Worm Beneath the Nail

THE NOTEBOOKS OF DYLAN THOMAS, edited by Ralph Maud. 364 pages. New Directions. $8.50.

For a man who devoted so much of his life to drinking up his talent, Dylan Thomas had a remarkably methodical approach to that talent when he was putting it to work. In his tight, clear script he filled notebook after notebook with the history of his poems--when the idea was first set down, how long he sat on it, how he cleaned up the various versions, what he chose to publish and what he left out. Such matters may seem too arcane for all except literary note-pickers, but for those who remember Thomas as a presence and his Collected Poems for some of the best written in recent decades. The Notebooks help to explain the evolution of his art.

"My method is this," he explained. "I write a poem on innumerable sheets of scrap paper, often upside down and crisscross ways unpunctuated, surrounded by drawings of lampposts and boiled eggs, in a very dirty mess; bit by bit I copy out the slowly developing poem into an exercise book; and, when it is completed, I type it out. The scrap sheets I burn." Fourteen years after Thomas' death, collectors still mourn those burned scraps. But four of his workbooks of self-history are available for study--at 26, Dylan sold them to the Lockwood Library of the State University of New York for $101. Others may yet turn up, but these are enough to discount fully the romantic belief of his pre-hippie worshipers, who liked to think that their boozy, wenching golden boy had reached out carelessly and seized his lovely lines as they drifted into his alcoholic haze.

The entries culled by Editor Maud show clearly the developing poet. He was only 15 when he started the first of the four notebooks he sold to the Lockwood, under 20 when he made the last entry in them, but from the very first they reflect both a fierce doubt about the worth of life and a fierce enthusiasm for it. "We are too beautiful to die," wrote the doubting adolescent, and soon he was noting that the beautiful die young (Thomas himself was to die at 39).

On through four years of doubt and cynicism, he shook his fist at mortality--the defiance sometimes gorgeously expressed, at others trapped by fuzzy rhetoric. In the last entry, Thomas wrapped together the best and the worst that he had seen and felt so far:

This world is half the devil's and my own,

Daft with the drug that's smoking in a girl

And curling round the bud that forks her eye.

An old man's shank one-marrowed with my bone,

And all the herrings smelling in the sea,

I sit and watch the worm beneath my nail

Wearing the quick away.

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