place in the scheme of things at last...
...La Pérouse is an almost forgotten name today, but legend has it that just before Louis XVI went to the guillotine he asked, "Have we any word about M. de La Pérouse...
...Sydney Parkinson, who accompanied Captain James Cook as an artist and naturalist...
...Adolescence is drawn to his operatic passions and sweeping declamations about sex and death: The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age...
...As it dispatched men to die at sea, the scientific enlightenment bred social upheavals that spilled more blood at home...
...Lycett suggests that a combination of amphetamines, cortisone and morphine, prescribed sequentially by a doctor over the 24 hours before Thomas was rushed to the hospital, made his recovery almost impossible...
...Meanwhile Caitlin languished in Bellevue, having suffered a breakdown at the sight of her dying husband...
...His entire oeuvre, through his last works, appeals most strongly to youth...
...Lycett, who has chronicled the lives of Muammar Qaddaf i, Ian Fleming and Rudyard Kipling, wants to make sense of what drove a gifted man to write so fervently as he slowly destroyed himself...
...Vincent's Hospital in New York (the same institution that gave another hard-living, self-destructive poet, Edna Millay, her middle name) loses nothing in this account...
...To his surprise, Merwin spots hens and cats with kittens...
...Fans of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels will encounter here a much less benign portrait of Sir Joseph Banks, the amateur naturalist who headed the scientific team on Cook's voyage...
...that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer...
...The principal motive of all this exploration was, after all, "colonial occupation...
...Merwin's essays in The Ends of the Earth (Shoemaker & Hoard, 288 pp., $26.00) are an idyllic holiday, with a few radiant epiphanies...
...He sponged off others, took advances for books he never wrote, drank to excess, and indulged in hard drugs when they were available...
...Yet not all were enchanted with him...
...Inspired in part by Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, the 1953 play Under Milkwood remains fodder for high school drama productions...
...During the New Deal, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) reforested the islands, seeding the nonindigenous trees and vegetation tourists see today...
...Infatuated by the prospect of dominion over the environment, young men like Parkinson enthusiastically signed up for dangerous voyages of exploration, although they realized their chances of returning alive were slim...
...Three of the pieces recall individuals: the late Nation publisher George Kirstein...
...In his essay on Parkinson, he probes the meaning of naturalist drawing during the Age of Reason...
...After the first death, there is no other...
...Initially, Thomas' literary successes balanced out his personal failings in the eyes of many acquaintances...
...In one of the most austere monasteries, one monk breaks the rules to show his precious stamp album to the visitor...
...By dying young Thomas gained entry to the pantheon of doomed poets— the company ofLord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Sylvia Plath...
...Enthralled by the theater, he often mugged to his audiences...
...Unbeknown to us undergraduates, as well as our teachers, styles in contemporary verse were undergoing a great upheaval...
...Their thirst for fresh knowledge sounds admirable, and in most respects it was...
...Sketches of scientific specimens were symbols of an orderly universe tamed by humans...
...Moreover, he was deeply afraid he had outlived his gift...
...Thomas' U.S...
...reading tours between 1950 and 1953 were greeted with the celebrity treatment soon to be accorded British rock stars...
...He reconstructs their ideas and attitudes from old journals, honors the motives and opinions of their own age when such honor is due, and expresses a keen respect for their courage in the face of overwhelming perils...
...Lycett can write more frankly than previous Thomas biographers because, half a century on, most who knew him are dead or elderly—the poet himself would have been 90 this year...
...All too soon the gliding proas and abundant plant life—the sights that had captivated 18th-century explorers—were gone for good...
...cummings and Marianne Moore...
...For one thing, he mischaracterizes the era of e.e...
...This may not be the biographer's fault...
...As a bohemian character he bewitched many in the literary world, not merely with his talent but because people found him improbably "spiritual" and "ethereal...
...There the trail goes cold...
...As the comatose Thomas fought for breath, writers, academics, former and current mistresses (some of them also authors of distinction), and poetry groupies kept vigil at the hospital, chastising one another for letting their idol reach such a state...
...His schoolmaster father, in a burst of romanticism, named his second child and only son after a character in the great Welsh epic The Mabinogion...
...By 1827, when the disaster was confirmed by a party from New Zealand, it appeared a few had survived...
