AMERICA AND DYLAN THOMAS
261
of his record
is
just the wild and limitless nature of his devotion to
his
subject. It has, at times, almost the character of an hallucination.
"The sharpest scrutiny
is
the condition of enduring fame," Froude
said as he set out to tell all he knew about Carlyle. This is the dominion
of history and scholarship. And yet Brinnin's book does not seem to
be a product of the historical impulse as we usually think of it. His
journal is truly an obsessive document and is most unusual for that
reason. It is not easy to think of anything else quite like it, anything
one might justly compare it with. His commitment to his subject is
of such an overwhelming degree that he cannot leave out anything. He
treats Dylan Thomas as a great force of nature and would no more
omit an infidelity or a hangover than a weatherman would suppress the
news of an ugly storm. In certain respects, the book is not a piece of
composition at all, but is rather the living moment with its repetitions,
its naivete, its peculiar acceptance of and compulsive attachment to every
detail of Thomas's sad existence. It is as flat and true as a calendar. As
a record, it is oddly open and marked by a helpless, uncomfortable fas–
cination on Brinnin's part. For
him
Thomas was an addiction. Having
once taken on the friendship, Brinnin was trapped, spell-bound, enlisted
in a peculiar mission. Here are sentences from the early pages of the
journal which tell of Thomas's first American visit: "He slept, breath–
ing heavily, as I fingered through some English magazines he had
brought with him, and watched the early lights of Manhattan come on
through the sleet. As I contemplated Dylan's deep sleep, I tried first
to comprehend and then to accept the quality (it was too early to know
the dimensions) of my assignment . . . no one term would serve to
define a relationship which had overwhelmed my expectations and al–
ready forced upon me a personal concern that was constantly puzzled,
increasingly solicitous and, I knew well by now, impossible to escape."
Although Brinnin was the business agent for Thomas's American
performances, his presence is due, not to business concerns, but to the
notion of a mysterious and compelling destiny, a fatigued and yet some–
how compulsory attendance. The "too late now to turn back" theme is
heard again and again. "I knew that, above all now, I wanted to take
care of him.... Just as certainly, I knew that I wanted to get rid
of him, to save myself from having to be party to his self-devouring
miseries and to forestall any further waiting upon his inevitable col–
lapses." Reading such passages, you are reminded of the fatal commit–
ments in Poe's work, of those nightmares of the irresistible and irrational
involvement. Even Thomas's first visit was anticipated by Brinnin as
