The Poet Who Never Grew Wise the Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas

By Paul Gray

Dylan Thomas lived 13 days past his 39th birthday and has been dead now for nearly 33 years. Yet the story of his spectacular rise and fall, recounted in several biographies, numerous memoirs and even a Broadway play that starred Alec Guinness, retains an eerie, timeless allure. Dylan's saga combines Orphic myth with cautionary tale. Depending on who does the reading, the hero was either an inspired, fragile bard who fell upon the thorns of life or an overpraised, cadging drunk who finally got what he had been asking for and deserved. Thomas' Collected Letters will fuel such disagreements but hardly settle them. The roughly 1,000 pieces of correspondence assembled here, some 700 published for the first time, offer no staggering revelations. They do provide the artist's running commentary on the accelerating chaos of his own life.

By the time he left school at 16, Thomas had decided that he was a poet and that his art would help him escape his native Swansea, Wales, and "the smug darkness of a provincial town." After one of his poems appeared in a London newspaper, he received a complimentary letter from Pamela Hansford Johnson, a bank clerk and aspiring poet who would later become a well-known novelist. A correspondence developed, during which Thomas assumed the roles of mentor, critic and romantic outlaw.

He described himself as "a thin, curly little person, smoking too (many) cigarettes, with a crocked lung," and shrugged off his mysterious illness as his destiny: "A born writer is born scrofulous; his career is an accident dictated by physical or circumstantial disabilities." He stressed his dedication to a pure but unrewarding craft: "Poetry wouldn't keep a goldfinch alive." And he professed to be above the battle to support himself. "There is no necessity for the artist to do anything," he lectured her. "He is a law unto himself."

On the evidence of his letters, Thomas went on clutching his damp adolescent convictions until, some 20 years later, he died of drink and complications in a New York City hospital. The task of being a law unto himself entailed the remorseless exploitation of intimates, casual acquaintances and total strangers. The poet proved himself up to such demands. "I am the most unreliable friend that ever was," he confessed in a letter in 1934, and he was not kidding. He agreed to be best man at the wedding of Poet Vernon Watkins, his closest and most loyal confidant, and then failed to show up for the ceremony. To his credit, Thomas usually knew when he had behaved unconscionably. "I owe you so many apologies I don't know where to begin," he opened one missive in 1950, and variations on this formula abound in his letters. He disarmed anger or outrage through self-castigation: "My selfish carelessness and unpunctuality I do not try to excuse as poet's properties. They are a bugbear & a humbug."

He usually worked himself back into favor. Dylan was, after all, increasingly famous and boisterously charming. He could play the convivial clown entertaining the chaps at the pub, and the naughty boy whom women fought one another to comfort and reform. He encouraged such ministrations but certainly had no intentions of being changed. The poet chose for his bride Caitlin Macnamara, an Irish woman as flighty and flamboyant as himself, and promised her before their wedding, "You'll never, I'll never let you, grow wise, and I'll never, you shall never let me, grow wise, and we'll always be young and unwise together."

He got at least half his wish. He grew "sadder and older" but no more willing to adapt to the demands of the world than he had been as a teenager. The price paid for this refusal becomes ominously clear in The Collected Letters. It is one thing for Peter Pan never to grow up. A poet with a wife, three children and a dependency on booze cannot afford that luxury. His letters requesting, demanding, begging for money grew increasingly embarrassing. "I am a deserving cause," he insisted. He hit on the scheme of "getting my living-money from people and not from poems" and solicited shamelessly for the next "rich bitch" to support him. He found patrons, then abused their generosity. After World War II, Thomas' fortunes ostensibly improved. He landed some screenwriting assignments, became well known through his readings for the BBC ("radio whinnies," as he described them), and started a routine of lucrative U.S. tours. The more he earned, the more he somehow owed.

His final years were hellish punishment for earlier indulgences. "I do not like reading my old poems," he wrote one admirer, "because I am not working on new poems." Yet reading his old poems before bedazzled crowds was what he was paid handsomely to do. His letters supply no evidence that he seriously contemplated suicide. But they portray, powerfully, a man trapping himself in a quandary from which there seemed to be no earthly escape. His poetry survives. The impractical young dreamer from Wales may have been wrong about almost everything but his immortality.