An Inebriate Of Words

By R.Z. Shepard

DYLAN THOMAS: A BIOGRAPHY by Paul Ferris Dial; 399 pages; $9.95

There are generations still kicking to whom "good vibes" mean Lionel Hampton, "far out" is the suburbs, and Dylan is Thomas the poet from Wales, not Bob the minstrel from Minnesota. And yet Dylan Thomas would have been as self-destructively at home in the '60s of overdosed pop music stars as he was in his own time, the '30s and '40s of underpaid poets.

The notorious Thomas was a theatrical figure who conformed to the public's concept of the hard-drinking romantic. It was the private craftsman who produced such poems as Fern Hill and In Memory of Ann Jones, works which reveal the vitality and uncluttered emotional depth of a great lyric talent. If Thomas also wrote his share of maudlin, obscure verse, it was rarely without an undercurrent of sexual energy and startling imagery ("The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars").

The poet's own life unwrinkled in a style reminiscent of Baudelaire's gropings for a back door to salvation and Verlaine's poetes maudits, those supposed victims of Philistine indifference. The settings, characters and influences in Thomas' life were, however, unmistakably Celtic. According to Richard Burton, another legendary Welshman and friend of the poet's, they were "the unsure arrogance, the mock belligerence, the comic wit, the large gestures and the small men, and the lust for English and its lovely words and the tricks you can play with it, and the booze everywhere, booze commas, booze colons, booze full-stops, that belonged to all that little world of Mumbles and Langland Bay and Worms Head and Swansea and of which Dylan Thomas was the concentrated essence."

Burton uncorked that 180-proof prose twelve years ago in a review of Constantine FitzGibbon's The Life of Dylan Thomas. It remains the biography to read if you are reading only one. Paul Ferris' new study is somewhat clinical and dry --especially when compared with FitzGibbon's, and with John Malcolm Brinnin's intimate and lively chronicle of Thomas' raucous poetry-reading tours of the U.S. It was during the last trip in 1953 that Thomas conducted his famous bender through New York's Greenwich Village. Delirious with drink and looking like a decayed cherub, he collapsed in his hotel room. After ill-advised injections of cortisone and morphine, he was hospitalized on Nov. 5. He died four days later of what one physician termed "a severe insult to the brain."

Ferris is more interested in transforming Dylan Thomas from a literary gossip item into a case history of arrested adolescence. He has supplemented the story of the Swansea son of an overattentive mother and dissapointed schoolteacher father with some fresh evidence. A former baby sitter recalls the child Dylan as "an absolute tartar, an appalling boy." At twelve, he plagiarized a poem and had it published in the Cardiff Western Mail As a young reporter in Swansea, Thomas developed his heavy drinking habits for, Ferris suggests, "the pleasure of being rescued afterwards." He was obsessed with fears of sexual inferiority, and he never outgrew a compulsive need to steal from family, friends and acquaintances. Once as the dinner guest of a psychiatrist, he excused himself and defiantly returned wearing the doctor's suit, shirt, tie and socks.

Thomas apparently lived in the classic certitude that personal charm and poetic gifts entitled him to special treatment. "There is no necessity for the artist to do anything. There is no necessity. He is a law unto himself, and his greatness or smallness rises or falls by that," he wrote to his girl friend Pamela Hansford Johnson. Pamela went on to write successful novels and marry C.P. Snow. Thomas went on to craft melodic verse and marry Caitlin Macnamara, a former playmate of Augustus John's. She was, said a London acquaintance, "like the figurehead of a ship, a fantastic poet's girl, a sort of corn-goddess." Of her marriage to Dylan, Caitlin wrote in Leftover Life to Kill, "We lived almost separate lives, though physically close, and passed each other with a detached phrase on strictly practical matters; as though we were no more than familiar landmarks, in the furniture of our minds. Excluding the times, more frequent at night, when the house rattled, and banged, and thudded, and groaned with our murder of each other."

Biographer Ferris can fill in some blanks about Thomas' shaky finances, dig up the autopsy report that found Thomas' liver in reasonably good shape, even print unpublished verse of no particular distinction. In the end, the book seems too late with too little. But its main shortcoming is a failure to render the only Dylan Thomas that really matters--the maker of pagan word music that can still pass the A.E. Houseman power test by raising the hairs on the back of the listener's neck. -- R.Z. Sheppard

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