Dylan Thomas: A New Life

It's a long book but surprisingly compact, and Lycett seems to have the happy knack of being able to condense the long drawn out memories of others into snappy paragraphs or two-liners. His previous book on the life of Ian Fleming raised the bar for James Bond studies and I am not surprised to see that his life of Thomas (who like Fleming cut his own brand of swaskbuckling throughout the English speaking universe) is also something of a triumph. It is the first biography of Thomas to set out properly his confusing travels to California (where I live)--his sojourns to San Francisco and LA (where he met Chaplin, Shelley Winters, Isherwood, etc) finally make some chronological and emotional sense. Lycett is also good, as he was with Fleming, at showing particular moments in each man's career where popular enthusiasm brought their work to a new level of acceptance. For Fleming, of course, the filming of the Bond stories brought him an attention he had craved for years but then decided he didn't want. For Thomas, it seems to have been the publication in 1946 of DEATHS AND ENTRANCES that shook him up and created in a fiery fogre of fame and alcohol, a new Dylan Thomas, one cockily confident and supremely able to go about life with only a smile and a vast adoring public to sustain him. And, in each case, Lycett also sketches "the wife" tidily, so that we see how Ann Fleming and Caitlin Thomas pulled the strings--or failed to. Hooray for Andrew Lycett, can't wait to see who you turn your sights on next.

Long ago, I came upon Dame Edith Sitwell's description of Thomas: "He was not tall, but was extremely broad, and gave an impression of extraordinary strength, sturdiness, and superabundant life. (His reddish-amber curls, strong as the curls on the brow of a young bull, his proud, but not despising, bearing, emphasized this.) Mr. Augustus John's portrait of him is beautiful but gives him a cherubic aspect, which though pleasing, does not convey ... Dylan's look of archangelic power. In full face he looked much as William Blake must have looked as a young man. He had full eyes--like those of Blake--giving him at first the impression of being unseeing, but seeing all, looking over immeasurable distances." Of course, she does not describe what was in his mind and heart. For that, we rely on what was revealed by his behavior during an avoidably brief life (1914-1953) and by what is suggested in what he wrote. Also, we have two excellent biographies. This one and another written by Paul Ferris. Briefly, here is some background information about Thomas' life. He was born in the Welsh seaport of Swansea, Carmarthenshire, and received all of his formal education at the local grammar school. He then earned his living in a variety of jobs as an actor, reporter, reviewer, and handyman. At age 22, he married Caitlin Macnamara and thus began an especially tumultuous relationship which continued until his death. She bore him three children. For most of his adult life, he struggled to support his family (e.g. writing for the Ministry of Education) before serving in World War Two as an anti-aircraft gunner. Afterward, his struggles to support himself and family continued, even with writing assignments for the BBC. Then in 1950, he delivered the first of a series of readings of his works in the United States, returning twice more for additional tours in 1952 and 1953. Caitlin soon grew to hate the United States because (in her opinion) the adoration he received there activated, indeed encouraged his excessive appetites, especially for alcohol and for other women. One of my college English professors had accompanied Thomas during several of his binges in New York City in 1953. I asked him what Thomas had died of. He replied "Everything." His life ended prematurely but probably inevitably in San Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan on November 9, 1953. He was 39 years of age. Credit Lycett with rigorous and comprehensive research on Thomas' life. He also had one significant resource which Ferris did not: Ferris. (Also Welch, Ferris was born about a mile from Thomas' childhood home.) There are passages in this book when it seems that Lycett is as charmed by Thomas as were so many others, giving the brilliant poet the benefit of the doubt when discussing his frequently offensive behavior, especially his mean-spirited abuse of family members (notably wife Caitlin) as well as of others who befriended him. (Ferris is far less forgiving of Thomas' misbehavior.) According t

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. This was the first poem by Dylan Thomas I read while in college, and its words haunt me still. This poem, and others such as "Fern Hill," "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London," "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower," "Poem on His Birthday," "I See the Boys of Summer," and "Over Sir John's Hill" established him as the epitome of romanticism and one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. Dylan Thomas, "the Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive," was born on Oct. 27, 1914, in Swansea, Wales. He died of pneumonia and acute alcoholic poisoning in New York City, during his fourth lecture tour in the United States, on Nov. 9, 1953. His final resting place, marked by a simple white cross, is in St. Martin's churchyard, Laugharne, in West Wales. Andrew Lycett's Dylan Thomas: A New Life was published in England last year to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the poet's death. Lycett, a regular contributor to the Times (London), has written a thorough, astonishingly detailed study of Thomas' life. A cynic might describe this exhaustive biography as exhausting, for one needs patience and perseverance to wade through its intricate details. Nevertheless, at the end, one is glad to have read this highly informative and scholarly work. One marvels at the amount of research needed to create such a sustained narrative. As I read Lycett's work, the image of the prodigal son often rose to mind: the story of an irresponsible young man who "wasted his substance in riotous living." Much of the book is a sad chronicle of Dylan's marathon pub crawling, multiple fornications, and shameless sponging off his friends. Dylan once revealed his personality in a nutshell: "One: I am a Welshman; two: I am a drunkard; three: I am a lover of the human race, especially of women." To put it bluntly: Dylan Thomas chased anything and everything in skirts (the gentleman doth protest too much, methinks ... concerning his protestations of disinclination toward homosexuality). A pitiful alcoholic, he often drank his breakfast, lunch, and supper. He was forever cadging from his friends, "borrowing" the "loans" that he had no intention of repaying. In a classic statement of his professional purpose, Dylan wrote: "I have a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my inquiry is to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, downthrow and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression." Lycett describes Dylan Thomas as "this oddly religious man who lived outside any formal creed," and who, "caught between Muse [poetry] and Mermaid [a tavern], wrote of "the absurdity of life in the midst of mortality, and of the inevitability of death. [Dylan wrote] of the relativism of a world where good and bad are 'two ways / Of moving about your death.' He was not the first poet to see the indif