THOMAS, Dylan (Marlais)

Nationality: Welsh. Born: Swansea, Glamorganshire, 27 October 1914. Education: Swansea Grammar School (editor of school magazine), 1925-31. Family: Married Caitlin Macnamara in 1937; two sons and one daughter. Career: Copyreader, then reporter, South Wales Evening Post, Swansea, 1931-32; freelance writer, from 1933; lived in London, with periods in Wales and Hampshire, 1934-45; worked for Strand Films, making documentaries for the Ministry of Information, during World War II; broadcaster and scriptwriter, 1946-49; lived in Laugharne, Wales, 1949-53; made four poetry reading tours of the U.S., 1950, 1952, 1953. Awards: Sunday Referee prize, 1935; Foyle poetry prize, 1952; Etna-Taormina prize, 1953; Italia prize, for radio play, 1954. Died: 9 November 1953.

Publications

Collections

Collected Prose. 1969.

Selected Writings, edited by J.P. Harries. 1970.

The Poems, edited by Daniel Jones. 1971; revised edition, 1974.

Selected Poems, edited by Walford Davies. 1974.

Collected Poems 1934-1953, edited by Walford Davies and RalphN. Maud. 1988.

The Dylan Thomas Omnibus: Under Milk Wood, Poems, Stories, Broadcasts. 1995.

Dylan Thomas, edited by Walford Davies . 1997.

Short Stories

The World I Breathe (includes verse). 1939.

A Prospect of the Sea and Other Stories and Prose Writings, edited by Daniel Jones. 1955.

Adventures in the Skin Trade and Other Stories. 1955.

Two Tales: Me and My Bike, and Rebecca's Daughters. 1968.

Novels

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. 1940.

Rebecca's Daughters. 1965.

The Outing. 1971.

The Followers. 1976.

The Death of the King's Canary, with John Davenport. 1976.

Plays

Return Journey (broadcast 1947). In New Directions: Five One-Act Plays in the Modern Idiom, edited by Alan Durband, 1961.

The Doctor and the Devils, from the Story by Donald Taylor (film-script). 1953.

Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices (broadcast 1954). 1954.

The Beach of Falesá (film-script). 1963.

Twenty Years A-Growing: A Film Script from the Story by Maurice O'Sullivan. 1964.

Me and My Bike: An Unfinished Film-Script. 1965.

The Doctor and the Devils and Other Scripts (includes Twenty Years A-Growing, A Dream of Winter, The Londoner). 1966.

Screenplays:

Balloon Site 568, 1942; Wales, 1942; New Towns for Old, 1942; Our Country, 1944; When We Build Again, 1945; The Three Weird Sisters, with Louise Birt and David Evans, 1948; No Room at the Inn, with Ivan Foxwell, 1948.

Radio Writing:

Quite Early One Morning, 1944; The Londoner, 1946; Return Journey, 1947; Under Milk Wood, 1954.

Poetry

18 Poems. 1934.

Twenty-Five Poems. 1936.

The Map of Love: Verse and Prose. 1939.

New Poems. 1943.

Deaths and Entrances. 1946.

Twenty-Six Poems. 1950.

In Country Sleep and Other Poems. 1952.

Collected Poems 1934-1952. 1952; as The Collected Poems, 1953.

Two Epigrams of Fealty. 1954.

Galsworthy and Gawsworth. 1954.

The Notebook Poems 1930-1934, edited by Ralph N. Maud. 1989.

Letter to Loren. 1993.

Other

Selected Writings, edited by John L. Sweeney. 1946.

Quite Early One Morning: Broadcasts. 1954; revised edition, 1954; A Child's Christmas in Wales published separately, 1955.

Conversations about Christmas. 1954.

Letters to Vernon Watkins, edited by Vernon Watkins. 1957.

Miscellany: Poems, Stories, Broadcasts. 1963.

The Colour of Saying: An Anthology of Verse Spoken by Thomas, edited by Ralph N. Maud and Aneirin Talfan Davies. 1963; as Thomas's Choice: An Anthology of Verse Spoken by Thomas, 1964.

Miscellany Two: A Visit to Grandpa's and Other Stories and Poems. 1966.

The Notebooks, edited by Ralph N. Maud. 1967; as Poet in the Making: The Notebooks of Thomas, 1968.

