DYLAN THOMAS’S LAST FOUR TRAGIC YEARS

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28020, 14 July 1956, Page 5

DYLAN THOMAS’S LAST FOUR TRAGIC YEARS

GENIUS RAMPANT"

vftrlan Thomas in America. By John Malcolm Brinnin. Illustrated with 10 pages of photographs. Dent. 245 PPIn November 1953 Dylan Thomas iiiied in America at the age of 39 of direct alcoholic poisoning of brain -tissue and brain cells or—to use an z. expressive medical term—an “insult” jto the brain. Such a premature and - death naturally causes more 4 than usual interest, and a legitimate curiosity, to te felt toward any biographical study of the poet. And •John Malcolm Brinnin’s account of D Thomas— -the first in the field—alii though it only covers the last four - vea rs of the poet’s life, is far from ' being just “any” biographical study, •i it is a work of great sympathy and .4 understanding written by an intimate ’’friend who is also a poet himself and 11 great admirer of Thomas’s writing. ,3 But it is also extremely candid. Mr J ‘3rinnin glosses over none of the hard, r; he unpleasant, even the preposterous, acts of Thomas’s life. Instead, he ’t nterprets them with a deep insight jwm of affection, and of the painful j urmoil of the feelings which intimacy ? vith Thomas invariably involved. The .1 esult is a book that is fair and honest, nd of absolutely absorbing interest. It was Brinnin who was the instiM ;ator and organiser of Thomas’s first ?i our of America in 1950. From the ' jrst days of his meeting with the <? oet he found himself forced into a , implex relationship. Thomas’s life i moved to be one long pub-crawL It » vas difficult to persuade him to eat or ■; o sleep. On social occasions he was J ikely to tell bawdy stories, to give 2l ewd or outrageous answers to civil *i luestions and to make most direct j idvances and preposterous suggestions j o the ladies. He was highly undepend- - ible and irresponsible about his en- .. jagments, his clothes, his money and . :is dependants. Moreover, he was a a nek man, afflicted with periodic fear!*ful fits of coughing and retching, in ; physical appearance a paunchy cari;icature of the cherubic young poet •\lAugustus John had painted fifteen • years before. “I tried first to comprehend,” says . Brinnin, “and then to accept the > quality (it was too early to know the dimensions) of my assignment, whether •: t be that of reluctant guardian angel, : brother’s keeper, nursemaid, aman--4 jensis, or bar-companion; no one term would serve to define a relationship ■■ which had overwhelmed my expecta- . dons and already forced upon me a q personal concern that was constantly i Mizzled, increasingly solicitous, and, ’ I knew well by now, impossible to s escape.” There were of course con--4 solations in this tutelage. Thomas was i not only a celebrity; in his best - moments he was engaging and full of - eharm, a gay, witty, and rollicking companion, “both a living delight’’— ? ays Brinnin—“and a living torment.” ’ lis poetry readings were magnificent i nd a resounding success throughout • he States. It was possible for Brinnin I nd his other intimates to think of idm as “genius rampant,” even to - ome to the paradoxical conclusion i hat “there was a seam of primal I mocence at the core of him,” that " his life was the furious denial of a i aintliness he could not hide;” and l hat his drinking was a means “not >sf fleeing life but of embracing it,” • lemming in part from a deep lonelii less. Such explanations of Thomas’s way > if life may seem even over-generous > o some readers of Brinnin ,s book. And it can be remarked mat toward ihe end of the boon, as Thomas r ilunges wilfully towards death and • ieif-aestruction, ’ Brinnin’s judgments • become—from bitter experience—a little sharper. He still loves and tends him, but ne sees him more as a daemonic natural force—the "roaring • boy” of modern literature—annihilat- > ing, devouring and destroying both [ himself and those close to him. Even his cnarauteiisuc irum ‘ constant repetition, become tedious. Un the second tour to America in 1952 Thomas brought with him his wife Caitlin. Their joint behaviour was just as startling as that of Thomas none on his first tour. Mrs Thomas was just as likely as her husband to answer civil questions with violent language, and their disagreements in public were on such a scale that people ceased asking them to parties for fear of having their premises wrecked. But again Brinnin is full* of insight and understanding. He makes tvery allowance for both husband and wile, and analyses their oovious

