Part of “Dylan Thomas : Memories and Appreciations,” from Encounter (January 1954).
IT IS DIFFICULT FOR ME to write anything, stunned as I am, like many another, by the news of his death. I knew him for only three brief periods, yet I had come to think of him as a younger brother: unsentimentally, perhaps, and not protective as so many felt inclined to be,—for he could fend for himself against male and female; but rather someone to be proud of, to rejoice in, to be irritated with, or even jealous of. He was so rich in what he was that each friend or acquaintance seemed to carry a particular image of him: each had his special Dylan, whom he cherished and preserved intact, or expanded into a figure greater than life: a fabulous aging cherub, capable of all things. I think Thomas often knew exactly what each person thought him to be, and, actor that he was, would live up to expectations when it suited his mood. Often this would take the form of wry, ironical, deprecatory self-burlesque: as if he wanted to remind himself of the human condition. Like Chaplin, whom he loved, he could laugh at himself without being coy, and call up tenderness in those who rarely felt it.
The demands of his body and spirit were many; his recklessness, lovely. But even his superb energies felt the strain, I should say, on lecture tours when he was set upon by fools. Any kind of social pretentiousness disturbed him, and particularly in academia. The bourgeois he did not love. And he could, and did, act outrageously, on occasion, snarling from one side of his mouth to a gabbling faculty wife that nobody ever came to America except to get fees and drink free liquor; only to wish, wistfully, the next five minutes, to someone he respected, that he could stay in this country for a time, and maybe even teach; show the young what poetry really was. But even in black moods, his instinctive sweetness and graciousness would flash through. More than any other writer or artist I know, he really cared for and cherished his fellow men.
I first met him in 1950, in New York. John Brinnin had written twice that Dylan Thomas wanted to meet me. I found this hard to believe, but when I came down from Yaddo in May, still groggy from my own private wars with the world, it seemed to be so.
Someone had lent me an apartment uptown; he was staying downtown on Washington Square. We sometimes alternated: one would rout out the other, different days. He had been built up to me as a great swill-down drinker, a prodigious roaring boy out of the Welsh caves. But I never knew such a one. Some bubbly or Guinness or just plain beer, maybe; and not much else. We would sit around talking about poetry; about Welsh picnics; life on the Detroit river, and in Chicago (he greatly admired The Man with the Golden Arm); the early Hammett; and so on. Or maybe bumble across town to an old Marx Brothers movie, or mope along, poking into book shops or looking into store windows. One night he insisted I come along, with others, when some fellow Welshmen, in America for twenty years, entertained. And then I saw what he meant to his own people; to those hard-boiled businessmen Thomas was the first citizen of Wales, and nothing less.
Sometimes he would recite,—and what that was many know; but I think offstage he was even better, the rhythms more apparent, the poems rendered exactly for what they were. I remember he thought “After the Funeral” creaked a bit at the beginning: that he had not worked hard enough on it.
He had a wide, detailed, and active knowledge of the whole range of English literature; and a long memory. I noticed one day a big pile of poems,—Edward Thomas, Hardy, Ransom, Housman, W.R. Rodgers, Davies, and others,—all copied out in his careful hand. He said he never felt he knew a poem, what was in it, until he had done this. His taste was exact and specific; he was loyal to the poem, not the poet; and the list of contemporaries he valued was a good deal shorter than might generally be supposed.
He was one of the great ones, there can be no doubt of that. And he drank his own blood, ate of his own marrow to get at some of that material. His poems need no words, least of all mine, to defend or explain them.