Biography: There can have been few people, anywhere, ever, beside whom it was less advisable to stand in a pub than Dylan Thomas. At best he might approach and introduce himself with "I'm Dylan Thomas and I'm f--king skint".
At worst he would end up moving into your house, flogging off its contents, urinating on the carpet, having an affair with your wife, and inviting his friends to come and stay too. Dylan Thomas died in New York on November 9th, 1953, a few days after his much reported (but apparently apocryphal) boast: "I've had 18 straight whiskies. I think that is the record." He was 39.
Thomas's life is a sad and shambolic tale, and for much of the second half of Andrew Lycett's Dylan Thomas: A New Life readers may struggle to remember why they should be interested in this staggeringly unpleasant, scrounging lout. Yet many years before his self-destruction Thomas had been an outstanding poet, the author of maybe half a dozen poems as luminous and magisterial as anyone had written since Yeats. The key to Thomas's art, and perhaps to its drying up too, was childhood. Has anyone ever written a better paean to youth than 'Fern Hill'?
Poems spilled and spewed out of the young Thomas like beer from a tap. His mother had been indulgent, and he counted on language to treat him the same way. It is tempting to see a perpetual thumb-sucking child in Thomas, but the description of his "nervous hand rehearsing on the thigh/Acts with a woman" spells out the poems' real juvenile vice. They are monotonously, obsessively masturbatory. And when the flow began to dry up, as it did all too early for him, Thomas knew that he was in trouble.
His relationship with Wales was troubled. He complained to Hugh MacDiarmid of being "regarded in England as a Welshman (and a waterer of England's milk), and in Wales as an Englishman", and to a character in The Three Weird Sisters Wales is "full of senile morons and vicious dwarfs". "Land of my Fathers!" he exclaims, "as far as I'm concerned, my fathers can keep it."
For these and other crimes against cultural nationalism R.S. is much preferred to Dylan Thomas in some Welsh quarters even today.
A corollary of this was Thomas's knowledge, from an early age, that London, not Swansea or Cardiff, was where his career would be made. The lure of Soho was strong. Once arrived, Thomas was keen to signal his distance from the previous generation: Auden, MacNeice, Spender and Day Lewis were the "Brotherhood of Man - love thy neighbour and, if possible, covet his arse".
His true contemporaries were those hard-drinking, emphatically non-Oxbridge poets of the 1940s, George Barker, W.S. Graham and Norman MacCaig. During this period he befriended George Reavey, publisher of Samuel Beckett's Echo's Bones, though the shared association never brought the Welsh and Irish writers together; Thomas attacked Beckett's Murphy in 1938 for its "Freudian Blarney: Sodom and Begorrah".
A veil of tact is probably best drawn over his marriage to Caitlin Macnamara. It is difficult to imagine someone capable of out-misbehaving Thomas in public, yet she just about manages it. After a poetry reading her husband had organised, she approached the Queen and said, "I say, do you like this? I don't. I think I shall ask for my money back", before flicking her cigarette ash on the Queen's dress. Thomas womanized intensely, though his various skirt-chasing capers have something desperate and puerile about them. "To sleep with you would be like sleeping with a god", cooed a female admirer in a letter. "She's desperate for me to poke her," Thomas reported to his friend Francis King, "but who wants to poke a bowl of cold porridge?"
Thomas was so much a creature of the 1930s and 1940s, his death a year before the birth of "the Movement" in 1954 seems almost prophetic. And sure enough, very soon afterwards his reputation was being publicly shredded. Though Philip Larkin was ambivalent where Thomas was concerned, for Kingsley Amis and Donald Davie there was no room for doubt: he was the enemy, to be stamped on, hard.
Their reaction was part snobbery and part resentment of his pseudo-Celtic mystique, but also based on a hatred of 1940s bohemianism and its feckless bards, pissing their talent away rather than knuckling down to the serious business of becoming lecturers in provincial English universities.
At least that other Movementeer D.J. Enright rose to humour on the subject, calling "Rage, rage, against the dying of the light", "rather impudent advice, as if to say, 'Now, father, I want you to pull yourself together and stump around the bed, even if it kills you'".
Lycett is a diligent and dutiful biographer, though not above illiteracies such as 'His chubby legs are crossed laconically' or a reference to an "eponymous play" by Yeats.
The handful of Thomas's great poems forms the justification for this book, but Lycett does not have anything new or startling to say about them. Forget the life. Read the poems.
David Wheatley is a poet and critic
- Dylan Thomas: A New Life By Andrew Lycett, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 434 pp. £20