The Glass Character: Dylan Thomas

Showing posts with label Dylan Thomas. Show all posts

Sunday, December 1, 2013

Dull, drunk, dead: my life with Dylan Thomas

Blogger's note. It never ceases to amaze me with what reverence people approach the work of Dylan Thomas. You can't even throw one brickbat at the guy! If he were alive he'd be too drunk to notice anyway. But of all his hallowed writings, even more hallowed than Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, which holds the record for the most misquoted poem in the history of the world ("Don't go gently into the night"; "Let's go gently into the night"; "you should go gently into the night, listen to me, I'm your hospice worker," etc., etc.), this one is the most hallowed, even more hallowed than Halloween.

As I was saying (and in this I am approaching the windbaggedness of my own chosen subject), there is one particular work which is considered his Masterpiece. This is Under Milk Wood, in which the ravelled and burlap-clad townsfolk of Llareggub (which is, surprise-surprise, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, "Buggerall"spelled backwards) declare themselves as if each one of them stood on a soapbox in the Town Square.

These people are "good" because they are RURAL: they live in small towns, which makes them Real. They aren't big city folk with their evil habits. They shine with goodness even if they are total rotters and ratfinks. We love them. We love them because Dylan Thomas loves them, and Dylan Thomas loves them because they are lucrative.

It's pretentious, it's showy, it's writing that calls attention to itself, a thing I loathe beyond description. I've probably reviewed 350 books in my time (and if that sounds like a lot, I did one a week for a long time, and doesn't that add up, folks? Or can't you do math?). It's verbal fireworks, it's "oooooooh" and "ahhhhhh" and "oh, isn't it marvelous", which (like all showing off and verbal swaggering) it isn't.

In my tireless and demanding research for this thing, I discovered how many different versions of this "play for voices" have been produced over the years. God knows how it was supposed to be presented: each player standing in front of the audience with a paper bag over their head? (for after all, each one has an annoying habit of introducing him/herself so there won't be any confusion: "Fiddle-dee-dee, I am Mr. Prothero the Butcher! Come and see my meat!" And stuff like that.)

The thing was made into a movie, of course, with Richard Burton playing the town drunk. I discovered today that there was a highly-praised dance version, though how you can dance in Welsh is simply beyond me.

What next, I wonder? Under Milk Wood performed in American Sign Language? With semaphores, or maybe in Morse code? How about Dylan Thomas on Ice?

There's no end to it, it seems. In my exhaustive (and exhausting) research, I stumbled upon a far better writer who never got his due because he was too busy fuming bitterly about how his famous rival Dylan Thomas got all the babes, even if his prick was as limp as a pickled eel from the Llanfairwlllpggygygogoch Tavern.

His attempt to copy Dylan Thomas almost succeeded until he got partway through the play and broke into one of his inebriated rants. Plus people were just a little puzzled by his name: Dullyn ("Cosmo") Thomas: didn't he look just a little bit like Kramer from Seinfeld? SinceSeinfeld wouldn't be invented for another 40 years, it was a strange comparison to make.

So here, without any reservations except for the quality and relevance of the work, I present a heretofore ignored and neglected masterpiece.

Under Skim Milk Wood

by Dullyn Thomas

Hark! Listen ye! Come closer, closer! until ye can breathe in me foul alcoholic breath. For I am about to tell’ee of many things! Of many things, yes! that you are not interested in. Of many quaint people! Of many quaint folk in the buffling, baffling, blustering, blistering darkness, buffooning like circus-tents in the sussurating Swansea spring, of many fair quair folk who aren’t like anybody, see, 'cause I just made ‘em up on the spot.

Come see, everybody, how this imaginary Welsh town carved out of malt and marzipan made Dylan Thomas rich! And an injustice it was, too. It was Dullyn Thomas that got here first, which is how this rip-roaring cascade of clichés got started. I’m like to rip his fat sodden gullet out and wring his crapulous neck like a chicken! But that is a tale for another time. For Mr. Thomas now holds up the wall of the pub, and as he holds it up, he begins to remember. . .

About the old lady, Mrs. Teacozy, who used to sit on her front porch and wonder when the tide would come in. Which is strange, because Mrs. Teacozy lived 450 miles inland.