Early Prose Writings, edited by Walford Davies. 1971.

Living and Writing, edited by Christopher Capeman. 1972.

Miscellany Three. 1978.

Collected Letters, edited by Paul Ferris. 1985.

The Filmscripts. 1995.

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Bibliography:

Thomas: A Bibliography by J. Alexander Rolph, 1956; Thomas in Print by Ralph N. Maud and Albert Glover, 1970, Appendix 1969-1971 by Walford Davies, 1972; A Bibliography of Writings about Dylan Thomas from 1960 to 1989 by Joseph Magoon, 1994.

Critical Studies:

Thomas: Dog among the Fairies by Henry Treece, 1949, revised edition, 1956; The Poetry of Thomas by Elder Olson, 1954; Thomas: A Literary Study by Derek Stanford, 1954, revised edition, 1964; Thomas in America: An Intimate Journal by John Malcolm Brinnin, 1955, and A Casebook on Thomas edited by Brinnin, 1960; Leftover Life to Kill by Caitlin Thomas, 1957; Thomas by G. S. Fraser, 1957, revised edition, 1964, 1972; Thomas: The Legend and the Poet edited by E. W. Tedlock, 1960; A Reader's Guide to Thomas by William York Tindall, 1962; Entrances to Thomas' Poetry by Ralph N. Maud, 1963; Thomas by T. H. Jones, 1963; The Religious Sonnets of Thomas: A Study in Imagery and Meaning by H. H. Kleinman, 1963; Dylan: Druid of the Broken Body by Aneirin Talfan Davies, 1964; The Days of Thomas by Bill Read, 1964; Thomas: His Life and Work, 1964, Welsh Dylan, 1979, and A Thomas Companion, 1991, all by John Ackerman; The Life of Thomas by Constantine FitzGibbon, 1965; Thomas by Jacob Korg, 1965; The Craft and Art of Thomas by William Moynihan, 1966; Sound and Sense in Thomas's Poetry by Louise Murdy, 1966; Thomas: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by C. B. Cox, 1966; The Growth of Milk Wood by Douglas Cleverdon, 1969; An Outline of the Works of Thomas by Richard Morton, 1970; Thomas's Early Prose: A Study in Creative Mythology by Annis Pratt, 1970; The World of Thomas by Clark Emery, 1971; The Saga of Prayer: The Poetry of Thomas by Robert K. Burdette, 1972; Thomas: The Code of Night by David Holbrook, 1972; Thomas: New Critical Essays edited by Walford Davies, 1972, and Thomas by Davies, 1976; The Country of the Spirit by Rushworth Kidder, 1973; Thomas: Poet of His People by Andrew Sinclair, 1975, as Thomas: No Man More Magical, 1975; Thomas: The Poet and His Critics by R. B. Kershner, Jr., 1976; Thomas: A Biography by Paul Ferris, 1977; My Friend Thomas by Daniel Jones, 1977; Portrait of a Friend by Gwen Watkins, 1983; Thomas's Places: A Biographical and Literary Guide by James A. Davies, 1987; The Prose Writing of Thomas by Lin Peach, 1988; Thomas: Craft or Sullen Art edited by Alan Bold, 1990; Time Passes: Dylan Thomas's Journey to Under Milk Wood by R. F. G. Jones, 1994; Artists in Dylan Thomas's Prose Works: Adam Naming Aesop Fabling by Ann Elizabeth Mayer, 1995; Dylan Thomas and His World by Derek Cyril Perkins, 1995; Double Drink Story: My Life with Dylan Thomas by Caitlin Thomas, 1997.

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There are writers whose gift is to put down roots within the world of dreams, the logic of whose work is the logic of the dreaming and not the waking mind. Dylan Thomas's stories, no less than his more widely acclaimed poetry, inhabit such a world, the tales of "good old three-adjectives-a-penny belly-churning Thomas, the Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive."

At his worst, in The Map of Love and the posthumous A Prospect of The Sea, he had a genuine storytelling talent submerged by willful and self-indulgent oddity, a narratorial gift imprisoned within a style that could not register the depth of seriousness his ostensible subject required. Yet at his best, in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog and his radio stories, the personal recollections heightened by a more mature style and dramatic presentation are as unforgettable as they are powerful.

