The Poet as Martyr

CLEM ANDERSON (627 pp.)--R. V. Cassill--Simon & Schusfer ($5.95).

It was probably inevitable that Dylan Thomas, like Scott Fitzgerald, would sooner or later become a mark for the novelist, and equally inevitable that the fiction of his life would be beggared by the facts. Clem Anderson is a thinly disguised Midwestern incarnation of Thomas, and as the novel opens, he is 37, newly successful, about to marry a blonde Hollywood starlet, and already suffering the physical penalties of literary lionization--"the bloaty softness of his face, the bat's-flesh bags under his eyes." From that high or low point, Novelist Cassill traces the fever chart of Clem's fatal illness--his life--in an intricate series of flashbacks.

In what reads almost like a Behavior Manual for Modern Poets, Clem drifts from Acapulco to Paris to New York--wenching, wiving, divorcing, insulting his friends and occasionally scribbling. During his final, alcoholic collapse he sits in a Greenwich Village bar playing the literary clown to agents and publishers, sexual adventuresses and adoring disciples. He is found one morning, overcome by escaping gas, in the apartment of an admirer who lies sprawled nude on the sofa. The girl dies immediately, but Clem lingers several days--time enough for the "trooping animals," with "a brutish anxiety not to let him go," to cluster in the hospital. Novelist Cassill parrots John Malcolm Brinnin's gruesome description of Dylan Thomas' similar death in an oxygen tent, concluding with the moment in which a fellow poet clasped "the cold, yellowing feet" of the corpse "in a gesture either of pleading or of farewell."

One trouble with the book is that Clem's credentials as a writer are questionable. To suggest his hero's talent, Novelist Cassill quotes a quantity of Anderson prose and verse, all of it unimpressive. What makes the novel fascinating, nevertheless, is its curiously romantic assertion of modern literature's most popular legend--that the world is a conspiracy intent on destroying the poet by pulling him from "the Oedipal throne of his loneliness and art." In other times, poets died simply of starvation or of drink or in barroom brawls or at the hands of their mistresses' husbands. Now, if they abide by literary rules, they must succumb to a kind of massive sociological assault.

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