Coursing through the frozen prairie in 1950 aboard a night train from Chicago to Iowa City, where he was scheduled to deliver a highly anticipated reading hosted by the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and attended by the wider campus community, the world-renowned Welsh poet Dylan Thomas did what came naturally—he imbibed with the locals. As famous as he was, Thomas was never more comfortable than at a bar cavorting with perfect strangers, swapping tales, and filling the room with his raucous wit and Welsh-English brogue. The fellow travelers he fell in with in this case were hard-drinking truck drivers, whose conviviality was not below this poet renowned for his BBC broadcasts and poetry volume Deaths and Entrances, published in 1946, that established him as a major literary figure. With Thomas in the mix, the otherwise drab dining car on this blindingly boring four-hour journey west across the Mississippi River valley was overflowing with high spirits. Thomas had boarded the train sober; but when Workshop faculty member Ray B. West, Jr., arrived to shuttle him to his speaking engagement, set to take place in the Senate Chamber of the Old Capitol just a few hours later, the poet was dead drunk. As West helped him from the train, Thomas bellowed in agony, “This is the night I don’t go on!”1
Given the high stakes of Thomas’s visit, a fast and furious remedy was necessary. Staff and administration had been long preparing for his arrival, rolling out the red carpet for this distinguished guest by situating his talk in the majestic gold-domed Old Capitol building, the architectural crown jewel at the heart of campus reserved for only the most auspicious occasions. Barely able to walk, Thomas was beside himself muttering an incoherent slur of profanity-laced epithets, disheveled and in no shape to face the university community’s top brass. High-profile representatives from the publishing industry, including Seymour Lawrence, were also in attendance. This was a cast carefully arranged by Workshop director Paul Engle to be a glittering spectacle for potential investors in the program and to stimulate the professional development of his students. West knew the show must go on.
Thinking fast, West went where most Workshop faculty and students gravitated when facing an acute crisis, whether financial, personal, or creative—the Quonset hut main office situated a short distance down the hill from the Old Capitol building. Like Gabriel piloting the obliterated Freddy Malins across the dance floor and out of view for the sake of decency in James Joyce’s “The Dead,” West rushed Thomas into the office bathroom, which had an actual tub, dunked him in ice-cold water, helped him back into his clothes, and ushered him up the hill to the awaiting packed audience of literati and dignitaries in the stately confines of the Senate Chamber. Miraculously, as W. D. Snodgrass recalled, “he delivered one of his most beautiful readings,” fully living up to the occasion Robert Lowell’s introduction described in superlative terms. The purpose of the event, Lowell said, was “to hear an important poet, perhaps the most important of our time—a poet who had altered the modern trend, who seemed to have sprung from a different tradition than most poets today, who had revived what seemed to be a romantic sensibility at its best,” as West later paraphrased it. His reading was mellifluous and powerful; “his syllables penetrated the far corners of the hall, each word distinct from the next, so that it seemed to hover a moment in the air like the flare of a rocket before giving way to the next one.” The fireworks were delivered with a stately grace one could imagine of Lord Byron himself, his voice “sonorous and nearly Shakespearean” as he held the book with his arm theatrically extended. Between passages his arm lowered and his eyes glazed over. The public stage persona of the poetry reader, a consummate professional, transformed into the private romantic bohemian, a waggish buffoon whose “speech was slurred, shambling, obscene.”2 Then, beginning to read again, he raised his head, extended the book and shifted back into character, summoning back the oracular “strange compelling music of his native Welsh diction.” Occasionally he would pause to pick up a glass of water, only to regard it with a look of horror and replace it quickly on the table, the chill of his jarring ice bath still deep in his bones. That “strange and wild” voice overwhelmed the room, leaving listeners marveling. “There is nothing like Dylan Thomas in poetry today. There is a wholeness, a harmony, a radiance about everything he has written which sets him apart,” as Lawrence Ferlinghetti described his later performance in San Francisco in 1952.3