About Mr. Prothero, the scientist, who blew off his hair doing an experiment in the bedroom and lost his wife’s favour forever, for he blew off his dick at the same time.

(Which is a shockingly earthy, sexual, explicit thing to say. Oh my goodness, Dylan Thomas is such a sensualist and was probably great in bed.)

First voice: Lookee here, I’m dead! Can’t you tell?

Second voice: Frankly, this play’s so dead, I can’t distinguish it.

Third voice: Extinguished, are you?

Fourth voice: Oh, the wordplay, the wordplay!

Fifth voice: Yes let us gasp at the wordplay as if we’re seeing the fireworks. Which in fact we are.

Mr. Curmudgeon: And you mean to say, me lad, that you don’t think of all this play-writin’ business as just a lot of literary showin’-off?

Me lad: Yes, me Mr. Curmudgeon. It IS a lot of literary showin’-off, but that’s just the point.

Mr. Curmudgeon: The showin’ off?

My lad: No, the point.

Plump Young Lady in the Bushes: And then I seduced him, aye. I rolled around in the grass gettin’ me dress dairty, and I opened me legs and I sinned and sinned until me diaphragm exploded.

Fifteenth voice: Oh Mr. Playwright, please,please isn’t it about time this play got started? I meansay, up to now it just doesn’t seem to have much of a point.

Mr. Cadwalladwrrwrr: Oh but the point is, I drownded at sea fifty years ago and it were wonderful. Now the fishes swim through me eye sockets and eat me brain.

Mrs. Cadwall-whatever: You bastard, get back into bed and sarrvice me!

(Oh, the earthiness! The bawdiness! The Chaucerian attempts at naughtiness!)

So. Ye heark. Heark ye, for the citizens of Blowitoutyourarse are about to Speak. They don’t have much to say but that never slowed down that other Mr. Thomas up until now. Moreover, I am about to reveal his Literary Secret, his method. He collared some lad in the White Horse pub and had him scrawl down any-such-thing because he had a publisher’s advance, see? So it was time for him to get right poetical-like.

Miscellaneous voice: Yes. Nothing inspires the poet like a few dozen pints of Guinness, a pathetic publisher’s advance that’s already spent and a towering deadline, after which will follow a timely and merciless lawsuit. So it were time Mr. Thomas began to write about his imaginary little village, which to avoid being sued for libel he renamed Lllargybargybrwllltwlltwwlt –

Another Plump Young Lady, but not as seductive:
- which keeps on changin’ its spellin’ - just to confuse the tourists – who come to here to Blowarse, as we like to call it, to see the heavin’ bleedin' whales in the place of his boyhood – that other Thomas, I mean, the one who could write –

Parson Llewwllynn: Silence, woman! Shut thy slutty mouth and speak no more! Thou hast been found out: thou possesseth a vagina and will be cast into everlasting hell because you suddenly realized it!

(Oh, the tight-lipped pastor – such wicked mirth at his expense!)

Dylan Thomas: There are no whales in

Wales

(All voices, in unison): Just wails!

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Signifying. . . nothing?

Medical stuff is a poor topic, I know, but lately I’ve become preoccupied with it. And this in spite of the fact that I hate seeing doctors and very rarely feel that I am being listened to or taken seriously.

I’m in that grinder of tests that everyone is fed into when there are any sort of symptoms at all. So far I’ve been safely spat out the other side, given the all-clear. I WANT this to be over with and I WANT to feel entirely OK.

And I don’t.

I won’t recount what the “symptoms” are (and how I hate that word, as it implies “this person must really be sick”, when the “issue” is finding out if I am even sick at all.). They’re boring, “signifying nothing”, as Hamlet used to say on one of his bad days. But whatever they are, or aren’t, they won’t go away, not yet anyway, though I know they will be gone tomorrow morning and never be back.

I can’t go in. That’s what I told my husband today. I just can’t. The thought of “going in” stirred up an ice-storm of panic that sucked me up into some sort of whirling white vortex, and all I wanted to do was get OUT. I haven’t called and I haven’t made an appointment because I know there is nothing wrong with me, so there is no point.

Then how to ignore the swirling forces of “whatever” that I can’t seem to get away from? It’s probably nothing. I’m not bleeding to death, hey! I can walk. Sometimes I find it hard to walk fast however and don’t want to, or have to sit down.