THE INCAS ’ Inca Adventure. By Bertrand Florney. Allen and Unwin. 203 pp. . Traditionally, the ancestors of the ■ Inca tribe were supposed to have snerged from caverns situated in what is now southern Peru. Dissatisfied with what they found there they • ;ourne - ved northward, under the leadership of Manco, and settled in the valley of Cuzco. It was in this valley that the golden rod carried by Manco bad sunk magically into the ground - indicating it to be the Incas’ predestined home. It did not take them . ‘Ong to conquer the local tribes and •hen to consolidate their status to that of a ruling caste among their immediate neighbours. Creative and aggressive, the Incas soon established a complex civilisation over a wide area. ■Though they contributed much to the of civilisation themselves, it is generally believed that they organised ® renaissance of an earlier civilisation «iown as the Tiahuanaco period. In uieir highest state the Incas developed • form of socialism controlled by a bureaucracy in which the term Inca, originally tribal, came to be used as J® indication of rank. Well versed in «one masonry and in the shaping of metals these astonishing people commonly performed the delicate operaon of trepanning as is evidenced by found sicu il s which have been .^ e me °f the coming of the Spaniards the Empire was divided by L i ute between Huascar and Atawho both felt they should suc-'-eo their father Huaya Capac. The ory of what happened is well told in rrescotts “History of the Conquest of is briefl y sketched by Bertrand Florney in this interesting aty 1 Pt to resurrect the culture of the _, • Since Prescott’s day much more xnown of this skilled and intelligent ,j;P ie through the unearthings of the cnaeologists’ spade. The other source earU V^dence ’ documents of the nT Spaniards, tend to extremes: yjj’cilaso de la Vega, part Inca himfa^ Stresses the good side, while views the Indians as having bv th liberated from an. evil bondage win Spaniards. Bertrand Florney is qualified to seek the middle path the two extremes. He has himself in all the available if the extensive bibliography on go by. He has also been . bve expeditions uncovering hidden I-j® 3 ruins and has lived among the who inhabit the part of the which once belonged to the empire. Out of his experience , a ~ succeeded in producing a very ►enable and interesting book illuswith photographs and drawings ai Irtea sites and relics.

anJ} a ?™ eS ?u With sen sitive perception thfi sy ™ path y- HIS visits to them at . JlO l ne ln Wales ’ between thl° mass J OU F S to America, give him o PP or tunity to penetrate further u ls . Vlolen t partnership, which uas based on a deep mutual passion, b s LJ^ aS- 7? or Mrs Thomas at least a PP aren tlymore a rivalry than a marriage. They held one another.” ? n a . death-grip.” 1O „ e third American visit in April 1953 was primarily for the premiere performance of “Under Milk Wood,” unfinished when Thomas arrived , York - Working in fits and figLu bet ™ e § n drinking bouts, and nrmly goaded on by friends, he was able twenty minutes before curtain time on the first night—to devise a tentative conclusion, fragments of the play being handed the actors as they m ake-up. This short visit was the happiest of his American tours, and he left the country promising soberly to follow medical warning and v.wprk toward general physical rehabilitation.

But there were deep and complex reasons to account for his inability to follow such resolves. Chief among tnese was perhaps his consciousness of creative aridity. He had written himself out, and he was furiously seeking, as Brinnin puts it, “ways in which creative exercise could be postponed or superseded.” A combination of guilt, self-disgust, and indolence, and the inadmissible thought of failure, caused him to seek escape from himself in yet another visit to America. But when he arrived, it was sadly apparent that he had come only to die. More than once indeed he confessed his wish to die, and in his final acts he courted death. Brinnin tells this tragic story in vivid detail and with full documentation. Presumably he kept a journal throughout his acquaintance with Thomas, and he reproduces several of the poet’s letters as well as innumerable conversations. Interesting incidental information crops up on the poets reading (which included plenty of Micky Spillane), his methods of writing poetry, his rather “hasty and impressionistic” approach to the poetry of others, and his opinions of his own poetry—“poems in praise of God’s world by a man who doesn’t believe in God,” or more latterly, “statements made on the way to the grave.” And by implication, if not intentionally, Brinnin’s book about Thomas’s life raises many important questions about the relation between his life and his work. It is difficult not to find connexions between me obscurity and violence of his writing, and the uncontrolled disorderliness ui his way of living as Brinnin describes it. But even if the reader resolutely discards such deductions and makes a careful distinction, as many of Thomas’s harassed literary agents in the States did, between impossible man and great poet, Brinnin’s book still remains a remarkable study of a Dionysian genius, which is by turns touching, comic, and terrible.