Thomas was the most notorious reckless romantic of his era, and his hostility to academic literary critics—he detested their “bloody nit picking”—paradoxically made him more attractive to university audiences.4 Literary critics and creative writing teachers especially found appealing the authenticity of this performing poet, seemingly from another era, who lived for the music of verse.5 From his early BBC days, oratorical performance was his strong suit; a Thomas poem was always better read in his own voice than silently on the printed page. In addition to influencing the faculty and students on the many college campuses where he read, “the tradition of oral poetry Thomas presented became a model as well for many of the younger poets who were to constitute the heart of the San Francisco Renaissance—the Beat Generation,” as Beat historian Barry Silesky observes.6
Iowa was but one stop on his whirlwind tour of the United States that began in late February of 1950 and was intended to showcase that charismatic voice. Thomas’s proclamation that this was the night he would not go on, which spurred the horrified West into action to ensure that he did, exposed his fear that his bacchanalian lifestyle might prevent him from meeting all the dates on the frantic schedule set by his agent, John Malcolm Brinnin. Starting at Yale and Harvard, he made stops for readings throughout New England and proceeded to the Midwest, which included the Universities of Chicago, Illinois, and Notre Dame before his journey by train to Iowa. The breakneck pace of the tour was daunting; he would keep more than thirty engagements over the span of three months. Almost all of his stops were at universities with jaunts into the broader literary and entertainment culture off campus. Across the bay from UC Berkeley he mixed with Beat poets in San Francisco, led by Lawrence Ferlinghetti at their haven in City Lights Books, and near UCLA, he fell in with Hollywood film icons Shelley Winters and Charlie Chaplin. Winters not only knew of Thomas but was familiar with his poetry. When he amorously took her enthusiasm the wrong way, she successfully rebuffed his advances. Chaplin hosted him at his home and treated his group to an impromptu comedy routine. When the star-struck poet said his friends in Wales would never believe he had been the guest of Chaplin, his host delighted him by instantly composing a cable and sending it off to his wife Caitlin in Laugharne.7
This was no perfunctory set of visits, but a carefully plotted tour arranged by his literary agent Brinnin to maximize Thomas’s exposure and generate employment opportunities. What brought Thomas to Iowa was a combination of the sheer scale of Brinnin’s colossal publicity network, fueling the literary equivalent of the Beatles’ American invasion, and Engle’s extraordinary capacity to attract the most significant writers of the era. Robert Lowell’s presence on the faculty was the key to securing the date with Thomas, who had admired his poetry and sought a similar position to his at an American university as a means of continuing his career as a practicing poet. A key shift in Engle’s responsibilities for the Workshop had led to his hiring of Lowell. When Ray West brought his journal the Western Review with him to Iowa, Engle’s editorial duties ceased. West’s Review lifted Engle’s burden of running a new journal after American Prefaces had discontinued publication during the war years. This enabled Engle to concentrate his energy and time on expanding his network, which rapidly grew to include “every American and British writer of any accomplishment in the last sixty years,” many of whom Engle brought to Iowa as faculty, both temporary and long-term, or students.8 In a 1976 letter, West recalled that Engle was in New York soliciting funding for the program during Thomas’s visit, noting that the “teachers of poetry during Paul’s absence were Robert Lowell and John Berryman” and that the “Visitors who came to read and lecture included, most
memorably, Dylan Thomas and Roy Campbell.”9
Lowell, thinking like Engle, knew that Thomas’s presence on campus would infuse the program with fresh energy. West had recently heard word that Thomas was nursing a horrific hangover after his Notre Dame engagement, when “the boys in Chicago had been feeding him boilermakers.” Advised to restrict hard liquor and “keep him on beer,” since “he loves beer and gets along well on it,” West heard opposite advice from Lowell, who knew what kind of impact an unleashed Dylan Thomas could have on the campus community. With no limits to his behavior, Thomas might “be provoked into creating some scandalous fuss that would enliven the city,” a comment revealing how little Lowell cared for the visitor’s personal well-being in the process of exploiting his popularity for the Workshop’s benefit. Thomas’s stay with West extended to just under two weeks before he boarded a flight from Cedar Rapids to San Francisco to continue his tour.10
