The Posthumous Life of Dylan Thomas

BY ALFRED KAZIN

DYLAN THOMAS’S posthumous life began before he died. Before he died, before he lay for days in a coma in St. Vincent’s Hospital, New York, while the literati, literary hostesses, patrons, and others milled around the hospital — one lady even came into his room and stared at him for half an hour while he lay trussed up like an animal in an oxygen tent, with tubes in his mouth and nose — anyone up and down the broad literary-academic acreage of this country who heard him read, or watched him drink, could have said to himself, more usually herself, “That man is great, that man is disturbing, nothing so exciting has happened to me since I passed my Ph.D. orals, I am going to remember this, he will soon be dead.”

He will soon be dead. The legend of the poetdying-young is based not merely on the opposition between poetic idealism and a materialistic society documented by Chatterton, Keats, Shelley, Hart Crane, but on the romantic faith that true poetry is of a shattering intensity that destroys the poet even as it brings out of him, in letters of fire, the poetry itself. And the expectation is superstitious. What is peculiarly dear to us, what really transports and charms us, what brings new life to us from the hero, the poet, the great man — this, by an automatic human discount, is vulnerable and frail. But beyond these general considerations was the overwhelming single consideration of Dylan Thomas, who seemed not only more gilted, mote eloquent, more joyous than any other poet of his generation, but who was peculiarly available to all and everyone, so utterly without pose and literary pomp — he was always ragging his own poetry and, as he beerily filled out, the little barrel figure he made — that alive he was already “Dylan” to every casual pub-mate and literary pickme-up, with the impending appeal, winsome and rakish, of a Frank Sinatra.

It was this combination of genius and plainness, of force and sweetness, that made so many people write him off from the living before he was dead. He had an old-fashioned “big” gift that made people identify him with the “big” tragedies of oldfashioned poets. Just as many people in England and America who had no contact with advanced poetry read him with a puzzled but obstinate sense that he was important, while foreigners in Germany and Sweden, puzzling out his poems, would say with a sigh, “This is a poet,” so they knew, they all knew, that he would “die soon.” For beyond everything else — beyond the fact that he was endlessly available, that he conducted his life in public, so that everyone knew whom he loved and whom he drank with and how he had turned over a table full of food and drink at Sweet Thing College — lay the overwhelming fact that he was so obviously not in control of his life and did not pretend to be. Perhaps no one is in control any more and it is only in America that people still pretend to be. But the ruling fiction in government and philosophy and education, and even among writers, is that we must all know exactly where we are going and how to get there. As Time once noted admiringly about a suburban housewife, “she had life by the tail.”

It was just the other way with Dylan Thomas. And it was because in an age lull of supremely careful people searching for the “security” of personal happiness Dylan lived without sense, without a bank account, without an analyst, that he provoked the most tremendous astonishment and affection from people who had understandably forgotten what an enormous personal force can lie behind poetry. But he also aroused a certain fear, a fear for him and just as strong a fear of him, of all he could do to people’s arrangements and engagements, and this often took the form of wishing “justice” to be done to him. He was so outrageous, as a student once complained, that in certain quarters his death aroused moral approval. And this belief in punishment, in righteous wrath against the outrager, was something that Dylan himself felt. When he first got the d.t.’s near the end of his life, he said that he had seen “the gates of hell.” With his background in the shabbygenteel and the Nonconformist Welsh conscience; with his all-too-schoolteachery father and profoundly influential mother (to whom he paid dutiful daily visits at home), he not only felt at the end that he was in hell but that he deserved to be.

Of course he felt this — nobody brought up in our Hebraic-Anglo-Saxon-Puritan tradition ever sins carelessly, is ever totally apart from the sense of “sin.” But the essential fact remains that Dylan Thomas didn’t yield to that peculiarly American and modern folly of imagining that one can morally insure one’s destiny. As a poet and as a very canny observer in several countries, he felt that life in the twentieth century is peculiarly chaotic and measureless, full of desperate private rebellions and self-blame in a society which less and less gives most people any ideal to be faithful to. He felt that metaphysically we have no knowledge and no certainty — he said that his poems had been written “in praise of God by a man who doesn’t believe in God” — and that only “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” the life process from love to death, is real.

And since he lived what he believed, or rather what he didn’t believe, it was quite clear, oh, terribly clear long before his death! that Dylan Thomas was wonderful but extreme, and that he would die soon. It was not merely that he behaved badly, that he turned over the plate of canapés at one place and addressed ribald remarks to the pretty young dean of women at another. What made him outrageous to some — and exactly as challenging to others — was that he had, in the provocative sense, no hope.

