262
PARTISAN REVIEW
a gloomy necessity; he approached the arrival with a painful and help–
less alarm, and yet with a feeling of the inevitable. The commitment
was of a quality i.rllpossible to analyze.
It
went beyond any joy that
might or might not be found in Thomas's company, beyond mutual
interests and personal affinity. It was so deep and so compelling that
despair was its natural mood. Because of the fabulous difficulty of
Thomas's character, this mood of despair seems more appropriate than
the carousing, robust tone some others fall into when they talk of
Thomas. In Brinnin's book it is always, in feeling at least, the dead,
anguished middle of a drunken night. The despair, the wonder and the
helplessness start the book and lead up to the grim, apoplectic end. There
is no pretense that it was fun. It was maddening, exhausting, but there
it was. And after Thomas died there was no release from the strain be–
cause the book had to be written, fulfilled with the same dogged, tired
fascination the author felt in the case of the actual events. The self–
effacement of the style seems a carry-over from the manner one adopts
when he sits, sober, exhausted and anxious, with a drunken friend whose
outbursts and ravings he is afraid of. The lists of guests at a party,
the lecture dates, the financial details-the reader takes these in nerv–
ously, flatly, with the sense of a strange duty being honored. The girls,
the quarrels, the summers and winters, the retchings, the humiliations,
the heights and the depths-they are all presented in the same gray,
aching tone. The writing of the book seems to have been the same sort
of hallucinated task as the planning of the lecture tours. There is a
unique concentration upon the elemental, upon how much Thomas
slept, how much he could be made to eat, upon the momentary pre–
dicaments. Of character analysis or literary analysis, there is very little.
This is the terrifying breath of life, but of a life without words. "He
was
ill
and downcast again in the morning...." "We broke our trip
to Connecticut by a stop in Sturbridge, to drink ale before the wood–
burning fireplace of an old inn, and arrived at the University just in
time to spend an informal hour with the fourteen students of my
graduate seminar." To spend
an hour
with the
fourteen
students! One
does not know what to make of the inclusion of so much fact and
figure. Thomas's conversation, so rare and beautiful, is not captured at
all. The record is of another kind.
It
is certainly bemused and depressed
and yet it is outlandishly successful as a picture of the prosaic circum–
stances of some months in a dramatic life.
Near the end: "There he ate an enormous dinner-a dinner which,
in the course of events, was to be his last full meal." Dylan Thomas
