The oval Welshman.

Pryce-Jones, David

Andrew Lycett Dylan Thomas. Overlook Press, 416 pages, $35

"We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;/ But thereof come in the end despondency and madness." Wordsworth was writing about Thomas Chatterton, "the marvellous boy," but these memorable lines have done much to fix a popular and romanticized conception of the poet as someone called to purposes too high to be fulfilled, and therefore destined to burn out in disaster. In the twentieth century, Dylan Thomas was another marvellous boy who seems to prove that the poet's vocation really is stricken. Anyone thinking about him today can only be astonished and saddened by the drinking, profligacy, and philandering left in his wake. The squandering of his gifts looms like some exemplary warning never to be a poet. By the time of his death in 1953, a few days after his thirty-ninth birthday, he was far beyond despondency, and close to madness.

He had gifts all right, something all his own, a supple wordiness with a flair of comedy, even absurdity, about it. "Man should be two tooled, and a poet's middle leg is his pencil." Nobody else, not even Lawrence Durrell, could have written that. The way to seduce a barmaid in a pub, he thought, was to ask, "How would you like to fornicate with an oval Welshman?" Ireland, glimpsed on a flying visit, was "a wild, unlettered, unfrenchlettered country." Writing to George Barker, another poet all over the place, he revealed in a single sentence how self-pity bled into bravado (and all in odd grammar too): "all my friends are failures, I think the glories of the world are mingy, and the people I know and like best--hack Fleet streeters, assistant assistant film-producers, professional drunks, strays and outlaws, who are always, & always will be, just about to write their autobiographies." Philip Larkin was stingy with praise and quick to spot a fraud, but after listening to Thomas do a turn one evening, concluded, "Hell of a fine man: little, snubby, hopelessly pissed bloke who made hundreds of cracks and read parodies of everybody in appropriate voices."

Dylan Thomas's special contribution was to modernize Victorian sentimentality into a contemporary idiom. Sentimentality, critics usually say severely, depicts reality in a cosy light, which must be fatal to a serious writer. Is that necessarily so? Surely sentimentality for some is a welcome escape into a safe landscape, and for others it is a surrender to emotion, not on the grandest scale no doubt, but a lump in the throat is all the same better than indifference. Thomas's poems certainly aspire to be grand, even universal, but the wish for a happy ending flushes tints of pink and mauve through them. The weather is always stormy, the poems declare, but there is no real need to get wet. Take two of his most famous poems, "And death shall have no dominion" and "Do not go gentle into that good night." Both show how close his strength is to his weakness. Undoubted passion sustains the false comfort of the underlying thought. Death is certain to have dominion, and as for going gentle into that good night, the poem contradicts itself with the words of the second verse, "wise men at their end know dark is right."

The gladness of his youth is unmistakable. Like many born and growing up in the city of Swansea, he was a Welshman with an anglicized education and culture. His father was a rather stiff schoolmaster; his mother was kindly, without intellectual pretensions; both of them indulged their son. All his life he was running away from this background, while also regretting and idealizing it. This is the dynamic of Under Milk Wood, his play for voices in the manner of Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology, and a masterpiece of sentimentality like no other. Llareggub, his imaginary Welsh village whose name has to be read backwards with a giveaway giggle, is a garden paradise of lovable foibles. "We are not wholly bad or good/ Who live our lives under Milk Wood." Flattery of this sort sets an accepting smile of self-congratulation on every face in the audience.

Books by Constantine FitzGibbon, John Malcolm Brinnin, Paul Ferris, and one or two others have already pegged Dylan Thomas securely as another marvellous boy progressing to destruction. Andrew Lycett follows on. Professional biographer that he is, he has tracked down survivors from the storm, and unearthed unpublished notebooks and correspondence here and there. He likes his subject enough not to patronize him as others often do. "Fine" is the adjective he applies to almost all the poems he singles out, refraining from analysis though lapsing into occasional psychobabble about wombs and masturbation and spirituality. The approach is pretty steady, as in the old rhyme: One foot up and one foot down, that's the way to London town.

