Lord Robens on the car industry Reviews by John Kenyon and Auberon Waugh

Gabriel Pearson on Dylan Thomas

The energies that went into repudiating bylan Thomas after his death and in combating the glib and ghoulish publicity he SO lavishly fed with his own viscera are evidently still unappeased. Thomas lies in critical limbo; despite the traditional scholarly embalming, he retains a flavour Of tainted meat, of matter over-hung, overhigh, and subtly off. This has become clear again in the marked indifference that has greeted these two volumes*. They have had to be noticed, but have hardly been Welcomed. Compared with the warm Waves of fuss that will, quite rightly, lap around the newly-published facsimile of The Waste Land, the reception has been almost blatantly cool. I take this to mean that Thomas's legend is charged and dangerous and potent enough to make critics edge away when they see it making towards them refurbished in these two handsome volumes. The legend is still an Lin-negotiated legacy, fraught with predictable discomfort however you play it, Whether with aloofness or bold enthusiasm. Either way, Thomas remains Powerful, disreputable and not to be patronised.

All the heads under which he might be tYPed simply fail to contain him. He was a 'fifties provincial two decades early, but Without their aggression and their envy and with the secure wit that allowed him to joke about his forays to the metropolis as "Capital punishment." He ended, notoriously, as the victim of a unique brand of academic show-business without any of the exculpatory alibis that now attach to dealings with Pop. He was postBohemian and pre-hip. In so far as he has been located at all, it is as a Welsh word wizard, a kind of literary Owen Glendower, leading his drunken tribes in apocalyptic warfare against the Auden gang. This is the kind of literary history Proposed, for example, by Alvarez in the introduction to his Penguin The New P°etrY. He argues that Thomas was all right because he had something to say. He

*Dylan Thomas: The Early Prose Writings edited by Walford Davis (Dent £2.50) DYlan Thomas: The Poems edited by Jones (Dent £2.50) was " a fine rhetorician " (a phrase which registers the same sort of embarrassment as does Leavis's calling Dickens " a great entertainer "), but he was a bad example, rightly exorcised by the sobriety of the 'fifties.

The publication of The Poems should at least alert us to the fact that this account is badly faulty. Thomas did not lead a reaction against Auden but was in fact a younger contemporary, who divided the decade with him. The editor of The Early Prose quotes Thomas in 1937 evaluating Auden as "a wide and deep poet . . . as potentially productive of greatness, as any poet writing in English." This magisterial praise is quickly qualified by the envious whiplash of his last sentence: "Congratulations on Auden's seventieth birthday" which sounds like the confident challenge of a younger brother rather than the roar of a usurping son. The Poems remind one that very early Thomas was not unlike early Auden. They shared a common predicament, a common search for an idiom, which in both cases manifests itself as an extreme precociousness.

Both had rapidly and early to improvise functioning poetic identities in the absence of sustaining traditions and centralities. Both were, I would argue, real heirs of the first world war — much more so than the elders who actually escaped or experienced it — having to find themselves, or some version of a self, with very little aid, in the evacuation of 'social and cultural value that was the aftermath of the war. The great masters of modernism — Lawrence, Joyce, Eliot, Pound — still drew on the relatively stable resources of pre-1914 Europe. By contrast, both Auden and Thomas strike one as representing a spiritually orphaned generation coming to consciousness of itself in a landscape strewn with literal, social and literary ruins, one made empty by catastrophe. It comes almost suspiciously pat to my case that Thomas was born in 1914.

This relates them both to a much wider climate of post-war European expressionism. Auden arrived in Berlin as if by a homing instinct. Of course both manifest the peculiar insular disabilities and social strengths of the English experience. There was no avant-garde, and really little else to join. Both poets, in their early work, seem to be groping for primary shapes and structures with which to contact or encounter the social emptiness about them. And both manifest at the beginning a not dissimilar vein of nervy apocalyptic jokiness. A couplet from an unpublished poem of 1933 shows Thomas producing an Audenesque effect: The Western man has lost one lung And cannot mount a clothes horse without bleeding

This is perhaps more seriously surrealist than anything Auden could manage though in fairness it should be added that it occurs in a poem sloppier than anything Auden could conceive. The pun on "Western man" reminds us of the background of mass culture again which both Auden and Dylan Thomas wrote, with its simultaneous overstimulation and exhaustion of meaning. One of the finds of The Early Prose Writings is a surprisingly adept and informed essay on 'The Films' written when Thomas was sixteen. The relationship between intensive film-going and precocity is a fairly obvious one. Another fragment, however, points up a significant difference:

Before the gas fades with a last harsh bubble, And the bun in the hatstand discovers no coppers, Before the last fag and the shirt sleeves and slippers, The century's trap will have snapped round your middle.

