How good was the Boyo?

When Dylan Thomas first lived at the Boathouse, Laugharne (tel. Laugharne 68) there was no electricity, no running water and the rats took liberties. Today it is a spick and span little gimcrack museum. I went there recently hoping perhaps for a faint psychic whiff of Wales’ most famous son. But the place has been tarted up to such an extent that gawping at the memorabilia behind the glass all I felt was a terrifying sense of alienation from the recent past. The other visitors were mostly Welsh. They wandered grimly from room to room, passing critical comments about the meagre furniture and complaining about the entry fee. In the upstairs living-room I overheard an elderly Welsh man sum up Thomas’ life to his friend as ‘pathetic, really, when you come to think about it’. Many who plough on to the tragi-comic end of Andrew Lycett’s Dylan Thomas: A New Life will no doubt shake their heads in sorrowful agreement.

Larger than life, Dylan Thomas died of drink aged 39. A good half of the 90 collected poems were written or half-written in his bedroom at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, Swansea before he was 20. Then he went to London, was hailed as a genius by Cyril Connolly and Edith Sitwell, and started drinking for Wales. The rest were worked out while waiting for the pubs to open. One has the impression that if the absurd laws governing pub-opening hours in this country had been liberalised during his lifetime, the Cwmdonkin Drive bedroom poems would have been the end of it.

Thomas supplemented his income from poetry by begging. Discarded sheets of paper found in his Laugharne writing shed after his death suggest that he put as much effort into the begging letters as he did into the poetry.