The Prodigal

SELECTED LETTERS OF DYLAN THOMAS edited by Constantine FitzGibbon. 420 pages. New Directions. $8.50.

Remember me? Round, red, robustly raddled, a bulging Apple among poets, hard as nails made of cream cheese, gap-toothed, balding, noisome, a great collector of dust and a magnet for moths, mad for beer, frightened of priests, women, Chicago, writers, distance, time, children, geese, death, in love, frightened of love, liable to drip.

Almost 17 years after Dylan Thomas wrote this bitterly lighthearted self-description, a great many people wonder if they do indeed remember him. The lecherous, boozy, pudgy little Welshman they knew has gradually been transformed by myth and legend into a sympathetic, demon-driven poet-genius. In his eloquent biography, The Life of Dylan Thomas (TIME, Oct. 29, 1965), Constantine FitzGibbon persuasively argued that both views of his old friend Dylan were correct and not incompatible. On the contrary, his point was that Dylan's slobbish failures as a human being kindled wild erratic fires in his verse, yet prevented him from realizing his full genius as a lyric poet. In this engrossing selection of Dylan's letters--carefully culled to offer a psychological study rather than a supplement to his biography--FitzGibbon reinforces his point.

D.T.s, Darling. Dylan was an obsessed letter writer. From 1931--when he was a 16-year-old schoolboy in Swansea, vainly pleading for help in starting a literary periodical--to his death from an epic bender in 1953, he expended far too much of his energy and spewed out probably too much of his inspiration in correspondence. His correspondence shows that, as far as his work was concerned, he was less careless and, at least in his heart, less irresponsible, than his outrageous personal behavior indicated.

His youthful letters to Pamela Hansford Johnson, whom he courted from 1933 to 1935, are especially revealing. "My facility is, in reality, tremendously hard work," he explained. "I write at the speed of two lines an hour . . . My poems are 'watertight compartments,' the last thing they do is flow; they are much rather hewn." He was not blind to his faults, accused himself of "immature violence, rhythmic monotony, muddleheadedness, overweighted imagery."

Yet neither his agonizing remorse nor his painful honesty could stanch his compulsion for overindulgence. In one whimpering letter, he wrote: "I'm just on the border of D.T.s, darling, and I've wasted some of my tremendous love for you on a lank, redmouthed girl with a reputation like a hell . . . I'm such a bloody fool."

Padded Room. The letters show that Dylan could never honestly attribute his behavior to an artist's usual frustrations. He never suffered from a lack of recognition. When he was only 19, such poetic nabobs as T. S. Eliot and Stephen Spender were impressed by his published work, offering aid and encouragement. His chronic fault was that he was a wastrel--and not only in his constant pursuit of a new bed or bottle. He was recklessly profligate in everything. Some of these letters about relatively unimportant matters contain some of his best prose. Thus, in a lyrical homesick reply to Poet Margaret Taylor (after she had written him about a house he might rent in Wales): "The room, the velvet, padded room upstairs where poems are waiting like people one has always loved but never met, and O to sit there, lost, alone in the universe, at home, at last, the people all with their arms open!"

Inevitably, his profligacy drained his spirit. When he left for his last American tour, sick and penniless, he perhaps knew that the end was near. In one of his last letters to Princess Caetani, a sometime patron, he wrote: "It is not enough to presume that once again I shall weave up pardoned, and waddle and gush along the land on my webbed sealegs as musical and wan and smug as an orpheus of the storm: no, I must first defeat any hope I might have of forgiveness by resubmerging the little arisen original monster in a porridge boiling of wrong words and make a song and dance and a mockpoem of all his fishy excuses.

"The hell with him."

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