Dylan Thomas’s centenary in 2014 generated six or seven new, or else republished, titles. One of these is William Christie’s concise biography, taking its place in a series of crunchy studies of important writers in English, published by Palgrave Macmillan. His account of that short life of poetic melodrama is clear-headed and sober, unlike the poet, who generated such polar responses. For example, Dylan claimed the poet Norman Cameron as his best friend, but the latter portrayed him in an acid poem as ‘The Dirty Little Accuser’:

What was worse, if, as often happened, we caught him out
Stealing or pinching the maid’s backside, he would leer,
With a cigarette on his lip and a shiny snout,
With a hint: ‘You and I are all in the same galère.’

Scholarly though this book undoubtedly is, it begins with a terrible clanger. In his introduction, Christie reflects on Thomas’s early-to-mid poetry in its convoluted surrealism. He compares this style, or set of habits, with that of Australia’s 1940s creation, ‘Ern Malley’. He justly characterises the poems of the Malley hoax as ‘pretentious and impenetrably difficult’, but attributes their composition to James McAuley and Douglas Stewart. The former poetry editor of The Bulletin would have turned in his grave over this, as would the guilty Buddhist Harold Stewart, from his grave in faraway Japan. This error is repeated in the book’s index, raising questions about the editing process here. Or else about the author’s knowledge of Australian literary culture.

Number 5 Cwmdonkin Drive (photograph by ceridwen, Wikimedia Commons)

Once we get past Christie’s preface, this ‘literary life’ is very solidly done, its scholarship fine-tuned. We begin with a schoolmaster’s bright son growing up in Cwmdonkin Drive, Swansea, ‘amid the terrors of the Welsh accent and the smoke of the tinplate stacks’. Dylan’s admirable father proved a strong influence; the lad was never encouraged to learn the Welsh language. Yet the young man’s ego craved the hyperbole of being a glamorous Celt – and the many pints of ale that went with it. Accordingly, the witty Gavin Ewart has claimed that he ‘sometimes sounded like a preacher in full flow’.

Moreover the ‘provincial Wales’ he grew up in had nothing much Celtic about it – except that somehow, in the young poet’s mind, his ‘was truly a literary life’, with a generic extravagance and strange vocabulary. Christie reminds us how far Thomas’s early poetry was obsessed with the body, even with its masturbation. It was also marked by the big Marlovian boom-boom, which some readers found sexy.

‘Thomas’s early poetry was also marked by the big Marlovian boom-boom, which some readers found sexy’

This was a poetry of excess: if you like, a railing against the glum 1930s, but rooted in recreations of childhood innocence. His great radio play, Under Milk Wood (1954), presents this, in full orchestration. It treads the village green of comic sentiment ebulliently. For a sensibility as excitable as Dylan’s, the fall into adulthood must have been a tragedy of sorts. Indeed, at one point here we are beguiled by a claim that ‘the heart of the ageing poet yearns to move in the heart’. Yet he was also obsessed by craftsmanship.

Christie is a good close reader of the poetry, as his sensitive accounts of lyrics as early as ‘Before I Knocked’ or expansively late as ‘Over Sir John’s Hill’ bear out. Poems are works of art made out of language, while language is a delicately treacherous medium, all the more so since the zigzag path of the Romantic movement, in which Christie is very much versed. Romanticism questions language at the same time as glorifying its diction: inventing new idioms, it interrogates our speech.

This literary life is challenged by a common paradox: what do the events of a writer’s life have to do with the daily job of sitting at a desk and writing. Unless the life is scandalous or grandiose, there will be a lack of action: Byrons and Rimbauds are few. Writers are meant to be writing. At least Thomas chose the grandiose path, and the author’s narrative tactic here is to oscillate between close reading of the poems and ‘the unsettled and impecunious gypsy life’.

