by SEAMUS PERRY
- The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: The New Centenary Edition edited by John Goodby
Weidenfeld, 416 pp, £20.00, October, ISBN 978 0 297 86569 8 - Under Milk Wood: The Definitive Edition edited by Walford Davies and Ralph Maud
Phoenix, 208 pp, £7.99, May, ISBN 978 1 78022 724 5 - Collected Stories by Dylan Thomas
Phoenix, 384 pp, £8.99, May, ISBN 978 1 78022 730 6 - A Dylan Thomas Treasury: Poems, Stories and Broadcasts
Phoenix, 186 pp, £7.99, May, ISBN 978 1 78022 726 9
Dylan Thomas’s foredoomed premature death feels intrinsic to his late romanticism, part of what made him the ‘Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive’, as he labelled himself. But he could have escaped the legend to which he had devoted such energies. As Paul Ferris’s excellent biography established some time back, while Thomas was certainly in a bad way, his death was down to a medical blunder. He wasn’t martyred by the barbarians of the Inland Revenue: by the time he died Thomas was on the verge of being what he had never been before – a success. A collaboration with Stravinsky was planned: they were to work on an opera set in a post-nuclear age in which the world was to be invented again from scratch, possibly with the help of aliens. Thomas’s interest in film, which had begun during the war, was well developed and he continued to concoct ideas for movies: he hoped they would make money, of course, but it wasn’t only the money that drew him. He was very keen at one stage on a project unpromisingly called ‘Me and My Bike’; and he actually finished a screenplay, quite a good one, about the body-snatchers Burke and Hare. His friend William Empson remembered him speaking in detail about a film he wanted to make about the life of Dickens, ‘very profound and very box office’, as Empson remembered it, adding loyally: ‘If Dylan had lived a normal span of life it would have been likely to mean a considerable improvement of quality in the entertainment profession.’ Talks on BBC Radio had started to turn him into a lucrative personality: his reminiscences of a Welsh childhood hit something very like the note of hard whimsy that would later make Betjeman the nation’s favourite. ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’, based on a talk for Children’s Hour and a piece for Picture Post, became one of Thomas’s most popular works, and there was plenty more where that came from. He had already appeared on television twice (no recordings survive). Everyone recognised the new departure represented by Under Milk Wood, which brilliantly occupied a space between poetry and popular entertainment. ‘A radio comedy about Wales’, as he once referred to it, it was one of those works which become an old favourite while still brand new. And finally, America adored him. Geoffrey Grigson, an early supporter and subsequently an astringent critic, thought Thomas appealed especially to ‘persons of a kind needing shots of the notion of art as others need shots of insulin, of a kind put on heat by the slightest contact with artists of any nature’; ‘America proved fantastically full of such people,’ Grigson judged bleakly.
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