I am not a fan of Dylan Thomas, in fact, I hadn't even read much of him until two days recently that I spent listening to his BBC recordings and reading everything I could find online. Rarely before, if ever, have I felt so tortured writing an article. But if ever I needed any more proof how much I loved writing, the rush at the end of this was it. There are a reading of his works recently, and this is what I wrote about that mid-morning:
Is it easy to love a mad genius, forgive him and her for
their digressions from accepted norms of morality and social behavior because
of what they are and what they create? Literature and art and music are replete
with raucous, loveable creativists who were a tad off the rocker most of their
lives, but they left behind and/or continue to create that which beautifies
this world every day. And so their un-conventions are tolerated. Dylan Thomas
was known to be a roistering, drunken and doomed poet; it was a reputation he
actively encouraged and did everything he could and more to keep up with. Like
many other mad geniuses, he did not live long, all the ‘living’ he did sent him
to an early grave, at just 39.
The Welsh poet was born a hundred years ago in Wales, in
Swansea “…an ugly, lovely town…sprawling,
unplanned, smug-suburbed…” He did not speak Welsh, he did not see himself
as a Welsh poet and he did not seem to like being Welsh much either. His poems
though, rolled over the tongue, his own on BBC recordings, or those of actors
or readers reading aloud, taste mightily of the Welsh air, smelling of mountains
and the headlands of Mumbles along Swansea Bay.
A little of the imagery that was so much a part of his
poems, radio dramas and short stories seeped into Bangalore’s Rangashankara
recently, when the actors Gareth Armstrong and John Griffiths read out from
Thomas’ body of work. The two, blessed with the gift of golden voices, rich and
sonorous, sang traditional drinking songs, brought alive eccentric old uncles
and gave a peek into Welsh life in the post-World War II years. To old fans,
the Sunday morning reading allowed them an hour to dust off and revisit old
favourites. To those unfamiliar with Thomas’ works, it was just the right
introduction, the two actors having chosen some of his most accessible stories
and poems.
How apt that this comes at the beginning of Thomas’
centenary birth year. Different parts of the world are planning many events, readings
and plays. How apt too that the reading is by two Welsh men, both old enough to
have known the Wales Thomas wrote about, one, Armstrong, even having being
taught by some of Thomas’ old teachers. You know they are personal fans of
Thomas’ works, it shows in their rendering. They must have been boys like the
boys Thomas writes about in ‘Reminiscences of Childhood’. The memories of
childhood have no order, Thomas writes, oscillating between describing people
in his town to talking of his firm and kind school behind which was a narrow
lane, the lane was always the place to
tell your secrets; if you did not have any, you invented them. When
Armstrong and Griffiths read, they become those boys, boasting, making up
secrets to tell in the lane of
confidences.
The reading, which will, by the end of it, turn out to be a
delightful potpourri of Thomas’ stories, verses and plays, is interspersed with
the actors’ insights into the poet's life and those old times. They tell of how
Thomas’ parents probably spoke Welsh themselves, but the children were resolutely
brought up to speak and write English. As a result, Thomas only ever wrote in
English. His style though is said to have been heavily influenced by and adheres
extensively to the rules and metrics of Welsh poetry, however unwittingly on
his part.
Thomas’ Wales was an era where holidays meant being sent off
to stay with relatives who might have no children of their own or ‘A Visit to
Grandpa’s.’ Griffiths and Armstrong become the grandpa and the boy. The anecdotal
story takes the reader into villages like Llansteffan and Llangadock where the
eccentric grandpa would rather be buried while he was alive, for the ground is comfy and you can twitch your legs
without putting them in the sea.
The little nooks of Wales are ever present in Thomas’
stories. He is as much of his geography as his country claims him as its own. Mumbles,
a headland off Swansea Bay, is the venue for ‘Holiday Memory’. The train that
took Thomas and his family there used to be the oldest passenger train in the
world, Griffiths lets in, right before belting out a Welsh song for while
waiting for the train. It used to be a journey three miles long, to Mumbles,
for August Bank Holiday. The holiday is full of a slap of sea and a tickle of sand and Thomas remembers the sea telling lies in a shell, held to my
ear for a whole harmonious, hollow minute by a small, wet girl in an enormous
bathing suit marked Corporation Property.
There is little of his poetry except for the more popular
‘Fern Hill’ and ‘The Hunchback in the Park.’ Perhaps it is because the hour is
short, or maybe it is that Dylan Thomas isn’t always for digested reading. The
two actors regale instead with another story, that of a young Thomas being
taken along by an uncle on an outing to Porthcawl with a motley bunch of
friends. Riding on a charabanc, a motor coach, the old men stop for
“refreshments”, little Thomas left to guard the chara for 45 minutes (that) passed like a very slow cloud. He passes time
looking at the cows opposite, and they look at him, there was nothing else for us to do. The public house (pub) crawl
that follows leaves the men drunk and in changed colours, beetroot and rhubarb
and pius. They holler, blow the bugle and rollick like enormous ancient bad boys. Much later, just as Thomas drifts
off to sleep against his uncle’s mountainous
waistcoat, “who goes there?” cries out Will Sentry, to the flying moon.
The idyllic stories and the large bulk of his poetry weren’t
enough to feed Thomas’ growing family. Then came the BBC years, where to
supplement his paltry income from writing, he wrote scripts and went on to
record poetry readings, short stories and participate in discussions and
critiques. Thomas’ readings now make his work a little more approachable. In
those years, his deep voice made him popular across the pond in the US, where,
on one of several reading tours, he finished ‘Under Milk Wood’, a part of which
Gareth Armstrong and John Griffiths read and conclude with. The full radio play
wasn’t broadcast until after his death in New York in 1953.
Thomas, ravaged already by years of alcoholism by then,
stayed at Chelsea Hotel on that last trip to America. Befitting perhaps for the
doomed poet to have ended up there, in that mecca for mad geniuses of that age.
Its hallowed hallways were witness to many a madness, inspiring many a
masterpiece. Chelsea Hotel added to its roster Thomas’ story too, his famous
boast of having downed “18 straight whiskies” after a bottle of Old Grandad on
his last night feeding into the Hotel’s legend.
Just as the whiskies and the women and the
unpredictabilities fed into Thomas’ image of himself and what the world had
come to expect of him. It would be easy to let his reputation take precedence
over his words – a riotous youth squandered away is more amusing a story than
how he strung his words, like some medieval bard who roamed the Welsh
highlands. He went with a rage, rage
against the dying of the light. And it is for words such as these that
another mad genius’ debauchery becomes forgiven.
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