Dylan Thomas had more than his fair share of good fortune. To borrow a phrase of Cyril Connolly's, the old cats were watching at the mouse-holes of talent the moment he peeked out. Victor Neuburg, a long-forgotten minor literary entrepreneur, published his early poems. John Lehmann, Geoffrey Grigson, Connolly himself, in fact all the old cats, immediately fell over themselves to scoop him up. Edith Sitwell gushed on his behalf. He could write to his friend Vernon Watkins that he had lunched with "Pope" Eliot, who was "charming, a great man, I think, utterly unaffected," discussing for much of the time various methods of curing the rheumatism bothering him that day. A rare objector was Stephen Spender, who accused him of pouring "poetic stuff" as out of a tap. "Love thy neighbour and, if possible, covet his arse" was Dylan Thomas's mockery of the fashionable Auden-Spender style. His refusal to write political poetry was all the more striking because he larded his speech and his letters with the leftist cliches slopping around him.

Poetry in the Thirties was rich and varied, and most of the poets avoided romanticized doom quite as successfully as Wordsworth himself had once done. Dylan Thomas managed to steer a course among them. Sponging from friends proved easy, but when the pinch became unbearable he proved that he could earn money like any other hard-up egghead, writing scripts for the BBC and various film-makers, doing readings on the academic circuit in America. He liked to play cricket and croquet, to swim and go for picnics on the beach, and wanted a house of his own. Suburban respectability was a kernel planted deep in this marvellous boy's soul, mad out of it flowered that wondrous sentimentality.

Why, then, did it all go so wrong? Lycett is wise enough to leave open all possible judgments and conclusions. Now and again he suggests that Dylan Thomas was playing the role of poet, turning himself deliberately into something like a trade-mark, living on "guile mad beer:' Or perhaps some sense of being Welsh set up an insoluble tension when it came to living among the English and writing in their language. Welsh irony and humor are defensive tactics, and they escape measurement. "Land of my Fathers! As far as I'm concerned, my fathers can keep it" Plenty of other deracine intellectuals of Welsh origin have echoed this crack of his, while also making sure to live in Wales, or at least keep a foothold there. The pub-crawling was a latter-day version of Orpheus's descent into hell. At the end of one lecture, he was so drunk that he vomited into the fireplace. Incapacitated, he might well wet the mattress of any bed he passed out on. There seems to be no good reason for so much furious distress. "Ardents" was the contemptuous term he coined for the many women who were in the habit of throwing their impetuous selves at him. Some, for instance Margaret, wife of the historian A. J. P. Taylor, sought to mother him. Others, like Pearl Kazin, had fantasies of love. However much they had brought him, he threw them all over ungratefully. Cruelty is the flip side of sentimentality.

Which brings us to Caitlin Macnamara, Cat to him, his wife, the mother of his children. Either she was a bravely bohemian free spirit who blundered into a horror not of her making and was greatly punished for it, or she was Venus intent on her prey, a harpy, destroyer of the hapless curly-haired overgrown baby in her clutches. Either she too was sentimental and cruel by nature, or he obliged her to defend herself by outdoing his bad behavior. Her manners, her rudeness, scourged almost everyone she met. She could stub a cigarette out on the bare arm of someone who irritated her. Deliberately out to humiliate him for his heedless affairs, she picked up rough trade in the streets. When they fought physically, breaking bones and blacking eyes, she gave as good as she got, on occasion frightened that she had killed him. She made sure to spoil his every success. But who was victim, and who victimizer, is anyone's guess.

Lycett's account of the final scenes is bleak. They were apart, he in New York in a chaos of alcohol and medication; she in Wales with the children but no money. A week or so before Dylan Thomas swallowed the fatal eighteen straight whiskies which he boasted about with almost his dying words, but which were probably far fewer in number and anyhow less life-threatening than injections he had received from a doctor, she sent him a telegram: "You have left me no alternative but suicide or the streets. Hate. Caitlin." Flying in and hurrying to the hospital where he had been admitted in a coma, she asked, "Is the fucking man dead yet?" Friends arranged for her admission to a private psychiatric clinic on Long Island.

Years afterwards, a memorial plaque was put up to him in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, which is an English nod in the direction of immortality. Years afterwards too, Caitlin published a memoir in which she put the blame for everything on drink. A painfully lived reality now reposes in the beautified ending of legend, and the sentimentality of it perfectly fits the modern age.