Since Thomas emulated Lowell and desired a position like his at Iowa, he knew that remaining as long as possible beyond the requisite night or two might pay dividends toward a future faculty job. In the wake of the tour, he entered negotiations for a position with the speech department at the University of California, Berkeley, despite his failure to comprehend the unit’s purpose and self-definition. “I don’t quite know what the function of this department is,” he confessed, undeterred in his pursuit of an offer. “No date for my possible employment was mentioned, but I gather that it is under discussion now,” he wrote a friend in hopeful tones.11 During the planning of the tour, Thomas made his immediate short-term demands clear: “I don’t want to work my head off, but, on the other hand, I do want to return to England with some dollars in my pocket.” Aware of his own inability to handle money and perennial confusion about the location and time of his appointments, he gratefully handed over such matters to Brinnin: “I’ll have to leave this to you. I hand the baby over, with bewildered gratitude.”12
After returning from his trip, he wrote his wealthy patron Margaret Taylor about the position of poets in universities. On display in the letter is Thomas’s capacity to play the mad poet persona on the page and not just in person. In it, he dramatizes his exhilarating and exhausting tour that kept him from his correspondence. “I was floored by my florid and stentorious spouting of verses to thousands of young pieces whose minds, at least, were virgin territory,” he quipped with a clever double-entendre. Delighting in the sound of his rollicking recollection, he continued, “I was giddy agog from the slurred bibble babble, over cocktails bold enough to snap one’s braces, of academic alcoholics anything but anonymous.” In Iowa City, he was escorted in “powerful cars at seventy miles an hour,” rocket-like speed for the time, “tearing from Joe’s Place to Mick’s Stakery, from party to party.”13 The letter then abruptly pivots as Thomas dons his poised and calculating alter ego, an identity acutely aware of the institutional parameters of making a living as a professional poet.
In sober exacting prose clashing with the madcap debauchery of the letter’s opening two paragraphs, Thomas measures the landscape of professional positions for poets, paying close attention to the role of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The shift suggests Thomas’s use of the mad poet role was a gratuitous act for Taylor’s amusement, a way of charming her before focusing on business. Now surveying his competition with deadly accuracy, he identifies the only well-known poets unattached to universities, “Wallace Stevens, Vice President of an Insurance company, and e. e. cummings, President, Treasurer, Secretary, & all the shareholders of E. E. Cummings Ltd, a company that exports large chunks of E. E. Cummings to a reluctant public,” he observed with a jab at his rival. But Robert Lowell’s career, he makes clear, is exemplary of the potential for a poet’s professionalization in conjunction with American academic institutions in 1950. With great precision, he defines Lowell’s position as “running a Poetry Workshop in Iowa State University [before it was renamed the University of Iowa], there to ‘discuss the demands of the craft, to criticize the individual works of student members of the workshop, and to foster enthusiasm for poetry & the sense of criticism among them.’ ” He notes Lowell’s official title is “Poet in Residence” and that another writer runs a similar workshop only for prose. “Lowell is paid the same salary as an Assistant Professor: in his case, between 5 & 6,000 a year.” The advantages to such a position are obvious compared with the dearth of such professional opportunities for poets in Great Britain. “The disparity in incomes, & in spending power, between America & here is so great,” he noted, that one can only imagine “what money a similar post, if established here, would demand.”14
Taylor had considered providing funds for the establishment of a program in creative writing like Iowa’s at a British university, naming Thomas as faculty and perhaps director. The thoroughness and accuracy of his description of the various institutional arrangements for the employment of practicing poets at American universities suggest Thomas’s serious desire for such a position. He specifically comments on programs for whom “the procedure is the same as in Iowa” in which “the Poet in Residence is engaged for one year only,” comparing them to others. He described “other universities [where] the Poet is engaged for far longer periods, sometimes permanently.” The variance of time frames also pointed to the possibilities “to arrange for other poets to come along occasionally as guests, & supervise the activities of the workshop (if it could be called that) for one session or more and/or to read or lecture.”15 Taylor demurred on that prospect, but maintained her support of Thomas by purchasing a basement flat for him and his wife Caitlin in London, under the assumption that it would place him in a more favorable position from which to search for employment. The couple moved in winter of 1951, but Thomas detested the accommodations, calling it his “London house of horror,” and did not return after his second trip to the United States in 1952.16