Into that life inevitably came World War II, along with it the poet’s need to skip aside from active service, and even from labour in a munitions factory. As he wrote in a letter, ‘evenings in a factory rest centre, snooker and cocoa, then bugs in digs and then clocking in and turning and winding and hammering to help kill another stranger, deary me I’d rather be a poet anyday and live on guile and beer’.

Deary me, it is surely no wonder that Dylan Thomas is no longer a magical name for younger poets; moreover, in an increasingly feminised world of the humanities, his boozy swaggering manliness cuts little ice. ‘And death shall have no dominion’ does not cajole readers as once it did.

To return to the life, his career was by now supported by broadcasting gigs for the BBC. At the same time there was his cynical dependence on an amorous patron from Oxford, whose support lasted for years. Indeed, this brought him back from England to the famously poetic boathouse in Laugharne. He lived in fame and drunkenness, engaged in a fiery marriage with Caitlin, who, allegedly, ‘did not give a bugger what anyone thought’ of her bohemianism. Thomas died in November 1953, just a year after the publication of his Collected Poems 1934–1952, which was to be an overwhelming success. He was never to work on a proposed opera with Stravinsky. What is more significant, emotionally, is that he had lived less than a year after his own father’s death.

Statue of Dylan Thomas, by John Doubleday, 1984, in Dylan Thomas Square, Maritime Quarter, Swansea, Wales (photograph by Stu's Images, Wikimedia Commons)

There remain his finest poems, which, without doubt, include the powerful elegy for his father, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’: this is not only the most influential villanelle of the century but, in Christie’s words ‘also a poem about love’. Others would surely include the lucidly open ‘Poem in October’, and of course ‘Fern Hill’. Thomas always yearned for a countryside he had never really lived in. Perhaps it was called Innocence, a pastoral.

With its concise clarity, followed by handy notes and bibliography, this biography of Dylan Thomas as a twentieth-century poet will be valuable to those who want to teach or study his achievement. He may have been a bit of a shit, but he wrote fine rhetorical poems, early and late.

Fumy glitter

New readings for Dylan Thomas’s centenary

Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Dylan Thomas: A Literary Life

by William Christie

Palgrave Macmillan, $87.50 hb, 243 pp, 9781137322562

The legendary Dylan has now been dead for a century and his fumy glitter has probably faded a little. But then, how far do any poets these days really have glamour to show for themselves, no matter how hard they drink? Very few, in the Anglophone world at least: there’s nobody around like Wales’s roaring boy.

Dylan Thomas’s centenary in 2014 generated six or seven new, or else republished, titles. One of these is William Christie’s concise biography, taking its place in a series of crunchy studies of important writers in English, published by Palgrave Macmillan. His account of that short life of poetic melodrama is clear-headed and sober, unlike the poet, who generated such polar responses. For example, Dylan claimed the poet Norman Cameron as his best friend, but the latter portrayed him in an acid poem as ‘The Dirty Little Accuser’:

What was worse, if, as often happened, we caught him out

Stealing or pinching the maid’s backside, he would leer,

With a cigarette on his lip and a shiny snout,

With a hint: ‘You and I are all in the same galère.’

Scholarly though this book undoubtedly is, it begins with a terrible clanger. In his introduction, Christie reflects on Thomas’s early-to-mid poetry in its convoluted surrealism. He compares this style, or set of habits, with that of Australia’s 1940s creation, ‘Ern Malley’. He justly characterises the poems of the Malley hoax as ‘pretentious and impenetrably difficult’, but attributes their composition to James McAuley and Douglas Stewart. The former poetry editor of The Bulletin would have turned in his grave over this, as would the guilty Buddhist Harold Stewart, from his grave in faraway Japan. This error is repeated in the book’s index, raising questions about the editing process here. Or else about the author’s knowledge of Australian literary culture.