I never get sick, and if I do they throw me out anyway. I am never listened to. This is one of these dysphoric, self-annihilating realizations that jams my face down in the mud of mortality. Have I had a good life? Have I felt wanted? And just what have I contributed, anyway?

It could have been worse, I suppose, could have ended me in my mid-30s, though I jumped clear just in time before the locomotive ran me over. But in the midst of the high of turning 50, at the very peak of my happiness and productivity, it happened again. This one was truly wicked and seemed to indicate demonic forces that I could barely grapple with. At the same time, I completely lost my faith.

I understand self-destruction, too well, but I refuse to do it. I’ve been pared down pretty far in the past few years, though you’d never know it to look at me (for I’ve gained at least blblblblt lbs.) I cling to the tattered remnants of my ambition, realizing that the playwright Clifford Odets was so so right when he said, “Success is the jinni (genie: playwrights can't spell) that kills.”

Another playwright from the same era, George S. Kaufman (whose wife Beatrice was BFF with Oscar Levant) said, “What makes you, unmakes you.” If you understand this at all, then you are already unmade.

But aren’t we ALL unmade in the end, like some great tumbled tangled psychic bed? Trees fall and rot, and so do we, though the medical profession tries very hard to beat back the flames (sorry for the mixed metaphor). I wonder why we scramble so hard to stay alive for as long as we possibly can. Don’t we all end up in pretty much the same place?

I know that sounds bleak, and I would gladly give an arm and a leg and both kidneys to anyone in my very small, very close, very dear circle of family. I wouldn’t even have to think about it. But I just can’t see it in general. As Charlie Brown once said (speaking of great playwrights of the 1920s), “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand.”

I’ve missed the comrades who’ve fallen, and there have been too many of them: wise Gerry the benevolent patriarch, quickly consumed by cancer; beloved Peter, the best friend I ever made in two seconds, who seemed to be gone in another two; Glen the journalist/poet who fled from the psych ward and committed suicide; Ken the devoted cynic and constant presence in my church choir, who literally dropped dead in his tracks. Then – weirdly – Kathleen, who never should have died at all, who cannot be dead because it just isn’t possible.

There’s another one or two in there, and I can’t remember who they were. Now this is weird. I thought there were six, at least. How could I forget a whole person?

I just recently started nosing around in the work of Dylan Thomas again, remembering that he sometimes wrote “shape poems” (concrete poems that took the actual shape of objects or whatever-the-hell. Childish, really.) All I could find in his poetic imagery was mortality, and more mortality, rot and death, mixed in with some pretty ghastly sexual images. The guy ended at 39, self-ended I mean, awash in alcohol: the innocent baby-bird look of his youth had grown puffy, slur-eyed, deathward, with a large bulb for a nose. A tragic or pathetic or even disgusting clown. Poets seem to off themselves early, one way or another, hating life, seeing through it, or hating themselves. Robert Frost was one of the few who escaped that fate, though I remember reading somewhere that his son committed suicide.

So what does all this have to do with not wanting to call the fucking doctor?

I know I will call eventually, or maybe I will not, because nothing’s wrong anyway. I’m just all caught up in this stuff and have to get away from it. I am now in my 60^th year, for fuck’s sake, and though I don’t feel old, time has whipped by in such a blur that it shocks me sometimes. I was sitting in a restaurant across from my son at my birthday dinner last night, and thought to myself: he looks almost middle-aged. His hair is thinning and he has lines around his eyes and mouth. He looks great, is very buff, bulky with muscle as he never was in his boyhood when he generally got sand kicked in his face. He’s a superb athlete who has a good chance of reaching 90 because his habits are so much better than mine. But still. A receding hairline? I remember the night I gave birth to him.

And here are these two Nordic-looking blonde grandgirls who surely must have inherited their startlingly blue eyes and cornsilk hair from my side of the family, though several generations removed: I just helped push the blonde genes along. I noticed Erica’s hands as she did a magic trick with crayons, and I was shocked to note that they look like her father’s, which look like mine.

Well, you can’t bail on THAT, can you? My time with them is timeless, a complete absorption in giggly fun and a wash of unconditional love. Do I need to stay around to be the conduit for such love (for surely I am not the “source” but only the conveyor)? Or, like everyone else, will I stay because of the same primal urge to survive that has overpopulated the earth to the point of near-catastrophe?

