from the Introduction to my Dylan Thomas Biography

Caitlin, the angry wife and then the angry widow of Dylan Thomas, used to say tartly that he had the sense to die young. She lived on for a further forty-one years, until 1994, hating her decrepitude, as Thomas might have hated his. But death at thirty-nine, more or less in the arms of a mistress, and awash with alcohol, freeze-framed him in people’s imagination as a poet who lived and died like one: lyrical, dissolute and struck down in his prime.

His story is more complex. Even the climactic scenes have been tinkered with. The final ‘eighteen straight whiskies’ are a myth. The mistress, though real enough, is evidence of casual infidelity, not of a great womaniser; he was too disorganised for that. Nor was he in his prime. By that October day in 1953, he was spiritually as well as physically wasted.

None of this matters in the long run, which is concerned with the poems, except that even here the lurid reputation has helped spread his fame and so drawn in readers who might never have heard of a poet who lived a quiet life and died, as he once predicted in a short story, of ‘a wasting, painless disease,’ speaking ‘my prepared last words.’ Look at internet search-engines and you might conclude, from the number of hits generated by the magic words ‘Dylan Thomas’ and ‘Under Milk Wood,’ that his fame is infinite.

This coupling of pop legend and literature has been a godsend to his biographers, who (understandably) have let each side of his life feed on the other. This process took some time to develop. It is hard to believe now that the first of us, Constantine FitzGibbon, a lull-time writer on the look-out for commissions, initially turned down an invitation to do the ‘official’ Life.

FitzGibbon, an American with Irish connections, was a clever and well-regarded writer; his political novel, When the Kissing Had to Stop, is still cited. He had known Thomas in wartime London. When the copyright trustees approached him in 1962, he replied that ‘Dylan really did nothing except write poems and be tremendous fun. I cannot see a full-length book in it.’ He was persuaded to have second thoughts.

The source of the Thomas legend is, not surprisingly, its subject. Accounts of extravagant behaviour are easily authenticated by quotes from the man himself, who liked to make comic capital from tales of wild living that were only half true or not true at all. The real Thomas lies deeper. Behind the public cavortings was a private agony, which is the real subject of biography.

Thomas’s career as a poet, the only course that ever occurred to him, was pursued at the expense of others. Apparently unable to manage his affairs, he relied on friends, patrons and wife to keep him in business, enjoying middle-class comforts. Being dependent didn’t worry him unduly. His begging letters were stylish and endlessly rewritten for maximum effect. But he was not unaware of the depths he could sink to. The draft of a cringing verse-letter he wrote to one of his patrons, Marged Howard-Stepney (Collected Letters, 932-3), was found by Caitlin, and drew an agonized apology from her husband for its ‘bamboozling dirt’ and ‘sycophantic arselicking.’

As far as he was concerned, his vocation excused everything, which is reasonable enough, given his talents, although with Thomas one has the feeling sometimes that his disregard of convention is calculated, that he is a self-conscious bohemian: unlike his wife, whose maverick nature was in her bones. This is not to belittle his obsession with the role of poet. When young he liked to dwell on himself, enclosed in a private world of words, which for him had a reality of its own. He was once quoted as saying that ‘when I experience anything I experience it as a thing and a word at the same time.’ Lines like ‘My busy heart who shudders as she talks / Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words,’ written when he was eighteen or nineteen, touch on this preoccupation.

It is almost as though words, for Thomas, could be a substitute for deeds and their consequences; an excuse, even, for whatever else happened.