I was introduced to the work of Dylan Thomas at exactly the right moment - which was that post-Lord of the Rings era, after I first had felt the impact of major literary greatness, and began to seek more.
The medium was a one-man-show in Bristol by David Ponting, a dental patient of my Father's, who went on to portray Thomas hundreds more times through his life, and all over the word.
As I recall it, the show was in a small and intimate theatrical venue; perhaps at the Old Vic Theatre School or somewhere in Bristol University (where I think Ponting worked). It was a biography using quotations from Thomas's poetry and prose works, mainly; and Ponting shifted between narration and acting the role of Thomas.
After this I read a good deal of Thomas - perhaps all of his stories and some articles and essays, nearly all of which I liked a lot.
I also tackled the poems, where my appreciation is more varied and selective. I do not much enjoy his early poems, and find "Do not go gentle" to be highly aversive in meaning.
Bu several others I rate highly, and my absolute favourite (and one of the best poems ever, for me) is the second last published in the collected poems: Fern Hill.
This is the one that starts "Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs" and ends "Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means/ Time held me green and dying/ Though I sang in my chains like the sea."
But it is Thomas's prose that has had the biggest impact on me.
He wrote wonderfully well about middle-late childhood and adolescence. Some of the pieces are bittersweet (like life) such as several stories in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog - including "Who do you wish was with us?" (read here by the magnificent Philip Madoc).
Thomas wrote some of the most completely-enjoyable and perfectly-made examples of short humour I have encountered: such as A Child's Christmas in Wales and The Outing (originally titled "A Story". The short prose form most suited his particular genius - and when he wrote consecutively at greater length (such as Under Milk Wood) there get to be dull patches and a sense of contrivance - in between the marvels.
How deep was Dylan Thomas - was he more than a supreme wordsmith and sentimentalist? I think he was; I think he was one of the greatest 20th century writers; because he understood and memorably expressed both the delights and the tragedy of life.
This is why Thomas always has spoken powerfully to so many serious "general readers" beyond the professional and the academic - like the many thousands, all over the world, who saw David Ponting's show, over several decades..
Dylan Thomas's actual life (as told in Paul Ferris's biography, and in stark contrast to the mass media propagated "legend") was badly marred by immaturity, dishonesty, selfishness, and sheer self-destructiveness.
But underneath and fundamentally is evident a strongly religious conviction and aspiration, a cosmic perspective - which both frames and permeates even his comic writings. God is nearly always a hidden presence - even when unmentioned.
The opening of: "Who do you wish was with us":
Birds in the Crescent trees were singing; boys on bicycles were ringing their bells and pedalling down the slight slope to make the whirrers in their wheels startle the women gabbing on the sunny doorsteps; small girls on the pavement, wheeling young brothers and sisters in prams, were dressed in their summer best and with coloured ribbons; on the circular swing in the public playground, children from the snot school spun themselves happy and sick, crying 'Swing us!' and 'Swing us!' and, 'Ooh! I'm falling!'; the morning was as varied and bright as though it were an international or a jubilee when Raymond Price and I, flannelled and hatless, with sticks and haversacks, set out together to walk to the Worm's Head.
Striding along, in step, through the square of the residential Uplands, we brushed by young men in knife-creased whites and showing-off blazers, and hockey-legged girls with towels round their necks and celluloid sun-glasses, and struck a letterbox with our sticks, and bullied our way through a crowd of day-trippers who waited at the stop of the Gower-bound buses, and stepped over luncheon baskets, not caring if we trod in them.
'Why can't those bus lizards walk?' Ray said.
'They were born too tired,' I said.
We went on up Sketty Road at a great speed, our haversacks jumping on our backs. We rapped on every gate to give a terrific walkers' benediction to the people in the choking houses. Like a breath of fresh air we passed a man in office pin-stripes standing, with a dog-lead in his hand, whistling at a corner.
Tossing the sounds and smells of the town from us with the swing of our shoulders and loose-limbed strides, half-way up the road we heard women on an outing call 'Mutt and Jeff!' for Ray was tall and thin and I was short. Streamers flew out of the charabanc. Ray, sucking hard at his bulldog pipe, walked too fast to wave and did not even smile.
I wondered whom I had missed among the waving women bowling over the rise. My love to come, with a paper cap on, might have sat at the back of the outing, next to the barrel; but, once away from the familiar roads and swinging towards the coast, I forgot her face and voice, that had been made at night, and breathed the country air in.
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