Thomas’s admiration of American university positions for poets was of course complicated by his disdain for criticism. The day after his reading in the Senate Chamber of the Old Capitol at Iowa, Lowell introduced Thomas to thirty-five MFA students in one of the Workshop’s converted army barracks. Thomas, totally uncomfortable in the classroom environment, especially in the instructor’s role if only as a guest speaker, was bewildered. He asked Lowell sheepishly after his lavish introduction what he was supposed to do. Lowell, barely concealing his frustration, “waved his arms in the air. ‘Anything,’ he said, ‘just anything,’ ” West recalled. “Dylan explained that he was no critic, he didn’t really know how to talk about poetry, the way critics did.”17 Instead, he asked Lowell for an anthology of British poetry, which he handed him. Thomas, suddenly comfortable and animated, leafed through the pages to the poems that he liked, read them with the same dramatic virtuoso flair of his performance the day earlier, and paused to explain why they appealed to him. He also made mention of poems he disliked and offered explanations for each. The critic in him emerged. Had he lived longer, he might have found his voice as a powerful instructor in an MFA poetry workshop like Iowa’s.
Thomas’s admiration of university poets helps explain why he was relatively well behaved on his trip to Iowa City. As his correspondence indicates, he was on a mission to establish a professional career in the manner of his friend Robert Lowell. The unusually long time he spent at the Workshop, and willingness to make a return visit, point to the value of Iowa in his estimation. He left a lasting impression and was long remembered mainly for the poetry, if not for a few slips triggered by whisky. On one occasion, he succumbed at Joe’s Place in Iowa City, missing a dinner engagement and returning home to West’s residence early the next morning. A woman had taken him to her apartment on the opposite bank of the Iowa River where she kept his glass full of Scotch all evening while reading from her own poetry. Thomas tolerated the abysmal poetry in exchange for Scotch, so he stayed, missing his dinner date and alarming the Wests, who did not hear him stagger onto their porch until long after sunrise. On another occasi
on, a discussion with a doctor’s wife over martinis turned ugly. The conversation moved toward socialized health care, of which he was a staunch proponent, having benefited from it personally. “Why, you don’t know what you’re talking about!” she screamed at one point when she perceived one of his comments as an insult to her husband’s profession. He shot back reflexively, “You bloody fuckin’ bitch!” The phrase was a mere preface to what West described as “the most elegantly strung together sequence of obscenities she had ever heard uttered,” profane poetry at its best, liquor-ridden misogyny at its worst.18 If these were his most scandalous scrapes in Iowa City, he had behaved like an angel, especially compared with the ugly public battles—some devolving into embarrassing drunken tirades—with his wife Caitlin in San Francisco two years later.
Before he could make a concerted effort at securing a university position, Thomas died at the age of thirty-nine, on November 9, 1953, in a Catholic hospital in Manhattan just days after claiming, “I’ve had 18 straight whiskies. I think that’s a record!”19 Multiple complications—gout, upper respiratory infection, and several other untreated conditions—have been disputed since as the causes of death. Pathologists conducting the autopsy claimed that pneumonia, brain swelling, and a fatty liver were also contributing factors. He had complained of difficulty breathing and was rushed to the hospital, slipping into a coma for several days while doctors worked to revive him. Although Thomas himself was unconscious, his wife Caitlin was the one “raging at the light” in accord with his most famous poem. She arrived at the hospital “stinking drunk,” asking, “is the bloody man dead yet?” Complicating matters was the presence of Thomas’s mistress, Liz Reitell, at the hospital. Deepening tensions further, Reitell was the assistant to John Malcolm Brinnin, Thomas’s literary agent, who was also at his bedside.
A Delicate Aggression Page 21
