“Somebody who read aloud and lectured too much too often and too long in a too-hospitable place and who became sated with public words and with his own exhibitionism. On his return he couldn’t get down to work; he missed the willing audience, the easy, but killing money . . .” This observation of Dylan Thomas was written in February 1953, between his second and third reading tours of America. The description, however, was not written by one of his contemporary detractors, but by the poet himself.
Thomas, it seems, was as aware as anyone else of the potential dangers that his relationship with America offered. In the same letter he continues: “Endless booming of poems didn’t sour or stale words for me, but made me more conscious of my obsessive interest in them and my horror that I would never be innocent enough to touch and use them. I came home fearful and jangled. There was my hut full of pencil and paper . . . but I couldn’t write a word.”
Despite this admission of America’s sapping effect upon him, within a few months Dylan would be flying to the country for a third reading tour, and again, before the end of the year, for a fourth — from which he was to return only in his coffin.
This weekend I am packing my bags for America too, to participate in the New York celebrations of the anniversary of Dylan Thomas’s death in the city 50 years ago. Somehow it seems appropriate that I’ll be remembering Thomas there, in New York, rather than in Wales, our shared country of origin. It was in America, after all, that he became firmly established as one of the leading poets of his generation. In America that he became a “celebrity”, recognised in bars and drawing audiences in their thousands. And it was in America, paradoxically, that the man began to crumble under the weight of the myth crystallising about him. The process of hospitality and adulation was eroding him with drink, anxiety and fear. America took Dylan Thomas to her bosom, but it was a suffocating embrace.
This isn’t to say that America actually killed Dylan Thomas, as some have suggested, but she was certainly a talented accomplice to the real killer, who was Thomas himself. Truman Capote foresaw this when he met the poet on his second tour: “An overgrown baby who’ll destroy every last thing he can get his hands on, including himself.”
Except, of course, there was one thing that Thomas never wanted to destroy: his poetry. This is why he eventually destroyed himself and why it is appropriate to mourn and celebrate Thomas in America: because it was there that the poet died, long before the man himself.
Thomas’s life read like a blueprint of 20th-century Celtic migration: from countryside to industrial town, to London at 18, and then across the water to America, the New World. This movement was characterised and shaped by escape, Thomas’s favourite and most natural impulse (Houdini held an ongoing fascination for Thomas, and he even spoke of writing a play titled The Escape Artist). In his poetry he escaped into his childhood, Laugharne and London were escapes from each other, and in 1952 America was an escape from Britain, home troubles and the hot breath of the Inland Revenue.
Invited over by John Brinnin, the director of the New York Poetry Centre, Dylan’s first tour set the tone for his relationship with America. He performed, spoke, lectured and mesmerised with his booming, posh Welsh voice and in return she laid accolades, money and often willing women at his feet. In return again, he drank the unfamiliarly strong liquor, wrote sobbing, guilt-ridden love letters home to his wife Caitlin and, faced with sombre American academia, played up to the role of the “roaring boy”, the playful, verbose Celt jester at the court of the American king. The transition from poet to performer seemed to strain Thomas physically (he was often sick before taking the stage) and creatively. Thomas’s poetry is always performing, even on the page. In his hands language becomes a physical experience; a dextrous, hypnotic show. But now, in America, Thomas the poet was being swallowed by Thomas the performer, “a voice on wheels” as he described himself in a letter to Caitlin. He actually read surprisingly little of his own poetry, taking up much of his readings with work by Yeats, Wilfred Owen, Hardy and other poets he admired.
But the endless talking about and reading of his own work stood in crude juxtaposition with what he knew to be the reality; that his writing of poetry had slowed to almost nothing. At 18 he had completely embraced the vocation of the poet: “To hell with everything except the inner necessity for expression and the medium of expression, everything except the great need for forever striving after this mystery and meaning I moan about.” Now this daily presentation of poetry, without the substance of new writing to support it, shook Thomas to the core with fear and self-doubt.
