The Lecturer's Spring

MANNERS & MORALS

The late Dylan Thomas, one of the best poets of his generation, could also write and speak lively, perceptive prose. Last October, home between U.S. lecture tours, Welshman Thomas recorded a broadcast for the BBC. Last week in the BBC's magazine The Listener, U.S. citizens got a chance to read what Thomas had to say about "A Visit to America."

"Across the United States of America, from New York to California and back, glazed, again, for many months of the year, there streams and sings for its heady supper a dazed and prejudiced procession of European lecturers, scholars, sociologists, economists, writers, authorities on this and that and even, in theory, on the United States of America . . ."

No Escape. "At first, confused and shocked by shameless profusion and almost shamed by generosity, unaccustomed to such importance as they are assumed, by their hosts, to possess, and up against the barrier of a common language, they write in their notebooks like demons, generalizing away, on character and culture and the American political scene. But, towards the middle of their middle-aged whisk through middle-western clubs and universities, the fury of the writing flags . . . And in their diaries, more & more do such entries appear as, 'No way of escape!' or 'Buffalo!' or 'I am beaten,' until at last they cannot write a word. And, twittering all over, old before their time, with eyes like rissoles in the sand, they are helped up the gangway of the home-bound liner by kind bosom friends (of all kinds and bosoms) who bolster them on the back, pick them up again, thrust bottles, sonnets, cigars, addresses, into their pockets, have a farewell party in their cabin, pick them up again, and, snickering and yelping, are gone: to wait at the dockside for another boat from Europe and another batch of fresh, green lecturers.

"There they go, every spring, from New York to Los Angeles: exhibitionists, polemicists, histrionic publicists, theological rhetoricians, historical hoddy-doddies, balletomanes, ulterior decorators, windbags and bigwigs and humbugs, men in love with stamps, men in love with steaks, men after millionaires'" widows, men with elephantiasis of the reputation (huge trunks and teeny minds), authorities on gas, bishops, bestsellers, editors looking for writers, writers looking for publishers, publishers looking for dollars, existentialists, serious physicists with nuclear missions, men from the BBC who speak as though they had the Elgin marbles in their mouths, potboiling philosophers, professional Irishmen (very lepri-corny), and, I am afraid, fat poets with slim volumes . . .

"See the garrulous others, also, gabbing and garlanded from one nest of culture-vultures to another: people selling the English way of life and condemning the American way as they swig and guzzle through it; people resurrecting the theories of surrealism for the benefit of remote parochial female audiences who did not know it, was dead, not having ever known it had been alive; people talking about Etruscan pots and pans to a bunch of dead pans and wealthy pots in Boston. . .

"Did we pass one another, en route, all unknowing, I wonder; one of us spry-eyed, with clean, white lectures and a soul he could call his own, going buoyantly west to his remunerative doom in the great state university factories; another returning dog-eared as his clutch of poems and his carefully typed impromptu asides? I ache for us both. There one goes, unsullied as yet, in his Pullman pride, toying--oh, boy!--with a blunderbuss bourbon, being smoked by a large cigar, riding out to the wide open spaces of the faces of his waiting audience . . ."

Verbal Ectoplasm. "He is vigorously welcomed at the station by an earnest, crew-cut platoon of giant collegiates, all chasing the butterfly culture with net, notebook, poison-bottle, pin and label, each with at least 36 terribly white teeth, and nursed away, as heavily gently as though he were an imbecile rich aunt with a short prospect of life, into a motorcar in which, for a mere 50 miles or so traveled at poet-breaking speed, he assures them of the correctness of their assumption that he is half-witted by stammering inconsequential answers in an over-British accent to their genial questions . . . He is then taken to a small party of only a few hundred people all of whom hold the belief that what a visiting lecturer needs before he trips on to the platform is just enough martinis so that he can trip off the platform as well. And, clutching his explosive glass, he is soon contemptuously dismissing, in a flush of ignorance and fluency, the poetry of those androgynous literary ladies with three names who produce a kind of verbal ectoplasm to order as a waiter dishes up spaghetti--only to find that the fiercest of these, a wealthy huntress of small, seedy lions (such as himself) ... is his hostess for the evening ...

"Late at night, in his room, he fills a page of his journal with a confused, but scathing, account of his first engagement . . . and falls to sleep where he is immediately chased through long, dark thickets by a Mrs. Mabel Frankincense Mehaffey, with a tray of martinis and lyrics. And there goes the other happy poet bedraggledly back to New York which struck him all of a sheepish never-sleeping heap at first but which seems to him now, after the ulcerous rigors of a lecturer's spring, a haven cozy as toast, cool as an icebox, and safe as skyscrapers."

One month after recording his rollicking valedictory, at the beginning of a lecture tour (TIME, Nov. 16), Poet Thomas, 39, died in New York.

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