Man and Poet

These thirty-eight essays on Dylan Thomas are divided into two sections, headed respectively ‘The Man’ and ‘The Poet’. In practice the two categories overlap. One can say roughly that, among those who write of the man, some could see round his alcoholism and some could not. Augustus John, Lawrence Durrell, Philip Burton, John Davenport, Louis MacNeice, and above all, Roy Campbell, seem to have grasped that the man was bigger than his bio- chemistry, and so they have much good news to report of Thomas living; whereas others are daunted and confused. This is Roy Campbell’s inimitable comment:

He was quite stout now, but I recognised the voice and the eyes. What he had lost in beauty he had made up in character, wit, and knowledge. Those extraordinary bumps on his forehead had grown more rugged. He was less self-conscious and had none of that English reserve and restraint which he had affected for the first half hour when I met him first. Success had made him modest instead of having the usual opposite effect . . .

Campbell’s portrait is very positive and convincing. Thomas’s American friends, however, seem to have been more easily hypnotised by the nimbus of mediumistic grandeur that surrounded his verse-readings. And since Americans are usually at heart conventional people, Thomas’s alcoholic ribaldry often shocked them more than it need have done. The English portraits are the best.

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On the other hand the American critics of Thomas’s poetry are on the whole more perceptive than the English. They never come near making, for example, the grotesque mistake that Geoffrey Grigson made when he dismissed the poetry as the ‘peeling off of dirty drawers’. American critics appear to understand symbolism. Even Karl Shapiro’s debunking essay treats the work with full seriousness.

The book provides, in its totality, an interesting corrective to the Thomas legend and comes as near as a book can to giving a clear outline of the life and work of this many-sided man.

1961 (244)