This kind of social detail is well within Auden's compass and the minatory syntax sounds like Auden in one of his sinisterfolksy veins rather than Thomas. But the word fag seems to explode from inside the milieu, not far enough indeed to escape a note of 'fifty-ish triviality, but still pointing inwards to an interiority of social usage which was one of the linguistic levels that Thomas later built into his multi-layered diction, with the effect that enabled him quite naturally to relate a failure of inspiration to the environment of mass unemployment:

Oh no work of words now for three lean months in the bloody Belly of the rich year . . .

The virtue of this new volume of the poems is that it makes evident what we have always known, that the bulk of Thomas's poetic output dates from between 1929 and 1933, the period,

substantially, of early Auden. This tends to be obscured by Collected Poems, 1934 1952. Indeed, the date 1934 is thoroughly

misleading, referring as it does to Thomas's first published volume. Readers

should be assured that The Poems in no sense supersedes Collected Poems. That has a retrospective concentration and

integrity: it is what Thomas at his most mature wanted to have established as his. Indeed, Thomas, at his death, left surprisingly few loose ends; only two

unfinished poems, both reconstructions, both printed here. By contrast, The Poems

looks inevitably bushy and baggy, pulling the emphasis back to Thomas's extraordinarily productive adolescence. But they also make the comparison with Auden more inescapable. Indeed, they begin to seem like part of one whole when viewed together in their beginnings. Each over develops what the other neglects: crudely, thought as against feeling. Auden handles language from outside, like a craftsman or sportsman, while Thomas burrows into the body of the language itself from which he delivers oracles from the heat of its decomposition. They were together, it seems to me, the sundered halves of the great modernist poet that English poetry, after Eliot, failed to throw up.

This helps to explain the shape of their careers, of their lives, even, in Thomas's case, to determine a choice of deaths. Both remained until the end of the 'thirties essentially adolescents, constructing a highly synthetic, one-sided poetic identity. Auden retained the aloofness, the collec.': tor's disinterestedness (a late carry-over from what the psychologists call the latency period), a fascination with inventions. codes, gangs. Thomas harnessed an equally adolescent hysteria, based on a fascinated and horrified curiosity about bodily function. Both poets came to sharp crisis points in their careers at about the same time. Auden went to America; Thomas almost stopped writing poetry, became involved with film scripting and sold off the notebooks from which he had quarried poems all through the 'thirties.

Both then leapt across the crisis period into modified versions of their adolescent selves. Thomas became concerned with childhood which he viewed in a premature perspective of old age. Auden consolidated the encyclopaedic tendencies of the latency period, while handling the vicissi tudes of his career with a strategic discipline that worked by spreading the load without dissipating energy. Even their collected poems (Auden's of 1950 and Thomas's of 1952) seem to have the definitiveness of an established fate. Auden's subsequent presence has seemed in some respects less eloquent than Thomas's absence.

Of the two, I believe, against the grain of current prejudice, Thomas denied less of himself than Auden and emerges from a reading of his poetry and prose 'as the richer, more humanly grounded artist. His vision tells in the major cruxes of his own life. I have in mind such poems of his late earlier manner as 'If my head hurts' and ' I make this in a warring absence' where vision and life experience seem to come together and uphold the dignity and truth of each. They are surely the most splendidly worded odes written by any British poet since Yeats. They have the courage to dispense with irony and metaphysical apparatus and speak densely but directly. Likewise, ' Alterwise by OwlLight' achieves the kind of synthetic epic allegory that is the typical product of classic modernism and compared with which Auden's work seems bodiless and dissipated.

Finally, there is the question of their prose. Neither Thomas nor Auden is a major prose writer, but like Eliot and Yeats their prose forms a matrix for theii, poetry. Auden's critical writing is undoubtedly superior to Thomas's. The reviews collected in The Early Prose do show that Thomas's judgements Could be shrewd and independent. The aplomb with which he cuts straight to the central mush of contemporaries like Spender and Lehmann is impressive. As an imaginative prosewriter Thomas seems to me to have been consistently undervalued. He developed early an expressionist prose which he handled with a bravura, a fundamental sense of knowing what he was doing, found in no contemporary writer. The stories reprinted in The Early Prose are impressive by any standards but when one takes into account how quickly he modulated into the delicate realism of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog the achievement, for all its casualness, seems astonishing. Thomas's legend remains the enemy. It has induced timidity. It will probably zterly.us both the Variorum Poems and the,leolleCtfid Prose that we need to see his'aolilevemerit,whole, But it would be nice to think that these two volumes have arrived in time to promote some belatedly intelligent thinking about him.