HE HAD no hope. I don’t pretend to know exactly why this was, and it’s too easy to say, as so many have, that he drank in order to recover the first excitement of his lyrical gift. I think that fundamentally his lack of hope came from the lack of ideas suitable to the boldness of his temperament and vocation. He had no philosophy or belief that could express for him, that could work for him, that could even explain the burden of love and terror before the natural world that is the subject of all his poetry. He was almost the pure type of the romantic artist in our world, determined to write only “happy” poems that would show life as joy. But he was unable or unwilling to bridge the gap between the splendor of his solitary conception and the deadness of the world without the poet’s light on it. All of Thomas’s poetry shows the profound romantic need to intensify existence, to make it all come alive as it is in personal consciousness. But where so many great poets— Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, even Whitman — have recognized that their task is not to lose their new vision to the commonplace world but to explain and to unite it to human existence, Thomas felt absurd and histrionic, acted like a man who in his heart thought himself a fake.

He was too humble. It is a strange thing to remember of anyone whose gift was so personal and sweeping, but he regarded his own gift as slightly absurd; he sheltered it, wouldn’t have his poems discussed, because he couldn’t admit that poetry is thought, and that what he said in his poems many of his contemporaries really believed and were most deeply grateful to a poet for saying again. He was left with his fantastic linguistic gift as if it were something to read from, to entertain with, but not, in the artistic sense, to practice as a criticism of life.

But then, how could he have felt this in our age? The great romantic manifestoes were charters of human liberation by poets who identified themselves with new classes and revolutionary new ideas in society. In the gray drab British welfare state, Dylan Thomas felt like a “spiv,” a juvenile delinquent. Being an utterly accessible and friendly and idle-feeling man, he couldn’t help seeing himself as a faintly comic version of that universally respected legend, “The Poet.” The public entertainer in him exploited the miseries of that humble bloke, that rumpled and tired Welshman, Dylan Thomas, who had no trouble enjoying his gilt but who sometimes looked on it as something that had oddly been given him — he couldn’t say just why! About other poets he could be utterly conventional in his admiration; his BBC talks on poets of Welsh background are banal. He even read the poetry of others with steadier power than he did his own. But if he was more reserved with people and perceptive about them than anyone watching him would have guessed, he was, about himself, without hope in the sense that he had nothing with which to explain and to justify the utter naturalness and human application of his poetry.

He believed in himself as a poet, there is no question about that; what he didn’t believe in was what it was peculiarly the task of someone with his genius to believe in: that his poetry gave us truth about life and was a judgment on all of us, not just on himself. When people say that he drank in order to recapture the old ecstasy, his first excitement, they forget that his problem was not merely to recover this ecstasy, which understandably flagged, but to believe in it. Only this would have shown that he was in fact as great as others knew he was.

But guessing at his vulnerability, people foresaw his early death; and observing his abandon, they mistook his hopelessness for confusion. Obviously no poet of such fierce perception can tidily put his life away when he is not writing. The poet lives the truth he has to write, and when he is not writing he may live it in a chaos of unorganized sensations, of an excitement throwing itself upon life, that can bound back and destroy him. And Dylan Thomas’s lack of “hope,'’ in the specific sense in which I have tried to state it, should not obscure the central fact that as a poet he was the very opposite of the anxious salvation-seekers who are so dear to contemporary poetry. The tremendous vogue of Thomas’s poetry stems from the fact that after the era of would-be “hard,” pseudo-Christian verse of T. S. Eliot’s followers and the self-conscious ironies of Auden, Thomas brought back to poetry resonance of feeling, the connection with nature, love, and death which is the peculiar power of poetry and which Rilke defined as “the past that breaks out in our hearts.”

The deepest side of such poetry — and of such an attitude to poetry — is not merely that it rests on images which are to be accepted literally in their unmediated force, but that it represents an attitude toward life itself which is the opposite of control, complacency, and deliberation. In Thomas’s poetry, life speaks through us:

man is an instrument of the energy that is divine; he is not, to use the American idiom, “structuring” life to make all things neatly realizable and containable. Ours is an irreverent culture. In the work of Thomas — and of Thomas’s beloved Whitman — life, in the final vision, attains not a definite character but the quality of a worshiped and awesome natural force. It becomes a great fire, beyond man’s ability to put it out, but to which he is glad, at most, to get near, still nearer, so as to be able to get down in words a breath of this radiant flame.

