|
COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
From 1982, John Malcolm Brinnin on a memorial for Dylan Thomas
To begin at the beginning: In October, 1914, when the Swansea schoolmaster David John Thomas decided to call his newborn son Dylan, the name was virtually unknown, even in Wales. D.J., as he was called, had found it in the Mabinogion, the collection of medieval Welsh tales, where it is the name of a minor character--"a fine boy-child with rich yellow hair." Florence, the boy's mother, had her doubts about the odd name: the correct Welsh pronunciation, which the family used, is "Dullan," and she worried that other children would tease him by calling him "dull one." Later, when broadcasting on the Welsh service of the BBC, Dylan Thomas had to instruct the announcers to say "Dillan," the way he himself pronounced it.
By 2003, according to Social Security records, "Dylan" had become the nineteenth most popular boy's name in the United States--just below "James." For the parents of many of those American Dylans, the name probably evokes the teen heartthrob on the TV series "Beverly Hills 90210"; for their grandparents, it will always recall the singer formerly known as Robert Zimmerman. But those later Dylans only borrowed its aura of brooding, youthful rebellion; in the most literal sense, Dylan Thomas made his name.
To achieve that level of fame as a poet demands more than talent, or even genius. From Byron to Sylvia Plath, it has also required scandal, tragedy, and early death. And the glamour of Dylan Thomas has always been peculiarly potent in the United States, because the last acts of his tragedy were played out here, in Manhattan. His Stations of the Cross are the Chelsea Hotel and the Ninety-second Street Y, the White Horse Tavern and St. Vincent's Hospital--where he died of alcohol poisoning on November 9, 1953, just after his thirty-ninth birthday. Wales was Thomas's great subject, and England made his reputation; but it was America that created his legend.
The question, raised by many at the time and fiercely debated ever since, is whether America also killed him. During his four American tours, between 1950 and 1953, Thomas put on a better show than any visiting writer since Dickens. His rich, honeyed baritone, and a dramatic instinct honed by years of broadcasting, made him a powerful reader of his own and others' poems. But what drew crowds from New York to San Francisco, and on every college campus in between, was not just the performance; it was the possibility that Thomas would finally, irreparably, crack up. Elizabeth Hardwick remembered how professors and students alike were mesmerized by his alcoholic high-wire act: "Would he arrive only to break down on the stage? Would some dismaying scene take place at the faculty party? Would he be offensive, violent, obscene? These were alarming and yet exciting possibilities." As Andrew Lycett writes in his new biography, "Dylan Thomas: A New Life" (Overlook; $35), Thomas "exhibited the excesses and experienced the adulation which would later be associated with rock stars."
What makes him unique among poets, even famous poets, is this distinctly modern and American cast of his celebrity. He took part in the savage transaction of stardom: his reckless self-indulgence satisfied his audiences' fantasies, and his destruction satisfied their moralistic envy. Many people shared an obscure sense of gratification that Thomas had died young, as a poet should. That way, he could be mourned in the grand style, like Adonais: ". . . the loveliest and the last, / The bloom, whose...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