The distinction between his earlier surreal prose and his later more naturalistic style is one commonly accepted by critics. Thomas himself, referring to the early stories with characteristic humor as "the death and blood group," felt that they suffered from "immature violence, rhythmic monotony, frequent muddleheadedness and a very much overweighted imagery." Despite this they introduce many of his recurrent themes that were to persist throughout his career: a preoccupation with birth and death, a sacramental vision of the natural world, an obsession with Biblical symbols, and the myth and mysticism of Welsh folklore. Only on rare occasions, as in "The Burning Baby," "The Enemies," and "The Dress," do these elements not overwhelm the narrative with their symbolism. This is all the more unfortunate, because a close reading of these stories often reveals a serious concern to try to comprehend the origins of sexual violence and sadomasochism, as in "The True Story" and "The Vest," or a radical overturning of established religious myths and associations, as in "The Tree" and "The Holy Six."

His morbid preoccupation with images of incest, violence, and horror, apart from reflecting the adolescent mentality of his heavily mined notebooks and a passing acquaintance with Freud, also pay homage to the influence of Caradoc Evans, a man widely castigated in Wales for his brutal and excessive satires of Welsh peasantry. It will surprise few that Thomas's favorite quote about Evans came from a fearsome Welsh journal, The Nonconformist Objector, which charged Evans with possessing "an imagination like a sexual pigsty."

The passing of the 1930s revolution in middle-class sensibility, and its obsession with the spontaneity of inchoate power, marked a change in Thomas's stories. Responding to Richard Church's suggestion that he concentrate on narratives inspired by his early years in Swansea, Thomas produced his finest collection of stories, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, a Joycean sequence rooting the dreams, obsessions, and frustrations of the individual in a clearly delineated sense of place, the urban and rural locale of South West Wales.

The stories work by retaining an instinctive innocence and humor that is contrasted with the stark social realities and despair of the 1920s and 1930s. As lamented by the narrator of "An Extraordinary Little Cough," they are set in a time "some years before I knew I was happy." The finest achievement, "One Warm Saturday," achieves its epiphanic moments by relating to the structuring image of Victorian romanticism by means of Tennyson's poem "Come into the Garden Maud." The narrative plays on the similarities and dissimilarities between the two: the Victorian Gardens, the youth and his "dream girl" reading poetry to her, desiring to be buried, losing her in the house, and his ensuing madness. There is a fruitful tension between the narrative prose story and the poetic prose dreams contained within its form, as if the protagonist and the characters are constantly reimagining the story from the inside as it unfolds:

As he thought this, phrasing her gentleness, faithlessly running to words away from the real room and his love in the middle, he woke with a start and saw her lively body six steps from him, no calm heart dressed in a sentence, but a pretty girl, to be got and kept.

The stoic clarity of the final sentence encapsulates the unfulfilled romantic dreams of a generation while still managing to retain the cadence and flow of a born storyteller:

The light of the one weak lamp in a rusty circle fell across the brick-heaps and broken wood and the dust that had been houses once, where the small and hardly known and never-to-be-forgotten people of the dirty town had lived and loved and died and, always, lost.

The finer achievement in his later prose was made possible by the fusing of the visionary power of his interior world with an economy of implication that allowed the serious and the comic, the surreal and the naturalistic, to thread simultaneously through the same story. At the outbreak of war Thomas was employed as a scriptwriter for films and as a writer and broadcaster for radio, both of which contributed to the development of his later stories. The narrative economy, the sustaining of atmosphere and character, and the evocative sense of place demanded by those mediums resulted in such autobiographical gems as "A Visit to America," "A Story," "Reminiscences of Childhood," and "Holiday Memory." The near devastation of Swansea by bombing produced the uproarious comedy and wry sadness of "Return Journey" and the finest Christmas story of them all, "A Child's Christmas in Wales."

Thomas's imaginative and comic prose gifts showed no signs of diminution, as Under Milk Wood and his proposed collaboration with Stravinsky on a libretto will testify. His early death in 1953 at the age of 39 robbed the world not only of a great poet but also of a prodigious and underrated storyteller.

—Simon Baker

See the essay on "A Child's Christmas in Wales."