260
PARTISAN REVIEW
greatness began it all, and the urgency of his drinking, his uncontrollable
destructiveness seemed to add what was needed beyond his talents. He
was both a success and a failure in a way we find particularly appealing.
What he represented in the vividness of his success and failure was real
and of irresistible power to certain art-conscious Americans. He had
everything and "threw it all away." In him sophisticated schoolteachers,
bright young girls, restless wives, bohemians, patrons and patronesses,
found a poet they could love. He was not conservative, not snobbish,
not middle-class, not alarmingly intellectual; he was a wild genius who
needed caring for. And he was in a pattern we can recognize all too
easily-the charming young man of great gifts, willfully going down
to ruin. He was Hart Crane, Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the stuff of which
history is made, and also, unexpectedly, something of a great actor;
indeed he was actually a great actor in a time when the literary style
runs to the scholarly and the clerical. He satisfied a longing for the
extreme. He was incorrigible and you never knew what he might do.
He was fantastically picturesque. His Anglo-Welsh accent delighted
everyone who heard it. Every college girl had her Dylan Thomas anec–
dote and it was usually scandalous, since he had a pronounced gift for
that. His fees were exceeded only by the Sitwells,
tous les deux,
and
by Eliot. His drinking had made him, at least superficially, as available
as a man running for office. Everyone knew him, heard him, drank
with him, nursed him. He was both immoderately available and, in the
deepest sense, utterly unavailable too. His extraordinary gregariousness
was a sign of his extremity. He knew everyone in the world, but for
a long time he had perhaps been unable to know anyone. Oddly enough,
at the end Thomas was more "fashionable" than he had ever been in
his
happier days. Even excess, carried off with so great a degree of
authenticity and compulsiveness, has a kind of
chic.
John Malcolm Brinnin's book,
Dylan Thomas in America/
has
been praised by some critics, but many others have felt a good deal of
moral annoyance a·bout the work. They have found Brinnin a false
friend, and they have decided his material might better have gone
unpublished. Thomas's widow was much disturbed by the "intimate
journal" and, one hears, has written a book-length "answer" to it. It
seems unfair to accuse Brinnin of treachery or of the commercial ex–
ploitation of
his
friendship with Thomas-the most astonishing aspect
1 Atlantic Monthly Press-Little Brown. $4.00.