OBVIOUSLY, then, Dylan Thomas represented for many Americans a rare touch of greatness, a relief from the ever-pressing success story. He embodied, without a word said to this effect outside his poetry, the pure romantic vision that is still admired in America underneath the automatic responses of our culture. No matter how fussily detailed and self-conscious our lives become, there is in our fundamental classlessness and our physical restlessness freedom from the frigid respectability that can be so depressing a feature of middle-class life in Britain. And Dylan was so friendly, in this respect so much like an American, so easy to call by his first name! He encountered a welcome here which not only made him feel as if he were free-floating in a sky made up of unlimited parties, girls, and liquor, but which, in the heady, inflated, overprosperous, overstimulated atmosphere of America since the war, must have made him, with his peculiarly heightened capacities for life, feel that he had been sent spinning out of the damp, dark wrappings of seaside life in Wales and hack work in London. The more uncontrolled he felt about life, the more he fell upon American parties, American excitement, American adulation, as if everything came from a rich, infatuated, always indulgent mistress. He drank here not like an alcoholic who enjoys his liquor, but like a fat boy gobbling down chocolate bars who can’t believe that they make him fat. Inevitably, his death here made it seem to many glumly envious and depressed Britons at home as if Dylan Thomas had died of America as well as in America, and as soon as the news of his death at thirty-nine reached London, the word went out from his old literary pals that “America killed Dylan Thomas.”

In a sense it was true. Just as many Americans die of the American way of life, of the American pace, of American traffic, so Dylan Thomas’s end was certainly speeded by that unlimited supply of hard liquor without which nobody dares entertain any more, and which is not only more difficult to obtain in Britain, on British incomes, but which became to Dylan what poetry might have been if, in his own rueful words, he hadn’t been flying over America “like a damp, ranting bird.”

But it is also true that since the war a great many Britishers haven’t needed to find in Dylan Thomas’s death a reason for being exasperated with America: they already have so many. Any American who follows the British literary and highbrow press becomes hardened to the bitter and sometimes hysterical jealousy of this country — particularly from Marxists who can’t bear to admit how much, in different fashions, Russia and the gray British welfare stale have let them down — but it is ironic that Dylan Thomas’s death should be blamed entirely on America. Like so many romantic writers, he felt a natural affinity with this country, while in Britain, being utterly outside the “Establishment,” he was regarded with a certain loving contempt by some of the snobs who so righteously gnashed their teeth after his death. Nevertheless, Thomas’s death was a terrible loss to his own people, to his own kind, and it is really because the mediocrity of literature today is less cleverly concealed in Britain than it is in this country that the death hit so hard.

THE posthumous life of Dylan Thomas as a legend and a symbol — the last romantic poet in a conformist society, the Welsh lyric singer corrupted by the American fleshpots — became really intense when the personal rivalries between those who had loved Dylan came out into the open. Now that he was dead, many people felt an enrichment of their lives through their retrospective share in him. The fact is that Dylan Thomas was a peculiarly lovable as well as magnetically gifted person, that he inspired a great many gifted people with the sense of an unusual radiance in their lives. And just as the many elegies after his death addressed him with an intimacy that is inconceivable in relation to any other famous poet of our time, so the extraordinary agitation he inspired lives on after him in the fascinated reportage of every detail of his life by people who obviously preferred Dylan drunk to anyone sober.

John Malcolm Brinnin’s Dylan Thomas in America was, of course, the principal tool in shaping the posthumous legend of Dylan Thomas. And it is a mark of Thomas’s fantastic vitality in death that a great many people who don’t read his poetry, but who very properly see his life as a symbol of it, have found in Brinnin’s book the documented record of what they regard as the very poetry of excess. They love this excess because it gives them a touch of the old romantic heedlessness and abandon, the price of which they do not have to pay, and which, as they read in Brinnin the account of Thomas’s terrible last days, makes them shudder at an end so violently consistent with his life.

It is no accident that in our period the unconscious protest of so many young people against an overregulated but vacuous society is embodied in the admiration of recklessness which one sees in the cult of the young movie actor, James Dean, who died speeding; and that among a great many of the young intellectuals there is a similar cult of “Dylan,” whose extraordinary records are fancied by the same people who admire the new jazz and hot rods. In colleges all over the country, listening to Dylan’s voice as, “crooning” his poems, he still tries to catch his breath between lines, young people get from him the same suggestion of pure feeling that they get from good jazz. The California poet, Kenneth Rexroth, has linked as heroes of “the beat generation” “two great dead juvenile delinquents — the great saxophonist Charlie Parker, and Dylan,” and insists that “if the word deliberate means anything, both of them certainly destroyed themselves. . . .

