Books

Dylan Thomas on visiting the United States

Wry, sometimes hilarious account of European lecturers doing the American circuit

Welsh poet and playwright Dylan Thomas: his prose, as well as his poetry, demonstrated a remarkable inventiveness with words. Photograph: Picture Post / Hulton|Archive

Brian Maye
Sat Feb 27 2021 - 06:00

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) is well known as a poet but, curiously, apart from the collection of short stories titled Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, the rest of his prose works were published after his death. Had he something to hide?

His poetry showed a remarkable inventiveness in how it used words and this applied to his prose as well, as may be seen in his wonderful play for voices Under Milk Wood, which opens with the description of a moonless night in the small town, “starless and bible-black, the cobbled streets silent and the hunched courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea”.

It was common – and lucrative – at the time for writers to go on lecture tours to the United States, and Thomas’s A Visit to America (1934) is a wry, sometimes hilarious account of the huge numbers of European lecturers doing the American circuit. It sets a blistering pace from the start, matching the speed with which the lecturers traversed that vast half-continent.

There they go every spring from New York to Los Angeles: exhibitionists, polemicists, histrionic publicists, theological rhetoricians, historical hoddy-doddies...

“Cross the United States of America from New York to California and back glazed again. For many months of the year there streams and sings for its heady supper a dazed and prejudiced procession of European lecturers … But towards the middle of their middle-aged whisk through middle-western clubs and universities, their spirits are lowered by the spirits with which they are everywhere strongly greeted and which, in ever increasing doses, they themselves lower…”

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Thomas was under no illusions about these lecturers, himself included.

“There they go every spring from New York to Los Angeles: exhibitionists, polemicists, histrionic publicists, theological rhetoricians, historical hoddy-doddies, ulterior decorators, men in love with stamps, men in love with steaks, men after millionaires’ wives, men with elephantiasis of the reputation (huge trunks and teeny minds), authorities on gas, bishops, best sellers, new spellers, editors looking for writers, writers looking for publishers, publishers looking for dollars, existentialists, serious physicists with nuclear mission, men from the BBC who speak as though they had the Elgin Marbles in their mouths, pot-boiling philosophers, professional Irishmen (very leprechauny), and, I’m afraid, fat poets with slim volumes.”

Whew!