Post-blog: Actually, I think it was Macbeth, that "signifying nothing" bit I mean. I've always liked the Scottish play, and the "life's but a walking shadow" speech is just about the only Shakespeare I can recite by heart. I'm the life of the party, can't you tell?

Monday, February 11, 2013

Let's Play With Shapes!: or, the concrete poetry of Dylan Thomas

Who

Are you

Who is born

In the next room

So loud to my own

That I can hear the womb

Opening and the dark run

Over the ghost and the dropped son

Behind the wall thin as a wren’s bone?

In the birth bloody room unknown

To the burn and turn of time

And the heart print of man

Bows no baptism

But dark alone

Blessing on

The wild

Child.

Now

Now
Say nay,
Man dry man,
Dry lover mine
The deadrock base and blow the flowered anchor,
Should he, for centre sake, hop in the dust,
Forsake, the fool, the hardiness of anger.

Now
Say nay,
Sir no say,
Death to the yes,
the yes to death, the yesman and the answer,
Should he who split his children with a cure
Have brotherless his sister on the handsaw.

Now
Say nay,
No say sir
Yea the dead stir,
And this, nor this, is shade, the landed crow,
He lying low with ruin in his ear,
The cockrel's tide upcasting from the fire.

Now
Say nay,
So star fall,
So the ball fail,
So solve the mystic sun, the wife of light,
The sun that leaps on petals through a nought,
The come-a-cropper rider of the flower.

Now
Say nay
A fig for
The seal of fire,
Death hairy-heeled and the tapped ghost in wood,
We make me mystic as the arm of air,
The two-a-vein, the foreskin, and the cloud.

Ceremony After a Fire Raid

I
Myselves
The grievers
Grieve
Among the street burned to tireless death
A child of a few hours
With its kneading mouth
Charred on the black breast of the grave
The mother dug, and its arms full of fires.

Begin
With singing
Sing
Darkness kindled back into beginning
When the caught tongue nodded blind,
A star was broken
Into the centuries of the child
Myselves grieve now, and miracles cannot atone.

Forgive
Us forgive
Us your death that myselves the believers
May hold it in a great flood
Till the blood shall spurt,
And the dust shall sing like a bird
As the grains blow, as your death grows, through our heart.

Crying
Your dying
Cry,
Child beyond cockcrow, by the fire-dwarfed
Street we chant the flying sea
In the body bereft.
Love is the last light spoken. Oh
Seed of sons in the loin of the black husk left.

If I were tickled by

the rub of love a rooking girl

who stole me for her side why then

I might be able to write them shapes

just the way Mr. Dylan Thomas could

do, that is when he was not too sou

sed by Divine Inspiration which has

soused many a good writer into

an early grave. If I were tick

led by the rub of love, I

might now have ear

ned a little mon

ey from all

this non

sens

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

NOT a Child's Christmas in Wales: really bad Dylan Thomas

Not too many people know this, but I'll tell you right now: Dylan Thomas was a really bad writer. He crammed adjectives together in a way that made everyone gasp, "Ohhhhh!" and "Wheeeee," as if they were watching fireworks. But that's not good writing. That is what is referred to in literary terms as a "cheap trick".

He wrote about Wales as if it were the dark side of the moon, some exotic or even erotic place where the sea sang its siren song: but the truth is he hated Wales. Hated its narrow religion and suffocating parochialism and "the museum that should have been in a museum" (and I've seen a few of those). He must have hated where he came from, or he wouldn't have gone to America to read poetry to melting young girls and get so soused his head exploded. He had to have a shtick of some sort, a shtick that other writers hadn't quite thought about, a Yeats-ian, Joyce-ean thing, except not Irish.

You HAVE to love Dylan Thomas. You HAVE to admire the solid blocks of poetry or the yammering sing-songy short stories. The only one I really liked was about the guy in the bar, soused, who meets the love of his life, goes to the men's room and never finds his way back. Ever. Reminds me a bit of This is Spinal Tap and how they can't find the stage. You can't say you hate Dylan Thomas and hold your head up in literary circles. Oh, but look at this image! Oh, but look how he does this, how he does that. Though there are some interesting images in And Death Shall Have No Dominion, it seems to have been written for Richard Burton (soused) to read on the Ed Sullivan Show, which in fact I think he did.

