Jeremy Clarke
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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. One of his easiest and most long-suffering touches was Margaret Taylor, wife of AJP. She not only believed in Thomas’s poetic genius, but was also sexually attracted to him. Once, when he was living in a gypsy caravan she’d bought and parked in her garden for him to work in, he returned from the local pub to find she’d prepared a dish of jugged hare for him to eat. He didn’t want it, he said. He wasn’t hungry. Margaret insisted. He must eat something. ‘Oh all right then,’ said her hero, ‘I’ll eat the hare of the bitch that dogs me.’ Which, if true, is a remark that neatly illustrates not only Dylan Thomas’s obsession with the language, but also his frankness, his spite, his unhappiness and, at a push, his clown’s heart.
Connolly and Sitwell thought Thomas was the real thing, a poet of the first magnitude. John Betjeman admitted to liking some of his poems. T. S. Eliot was kind enough to respond to a begging letter with a small cheque. But others — Larkin for instance — questioned whether the poems had any meaning behind them. Picking on the phrase ‘immortal hospital’ in the poem ‘Holy Spring’, Larkin wrote:
Now that is a phrase that makes me feel suddenly a sort of reverent apprehension, only I don’t know what it means. Can’t the fool see that if I could see what it means I should admire it twice as much?
Lycett is the most unobtrusive of biographers. Any opinions he might have he keeps largely to himself. Nor does he moralise. His method is simply to dump the mess that was Dylan Thomas’s life in a great steaming heap in front of us, leaving us to pick out the bones for ourselves. Given that Thomas was notoriously mendacious even for an alcoholic poet, and that most of the witnesses to the life were fellow artists of one kind or another, it isn’t, perhaps, such a bad one.
Dylan Thomas buffs will inevitably compare this book with the Ferris (1977) and the updated Ferris (1999) biographies. I found little in Andrew Lycett’s ‘new life’ which was new. With Caitlin dead and buried, Lycett has perhaps felt less constrained when writing about her infidelities than otherwise. But he doesn’t harp on them.
A striking little example of this restraint is where he quotes from a letter from Augustus John to Caitlin. Ferris (1999) quotes John as saying that he hopes she ‘hasn’t caught any more diseases from Dylan, or anyone else’, and that he advises her to keep her pleasures clean — ‘also your quim, my little seraph’. Instead of ‘quim’, nice Mr Lycett has ‘word indistinguishable’.
November 9th was the 50th anniversary of Dylan Thomas’s death. To pilgrims making for Laugharne I’d say this. Visit the immaculate Boathouse if you must, but if it’s anywhere, the nicotine-stained saloon bar of Brown’s Hotel is where Dylan Thomas’s spirit is.
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