Not Going Gentle Anywhere

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During one of his boozy, boisterous poetry reading tours of the U.S. in the 1950s, Dylan Thomas was asked how he felt about something or other "as a poet." He replied, "I'm only a poet when I'm writing poetry. The rest of the time, I'm...well, Christ, look at me."

He wasn't a pretty sight. Tousled and bloated, he was drunk much of the time, playing the buffoon and getting into fights at bars and parties, making crude passes at women and cadging money and favors that he rarely repaid. As Andrew Lycett recounts in Dylan Thomas (Overlook Press; 421 pages), he spawned bad debts, pilfered from and vandalized homes he stayed in, and insulted and embarrassed the people who tried the most to help him. It wouldn't be long before he died of alcohol poisoning in New York City in 1953, at the age of 39.

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Most of the works that make Thomas a major figure in 20th century poetry had been written by the time he was 26, including such poems as "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower," "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" and "When All My Five and Country Senses See." After that he survived largely by playing the role of the errant romantic genius, though he did manage to produce Under Milk Wood, his enduringly popular play for voices, in his last years. After a teenage stint on a newspaper in his native Wales, the only paid work he found was giving talks on BBC radio, writing film scripts during World War II and going on his ruinous tours. But what a performer he was. In person he could be hilariously entertaining, at least until he vomited or passed out. Onstage, no matter how much he had had to drink, he unfailingly gave powerful readings in his sonorous, slightly hammy voice.

Countless women were eager to bed him and, in the case of the older and wealthier ones, to support him--"ardents," he called them. Friends, colleagues and hangers-on were willing to forgive him almost anything because of his gifts and because of an underlying innocent sweetness they saw in him. (Not everyone, though: the young Kenneth Tynan described him as "a surly little pug, but a master of pastiche and invective. Thinks himself the biggest and best phoney of all time, and may be right.")

These people today would be called enablers, and none was worse than his tempestuous Irish wife Caitlin, who was as much a drunk and a brawler as he was. In seaside towns in Wales and the bohemian precincts of London, they made do in squalid lodgings, haphazardly raising three children, bickering violently and competing in infidelity. Lycett suggests that the main cause of Thomas' self-destructiveness was his passionate, lethal co-dependency with Caitlin.

It's a colorful and poignant tale, but in Lycett's hands it goes on too long. The book would benefit from fewer pub crawls and more pointed analysis, especially of the poetry, on which Lycett is perfunctory. Thomas once said, "I hold a beast, an angel and a madman in me." Lycett gives us plenty of the beast and the madman. The angel is scarcely glimpsed.