Reading A Child's Christmas in Wales used to be de rigueur in classrooms and around the fireplace on Christmas Eve. Today it all feels dated somehow, dense Christmas pudding or a fruitcake passed back and forth in the family until it turns into the sort of igneous rock that was used to build the ancient Pyramids.

This is only a small fragment of one of Thomas' more interminable short stories, called Quite Early one Morning. It was written to pad out the selections on a Caedmon recording he did in the '40s - I know because I have a copy of it rattling around somewhere. Dylan Thomas was famous for his "Welsh-singing" voice and his magnificent readings. OK, if you like Richard Burton with a headcold and a hangover. There is a definite wobble. And then there was the mess of his personal life, which I will not get into.

This story (the fragment I have shared here: it's about a zillion pages long and I thought you'd get bored) is precious and atrocious at the same time. Pretrocious? It's cute. Those little Welsh people in the town, goddamn! they were funny to write about. It drips with the sort of entitlement that announces to the world, "I have arrived. And you have not." It may or may not be a forerunner of Under Milk Wood: Under Skim Milk Wood, perhaps.

I used to love A Child's Christmas in Wales until I actually read it and saw all sorts of cheap verbal tricks going on. If you really want a good Christmas story, make like Linus in the Peanuts story, hit the lights and open the gospel of Luke. In the meantime, this ISN'T from A Child's Christmas in Wales, so it can't be all bad.

I walked on to the cliff path again, the town behind and below waking up now so very slowly; I stopped and turned and looked. Smoke from one chimney - the cobbler's, I thought, but from that distance it may have been the chimney of the retired male nurse who had come to live in Wales after many years' successful wrestling with the mad rich of Southern England. (He was not liked. He measured you for a strait-jacket carefully with his eye; he saw you bounce from rubber walls like a sorbo ball. No behaviour surprised him. Many people of the town found it hard to resist leering at him suddenly around the corner, or convulsively dancing, or pointing with laughter and devilish good humour at invisible dog-fights merely to prove to him that they were normal.)

Smoke from another chimney now. They were burning their last night's dreams. Up from a chimney came a long-haired wraith like an old politician. Someone had been dreaming of the Liberal Party. But no, the smoky figure wove, attenuated, into a refined and precise grey comma. Someone had been dreaming of reading Charles Morgan. Oh! the town was waking now and I heard distinctly, insistent over the slow-speaking sea, the voices of the town blown up to me. And some of the voices said:

I am Miss May Hughes 'The Cosy', a lonely lady,
Waiting in her house by the nasty sea,
Waiting for her husband and pretty baby
To come home at last from wherever they may be.

I am Captain Tiny Evans, my ship was the 'Kidwelly'
And Mrs Tiny Evans has been dead for many a year.
'Poor Captain Tiny all alone', the neighbours whisper,
But I like it all alone, and I hated her.

Clara Tawe Jenkins, 'Madam' they call me,
An old contralto with her dressing-gown on,
And I sit at the window and I sing to the sea,
For the sea does not notice that my voice has gone.

Parchedig Thomas Evans making morning tea,
Very weak tea, too, you mustn't waste a leaf,
Every morning making tea in my house by the sea
I am troubled by one thing only, and that, belief.

Open the curtains, light the fire, what are servants for?
I am Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard and I want another snooze.
Dust the china, feed the canary, sweep the drawing-room door;
And before you let the sun in, mind he wipes his shoes.

I am only Mr Griffiths, very short-sighted, B.A., Aber.
As soon as I finish my egg I must shuffle off to school.
O patron saint of teachers, teach me to keep order,
And forget those words on the blackboard - 'Griffiths Bat is a fool.'

Do you hear that whistling?- It's me, I am Phoebe,
The maid at the King's Head, and I am whistling like a bird.
Someone spilt a tin of pepper in the tea.
There's twenty for breakfast and I'm not going to say a word.

I can see the Atlantic from my bed where I always lie,
Night and day, night and day, eating my bread and slops.
The quiet cripple staring at the sea and the sky.
I shall lie here till the sky goes out and the sea stops.

Thus some of the voices of a cliff-perched town at the far end of Wales moved out of sleep and darkness into the new-born, ancient and ageless morning, moved and were lost.