...Women are forbidden, and for centuries even female animals were discouraged...
...Thanks in part to the Revolution, it took almost 40 years to discover that LaPérouse's ill-fated expedition was shipwrecked off Vanikoro Island...
...Unlike the bad-boy antics that make all too vivid an impression in print, the nature of his charm remains elusive to the reader...
...AFTER so much stürm und drang, WS...
...Parkinson himself died on his journey with Cook...
...His verse can be unnecessarily obscure because he prized sound over meaning...
...But Lycett goes overboard when he asserts that "until Dylan's appearance, American poetry had been a modest, staid and introverted affair, caught in a straitjacket of academic textual criticism...
...As the history of magic indicates, finding the "real' name of anything is a way of claiming and establishing power over it...
...His older, richer lovers supported him—generously providing for Caitlin and the children as well...
...Merwin not only takes us to enchanting places, he is the most convivial of companions on the journey...
...The lure of discovery trumped any mortal fears...
...Thomas' exhibitionist behavior matched his literary excesses: the false profundity of youth, maudlin sentimentality, romantic posturing, baroque rhetoric...
...His formal education ended with the equivalent of a high school diploma...
...He performed so erratically in the few jobs he held during his life that he was soon fired, if he did not quit first...
...Women were particularly drawn to the poet, rushing enthusiastically mto bed with him...
...By the time he turned 26, he had already written 80 per cent of the poetry he would produce, and a pile of unfinished projects was mounting...
...In La Pérouse's story, the excitement of first encountering uncharted islands is set in counterpoint to tumults back in France that his crew knew nothing about...
...Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales, in 1914...
...Although Lycett discusses Thomas' personality at length, we must take his magnetism on faith...
...Andrew Lycett's Dylan Thomas: A New Life (Overlook, 434 pp., $35.00) traces a career that was truly meteoric, a bright flash dazzling the public eye that vanished in a tragic, sudden flameout...
...Reflections of a Mountain" chronicles a walking tour of Mount Athos in 1973, during the Yom Kippur War...
...During his lifetime audiences warmed to his style in a critical climate that touted John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins over William Wordsworth and John Keats...
...A swing of the pendulum of taste has awakened us to the bombastic quality of his oratory...
...The islands of Hawaii (where Merwin has long resided) were logged for firewood by early visiting sailors...
...A sensitive child, he developed an early sense of death and was haunted by stories of young men from his town killed or maimed in World War I. The Thomas family was obsessed with gentility, and their repressed middle-class lifestyle was riddled with anxieties...
...Though we may not be as starry-eyed as the adoring fans of 50 years ago, we still swoon to his most inspired lines: "Do not go gentle into that good night./Rage, rage against the dying of the light...
...At times Merwin casts himself as an explorer...
...His first collection of verse appeared in 1934 and was soon followed by a spate of stories, more poems and a novel...
...They had eventually built another small boat and set off several years before the rescue mission arrived...
...Lycett does a workmanlike job of sifting truth from legend, but rather than another retelling of the Dylan Thomas story, we could use a fresh evaluation of his poetry...
...But sometimes their passion let serpents into the garden...
...Thomas was only 17 when he composed those lines...
...In fact, most things there turn out to be not quite as they first appear...
...While in the classroom we were absorbing Thomas' rhetorical flourishes and metaphysical speculations, poetry was slimming down, assuming cadences of ordinary speech, stripping offhigh gloss for a rougher, more immediate and less worked-over effect...
...Though out of step with this trend, we were just the right age to encounter his writing for the first time...
...From a young age, the son scorned respectability and rebelled...
...Assured as his reputation may be in Great Britain, however, American readers now think he may have been overrated...
...His later work is characterized by a sinuous music that conveys his convictions about the physical world and our own relation to it...
...Had the Welshpoetnot died at age 39 in 1953, he would have been a contemporary of most of my college professors— men and women then in their prime...
...The most hospitable, liberal monks reveal themselves as fierce anti-Semites...
...His marriage to a beautiful young woman, Caitlin Macnamara (she grew up modeling for the painter Augustus John), became notoriously tempestuous and he was neglectful of their three children...
...The isolated peninsula is inhabited almost exclusively by Orthodox Christian monks...
Vol. 87 • May 2004 • No. 3