“Both of them,” Rexroth has written, “were overcome by the horror of the world in which they found themselves, because at last they could no longer overcome that world with the weapon of a purely lyrical art. . . . Both of them did communicate one central theme: Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense — the creative act. . . . Dylan Thomas’s verse had to find endurance in a world of burning cities and burning Jews. He was able to find meaning in his art as long as it was the answer to air raids and gas ovens. As the world began to take on the guise of an immense air raid or gas oven, I believe his art became meaningless to him.” And in a violent but deeply moving elegy to Thomas, “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” Rexroth attributes the poet’s death to the superficiality of his contemporaries:

The bitterness in these lines is by no means unusual. All over the country, often in isolated places, there are people, more especially young people, who look on Thomas as a rebel against mass society and a victim of the organization man. It is in America, at the antennae of the modern age, where the full force of technological culture is felt, that the cult of Dylan Thomas has reached its peak — documented, too often, from the remorseless day-by-day record of Thomas the drunk and the wastrel which Brinnin put down with so much fervor and unconscious resentment against the elusiveness of this magnetic figure. So closely do people feel related to Thomas that there are endless arguments still about Brinnin’s book, for people tend to identify with Thomas to the point where they resent its itemization of his “lapses.” When Brinnin admitted that he could not really account for Thomas’s more extreme behavior, he meant that he did not want to and was punishing him for being so unmanageable. But to the “ardents,” Thomas’s life in itself, not in relation to them, has a heroic significance quite the opposite of the continuous disintegration that Brinnin leaves us with.

It was in protest against this impression that Dylan’s widow, Caitlin Thomas, offered a brief foreword to Brinnin’s book. And now that her own memoir, Leftover Life to Kill (Atlantic-Little, Brown, $4.50), has finally been written, a most important word from the most intimate source of all has been said. In his posthumous life Dylan Thomas really speaks now, through his widow. Caitlin Thomas’s book is not the “answer” to Brinnin — the mere justification of her husband — that had been expected. It is better than that. It is an amazing duplication of Thomas’s own strength and recklessness and abandon by a woman who obviously was the only person with a spirit equal to his and who consequently fought him and hated him and loved him to the point where their conflicting intensities almost killed each other. The only thing I don’t admire in Mrs. Thomas’s book is the self-pity in the title and a would-be pathos, at the end as at the beginning; but the self-pity is utterly shown up and exploded by the fierce emotional charge of the book and a powerful style which, once she gets control of it, gives one the same pleasant Celtic resonance from her careening Irish sentences that one gets from his tipsy Welsh ones.

The people who will be shocked by Caitlin Thomas’s book would be shocked by Dylan Thomas if he were alive. A posthumous life is easy to take, for us who deal with it as symbol; Caitlin Thomas is so much alive that her book, which is as much about herself as about Dylan, never explains Dylan’s directness and eloquence so much as when, with amusing honesty and perfect tenderness, she recounts her life on the Isle of Elba with a young Italian miner, surrounded by the violently hostile respectable.

There is about her, as about Dylan, a perfect genius for trouble. She is a born rebel who in today’s situation doesn’t know what to rebel against. She has her husband’s instinct for extreme and desperate situations. But reading the account of her dismal life in Wales alter Dylan’s death, and of her flight to Elba with her five-year-old son, I could not help feeling that, given her temperament, she behaved with exemplary courage and humanity. What makes the book so remarkable is that, time and again, whether she is writing about Dylan, or herself, or her children, one hears the boisterous Thomas lilt, the authentic note, the lyrical cry from the heart that gives his style its force.. And most unexpected and revealing, she makes it clear that in her, as in Dylan, is the fatal mixture, with her powerful temperament, of that intellectual frailty, that excessive availability and need to be loved, which so many pettier types have known how to protect themselves from.

The tragedy of Caitlin Thomas is not what she says it is — not entirely a matter of the tempestuous life with a genius as erratic as herself or of the subsequent loss which, frightful as it is, has obviously given her back to herself. The tragedy is in the excessive vulnerability, the constant readiness to be hit in the face which, in a person with her insurrectionary heart, cripples her at the very moment that she can rise to her full strength. She tells us that she had a passion for solitary dancing à la Isadora Duncan, where she could feel the “flowing” — but “as soon as I spotted the ‘glance’ of an audience, I was finished: the brain on the alert, all suspicion again, put the pincers on, and the capricious flow stopped abruptly. . . .

“That was one reason, now I come to think of it, why Dylan found it so annoying: it is the direct opposite of words. . . . It may be one of the substances that poetry is made of; that words are formed from; but its elemental — right back, through the encumbering ages, to the creation, the planets, the dinosaurs; the skeletons and protoplasm — force is, above any other point of supremacy, wordless. . . .”

Actually, her sense of what art means to her — this elemental force, right back through the encumbering ages — is exactly what makes her husband’s poetry so vivid. In her, as in him, there is this same exciting and disturbing combination of force without hope — without a meaning she can assign to her experience that would relieve her from emotional suffering. Her rule of life, she says, is “always be ready to clasp the impending disasters,” and I believe her. So that despite the essential modesty that seems to me the key to the tragedy of Dylan Thomas and the long-delayed emergence of his wife, it is this elemental force for which one remains grateful in reading her book. It is so much rarer than a “defense” of Dylan Thomas — who needs none.