Books: Pintpot Pan

THE LIFE OF DYLAN THOMAS by Constantihe FitzGibbon. 370 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $7.95.

"Is the bloody man dead yet?" cried the distraught wife of Dylan Thomas as she rushed into a Manhattan hospital where the poet lay stricken with a "massive alcoholic insult to the brain." The answer is no. Twelve years after his death, even people who think poetry is what appears on greeting cards have heard the legend that the wild Welsh wonderboy was the greatest lush, lecher, and lyric poet produced in this century by the English-speaking world.

In this careful and eloquent biography, the first full-length portrait of Poet Thomas ever published, Author Constantine FitzGibbon demonstrates with vivid detail that the reality sometimes outdid the legend. As a longtime friend of Dylan's, FitzGibbon is painfully aware of the flaws in his subject's character. Dylan, he says flatly, was a slob, a liar, a moocher, a thief, a two-fisted boozefighter, a puffy Priapus who regularly assaulted the wives of his best friends, an icy little hedonist who indifferently lived it up while his children went hungry. Yet at the same time, says Friend FitzGibbon, Dylan was generous, kind, charming and stupendously witty, a genius who failed to become a great poet only because he became a great clown.

The Brat. A badly spoiled boy was father to this alarmingly mixed-up man. Dylan was a sickly lad—weak lungs, brittle bones—and FitzGibbon reports that his mother nursed every minor symptom into a major illness. In bed or out, he soon became a brat. He stole candy from the corner store, smoked cigars in the local cinema, spied on the nursemaid while she washed her breasts in a handbasin. However, he was a precocious brat. His father, an English teacher, bellowed scenes from Shakespeare at the huge-eyed child while he was still in swaddlings, and when he was eight or nine he began to write poems of his own.

At 16, with his father's consent, Dylan quit school to become a practicing poet, and at 19 he sold his first lines to the London weeklies. Many of them vibrated with a grand organic energy that had not been present in English verse since the Elizabethans.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

Is my destroyer.

Roly-ProleyMarxist.Unhappily,Dylan had histrionic as well as poetic gifts, and they urged him not only to be but to play the poet. Since the poetic image was proletarian at the time (1934), Dylan promptly plunged into the slums of Soho and there tried terribly hard to be a roly-proley Marxist. Though he looked like a choirboy, he argued like a Bolshevik, dressed like a bum, drank like a culvert, smoked like an ad for cancer, bragged that he was addicted to onanism and had committed an indecency with a member of Parliament. He slept with any woman who was willing, subsisted largely on a diet of ice cream sodas mixed with ale instead of seltzer, and all the while belabored the general ear with wild and wonderful hwyl, as the Welsh call eloquence:

"Silence is a needle passing through water."

"An alcoholic is somebody you don't like who drinks as much as you do."