The suggestion was made the other day that Dylan Thomas may have been dyslexic. Apparently, the experts deduced this from the style of his poetry. It seems an odd assertion. Dyslexic children find difficulty, and therefore no pleasure, in reading. Dylan, according to his parents, taught himself to read when he was three, and thereafter read, in his own words, ‘indiscriminatingly and all the time, with my eyes hanging out on stalks’. Doesn’t sound like a dyslexic child to me, though doubtless the experts know better. Also in the news recently was the announcement of a Dylan Thomas Prize, worth £50,000 to the winner. Considering that having failed to file a tax return for years before the Inland Revenue caught up with him and sank its claws in so deeply that from 1948 to his death in November 1953 ‘he was never, for a single day’, according to his biographer Constantine Fitzgibbon, ‘free of financial terror’, the value of this prize seems like a bad joke.
It’s difficult now, when the name Dylan has more people thinking first of the American songster than the Welsh poet, to convey to the young just how famous Dylan Thomas was half a century ago, and why. His poetry wasn’t easily accessible like Betjeman’s; it was rhetorical, high-flown, romantic, and sometimes it didn’t, as poets like Larkin and Kingsley Amis (both a few years younger), irritably complained, make sense. Certainly, sense is not always easy to extract from it, though it always made a splendid sound, which is more than can be said for Larkin’s and Amis’s verse. The high sales of his Collected Poems (10,000 in the first year, 20,000 in the second, after his death) probably owed as much to the legend of the wild, dissolute, doomed poet as to the work, though the same observation can’t be applied to the hugely successful play Under Milk Wood.
The stories of his American tours, of his drunkenness and wild behaviour, fed the legend, and then his death, following his boast, ‘I’ve had 18 straight whiskies — I think that’s the record’, confirmed it. It was a sort of suicide, people said; he destroyed himself because he was written out. In short, for the early Fifties, Dylan played the part that rock stars were to do later; he was our generation’s Jim Morrison or Pete Doherty.
The American poet James Dickey put the case against him in a Paris Review interview: ‘Thomas didn’t write one poem in the last six years of his life… Why should he write another book of poems and maybe give the critics another shot at him that would lower his reading fee?’ A judgment both malicious and inaccurate. Poems were still written. As his widow Caitlin says, ‘They were taking him longer to finish than they had ever done before, but they were far better poems for it.’ In any case, the publication of the Collected Poems gave any critic the chance to shoot at him; in fact the reception of the book would only have raised that reading fee.
Drink and financial anxiety — the two horribly connected — were at the root of his troubles, and it was booze that killed him, with a bit of help from the incompetence of the doctors in New York. What makes the thought of his early death still bitter is that the financial troubles were nearly behind him. The Collected Poems and Under Milk Wood would have given him freedom from the gnawing anxiety. Caitlin came to believe that with this burden lifted ‘he would have sorted himself out and brought his drinking under control because all the things that made him drink were coming under control as well’. That may be so. My view has always been that there was nothing wrong with him that knocking off the booze wouldn’t have enabled him to put right.
I used to know Caitlin when I was living in Rome in the early Seventies. She was in AA by then and social life was a torment to her, but she was very kind and generous to me at a difficult time in my own life. No doubt she had been different in her drinking days — hot-tempered, quarrelsome and demanding, by many accounts — but I found her gentle and understanding. I never asked her about Dylan. Of course now I wish I had, but it seemed that the memories were still too painful, and I think that she had suffered from living in the reflection of his glamour.
As for the poetry, I still read it with enjoyment, admiration and puzzlement, and relish the prefatory note to the Collected Poems:
I read somewhere of a shepherd who, when asked why he made, from within fairy rings, ritual advances to the moon to protect his flocks, replied ‘I’d be a damn’ fool if I didn’t!’ These poems, with all their crudities, doubts and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn’ fool if they weren’t.
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