It was, however, these readings that led to Thomas’s notoriety and fame. Although he frequently took to the stage drunk, he seemed to hit a clean groove when reading and the sheer power of his performance swept the American audiences away. As Robert Graves said on hearing Thomas’s voice: “He could put on the hywl. . . I had to keep a tight hold of myself to avoid being seduced.” Others were not so successful, as Thomas discovered in America, when, after college readings, young women eagerly came to meet the Welsh poet who had so blown them away from the stage.
It has been said that Thomas aroused “the most sacrificial longings in American women,” but when Caitlin accompanied him on his second tour she saw the situation somewhat less poetically. These “young ladies”, she said, were “candidly if not prepossessingly spread-eagled, from the first tomtomed rumour of a famous name. They conducted their courting with the ferocity and tenacity of caged Amazons and nothing less than the evaporation of their prey would make them go away.” Although Caitlin’s description is undoubtedly laced with jealousy, she had obviously already recognised why her husband wasn’t made for America. He was, she said in the Italian idiom, “a piece of bread”, too soft to withstand the American way of life, which brought out his weaknesses, one of which, of course, was women.
Dylan’s relationship with Caitlin had long been a stormy and even violent one, but his dependency upon the love of one woman was a rock on which his writing was founded. There had been infidelities on both sides before America, but his American tours put a vastly increased pressure on the marriage. Dylan, in his childlike way, needed women as protectors, buffers against the world, and he sought them out in America, while Caitlin embarked on a series of revenge affairs back in sleepy Laugharne. The resulting, ever-widening fissures in their relationship; the guilt, the jealousy, all were blows to Dylan’s mental wellbeing and his ability to write poetry.
Perhaps the most damaging element of Dylan’s American tours, however, was the role he felt compelled to play. On his first reading in New York John Brinnin introduced the poet as coming “from the druidical mists of Wales”. This ridiculously romantic and antiquated phrase is revealing for how Thomas was viewed in America, and perhaps, for how he presented himself, as a perfect specimen of what Seamus Heaney has called the “bucklepping tribe, an image of the Celt as perceived by the Saxon, a principle of disorder and childish irresponsibility complementary to the earnest, gormless routines and civility of Albion”.
As the in-house Celtic bohemian Thomas appeared to know what was expected of him, perhaps, sadly, all too well. Speaking to an audience back in Wales he described how, outside Wales, “one is given a foreign licence to be a Welshman, and the odder one is the more typical is it thought to be of the character and behaviour of those brutal and benighted songbirds who cluster together, hymning on hilltops, in the woad and llanwigwams. . .” America tempted the bucklepper in Thomas, the intoxicating, partying, drinking, joie de vivre Welshman. The image of the poet without the poetry, and it was this, in the end, that killed Thomas.
In America I’ll be visiting the mythic landscape of such a Dylan Thomas; the Chelsea Hotel where he eventually collapsed, the White Horse Tavern where he drank and held court. But in being there I want to remember and celebrate not the poet himself, but the poems — the handful of verses that display Thomas’s strange and resonant genius. In the 50 years since his death his work has veered in and out of critical favour, but these poems are still undoubtedly his definitive achievement. In his best poetry Thomas found a language and idiolect totally unique in the history of English literature, a deeply percussive verse that held the world singing in his palm. He also wrote what is perhaps the best villanelle in the English language, Do not go gentle into that good night.
It is these poems I’ll be reading at the celebrations in New York, and these poems that deserve to be remembered alongside the tragic, sad, funny story of the poet who wrote them. A poet whose voice left an indelible mark on a generation, as Larkin acknowledged when, on hearing of Dylan’s death, he placed the Welshman alongside Auden and Eliot in a trinity of poetic influence; “I can’t believe that D. T. is truly dead. It seems absurd. Three people who ’ve altered the face of poetry, and the youngest has to die.”
Read on
- Andrew Lycett: Dylan Thomas: A New Life (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20 Buy the book)
- Dylan Thomas Reading His Poetry (HarperCollins audio CD, £9.99 Buy the book)
- Collected Poems 1934-1953 by Dylan Thomas (Phoenix, £6.99 Buy the book)
- The Blue Book, poems by Owen Sheers (Seren, £6.95 Buy the book) Owen
Sheers’s novel The Dust Diaries will be published by Faber in 2004