POETRY [Reviewed by W.H.O.J The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Faber and Faber. 543 pp. Selected Poems. Rand ell Jarrell. Faber and Faber. 223 pp. Wallace Stevens died in 1955 and thereby closed a lifetime of prolonged and unusual endeavour. He was neither a bohemian, nor a university lecturer, nor a journalist; he worked in an insurance company to earn his living, and even on American standards, his was the life of big business He stayed clear from all cliques, movements, little magazines and manifestos. He was the recluse; and he found his hermitage in the steel, the concrete and the glass of the world of tycoons. During the whole of this time he wrote and published poetry which is unlike anything produced in England and America at the time. He did not take the trouble, by delivering lectures or writing reviews, to become well-known. Hence his work was never popular, though throughout his life it gained ground with a small but significant minority—the poets themselves.

This vast volume of his collected poems is a monument to a long life of unremitting industry and dedicated effort. It would be a rash critic who would unreservedly say that the industry was either wasted or fruitful, the dedication to sterile phantoms or to prospering deities. For Stevens’s poems populate a world that he himself fashioned, one that has only the most tenuous links with either the everyday world of peoples and things, or the more stylised world of conventional literature. This world could be compared to “Finnegan’s Wake” for its uncompromising inaccessibility, with one great difference. Where Joyce revised the very shape of words and the sequence of meaning, Stevens is strictly orthodox in these respects. The surface meaning of any statement is perfectly clear; what it ail amounts to is usually a complete mystery. This book is either the finest product of a cultured sensibility, or else the ultimate of despair in the possibility of communication. It would be easy to say that this book simply stands for a lifetime of misdirected effort: 500 pages of poems culminating in the significance of a nonsense syllable. It would be easy, but unjust. For, especially in his early poems, and indeed throughout the book, one continually meets the stanza, the paragraph, or the individual short poem, whose clarity brilliance and depth, point to the possible existence of a new poetic world, comparable in magnitude to that of Dante or that of Milton. But there is this important difference. A clear path leads from Dante or Milton to the flesh and blood concerns of the human race—their religious beliefs and their worshio. The path that leads out of Stevens’s verse appears to lead into a realm scarcely less rarified; aesthetic theory of the most obscure and esoteric kind.

A world that has taken a lifetime to build would need at least a few years to be understood. Then years with Wallace Stevens could bring one to a full awareness of a poetic sensibility beside which Yeats might well appear a slightly shrill old man and Pound a vulgar brawler. Randall Jarrell presents no such difficulties. His obscurities are frequent enough, but they are the kind we are used to. He can be solved like a not too difficult crossword puzzle. The true modern poet is thoroughly conventional beside an uncompromising individualist like Wallace Stevens. Jarrell inhabits the world we are all acquainted with: he is concerned, as most poets are. to take the sensible world and remake it in ways that can be followed with relative ease. A university library, a si~k child, an adolescent girl. Ireland. Austria, music, the war in the air—these are the basic situations which occur in these poems. He is rhetorical, argumentative, and abusive; he is bursting with the importance of his message. There is an atmosphere of hustle and emergency in this book—qualities we tend to associate with the American businessman and politican rather than the mainstream of highly educated

American poets. Jarrell is certainly more closely related to his continent than Stevens, and probably a more direct expression of its style and attitude than the better known Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom or Robert Penn Warren.

Apart from well-known anthology pieces, the poems that stand out in the book are those associated with the recent war, during which Jarrell served in the American Air Force. They are not conventionally war poems; they do not excite to heroic action. They reflect, essentially, the loneliness of the expatriate American fighting a war on the Continent, living among strangers, at grips with an enemy never seen except through bomb sights. Isolation, nostalgia, purposelessness, are much more potent realities than the alleged objectives of the war. These notes are strengthened and sustained in a number of poems which explore the experiences of the prison camp. Here is some of the mosi valid war poetry ever written. Jarrell certainly speaks directly to our present conditions; but whether he will last as long as the infinitely more skilful Stevens is an entirely open question A collection of 28 essays in miniature on horses of many breeds is Frank Crew’s latest companion publication to ‘‘Devoted to Dogs” and ‘‘Devoted to Cats.” DEVOTED TO HORSES (Frederick Muller, 63 pp.)—a pocket-sized volume with 28 beautiful camera studies—is just the right gift for a horse-lover. Crew talks so naturally about horses that his essays are all little gems of affection. There is sentiment but not sentimentality in his writing and an infectious enthusiasm that would touch even the most mechanically-minded reader who might, by Chance, pick up a copy of the book. dr