Dylan Thomas

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31333, 1 April 1967, Page 4

Dylan Thomas

Selected Letters of Dylan Thomas. By Constantine Fitzgibbon. 417 pp.

Hero is the essential Dylan Thomas—poet, buffoon, drunkard, genius—sharing with us the dark intimacy of his thoughts in a spate of words we seem to hear rather than read. Bellowing, declaiming, cajoling, he speaks across the years in rich ribald rhetoric that shocks and stimulates. Who-could resist him? “Give me a sheet of paper,” Thomas once wrote, “and I can’t help filling it. The result more often than not, is good and bad, serious and comic, lucid or nonsensical, by the turns of my whirligig mentality.” The letters in this selection are all this and more, many being, as Mr Fitzgibbon says, “in themselves works of art.” Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales, in October, 1914, and died in New York in 1953, at the age of 39. Only recently has the full brilliance of his work emerged, and many anthologies featuring his contemporaries, contain no mention of him or example of his work. Although all his prose writings were of a high standard, Thomas always considered his poetry the more important, and many of the letters chosen by Mr Fitzgibbon include thoughtful theorising about his verse; there are rare references to prose techniques also, but the letters themselves are magnificent evidence of his superlative talent as a writer of prose, and need little inter-

preting. However, Mr Fltzgib bon has headed each letter with explanatory notes which give the background to the correspondence and define anj unusual features.

The book is prefaced with the author’s introduction anc a chronology of Thomas’s life The work is dedicated tc Pamela Hansford Johnson, the novelist-wife of C. P. Snow, “with gratitude,” and well it might be. Miss Hansford Johnson has made available many of the letters written to her by Dylan Thomas during a long and intimate correspondence, in the years immediately before his marriage to Caitlin Macnamara, and has given Mr Fitzgibbon invaluable “advice and help.” The balance of the letters are addressed to literary friends, editors and his parents. There are none, oddly enough to the enigmatic Caitlin.

Mr Fitzgibbon gives as his main basis for selection, his desire to give, “the flavour of the man, of his complex, enchanting, maddening and ultimately tragic personality.” How well he has succeeded will be apparent to all who read these haunting pages. Mr Fitzgibbon, well-known for his novel “When The Kissing Had to Stop,” has also written “The Life of Dylan Thomas.”

I’m certain there are more ancestors around Ulster than in most places. Making a family tree is a pastime that is much enjoyed, and the finished product is greatly valued. Even in these democratic days, and in a country where the careful Scottish strain is strong and bank balances really matter, ancestors can matter more. Everyone knows everyone, and everyone’s parents and grandparents, so no family skeleton can possibly remain hidden for very long. After all, this north-east corner of Ireland which still remains a part of the United Kingdom is only a small part of a very small country. Its population is not much larger than the English city of Birmingham—only about a quarter of a million

more.—Frances Bailey, an Ulster worman, taking a look at Northern Ireland in a 8.8. C. broadcast