Once we get past Christie’s preface, this ‘literary life’ is very solidly done, its scholarship fine-tuned. We begin with a schoolmaster’s bright son growing up in Cwmdonkin Drive, Swansea, ‘amid the terrors of the Welsh accent and the smoke of the tinplate stacks’. Dylan’s admirable father proved a strong influence; the lad was never encouraged to learn the Welsh language. Yet the young man’s ego craved the hyperbole of being a glamorous Celt – and the many pints of ale that went with it. Accordingly, the witty Gavin Ewart has claimed that he ‘sometimes sounded like a preacher in full flow’.

Moreover the ‘provincial Wales’ he grew up in had nothing much Celtic about it – except that somehow, in the young poet’s mind, his ‘was truly a literary life’, with a generic extravagance and strange vocabulary. Christie reminds us how far Thomas’s early poetry was obsessed with the body, even with its masturbation. It was also marked by the big Marlovian boom-boom, which some readers found sexy.

This was a poetry of excess: if you like, a railing against the glum 1930s, but rooted in recreations of childhood innocence. His great radio play, Under Milk Wood (1954), presents this, in full orchestration. It treads the village green of comic sentiment ebulliently. For a sensibility as excitable as Dylan’s, the fall into adulthood must have been a tragedy of sorts. Indeed, at one point here we are beguiled by a claim that ‘the heart of the ageing poet yearns to move in the heart’. Yet he was also obsessed by craftsmanship.

Christie is a good close reader of the poetry, as his sensitive accounts of lyrics as early as ‘Before I Knocked’ or expansively late as ‘Over Sir John’s Hill’ bear out. Poems are works of art made out of language, while language is a delicately treacherous medium, all the more so since the zigzag path of the Romantic movement, in which Christie is very much versed. Romanticism questions language at the same time as glorifying its diction: inventing new idioms, it interrogates our speech.

This literary life is challenged by a common paradox: what do the events of a writer’s life have to do with the daily job of sitting at a desk and writing. Unless the life is scandalous or grandiose, there will be a lack of action: Byrons and Rimbauds are few. Writers are meant to be writing. At least Thomas chose the grandiose path, and the author’s narrative tactic here is to oscillate between close reading of the poems and ‘the unsettled and impecunious gypsy life’.

Into that life inevitably came World War II, along with it the poet’s need to skip aside from active service, and even from labour in a munitions factory. As he wrote in a letter, ‘evenings in a factory rest centre, snooker and cocoa, then bugs in digs and then clocking in and turning and winding and hammering to help kill another stranger, deary me I’d rather be a poet anyday and live on guile and beer’.

Deary me, it is surely no wonder that Dylan Thomas is no longer a magical name for younger poets; moreover, in an increasingly feminised world of the humanities, his boozy swaggering manliness cuts little ice. ‘And death shall have no dominion’ does not cajole readers as once it did.

To return to the life, his career was by now supported by broadcasting gigs for the BBC. At the same time there was his cynical dependence on an amorous patron from Oxford, whose support lasted for years. Indeed, this brought him back from England to the famously poetic boathouse in Laugharne. He lived in fame and drunkenness, engaged in a fiery marriage with Caitlin, who, allegedly, ‘did not give a bugger what anyone thought’ of her bohemianism. Thomas died in November 1953, just a year after the publication of his Collected Poems 1934–1952, which was to be an overwhelming success. He was never to work on a proposed opera with Stravinsky. What is more significant, emotionally, is that he had lived less than a year after his own father’s death.

There remain his finest poems, which, without doubt, include the powerful elegy for his father, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’: this is not only the most influential villanelle of the century but, in Christie’s words ‘also a poem about love’. Others would surely include the lucidly open ‘Poem in October’, and of course ‘Fern Hill’. Thomas always yearned for a countryside he had never really lived in. Perhaps it was called Innocence, a pastoral.

With its concise clarity, followed by handy notes and bibliography, this biography of Dylan Thomas as a twentieth-century poet will be valuable to those who want to teach or study his achievement. He may have been a bit of a shit, but he wrote fine rhetorical poems, early and late.  g

Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s most recent books of verse include The Universe Looks Down (2005) and Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw (2008).